1 The Rise of the Flipped Classroom
There are two related movements that are combining to change the face of education. The first of
these is a technological movement. This technological movement has enabled the amplification
and duplication of information at an extremely low-cost. It started with the printing press in the
1400s, and has continued at an ever-increasing rate. The electronic telegraph came in the 1830s,
wireless radio in the late 1800s and early 1900s, television in the 1920s, computers in the 1940s,
the internet in the 1960s, and the world-wide web in the 1990s.
As these technologies have been adopted, the ideas that have been spread through their channels
have enabled a second movement. Whereas the technological movement sought to overcome real
physical barriers to the free and open flow of information, this ideological movement seeks to
remove the artificial, man-made barriers. This is epitomized in the free software movement (see,
e.g., Stallman and Lessig[67]), although this movement is certainly not limited to software.
A good example of this can be seen from the encyclopedia. Encyclopedia Britannica has been