When the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier published Traite Elementaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) in 1789 together with his oxygen theory of combustion, he created a scientific Paradigm Shift.
When Albert Einstein delivered in 1905 his Theory of Relativity contained in the paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", he created a scientific Paradigm Shift.
Now whilst it was not Thomas Kurn’s intention, the term today has been adopted and embraced widely to include both the scientific and non-scientific worlds. This is because his insights can be applied with equal rigor to them both. His argument states that "when enough significant anomalies (inconsistencies) have accrued against a current paradigm, a state of crisis is created which allows new ideas to be tried, eventually leading to a new paradigm". This new Paradigm gains its own new followers, “and an intellectual "battle" takes place between the followers of the new paradigm and the hold-outs of the old”. For example, this was a battle lost by the English monarchy hold-outs in 1215 with the signing of the Magna Carta Libertatum (Great Charter of Freedoms) which brought about a Paradigm Shift in societal governance.
Today, a Paradigm Shift is said to occur when the vast majority of the members in a community changes from one way of thinking to another and is less dramatically tagged ‘the old way of thinking’ Vs ‘the new way of thinking’. But fundamentally, it is a revolution, a transformation, a conversion, a metamorphosis that just does not happen by chance but it is driven by agents of change with the likes of scientists, inventors, social change activists, innovators and entrepreneurs all delivering or exploiting environmental or economic transformations, expanding commercial markets, technological advancements or major social attitude shifts.
Other great Paradigm Shifts in human civilization have centred around the harnessed benefits of fire and the revolutionary innovations of the wheel and gunpowder. Agriculture was a Paradigm Shift some 10,000 years ago in early primitive society, where it changed their way of life from being nomadic into settled structured communities. Down through history, the art of war has seen many innovations but it could be said that it was the development of the airplane that ushered in its greatest Paradigm Shift.
In more recent times, when Jack Kilby / Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce (Intel founder) / Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation received their U.S. patents in 1959 for the microchip, they created a Paradigm Shift in data/information processing that is still effecting significant societal change even today. In 1990, thirty years after the invention of the microchip, an English computer scientist at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, Timothy Berners-Lee with the help of Robert Cailliau, implemented the first successful communication between an HTTP client and server via the Internet. Little did they know less than 20 years ago, that in bringing about the World Wide Web, they had sown the seeds of a Paradigm Shift in Open Online Learning that will rock the very foundations of the centuries old Paradigms in education, teaching and learning.
"The skills required for the future will be the same as those required for today – coping with and adapting to change." PB
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