Shirkey on Participation & Openness

In "The Shock of Inclusion," Clay Shirkey reminds us that our success in the age of the Internet will be determined by the ways we use this new tool or the ways we fail to use this new tool.

Using an analogy from the intervention of the printing press, Shirkey suggests that alchemists (who were working on turning lead into gold) failed and chemists succeeded in large part because of how they used the availability of printing to share their work. Shirkey writes,

"The problem with the alchemists had wasn't that they failed to turn lead into gold; the problem was that they failed uninformatively. Alchemists were obscurantists, recording their work by hand and rarely showing it to anyone but disciples. In contrast, members of the Invisible College shared their work, describing and disputing their methods and conclusions so that they all might benefit from both successes and failures, and build on each other's work."

In short, Shirkey suggests that developing a culture of "sharing" through print is why chemists and other scientists succeeded... not print itself, but a willingness to share using print.

Shirkey extends this thinking to the Internet writing,

"As we know from arXiv.org, the 20th century model of publishing is inadequate to the kind of sharing possible today. As we know from Wikipedia, post-hoc peer review can support astonishing creations of shared value. As we know from the search for Mersenne Primes, whole branches of mathematical exploration are now best taken on by groups. As we know from Open Source efforts like Linux, collaboration between loosely joined parties can work at scales and over timeframes previously unimagined. As we know from NASA clickworkers, groups of amateurs can sometimes replace single experts. As we know from Patients Like Me, patient involvement accelerates medical research."

He notes that although experts such as professor, physicians and others who have held a privileged position in regards to the ability to publish their ideas know longer have that position and that we will "will complain about the way the new abundance of public thought upends the old order, but those complaints are like keening at a wake; the change they fear is already in the past. The real action is elsewhere."

Shirkey suggests that we have the opportunity to use the Internet

"as an Invisible College, the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change, but to do this will require more than technology. It will require that we adopt norms of open sharing and participation, fit to a world where publishing has become the new literacy."

World is Open-- Not your parent's education--1

Today I began reading Curt Bonk's, The World is Open. There is much to learn from this book, but it is important to take a thoughtful look at Bonk's characterization of the the promise of the web for learning.

"If we could travel back in time with him [his grandfather], we would see that the educational opportunities of a century ago were phenomenally different from what we have today" (p. 13).

Bonk then lists the things that were not available to his grandfather, they include:

1. podcasts made of his school lessons in case he missed class;
2. instructors who waxed eloquently in their blogs about how a particular class was going or supplemental course links.
3. email messages that linked him to wondrous electronic course resources.
4. no virtual worlds to explore for hours on end.

He sums up this paragraph with

"Grandpa George and his classmates could not move about to computer labs and media rooms in accordance with their interests and learning pursuits or think about entering and exiting a course at any time of the day" (p. 13).

Of course, most students today don't have this experience either. In fact, very few students at any level of learning routinely have the experience that Bonk is describing. There are certainly examples of teachers who are providing this type of experience, but few students regularly have this opportunity.

This doesn't mean that this experience should not exist or could not exist (and Bonk wants us to catch this possible future), but at present today's student is mostly having the same experience as his grandfather. One of the questions we should be asking is why are more students not having this experience?

What will New Media Look like in the future?

Get There Early: Sensing the Future to Compete in the Present

Bob Johansen, Institute for the Future

http://connect.extension.iastate.edu/p53095789/

Embracing the Chaos (& other scary tales from the social web)

Tara Hunt, Author, The Whuffie Factor Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer, Citizen Agency

http://connect.extension.iastate.edu/p26037816/

Education Will Change Everything?

What will change everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live and see?

So begins John Brockman's interesting way to get us thinking in 2009. There are many interesting answers offered by scientists and writers across numerous fields, but I found these observations about education the most interesting.

Chris Anderson, A Web-Empowered Revolution in Education and Haim Harari, At Last Technology Will Change Education begin by offering us the hope that education will truly be transformed by technology. Anderson suggests

"the means of spreading both knowledge and inspiration have never been greater. Five years ago, an amazing teacher or professor with the ability to truly catalyze the lives of his or her students could realistically hope to impact maybe 100 people each year. Today that same teacher can have their words spread on video to millions of eager students. There are already numerous examples of powerful talks that have spread virally to massive Internet audiences."

Both Anderson and Harari identify a number of the technological developments that will transform education. They note that "the physical cost of distributing a recorded talk or lecture anywhere in the world via the internet has fallen effectively to zero," "the speed and price of data transmission, the advances in software systems, the feasibility of remote video interactions, the price reduction of computers, fancy screens and other gadgets, finally begin to lead to the realization that special tailor-made devices for schools and education are worth designing and producing." Harari notes "the generation that grew up with a computer at home is reaching the teacher ranks. The main obstacle of most education reforms has always been the training of the teachers. This should be much easier now.

Harari though warns us about the dangers if we fail to expand education, "a technology-driven globalization is forcing us to see, to recognize and to fear the enormous knowledge gaps between different parts of the world and between segments of society within our countries. It is a major threat to everything that the world has achieved in the last 100 years, including democracy itself."

Roger Schank, in an article titled, Wisdom Reborn, has a more narrow, but still compelling way in which technology will change us. He suggests the

"days of just in time storytelling will return. The storyteller will be your computer. The computers we have today are capable of understanding your needs and finding just the right (previously archived and indexed) wise man (or woman) to tell you a story, just when you need it, that will help you think something out. Some work needs to be done to make this happen of course. No more looking for information. No more libraries. No more key words. No more search engines.

Information will find you, and just in the nick of time. And this will "change everything."

Alison Gopnik, Never Ending Childhood, suggests that developing a knowledge-based economy will depend on us continuing to learn through our lifetimes and she suggests that this will require us to foster "child-like learning" for longer periods of time. She writes,

"The world is transforming from an agricultural and manufacturing economy to an information economy. This means that people will have to learn more and more. The best way to make it happen is to extend the period when we learn the most — childhood. Our new scientific understanding of neural plasticity and gene regulation, along with the global spread of schooling, will make that increasingly possible. We may remain children forever — or at least for much longer.

Humans already have a longer period of protected immaturity — a longer childhood — than any other species. Across species, a long childhood is correlated with an evolutionary strategy that depends on flexibility, intelligence and learning. There is a developmental division of labor. Children get to learn freely about their particular environment without worrying about their own survival — caregivers look after that. Adults use what they learn as children to mate, predate, and generally succeed as grown-ups in that environment. Children are the R & D department of the human species....

These changes reflect brain changes. Young brains are more connected, more flexible and more plastic, but less efficient. As we get older, and experience more, our brains prune out the less-used connections and strengthen the connections that work. Recent developments in neuroscience show that this early plasticity can be maintained and even reopened in adulthood. And, we've already invented the most unheralded but most powerful brain-altering technology in history — school."

Stephon Alexander, On Basketball and Science Camps

Maybe the most powerful idea is suggested by Stephon Alexander who reminds us that we spend much more time nurturing and coaching athletic skills than science skills. He relates his own life-changing experience of spending a summer at science camp rather than basketball camp and the transformative results. He asks,

"What if there were a global organization of scientists and educators dedicated to identifying (or scouting) the potential Michael Jordans of science, regardless of what part of the world they are from and regardless of socioeconomic background? ...What if these students were provided the resources to reach their full potential and naturally forge a global community of scientific peers and friends? What we would have is, among many benefits, an orchestrated global effort to address the most pressing scientific problems that current and future generations must confront: the energy crisis, global warming, HIV, diplomacy to name a few. I think an initiative that markets the virtues of science on every corner of the planet, with the same urgency as the basketball scouts on corners of street ball courts, would change the world. Such a reality has long been my vision..."

Mine too!

Human Communication Eras

In a interesting paper, "Once in a hundred generations" Paul Berkman, writes,

"Once in a hundred generations, every 2000 years, an information technology threshold is reached that changes human capacity to manage and discover knowledge. Invention of the digital medium created such a paradigm shift and we are now faced with the challenge of sustaining the information products generated with this transformational technology."

Berkman goes on to describe the implications of this digital transformation for libraries, but the emergence of digital information has implications for learning and all parts of society that involves knol edge and information. This reminds us how big of a change we are experiencing.