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Friday, September 25, 2009
Week 4 - Blog Posting #7 -Second Life
I have watched Second Life's progress for several years now. Until January of this year, I was teaching a class at Full Sail about making art for Video Games so obviously SL was of interest to me. There are two things that turn people off I think.
1. It is not a game. People are only used to seeing 3d graphics in a game setting. It takes some imagination to see the other things that can be done in a virtual space such as SL.
2. It doesn't look as good as a video game. SL will never look as good as a video game for several reasons. First, most of the content is created by the users and there are strict restrictions on how this content is made. I have looked into it, and even stuff I made as a professional 3d artist wouldn't look that great. The other reason it doesn't look great is SL has to run on an average computer. They didn't make it to run on a Xbox or PS3. Therefore not only can't they take advantage of the top of the line graphics, they have to shoot for the average machine. Now this average is getting better quickly, but even so they will always lag behind the state of the art.
This doesn't mean that SL doesn't have huge potential. The citizens of SL are prototyping the rules and social customs for an artificial reality. This is something that will be very important in about 5-10 years. I am sure when people first downloaded the first beta Mozaic we browser they had no idea of what the web would become. I know because I was one of them!
In 10 years time, you will be able to enter a virtual world that is indistinguishable from reality. That is a very exciting proposition and the folks in SL are trying out the customs we will need then.
I checked out the various links Dr. Siegel provided us. The Multiple Intelligences area was a very neat way to explain that concept to people. Sometimes books are a bit dry so being able to see examples is a very accessible way to explore the concepts. I played the Steel Drums! :)
The Blooms area was a little less interesting but I liked how the Blooms blocks were laid out with the third dimension. The higher the block, the more desireable it was until you got all the way to metacognitive. Neat idea. Even so, I still find Blooms boring. :)
The group I joined was the International Spaceflight Museum. I have been facinated by spaceflight for my whole life, so this was a natural interest to me. I went to their location in SL which was the International Spaceflight Museum Bravo. This consisted of many 3d models of rockets. Some of the rockets were recent which shows someone put in a lot of time building them. Short of going to Kennedy Space Center for a field trip, I can't think of a better way to introduce children to the space program. I had a good time exploring the rockets and joined their group
In 10 years time when our children are engaged in photorealistic virtual worlds we will be able to tell then about Second Life. It's like when our grandparents tell us about the first time they saw an airplane. :)
1. It is not a game. People are only used to seeing 3d graphics in a game setting. It takes some imagination to see the other things that can be done in a virtual space such as SL.
2. It doesn't look as good as a video game. SL will never look as good as a video game for several reasons. First, most of the content is created by the users and there are strict restrictions on how this content is made. I have looked into it, and even stuff I made as a professional 3d artist wouldn't look that great. The other reason it doesn't look great is SL has to run on an average computer. They didn't make it to run on a Xbox or PS3. Therefore not only can't they take advantage of the top of the line graphics, they have to shoot for the average machine. Now this average is getting better quickly, but even so they will always lag behind the state of the art.
This doesn't mean that SL doesn't have huge potential. The citizens of SL are prototyping the rules and social customs for an artificial reality. This is something that will be very important in about 5-10 years. I am sure when people first downloaded the first beta Mozaic we browser they had no idea of what the web would become. I know because I was one of them!
In 10 years time, you will be able to enter a virtual world that is indistinguishable from reality. That is a very exciting proposition and the folks in SL are trying out the customs we will need then.
I checked out the various links Dr. Siegel provided us. The Multiple Intelligences area was a very neat way to explain that concept to people. Sometimes books are a bit dry so being able to see examples is a very accessible way to explore the concepts. I played the Steel Drums! :)
The Blooms area was a little less interesting but I liked how the Blooms blocks were laid out with the third dimension. The higher the block, the more desireable it was until you got all the way to metacognitive. Neat idea. Even so, I still find Blooms boring. :)
The group I joined was the International Spaceflight Museum. I have been facinated by spaceflight for my whole life, so this was a natural interest to me. I went to their location in SL which was the International Spaceflight Museum Bravo. This consisted of many 3d models of rockets. Some of the rockets were recent which shows someone put in a lot of time building them. Short of going to Kennedy Space Center for a field trip, I can't think of a better way to introduce children to the space program. I had a good time exploring the rockets and joined their group
In 10 years time when our children are engaged in photorealistic virtual worlds we will be able to tell then about Second Life. It's like when our grandparents tell us about the first time they saw an airplane. :)
Monday, September 21, 2009
Week 3 - Blog Posting #6 -Communities of Practice
As I watched the video on what a Social Network is, something in the back of my mind was bugging me. I felt like I seen something like this before. I have been a teacher and a computer programmer and a computer graphics person for my whole career. I can see parallels in Social Networks in some of those fields and in my personal life.
As a teacher, I got my job because I knew someone at Full Sail. As a matter of fact, every single job I got was because I knew someone there or someone recommended it to me. Businesses have a problem in hiring people. A resume only tells part of the story of what makes a good employee. I have known many people who have been talented, but lack people skills or are annoying to work with. If a business has to choose between two equally skilled prospects, they will choose the one who has the better references usually.
As a programmer, I have been doing a lot of work in the past two years with databases. I thought database programming would be boring but it is actually interesting seeing what you can do with the data. Finding associations in the database is called Data Mining. Basically according to www.theearling.com "Data Mining tools predict future trends and behaviors, allowing businesses to make proactive, knowledge-driven decisions. (White, 2009) I have noticed that the more data you add to the set, the more interesting connections can be made. The more people you have in your Social Network, the more interesting opportunities pop up.
Another way Social Networks can be used is for dating. Many people are uncomfortable with bars and typical social places. Online dating provides a degree of comfort and also gives a person a large pool of prospective mates. If you are looking for that one in a million person, then you need a pool of a million.
All this networking can have a down side however. A project the government started in 2002 called Total Information Awareness was set up to find terrorists. As
the Electronic Privacy Information Center website says the project "...would oversee vast databases of digital fingerprints and photographs, eye scans and personal information from millions of American citizens and lawful foreign visitors (epic.org, 2005) The possibility for abuse is certainly obvious. Last year during the presidential campaign the famous "Joe the Plumber" had his state records pulled by state employees and given to the media. So Social Network have their down sides. Like any technology we as a society will have to learn to live with the down sides too.
As a teacher, I got my job because I knew someone at Full Sail. As a matter of fact, every single job I got was because I knew someone there or someone recommended it to me. Businesses have a problem in hiring people. A resume only tells part of the story of what makes a good employee. I have known many people who have been talented, but lack people skills or are annoying to work with. If a business has to choose between two equally skilled prospects, they will choose the one who has the better references usually.
As a programmer, I have been doing a lot of work in the past two years with databases. I thought database programming would be boring but it is actually interesting seeing what you can do with the data. Finding associations in the database is called Data Mining. Basically according to www.theearling.com "Data Mining tools predict future trends and behaviors, allowing businesses to make proactive, knowledge-driven decisions. (White, 2009) I have noticed that the more data you add to the set, the more interesting connections can be made. The more people you have in your Social Network, the more interesting opportunities pop up.
Another way Social Networks can be used is for dating. Many people are uncomfortable with bars and typical social places. Online dating provides a degree of comfort and also gives a person a large pool of prospective mates. If you are looking for that one in a million person, then you need a pool of a million.
All this networking can have a down side however. A project the government started in 2002 called Total Information Awareness was set up to find terrorists. As
the Electronic Privacy Information Center website says the project "...would oversee vast databases of digital fingerprints and photographs, eye scans and personal information from millions of American citizens and lawful foreign visitors (epic.org, 2005) The possibility for abuse is certainly obvious. Last year during the presidential campaign the famous "Joe the Plumber" had his state records pulled by state employees and given to the media. So Social Network have their down sides. Like any technology we as a society will have to learn to live with the down sides too.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Week 3 - Blog Posting #5 -Social Media
While listening to Gordon Brown's TED talk I was struck again by a question I had about the downside of all this social connectivity. He is talking about Global Warming, one world government, etc... Politically I don't agree with that kind of stuff so I was perhaps a bit skeptical of his argument. This leads me to my question though.
If information is so much more freely distributed, why is it getting harder to find out what is the truth? For example, right now in America, we are embroiled in a huge argument about our health care system. Not only is what to do about it being argued, but both sides are claiming the other side is lying about basic facts. How can it be so hard to find out what it true?
I think this is a multipart problem.
1. We see what we expect to see. Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times wrote during the Democratic Debates last year: "Another challenge is the biased way in which we gather information. We seek out information that reinforces our prejudices. (Kristof, 2008)" When there was only three nightly news casts, everyone tended to have a more homogenized view of the world. The view the networks broadcast tended to be more in the center because that was their audience. These days, there is a broad range of news shows, from MSNBC on the left to Fox News on the right. They both report the same things, just from different viewpoints. Is one right?
2. Media is now fully enmeshed in politics. Barack Obama's election was due in no small part to social media. Individuals who in previous elections would be able to make a small donation, or man phones, or just vote, could now generate media supporting their candidate. This information would then go around the world. Never before has the power to shape world opinion been in everyone's hands. This used to be the exclusive domain of the established media. Not any more. Now anyone can be a journalist. When US Airways flight 1549 crash landed in the Hudson River in January, the first picture the world saw of it was taken by a bystander with his iPhone in a ferryboat and posted on Flickr. You can see it here as well as lots of other Web 2.0 links about the event.
So does this widespread media capability mean more truth? I doubt it. The truth is in the eye of the beholder. We will always be questing for what we consider the truth. Just ask the Flat Earth Society.
If information is so much more freely distributed, why is it getting harder to find out what is the truth? For example, right now in America, we are embroiled in a huge argument about our health care system. Not only is what to do about it being argued, but both sides are claiming the other side is lying about basic facts. How can it be so hard to find out what it true?
I think this is a multipart problem.
1. We see what we expect to see. Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times wrote during the Democratic Debates last year: "Another challenge is the biased way in which we gather information. We seek out information that reinforces our prejudices. (Kristof, 2008)" When there was only three nightly news casts, everyone tended to have a more homogenized view of the world. The view the networks broadcast tended to be more in the center because that was their audience. These days, there is a broad range of news shows, from MSNBC on the left to Fox News on the right. They both report the same things, just from different viewpoints. Is one right?
2. Media is now fully enmeshed in politics. Barack Obama's election was due in no small part to social media. Individuals who in previous elections would be able to make a small donation, or man phones, or just vote, could now generate media supporting their candidate. This information would then go around the world. Never before has the power to shape world opinion been in everyone's hands. This used to be the exclusive domain of the established media. Not any more. Now anyone can be a journalist. When US Airways flight 1549 crash landed in the Hudson River in January, the first picture the world saw of it was taken by a bystander with his iPhone in a ferryboat and posted on Flickr. You can see it here as well as lots of other Web 2.0 links about the event.
So does this widespread media capability mean more truth? I doubt it. The truth is in the eye of the beholder. We will always be questing for what we consider the truth. Just ask the Flat Earth Society.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Stormfront Part 2 - The Demise of Higher Education
The Demise of the current Higher Education model
"the whole bloated, expensive, lecture-based higher education system will face the first challenge to its very existence: open-source, online higher education that costs a fraction of four years at Harvard—but is good enough for employers who want a college graduate" - Scott McNealy - former CEO of Sun Microsystems (read the whole article here)
As I explained in my previous Stormfront post, I believe the current model of Education (primarily K-12) came into being on a set of conditions. Let me formally spell them out here.
1. Businesses needed a large quantity of assembly line workers.
2. These workers needed a limited range of skills such as Reading, Writing and Arithmatic..
3. These skills needed to be of a uniform quality. (thus allowing workers to be interchangeable)
4. Life expectancy was shorter so it was expected that a person would stay in their job for their entire career.
5. The job would not change much over that career.
I believe it is now clear that all of these conditions no longer exist. Therefore the raison d' être for the formal education system has disappeared. In the past formal Education has adapted to changes, such as the advent of computers, and has survived but there is a new problem it has to deal with that I believe is insurmountable without totally rethinking the system. Let me set this up with a basic lesson in economics.
Econ 101.
Scarcity = value.
If I am a producer of a product, I can sell this product to people who want it, but who cannot get it through someone else. If I am the only producer, (a monopoly) then I can charge very high prices. If I have competitors, I have to moderate my prices, but as long as all the competitors have similar costs, the prices will be in the same range. This system will sustain itself as long as the product is in demand and the supply is limited. However, if demand decreases, or supply increases the price will change.
Distribution
Distribution does affect things quite a bit. Production does not equal supply by itself. You still need to get your product to the consumers. If you have a farm in California, you can sell your produce to consumers in Maine, but you have to truck it there first. Even if you can produce a huge amount of crops, you still have to transport it. This will constrain the supply even if production is not limited. The cost of that transportation will also increase your product price. This is ok as long as your competitors have to pay similar costs.
Information
Consider information. Information is a product that is produced in infinite combinations with infinite diversity. In other words, the production is unlimited. Anyone can produce information. This can take many forms. Facts, figures, conversations, music, film, stories, really any form of media is information. Over the last 20 years computers have almost completely transformed our ability to create things. This transformation has been seen in almost every part of society and was not forseen. If you look at a what people in the 1950s thought the year 2000 would be like, it was all about flying cars, moon bases and personal robots. None of that has happened. Why? The part that was missing from their vision was computers. (robots were kind of like that, but few thought about computers without bodies). Computers were the last big StormFront. The Internet is the next.
The computer allowed those in the information production business (newspapers, book sellers, movies studios, record labels) to experience a drastic reduction in production costs, this triggering a golden age of business. (1982-1998)
When personal computers became widespread in the early 1990s, they were not a threat to the major information producers. In our farm analogy, it is like everyone can now farm, but only the original producers have the trucks to get the produce to Maine. The distribution costs were too high for just anyone to enter a market. Thus, for a while the status quo was preserved. Then came the internet and this changed everything.
The Internet
The Internet is not a producer of information; it is a distributor of information. Right now it costs almost nothing to distribute information to the rest of the world. It is a way for producers to directly connect to their customers with essentially zero distribution costs. Movie studios, record companies, news organizations, and schools exist primarily as distribution systems. The cost of actual production has been dropping steadily over time especially with computer technology. So a record company has a great deal of costs involved in producing, marketing, and shipping a CD to a record store. A CD costs about 50 cents to make but cost $15. Why? Because there is a huge distribution system behind it. Now with the advent of distribution systems like iTunes, the distribution costs are very low, thus the prices are very low. More importantly, what they are selling is digital. This changes everything.
Digital = no scarcity.
Digital information can be copied infinitely with no loss of quality. Therefore there is no scarcity to it. If there is no free means to distribute copies, then producers are ok, but now that has changed too. If a product is free to make and free to distribute, then it is not scarce. No scarcity = no value. This means death to the distributors. Their services are no longer required.
How this applies to formal Education
So finally we get to Education. (thanks for hanging in there) The whole Education system was set up as a distribution system for information. They did produce some of it themselves in the form of research, but generally the information they sold was accumulated from elsewhere. It was too difficult and time consuming for a regular person to accumulate this information themselves so they paid a University to do it for them and then attended classes to receive it. The quality of the information did vary from school to school, so people had a choice on price. (not everyone drives around in a BMW) The big problem is, people can now get their own information. Thus to the list of Education conditions we can add a 6th condition.
6. Information is scarce.
This last one was the one keeping formal Education afloat. Now it is gone too, and I think will force a drastic change in how Education is pursued in the next decade. "The economics of traditional schooling are so out of whack that there is an opening for new players," says Fred Fransen, executive director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education in an article on Businessweek.com. The author of that article said the following:
"The Harvards of the world won't go away. They will continue to be the high-fidelity players in the fidelity/convenience trade-off. But a large swath of the population might decide that going deeply into debt before even starting work is too high a price to pay for a high-fidelity education when a more convenient version will do. They will pull out of mid-level universities. Just as surely as many consumers gave up music CDs for Internet downloads, many students will soon decide to put aside a four-year stint at a traditional university for a cheap, easy, and good-enough degree delivered through laptop screens and smart phones. Schools in the middle of the pack—neither high-fidelity nor high-convenience—will have to adapt or suffer." - Kevin Maney
Part of the answer to the Education system's quandary is found in my assertion that Knowledge and Information is not the same thing but I will get to that in a later post.
So how will this change happen and why so soon? The answer lies in a folk story about the Chinese Emperor.
"the whole bloated, expensive, lecture-based higher education system will face the first challenge to its very existence: open-source, online higher education that costs a fraction of four years at Harvard—but is good enough for employers who want a college graduate" - Scott McNealy - former CEO of Sun Microsystems (read the whole article here)
As I explained in my previous Stormfront post, I believe the current model of Education (primarily K-12) came into being on a set of conditions. Let me formally spell them out here.
1. Businesses needed a large quantity of assembly line workers.
2. These workers needed a limited range of skills such as Reading, Writing and Arithmatic..
3. These skills needed to be of a uniform quality. (thus allowing workers to be interchangeable)
4. Life expectancy was shorter so it was expected that a person would stay in their job for their entire career.
5. The job would not change much over that career.
I believe it is now clear that all of these conditions no longer exist. Therefore the raison d' être for the formal education system has disappeared. In the past formal Education has adapted to changes, such as the advent of computers, and has survived but there is a new problem it has to deal with that I believe is insurmountable without totally rethinking the system. Let me set this up with a basic lesson in economics.
Econ 101.
Scarcity = value.
If I am a producer of a product, I can sell this product to people who want it, but who cannot get it through someone else. If I am the only producer, (a monopoly) then I can charge very high prices. If I have competitors, I have to moderate my prices, but as long as all the competitors have similar costs, the prices will be in the same range. This system will sustain itself as long as the product is in demand and the supply is limited. However, if demand decreases, or supply increases the price will change.
Distribution
Distribution does affect things quite a bit. Production does not equal supply by itself. You still need to get your product to the consumers. If you have a farm in California, you can sell your produce to consumers in Maine, but you have to truck it there first. Even if you can produce a huge amount of crops, you still have to transport it. This will constrain the supply even if production is not limited. The cost of that transportation will also increase your product price. This is ok as long as your competitors have to pay similar costs.
Information
Consider information. Information is a product that is produced in infinite combinations with infinite diversity. In other words, the production is unlimited. Anyone can produce information. This can take many forms. Facts, figures, conversations, music, film, stories, really any form of media is information. Over the last 20 years computers have almost completely transformed our ability to create things. This transformation has been seen in almost every part of society and was not forseen. If you look at a what people in the 1950s thought the year 2000 would be like, it was all about flying cars, moon bases and personal robots. None of that has happened. Why? The part that was missing from their vision was computers. (robots were kind of like that, but few thought about computers without bodies). Computers were the last big StormFront. The Internet is the next.
The computer allowed those in the information production business (newspapers, book sellers, movies studios, record labels) to experience a drastic reduction in production costs, this triggering a golden age of business. (1982-1998)
When personal computers became widespread in the early 1990s, they were not a threat to the major information producers. In our farm analogy, it is like everyone can now farm, but only the original producers have the trucks to get the produce to Maine. The distribution costs were too high for just anyone to enter a market. Thus, for a while the status quo was preserved. Then came the internet and this changed everything.
The Internet
The Internet is not a producer of information; it is a distributor of information. Right now it costs almost nothing to distribute information to the rest of the world. It is a way for producers to directly connect to their customers with essentially zero distribution costs. Movie studios, record companies, news organizations, and schools exist primarily as distribution systems. The cost of actual production has been dropping steadily over time especially with computer technology. So a record company has a great deal of costs involved in producing, marketing, and shipping a CD to a record store. A CD costs about 50 cents to make but cost $15. Why? Because there is a huge distribution system behind it. Now with the advent of distribution systems like iTunes, the distribution costs are very low, thus the prices are very low. More importantly, what they are selling is digital. This changes everything.
Digital = no scarcity.
Digital information can be copied infinitely with no loss of quality. Therefore there is no scarcity to it. If there is no free means to distribute copies, then producers are ok, but now that has changed too. If a product is free to make and free to distribute, then it is not scarce. No scarcity = no value. This means death to the distributors. Their services are no longer required.
How this applies to formal Education
So finally we get to Education. (thanks for hanging in there) The whole Education system was set up as a distribution system for information. They did produce some of it themselves in the form of research, but generally the information they sold was accumulated from elsewhere. It was too difficult and time consuming for a regular person to accumulate this information themselves so they paid a University to do it for them and then attended classes to receive it. The quality of the information did vary from school to school, so people had a choice on price. (not everyone drives around in a BMW) The big problem is, people can now get their own information. Thus to the list of Education conditions we can add a 6th condition.
6. Information is scarce.
This last one was the one keeping formal Education afloat. Now it is gone too, and I think will force a drastic change in how Education is pursued in the next decade. "The economics of traditional schooling are so out of whack that there is an opening for new players," says Fred Fransen, executive director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education in an article on Businessweek.com. The author of that article said the following:
"The Harvards of the world won't go away. They will continue to be the high-fidelity players in the fidelity/convenience trade-off. But a large swath of the population might decide that going deeply into debt before even starting work is too high a price to pay for a high-fidelity education when a more convenient version will do. They will pull out of mid-level universities. Just as surely as many consumers gave up music CDs for Internet downloads, many students will soon decide to put aside a four-year stint at a traditional university for a cheap, easy, and good-enough degree delivered through laptop screens and smart phones. Schools in the middle of the pack—neither high-fidelity nor high-convenience—will have to adapt or suffer." - Kevin Maney
Part of the answer to the Education system's quandary is found in my assertion that Knowledge and Information is not the same thing but I will get to that in a later post.
So how will this change happen and why so soon? The answer lies in a folk story about the Chinese Emperor.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Week 2 - Blog Posting #4 -21st Century Skills & Lifelong Learning
I would add a skill to the list of 21st Century Skills. That is Lateral Thinking. Lateral Thinking was defined by Edward de Bono who originated the idea in 1967. Basically it is a series of techniques for problem solving where many different ideas can be evaluated, and discarded if they don't work. I have seen my students many times try a quick web search to find some information but if they don't find it right away, they give up. We need to teach them how to brainstorm and be original. In terms of Lifelong Learning this will be normal in the next decades. Our current school system of finishing college at age 23 was predicated on a short life expectancy. You went to school, got a job, stayed at that job, retired and then kicked. These days, whole industries will rise and fall in the course of the next 20 years alone. Our students will have to be constantly training and learning just to keep up. They do learn a great deal of course from their Personal Learning Networks.
I think everyone has a PLN and always had. It starts with out parents, branches out into close friends and continues with mentors. The web now allows the branches to be much farther and much faster, but I think the principle is still the same as it has always been. As Vicky Davis says about her students using PLNs "A PLN becomes a student's virtual locker, and its content changes based on the student's current course work. When I assign them a term paper, the students comb the Web to sign up for information that will feed into their personalized Web page to construct a PLN for that topic. When they get a new project, they assemble another page (Davis, 2009)."
What I find facinating about Personal Learning Networks is how they can be customized to a person's needs. You can have different pages for different areas of study. They are updated constantly. Of course this constant flow of information still needs to be evaluated, which is an essential skill for the 21st century learner. The tools of a student are ever changing, customizable and powerful in the hands of a skilled user.
I think everyone has a PLN and always had. It starts with out parents, branches out into close friends and continues with mentors. The web now allows the branches to be much farther and much faster, but I think the principle is still the same as it has always been. As Vicky Davis says about her students using PLNs "A PLN becomes a student's virtual locker, and its content changes based on the student's current course work. When I assign them a term paper, the students comb the Web to sign up for information that will feed into their personalized Web page to construct a PLN for that topic. When they get a new project, they assemble another page (Davis, 2009)."
What I find facinating about Personal Learning Networks is how they can be customized to a person's needs. You can have different pages for different areas of study. They are updated constantly. Of course this constant flow of information still needs to be evaluated, which is an essential skill for the 21st century learner. The tools of a student are ever changing, customizable and powerful in the hands of a skilled user.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Week 2 - Blog Posting #3 - Media Literacy
Never in all of human history has it been so easy to express yourself. A person can take a video of their cat dunking its head under a water faucet (watch it here) and in 6 days as of 9/14/09 it has been watched 884,501 times. The total publishing cost was zero. Two students from MIT took pictures from space using a weather balloon, a parachute, and a GPS cell phone texting them the camera's location. Total cost = $148 dollars. (see it here) Our media tools are getting exponentially more powerful, exponentially faster, and the cost is dropping exponentially. This leads me to several interesting conclusions.
1. As the barriers of entry continue to drop the amount of content will increase at a faster and faster rate. The more content that is around then the more raw materials producers will have to work with and the more ideas can be tried.
2. Because the internet fosters a high degree of anonymity, content producers can feel a high degree of freedom to experiment with new things. Failure is mostly a subjective thing online. Almost everyone can find an audience for their work if they look for one.
3. Good ideas are shared around at Internet speed. This can be virtually overnight. We are entering an era where you can share ideas with the world almost as fast as you can think them (or tweet them). What you are looking at is what Josh Hallet talked about in his interview video where he said is on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" the crowd is right about 91% of the time. I had noticed this. We have never had the capability to apply so much brain power to a problem at once. Not only that, but this knowledge is captured in net search engines and so becomes a potentially valuable reference. This body of information is not necessarily knowledge however. There is a difference between information and knowledge. I like how Daniel Socaco put it on his blog: "It is very important to have this difference clear, specially in our Internet-based society. Today information is freely available to anyone anywhere in the world. An eighteen year old boy from the [sic] Sri Lanka could easily search on the web and find all the information ever produced about an Adenoidectomy. But I am not sure whether I would like to have this same boy performing that surgery on myself…(Socaco, 2006)".
4. These good ideas can be very disruptive to the status quo. This is because ideas come in two types. Evolutionary and revolutionary. Evolutionary means an idea is gradually improved over time. However, on the internet that time can be very quick indeed. Revolutionary ideas generally come about when one has complete freedom to think outside the box. This condition happens on the Internet right now. Again, this is very quick. A brilliant idea can be distributed to the world overnight.
Very rapid ideas lead to rapid change. This rapid change is the catalyst for disruptions to the status quo.
What this means for Education is quite game changing. Professor Clayton M. Christensen has written several books on Disruptive Innovation. He recently was interviewed about how this can apply to Education. "In education, this will mean that the tools of the software platform will make it so simple to develop online learning products that students will be able to build products that help them teach other students. Parents will be able to assemble tools to tutor their children. And teachers will be able to create tools to help the different types of learners in their classrooms. (Christensen, 2008)
On the internet those will media savvy will be the quick, those without it will be the dead.
1. As the barriers of entry continue to drop the amount of content will increase at a faster and faster rate. The more content that is around then the more raw materials producers will have to work with and the more ideas can be tried.
2. Because the internet fosters a high degree of anonymity, content producers can feel a high degree of freedom to experiment with new things. Failure is mostly a subjective thing online. Almost everyone can find an audience for their work if they look for one.
3. Good ideas are shared around at Internet speed. This can be virtually overnight. We are entering an era where you can share ideas with the world almost as fast as you can think them (or tweet them). What you are looking at is what Josh Hallet talked about in his interview video where he said is on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" the crowd is right about 91% of the time. I had noticed this. We have never had the capability to apply so much brain power to a problem at once. Not only that, but this knowledge is captured in net search engines and so becomes a potentially valuable reference. This body of information is not necessarily knowledge however. There is a difference between information and knowledge. I like how Daniel Socaco put it on his blog: "It is very important to have this difference clear, specially in our Internet-based society. Today information is freely available to anyone anywhere in the world. An eighteen year old boy from the [sic] Sri Lanka could easily search on the web and find all the information ever produced about an Adenoidectomy. But I am not sure whether I would like to have this same boy performing that surgery on myself…(Socaco, 2006)".
4. These good ideas can be very disruptive to the status quo. This is because ideas come in two types. Evolutionary and revolutionary. Evolutionary means an idea is gradually improved over time. However, on the internet that time can be very quick indeed. Revolutionary ideas generally come about when one has complete freedom to think outside the box. This condition happens on the Internet right now. Again, this is very quick. A brilliant idea can be distributed to the world overnight.
Very rapid ideas lead to rapid change. This rapid change is the catalyst for disruptions to the status quo.
What this means for Education is quite game changing. Professor Clayton M. Christensen has written several books on Disruptive Innovation. He recently was interviewed about how this can apply to Education. "In education, this will mean that the tools of the software platform will make it so simple to develop online learning products that students will be able to build products that help them teach other students. Parents will be able to assemble tools to tutor their children. And teachers will be able to create tools to help the different types of learners in their classrooms. (Christensen, 2008)
On the internet those will media savvy will be the quick, those without it will be the dead.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Cost is no longer an obstacle
Technology is advancing so quickly that it puts things that 10 years ago cost millions of dollars into the hands of anyone.
Example: Two MIT students took a picture of the earth from space for a budget of $148. Quite amazing how they did it! Read about it here.
Example: Two MIT students took a picture of the earth from space for a budget of $148. Quite amazing how they did it! Read about it here.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Stormfront Part 1 - What is past is prologue
What is Education? What is Learning? I believe the two are different things. Learning is being able to acquire and apply new information. You can do this anywhere and it is a very natural process. When we are just in infant we learn that if we cry, the adults will do things to make us stop crying. Learning is something that happens all the time and we can’t stop even if we wanted to. But what is Education? Recently I came across a blog posting that summed it up.
“So I then came to define education as learning under the assumption of scarcity, learning under the assumption that the means for acquiring something called knowledge are scarce.” – Ivan Illich
This came from a blog posting from John Connell. I will talk more about the assumption of scarcity in a later posting but for now let’s briefly review how we got to our current Education system.
One of the earliest forms of formalized education came with Greek Philosophers. People like Socrates had a small group of followers whom they taught. They pioneered a form of learning called the Socratic Method. I imagine this was a very effective learning method. There was no formal lesson plan so things progressed at the pace of the learner and topics were covered until they were understood. Most importantly it went all the way to the deepest form of learning which is Teaching.
We learn....
10% of what we read.
20% of what we hear.
30% of what we see.
50% of what we both see and hear.
70% of what is discussed with others
80% of what we experience
95% of what we teach
William Glasser (1998
The obvious limitation of the small group method is it very few people can access it.
Another early form of education was the Apprenticeship system. This was where a student went to learn from a master of a craft. Eventually with practice, the student became a master as well. This one to one learning is extremely effective but slow and not very efficient at large numbers of students.
At the dawn of the 20th century came the age of Mass Production. This principle was for assembly lines that would create products quickly and cheaply. In order for these systems to work, workers would be needed to operate the production lines. These workers needed a set of skills that can be summed up in the cliché of Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. This made workers interchangeable parts of the process. The modern school system I believe was then designed to furnish these workers. This model of education is called the Industrial Model of Education by Don Tapscott in his fascinating article The Impending Demise of the University.
This model has a strength and a weakness. The strength is you can take almost any child and provide a relatively uniform set of basic skills. The major weakness is you can’t much else than that. There is no funding to desire to provide a personalized level of learning. As a student you were allowed certain elective classes, but in K-12 they were not core classes. Everybody had to take English, etc... This wouldn’t be such a big problem if it wasn’t for a common misconception among people that schools are for learning. They aren’t. Schools are for teaching. Teaching and learning aren’t the same thing. This article at Knowledge@Wharton is very clear on this point.
As Oscar Wilde put it
"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth learning can be taught."
So will this system change and if so how? In part 2 I will look at the impending fall of Higher Education.
“So I then came to define education as learning under the assumption of scarcity, learning under the assumption that the means for acquiring something called knowledge are scarce.” – Ivan Illich
This came from a blog posting from John Connell. I will talk more about the assumption of scarcity in a later posting but for now let’s briefly review how we got to our current Education system.
One of the earliest forms of formalized education came with Greek Philosophers. People like Socrates had a small group of followers whom they taught. They pioneered a form of learning called the Socratic Method. I imagine this was a very effective learning method. There was no formal lesson plan so things progressed at the pace of the learner and topics were covered until they were understood. Most importantly it went all the way to the deepest form of learning which is Teaching.
We learn....
10% of what we read.
20% of what we hear.
30% of what we see.
50% of what we both see and hear.
70% of what is discussed with others
80% of what we experience
95% of what we teach
William Glasser (1998
The obvious limitation of the small group method is it very few people can access it.
Another early form of education was the Apprenticeship system. This was where a student went to learn from a master of a craft. Eventually with practice, the student became a master as well. This one to one learning is extremely effective but slow and not very efficient at large numbers of students.
At the dawn of the 20th century came the age of Mass Production. This principle was for assembly lines that would create products quickly and cheaply. In order for these systems to work, workers would be needed to operate the production lines. These workers needed a set of skills that can be summed up in the cliché of Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. This made workers interchangeable parts of the process. The modern school system I believe was then designed to furnish these workers. This model of education is called the Industrial Model of Education by Don Tapscott in his fascinating article The Impending Demise of the University.
This model has a strength and a weakness. The strength is you can take almost any child and provide a relatively uniform set of basic skills. The major weakness is you can’t much else than that. There is no funding to desire to provide a personalized level of learning. As a student you were allowed certain elective classes, but in K-12 they were not core classes. Everybody had to take English, etc... This wouldn’t be such a big problem if it wasn’t for a common misconception among people that schools are for learning. They aren’t. Schools are for teaching. Teaching and learning aren’t the same thing. This article at Knowledge@Wharton is very clear on this point.
As Oscar Wilde put it
"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth learning can be taught."
So will this system change and if so how? In part 2 I will look at the impending fall of Higher Education.
Intro to the Storm Front thread
We live in momentous times. It seems like everyday our lives are shifting. These movements are sometimes subtle. We get a new cell phone that is amazingly more capable than the one we had just two years ago. Sometimes the movements are dramatic: A new Web 2.0 company explodes on the scene and changes the way we communicate overnight such as Twitter. Why are these changes happening? Will they continue? What is causing it? What are the likely effects and in what fields? These are all questions that are lurking in many people’s minds. Some are only distantly aware of them, but others are trying to find the answers. I fall into the latter category. For my purposes, I will focus on Education and try to answer some of those questions.
I have been a college teacher at Full Sail University for the last 12 years. During that time I have seen many changes in our school and in our students. I believe however, that was happened in the last decade will pale in comparison to what is about to happen in the next. Over the few weeks I will try to lay out a case for a revolution in Education that I believe will occur. The first signs of this revolution are just now appearing on the horizon. Like a powerful storm it sends out warning signs. I am going to point out the signs I have seen so far and try to extrapolate them into the future.
I have been a college teacher at Full Sail University for the last 12 years. During that time I have seen many changes in our school and in our students. I believe however, that was happened in the last decade will pale in comparison to what is about to happen in the next. Over the few weeks I will try to lay out a case for a revolution in Education that I believe will occur. The first signs of this revolution are just now appearing on the horizon. Like a powerful storm it sends out warning signs. I am going to point out the signs I have seen so far and try to extrapolate them into the future.
Friday, September 11, 2009
More on Augmented Reality
In my discussion post on the Go 2 Web site I talked about Augmented Reality. One of the apps I checked out was called Layar. It allows people to create datasets of information and geotag them. Well here is an example of this for this morning.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/11/video-the-unsettling-truth-about-our-augmented-reality-future/#continued
In that video (it's in dutch) a Layar layer was created that showed where star's houses are in Amsterdam. The man in the video is walking around Amsterdam with his phone and it is showing him where people's houses are. At 2:47 of the video he actually sees Brad Pitt in his house! Heh. Note it doesn't actually track the people, just the houses. It is not such a stretch though that if enough people use that application, people can be updating it based on siting of stars. "Hey Brad Pitt just walked into the store I am in!". Update the layar site and everyone nearby will be notified. Instant flash mob.
Is this a good thing? Well like every new technology, it will have both good and bad uses. Standards of usage will have to be developed.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Week 1 - Blog Posting #2 - Learning 2.0
What is Learning 2.0? Well to know that let us look at Learning 1.0 first.
According to dictionary.reference.com Learning is defined as
1. knowledge acquired by systematic study in any field of scholarly application.
2. the act or process of acquiring knowledge or skill.
Note that the definition does not mention school.
As I was watching the plethora of videos offered by Dr. Siegel there was one particular line that I liked. The very last line of Learning to change, changing to learn a teacher says: “It’s the death of education, but the dawn of learning and that makes me very happy”. That I think is the most important line of all the videos. Here is why.
As that video also stated, our current Education system was setup at the start of the mass production era, and used a lot of the same techniques. It was designed to provide factory workers who had a minimum set of skills. Those were Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. Those are a cliche now but they accurately described the curriculum a hundred years ago. Reading because you had to be able to read directions on how to operate the assembly line. Writing so you could generate reports. Arithmetic so you could do simple math required for operating the line.
To see a modern example of an assembly line here is a video of the assembly of the new A380 Jumbo Jet from Airbus. It is quite a cool video! If you watch it, you notice how the people are like cogs in the machine. No individuality. They are interchangeable.
The modern society we are living in has changed dramatically from the one only 30 years ago. Creativity has become much more valuable than it was. A common refrain from the last several years is that our country is “exporting” jobs to other countries. That is true. It is also true that most of those jobs are lower skilled job such as manufacturing. With modern education techniques it is fairly simple to teach a person in a foreign country to operate the modern machines of an assembly line. Transportation costs are also very low so it makes sense to drop the labor costs too. Eventually robotics will replace all assembly line jobs. Ayers and Miller predicted this in their article entitled: Robotic Realities: Near-Term Prospects and Problems “The current generation of robots, lacking sensory data processing and interpretation capabilities, can potentially replace up to 1.3 million manufacturing jobs. The next generation, with crude vision or tactile senses; will potentially displace about 3 million more (1983).” They were right.
So if assembly line skills are being rendered obsolete by machines, what is left for humans to do? How about think, dream, and create? As Ken Robinson said in his Ted talk, children are born creative. We are “educating them out of their creative capacities”. Education is now attempting to change as it becomes increasing clear to educators that the assembly line model is not useful anymore.
Learning is happening outside the classroom now at ever increasing rates. This ability to use outside sources to learn from is what I define as Learning 2.0. Like Web 2.0 it is interactive, dynamic and personalized. It can happen anywhere the student is, not just in the classroom. Teachers are trying to figure out what their role is in this new learning model. I believe the students will tell us what they want us to do.
According to dictionary.reference.com Learning is defined as
1. knowledge acquired by systematic study in any field of scholarly application.
2. the act or process of acquiring knowledge or skill.
Note that the definition does not mention school.
As I was watching the plethora of videos offered by Dr. Siegel there was one particular line that I liked. The very last line of Learning to change, changing to learn a teacher says: “It’s the death of education, but the dawn of learning and that makes me very happy”. That I think is the most important line of all the videos. Here is why.
As that video also stated, our current Education system was setup at the start of the mass production era, and used a lot of the same techniques. It was designed to provide factory workers who had a minimum set of skills. Those were Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. Those are a cliche now but they accurately described the curriculum a hundred years ago. Reading because you had to be able to read directions on how to operate the assembly line. Writing so you could generate reports. Arithmetic so you could do simple math required for operating the line.
To see a modern example of an assembly line here is a video of the assembly of the new A380 Jumbo Jet from Airbus. It is quite a cool video! If you watch it, you notice how the people are like cogs in the machine. No individuality. They are interchangeable.
The modern society we are living in has changed dramatically from the one only 30 years ago. Creativity has become much more valuable than it was. A common refrain from the last several years is that our country is “exporting” jobs to other countries. That is true. It is also true that most of those jobs are lower skilled job such as manufacturing. With modern education techniques it is fairly simple to teach a person in a foreign country to operate the modern machines of an assembly line. Transportation costs are also very low so it makes sense to drop the labor costs too. Eventually robotics will replace all assembly line jobs. Ayers and Miller predicted this in their article entitled: Robotic Realities: Near-Term Prospects and Problems “The current generation of robots, lacking sensory data processing and interpretation capabilities, can potentially replace up to 1.3 million manufacturing jobs. The next generation, with crude vision or tactile senses; will potentially displace about 3 million more (1983).” They were right.
So if assembly line skills are being rendered obsolete by machines, what is left for humans to do? How about think, dream, and create? As Ken Robinson said in his Ted talk, children are born creative. We are “educating them out of their creative capacities”. Education is now attempting to change as it becomes increasing clear to educators that the assembly line model is not useful anymore.
Learning is happening outside the classroom now at ever increasing rates. This ability to use outside sources to learn from is what I define as Learning 2.0. Like Web 2.0 it is interactive, dynamic and personalized. It can happen anywhere the student is, not just in the classroom. Teachers are trying to figure out what their role is in this new learning model. I believe the students will tell us what they want us to do.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Week 1-Blog Posting #1-Web 2.0
Web 2.0. Quite the buzz word isn't it? According to O'Reilly's website, the term was first coined by O'Reilly VP Dale Dougherty in 2001 (O'Reilly, 2005). Further in that article he states that "...there's still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means, with some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom (O'Reilly, 2005)."
After watching the class videos and doing some research I believe I understand what Web 2.0 is and how it is different from Web 1.0. Basically in Web 1.0 the web did not understand who you were. It was one directional. Everyone had the same experience on the various websites. Web 2.0 is about a two way flow of information. The web becomes aware of, and gathers information about its' users. Therefore the experience becomes dynamic and personal. A great example of this is Amazon.com. If a user goes to that website it will allow you to browse their catalog for products. This is web 1.0. However, if the user creates an account and logs in, the experience changes. Amazon presents the user with suggested products based on their past purchasing history. The amazing thing is, many times these products are of actual interest to me.
According to Maryam Mohit, Amazon.com's V.P. of Site Development, the key is listening to the customers. "One wonderful thing about the Web is that when you release something, you instantly know what's working about it or not, because people from all over the world write and tell you (Hurst, 2002)."
The Web will continually develop a better user experience. I believe the dawn of Web 2.0 will be remembered as the time when the web became more than a catalog, or library and became the most powerful communication tool in history. In order to apply this to Education, schools will have to become more like Web 2.0. They will have to be dynamic, interactive, and customizable. These are now becoming possible with Web 2.0 technologies. There are a few tradeoff though. The teacher will have to give up some control. Control is the opposite of freedom. Freedom is a essential part of Web 2.0. It is the liberation of ideas!
References:
O'Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0 - O'Reilly Media. Retrieved 09/9/2009 from
http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html
Hurst, M. (2002). Interview: Maryam Mohit, Amazon.com - Good Experience. Retrieved 09/9/2009 from
http://www.goodexperience.com/2002/11/interview-maryam-mohit-amazonc.php
After watching the class videos and doing some research I believe I understand what Web 2.0 is and how it is different from Web 1.0. Basically in Web 1.0 the web did not understand who you were. It was one directional. Everyone had the same experience on the various websites. Web 2.0 is about a two way flow of information. The web becomes aware of, and gathers information about its' users. Therefore the experience becomes dynamic and personal. A great example of this is Amazon.com. If a user goes to that website it will allow you to browse their catalog for products. This is web 1.0. However, if the user creates an account and logs in, the experience changes. Amazon presents the user with suggested products based on their past purchasing history. The amazing thing is, many times these products are of actual interest to me.
According to Maryam Mohit, Amazon.com's V.P. of Site Development, the key is listening to the customers. "One wonderful thing about the Web is that when you release something, you instantly know what's working about it or not, because people from all over the world write and tell you (Hurst, 2002)."
The Web will continually develop a better user experience. I believe the dawn of Web 2.0 will be remembered as the time when the web became more than a catalog, or library and became the most powerful communication tool in history. In order to apply this to Education, schools will have to become more like Web 2.0. They will have to be dynamic, interactive, and customizable. These are now becoming possible with Web 2.0 technologies. There are a few tradeoff though. The teacher will have to give up some control. Control is the opposite of freedom. Freedom is a essential part of Web 2.0. It is the liberation of ideas!
References:
O'Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0 - O'Reilly Media. Retrieved 09/9/2009 from
http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html
Hurst, M. (2002). Interview: Maryam Mohit, Amazon.com - Good Experience. Retrieved 09/9/2009 from
http://www.goodexperience.com/2002/11/interview-maryam-mohit-amazonc.php
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
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