Preoccupations

Net Neutrality

From Four Eyed Monsters. Via Dave Snowden, who got it from a friend on Facebook, who …

US Citizens: Save the Internet | Rock the Vote

Technorati tags: net neutrality, internet, web

Mobiles

To get a sense of how rapidly cellphones are penetrating the global marketplace, you need only to look at the sales figures. According to statistics from the market database Wireless Intelligence, it took about 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide. The second billion sold in four years, and the third billion sold in two. Eighty percent of the world’s population now lives within range of a cellular network, which is double the level in 2000. And figures from the International Telecommunications Union show that by the end of 2006, 68 percent of the world’s mobile subscriptions were in developing countries.

— from The New York Times article focusing on the work of Jan Chipchase (and colleagues), Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?.

… have you ever stopped to wonder why? Why, regardless of culture, age, gender and increasingly context you're likely to find a mobile phone in the hand, pocket or bag of the person next to you? Put simply - the ability to communicate over distances in a personal convenient manner is universally understood and appreciated, and it's easy enough to get the basics without going to night school or taking a PhD. It certainly helps that, as a functional tool that can be used discreetly or with a flourish, the mobile phone makes an ideal vehicle for projecting one’s status and personal preferences - from the choice of brand, model, ring tone or wallpaper, or simply that (because you're connected) you've arrived.

Today over 3 billion of the world's 6.6 billion people have cellular connectivity and it is expected that another billion will be connected by 2010. But what is often overlooked is the disproportionate impact of mobile phones on different societies, which is one of the reasons why as researchers, we increasingly prefer to spend time in places like Cairo and Kampala: there is simply more to learn. These are places where for many, it's the first time they have the ability to communicate personally and conveniently over distances - without having to worry whether someone can overhear the topic of their conversation - communicate with whom they want, when they want. It makes new businesses viable and creates markets where there was none. For many it's the first time they can provide a stable fixed point of reference to the outside world - a phone number, which in turn creates a new form of identity that in turn enables everything from rudimentary banking to commerce. And not least - each new feature on or accessible through the mobile phone brings new modes of use - unencumbered by my, and probably your entrenched (and increasingly outdated) notions of entertainment, the 'right' way to capture and share experiences, the internet. If you work or study in the mobile space and you're expected to innovate, these are places that bring fresh thinking and new perspectives.

— from Jan Chipchase's article, Small Objects, Travelling Further, Faster.

The human race is crossing a line. There is now one cellphone for every two humans on Earth. ... we've passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cellphones on a planet of some 6.6 billion humans in about 26 years. This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history -- faster even than the polio vaccine.

"We knew this was going to happen a few years ago. And we know how it will end," says Eric Schmidt, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Google. "It will end with 5 billion out of the 6" with cellphones. ... "Eventually there will be more cellphone users than people who read and write. I think if you get that right, then everything else becomes obvious."

"It's the technology most adapted to the essence of the human species -- sociability," says Arthur Molella, director of the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. "It's the ultimate tool to find each other. It's wonderful technology for being human."

— from The Washington Post, Our Cells, Ourselves.

Technorati tags: mobile, mobiles, cellphones, Jan Chipchase, communication, internet, identity

What we're teaching this year

I thought I'd post here some links to stuff we've developed and are using with our first year students (13 year-olds). The material is in the public domain, on JotSpot.

So, here's the syllabus. (It's open to revision this year, as we teach it, and, of course, before we teach it again next year.)

Autumn Term

ICT at school, home ... mobile
Internet & web: key figures and events
Reading the social web: browsers, RSS and search
Communicating & collaborating, on- and off-line I: Office(s)

Spring Term

Communicating & collaborating, on- and off-line II: webmail, IM, chat, VoIP; blogs & wikis; video- and photo-sharing; social bookmarking and tagging; maps

Summer Term

Responsibility and Identity: Wikipedia (critical reading, responsible writing); social software (privacy, safety, digital identity)
The Law: copyright (links, permissions, problems); music (file-sharing, DRM); defamation and abuse (rights and responsibilities)
Games
Virtual Worlds   

Then there's a wealth of linked-to background material that served earlier this year as stuff for the department to immerse itself in as it readied itself. (We're very fortunate in the quality and commitment of the team which teaches this course.) I update this material from time to time so it can remain useful. 

Finally, the lessons to date: 

1  Introduction 

2  Home & mobile technologies 

3  The Internet 

4  Internet Pioneers 

5  The Web 

6  The Web 

7  Browsers 

8  Personalisation and home pages 

9  RSS & Aggregators 

10  Search 

11  RSS & Search: improving the signal to noise ratio 

12 Office: I

We've had fun delivering these within the constraints of time (one 40-minute lesson a week!) and the engagement of the pupils has been inspiring. 

In doing what we've been doing, my concern has been to leave behind what John Naughton called (in the Observer) the Old Person's ICT Curriculum. I also found inspiration along the way in Dave Snowden's blog post, Huginn and Muginn. Not everything there meshes with what we're doing (we're not delivering touch-typing and, yes, we should be) and we are teaching something of a body of knowledge (eg, about web history —€” Eliot: 'A people without history Is not redeemed from time' — but that's not what he was referring to: see 'don't teach ICT as if it was a "body of knowledge"'). Such things apart, I'm entirely at one with the spirit of remarks like these:

… make computers and broadband a universal right, like water … most computing skills and all social computing capability is learnt by doing and by regular practice rather than classroom lessons.

… what really matters is that children experience and contribute to the evolution of technology, and to see that evolution as a symbiotic relationship with human kind. That requires us … [to be] thoughtful and mindful. We don't need to sacrifice an eye to gain wisdom … but we do need to sacrifice an over explicit non-experiential approach to ICT teaching.

I also like his fifth point:

Let things emerge, don't plan … It's not so much about repeating a success as repeating the conditions which led to that success. In any complex system you can never replicate outcome, but you can replicate starting conditions. … you want multiple diverse initiatives to emerge, and you want to measure their impact on the social and educational fabric … not a series of pre-determined targeted outcomes.

There's been a surprising amount of room for things to emerge: pupils experiment in their own time, bring a lot to the table, anyway, and are excited by discovering more about the powers given them by contemporary computing.

I'd add to all this a word about the re-appraisal of Prensky's influential digital natives meme — a re-appraisal that has been going on for some time now. Here's Henry Jenkins (writing earlier this month):

Talk of "digital natives" helps us to recognize and respect the new kinds of learning and cultural expression which have emerged from a generation that has come of age alongside the personal and networked computer. Yet, talk of "digital natives" may also mask the different degrees [of] access to and comfort with emerging technologies experienced by different youth. Talk of digital natives may make it harder for us to pay attention to the digital divide in terms of who has access to different technical platforms and the participation gap in terms of who has access to certain skills and competencies or for that matter, certain cultural experiences and social identities. Talking about youth as digital natives implies that there is a world which these young people all share and a body of knowledge they have all mastered, rather than seeing the online world as unfamiliar and uncertain for all of us.

Teaching this course this year, we have had it confirmed that being born in 1994 doesn't mean that online life, for all that it may be familiar, is well understood: where it's come from, what it can do and what your options are —€” these are all things that unite adults and teens as we seek to develop and mature in this new and changing world.

Technorati tags: ICT, St Paul's, youth, teens, teaching, digital natives, digital divide

On not rushing to disparage the internet

Vint Cerf in last Monday's Guardian:

It is not often that a technological innovation changes fundamentally the way people communicate. In the 15th century the printing press made it possible to distribute the written word. In the 19th century, the telegraph enabled rapid point-to-point communication over long distances. Then there was the telephone. And we're still coming to terms with the social effects of radio and television.

It takes decades if not generations to fully understand the impact of such inventions. We are barely two decades into the commercial availability of the internet, but it has already changed the world. It has fostered self-expression and freed information from the constraints of physical location, opening up the world's information to people everywhere.

Shelley Powers, responding two days ago to Doris Lessing's bleak assessment of the internet's impact on culture, education and reading:

The internet is no more culpable for people 'wasting' time away than the television was, and the radio before that, and the electric light before that–on back through history marked by one invention or another. Technology does not change culture, as much as technology and culture impact, equally, on each other. …

… Amazon has grown fat on the profits of selling that which we supposedly disdain: books. Entire web sites spend most or all of their space providing reviews of, what else, books. The Gutenberg Project actually makes books available online for free. Ms. Lessing mistakes our assumptions of easy access of books for indifference to books. A very romantic thought, but not a very logical one. …

As for the banalities of this space, among the items I've read this week were [detailed summary of online reading, viewing and web-led book discoveries follows] … I would be curious to know at what point in all of this reading is the moment where I stepped over the line from spending time in banal pursuits, to spending time usefully? What makes one piece of writing more important and therefore more worthy than another?

Technorati tags: Vint Cerf, innovation, Shelley Powers, Doris Lessing, reading, culture, web

When the internet goes

The Onion — of course.

Technorati tags: The Onion

Never mind the 70s, watch out for the 90s

Read Momus yesterday on how the 70s might come back for a second time, but probably won't. Woke up this morning to hear IDS on 'the family' (BBC link here). Well, we've been there before!

So thinking about that made me dig out something Stephen Fry wrote for The Spectator (Diary), commenting on the rise and rise of 'family values' as a core part of the 'agenda' of Conservative politicians:

It has become impossible now to utter a sentence without the barons of the new trendiness insisting on the inclusion of the words 'standards', 'individual', 'values', 'responsibility' and 'family'. It doesn't matter in what order they occur or what meaningless nonsense they denote, the words must dominate what statesmen like to call our 'agenda'. Eight years ago I wrote an article in the Listener wondering at the half-cocked stupidity of politicians displaying such impertinence. The trendy belief in family values had already been going for a good seven years by then and there seems even now to be no end in sight. Nobody minds that the Conservative governments of the last 15 years have contained at least six adulterers and two homosexuals at cabinet level and dozens more on the back-benches. If these men want mistresses, love-children and boyfriends, then good luck to them. The British are a decent, tolerant and friendly people and like to see their fellow citizens enjoying themselves in a kindly, responsible and adult way. What really gets our goat is when these same men and their colleagues stand on podia in seaside towns at Party Conference time and tell us how to behave in private; what causes us pain and indignation is to hear them lecture the nation about the virtues of the family and deride those of us who prefer not to have our moral horizons dictated by the Daily Mail. The Family: that noble institution responsible for 70 per cent of all murders, over 80 per cent of incidents of child abuse and a full 100 per cent of all cases of incest.

Date? 13 November, 1993.

Into this stream of consciousness there came a discussion thread on ORG-discuss, focusing on this, 'Oral Answers to Questions: Home Department' (House of Commons, Monday, 9 July 2007) — on Internet Service Providers. Excerpt:

Patrick Cormack (South Staffordshire, Conservative):

Although I welcome the Home Secretary's comments, does she agree that it is a tragedy that what used to be the place where childhood innocence was protected and preserved—the home—is now often the place where it is corrupted and destroyed?

In the ORG thread, Suw quotes the indispensable danah boyd (quoted in a piece dated from midway through last year):

Unfortunately, predators lurk wherever youth hang out. Since youth are on MySpace, there are bound to be predators on MySpace. Yet, predators do not use online information to abduct children; children face a much higher risk of abduction or molestation from people they already know – members of their own family or friends of the family. Statistically speaking, kids are more at risk at a church picnic or a boy scout outing than they are when they go on MySpace. Less than .01% of all youth abductions nationwide are stranger abductions and as far as we know, no stranger abduction has occurred because of social network services.

Romanticising the past, or an institution, and demonising technology won't help anyone.

Technorati tags: ORG, ISPs, chidlren, youth, family

Talk at St Paul's

I spoke this morning to our first two year groups — years 9 and 10 (14 and 15 year-olds) about some aspects of the web and digital life, generational gaps in understanding these, search, mediated publics, Facebook … and schools. The slides are available online here. (I wish Slideshare could also make my slides' notes available — or maybe I've missed something? I've added the notes in the comments to the slides.)

I was finishing the slides early this morning when I finally ran through Tom's slides for his Reboot talk. I'd already included several shots of Facebook's privacy pages/options; inspired by Tom's coverage of the same, I added a couple more! I think I Twitter'd earlier this year that privacy options within Facebook were rendering me battle weary.

Technorati tags: teenagers, teens, youth

Forgetting, again

A post by Abe Burmeister set me thinking, again, about forgetting.

A friend said yesterday, 'After all, when we were young, at some point, we all did something, whatever it was — ran naked down some street, something …'. A photo taken then meant that we were caught forever, always running naked down that street, but it might have disappeared for much of its life, gathering dust in some drawer. Now that photo makes it (straight) to the web and to a kind of permanence and presence (even ubiquity) never before possible. The years pass, but the (by now distributed) photo doesn't.

Back in 2003, Fabio Sergio wrote about how,

… with everyone apparently fascinated with ways to remember I find myself toying with the idea of "technologies for forgetting" … All in all we are facing a future strung tight between the ideal, pacific world of the Memex, where man will be given "access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages", and one where Lenny Nero will feel at home, characterized by our collective inability to let go of our past.

I keep hoping (and working) for the first scenario to become our future, but recognize it will require active involvement from everyone, driven by ample awareness of what's at stake.

Over at Abstract Dynamics yesterday, Abe was saying something similar (in a piece about Gmail and Google's goal of "organizing all the world's information"):

Some information is meant to disappear, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Google it seems is not willing to make that distinction, although ironically they more than any other entity have the power to make things disappear. …

'Some information is meant to disappear', or be mediated. The memory of that time when as a kid you ran naked down some street can linger on in the telling, to be recalled years later, embellished and without its sting, a source of amusement, leg-pulling and amicable, entertaining embarrassment — your children delighted both at your discomfort and at discovering that once you were just like them. But a stark photo on the web, that's copied and posted again and again, sent to the senior partner of your new firm the day you're about to start working there, published in a newspaper years later …

Fabio imagines an angry argument between Mr A and Mr B, and imagines it twice — unfilmed and filmed. In the first case,

After a few days they hook up again, matters having cooled off and all, and they talk about the incident, re-living the discussion while trying to clear things up.The inherent fuzziness of their recollection helps in dumbing sharp edges down, as we have been proven to remember positive things better and negative things less clearly, and in the end they agree on a common explanation of the argument, thus creating the possibility for their relationship to evolve around the event. What is important here, though, is that what actually happened matters as much as what they mutually agreed happened. The final experience, mediated through their second conversation, has the opportunity to change from negative to positive, leaving clarification in place of contrast. All's well that ends well, right?

With filmed evidence of what actually happened,

… there will be simply less room to maneuver for both of them, less room to mediate experience into memory. Due to the timelessness quality of the digitally-produced artifacts, which potentially shine as new forever after they've been first created, Mr. A's descendants will still be able to hear (and judge) Mr. B's words and attitude. Take this one social magnitude level higher and what you get is a society unable to let go of its past's tiniest details.

Forgetting strikes me as something we need to pay a lot more attention to as we go forward with digital technology. It crops up in surprisingly different contexts (IT departments should check out danah boyd's post about teenagers and passwords — 'Technology is a bit too obsessed with remembering; there's a lot of value in forgetting').

And now I remember it, Anne Galloway wrote back in 2003 about forgetting:

We need to forget certain things to survive and stay together. What will happen if everything is tracked and recorded. How will we be able to forget? Will the owners and administrators of the data allow us to forget? For example, we have social and cultural practices (expectations and norms) in place that accommodate comments MADE IN PASSING ... what if certain comments are not allowed to pass?

And also this from 2004, on the Forgetting Machine:

So I was reminded of my Forgetting Machine. And that I am trying to build something that reminds us that not all things can or should be remembered. A tricky task, for sure! Part of this involves the creative corruption of information - along the lines of bricolage or remixing - as well as the selective and wholesale deletion of information.

Anne's paper (2006, I think), 'Collective remembering and the importance of forgetting: a critical design challenge', is available here (pdf). From the Abstract:

Memories are understood as relations of power through which we, as individuals and groups, actively negotiate and decide what can be recollected and what can be forgotten. And without being able to decide what we can remember and forget, we are effectively left without hope of becoming different people or creating different worlds.

That's absolutely my concern for the teenagers posting photos and stories about themselves and each other. I want for them (as I want for my own children) the possibility of their becoming different people, to have the chance to let experience grow into memory and to be allowed to let go, to forget.

Anne has a fine phrase in her paper, 'ubiquitous machines of merciless memory' — 'there is such a thing as too much memory … we need to forget in order to live'. Fabio Sergio asks: 'Are we heading towards an über-politically correct world, where we'll be forced to always ponder all of our words for fear of getting quoted 20 years from now … a future devoid of the room for doubt?'

This, then, is something we also need to be talking about in ICT: forgetting and remembering. I commend Anne's paper very warmly. It asks wise questions — 'What does it really mean if the memories held by our machines never change or get forgotten?' — and remembers that forgetting can be 'a kind of affirmation rather than … a denial. … the value of forgetting is its ability to interrupt time or escape temporal continuity, and thus (re)imagine human experience'. Her paper challenges designers to remember all this, too, and to design accordingly and wisely.

Technorati tags: memory, remembering, forgetting, Fabio Sergio, Anne Galloway, ICT, IT

'Top down politics is no longer sustainable in a bottom-up age'

Thought-provoking and rather more valuable than the thing I just read — George Osborne's talk at the RSA last week, 'Recasting the political settlement for the digital age'. Paul Miller drew my attention to it with his post:

Normally, listening to politicians talking about technology is a bit embarrassing. They fall into lots of very obvious traps and sound very naive. But the shadow chancellor has met the people, read the books and obviously spends a fair amount of time online (using Firefox which earned him extra brownie points).

The speech begins:

We are all here this morning because we share a common belief: we believe in the power of technology - in its ability to help transform society for the better by giving individuals more freedom, more choice and ultimately more power. At heart we are technology optimists. Of course technological change isn't always easy to deal with because it so often disrupts the established way of doing things. … Last November, in a talk on politics in the internet age, I identified some of the key social changes that have been unleashed by this technological revolution. Today I want to go further …

You can read the speech in full here. It describes 'three pillars on which I believe this new political settlement should be built':

• 'The first of these pillars is about equality - equality of information - or what Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive of Google, called "the democratisation of access to information" when he spoke to our Party Conference. For centuries access to the world's information - and the ability to communicate it - was controlled by a few: the powerful, the wealthy and the well educated. … No longer is there an asymmetry of information between the individual and the State, or between the layperson and the expert. This shift is changing the world. It is empowering individuals; raising expectations of government services; and increasing accountability for all of us who work in the public sector and in politics. …
• The second pillar of a new political settlement will be founded on new social networks. … On-line political networks are springing up in the UK too now - and interestingly they are almost all Conservative ones. There are those networks actively set up by the Conservative Party. … But it is not the official Conservative websites that I find most exciting. It is the unofficial ones. Take Conservativehome.com. … Although I, and other Shadow Cabinet members, am frequently the target of Conservativehome.com, it is for me unambiguously a good thing that it exists. … Top down politics is no longer sustainable in a bottom-up age. … 
• The final pillar of this new political settlement is open source. … Open source politics means rejecting the old monolithic top-down approach to decision-making. It means throwing open the doors and listening to new ideas and new contributors. It means harnessing the power of mass collaboration. And rather than relying on the input of a few trusted experts, it means drawing on the skills and expertise of millions. … Companies are now increasingly using "Wikis" to solve internal problems - because you can have lots of people working on them at once. Those people don't necessarily have to work for the company. This is a radical departure from our traditional understanding of the business model. … Similar collaborative approaches could be applied in government. … The direction of travel is clear. The government needs to get onboard. … Another way the government could harness an open source approach is through the procurement of open source software. … Ever since I visited the headquarters of Mozilla in Palo Alto I have become a user of their open source Firefox web-browser. … most central governments departments make use of no open source software whatsoever. What's going wrong? The problem is that the cultural change has not taken place in government. … Not a single open source company is included in Catalyst, the government's list of approved IT suppliers. … Another problem has been the lack of open standards in government IT procurement. All too often, a government IT system is incompatible with other types of software, which stifles competition and hampers innovation. Looking at the litany of IT projects that have collapsed or spiralled over budget, it's clear too that this has meant billions of pounds wasted and public service reform being hampered. The government's entire approach needs to be overhauled.'

Striking in itself — a speech about the changed and still changing world in which politicians now work, the challenges, the ways forward — every educator should be reading it:

… the internet is like the child pushing at boundaries of authority and challenging the established way of doing things - the business models from the last century, traditional media, long accepted notions of national jurisdiction and concepts of governmental control. The challenge is for the "pushed" - probably most of us here in this room - to resist the urge to push back: to regulate and legislate; to try to tame and to control.

… the most basic reaction to new technology: doing the old thing a new way. Instead … successful companies are harnessing this new technology to do things in a new way …

What's needed in government is as much a cultural shift as a technological change. A shift to a culture that welcomes criticism and comment - then reacts to it. A shift to a culture that seeks customers' views and ideas at every stage of developing a service. And a shift to a culture where every service can be improved, and no service is ever fully developed. That means more than constantly tinkering with public services for the sake of it. It means being open to fresh thinking and input from both users and deliverers.

How are we, educators and schools, adapting and changing to life in this world?  How are we preparing our students for this world where technology has rendered knowledge abundant; where innovation, creativity, entrepreneurial flair and initiative are prized skills and qualities; where teenagers are collaborating and networking and hacking yet little or none of this is informing and transforming the formal curriculum? (For an index of numerous previous posts to do with education, click here.) The direction of travel is, indeed, clear and schools, too, need to get onboard.

Technorati tags: George Osborne, RSA, open source, schools, digital immigrants, digital natives

Are you addicted?

Take the Internet Addiction Test and substitute 'read' or 'reading' or 'book' for 'on-line', 'internet', etc. For example:

How often do you find that you stay on-line read longer than you intended?

How often do you neglect household chores to spend more time on-line reading?

How often do others in your life complain to you about the amount of time you spend on-line reading?

How often do you block out disturbing thoughts about your life with soothing thoughts of the Internet a good book?

How often do you find yourself anticipating when you will go on-line be reading again?

How often do you fear that life without the Internet reading would be boring, empty, and joyless?

How often do you snap, yell, or act annoyed if someone bothers you while you are on-line reading?

How often do you lose sleep due to late-night log-ins reading?

Over the course of my life, I have failed, and still fail, with both books and the web on all these questions — if failure is what is meant by answering 'often'. And so would just about any of my friends and family — for at least one, if not both, of the … er … addictive substances.

I've seen some evidence of the Internet Addiction Test being used in, or considered for use in, UK schools. If the aim is to convince our students that we really are very out of touch, then that's a good idea. Otherwise, bin it.

Technorati tags: Internet Addiction Test, reading, schools, digital natives, digital immigrants

Alan Kay's & Doug Engelbart's vision

Alan Kay, interviewed in CIO Insight (another link via Martin's del.icio.us links): 

A great thinker in our field is Doug Engelbart, who is mostly remembered for inventing the computer mouse. If you search Google you will find Doug's Web page, where there are 75 essays about what personal computing should be about. And on one of the early hits you can watch the demo he gave in 1968 to 3,000 people in San Francisco, showing them what the world of the future would be like. 

Engelbart, right from his very first proposal to ARPA [Advanced Research Projects Agency], said that when adults accomplish something that's important, they almost always do it through some sort of group activity. If computing was going to amount to anything, it should be an amplifier of the collective intelligence of groups. But Engelbart pointed out that most organizations don't really know what they know, and are poor at transmitting new ideas and new plans in a way that's understandable. Organizations are mostly organized around their current goals. Some organizations have a part that tries to improve the process for attaining current goals. But very few organizations improve the process of figuring out what the goals should be. 

Most of the ideas in that sphere, good ideas that would apply to business, were written down 40 years ago by Engelbart. But in the last few years I've been asking computer scientists and programmers whether they've ever typed E-N-G-E-L-B-A-R-T into Google-and none of them have. I don't think you could find a physicist who has not gone back and tried to find out what Newton actually did. It's unimaginable. Yet the computing profession acts as if there isn't anything to learn from the past, so most people haven't gone back and referenced what Engelbart thought. 

The things that are wrong with the Web today are due to this lack of curiosity in the computing profession. And it's very characteristic of a pop culture. Pop culture lives in the present; it doesn't really live in the future or want to know about great ideas from the past. I'm saying there's a lot of useful knowledge and wisdom out there for anybody who is curious, and who takes the time to do something other than just executing on some current plan. Cicero said, "Who knows only his own generation remains always a child." People who live in the present often wind up exploiting the present to an extent that it starts removing the possibility of having a future.

Lots more besides to enjoy: on the way operating systems have been written as 'layered architecture … even though layered systems don't scale very well' — 'This is an example of the invisibility of normality. We're not even aware that we're accepting most things we accept. Any creative person has to try and force their brain to reconsider things that are accepted so widely they seem like laws of the universe. Very often they aren't laws of the universe; they're just conventions'. On the Viewpoints Research Institute, of which he is President: 

The Viewpoints Research Institute is actually involved in three new projects. One is the $100 laptop project that Nicholas Negroponte is doing. That is coming along very well. The first 1,000 factory-built machines were built in the last few weeks. The plan is to build 5 million to 8 million laptops this summer, and perhaps as many as 50 million in 2008. We're very involved in that. The other thing is a recently funded NSF project that will take a couple of giant steps, we hope, toward reinventing programming. The plan is to take the entire personal-computing experience from the end user down to the silicon and make a system from scratch that recapitulates everything people are used to—desktop publishing, Internet experiences, etc.—in less than 20,000 lines of code. It would be kind of like a Moore's Law step in software. It's going to be quite difficult to do this work in five years, but it will be exciting. 

The third project we're just getting started on and don't have completely funded yet, is to make a new kind of user interface that can actually help people learn things, from very mundane things about how their computer system works to more interesting things like math, science, reading and writing. This project came about because of the $100 laptop. In order for the $100 laptop to be successful in the educational realm, it has to take on some mentoring processes itself. This is an old idea that goes all the way back to the sixties. Many people have worked on it. It just has never gotten above threshold.

On the possibilities for computers and computing experience in the future: 

How much learning is a person willing to do to really learn how to use a computer? The answer, over the last 25 years of the commercialization of personal computing, is almost none. Nobody really wants to put in any amount of effort. The things that people have been willing to learn have tended to be like the media they grew up with, which have really simple user interfaces. (The big exception is video games.) You don't see Doug Engelbart's approach to user interface, which was an incredibly efficient, two-handed interface that required training to learn how to use. 

One way of looking at personal computing is to focus on the kinds of things that computers can help people learn. There are a whole bunch of things that can be done if learning, rather than function, matters. If you were to change the approach to the user interface, as we thought we were doing at Xerox PARC, to a more learning-curve-oriented system, then you would be able to accelerate the acceptance of the newer ideas about what computers can do.

But perhaps most of all: 

… the reason I work with children and not adults is because adults are famously difficult to change in any significant way. They've made a commitment to the norms of the world they live in. Children are born not knowing what culture they've been born into, how the culture thinks, and what that culture thinks is important. Yet they are born with some built-in patterns of thinking that are universal. Since the late sixties, I've been interested in the extent to which you could cultivate the kind of thinking skills that only a few people use in the world today, by getting children to learn much more widely and much more fluently than most adults have. If you want to make a change, get the children to think differently.

Technorati tags: Alan Kay, Doug Engelbart, Viewpoints Research Institute, OLPC, computers, computing, collective intelligence, organsations

2007

Eric Schmidt:

… what’s surprising is that so many companies are still betting against the net, trying to solve today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions. The past few years have taught us that business models based on controlling consumers or content don’t work. Betting against the net is foolish because you’re betting against human ingenuity and creativity. …

In 2007 we’ll witness the increasing dominance of open internet standards. As web access via mobile phones grows, these standards will sweep aside the proprietary protocols promoted by individual companies striving for technical monopoly. Today’s desktop software will be overtaken by internet-based services that enable users to choose the document formats, search tools and editing capability that best suit their needs.

Driving this change is a profound technological shift in computer science. For the past 20 years a client-server computing architecture has dominated digital infrastructures. Expensive PCs ran complex software programs and relied primarily on proprietary protocols to connect to bigger—and even more expensive—mainframe servers. The data and the power lived in these computers and their operating systems.

Today we live in the clouds. We’re moving into the era of “cloud” computing, with information and applications hosted in the diffuse atmosphere of cyberspace rather than on specific processors and silicon racks. The network will truly be the computer. … Cloud computing is hardly perfect: internet-based services aren’t always reliable and there is often no way to use them offline. But the direction is clear. Simplicity is triumphing over complexity. Accessibility is beating exclusivity. Power is increasingly in the hands of the user.

… put simple, intuitive technology in the hands of users and they will create content and share it. The fastest-growing parts of the internet all involve direct human interaction. … online communities are thriving and growing. The internet is helping to satisfy our most fundamental human needs—our desire for knowledge, communication and a sense of belonging. …

We’re betting on the internet because we believe that there’s a bull market in imagination online.

Technorati tags: Google, Eric Schmidt, cloud computing, desktop, online, open standards, knowledge, UGC

Is online already 'good enough'?

Sam Sethi posted at TechCrunch UK three days ago that 'I suddenly felt a wave of liberation come over me as I decided this was a good time to move my entire digital life (and data) to the web':

My goal was to simply separate my data from the application and in turn from the operating system.

So: Google Apps for Your Domain ('to host my POP3 email accounts and calendars'), Google Reader ('the next desktop item removed was my desktop RSS Reader'), Google Docs & Spreadsheets ('The next big challenge was to see if I could do without Microsoft’s Office on my desktop … Although I would consider myself a heavy user of Outlook and Powerpoint, I now consider myself a “lite” user of Excel, Word and Access'). On quitting MS Office for Google Docs & Spreadsheets:

I was pleasantly surprised, although it’s still very rudimentary - like moving back to Office 2002 or earlier - the product fits well with my “lite” user requirements. That said, the best thing about Docs & Spreadsheet was being able to collaborate online with other people. More often than not, that is what I find myself doing these days. e.g. for the TechCrunch Party I was collaborating with several people about the attendee list. No longer did I have to email document attachments and then integrate the changes from several people. I simply invited the people to use the online file and we all collaborated on the same file. Of course had Google bought JotSpot sooner, I might have additionally used the wiki capabilities.

Using Docs & Spreadsheet has enabled me to successfully remove the need for Word, Excel and Access 2003 from my desktop and to be clear I will NOT be upgrading to Office 2007 for the princely sum of £/$400. Instead I will use the Office 2007 free viewers if I need to read Office attachments in the future or I can wait until Google provide a free converter/reader for Docs & Spreadsheet. In fact most of the documents I receive today are PDF file attachments and I have already replaced Adobe’s desktop reader with the smaller, faster and free Firefox plug-in called Foxit.

Equally having replaced the need for Outlook, the issue of synchronisation between Outlook and Google calendars and the respective inboxes quickly became a non-issue. Although if you still wish to still use Outlook’s calendar then there are third party solutions that enable you to link the two services. The last major hurdle was to replace the need for PowerPoint, so I decided to trial a combination of online services. The first I am using is SlideShare which enables me to upload my (old) existing Powerpoint presentations and make them available online. Secondly I am trying two online presentation tools , Empressr and Thumbstacks. As Google continues to build their version of Office “online”, I guess it won’t be long before Google enter the market again and buy a presentation tool, but which one?

Sam goes on to discuss online storage ('[I] needed to have an online storage drive so that I was truly free of the OS and that when I was out and about I could also access my files'): what Google might soon offer and other, existing options, such as Amazon's S3. He concludes in part: 'Of course there are some feature limitations about this online configuration but most of those holes are being filled in by greasemonkey scripts or Firefox extensions for now. … Of course not everyone agrees with this type of migration to the web and I must admit for many people the richness of desktop applications will remain superior. I guess what I am looking for is flexibility of choice over bloated functionality that I no longer need or can afford.'

Well, sending this TechCrunch UK link to some colleagues immediately elicited a 'Just what I'm thinking of doing' response. (Sam followed up his posting with another, the same day, Hasta La Vista Microsoft … we won’t be back!, in which he noted others — Richard McManus, Ryan Carson — newly posting their thoughts about, or recording their experience with web-apps.) I had students last academic year writing essays in Writely, and I certainly expect the depth and degree of student and teacher engagement with web-apps to change dramatically in the coming months.

I blogged previously about Google Apps for Your Domain and Google Apps for Education here and here, and about Google Reader here. In the end, I think there's still a great market for hybrid tools. (One of my sons, on a new machine and without MS Word, asked my advice and ended up writing his university essay using Google Docs & Spreadsheets. But he told me later that he then downloaded his document at uni where he could finish off the look of his essay in Word.) Going online is going to score highly, though, because of ease of access (to your data), because of ease and reliability of storage (let a pro outfit store your data and back it up) — and because of the collaborative possibilities web-apps open up. The last will become very big, but right now are probably not figuring much on the radar of most early users in schools. (When we really understand the way the web has opened up collaborative possibilities then we will have undergone a sea change in education.) 

Of course, there's edge … and there's edge. Matt is already thinking about deploy-to-desktop:

Web apps are currently undergoing a renaissance–or perhaps they’re fulfilling the promise made when the genre was created in 1999. The technology, skills and community that go to make these web apps is beginning to turn in many different directions. We’ll soon see a number of different web app species. One I find most exciting is Deploy to Desktop. What if the same skills needed to build complex web apps could be turned to making desktop applications, starting from a simple web app in a HTML renderer window, and iterating to use native widgets, drag and drop, and full OS integration? (More about this in my App After App talk.)

As he writes there, he's not alone. How different computing will seem in just a short while.

Technorati tags: online, Google Reader, Google Apps for Your Domain, Google Apps for Education, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google, storage, Amazon S3, Windows Live, deploy to desktop

The future of e-learning

On Monday of last week, I went to the OII for the The future of e-learning. I'd wanted to post a few thoughts about this session before now, but in some ways I might be drawing more from the discussion for having left it this long.

Monday 16 October 2006 16:00 - 17:30

• Andrew Pinder, Chairman of the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta)

Location: Oxford Internet Institute, 1 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JS.

Andrew Pinder will discuss his vision of the future of e-learning. What are the key challenges for building a technological and institutional infrastructure for education in the 21st century?

Dame Stephanie Shirley spoke first, giving some context for the discussion. She remarked on how, over a number of years, education has become preoccupied with the development of skills over the transmission of information (from 'didactic' to 'conductive'). Andrew Pinder then took the floor. The webcast will be available soon from the OII (at this site). He was candid about not being an educationalist and the tension some of his words created springs, I am sure, from this difference of background, knowledge and experience: 

Between October 2000 and August 2004, Andrew was the UK's E-Envoy, responsible directly to the Prime Minister for co-ordinating the development of the knowledge economy in the UK. … During that time Andrew had significant involvement with the education sector, especially in relation to the large investment that has been made over the last few years in technology. Before becoming E-envoy, Andrew had a long career in both the public and private sector. He was a civil servant in the Inland Revenue for 18 years, working in a wide range of senior jobs, including Director of IT. He then moved to Prudential, where he ran operations and technology for almost five years, before having a stint at Citibank, initially as European Director of Operations and technology, before moving to the US to take up a global role with the Bank. He left Citibank in 1999, and became involved with venture capital, as well as carrying out some consultancy assignments within Government, including leading the first ever 'Gateway Review'. During this period, he was also Chairman of the Shropshire Learning and Skills Council, during its set up period.

Andrew left the E-Envoy role in August 2004. He now runs a small management consultancy, and has advised a number of other Governments in Asia, North America and Eastern Europe on how to develop the use of technology in their countries. Becta Board

Earlier this year, Becta published its annual report which has been summed up as saying that much money has been spent on IT in UK education with little discernible return. The report itself puts it somewhat more optimistically:   

There is a growing body of evidence that the use of ICT in education has a positive, if small, impact on learner attainment as measured in national tests.

Andrew told us Becta research concludes that about 15% of the UK's 25,000 schools have shown some gains in performance as a result of the technology that's been poured into them. Faced with such modest benefit, one has to ask, he said, was the technology wrong or was it just not used well? The core of his answer is that schools have lacked a business model, a comprehension of themselves as businesses — something that is required if they are to be able to discern how to put the technology to effective use. With respect to technological investment in particular, 'what is not happening is the industrialisation of education'. 

Andrew was, as he said, trying to be provocative in his choice of language. I'd noted back in May that he was linking industry and education, talking directly of the 'education industry'. Here's a BBC piece from then that I quoted when I spoke at Reboot 8 (see here): 

As Andrew Pinder, chair of the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta), told a conference this week schools are "one of a relatively small number of industries that do not look as if they have changed much over the past 30 years".

'The education industry': it is, I believe, an unfortunate turn of phrase. Amongst my notes from what Andrew said during last Monday's OII session: the education industry doesn't see itself as an industry; teaching is still a cottage industry, whereas in the wider world processes have been devised to implement technology and effect change; teaching is still conducted as something that works from the ground up (professionals often pride themselves on their own, separate expertise) — 'what's not happening is the industrialisation of education'; the supply side is 'hopelessly disorganised — tens of thousands of little "garage software" firms'; schools are rigid in nature, not exposed to dynamic pressures or to consumer demand … (That last took my breath away. My experience in the private sector doesn't square with that, but I was really thinking of a good friend who teaches in a state primary school and who faces, daily, 'dynamic pressures' and 'consumer demand' — ceaselessly revised demands made via management and LEA and DfES, a very large number of statemented children, with all that that means, and parents who are not slow in coming forward with their take on things.) 

Unsurprisingly, Andrew faced some strong reaction from the floor. I was impressed with how quickly he read the mood and came to feel that some of his language had not helped him advance his case. I was heartened by this because there is a great deal that we agree on and in the work that's to be done to implement technology in schools we don't want to be side-tracked by fighting each other. (I quite agree that schools are resistant to change — schools are, almost always, it seems, inherently conservative institutions — and I know from my own experience that collaborative work on projects with business teaches teachers to open their eyes much more, to consider both their own institution's development/business plan, or lack of it, and how organisations in general think of and organise themselves.) 

Professor John Furlong, Director of Educational Studies at Oxford, did a great job, I thought, in responding to some of the issues raised by Andrew. Homing in on things he mentioned which really interest me here: the great gap between the confident, skilful ways in which children handle technology at home and out of school — and the ways schools then expect them to handle it; how school authorities still often see themselves as owners of the knowledge they impart; how IT is profoundly disruptive to schools, teaching and teachers — so schools find IT very hard to work with. (Tony Hart, Commercial Director, Handheld Learning, later remarked that the real challenge of the new technologies in schools is to the role and nature of the teacher.) Andrew, John said, is asking the right questions but starts from the wrong place in his attempt to find the answers. 

I'm with Andrew when he came back after these points to say that, in order to change things, you need to change the whole institution. Agreed — but this certainly doesn't mean that we need an imposed, top-down solution. What we need (and we could also agree on this!) is two kinds of pioneer: the inspiring, individual teacher (Andrew was fulsome in his praise of such) and the organisational pioneer. 

I was struck that no-one used the term 'digital divide' — Prensky's digital natives and digital immigrants — but it is precisely this that makes for a significant, added difficulty in the use of the new technologies in schools. I read this in yesterday's Guardian: 

This week Schmidt warned an audience in Washington of the struggle Google faced with politicians. "The average person in government is not of the age of people who are using all this stuff," he told a public symposium hosted by the National Academies' Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. "There is a generational gap, and it's very, very real."

Just so.

Technorati tags: OII, e-learning, elearning, schools, Andrew Pinder, Becta, digital natives, digital immigrants