Abject Learning: Waves
I don’t pretend to be a McLuhanesque visionary, I’m just one of millions of nodes bobbing out in the digital wonderland, riding waves of information, with socially filtered antennae-bots probing out in innumerable directions and sending back data that I have no expertise to analyse. Lately I’m receiving increasingly strong and troubling transmissions…

Brian doesn’t need *my* juice to add to his message, but damn this is one beautiful bit o’ bloggery.

Why most conferences suck Scripting News
[I]f you want to have a truly useful conference that everyone gets something out of, structure it so that everyone has something to do at all times. Hopefully things that involve other people or the venue, if not, what’s the point of going somewhere to do this stuff?

We try to fill the time with sessions so people will have something to look at, but that’s not the same as having something to do.

Extending the argument, those who grew up with VCRs understand movies differently because their clocks don’t blink. While it may be true that those with the remote in their hands tend to stop, back, repeat, and slow mo more often than those without, I’d have to submit that the reason they do that is because (a) they can and (b) it occurs to them. Having a blinking clock is merely an artifact of prioritization. If it bothers you enough, you fix it. The underlying appreciation of the medium is based less on affordance than exposure to and knowledge of the vernacular.

The reality, of course, is probably more complex, but I would maintain that this notion is not that much different than looking at the difference between “pedagogy” and “andragogy.” I’ve long maintained that the distinction is arbitrary, artificial, and more an indictment of the shameful ways we treat kids in school than it is any kind of actual distinction in the way people learn. Compare the list of the characteristics of “adult learners” to what are alleged to be the characteristics of “digital natives” and the parallels become obvious.

The problem is, of course, that when we actually face the world of the Digital Ignorant — whatever age they are — we tend to see what we expect to see. The kid using the cell phone to text his gf with “<3 u - xx" isn't being any more technologically savvy than the study hall note passer of 40 years ago. He just has more tools at his disposal. The odds are good that he's still struggling with his history class and bored out of his skull learning English grammar. The adult that prints out email is, more often than not, translating to a "more convenient" (read: more familiar) medium. Is that really so different than having your inbox forwarding to your cell phone?

What *is* different is that the rich stew of available resources is being used by kids to learn a whole lot of stuff that just appalls parents and sends paroxysms of dread thru entire school districts. It's as if the kids all have access to the "secret notebook" and they're using it to learn things that adults can't learn or don't know. This activity is -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- characterized by these cognitive and behavioural tags:

1. Involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction
2. Experience (including mistakes) provides the basis for learning activities
3. Most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance to their personal life
4. Problem-centered rather than content-oriented

Those who looked up the andragogy link above will recognize these characteristics of adult learners as provided by Knowles but have to admit that they bear a striking resembance to the characteristics attributed to Digital Natives. The only thing different is a statement of the kinds of technology that the Natives are using.

But this fails to address the issue of why the “kids” are using it and the “adults” aren’t. Well, perhaps that perception isn’t really very accurate either as evidenced by a recent Harris Poll that finds that 80% of adults are going online and many of them are using the same technology as the “Natives.”

Could the reality be nothing more complex than an application of classic adoption? The early adopters — in this case kids who have more time on their hands than adults and fewer options available for socialization — are using the tools and toys provided by their parents in ways that many find as offensive and dangerous as drinking cadged beers behind the 7-11 and smoking cigarettes behind the barn was a decade or three ago.

The next time you’re tempted to drop a tab of “Digital Native” or label yourself “Digital Immigrant” ask this question:

Do I eat microwave popcorn differently than my kids?

THE RULES

1. Post these rules before you give your facts.
2. List 8 random facts about yourself.
3. At the end of your post, choose/tag 8 people and list their names, linking to them.
4. Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged.

EIGHT RANDOM FACTS ABOUT ME

1. I know how to mend net – and I use my feet.
2. I used to spend my summers working in a factory – until I became old enough to get legal work
3. I hate weeding — gardens, collections, file structures …
4. I love reading books and spend most of my spare time with a paperback
5. I don’t believe in protecting children at any cost. Prison is the ultimate protection and I don’t advocate locking up kids — or their minds. Ever
6. I’m a coffee snob. I don’t like Starbucks coffee because they have only one roast — too dark — and their blends are pathetic. But I drink it anyway.
7. I have too many blogs. Some don’t have my name on them. No, I won’t tell you what they are.
8. I write science fiction novels and publish them as audiobooks at http://podiobooks.com

THE MEME TRACE STOPS HERE

These memes are sometimes interesting, often cute, but I don’t know 8 people who blog that Clif hasn’t tagged already.

David Warlick wrote this reflective bit about the space today:

2 Cents Worth » Starting to Get It?
I’m coming to suspect, however, that there are many kinds of networks, and that they are, in a sense, part of one network, tied together (attracted to each other) through the conductivity of conversations and the gravitational pull of logic.

He goes on to talk about attention and how when we started blogging, there was a lot of attention available but that as more and more voices flooded into the space, the natural limits set by hours in the day begain to overwhelm attention. I think a lot of people (at least those who’ve been doing this for more than a few months) have had the experience of trimming back their feed lists because it’s just too much. So the idea of attention has merit, but this other notion of a variety of interconnected networks precipitated another discussion.

In an ancillary conversation I was having with Mrs B on the subject of professional organizations, we began to analyze what it is a professional organzation offers to its members in a networked world. Why would anybody pay dues to be a member of a club? What could a club offer that would make it worthwhile?

She pointed out that humans are tribal animals, so we want to belong to something — that old Maslow affiliation drive. Which made me go back and think about the idea of “professional organzation” as a way of permitting its members to address the top half of Maslow’s hierarchy. I don’t know quite how this all works yet, but I wanted to get it down while I could remember it.

One of the things the “tribe” needs is identity and that comes from a shared vision, shared values, and shared goals — a sense of “us.” The tribe also needs a center. The center becomes the instantiation of identity through that shared vision, value, and goal. Someplace where, if you go there and meet another member of the tribe, you know you have something in common — just by virtue of their being there — even if you’ve never met them before.

The next question, logicially, is the nature of this ‘community center’ and I thought it could be decentralized. A technorati feed with the tribe’s name as tag could provide the center, but that would require a level of skill, and expertise that I don’t think a lot of people have yet. It’s going to be hard to identify with a feed and most people don’t see the river of content flowing from a feed as a center.

And that brings us back to Ning and other centralized spaces like TappedIn or MySpace or The ORG. They provide a place to go to find the tribe. To see what the members are doing. They provide a baseline that’s easier to deal with than the dispersed and distributed model. The problem with the ones I know about are that there’s no good way to merge distributed and centralized content together.

Eventually, I began to think that the community center needs to be centralized as a symbolic commitment to the tribe. We can each have our own spaces but the tribe needs a kind of metaphorical long house. It’s an answer to Stephen Downes’ perennial question of “why does there need to be another place?”

I’m working in analogy here. In metaphor. Bear with me if it breaks down.

If I go to the market and meet somebody, we share some things in common, and for a short period we even share a common goal – getting whatever we came to the market for. But the meeting is co-incidental. It’s not being driven by any kind of common vision or shared outlook except in the most superficial way. We’re not tribe.

So if I tag a post as “online community” and it merges with something that somebody else posts, it’s co-incidental. We might have opposite views and opinions, and while that has some value, it’s not the view of the tribe. While it’s true that the person is part of my network, that person is not one of “us” and is not part of my affiliation set.

And that brings me back to David’s notion of the gravitational attraction of ideas and linked and related but not congruous networks. People are finding Classroom 2.0. People are joining, reading, writing, participating. There is a rudimentary sense of identify forming — an idea of tribe. We’re still in the storming-norming stages but it’s already beginning to shape up. The conversations that happen in there tend to stay in there. They don’t appear to be pinging out (altho it’s entirely possible that I’m missing it). A few people are cross posting content from outside in and from inside out, but the link out of the community seems to consist primarily of links to the individual members’ blogs and web sites. So this sorta looks like David’s idea of connected networks holds up with one network inside the Ning garden and links in and out.

All of this leads me to the conclusion that the value of places like Ning is in forming centers around which networks and affiliations can form. Not as a replacement for the distributed world of feeds and aggregators, but as kinds of hubs. Cross pollination centers. Tribes.

“Community and Collaboration on a Scale Never Seen Before”
[I]f 2007 is going to be the watershed year that it seems to be shaping up to be, we need to do more work in traditional spaces and spend less time blogging back and forth to each other. While this is a powerfully engaging and nurturing environment, if we are going to make our voices and ideas truly heard, we need to start building a grassroots movement “out there,” one that highlights the realities of the world and successes in the classroom through channels that those decision makers (read parents, board members, etc.) are still wedded to.

Here’s the problem, Will.

The report is calling for a new system, not a patch to the old. In the same way the airlines have replaced passenger rail, this new system of education will replace what we know as school. What will it look like? How will it be implemented? I agree that “blogging among ourselves” amounts to “preaching to the choir” but how would engaging the railroads in developing the airlines have helped? If we take this commission’s report seriously and start thinking about what a new — replacement — system would look like, why would those with vested interest in maintaining the status quo be willing to engage?

The Cluetrain holds — pardon the expression — a clue as does Kat Herding and Doc’s Latest writings. If business in the Industrial Age has been about economies of scale and de-personalization, then the new economy might buyers and sellers talking to each other to create products and services specific to the need. In many ways, we’re talking about artists and artisans being the workers in this new economy. Whether your art is accounting or marketing or distribution, when we start talking about creativity and imagination, we end up with art. Think: The Secret of My Success.

Which brings us to the model for this new economy. Is it something akin to a global “open mic night” where people form ad hoc collectives to create a specific work? A kind of jazz combo? Can we build cars that way? Or airliners? Will we need to, or will we let other parts of the world deal with the cheap-labor/mass-produced commodity goods?

I don’t know. ‘M just askin’

We’re becoming more and more aware of the effect of the internet on geography. The meta-verse erases space. Online, everybody is the same distance from anybody else. The corollary of that has been slipping by us. If the meta-verse erases space, it must also erase time. For those who spend many hours each day onlne, I don’t mean that kind of time. Einstein gave us the models for non-Euclidean space-time and we’ve projected the web into space without paying attention to the effect on time.

The trigger event for this line of thinking happened when my boss came looking for advice about having “a webcast.” She was thinking of the classic synchronous talking-head 45 minute presentation followed by a short Q&A complete with video and audio feeds for the presenter and a text chat for the audience. My suggestion was to distribute the presentation in advance, have the participants read it, and come ready to text-chat with the author. Since finding a date/time where all the people can get together is going to be difficult, why not make sure they get the most opportunity to talk together? By moving the logistics into asynchronous channels, it would leave the time on the synchronous channel for what could only be done synchronously. She thought this was a pretty good idea and she’s thinking about it.

But when I mentioned the conversation to my friend, Donal, he asked, “What can you only do on sync?”

After a lot of pondering, the answer turns out to be, “not much.” It boils down to those few circumstances in communication when emotion and rhetoric are more important than ideas. Donal said that at the time, but it took a while for me to agree with him. Ultimately, if we look at many activities — music, sports, education — the value of the synchronous aggregate is not in the music, or the game, or the lesson but in the synchronous performance — the emotional amplification of being part of something in the now that is larger than yourself.

One thing that we realized was the tyranny of synchrony — from dependence on phone, to IM, to chat room, to face-to-face meetings — was the ‘default’ condition because the current capabilities for asynchronous interaction are very, very new. Sure, we’ve had postal service for a long time, but even as little as 10 years ago, email was not common. The newer affordances like threaded discussion boards (with their roots in the old bbs systems), blogs (rooted in web pages) with RSS, and even the older email/listserv technology have only become endemic in the last 3-5 years. We operate synchronously because that’s the way it’s always been done.

But the Internet changes everything. The network makes everyone the same distance away, whether the person is sitting on the other side of the room or on the other side of the globe. With that transmutation of space, we also get a parallel transmutation in time. At a fixed velocity shorter distances require less time to traverse. Likewise in communications, if all distances are the same, then all messages take the same amount of time to deliver. The space between questioner and responder is — effectively — nil. Not technically zero, but fixed at an indentical quantum distance on all transactions. Looking at the projection onto time in this space/time model, we also have to shift time to a similar quantum duration on all transactions.

In a synchronous mode we have to wait for the other to finish before we can begin to assess the message. In many situations, we begin processing as soon as the other starts instead of waiting for the complete message. This creates the situation where people talk past each other without really hearing what the other is saying, formulating the response while the sender is still formlating the message. They allow the rhythms of communication to direct responses rather than the content. So even outside the meta-verse, emotion and rhetoric are more important than ideas and information.

In asynchronous modes of communication we do not have to wait for the transmission to be completed before we can begin processing. The transmission is complete as soon as we perceive it. That’s not to say that the message has been completely received, but rather that the sender is no longer engaged in the transaction at the point where the receiver begins receiving. The distinction — and while subtle — is profound. Since the sender is no longer engaged in the transaction, the process of sending and receiving becomes decoupled and processing time is expanded by virtue of not having to respond in the now.

Further, even conservation of the Einsteinian temporal flow is consistent with this manipulation of time. We cannot go forward in time — I can’t answer today a question you may ask tomorrow. I can answer tomorrow any question to may ask today. The causal arrow points forward in time. You ask and at some time in the future, I reply. The concepts of space/time are preserved — altho scaled somewhat surprisingly — in the meta-verse.

Yes, some things remain uniquely suited to synchronous effort — team sports, musical groups, and theatre. The value in these transactions is the emotional effect of participation. Other activities which have been synchronous in the past — work, education, and learning — can now be decoupled in meaningful ways to take advantage of the transmutation of time in the meta-verse.

Anyway. My daughter came to me the other day and said, “Dad? Can you teach me to read computer codes?”

“What do you mean ‘computer codes’? What kind of codes?”

She shrugged, “I don’t know. Whatever there is.”

So I gave her this book on Python for Absolute Beginners. I pointed out that Python is a kind of computer code and that by writing programs with it, she can get her computer to do stuff. I showed her the CD in the back of the book with Python and everything she needed to get started.

As of today – three days later – she’s read about half the book, installed python and all the ancillary utilities on her own computer, and written 8 or 9 programs in Python. She thinks she’d like to “learn more about web pages” now and has asked what kind of programming they use. She figures to be through the book by the end of the week next week, although I think she’ll slow down a little when she gets into the root-window interface stuff.

Punchline: She’s 10 and she’s helping her 7 year old sister install it on her computer so they can have “programming contests” and they don’t think anything is out of the ordinary with this.

And just as quickly shut it off again.

Scrabbling thru my playlist I found a couple of podcasts that were worthy of a re-run and let them play rather than listen to the aggravating babble on the airwaves.

I realized at that moment that my iRiver has become the sound track in my life. Sometimes it’s music, mostly it’s not. But I’ve noticed some things that are different now than BP (Before Podcasts).

Start with the easy one … I don’t have to wait for a good story to get over before I get out of the car. The first time I noticed this it kinda weirded me out. I pulled into my parking space, shut off the engine, and was halfway across the parking lot before I actually twigged that the lecture I was listening to in my buds never paused. In the past, I’d been known to have what Public Radio refers to in their pledge drives as “driveway moments” waiting for that engaging story to end. No more.

Next, is the sound itself. Yes, it’s a buffer against the outside world, but as a 50-something male of industrial decent, I confess freely that I don’t hear as well as I used to. It’s embarassing to have to ask people to repeat themselves all the time. Now, if somebody speaks to me, they have to get my attention first and as I pop out an earbud, the most natural thing is to get that repetition — which I usually am able to make out when they’re actually looking at me and I can pay attention to them. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

And on the subject of hearing loss … I’m too old to worry about it. I’d already lost a lot of it before I ever saw an MP3 player … what I have left, I plan to use. And I can’t even make you understand what it’s like to be able to hear clearly without having to answer the age old question, “CAN YOU HEAR IT?!” Yes, it’s probably accelerating the inevitable. But I might get hit by a truck tomorrow, too, and if I do, I’m not gonna lay there bleeding out and think, “If I’d only been better to my ears…”

Beyond that, having access to content from around the world always on tap has been amazing. I have my favorite shows but I listen to a lot of stuff just on the chance that I’ll find out something odd. The BBC has some downloads that are by turns fascinating, aggravating, and put-you-to-sleep-in-5-minutes-flat boring. But that’s the beauty of it. If it’s boring, a quick flip of the finger and we’re onto the next track — music from Africa, or a political speech from the Carribean, or a key note address from a recent conference.

There are some downsides. I don’t have a lot of time when I’m just thinking quietly. Yes, I can — and do — turn it off periodically so I can concentrate on something — like this post. But before long, I find I crave the input.

I’m not sure what all this means beyond the obvious. My digital input continues even when I’m away from the keyboard. I listen when I walk or drive — or washing dishes or folding laundry. Lots of times I’ll sit at the computer and plug in the buds while I’m doing some routine task. Along the way I ponder this as an “educational medium” and I kinda hope it never gets to be known for “being educational.”

I’m learning too much from it now to have it reduced to being “educational.”