The wrong lesson...

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I was reminded of a school experience of @stopstalkingme from many many years ago when I read this blog post at Zen Habits: Education Needs to Be Turned on Its Head

People often grow up to be competent learners, and achieve great things, after going through the traditional school system. But this is in spite of the system, not because of it. We are pretty adaptable people, inherently curious, and we can learn without an authority, but the current school system tries to beat this down. It usually fails to some degree, but to the degree it succeeds, it harms people.

The time this reminded me of was 18 years ago when @SSM was in the 2nd grade. She had written a long story, like 12 pages long, and it was a wonderfully entertaining story about a squirrel. It was a mystery with a surprise ending. I most definitely didn't see it coming.

She turned in her story to her teacher Mrs. Hood, and what she got back was not a warm response to a wonderfully told story. What she got back was that she hadn't stayed within the lines with her handwriting. She was told to copy her story over. She turned it in again and was told, "Not good enough. Do it again." This happened four times. It was a great lesson for @SSM. When I asked her what she had learned from this experience her answer was, "I have to write shorter stories."

Eighteen years later I can say that she used to write some great stories. She doesn't write stories anymore. Mrs. Hood, and the education system drove that desire right out of her. I can remember being totally pissed at the time that the system had their priorities upside down. Those priorities are still upside down today, and I don't think it can be fixed. We can only hope that something new and wonderful will emerge from the ashes.

If I was an advocate of Appreciative Inquiry this story would never be told. Instead we'd be talking about the wonderful citizens we've created by teaching them to stay within the lines. How sad!

Some blog post ideas...

Image by neilalderney123 via Flickr

I've been traveling a ton and not doing too much blogging. I have been thinking of some potential topics. Here's the list:

• Content isn't king-- it's social chum
• Social media and the late 1800's Farmer's Movement
• Why your social media strategy must start with copyright
• Learning from our failures-- I take on Appreciative Inquiry
  

Anything strike a cord? I'm guessing these won't result in a single post for each topic, but rather several. If I can take them on in bite size chunks it's more likely I'll write at least something.

Let me know and I'll try to get started.

Education: Adopting the worst practices to make the truly horrid

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The NYTimes has this interesting article on: In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History, Where it has some interesting things on electronic textbooks I found the comments on the future of education of most interest.

I've talked before about the high schoolification of higher education. I hadn't given much thought to the opposite occurring-- high schools adopting the worst practices of the academy. I found this vision of the future from the Orange County, CA superintendent of schools most troubling:

We’re still in a brick-and-mortar, 30-students-to-1-teacher paradigm,” Mr. Habermehl said, “but we need to get out of that framework to having 200 or 300 kids taking courses online, at night, 24/7, whenever they want.”

The future of a technology rich education is the scaling-up of today's factory model school? I thought we're eight (or so) years into the Web 2.0 world? It's been years since we thought of information technologies as instruments to increase productivity and efficiency: Sick Stigma applied to learning. Just say no!

I would hope that any discussion of the future of education would focus on ambient intimacy. Social learning in groups of less than eight. Using technologies to enable more personal, compassionate, and humanitarian learning experiences. I'm pretty certain this isn't going to happen in "classes" of 30, 300, or 3000.

There's a scene in Public Enemies that I've been thinking about for a few weeks. G Man, Melvin Purvis had been given the job of "getting" John Dillenger. He's been crafting a strategy, and realises he's got a problem. He goes to J. Edgar Hoover and says something like, "I can't do what you're wanting me to do with this team. I need..." He basically tells Hoover that the organisation doesn't have the right DNA to deal with this newer and more violent type of criminal. The criminals had innovated, and the bureaucracy had not. It simply wasn't in the culture of the FBI to do what it needed to do.

That's what I thought of when I read this article. The old team of educators isn't going to get the job done. We desperately need some new DNA. Some serious innovation.

People's first Wave experience

I attended a Google Wave presentation done by Jay Cuthrell at the Triangle Social Media Club meetup at iContact on Thursday night. I was anxious to see how someone would try to explain Wave to people who had never seen it, and also anxious to see their reactions. The night turned out to be even more fun for me as I got to participate in the show-- I got to do the driving from my own Wave sandbox account for the demonstration.

Jay did a nice job explaining Wave, and hit all of the major talking points. He stayed away, and rightfully so, from the business of building your own robots and applications. It was, for the most part, a talk aimed at non-geeks.

My take-aways (and some affirmations):

The elevator pitch: There are no shortcuts to an "ahhh hahhhh" moment. Most people have not watched the Wave demonstration video. The 1.5 hours required to watch it is more than most people want to commit. If you haven't watched the whole video, and even if you have, Wave is hard to understand. The demonstration last week was an hour long. That's not long enough for people who are watching, and not actively using it to get-it. I was sitting with @chillnc, one of the smartest and most clued-in people I know. After the demo he started asking some really good questions. It was clear that he had come away from the demo thinking Wave was one thing. After a couple of good questions he realized that it was also something completely different. Even after experiencing a really excellent demo Wave is hard to get your arms around. Many of us who are getting to know Wave pretty well are still struggling with the elevator pitch.

Control freaks: You all know the person-- the one who when the moment they speak you immediately know the opposite is true. Well one of those persons (for me) was in attendance. This person is your prototypical IT control freak. The one who starts talking about things like system requirements, privacy, Sarbanes-Oxley... This person reacted pretty negatively to the whole Wave concept. So, for me it was an affirmation that Wave is going to be big--very big. A game changer.

Your first Wave experience: The interface to Wave is a bit intimidating for people who haven't seen it before (which is almost everyone because people won't watch the demo). I still think that Wave will be quickly adopted by current Gmail users. For them the interface will feel comfy. There were several at the demo, however, who reacted negatively-- you know, bringing up their mothers and all... Seeing it versus using it is a different experience. BUT, it occurred to me during the demonstration that most people's first contact with Wave will not be from using it directly: loading Wave, logging in, and fumbling around. Instead, you will experience it embedded in some specialty application, maybe an e-commerce experience, and you won't even realize you've been Waved. You will use Wave because it provided some geek with a quick and easy way to implement some new and cool idea, and it will be much like using any other web application. It will be a gateway experience. You'll touch it once in some obscure place, touch it again and again and again, and before you know it you'll be hooked on the Wave way of working. I've been flooded with my own ideas on how Wave could be used. If I'm having these thoughts my guess is that a whole army of people, smarter and more creative than me, are busy right now building a ton of stuff that will change your world.

Now I need to catch a plane. It's funny how the blogging urge hits me at the worst possible moments. I reserve the right to edit this post later in the day. It's my blog. :) Have a good day!

The learning is happening elsewhere (if a tree falls pt 2)

Image by Inkyhack via Flickr

This Spiegel interview of Chris Anderson (The Long Tail,: The Future of a Radical Price) has been seeing a bit of discussion: Maybe Media Will Be a Hobby Rather than a Job

Anderson: I read lots of articles from mainstream media but I don't go to mainstream media directly to read it. It comes to me, which is really quite common these days. More and more people are choosing social filters for their news rather than professional filters. We're tuning out television news, we're tuning out newspapers.

I thought Andrew Sullivan summed-up the Anderson interview quite nicely: Letting The News Come To You

... the new media has ended the authority of media institutions. People have learned to see the little men and women behind the curtain and would rather trust the people they know - or come to know online - who have always been in front of the curtain and honest about what their biases are.

This shift from authoritative sources of information is not just impacting the news media-- it is impacting all institutions in the information business (and I am very purposely using the word information as opposed to knowledge). The way we learn most things is a social process. Learning is socially constructed. We learn together.

Which bring me to this quote from Matthew Hodgson: The rise and rise of social media

If you’re not part of this conversation, this collaboration, this community, then your stakeholders and your clients are obviously talking to other people.

Which is why the ivory tower, information silos, if-we-build-it-they-will-come strategies of the past century are obsolete. If you want to make a difference you have to get out from behind your web sites (the curtain), and join the people where the learning is occurring; online in places like Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed...

If a tree falls in the forest... part 1

Image via Wikipedia

I received an email on Friday that said, "Please take a look at the Encyclopedia of Earth and let me know what you think." So I did. There was a lot I noticed about the site which I could mention, like their copyright policies which are very progressive and quite awesome (CC 2.5 Share-Alike). I started right off wanting to like it.

I next moved to their reason for existence:

The motivation behind the Encyclopedia of Earth is simple. Go to Google™ and type in climate change, pesticides, nuclear power, sustainable development, or any other important environmental issue. Doing so returns millions of results, some fraction of which are authoritative. The remainder is of poor or unknown quality.

So I did a search on each of those terms and here's what came up: climate change-- Environmental Protection Agency #1 and Wikipedia #2, pesticides-- Wikipedia #1, nuclear power-- Wikipedia #1, and sustainable development-- Wikipedia #1.
Interestingly enough the EoE site never showed up in the results at all, or if it did, it was so deep that no human was ever going to see it.

Which begs the question: What's the point of having a so-called authoritative site if no one ever visits? Irrelevance and obscurity is fine, but you can achieve that without building a web site. If a tree falls in the forest...

Which brings me to my final point. If you want to make a difference you have to choose to engage with the people. There is no sense in building the web equivalent of the ivory tower. If you are an expert, and you find a problem in Wikipedia then you have an obligation to correct it. You have that power. Whether you like it or not, Wikipedia is the source that people go to for information. Shouldn't we all be working to make it the best source of information that we can? Building your own site is the web-world equivalent of taking your ball and going home. Which is a great strategy if being lonely is your goal.