wrote the Drool Room
learning in a way not recognized by the people in power
school wasn't originally designed for good - it was designed to label and segregate
school is not really failing what it was designed for. so if you call into question what you're wanting, it's going to take more than tweaking.
school was designed to fail 75% - to weed out people for the workforce
school was designed so that those with money would be able to keep their success
1800 's - to decapitalize the country.
if we don't like what's going on - it's the system that has to change. not the teachers and students
bill gates - because he's made a lot of money - must know what he's doing
poor people must not know what their doing
strategy for affecting change - empowering people who are in the buildings first
not that parents can't be innovative - most just have had a bad experience in school
we have to change what tech is in school
we have to let kids choice tech for selves
there is nothing for everyone
we don't value family here. the less money you have the less time you have to spend with your family.
the better you do at eradicating poverty -
western michigan k-5 - after kindergarten they have 3 possible tracts, traditional, looping and 120 kids and 6 teachers in one giant 1-5 classroom
colleges of ed are not leading this - so we need to
web (not internet) is 5000 days old - and if we would have suggested it 5000 days ago - we would have said - that's impossible. (and what has happened is amazing and no one is amazed)
so what will happen in the next 5000 days
100 bill clicks per day
55 trillion links
to a first approx - size of machine is size of brain
however your brain isn't doubling every 2 years
2040 - will exceed human brain in world
consequences
1) we're giving this machine a body -
portals
the cloud - touching the cloud to compute - everything goes through it
our environment becomes the web...embed web into the world
2) restructure it's architecture -
a) link computers - net [machine to machine] b) link pages [page to page] c) link info [id to id]
so you have to be open to having your data shared vs just your page or computer
after 5000 days - future d) link things
3) we're going to become co-dependent on it - our environment becomes the web...embed web into the world
always on it - total personalization will require total transparency
we think dependency is bad - but now - we're totally dependent on other techs - ie the alphabet, etc
next 5000 - not going to be the web but only better
going to be smarter (anticpate what we're doing in a good sense)
will know us
will be more ubiquitous - us in the middle of it
you have to begin to think of this as a new kind of stage - not just - only better
it's a large organism, it's a whole system, a one, a unity of some sort is starting to emerge.
book was on density - and how the coming together of people, intertwined as a web (emergence) was making the world a better place..
just finishing while he is a couple blocks away from 911, when density is embodied in the destruction, density kills
a week after - walking 20 blocks.. streets were alive with people, a beautiful urban day, the city was working, everything that makes a city successful was on display, on the streets.
decentralized in function - 20 blocks north, 2 days later, city was thriving
who builds a neighborhood - personalities, etc
answer - everybody and nobody
who is keeping the streets alive post 911 - whole system
increasingly what we're starting to see on the web
new model of inner-activity
you suddenly have the power to put a link to your dog on your page, and others have the power to click on those links
trouble with being exceptional
these notes from listening to her interview with Beatrice of Radio Free School.
the idea of balance
when you learn to love learning - you do things that interest you, whatever things that interest you end up connecting you to a lot of things in a lot of surprising ways..
so you end up being more well-rounded than anyone expects.. but it's not because you set out to do that
you learn something new in every environment - always learning.. because you're living
so glad to make the acquaintance of the lovely @EatTheDamnCake
esp love this: when she said - i wish it wasn't a competition, because no one thing is the answer. we need many choices. (my paraphrase)
and then the interviewer making a comment on questions asked of homeschoolers - that they don't seem to ask of others.. like - can you socialize, can you adapt to the real world
reminded me of Roger Martin's The Design of Business, we live in a reliability-oriented world, which we don't question. validity-oriented thinking, innovation, alternate thinking, is questioned beyond measure and then blown off when the same questions should be asked of everyone. the ones asking the questions are quite often lacking those answers most.
ie: can you adapt to the real world - how far from the real world is public school? life isn't like a traditional school classroom.
what spaces do they hatch in:
1) hunch state - slow
ie: tim berners lee - 10 yrs for www
create a space where ideas can mingle and swap
the great driver of scientific and techno innovation
has been the historic increase of connectivity - over the last 600-700 yrs
so yes - we're distracted.. but we have so many new ways to connect.
chance favors the connected mind.
fitting with Kelley's below - the more drippings we leave, the more potential for others to connect them, whether we do it or not..
min our selection of tech
but max the global choices of tech
Steve's april 2010 Ted
1650 english coffee house was crucial to the birth of the enlightenment
1) before that - people drank alcohol all day long
2) architecture of the space -
what are the environments that lead to unusual levels of creativity
coffee house
web
cities
bio environments - rain forrests
shared patterns?
flash, eureka, lightbulb - all share that an idea is a single thing
when really - it's a network that has never formed before
how do you get your brain into these environments where these networks will form
a design that matters
spend money getting aid and advanced electronics, but then when it breaks down, can't fix, so waste
these places can keep cars working.. so built a neonatal incubator from toyota parts
if we are trying to spaces for innovation.. we need messy looking spaces.
most people aren't good at telling/remembering where great ideas happened
kevin dunbar - went around and videoed and asked
almost all the important break through ideas happened at the conference table at the weekly lab meeting, often when they shared their mistakes (not individually by the microsope)
the liquid network, lots of different ideas playing off each other
aslo - a lot of great ideas linger for decades, not a lightbulb flash on moment
darwin tells the story of coming up with the idea for natural selection, says it's a light bulb moment in his auto bio
howard groover looked back at darwin's notebooks - he found that darwin had the full theory months and months before he had the lightbulb moment
he had the concept, but unable to fully think it yet
how do you create environments for ideas to have this long half-life?
google has hunch cultivating environments
and if you share that space, grows faster
used to be we locked them up - to make them more valuable
we should spend even more time valuing the sharing and connecting of ideas.
oct 1957 - sputnik - johns hopkins - nerd heaven
2 having an informal convo, "has anyone tried to listen to this thing?" so they try - and they pick up the signal
before long - they think they might be the first to do it, so they record it.
then they start thinking, we're noticing small frequency rates, we could probably calculate the speed using the doplar effect
we could look at the slope of the doplar effect to figure out how close it is to us
after 3-4 weeks, they have mapped the exact trajectory of this satellite going around the earth - from this little sounds
figured out an unknown location of satellite from known location on the ground
could you figure out the other way?
and they say yes
so they work on submarines with satellites
that's how gps was born,
30 yrs later - anyone could do it, and
great case study in the unplanned power of open innovative systems and spaces
listening, plotting, cold war, cup of coffee
chance favors the connected mind
how do i miss all this. this is from sept by steven - tinkering - and adjacent possibilities
really what headed to steven in the first place yesterday when i read this by stephen hurley at the coop
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speaking of the connected mind.. check this out - via smart mobs - mappings/networks that will make the world smart thanks to tweet from @ricetopher
p. 236 - what tech brings is expanding choices... which allow us to be us.
writing in 1950, sociologist David Riesman: " the more advance the technology, on the whole, the more possible it is for a considerable number of human beings to imagine being somebody else."
we expand technology to findout who we are and who we can be.
upon studying amish, hippies, wendell berry and eric brende - who believe they don't need exploding tech to expand themselves. they are all minimalists. but - have they traded contentment for revelation. have they discovered, can they even, who they can become.
this is fine for them, but what if everyone does it, the optimization of choice collapses.
by constraining the wuite of acceptable occupations and narrowing education, the amish are holding back possiblilites not just for their children but indeirctly for all.
unlike the amish and minimites, the tens of millions of migrants headed into cities each year may invent a tool that will unleash choices for someone else. if they don't, then their children will.
our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possiblilites fo rothers
the amish and minimites have important lessons to teach us about selecting what we embrace.
i do want to be choosy about what i spend time mastering. i want to be able to back out of things that don't work out. i do want the minimum because i've learned that i have limited time and attentions
ownership of choices
we owe the amish hackers a large debt... through their lives we can see the technium's dilemma very clearly:
to maximize our own contentment, we see the minimum amount of technology in our lives.
yet to maximixe the contentment of others, we must maximize the amount of technology in the world.
we can only find out own minimal tools if others have created a sufficient maximum pool of options we can choose from. the dilemma remains in how we can personally minimize stuff close to us while trying to expand it globally.
p. 244 - we can learn much from disruptive technologies
switching occupations is the norm for tech.. and invention requires many encounters with early adopters and collisions with other inventions to refine its role in the technium.
we make prediction more difficult because our immediate tendency is to imagine the new thing doing and old job better. (school, no?0
we are stuck in the same blindness.
ie: the advertisers pitched the telephone as if it were a more convenient telegraph. none of them suggested having a conversation.
technologies shift as they thrives. they are remade as they are used...
they bring completely unpredicted effects as they near ubiquity.
if we examine technologies honestly, each one has its faults as well as its virtues.. in fact, an invention or idea is not really tremendous unless it can be tremendously abused.
p. 246
first law of technological expectations:
the greater the promise of a new tech, the greater the potential for harm as well
so comes precautionary principle (first crafted in 1992) most recent version states: activities that present an uncertain potential for significant harm should be prohibited unless the proponent of the activity shows that it presents no appreciable risk of harm. [aup's, cipa, etc]
so - a tech must be shown to do no harm before it is embraced.
so - precautionary principle is very very good for one thing - stopping technological progress,
via cass r sunstein, we must challenge the precautionary principle not because it leads in bad directions, but because read for all it is worht, it leads in no direction at all.
every good produces harm soemwhere.
ie: malaria infects 300-500 mill, casing 2 mill deaths per year, it's debilitating to those who don't die and leads to cyclic poverty. but in the 1950's the level of malaria was reduced by 70% via ddt. it was so successful however, farmers eagerly sprayed it by the tons on cotton fields, so got into water cycles and into fa cells in animals, drop in reproduction rates for some predatory birds and die-offs in some fish and aquatic life species. so banned in 1972. and malaria cases in asia and africa rose again to deadly pre-50's levels.
plans to reintroduce ddt for households were blockded by the world bank, etc 1991 treaty by 91 countries - phase out ddt altogheter. ddt was probably bad, better safe than sorry. in fact ddt had never been shown to hurt humans, and the environmental farm from the miniscule amoutns of ddt applied in homes had not been measured. but nobody could prove it did not cause harm,despite its proven ability to do good.
risk aversion
we now know that people will accept a thousand times as much risk for tech or situations that are voluntary rather than madatory.
ie: you don't have a choice where you get your tap water, so you are less tolerant in regard to its safety than you might be from using a cell phone of your choice.
also - the acceptability of risk is directly influence by how easy it is to imagine both the worst case and the best benefits, and that these are determiend by ed, advertising, rumor and imagination.
you blog holds my latest (obviously not latest find those on be you site links below) finds/thoughts/ramblings. not intended for normal edu-blogger consumption or modeling. lookdirectly below for our collection of more orderly-random (chaordic) thinking... if you are so inclined...
