Archive for Knowledge Management
As power is moving away from hierarchically-structured organizations to newer forms of collaborative, bottom-up, open-sharing approaches, what is organizational leadership to do to embrace such change without losing complete control of its traditional mandates?
Photo credit: Stelian Ion
New media technologies have ushered us into a new extended environment in which the ability to share, exchange, collaborate and reach out are rewarded spontaneously by the system itself. Inside traditional organizations the forces of hierarchical control and bottom-up spontaneous sharing have finally come to collide on the main deck.
In other words, hierarchical control meets distributed and open self-organizing systems. The tower, meets the cloud. But this needs not be an either / or choice. “It could be a future of and-and-and, where both forms continue to co-exist peacefully.”
The “tower” of hierarchy control and the “cloud” of open collaboration are the two extremes of a new continuum in which organizations need yet to learn how to move swiftly.
Today, There are indeed huge opportunities awaiting for those organizations which have not only the courage to acknowledge these deep transformational changes but which have also the will to embrace and integrate these new trends in their own way of working.
Those institutions still resisting these changes are well set on a tragic path of increasing problems, internal tragedies and failures which will become more evident as the two opposing approaches grow further in an open contrast.
On the other hand, our culture, outside large organizations has already converted itself to the new way, embracing in most of its aspects, the distributed power of the “cloud”.
“All of you have your own hierarchical organizations – because that’s how organizations have always been run.
Yet each of you are surrounded by your own clouds: community organizations (both in the real world and online), bulletin boards, blogs, and all of the other Web 2.0 supports for the sharing of connectivity, information, knowledge and power.“
If your organization is evaluating how to best tackle such strategic issues and approaches to power control, I suggest you reserve a little extra time to immerse yourself in the fantastic journey that Mark Pesce has created in the following essay on Sharing Power inside Organizations.
Reading it and having those in power reflect upon it may open some new doors to transforming organizations to leverage the powerful changes already taking place in their internal ranks rather than succumb tragically to painful internal revolutions which only need a little extra time to fully come into full bloom.
Is your institution ready to adapt itself and find its way forward into this emerging approach to open sharing power? If not, here’s an inspiring tale:
Sharing Power (Aussie Rules)
by Mark Pesce
Family Affairs
In the US state of North Carolina, the New York Times reports, an interesting experiment has been in progress since the first of February.
The “Birds and Bees Text Line” invites teenagers with any questions relating to sex or the mysteries of dating to SMS their question to a phone number.
That number connects these teenagers to an on-duty adult at the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign. Within 24 hours, the teenager gets a reply to their text.
The questions range from the run-of-the-mill “When is a person not a virgin anymore?” and the unusual “If you have sex underwater do u need a condom?” to the utterly heart-rending – “Hey, I’m preg and don’t know how 2 tell my parents. Can you help?”
The Birds and Bees Text Line is a response to the slow rise in the number of teenage pregnancies in North Carolina, which reached its lowest ebb in 2003.
Teenagers – who are given state-mandated abstinence-only sex education in school – now have access to another resource, unmediated by teachers or parents, to prevent another generation of teenage pregnancies. Although it’s early days yet, the response to the program has been positive.
Teenagers are using the Birds and Bees Text Line. It is precisely because the Birds and Bees Text Line is unmediated by parental control that it has earned the ire of the more conservative elements in North Carolina.
Bill Brooks, president of the North Carolina Family Policy Council, a conservative group, complained to the Times about the lack of oversight.
“If I couldn’t control access to this service, I’d turn off the texting service.When it comes to the Internet, parents are advised to put blockers on their computer and keep it in a central place in the home. But kids can have access to this on their cell phones when they’re away from parental influence – and it can’t be controlled.
“
If I’d stuffed words into a straw man’s mouth, I couldn’t have come up with a better summation of the situation we’re all in right now: young and old, rich and poor, liberal and conservative.
There are certain points where it becomes particularly obvious, such as with the Birds and Bees Text Line, but this example simply amplifies our sense of the present as a very strange place, an undiscovered country that we’ve all suddenly been thrust into.
Conservatives naturally react conservatively, seeking to preserve what has worked in the past; Bill Brooks speaks for a large cohort of people who feel increasingly lost in this bewildering present.
Replicate The Wikipedia Structure
Let us assume, for a moment, that conservatism was in the ascendant (though this is clearly not the case in the United States, one could make a good argument that the Rudd Government is, in many ways, more conservative than its predecessor).
Let us presume that Bill Brooks and the people for whom he speaks could have the Birds and Bees Text Line shut down. Would that, then, be the end of it? Would we have stuffed the genie back into the bottle? The answer, unquestionably, is no.
Everyone who has used or even heard of the Birds and Bees Text Line would be familiar with what it does and how it works. Once demonstrated, it becomes much easier to reproduce.
It would be relatively straightforward to take the same functions performed by the Birds and Bees Text Line and “crowdsource” them, sharing the load across any number of dedicated volunteers who might, through some clever software, automate most of the tasks needed to distribute messages throughout the “cloud” of volunteers. Even if it took a small amount of money to setup and get going, that kind of money would be available from donors who feel that teenage sexual education is a worthwhile thing.
In other words, the same sort of engine which powers Wikipedia can be put to work across a number of different “platforms“. The power of sharing allows individuals to come together in great “clouds” of activity, and allows them to focus their activity around a single task.
It could be an encyclopedia, or it could be providing reliable and judgment-free information about sexuality to teenagers. The form matters not at all: what matters is that it’s happening, all around us, everywhere throughout the world.
The cloud, this new thing, this is really what has Bill Brooks scared, because it is, quite literally, “out of control“. It arises naturally out of the human condition of “hyperconnection“. We are so much better connected than we were even a decade ago, and this connectivity breeds new capabilities. The first of these capabilities are the pooling and sharing of knowledge – or “hyperintelligence“.
Consider: everyone who reads Wikipedia is potentially as smart as the smartest person who’s written an article in Wikipedia. Wikipedia has effectively banished ignorance born of want of knowledge. The Birds and Bees Text Line is another form of hyperintelligence, connecting adults with knowledge to teenagers in desperate need of that knowledge.
Hyperconnectivity also means that we can carefully watch one another, and learn from one another’s behaviors at the speed of light. This new capability – “hypermimesis” – means that new behaviors, such as the Birds and Bees Text Line, can be seen and copied very quickly. Finally, hypermimesis means that that communities of interest can form around particular behaviors, “clouds” of potential.
These communities range from the mundane to the arcane, and they are everywhere online. But only recently have they discovered that they can translate their community into doing, putting hyperintelligence to work for the benefit of the community.
This is the methodology of the http://www.appcnc.org/Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign. This is the methodology of Wikipedia. This is the methodology of Wikileaks, which seeks to provide a safe place for whistle-blowers who want to share the goods on those who attempt to defraud or censor or suppress. This is the methodology of ANONYMOUS, which seeks to expose Scientology as a ridiculous cult.
How many more examples need to be listed before we admit that the rules have changed, that the smooth functioning of power has been terrifically interrupted by these other forces, now powers in their own right?
Affairs of State
Don’t expect a revolution. We will not see masses of hyperconnected individuals, storming the Winter Palaces of power. This is not a proletarian revolt. It is, instead, rather more subtle and complex.
The entire nature of power has changed, as have the burdens of power. Power has always carried with it the “burden of omniscience” – that is, those at the top of the hierarchy have to possess a complete knowledge of everything of importance happening everywhere under their control. Where they lose grasp of that knowledge, that’s the space where coups, palace revolutions and popular revolts take place.
This new power that flows from the cloud of hyperconnectivity carries a different burden, the “burden of connection“. In order to maintain the cloud, and our presence within it, we are beholden to it.
We must maintain each of the social relationships, each of the informational relationships, each of the knowledge relationships and each of the mimetic relationships within the cloud. Without that constant activity, the cloud dissipates, evaporating into nothing at all.
This is not a particularly new phenomenon; Dunbar’s Number demonstrates that we are beholden to the “tribe” of our peers, the roughly 150 individuals who can find a place in our heads. In pre-civilization, the cloud was the tribe.
Should the members of tribe interrupt the constant reinforcement of their social, informational, knowledge-based and mimetic relationships, the tribe would dissolve and disperse – as happens to a tribe when it grows beyond the confines of Dunbar’s Number.
In this hyperconnected era, we can pick and choose which of our human connections deserves reinforcement; the lines of that reinforcement shape the scope of our power.
Studies of Japanese teenagers using mobiles and twenty-somethings on Facebook have shown that, most of the time, activity is directed toward a small circle of peers, perhaps six or seven others. This “co-presence” is probably a modern echo of an ancient behavior, presumably related to the familial unit.
While we might desire to extend our power and capabilities through our networks of hyperconnections, the cost associated with such investments is very high.
Time spent invested in a far-flung cloud is time that lost on networks closer to home. Yet individuals will nonetheless often dedicate themselves to some cause greater than themselves, despite the high price paid, drawn to some higher ideal.
The Example of The Obama Campaign
The Obama campaign proved an interesting example of the price of connectivity.
During the Democratic primary for the state of New York (which Hilary Clinton was expected to win easily), so many individuals contacted the campaign through its website that the campaign itself quickly became overloaded with the number of connections it was expected to maintain. By election day, the campaign staff in New York had retreated from the web, back to using mobiles.
They had detached from the “cloud” connectivity they used the web to foster, instead focusing their connectivity on the older model of the six or seven individuals in co-present connection. The enormous cloud of power which could have been put to work in New York lay dormant, unorganized, talking to itself through the Obama website, but effectively disconnected from the Obama campaign.
For each of us, connectivity carries a high price. For every organization which attempts to harness hyperconnectivity, the price is even higher.
With very few exceptions, organizations are structured along hierarchical lines. Power flows from bottom to the top. Not only does this create the “burden of omniscience” at the highest levels of the organization, it also fundamentally mismatches the flows of power in the cloud.
When the hierarchy comes into contact with an energized cloud, the “discharge” from the cloud to the hierarchy can completely overload the hierarchy. That’s the power of hyperconnectivity.
Another example from the Obama campaign demonstrates this power. Project Houdini was touted out by the Obama campaign as a system which would get the grassroots of the campaign to funnel their GOTV results into a centralized database, which could then be used to track down individuals who hadn’t voted, in order to offer them assistance in getting to their local polling station.
The campaign grassroots received training in Project Houdini, when through a field test of the software and procedures, then waited for election day.
On election day, Project Houdini lasted no more than 15 minutes before it crashed under the incredible number of empowered individuals who attempted to plug data into Project Houdini. Although months in the making, Project Houdini proved that a centralized and hierarchical system for campaign management couldn’t actually cope with the “cloud” of grassroots organizers.
In the 21st century we now have two oppositional methods of organization: the hierarchy and the cloud. Each of them carry with them their own costs and their own strengths. Neither has yet proven to be wholly better than the other.
One could make an argument that both have their own roles into the future, and that we’ll be spending a lot of time learning which works best in a given situation. What we have already learned is that these organizational types are mostly incompatible: unless very specific steps are taken, the cloud overpowers the hierarchy, or the hierarchy dissipates the cloud. We need to think about the interfaces that can connect one to the other.
That’s the area that all organizations – and very specifically, non-profit organizations – will be working through in the coming years. Learning how to harness the power of the cloud will mark the difference between a modest success and overwhelming one. Yet working with the cloud will present organizational challenges of an unprecedented order. There is no way that any hierarchy can work with a cloud without becoming fundamentally changed by the experience.
Affair De Coeur
All organizations are now confronted with two utterly divergent methodologies for organizing their activities: the tower and the cloud.
- The tower seeks to organize everything in hierarchies, control information flows, and keep the power heading from bottom to top.
- The cloud isn’t formally organized, pools its information resources, and has no center of power. Despite all of its obvious weaknesses, the cloud can still transform itself into a formidable power, capable of overwhelming the tower. To push the metaphor a little further, the cloud can become a storm.
How does this happen? What is it that turns a cloud into a storm? Jimmy Wales has said that the success of any language-variant version of Wikipedia comes down to the dedicated efforts of five individuals.
Once he spies those five individuals hard at work in Pashtun or Khazak or Xhosa, he knows that edition of Wikipedia will become a success.
In other words, five people have to take the lead, leading everyone else in the cloud with their dedication, their selflessness, and their openness. This number probably holds true in a cloud of any sort – find five like-minded individuals, and the transformation from cloud to storm will begin.
At the end of that transformation there is still no hierarchy. There are, instead, concentric circles of involvement. At the innermost, those five or more incredibly dedicated individuals; then a larger circle of a greater number, who work with that inner five as time and opportunity allow; and so on, outward, at decreasing levels of involvement, until we reach those who simply contribute a word or a grammatical change, and have no real connection with the inner circle, except in commonality of purpose.
The Cloud Model
This is the model for Wikipedia, for Wikileaks, and for ANONYMOUS. This is the cloud model, fully actualized as a storm. At this point the storm can challenge any tower.
But the storm doesn’t have things all its own way; to present a challenge to a tower is to invite the full presentation of its own power, which is very rude, very physical, and potentially very deadly. Wikipedians at work on the Farsi version of the encyclopedia face arrest and persecution by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and religious police.
Just a few weeks ago, after the contents of the Australian government’s internet blacklist was posted to Wikileaks, the German government invaded the home of the man who owns the domain name for Wikileaks in Germany. The tower still controls most of the power apparatus in the world, and that power can be used to squeeze any potential competitors.
But what happens when you try to squeeze a cloud? Effectively, nothing at all. Wikipedia has no head to decapitate. Jimmy Wales is an effective cheerleader and face for the press, but his presence isn’t strictly necessary.
There are over 2000 Wikipedians who handle the day-to-day work. Locking all of them away, while possible, would only encourage further development in the cloud, as other individuals moved to fill their places.
Moreover, any attempt to disrupt the cloud only makes the cloud more resilient. This has been demonstrated conclusively from the evolution of “darknets“, private file-sharing networks, which grew up as the legal and widely available file-sharing networks, such as Napster, were shut down by the copyright owners.
Attacks on the cloud only improve the networks within the cloud, only make the leaders more dedicated, only increase the information and knowledge sharing within the cloud. Trying to disperse a storm only intensifies it.
These are not idle speculations; the tower will seek to contain the storm by any means necessary. The 21st century will increasingly look like a series of collisions between towers and storms. Each time the storm emerges triumphant, the tower will become more radical and determined in its efforts to disperse the storm, which will only result in a more energized and intensified storm. This is not a game that the tower can win by fighting. Only by opening up and adjusting itself to the structure of the cloud can the tower find any way forward.
What, then, is leadership in the cloud? It is not like leadership in the tower. It is not a position wrought from power, but authority in its other, and more primary meaning, “to be the master of“. Authority in the cloud is drawn from dedication, or, to use rather more precise language, love. Love is what holds the cloud together.
People are attracted to the cloud because they are in love with the aim of the cloud. The cloud truly is an affair of the heart, and these affairs of the heart will be the engines that drive 21st century business, politics and community.
Author and pundit Clay Shirky has stated, “The internet is better at stopping things than starting them“. I reckon he’s wrong there: the internet is very good at starting things that stop things. But it is very good at starting things.
Making the jump from an amorphous cloud of potentiality to a forceful storm requires the love of just five people. That’s not much to ask. If you can’t get that many people in love with your cause, it may not be worth pursing.
How Organization Can Embrace The Cloud
All 21st century organizations need to recognize and adapt to the power of the cloud.
It’s either that or face a death of a thousand cuts, the slow ebbing of power away from hierarchically-structured organizations as newer forms of organization supplant them. But it need not be this way. It need not be an either / or choice. It could be a future of and-and-and, where both forms continue to co-exist peacefully. But that will only come to pass if hierarchies recognize the power of the cloud.
This means you. All of you have your own hierarchical organizations – because that’s how organizations have always been run. Yet each of you are surrounded by your own clouds: community organizations (both in the real world and online), bulletin boards, blogs, and all of the other Web 2.0 supports for the sharing of connectivity, information, knowledge and power.
You are already halfway invested in the cloud, whether or not you realize it. And that’s also true for people you serve, your customers and clients and interest groups. You can’t simply ignore the cloud.
How then should organizations proceed?
1) Do Not Be Scared of The Cloud
It might be some time before you can come to love the cloud, or even trust it, but you must at least move to a place where you are not frightened by a constituency which uses the cloud to assert its own empowerment.
Reacting out of fright will only lead to an arms race, a series of escalations where the your hierarchy attempts to contain the cloud, and the cloud – which is faster, smarter and more agile than you can ever hope to be – outwits you, again and again.
2) Like Likes Like
If you can permute your organization so that it looks more like the cloud, you’ll have an easier time working with the cloud. Case in point: because of “message discipline“, only a very few people are allowed to speak for an organization.
Yet, because of the exponential growth in connectivity and Web 2.0 technologies, everyone in your organization has more opportunities to speak for your organization than ever before.
Can you release control over message discipline, and empower your organization to speak for itself, from any point of contact? Yes, this sounds dangerous, and yes, there are some dangers involved, but the cloud wants to be spoken to authentically, and authenticity has many competing voices, not a single monolithic tone.
3) We Are All Involved In a Growth Process
The cloud of last year is not the cloud of next year. The answers that satisfied a year ago are not the same answers that will satisfy a year from now.
We are all booting up very quickly into an alternative form of social organization which is only just now spreading its wings and testing its worth. Beginnings are delicate times.
The future will be shaped by actions in the present. This means there are enormous opportunities to extend the capabilities of existing organizations, simply by harnessing them to the changes underway. It also means that tragedies await those who fight the tide of times too single-mindedly.
Our culture has already rounded the corner, and made the transition to the cloud. It remains to be seen which of our institutions and organizations can adapt themselves, and find their way forward into sharing power.
Originally written by Mark Pesce for The Human Network, and first published on May 10th 2009 as “Sharing Power (Aussie Rules)“.
About the author
Mark Pesce is a Sydney based consultant, writer and lecturer. His consultancy, FutureSt, advises media companies in publishing and broadcasting on strategies for forward movement in an ever more fragmented and converged media marketplace.
Photo credits:
Family Affairs – TatyanaGI
Replicate The Wikipedia Structure – Andres Rodriguez
Affairs of State – Irina Tischenko
The Example of The Obama Campaign – Peter Howe
Affair De Coeur – Lars Christensen
The Cloud Model – Nikolai Sorokin
How Organization Can Embrace The Cloud – Kyle Smith
Live teaching and learning marketplaces are a new emergent set of online exchanges where independent teachers and educators can easily share or sell their know-how with those looking for it. Independent guides and experts can deliver live and recorded lessons using a full set of web conferencing and e-learning components.
Photo credit: Wong Sze Fei
From video conferencing to document and presentation sharing there is no shortage of features enabling passionate and talented teachers to spread their talent and know-how to an audience of eager learners.
These new online learning and teaching exchanges offer for the first time the example of a distributed and un-ininstutionalized educational venue that offers plenty of opportunity for learners while offering independent knowledge experts a qualified venue to share and commercialize their expertise without needing to be hired by a university.
If you are wondering how can quality of teaching be guaranteed in such an environment, the answer lies in an effective mechanism, adopted by most of these teaching marketplaces, whereby students themselves are allowed to rate their own teachers.
The other advantages that these online learning and teaching marketplaces offer, are many, both from a learners and teachers perspectives.
For learners:
- It’s cheaper than enrolling to a university course or going to a private teacher.
- You are not limited inside pre-packaged learning paths, but you can rather follow your interests and cultivate your passions.
- You can learn at your own pace, wherever you want, and finding the time which is most comfortable for you.
- You don’t have to get through an exam or test to prove that you are learning something. You are self-responsible for your education.
For teachers:
- You can sell your own instructional material and share your knowledge with other passionate peers.
- You can teach from the comfort of your place, earning money and limiting the costs of teaching to your Internet connection fee.
- You get in touch with a far larger audience than the students you could physically meet.
- You are not subjected to any institutional rule or approach in the way you teach, and you’re greatly facilitated to use live interaction and multimedia content with your students.
If you want to explore in greater detail these new emergent online teaching and learning marketplaces, I have prepared for you a list of the most interesting live teaching platforms out there, complemented with a comparative table which compares each service main features:
- Live classes: live audio / video conferencing integration
- Social evaluation: connection and mutual evaluation between learners and teachers
- Content distribution: redistribution and sharing of lessons outside the learning platform
- Advertising: ads displayed on free version
- Premium price / features: first price level to access extended features
Here all the details:
Live Teaching And Learning Marketplaces Comparison Table
Live Teaching And Learning Marketplaces
- WiZiQ
WiZiQ is a web-based knowledge-sharing platform to facilitate live learning and teaching. Users can give or attend virtual classes and share instructional content with other people that have similar interests. WiZiQ supports full audio and video conferencing, and any learning material created inside the service can be redistributed via link or embed on web sites and blogs. Learners can rate their teachers and provide feedback about the quality of classes. WiZiQ free version includes: public chat, lessons with a maximum of 50 participants, ads displayed during navigation, and session recordings available for 30 days. Educators and students that need advanced features like private chat, lessons with up to 500 participants, ad-free browsing, or 1-year recording sessions can subscribe to the premium account for $49.95/year.
http://www.wiziq.com/ - Sclipo
A social learning network where users can connect and share similar educational interests: That’s what Sclipo is about. Aimed to both teachers and learners, the service takes advantage of a video conferencing facility that allows users to attend (or give) live classes up to 100 participants. The integration with Facebook Connect makes easy for learners to find and get in touch with peers, but also for teachers to post instructional material on Facebook profiles. Like in other similar learning platforms, learners can rate their teachers when the lesson is over. Sclipo is ad-supported and all main features are fully available for free, though to sell paid lessons and content or get no advertising, users need to upgrade at least to the first level of premium accounts for $4.95/month.
http://www.sclipo.com/ - Moontoast
The aim of Moontoast is to build an online human knowledge marketplace where passionate users can connect and sell their expertise by giving live audio / video classes. When a user buys credit to attend a lesson (1 credit = $1), both teachers and Moontoast earn money. Teachers can be rated by students, so it’s easy to find the right teacher by checking feedback from the Moontoast community. Material shared inside Moontoast cannot be redistributed elsewhere. The service is ads free and there are no premium accounts for the time being even if developers are planning to add extra features soon.
http://www.moontoast.com/ - MindBites
MindBites is both a self-publishing platform and a virtual community where anyone can share knowledge and capitalize on her expertise. Users are free to explore MindBites and look for passionate peers, but can also purchase specific video lessons from teachers that distribute their content inside the MindBites marketplace. Each registered user can provide feedback and rate the content purchased or watched. Like Moontoast, you have no subscription plans, but rather credits you can collect for $0.99 each and use to compensate the teachers. Lessons you buy can be viewed online or downloaded, but not be redistributed unless explicitly released under a CC license. MindBites is free to use and users will not see any ads browsing through the site.
http://www.mindbites.com/ - ForteMall
ForteMall is a web-based learning / training marketplace which provides both a global knowledge-sharing platform, and all the instruments to manage online learning transactions and exchanges. Teachers and learners can connect with each other in live conferences and trade their skills and expertise using the secure payment feature that relies on companies like PayPal. Teachers can also share instructional content on other web sites through a dedicated widget. ForteMall users can rate the quality of the service and the work of teachers. The web service is built on a freemium model, which means that basic services are all free, but optional features are available upon request. Teachers that desire more visibility for their courses can pay extra money to have their lessons featured inside special categories, listed on the homepage, or the name of their courses written in bold. Prices available inside the FAQ section of the site.
http://www.fortemall.com/ - Ailola
Ailola caters to both students and teachers who want to share and sell their expertise online. Learners can connect with other passionate peers and share their knowledge, while teachers have access to a worldwide elearning market to sell instructional content and give live classes. Real ratings by other students provide insights about the quality of the instructors. Audio and video conferencing tools are standard for all Ailola registered users. Instructional content traded or transferred inside Ailola cannot be redistributed on other web sites or across the web. The service is free to use and ad-supported.
http://www.ailola.com/ - xLingo
xLingo works as an exchange community which facilitates people around the world to connect and learn a foreign language. Users can e-mail each other, participate in forums or group discussions, and even start their own mini-blog to share and receive help. Audio and video streaming, as well as the option to rate the work of other users, is not supported for the time being. The service survives thanks to advertisement, but users can get rid of ads and get more storage for their xLingo mailbox by purchasing a premium membership priced at $20/year.
http://www.languageexchange.org/ - EduFire
EduFire is a distance education platform and social network service that allows live tutoring online through text and video chat. Originally promoted as a language learning engine, EduFire has later broadened its offering by adding text preparation courses and a wider range of topics. Learners are free to join in and share their experience. Teachers can charge a variable fee to put their learning material for sale and pay Edufire for providing audio and video streaming tools. Edufire is not ad-supported, and registered users are welcome to rate and provide feedback on the content published.
http://edufire.com/ - Eduslide
Eduslide offers a public learning content management system to create, upload and access slides of whichever topic you like. Unlike other competitors that focus on live video conferencing or video content production, Eduslide just keeps it simple and allows registered users to create presentations to showcase and share their knowledge. Each content is open and subjected to ratings from the Eduslide community. Eduslide is an open source project, meaning that anyone can download the source code and build upon it to improve the service. Eduslide is ads-free and does not provide any way to embed or redistribute published elearning material.
http://www.eduslide.net/
Originally prepared by Robin Good and Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia, and first published on May 11th, 2009 as “Live Teaching And Learning Marketplaces: The Emerging Online Social Learning Networks For Professional Independent Educators“.
The Paradox Of Web 2.0 – Part 2: What You Really Need To Teach Your Kids
Posted by: | CommentsThe Paradox of Web 2.0 is the realization that the big transformations and changes sweeping the worlds of communication, marketing and new media, from bottom-up participation to sharing and open collaboration are light years ahead and as distant as a far away galaxy from the education and schooling worlds where we supposedly prepare and nurture our kids to become the bright minds of our future.
Photo credit: Markus Angermeier
In this second part of my presentation at theEVO 2009 Multiliteracies event, I focus on further exemplifying what learning really is by showcasing my personal experience with Seymour Papert’s Logo turtle, a fantastic tool to learn math and geometry, as well as my frustration in learning to play percussions with my own music teacher.
From these two simple stories you can see how much the diving into, the being part of, the loving of something are so essential components of the learning process. Actually, I would even venture to say that those extra factors characterize a true, deep form of learning, vastly distant from what, although normally called learning, is just rote memorization with little or no understanding.
I then explore again some of what, inspired by Stephen Downes’ own list of true critical things to learn in life, should be some of the core topics of mandatory learning curricula everywhere. It is in fact, by realizing how distant the topics we force our kids to study are from those skills and abilities that can effectively help any human to communicate, listen, be creative and move swiftly through the many perils and surprises that life has in store for us.
Here Part 2 (Part 1):
The Paradox Of Web 2.0 – Part 2: What You Really Need To Teach Your Kids
by Robin Good
Robin’s Speech – Audio
Duration: 23′ – The audio is edited to play Robin alone. Full audio (65′) available here.
Full English Text Transcription
Do You Know About the Turtle?
Let me take some real-life examples, which I think can be quite illuminating for supporting my topic.
The turtle first of all. What is the turtle? Many of you may know about the turtle from the language LOGO developed by Seymour Papert, a great computer scientist, educational scholar and researcher, who over 20-30 years ago, developed this programming language that would allow kids to learn mathematics, and geometry in a way that was very engaging, playful, and which allowed them to discover those things by themselves and become one with them.
For those of you who haven’t had the experience to try this, it may sound a lot of abstract good thinking. In reality, I had an experience which showed me with my own kid how powerful this is, because he is going to school, and he was going for a while to a private teacher, and the mathematics teacher have him to do a lots of assignments, and getting a little bored on this, and so one day on the motorbike, we were just talking about the turtle, and I say: “Do you know about the turtle and what it does?“, and he said: “No, I don’t know.” So, i said: “Let’s download it when we are at the office.”
So, we downloaded this tool, there are many different versions available for all you to use, and they are all free, many open-source, and you get a very simple interface where you can give some simple task commands, and there this apparent turtle, it’s just a circle in some cases, that moves.
You say “forward 100“, and the turtle goes for 100 steps leaving a trail. So, by moving forward, right, left, top and down, you can actually design shapes, geometrical shapes, and so it was very easy for him to create a triangle, by learning a few commands, and then a square. And then I asked him to do a square had some extra-sides, a bunch of extra-sides. Don’t do me just four sides, do me a square with ten sides.
I then said: “Oh, why don’t you do a circle?“, and my son Ludovico said: “I don’t know how to do a circle, because there must be a command to do a curve, and I don’t know that command unless you tell me.” I said:
“Look, there’s no command to do a circle. You can discover it yourself. Just look at the square you just did with ten sides. Doesn’t it look like a little circle, tough a little rough? What if you wanted to make it more circle-like?“
And so, he lit up in a second, and he said: “Daddy, not only I know that I can make a circle now, but I also know how many sides it has to be. And the number of sides is 360.” He had that number sitting in there, inside his head, from before, from school, and so he decided that those two things now finally made sense if you create a 360 size of 1 pixel each, you are going to get a circle. He tried out and blam! There he had a circle.
In that moment, my son had created a circle himself, and he was one with that circle, knowing that he had created a circle, and knowing perfectly how it was made. In fact, it became an enjoyable game from there on to go on with things like: “Now let’s make it bigger, let’s make it half the size…“, and while we were doing this we were learning lots of formulas but without that dry, cold feeling of learning stuff that you’re just memorizing but has no meaning. We were creating and changing reality, though abstract reality, with our own thinking, and that was very powerful, enjoyable, and certainly a memorable experience, whereby mathematics for him is not now anymore for him something dry to memorize.
My Percussion Teacher Is Wrong
Let me take you also to another place. I myself am a buddying percussionist. I love Latin music. I love soul music, I like very much the rhythms that come from Africa, and so since I was a kid I liked to bang on something at the rhythm of the groove. So, on and off, I started at applying myself to it, and recently I signed myself to a percussion music school. I broadcast very often what we do there, if you go from the Qik.com/RobinGood platform where I use my little portable video camera. You can see some of our playing couple of times a week.
Anyway, I have there a private lesson with a teacher, and once a week we sit down in front of each other in sound-proof room, and we try to learn something.
My teacher is a great musician, is really charismatic. I really like him, but he teaches just like a very traditional teacher. He has no 2.0 stuff. So what he will tell me is:
“There are four beats in this, and on the up of the second beat you’re going to hit with your right hand with an angle of 45° down this way, and then as soon as that finishes you see there’s an up note so you’ll have to go “pick, pick” with the other hand, while you hit the bass with this. So, it’s 1, 2, and then there’s a third one like we saw… ok, now do it“.
When he says: “Now do it“, I can’t do nothing, nothing at all. Because my brain when it comes to music, doesn’t work like that, and for most people that I talk to, those who have made their brain work that way, it has take them a lot of effort, and they really have had to re-wire their brains; or they’re great musicians, who have had the opportunity to learn this technical know-how straightforward, serialized learning, after they had learned music through personal direct learning.
So my music teacher goes mad. He goes mad because he knows that I have a good ear, good sense of music, good rhythm, good timing, and I’m not just a stupid guy. He knows because he sees, and he’s a human being.
But when he sees that I cannot make a step, that I’m all blocked, he just doesn’t know what to do. So, I take over subliminally, and I use all my smart brain technology and I say to myself:
“Look, if he’s going to get mad, he’s going to try to play that rhythm back to me. So, I just wait for the time he’s going to get so mad, that he’s going to play it again for me. And when he plays it for me, what do I do? I just listen and record. I just simply record with my brain.“
It’s a function you have by default, you don’t have a driver to install, you don’t need a plugin there. You just say to your brain: “Record.” That’s it. It works.
Then, as soon as he stops, or while he’s going, you start playing back the recording, and then you tell your hands to do that rhythm. PU-PU-PA PU-PU-PA-PA. You don’t know that the third beat is done with a 45° degree angle, and… but you can do it.
Again, here learning is very much getting into the music, many of you know this, and it’s not transmittable by way of words, diagrams, or charts. Those can be of great help, ONCE YOU KNOW the rhythm and can play it, and then these can give you great extension of your vision, and more in-depth understanding, but not without FIRST getting your hands dirty.
And so my teacher puts in a very frustrating situation many of the learners, because he doesn’t realize this.
What Do We Really Need to Learn
Another point if Stephen Downes would be here now, reminding us of the little time left would be:
“Robin the approach of teaching is evidently not right, and if we look at learning, and the way it happens, in real life, just like you have made examples now, you’ve modeled for us now, it really looks like something different.“
So, one thing that we have set aside is that the paradigm shift is made up by realizing, in acknowledging, that teaching is not equal to learning in very deep, meaningful ways.
But what do we really need to learn is very much about what we would teach our kids on that spaceship we have left before, and that certainly again is not going to be very much about the seven kings of Rome, or some other dry notionistic stuff.
It’s going to be more like something that they can bring anywhere they can go. Any country, any region, any planet…
1. Live Healthy
Biologically, how am I made up? How do I work, is it good if I drink 20 Coca-Cola everyday or not, what difference does it make?
Knowing a little bit of the biology, chemical made-up of your organism, what makes you feel good, what makes you feel bad, what you need to put inside to get outside energy, coming out of your pores, and bloods, and veins? That’s what we need to know. What is good food and what is not without having to be sold to anyone line of thought, nor medicine, pharmaceutical, nor alternative, but understanding the information and where to get it so I can make my own choices without having to depend on prescriptions from somebody else.
That would be number one for me.
2. Know How to Read
Number two, because we know that without health we can’t really do nothing, Stephen Downes suggests, and I take directly him up on this, understanding really how to read things. Not how to read for the sake of knowing the letters and the words, but being able to read in a way that is the exactly the opposite of what my kids are being taught in school, which is to memorize flawlessly what is written there, and specifically the terms that are in the books.
This is completely useless. Because if it’s then asked them what they just said, and they don’t know what those words mean, and why things should be that way or another. It’s just self-brainwashing. They are not being brainwashed. They allow themselves to brainwash themselves with word that have no meaning.
Stopping and understanding all, to read in a meaningful way, and what are the techniques, the methods, the approaches, the strategies to do that, it’s very very valuable, and that’s something we should learn, in the time we dedicate to what we now call school.
3. How to Learn
Same thing would be how to learn. How to learn is not sitting in front of a teacher and listening, and looking quiet and educatedly posed with your body.
It’s about learning a very extended number of approaches, about exploring, trying out, making mistakes, summarizing, reviewing, sharing, planning out, using techniques that whereby you have a piece of paper and a pen you can do a thousand useful things with other people, to explore new grounds, to inventory new ideas.
I didn’t get any of this when I went to university in Rome, Italy, or San Francisco, California. Very little of this. Maybe one per cent of the overall curriculum is dedicated to that, but if you’re going to another planet, don’t you think this would be quite useful, to be able know how to learn? I’m sure I’m not the first telling you this, and I’m sure you’re more convinced than me since earlier times.
So, what else would me or Stephen Downes bring in here?
4. How to Be Creative
How to be creative and understanding! This is not a gift sent by God into your DNA, this is a faculty that anyone can develop by learning about the fact that creativity is all about knowing, enjoying how to solve problems.
Then, if those problems are more in the visual or auditory reality you tend to fall in the more classic, artistic fields, but you can be very artistic and very creative also when you fix some of your kitchen problems or electricity ones. Creativity is everywhere, and it can be measured by your ability to think differently. To think outside of the box, to think with your lateral thinking as Edward De Bono would say. That’s something else I would like to teach my kids on the spaceship.
And then what else?
5. How to Empathize
This is one of the things we miss the most, that is: Being able to put myself inside the shoes of whoever I’m talking with.
We’re here conferencing, chatting, and this and that, but many times, many of us, when confronted with another two eyes, and a mouth in front of us, are just competing for time in which they introduce their own words and share their ideas, but that sharing is very much one-way.
The ability to listen-in and listen-in between the words is really all about understanding pro-actively what the other is saying and what the other is craving for. Not just adding up: “Oh you know this, and this…” sometimes gets to be a little arid.
It’s not a competition for who has the last word, or for whoever knows most. It should be an exchange, and the exchange should be dictated by curiosity or by desire to help others. And so by stopping and looking at what it’s not been said, one can see where the other is wanting some gratification, reward, or wants to establish himself even if the others don’t want to and can be proper way with that desire if the setting and opportunity allow it. Isn’t that much better than wasting lots of words for nothing.
And so to empathize is to put oneself in the shoes of the person in front of you. We dedicate so very little time to this, in a practical, pragmatical way, so that we exercise this function and master it in our daily life, we could have lot of less hassles in our living rooms, without families, with boring friends, and girlfriends… how much frustration would we save ourselves in our lifetime just by mastering a little more of this discipline instead of knowing when the… whatever.
6. How to Tell Truth From Fiction
Let’s take a few more of these key topics that we never cover in the ideal learning classroom.
How to tell truth from fiction. The media literacy that many advocate today is very much important.
We have the situation all around where many people have a very hard time separating truth from fiction, propaganda and the protection of self-interests and so on. It becomes very hard for people to tell with their own heads how things really went, whether that is Gaza or whether that is 9/11 tragedy.
People are less and less equipped to evaluate by themselves the information that is given to them, and they have sold their beliefs system to newspaper, television, and radio mainstream channels.
I think this is very bad for this planet in general, not because of the news being brought forward or what they represent, but because it takes away from the thinking muscle. If you don’t exercise that muscle, is going to get loose, is going to get weak, is going to get like a mozzarella. In a world that keeps changing and where mainstream media is more powerful than ever, if Fox is your God, go for it. But if it’s not, think about it.
7. How to Predict Consequences
Look at the future is now what am I advocating, to look in the crystal ball, but many of our kids do very stupid things. Not because they don’t listen to us. I think they have all of the right not to listen to us and verifying things, but they don’t have the frame of mind, have not given the frame of mind, to think about what is going to happen next.
We ourselves sometimes don’t do it. Quite often. It doesn’t matter if you’re publishing a blog post, or if you’re shooting some firecracker out of the windows for new year’s eve. What are the consequences of doing that? Too many times we act like actors in a movie, like Tom Cruise’s of the situation, but the situation doesn’t warrant us to act like Hollywood stars, because there is no end of the movie, and the consequences are real. Way too many times we just don’t think.
So what about training a little bit myself and everybody around me in thinking a little more, in stopping and thinking before doing something. Yes there are some of us are very undecided in life, and that is not the point we’re trying to cure. We’re trying to cure when we act too much out of impulse, when we act not thinking about the consequences, whether that is electricity we’re wasting, or pollution, or doing sex without thinking, it makes a big difference what type of human being and civilization we create for the future. Having that skill coming up as a key one and not just as a secondary “I happen to learn abut this during my life” would be really valuable.
8. How to Value Yourself
Learning that is not a matter of getting good grades, but learning how to give yourself the opportunity to explore new grounds independently of the judgement of others and maybe sometimes against the judgement is very important.
Try also to question, and question, and and put yourself in front of the question forever: “Where the hell am I going, and why am I going there?” It’s got to be some of the time that I spend if I have an ideal classroom or space ship that I’m on to, and that I want to use to make my time useful.
Where the hell am I going? Trying to answer this question and putting your energies and slotting your time so that you can fulfill it in your lifetime, I think brings great rewards. Not all the time great money, but I don’t think that’s the key to living a successful life, or to really learn what is key to survive in any type of situation.
9. How to Communicate Effectively
Last but not least: How to communicate effectively.
I think myself that this is probably the one most important thing and most approachable thing to learn.
Spending time learning, mastering, discovering, exploring how to communicate better. To the person next to you, with voice, as well as with the most sophisticated technologies: from video to blog, RSS, P2P, whatever that is.
Mastering this allows you not only to live a better life, but to build opportunities for survival, that have been unthinkable of until today.
Because tomorrow many of us are going to be teachers, and guides, and many will be paid for doing this. So it’s not that it is going to be a commercialization of the teacher, but in this world of fast change and of knowledge economy it’s evident that there is going to be a lot more learning that is going to happen, and it’s not going to take any place in the classroom.
So someone is going to got to go and do it. And unless these people can communicate clearly including showing me the rhythm by doing PU-PU-PA PU-PU-PA-PA instead of telling me, we’re not going to learn very much.
10. How to Ask Good Questions
Last and closing.
I think we got to learn very well how to do what we just did until now, which is to keep asking ourselves great, fastidious, tremendously fastidious, uncomfortable questions so that we can open new gateways, new doors, new roads, make some mistakes, and find where we really want to go and how to get there.
End of Part 2 (Part 1).
Robin Good Shares the Key Resources For Good Learning – Video
Duration: 23′ 26″
Originally recorded by Vance Stevens for Vance’s GeekSpeek on February 26, 2009 as “The paradox of 2.0, an EDUPUNK perspective“.
What is the Web 2.0 paradox? It is the living paradox of a society which while it learns and applies fundamental new rules of behaviour and communication thanks to rapid growth of the Internet in many business sectors, it fails yet to have enough moral maturity to consistently carry over such realizations and discoveries into the world of education and learning.
Photo credit: Markus Angermeier
Despite many of us have perfectly clear what Web 2.0 is about (participating, sharing, being humble and listening, requesting feedback to learn from our mistakes) when we go home to our kids, we just forget all about it and in the act of sending them to school we really send them back to the Middle Ages.
Why is it so difficult for us to bridge what we have clearly realized in the media, television, radio and advertising markets to the world of education? Why do we see so little effort in injecting inside our schools some of the attitudes, approaches and skills we put to use in our work?
I’ve tried to make sense of why we are in such a paradoxical situation and I realize that while business and direct revenues impact and push rapid changes in the world of business, it takes much longer time to achieve the same changes in a field that provides no direct or immediate revenue to us. Especially when the changes that our business world has discovered would strongly undermine the present educational status quo, eliminating lots of existing costs and infrastructures, as well as the market value of many exams and certifications, deeply revolutionizing the world of work and professional guilds as we know it today.
Under these conditions, and with little hope that we can rapidly change our educational system, what is the best way to prepare your children to effectively prepare them for a future we know so little about?
During a live session with Vance Stevens and other participants at the EVO 2009 Multiliteracies event, I shared some of my thoughts on what actual learning is for me and also which stuff future generations need to know to be prepared in a world where’s no more space for good grades or pre-determined questions. Inspired by many books and great readings ranging from Ivan Illich to Seymourt Papert and from Stephen Downes to George Siemens and Jay Cross, here is my own remixed vision for where our educational systems fail and for what we really need to know, that is not yet inside the official school syllabus.
In Part 2 tomorrow, I provide some real-life examples where I explore the real skills that learners should possess to face the disruptive changes in our society. Abilities that aren’t taught at school.
Here Part 1:
The Paradox Of Web 2.0: What You Really Need To Teach Your Kids
by Robin Good
Duration: 23′ – The audio is edited to play Robin alone. Full audio (65′) available here.
Full English Text Transcription
The Web 2.0 Paradox
I’m Robin Good, and my contention, what I’m here for today, is challenging a little bit our way to often assume the beliefs about learning and the way it should be, and maybe also look a little bit more tangibly at what the ideal type of learning or a future type of learning can, or should, or must be for us to be happy about the results or what we are going to produce in our efforts to change and improve all of this.
This is really the focus. I’m arguing, contending, that we are in a so-called 2.0 paradox. That’s how I call it. Many of you have learned about the issue of 2.0, Web 2.0, collaborating, participating, sharing, syndicating, mashing up, mixing, listening to the others… All of these are concepts that since a few years we’ve been reading, and breathing, and writing, and exploring in many different ways, to the point where the advertising, the marketing fields, television, and other media have actually in many cases, already fully embraced many of this.
Software development, for example, is now done in a complete different way. Many of the web 2.0 companies are doing it in a way which it wasn’t done before: it’s immediately open, it likes to expose its own buzz, it likes to receive feedback and criticism from the audience in a continuous process, it keeps no secrets, it allows those that are going to be the customers to suggest new ideas and not just mistakes. All of this learning, from these explorations we’ve done in the ways we can communicate, collaborate together, are permeating, are increasingly part of this front-end, these edge areas in which we work, in which many of us work. Advertising, marketing, television, and so on. Certainly these are not areas in which everybody works, but they’re in front of us everyday.
The paradox of this is that those same people, those same individuals that have fully embraced, and that promote and evangelize about these ideas and use them in their professional work, when they turn back, and go home, and look at their kids, they have no shame in not realizing or acknowledging the huge discrepancy that there is between these ideas that we have already been implementing in daily life, and the privileged universe in which we are forcing our future generations to go into, with the supposed idea that we are going to prepare them better to manage this continuous change, the innovation, and all of these new approaches, and we send them in a world that is completely secluded from actual reality and in which none of these principles is made real for them to test.
Is Teaching Equal to Learning?
That’s not an easy shift to make and we keep just define ourselves in the situation by realizing that we don’t want to tear down schools, that we don’t want to revolutionize the institution. It’s taking so much effort for us to build and they have been there for quite some time. Some of us have been born and most of us just with this universe of education in place, and so the system appears by default to be a necessity in the way it is.
But, maybe if we go and question, and look really at the essence of it, we can see not only that maybe the system has created a monster that we should at least acknowledge, but that we don’t need to tear it down, to change the situation from what it is to what we would like it to be.
If we are looking at teaching and learning, first of all, and you guys are very much into this and this may be quite some obvious reasoning, but these are the reasoning that we should bring in front of those that most resist or are most alien to these ideas.
So let’s bring in front of them the question of: Is teaching really equal to learning? Because every time we think normally in our everyday life about learning that we need to have some kind of classroom or teacher that is going to help us learn those things. That is basically the idea we get every single day, is the default thing we think about. Is that really so? We should ask.
Put On Your Investigator’s Hat
My point is: if we look at the way we look, we learn things in our everyday life, if you look at the work of the many luminaries, opinion leaders out there, what they’re telling us is that learning takes place really not so much in the classroom, in the school, where lots of what we learn is how to have fun while the teacher doesn’t see, how to socialize with the others sex for the first time in our lives, how to do homework faster than anybody else so we have more free time, how to find out what’s going to be inside the next exam, so that we can answer to all the questions right.
That is really what we get to be trained for inside the school. All these things, things that don’t appear to be the actual content, but things that are on the side of the things that we learn, while the things we really learn in our lives, are learned in a little different way.
So, if you put on your investigator hat on your head, and you look really at how learning takes place in everyday life, you’re going to discover things you know very well, but you just don’t stop looking at.
What Do We Know After School?
Let me take some examples: we say that we know this and we know that, and that a school is very important because you get to know lots of things that are useful later in your life, but after school, of the knowledge we get there, how much we can really put to use or is effective in our ability to move through the fast changes that are happening, to learn the new technologies, to understand which news are good and which ones are not, to detect propaganda from actual information…
If we were to be sent back in time, say 200-300 years, could we say that we could play God on Earth?
We’re coming from the 21st century, we know lots of stuff. We know about electricity, television, radio, satellite, space travel, and so if we went back in time could we just play God inside the civilization where we landed by telling them how to invent and create the locomotive, the train, or the airplane? Could anyone of us do that? Could anyone of us tell them how to bring electricity to their civilization? Have we actually learned any of this stuff that we can put it to use to them? The moment you start thinking that way, though it may appear a little bit stretched, you see that the tools we have at hand, that remain with us are not so much immediately usable.
A Trip to Space
Let me bring another example for you: If you think of going back, being put on a spaceship that goes to a faraway planet, you’re on this space ship yourself and you got three or four months of travel in space, and in this spaceship you are there alone with your own two kids.
You have a son and a daughter, two wonderful kids, but the story is that you have to drop these kids on this distant planet three months, six months from now, and there is an alien civilization, probably higher intelligence, but you are just going to land them there and you’ll have to go away. This is what has been decided for you, and you have no choice. You’re just taking them there to this final destination.
Now, if you had these last six months with your kids, what are the type of things you would be teaching them before leaving them in such a situation. They don’t need to know the seven kings of Rome to be able to moving in this outer space. Will they need some mathematical formulas, will they need to be able to communicate to other people? In the most effective way though they don’t know the language?
What are the critical things we really need to know in such a situation, because if we can detect and identify those properly, then I think we’re going to look really at the type of things we need to learn in real life and that we supposedly they should be learning also in schools.
How Do We Really learn?
We are really questioning more fundamentally the overall approach…
Making groups or having assignments when the teacher has been pre-selected for me by somebody else on the basis of some certifications he’s got by passing some exams, or the kind we’ve been talking above, or where my peers in that group are people who have been selected only on the basis by their age or the district in which they live, I think it makes very little sense to me.
I think that if we’re looking and questioning the overall teaching system approach, we should also be mentioning the fact that all of what we’ve preached in 2.0 world, that is: bottom-up, participation, contribution, sharing, no dogmatic one-way view, but multiple, multi-faceted approaches, multi-dimensional look at things, just like in journalism is studied, are all critical for learning appropriately.
So we should have: First of all, an understanding that is not closing people in one place, that is not pre-selecting a teacher for them, but it should be me selecting who I’d want to learn from, and we have all the technologies and the resources to do this which we didn’t have 20 years ago, but now we do have them. I think they should be allowed to learn with people that are as passionate as me about the topic that I want to learn.
Why should I be forced to learn a pre-designed curriculum of items when I can be free, while advised and supported by people who have more experience, in going after the things that I’m really interested?
If I can follow my passions, I should be able to follow those, with the people that are mostly interested in that stuff.
If I keep having to go to school, and be closed in a room with people who share with me only their age and their geographic residential area, that’s not going to work very much. Why should I work with people only of my age? Who says that I cannot learn while sitting with people of different ages, experiences, novices and experts?
Did Someone Teach You How to Drive…
As we look at those fundamental aspects, then we can see how much discrepancy and how much of a confusion in the eyes of the average person on the street there is about teaching and learning, because if learning is equal to teaching, and teaching is what happens in the school, there’s no way to get out of that loop easily.
Once you confront them with the fact that when they first learned how to drive their car, there wasn’t somebody there telling them they have to lift slowly the friction pedal, or to keep this other foot out the way because you are going to use only the right one to accelerate and then stop, there was no other way for you to really learn that thing than seat down on the driver’s seat and try it out, and make some serious mistakes.
But that’s not what happens in school.
In school one is supposed to be able to be taught, shown on the blackboard, and if you make a mistake, you get a bad grade. You don’t get an encouragement because you’ve made a mistake, you have explored new grounds, you are trying new things and the things don’t work out, normally. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, but let’s look at the overall reality, let’s look at the school were my and your kids are going. That is what I see.
In reality we do not learn with somebody telling us every single move.
…Speak a Foreign language…
Take for example language learning. You want to sell me that I’ve learned the languages I know because I went to classes, that I learned English as a foreign language. Forget it!
I learned language first because I was a DJ and I had lots of vinyl records containing sheets with thealbum lyrics, and I loved to learn how to sing every single song I liked. And so by learning to sing I learned the pronunciation, and I had to learn the words and what they meant to not look stupid, that my first girlfriend would ask me: “Why are you singing the way you are singing this one?”
Then because I travelled, and I went to other countries. And when I was hungry, I had to say something meaningful for them to feed me and to give me a dead and everything. I’ve put myself in uncomfortable situations, where I had to change to make new things, but there wasn’t somebody there always telling me: “the grammar is this, one comes before two“, and so on. That can help structure, make sense of things, but many times this structure is given BEFORE you’re able to use it while it should be given most of the time afterwards.
…Swim…
I first want to play, get into the game, get my hands dirty, and then you tell me the grammar, because I want to know how to write better, I want to show off myself better now that I know how to use this tool with this language.
Again, teaching top-down, one-way structure, doesn’t work and we have this in front of us everyday.
The same thing when we learn how to swim. Was there somebody telling you: “now move this left arm a little bit in the front?” Yes, they did try, but you have to go into the water to try, just like you had to do with your video games.
…Play a Video Game?
How many times did you have to die inside a game or get smashed against a wall with your car to really learn how to drive? Millions of times for me, and many times…. in fact I just gave up because the encouragement from my partner wasn’t good enough, but if we were in an ideal world, they should have encouraged me because I was learning through my mistakes what it didn’t work, and there was just not enough fun, because my partners were too good and too much ahead of me to make me learn.
But making mistakes, is the way to learn, and I’ll tell you what… in all of these situations where we actually learn stuff that stays with us for years, and years, what we do is not just make mistakes, this is not my key point; it’s a number of things that we do that are completely different from what we do in school, in the supposed institutional environment that makes our learning so valuable.
- First of all, in most of the situations WE ARE with some peers, that we like, that are passionate, interested in the same stuff.
- Secondly, we go ask, when we learn a game we go find on Google a way to go through the game, to learn it faster, to find the shortcut keys, to find out if there’s a cheatsheet, whatever. We go to people who have a lot of experience, like my friends before and ask: “How do we do that?“, “How do you turn in the curve like this or like that?“. We ask in the moment we need it, and we’re so much craving for that knowledge that once they tell us we put it to use right away, and we master it.
That’s not what takes place in the classroom. We don’t do any of those things, and we always do them in an order that is unlike the typical order, in which we will learn so fast, and so fully in real life.
So one of the key things for the paradigm shift to take place is to bring all of these stuff in the face of everyone else.
End of Part 1
Robin Good Summarizes the Web 2.0 Paradox
Robin Good on the Paradox of 2.0 – Le Web 2008 from Erno Hannink on Vimeo.
Duration: 2′:35″
Originally recorded by Vance Stevens for Vance’s GeekSpeek on February 26, 2009 as “The paradox of 2.0, an EDUPUNK perspective“.
The Paradox Of Web 2.0 – Part 1: Is Teaching Equal To Learning?
Posted by: | CommentsWhat is the Web 2.0 paradox? It is the living paradox of a society which while it learns and applies fundamental new rules of behaviour and communication thanks to rapid growth of the Internet in many business sectors, it fails yet to have enough moral maturity to consistently carry over such realizations and discoveries into the world of education and learning.
Photo credit: Markus Angermeier
Despite many of us have perfectly clear what Web 2.0 is about (participating, sharing, being humble and listening, requesting feedback to learn from our mistakes) when we go home to our kids, we just forget all about it and in the act of sending them to school we really send them back to the Middle Ages.
Why is it so difficult for us to bridge what we have clearly realized in the media, television, radio and advertising markets to the world of education? Why do we see so little effort in injecting inside our schools some of the attitudes, approaches and skills we put to use in our work?
I’ve tried to make sense of why we are in such a paradoxical situation and I realize that while business and direct revenues impact and push rapid changes in the world of business, it takes much longer time to achieve the same changes in a field that provides no direct or immediate revenue to us. Especially when the changes that our business world has discovered would strongly undermine the present educational status quo, eliminating lots of existing costs and infrastructures, as well as the market value of many exams and certifications, deeply revolutionizing the world of work and professional guilds as we know it today.
Under these conditions, and with little hope that we can rapidly change our educational system, we should ask ourselves: Is teaching equal to learning?
During a live session with Vance Stevens and other participants at the EVO 2009 Multiliteracies event, I shared some of my thoughts on what actual learning is for me and also which stuff future generations need to know to be prepared in a world where’s no more space for good grades or pre-determined questions. Inspired by many books and great readings ranging from Ivan Illich to Seymourt Papert and from Stephen Downes to George Siemens and Jay Cross, here is my own remixed vision for where our educational systems fail and for what we really need to know, that is not yet inside the official school syllabus.
In Part 2 tomorrow, I provide some real-life examples where I explore the real skills that learners should possess to face the disruptive changes in our society. Abilities that aren’t taught at school.
Here Part 1:
The Paradox Of Web 2.0 – Part 1: Is Teaching Equal to Learning?
by Robin Good
Robin’s Speech – Audio
Duration: 23′ – The audio is edited to play Robin alone. Full audio (65′) available here.
Full English Text Transcription
The Web 2.0 Paradox
I’m Robin Good, and my contention, what I’m here for today, is challenging a little bit our way to often assume the beliefs about learning and the way it should be, and maybe also look a little bit more tangibly at what the ideal type of learning or a future type of learning can, or should, or must be for us to be happy about the results or what we are going to produce in our efforts to change and improve all of this.
This is really the focus. I’m arguing, contending, that we are in a so-called 2.0 paradox. That’s how I call it. Many of you have learned about the issue of 2.0, Web 2.0, collaborating, participating, sharing, syndicating, mashing up, mixing, listening to the others… All of these are concepts that since a few years we’ve been reading, and breathing, and writing, and exploring in many different ways, to the point where the advertising, the marketing fields, television, and other media have actually in many cases, already fully embraced many of this.
Software development, for example, is now done in a complete different way. Many of the web 2.0 companies are doing it in a way which it wasn’t done before: it’s immediately open, it likes to expose its own buzz, it likes to receive feedback and criticism from the audience in a continuous process, it keeps no secrets, it allows those that are going to be the customers to suggest new ideas and not just mistakes. All of this learning, from these explorations we’ve done in the ways we can communicate, collaborate together, are permeating, are increasingly part of this front-end, these edge areas in which we work, in which many of us work. Advertising, marketing, television, and so on. Certainly these are not areas in which everybody works, but they’re in front of us everyday.
The paradox of this is that those same people, those same individuals that have fully embraced, and that promote and evangelize about these ideas and use them in their professional work, when they turn back, and go home, and look at their kids, they have no shame in not realizing or acknowledging the huge discrepancy that there is between these ideas that we have already been implementing in daily life, and the privileged universe in which we are forcing our future generations to go into, with the supposed idea that we are going to prepare them better to manage this continuous change, the innovation, and all of these new approaches, and we send them in a world that is completely secluded from actual reality and in which none of these principles is made real for them to test.
Is Teaching Equal to Learning?
That’s not an easy shift to make and we keep just define ourselves in the situation by realizing that we don’t want to tear down schools, that we don’t want to revolutionize the institution. It’s taking so much effort for us to build and they have been there for quite some time. Some of us have been born and most of us just with this universe of education in place, and so the system appears by default to be a necessity in the way it is.
But, maybe if we go and question, and look really at the essence of it, we can see not only that maybe the system has created a monster that we should at least acknowledge, but that we don’t need to tear it down, to change the situation from what it is to what we would like it to be.
If we are looking at teaching and learning, first of all, and you guys are very much into this and this may be quite some obvious reasoning, but these are the reasoning that we should bring in front of those that most resist or are most alien to these ideas.
So let’s bring in front of them the question of: Is teaching really equal to learning? Because every time we think normally in our everyday life about learning that we need to have some kind of classroom or teacher that is going to help us learn those things. That is basically the idea we get every single day, is the default thing we think about. Is that really so? We should ask.
Put On Your Investigator’s Hat
My point is: if we look at the way we look, we learn things in our everyday life, if you look at the work of the many luminaries, opinion leaders out there, what they’re telling us is that learning takes place really not so much in the classroom, in the school, where lots of what we learn is how to have fun while the teacher doesn’t see, how to socialize with the others sex for the first time in our lives, how to do homework faster than anybody else so we have more free time, how to find out what’s going to be inside the next exam, so that we can answer to all the questions right.
That is really what we get to be trained for inside the school. All these things, things that don’t appear to be the actual content, but things that are on the side of the things that we learn, while the things we really learn in our lives, are learned in a little different way.
So, if you put on your investigator hat on your head, and you look really at how learning takes place in everyday life, you’re going to discover things you know very well, but you just don’t stop looking at.
What Do We Know After School?
Let me take some examples: we say that we know this and we know that, and that a school is very important because you get to know lots of things that are useful later in your life, but after school, of the knowledge we get there, how much we can really put to use or is effective in our ability to move through the fast changes that are happening, to learn the new technologies, to understand which news are good and which ones are not, to detect propaganda from actual information…
If we were to be sent back in time, say 200-300 years, could we say that we could play God on Earth?
We’re coming from the 21st century, we know lots of stuff. We know about electricity, television, radio, satellite, space travel, and so if we went back in time could we just play God inside the civilization where we landed by telling them how to invent and create the locomotive, the train, or the airplane? Could anyone of us do that? Could anyone of us tell them how to bring electricity to their civilization? Have we actually learned any of this stuff that we can put it to use to them? The moment you start thinking that way, though it may appear a little bit stretched, you see that the tools we have at hand, that remain with us are not so much immediately usable.
A Trip to Space
Let me bring another example for you: If you think of going back, being put on a spaceship that goes to a faraway planet, you’re on this space ship yourself and you got three or four months of travel in space, and in this spaceship you are there alone with your own two kids.
You have a son and a daughter, two wonderful kids, but the story is that you have to drop these kids on this distant planet three months, six months from now, and there is an alien civilization, probably higher intelligence, but you are just going to land them there and you’ll have to go away. This is what has been decided for you, and you have no choice. You’re just taking them there to this final destination.
Now, if you had these last six months with your kids, what are the type of things you would be teaching them before leaving them in such a situation. They don’t need to know the seven kings of Rome to be able to moving in this outer space. Will they need some mathematical formulas, will they need to be able to communicate to other people? In the most effective way though they don’t know the language?
What are the critical things we really need to know in such a situation, because if we can detect and identify those properly, then I think we’re going to look really at the type of things we need to learn in real life and that we supposedly they should be learning also in schools.
How Do We Really Learn?
We are really questioning more fundamentally the overall approach…
Making groups or having assignments when the teacher has been pre-selected for me by somebody else on the basis of some certifications he’s got by passing some exams, or the kind we’ve been talking above, or where my peers in that group are people who have been selected only on the basis by their age or the district in which they live, I think it makes very little sense to me.
I think that if we’re looking and questioning the overall teaching system approach, we should also be mentioning the fact that all of what we’ve preached in 2.0 world, that is: bottom-up, participation, contribution, sharing, no dogmatic one-way view, but multiple, multi-faceted approaches, multi-dimensional look at things, just like in journalism is studied, are all critical for learning appropriately.
So we should have: First of all, an understanding that is not closing people in one place, that is not pre-selecting a teacher for them, but it should be me selecting who I’d want to learn from, and we have all the technologies and the resources to do this which we didn’t have 20 years ago, but now we do have them. I think they should be allowed to learn with people that are as passionate as me about the topic that I want to learn.
Why should I be forced to learn a pre-designed curriculum of items when I can be free, while advised and supported by people who have more experience, in going after the things that I’m really interested?
If I can follow my passions, I should be able to follow those, with the people that are mostly interested in that stuff.
If I keep having to go to school, and be closed in a room with people who share with me only their age and their geographic residential area, that’s not going to work very much. Why should I work with people only of my age? Who says that I cannot learn while sitting with people of different ages, experiences, novices and experts?
Did Someone Teach You How to Drive…
As we look at those fundamental aspects, then we can see how much discrepancy and how much of a confusion in the eyes of the average person on the street there is about teaching and learning, because if learning is equal to teaching, and teaching is what happens in the school, there’s no way to get out of that loop easily.
Once you confront them with the fact that when they first learned how to drive their car, there wasn’t somebody there telling them they have to lift slowly the friction pedal, or to keep this other foot out the way because you are going to use only the right one to accelerate and then stop, there was no other way for you to really learn that thing than seat down on the driver’s seat and try it out, and make some serious mistakes.
But that’s not what happens in school.
In school one is supposed to be able to be taught, shown on the blackboard, and if you make a mistake, you get a bad grade. You don’t get an encouragement because you’ve made a mistake, you have explored new grounds, you are trying new things and the things don’t work out, normally. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, but let’s look at the overall reality, let’s look at the school were my and your kids are going. That is what I see.
In reality we do not learn with somebody telling us every single move.
…Speak a Foreign Language…
Take for example language learning. You want to sell me that I’ve learned the languages I know because I went to classes, that I learned English as a foreign language. Forget it!
I learned language first because I was a DJ and I had lots of vinyl records containing sheets with thealbum lyrics, and I loved to learn how to sing every single song I liked. And so by learning to sing I learned the pronunciation, and I had to learn the words and what they meant to not look stupid, that my first girlfriend would ask me: “Why are you singing the way you are singing this one?”
Then because I travelled, and I went to other countries. And when I was hungry, I had to say something meaningful for them to feed me and to give me a dead and everything. I’ve put myself in uncomfortable situations, where I had to change to make new things, but there wasn’t somebody there always telling me: “the grammar is this, one comes before two“, and so on. That can help structure, make sense of things, but many times this structure is given BEFORE you’re able to use it while it should be given most of the time afterwards.
…Swim…
I first want to play, get into the game, get my hands dirty, and then you tell me the grammar, because I want to know how to write better, I want to show off myself better now that I know how to use this tool with this language.
Again, teaching top-down, one-way structure, doesn’t work and we have this in front of us everyday.
The same thing when we learn how to swim. Was there somebody telling you: “now move this left arm a little bit in the front?” Yes, they did try, but you have to go into the water to try, just like you had to do with your video games.
…Play a Video Game?
How many times did you have to die inside a game or get smashed against a wall with your car to really learn how to drive? Millions of times for me, and many times…. in fact I just gave up because the encouragement from my partner wasn’t good enough, but if we were in an ideal world, they should have encouraged me because I was learning through my mistakes what it didn’t work, and there was just not enough fun, because my partners were too good and too much ahead of me to make me learn.
But making mistakes, is the way to learn, and I’ll tell you what… in all of these situations where we actually learn stuff that stays with us for years, and years, what we do is not just make mistakes, this is not my key point; it’s a number of things that we do that are completely different from what we do in school, in the supposed institutional environment that makes our learning so valuable.
- First of all, in most of the situations WE ARE with some peers, that we like, that are passionate, interested in the same stuff.
- Secondly, we go ask, when we learn a game we go find on Google a way to go through the game, to learn it faster, to find the shortcut keys, to find out if there’s a cheatsheet, whatever. We go to people who have a lot of experience, like my friends before and ask: “How do we do that?“, “How do you turn in the curve like this or like that?“. We ask in the moment we need it, and we’re so much craving for that knowledge that once they tell us we put it to use right away, and we master it.
That’s not what takes place in the classroom. We don’t do any of those things, and we always do them in an order that is unlike the typical order, in which we will learn so fast, and so fully in real life.
So one of the key things for the paradigm shift to take place is to bring all of these stuff in the face of everyone else.
End of Part 1
In Part 2 tomorrow, I provide some real-life examples where I explore the real skills that learners should possess to face the disruptive changes in our society. Abilities that aren’t taught at school.
Robin Good Summarizes the Web 2.0 Paradox
Robin Good on the Paradox of 2.0 – Le Web 2008 from Erno Hannink on Vimeo.
Duration: 2′:35″
Originally recorded by Vance Stevens for Vance’s GeekSpeek on February 26, 2009 as “The paradox of 2.0, an EDUPUNK perspective“.
How Do You Monetize Free: Tim O’Reilly And The Argument For Open Publishing
Posted by: | CommentsHow do you monetize free? Can you make money by giving away your very best ideas and content? In this video, publisher Tim O’Reilly makes an argument for open publishing, and explains how can you earn money from giving away your stuff without selling it.
Photo credit: Opl
If you consider $15.000.000 a year a good deal, then Tim O’Reilly has a point to make here. That revenue has been created initially by publishing and distributing books for Open-Source software and then later by building upon the interest generated by the Web 2.0 free paper, downloaded a million times or more to this day. By organizing and hosting prestigious events, and creating new opportunities around a vision shared with everyone for free, O’Reilly has literally been making a fortune around some key free resources.
“One size fits all“ is no longer a working approach in business.
“We are living in a wonderful world, in which there are many answers… This wonderful spectrum from free and ubiquitous, to scarce and valuable, gives us so many possibilities. Our job as inventors of businesses is to explore that range of possibilities and to create new music with it.“
Here the video with a full English text transcription:
How Do You Monetize Free
Duration: 4′
Full English Text Transcription
Be An Amplifier
Why should publishing be open? How many ways can I tell you this?
First off, because our mission is to inform, to educate, to transform the world by passing on good stuff. The more we do that, the better off we all are.
We are connectors, we are amplifiers. Our fundamental mission is about passing on what we have. Why the devil would we want to lock it up if we don’t have to? That’s reason number one.
Give Your Products Away
Reason number two: The pragmatic reason.
We have found through years of experiments, that we can actually make a pretty good living even when we give our product away.
We have published books on Linux where the authors have said: “I want this to be put under free documentation license” and we still ended up selling in some cases millions of dollars worth of copies of those books.
In many cases it was less than we would have made otherwise. But there are other books, where a topic was legitimized by the free content, and by getting millions of people to read it online, we were then able to commercialize them after the fact.
How to Monetize Open Publishing
I gave a keynote last year called: “Free is more complicated than you might think“, and one of my most compelling examples is the paper I wrote called: “What is Web 2.0?” It’s free, it’s been probably downloaded about a million times. One of my most widely read pieces. It has helped give a name to the industry. How do you monetize it?
I put together a series of events in which a relatively small number people, a thousands at a time for the Web 2.0 summit, maybe ten or fifteen thousands for the Web 2.0 Expo, come and give me a fairly substantial amount of money.
I’ve generated from that free paper a business that’s worth, I think, about 15.000.000 dollars a year, as part of my business.
There are models if you can use the amazing power of the Internet to spread ideas, you can then say: “How can I monetize this?”
Because there’s something that is intrinsically limited. Only so many people can fit in a room, and for an executive-style event you can charge a lot because because you’re limiting saying that only people above a certain kind of level of influence will let in. Or you can have a big event where many of the attendees are coming free like in an expo, and there you get money from sponsors who want to reach those people. So there are all kinds of different ways to monetize free.
“You Pick the Hat to Fill the Head“
I remember many years ago, when I was about 14 years old, I remember talking to this teacher of Sri Aurobindo yoga, in San Francisco. I was asking about reincarnation. I was saying: “How do you reconcile self-reincarnation with genetics?” And he said with this big beaming smile: “Oh, you pick the head to fit the head.” That was a wonderful phrase, and I often remember that. I think about that in the context of business models.
“You pick the hat to fit the had“. You don’t go for “one size fits all.”
So many people are looking for just one answer. But we are living in a wonderful world, in which there are many answers. How good is that?
This wonderful spectrum from free and ubiquitous, to scarce and valuable, gives us so many possibilities.
Our job as inventors of businesses is to explore that range of possibilities and to create new music with it.
Originally published by OPL on February 23, 2009 as “Tim O’Reilly answers the question “Why Open Publishing?““.
About the author
Tim O’Reilly is the founder of O’Reilly Media and a supporter of the free software and open source movements. He is widely credited with coining the term Web 2.0. After graduating from Harvard College in 1975 with a B.A. cum laude in Classics O’Reilly became involved in the field of computer manuals. He defines the job he does with his company: “changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.”
Photo credits:
Be An Amplifier – Stephen Coburn
Give Your Products Away – motorolka
How to Monetize Open Publishing – Nikolai Sorokin
“You Pick the Hat to Fill the Head” – lilyr