John Connell: The Blog

In 2006, a sur­vey con­ducted by Roper Pub­lic Affairs for the National Geo­graphic Soci­ety found that 63% of Amer­i­cans ages 18 to 24 could not find Iraq on a map of the Mid­dle East. Robert Pas­tor, a pro­fes­sor of Inter­na­tional Rela­tions at Amer­i­can Uni­ver­sity, described the prob­lem as “geo­graphic illiteracy.”

Two years later, one of us repli­cated the sur­vey with a smaller sam­ple and a slight variation.

Doug recruited 18 under­grad­u­ate stu­dents, also between 18 and 24. But instead of pro­vid­ing a map, he sat them in front of a com­puter and said, “Find Iraq.” One hun­dred per­cent of the stu­dents were able to do so — and more. They asked, “Street View or aer­ial?” “Do you want to focus on any par­tic­u­lar region or the whole coun­try?” “Should I turn the satel­lite imag­ing on or do you want it in map form?”

This is a quote from one of the best of the recent spate of books on learn­ing in the dig­i­tal age, A New Cul­ture of Learn­ing: Cul­ti­vat­ing the Imag­i­na­tion for a World of Con­stant Change, by Dou­glas Thomas and John Seely Brown.

It was not the stu­dents who were illit­er­ate in the orig­i­nal sur­vey, but those who set a prob­lem based on a com­plete lack of under­stand­ing of the nature of learn­ing, or indeed the nature of knowl­edge, in the dig­i­tal age.

Tech­no­rati Tags: dou­glas thomas, john seely brown, learn­ing, dig­i­tal lit­er­acy, knowl­edge

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Any notion what con­nects all of the above Face­book pages and sites?

Sim­ple: none of them exists any longer, since Face­book has arbi­trar­ily and with­out warn­ing deleted all of them. The Arabs may be hav­ing their Spring, but it seems that polit­i­cal protest and alter­na­tive views on how our soci­ety ought to be run have no place on Face­book in the UK.

The ques­tion being asked is, has Face­book taken this deci­sion entirely on its own, or has it been leant on, and if so by whom? Is it also part of a ‘wider crack­down on protest by author­i­ties in Britain?

The news reminded me of some­thing that Dave Winer wrote recently:

.…maybe Twit­ter and Face­book for­ever will be model cor­po­rate cit­i­zens, always putting the free­dom of their users ahead of their own bot­tom lines.

And if you believe that, keep on tweet­ing. Don’t worry, be happy.

But if it should hap­pen that your free­dom is abridged by these cor­po­ra­tions, and they aren’t the gov­ern­ment so they don’t have to respect your rights (you are free to speak else­where), you will be very glad I and the peo­ple I am work­ing with are doing what we’re doing.

Here’s the deal. I think the Inter­net itself is a social network.

That’s the guid­ing prin­ci­ple. Using stan­dards we already have, like HTTP, HTML, RSS, DNS, OPML, JSON — you can make a news net that is as open and dis­trib­uted as the Inter­net itself.

Winer here is talk­ing about writ­ing and news-gathering, but polit­i­cal activists on the Web also need to get out from under the fickle, arbi­trary and anti-democratic cor­po­rate blan­ket. I may not like the pol­i­tics or the approach of all of the groups listed above, but I abhor the idea that the likes of Face­book can decide whether or not they have the right to a vir­tual pub­lic plat­form. They are not to be trusted.

Tech­no­rati Tags: face­book, social tech­nol­ogy, cen­sor­ship, polit­i­cal activism

Design both as a pro­fes­sion and as a cre­ative activ­ity is not well under­stood. This has a great deal to do with the nar­row base of knowl­edge of most com­men­ta­tors, but also reflects a gen­eral lack of com­pre­hen­sion about the role of the cre­ative econ­omy in the 21^st century.

Ron Bur­nett, in a post on Apple’s use of design: The Magic Of Apple Is Really About The Magic Of Design. He chides those who tend to reduce design to a craft or to some­thing asso­ci­ated only or mainly with archi­tec­ture or engineering.

For me, Design is about knowl­edge, knowl­edge pro­duc­tion and the inte­gra­tion of knowl­edge into every aspect of how a com­pany, com­mu­nity and learn­ing insti­tu­tion works. Design is very much about putting intel­li­gence into objects (see the work of James Dyson) as well as bro­ker­ing rela­tion­ships among cre­ative peo­ple, entre­pre­neurs, out­puts and audiences.

Tech­no­rati Tags: apple, design, jonathan ives, knowl­edge

Very inter­est­ing new device from Asus — the Trans­former Tablet — and it is appar­ently sell­ing like hotcakes!

Thanks to Ian Stu­art for the link.

Tech­no­rati Tags: asus, trans­former tablet, ipad, kin­dle

Mortenson’s feet of clay expose far more than one fan­ta­sist: they also reveal a lot about the naivety of Amer­i­cans con­cern­ing the world and their role in it. No one ques­tioned him too closely, and, more impor­tantly, no one lis­tened closely enough to what the Pak­ista­nis them­selves had to say: the unrav­el­ling of the Morten­son fable has come as no sur­prise there. Even in such a highly con­nected world, some forms of infor­ma­tion still don’t travel and cer­tainly make no head­way against the word of an Amer­i­can hero. Amer­i­cans swal­lowed his tale because they wanted to. What empires – par­tic­u­larly those involved in vio­lent con­flict – need, above all, is heroes.

Madeleine Bunting, in today’s Guardian, on the sorry tale of an Amer­i­can hero found want­ing (fol­low­ing a 60 Min­utes report on CBS that uncov­ered the tale). She makes a valid point, but I do think she needs to add a qual­i­fier: many, pos­si­bly even most, Amer­i­cans. I know and work with many Amer­i­cans who are true cit­i­zens of the world and who do not fall under such a broad gen­er­al­iza­tion in any way.

Any­way, like so many, I was taken in by Mortenson’s tale of naive brav­ery and his Amer­i­can ‘can do’ atti­tude. Three issues in par­tic­u­lar are at the fore­front of my mind as I con­sider this tale unrav­el­ling so sadly, and rightly, about the man.

First, how on earth did he think he would get away with it? I can­not help but con­clude that he really did not think any­one in the part of the world he vis­ited woud have the nous or the where­with­all to chal­lenge his ver­sion of events or, indeed, to have a suf­fi­ciently loud voice to make them­selves heard in the USA and else­where. Per­haps he even thought they were all too remote to ever hear about his book and about his mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of events? It’s hard to say. I can only think that there is an under­ly­ing racism, or at the very least eth­no­cen­trism, in Mortenson’s atti­tude to this — a mind­set that sim­ply dis­missed the pos­si­bil­ity that these rural peo­ple stuck in the back of beyond, as he must have seen it, could pos­si­bly be heard or lis­tened to in the West.

Sec­ondly, what was the role of his co-author, David Oliver Relin, in all of this? There have been some ques­tions any­way about how much of the book Morten­son actu­ally wrote.

And thirdly, as the cover dis­played here shows, his pub­lish­ers pro­duced a children’s ver­sion of the book, adapted in good faith by Sarah L Thom­son, with a fore­ward by Jane Goodall. I won­der how those kids who have read the book will react to find­ing out it’s largely a work of fiction?

It will be inter­est­ing to see how it all plays out, and espe­cially how the pub­lish­ers will react to a sit­u­a­tion in which a pub­lish­ing suc­cess has now been, it seems, hugely tar­nished.

Tech­no­rati Tags: greg morten­son, three cups of tea, david oliver relin, fic­tion, racism, eth­no­cen­trism

I like this.

Thanks to Zoe Parker for the link.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desirin, youtube, zoe parker, music, japan, for­est

What we’re see­ing with quan­ti­ta­tive test­ing in school reform is very sim­i­lar. Gov­ern­ments and vot­ers are con­fronted with a phe­nom­e­non they are des­per­ate to improve, but can’t mea­sure. What goes on in a class­room is a social phe­nom­e­non that can’t be effec­tively cap­tured through stan­dard­ised mea­sure­ments. But they need a num­ber. So they’re cre­at­ing stan­dard­ised mea­sure­ments to get one. But imme­di­ately, the appli­ca­tion of the mea­sure­ment and its incen­tives changes the way the phe­nom­e­non is organ­ised. A com­plex, cre­ative process is stripped down to a mechan­i­cal one designed to pro­duce high test scores. The old-growth for­est is replaced with rows of Nor­way spruce. Ms Gold­stein writes:

In the social sci­ences, there is an oft-repeated apho­rism called Campbell’s Law, named after Don­ald Camp­bell, the psy­chol­o­gist who pio­neered the study of human cre­ativ­ity: “The more any quan­ti­ta­tive social indi­ca­tor is used for social decision-making, the more sub­ject it will be to cor­rup­tion pres­sures and the more apt it will be to dis­tort and cor­rupt the social processes it is intended to mon­i­tor.” In short, incen­tives cor­rupt. Daniel Koretz, the Har­vard edu­ca­tion pro­fes­sor rec­og­nized as the country’s lead­ing expert on aca­d­e­mic test­ing, writes in his book Mea­sur­ing Up that Campbell’s Law is espe­cially applic­a­ble to edu­ca­tion; there is a pre­pon­der­ance of evi­dence show­ing that high-stakes tests lead to a nar­rowed cur­ricu­lum, score infla­tion, and even out­right cheat­ing among those tasked with scor­ing exams.

From The Econ­o­mist. I could not have put it bet­ter myself.

Thank you to my friend and col­league, Charles Fadel for point­ing this out to me.

Tech­no­rati Tags: the econ­o­mist, edu­ca­tion, met­rics, gov­ern­ment

Fol­low­ing on from my recent post that picked up on a point made by Euan Sem­ple about those who ‘espouse the pri­macy of face to face com­mu­ni­ca­tions’, I came across an inter­est­ing and rel­e­vant post by Cisco’s ebul­lient ‘futur­ist’, Car­los Dominguez. In the post, he sets out seven point­ers intended to help those who want to try to build bet­ter col­lab­o­ra­tion within a cor­po­rate envi­ron­ment. I know I am biased, but I would argue that Cisco is a com­pany that has made very effec­tive use of social tech­nolo­gies both inter­nally and in its deal­ings with cus­tomers and part­ners world­wide — and Car­los Dominguez has been a major influ­ence in mak­ing that happen.

His seven point­ers are:

• Exper­i­ment — Many large enter­prises have very strict processes and guide­lines on the adop­tion of new company-wide tech­nol­ogy deploy­ments. I sug­gest adopt­ing an approach of exper­i­men­ta­tion. With­out exper­i­men­ta­tion you may miss a game chang­ing technology.
• Start Small — Engage in three to four small tech­nol­ogy deploy­ments and see what works.
• Mea­sure / Learn — At the onset of these exper­i­ments make sure you fig­ure out a way to cap­ture and mea­sure the impact of these tech­nolo­gies. The data/results are key in gain­ing sup­port from the exec­u­tive team.
• Exec­u­tive Spon­sor — Find an exec­u­tive spon­sor who is inter­ested in tech­nol­ogy or can gain the most from it. Keep them informed on a reg­u­lar basis.
• Expect Fail­ure — Not every­thing will work. Keep doc­u­men­ta­tion on what failed and why.
• Trust — This is one of the key things to under­stand. Noth­ing replaces fae-to-face meet­ings. The key human char­ac­ter­is­tic that enables or hin­ders col­lab­o­ra­tion is trust. Tech­nolo­gies like high def­i­n­i­tion video will have a sig­nif­i­cant impact on trust since facial expres­sions and body lan­guage are rec­og­nized. That makes HD video a valu­able tool if the teams have never met or if their per­sonal rela­tion­ships are lim­ited. Inversely, audio con­fer­enc­ing has very lit­tle impact on build­ing trust. Use the right tool for the job!
• Inside/Outside Com­pany — To max­i­mize the poten­tial of any col­lab­o­ra­tion effort, con­sider how to get peo­ple out­side your com­pany to par­tic­i­pate. Con­sider sup­pli­ers, part­ners and cus­tomers as poten­tial par­tic­i­pants and con­trib­u­tors. Some great things may happen!

If you would like to engage with Car­los, feel free to visit his web­site, or con­nect with him on Face­book and Twit­ter.

Tech­no­rati Tags: car­los dominguez, cor­po­rate col­lab­o­ra­tion, cisco, change

Stephen Downes points us at a nice time­line of edu­ca­tional tech­nol­ogy, on the Edu­demic site — every­thing from the Horn Book to the iPad, and with the likes of the stere­o­scope, the scant­ron, the CD-Rom drive and the iClicker in between!

The text relat­ing to the ‘school slate’ reads:

Used through­out the 19^th cen­tury in nearly all classrooms.…

19^th cen­tury? I learned to form my let­ters on a slate when I was in Pri­mary 1 in cen­tral Scot­land in 1962.……

Tech­no­rati Tags: edu­demic, edu­ca­tional tech­nol­ogy, school slate, stephen downes

Euan Sem­ple has a knack for short posts that force me to con­front some assump­tions. A recent one is a case in point, enti­tled Mass Illit­er­acy:

Are those who espouse the pri­macy of face to face com­mu­ni­ca­tion really just hid­ing the fact that they are illit­er­ate? I mean this in the sense that they are not very com­fort­able express­ing them­selves in writ­ing. Most peo­ple don’t really have much expe­ri­ence of putting thoughts down “on paper”. Not many peo­ple keep jour­nals, let­ter writ­ing isn’t what it once was, and busi­ness doc­u­ments are really a very small and undis­tin­guished sub­set of what is pos­si­ble with the writ­ten word!

Just won­der­ing …

It’s not quite the same issue, but Euan reminded me of some­thing that used to bug me through­out my teach­ing career: the idea of young peo­ple being taught how to write (beyond the mechan­ics of basic lit­er­acy, I mean) by teach­ers who rarely if ever did any writ­ing them­selves. How many teach­ers teach­ing writ­ing have ever actu­ally tried their hand, suc­cess­fully, at sus­tained writ­ing of any sort: jour­nal­ism, report-writing, essay-writing, short story writ­ing, writ­ing a novel.…whatever?

There is a wide gulf between the abil­ity to craft a well-honed sen­tence and the capac­ity to plan and write a sus­tained piece for a par­tic­u­lar purpose.

I would be inter­ested to hear if oth­ers think it mat­ters.

Tech­no­rati Tags: euan sem­ple, writ­ing, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, teach­ing