The Chaos Theory is featured in a newsletter this week by SEO marketing gurus at Bruce Clay Inc. The piece, honoring the passing of Edward Lorenz, explains for its search engine marketing clientele a principle that educators can use to great benefit. To use the SEO lingo, that edu principle is: academics who are expert on a subject can give juice to a webpage by linking to it and by commenting on excellent Net assets that they respect for their area of expertise. Here is why doing so nudges order from chaos, from the Bruce Clay SEO newsletter:

This idea [Chaos Theory] has been dubbed ‘The Butterfly Effect’, derived from Lorenz’ example that a butterfly’s wings flapping in one area can make changes in the atmosphere so strong that they could force a tornado to develop somewhere else. His ideas have altered the way that we look at most scientific fields, and we would be wise to understand its importance in our endeavors as well . . . .

As for chaos theory specifically, search engine optimization is also directly tied in with the observation and management of minute changes within the system. Tweaking is often the term used in this regard. These small changes, when applied correctly, can prove to have vast effects on the system as a whole.

For instance, depending on the status of the rest of the system, it is possible that if one were to do something as small and insignificant as adding a specific word to the title tag of one of their pages, a large effect on rankings for that term could occur. This would then have a huge effect on the system itself. Obviously, in order for one page to increase in rankings, it must displace a page above it. Let’s say that your page was before in 50th place, and has now displaced pages above it to become number eight. . . .

A hypothetical example of applying this to open educational resources: There are 20 webpages on hypothetical molecule OERX. Professor Smith, who is the world expert on OERX, comments in his blog about one of those 20 webpages, and hyperlinks in his post to that webpage. Within a week, the page he commented on moves to the first page of Google SERPs (search engine result pages). A laboratory chief where OERX molecules are studied reads Smith’s blog post, writes about it on his own blog and links to the page Smith liked. The next week that page is at the top of the Google SERPs. Particularly for an academic subject as small as a particular molecule, just 2 jolts like these of academic juice can dramatically affect SERPs ratings. In this example, teachers and students who searched for OERX would find a page at the top of their SERPs that is respected by 2 leading OERX experts.

The image above is from a work in progress on my Learnodes.com website about how edu can use network tools to morph searching for learning into emergent findability. As educational resources are released into the open Net (as I have tried to suggest in the image), educators can ply to wonderful educational advantage, the SEO tools explained by Bruce Clay Inc. and other online marketing experts. The butterfly effect for academic experts can become to juice the emergence from the online chaos of the nodes that they respect.

Currently I am reading Carl Zimmer’s book, just out, titled Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life. Nearly twenty years ago I read George Gilder’s then best seller of the same main title: Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution In Economics And Technology (1990). Both books are about how micro pieces make things happen.

The premise of this blog and generally of my writing is that the Net is a swamp filled with the gold which will cause global enlightenment as the 21st century rolls on. Both Gilder’s and Zimmer’s Microcosms describe the sort of swamp where tiny pieces interact to cause it all. In the golden swamp, gold too is micro. Take this sample (page 43) from Zimmer:

How does E. coli’s metabolism manage to stay so supple when it is made up of hundreds of chemical reactions? With thousands of possible pathways it could choose from, why does it choose among the best few? Why doesn’t the whole system simply crash? Part of the solution lies in the shape of the network itself, the very layout of the labyrinth.

How does the massive heap of information we call Wikipedia emit supple knowledge. With millions of of possible paths to webpages to choose among why does Google choose to place the best few at the top? Why does the chaos of content connections online make sense emerge instead of just crashing?

There are big answers for understanding the future of learning in two principles at work here.
First: Yes, the Net is a content microcosm — what happens emerges from of cosmos of tiny pieces.
Second: That cosmos is a network. Zimmer writes (page 42): “In neither case does robustness come from some all-knowing consciousness. It emerges from the network itself.”

As Gilder has done in the past, Zimmer exercises our thinking for getting our heads around online education. We need to know we fail when we impose some all-knowning education practice from the analog world. Letting E. coli show us the robustness, flexibility, and versatility of micro bits in the action of life suggests how we might entice knowledge to emerge from the content of the Net.

Harvard Law School is the first law school to make open access mandatory for its scholarly articles. The Harvard Law School faculty made the move to open access by unanimous vote, requiring each faculty member’s scholarly articles to be available online for free. The venerable institution’s announcement includes some justifiable pride:

“The Harvard Law School faculty produces some of the most exciting, groundbreaking scholarship in the world,” said Dean Elena Kagan ‘86. “Our decision to embrace ‘open access’ means that people everywhere can benefit from the ideas generated here at the Law School.”

Under the new policy, HLS will make articles authored by faculty members available in an online repository, whose contents would be searchable and available to other services such as Google Scholar. Authors can also legally distribute the articles on their own websites, and educators here and elsewhere can freely provide the articles to students, so long as the materials are not used for profit . . . .

High school teacher Steve Dembo blogs that he is fed up with arguments that keep mobiles out of classrooms because they distract from learning. He writes:

Paper clips are a distraction. Spiral notebooks are a distraction. And as we’ve seen recently, students certainly do NOT need a cell phone to cheat on an exam. So off the top of my head, I decided to rattle off a few things that cell phones could be good for. Such as…
1) Check the spelling/definition of a word
2) Research a topic
3) Look up reference images
4) Pull up maps (even with satellite imagery)
5) Document a science lab with built in digital camera/video
6) Fact check on the fly
7) Mail questions to the teacher that they might be embarrassed to ask
Classroom response system
9) Take quizzes
10) Record and/or listen to podcasts

If you check out the list on Steve’s blog, he will point you to examples for most of his list.

Via The Wired Campus where writer Catherine Rampell invites visitors to send in more ideas.

The Wildlife Disease Information Node in the image with this post came to my attention through the RSS (really simple syndication) feed from the USGS (United States Geological Survey). By subscribing to the USGS Newsroom feed, I get a headline linked to each news story from the science being done and observed at this major earth sciences institution. As the story from the image shows, the science that can be delivered is real, fresh, and something unlikely to reach a classroom or school lab through print. The subject in this illustration is turtle cancer in Trinidad and Tabago, reported in April 2008. The interactive map is definite cool stuff technically, but is also a superb tool for biological studies.

The potential of RSS is only beginning to be glimpsed across all Net sectors. In promoting the use of RSS for as a public relations tool for online commerce, one of the top firms in online marketing observes:

Feedburner recently reported that they track around 60 million RSS subscribers. Even if that number were 70 million RSS users (counting people that use RSS with other applications or platforms) this would still convert to a meager 5,4% of the Internet users around the world, says Daily Blog Tips.

RSS is a Web 2.0 tool that educators can use to grab fresh learning content. It is also a way that creators of educational resources can spread the word about their materials, as open educational resources MIT Open Courseware is already doing.

Carnival #122 invites you to sit comfortably and get ready for a blast of the best mobile writing of the week - and includes GoldenSwamp’s post about medical imaging via mobile texting.

The recent uproar in United States politics about race stirred up by Jeremiah Wright has led to a flood of analysis. In the Washington Post this weekend there was an especially powerful piece by Gary MacDougal in which he lamented:

Imagine getting up each morning to go to work in a society that doesn’t want you, doesn’t respect you and seeks to hold you back. Your spiritual leader has told you this, after all. With powerful rhetoric, Wright has asserted, for instance, that white America sees black women as useful only for their bodies. If this is the message you got from your mentor, would you expect that you could succeed? Would you try very hard, if at all?

If you are a black youngster in an academically strong mainly white school, you may feel intimidation, especially if you have been listening to Wright and his ilk. If you are a black student in an all black inner city school, you can feel certain you are there because you are black and that you won’t be learning as much as if you had been born white and were attending the academically strong white school on the other side of town.

The day is now here that our example black kids can pull their mobile phones out of their pockets and catch up on the news from the BBC. Their white counterpart at Highland Park High School in Dallas, the most elite prep schools in Korea, rural villages in Kenya, and the finest and/or worst schools across the planet will all see exactly the same news.

Mobile learning is blind to race, and of course to gender or anything else that we humans employ to demean and elevate. All we have to do is optimize open educational resources for mobile to have true equality in knowledge delivery. The end to academic intimidation is already in our kids’ pockets. We can be quite sure that the mobile has no inkling of a society that doesn’t want you, doesn’t respect you and seeks to hold you back.

From UCBerkeleyNews, come news that is the edge of an incoming wave. That wave will bring good things PCs have been able to do to literally billions (about 2 billion) new people. The news from Berkeley is this: “The Boris Rubinsky, professor of mechanical engineering tells how his team conceived and developed a new device that uses cellphones to make medical imaging much cheaper and more accessible to the poor.”

The news release contains a video narrated by Professor Rubinsky in which he briefly shows how technology works, gives the point of view of the developers, and touches on some implications that they see. The 2:30 minute video sweeps away a long list of short-sighted dismissals of the potential of the mobile. We learn these and other things:
- Medical imaging is one of the most important advances in medicine, yet three-quarters of the world does not have access to medical imaging.
- Humanity can be served, with lives saved, by developing advanced medical imaging that is accessible to everyone around the world.
- The technology developed by Rubinsky is a very simple device, with a component that is attached to the patient. The device measures electrical information from the patient and conveys the information to a simple cellular phone that transfers information in the same way as a text message. The information is transferred to a very powerful computer at a processing center - and then the doctor gets back the image on the cellular phone.
- All the physician needs in a remote area where there is no medical imaging is a simple recording device and his/her own cellular phone.
An in-depth article about this project is online at the Public Library of Science.

My focus in the mobile field is in its potential for education. I discovered news about this medical image project in The Wired Campus report. Although there is certainly no argument that the medical imaging delivery by cellular phone is stunningly good news, what about leaping to the obvious conclusion that: hey, we could do something like this for delivering education! Folks are forever saying mobile phones will not deliver education because most of them can just deliver voice and limited text messages. That did not stop Professor Rubinsky’s team. Educators need to make sure they are riding the incoming wave of mobile innovation.

The advertising and marketing worlds are far down the road to reaching today’s youth through the Internet; education is not. Morgan Stanley’s March 18, 2008 72-page Internet Trends report only mentions “education” once. You can see the mention in the above image at the the bottom of the box on the left by the blue square where it says “Work, Business, Education.” As the pie chart shows, education is only part of 6% of the “Worldwide Share of Online Time.” The chart also shows that social connections are how 15-24 year-olds are connecting online, in a category of use that did not exist 3 years ago.

For education to reach students via the Net, we would do well to drop in on what the advertising and marketing folks are learning about reaching people online through social networks. The following advice, called Join The Conversation, is from an email newsletter sent this week to subscribers by the Internet marketing firm Bruce Clay, Inc.:

At SMX Social, it was clear that engagement is built into the very fabric of social media. Highly interactive and gaining momentum, social networks are the gathering place for groups of like-minded individuals. If utilized properly, social media presents a golden opportunity for marketers. Of course, it’s the first part that’s tricky. Creating original and engaging linkbait, submitting relevant content to social bookmarking sites, and being present on networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are all challenging and resource-intense projects, but hold the potential for huge returns.

In light of the Morgan Stanley report on Internet trends, marketers can’t afford to stay in the dark as far as social media is concerned. According to the study released last month, Internet users across the globe are spending 16 percent of their online time on social sites, like Facebook and YouTube. In fact, the study said that the combined number of page views for those two sites is higher than Google or Yahoo page views, possibly even combined. What’s remarkable is that the “Social Connections” category wasn’t even on the researcher’s radar three years ago. For quick highlights of the report, check out the story on TechCrunch.

Education is not there in top mobile web sites. Wow! The kids all have mobiles. As the mobile web expands in the next months and years, the opportunity is obvious to deliver learning directly to students. The top ten mobile web sites reviewed this week by all about symbian.com include just one of the ten where there is anything like academic material to learn; that one is the mobile BBC.

The roadmap image with this post promotes Apple’s iPhone software roadmap. Education needs another kind of roadmap for this era of smart phone emergence. We need a roadmap for putting learning into the mobile mix.

There are more posts from the mobile blogosphere about the status of the mobile web at this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists.

Unbundling gives us a much needed new word in the education vocabulary. Today the word is in an Opinion piece in the New York Times:” A bill pending in Congress would require publishers to sell “unbundled” versions of the books — minus the pricey add-ons.”

Nicholas Carr has a whole chapter called “The Great Unbundling” in his book The Big Switch, a top seller in the latest wave of books about the Internet. Carr, who writes for the Harvard Business Review and other financial publications, uses this word from finance that becomes wonderfully apt for what happens when many kinds of content arrive on the Net: they unbundle. He explains in The Big Switch (page 153) what happens when newspapers are put online:

The publisher’s goal [in print] is to make the entire package as attractive as possible to a broad set of readers and advertisers. The newspaper as a whole is what matters, and as a product it’s worth more than the sum of its parts. When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart. Readers don’t flip through a mix of stories, advertisements, and other bits of content. They go directly to a particular story that interests them, often ignoring everything else.

The lesson for educators is that education is fighting the nature of the Net unless it allows its online resources not only to be open, but also to unbundle. When a study course or curriculum is a bundle online, having inside it several bundled lessons, each of which lessons bundles a number of related ideas, that are in turn bundles of webpages, images, and videos - with all that bundling potential users do not quickly find the particular idea or facts they want to teach or learn. Since they cannot go directly to what they want, Net users typically go someplace else where they can.

Realizing the force of the unbundling nature of the Net presents educators with an innovation challenge and opportunity. Flat World Knowledge, mentioned in the New York Times Opinion piece today, is in the vanguard of education methodology that empowers teaching and learning in the Net environment. They plan to let professors pick and choose content to bundle custom textbooks for their own courses.

Another area of innovation the unbundling realization is sparking for educational resources folks is search engine optimization (SEO. The bundled educational content can be modified so the search engines can find the parts inside and/or some of the best parts can be duplicated as findable learn nodes outside of the bundles where their clones are lodged.

As my recent post on findabity introduced, I am discovering tricks from the SEO (search engine optimization) guys in the online commerce world that educators can use to improve online learning in major ways. Take for example giving link juice. That potential professorial power is defined by a post at getfoundnow.com: “Link Juice refers to the quality or weight that any website can pass on to other sites through links.”

Interestingly, professors have been giving link juice for a long time in the form of listing their favorite links on a webpage they make themselves about the content in which they are expert. In his book Building Findable Websites, Aarron Walter puts the idea this way (p. 80):

Content that Sucks (Users In)
Well-produced, valuable content on a website has a gravity that can suck users in with great force. When people find something on the Web that’s exciting, they love to be the first to introduce others to it. Perhaps it’s ego or maybe it’s altruism. Combine this fact of human nature with the inherent connectivity of the Web and you have a recipe to unite a large number of people around your website.

The midway for the Carnival of the Mobilists this week is set up this week at MobileJones. Featured posts are a reflection of mobile’s push to data and multimedia in 2008: Handset companies, former handset companies, Internet companies, new entrants and social networking giants are all involved in mash-ups of services. The best mobile blogging is showcased each week at the Carnival.

Included this time is a post last week on SmartMobs: “Can the Cell Phone Help End Global Poverty?” introducing an article from the New York Times Magazine on the travels and intelligence gathering of Nokia’s Jan Chipchase. Carnival host Debi Jones writes for her mobilist audience: “With the ubiquity of the cell phone comes opportunities beyond sales of games and dating applications.”

When someone links to something online, they “give it juice” in the lingo of search engine optimizers - the SEO experts. If you are an expert on the armadillos and link from your website to someone else’s webpage about armadillos, you give juice to that webpage. The search engines know you know something and the link from you to the other webpage tells the search engine spiders that the other webpage is a respected resource about armadillos.

In his excellent book Big Switch about what is happening on the Net, Nicholas Carr has a chapter he calls “A Spider’s Web.” He begins that chapter by recounting how two New York Times reporters used the keywords she had entered in AOL (and gathered by spiders) to identify user 44317749. Carr writes (page 186): “Number 44327749 turned out to be Thelma Arnold, a sixty-two-year-old widow living in Lilburn, Georgia. On August 9 [2006], Arnold woke up to find her name and picture on the front page of the national edition of the Times.”

What happened to Thelma Arnold can seem scary, and it most certainly is spurring the development of more and more sophisticated methods to protect online privacy. That is well and good. But there are huge findability opportunities here. The education industry has pretty much held the Net at arms length for years, and one of the main excuses has been that it was difficult to find things in the profusion of online materials. Finding something very specific turns out not to be hard at all. (Just ask Thelma.)

It is not hard at all to give juice to the good nodes so they will be at the top of the searches made by students and teachers. In fact, a lot juice is already going to this fine armadillo website that comes up at the top of the SERPs (search engine results pages): Armadillos Online! (which is the source of the image with this post.). Joshua Nixon, who has hosted this website since 1995 is careful and generous with is juice as is clear on his Other armadillo resource on the web page.

Educational findability is the next big thing for learning. A white paper released today by GoldenSwamp describes the sequence from searching to search optimization to findability that is the logical course of our learning relationship with the online ecology. Although education is not far along in any of the steps, the paper points out that the progression is both necessary and inevitable as learning moves into the connective age.

The image with this post was captured from a tiny moment of Internet activity by the School of Engineering, University of Tokyo. The concept educators have had of teaching teachers and students to search for quality learning materials in the enormity and complexity of the Net is obsolete. As we move even beyond the Web 2.0 interlude, network laws are exerting functions and powers we are only beginning to understand. None of these is more exciting and hopeful that findability. Peter Morville writes in his groundbreaking book Ambient Findability (O’Reilly, 2005, pp. 4-6):

Ambient findability describes a fast emerging world where we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime. We’re not there yet, but we’re headed in the right direction. Information is in the air, literally. And it changes our minds, physically. Most importantly, findability invests freedom in the individual. As the Web challenges mass media with the media of the masses, we will enjoy an unprecedented ability to select our sources and choose our news. In my opinion, findability is going ambient, just in time.

Educators should help make this happen, and as teachers have the fascinating new endeavor before them of using what they know to help related cognitive materials find each other.