The internet is a swamp full of gold for learning. The gold emerges in patterns that are small world networks. This blog is a swamp about networks from which I hope some gold will emerge for you. Judy Breck, Swampkeeper
The image posted here is my modification of a drawing from Roger Penrose’s marvelous best selling book The Road to Reality. I have added the dark circle on the upper right, which is a miniature of the depiction of Internet clustering that is illustrated by the new Los Alamos Map of Science.
Surely we can say that the Internet is a new world “out there” in cyberspace. We know that it is a network. It seems to form a natural mirror of more tangible worlds, especially when we let it form in an open way obeying its own network laws.
I think the image with this new fourth world has strong merit. It certainly is interesting to think about.
My GoldenSwamp blog is broadening its scope today. Since I established it, way back in April 2004, I have used GoldenSwamp to write about the emerging education online — and I will continue to do that. But I will also write about other emerging network subjects, including politics, media, mobile computers, games, and the network science that explains much of what is happening in our creatively complex world.
I will also post now and then about things that come along just begging to be written about. The cute owl chick featured today at ZooBorns is a sample of that. A painting teacher I had years ago, Edgar A. Whitney, posed something he could not solve. What, Ed would say, makes something cute is a mystery.
Vivek Kundra is the U.S. CIO, appointed by President Obama. CIO = Chief Information Officer. At the Personal Democracy Forum, that I attended this week, CIO Kundra “pulled back the curtain,” as the PdF writes, on the new federal IT spending dashboard. Kundra talked about the IT Dashboard in terms of changing “government culture.” On the dashboard homepage dated July 02 is this Agency Update:
“Monday June 29, 2009
Almost 400 Federal employees help test the IT Dashboard. From June 11 through June 29, OMB hosted daily Open House sessions, with tremendous attendance from over 30 Federal agencies.”
The IT Dashboard has cool and edgy tools for going “deep,” as the USCIO put it, into our country’s “investments.” What kept going through my mind was that the dashboard would be an excellent tool for Congress to look at how the Administration is spending money. Someone in the audience asked if the dashboard looks at how stimulus and healthcare funds are invested. The USCIO explained that only what is spent for information technology by government departments is thus far covered, but there are considerations for extending the process.
In another talk at the conference, Jeff Jarvis, author ofWhat Would Google Do?, predicted that government is going to change [because of network effects] as the newspapers are now and as other sectors [have been shaken to the core]. [Brackets my words] So, the interesting thing to watch with the Obama administration’s networking initiatives is which way will change flow. I disagree with the apparent White House assumption that ideas from the Administration will permeate the nets. I think they will experience emergence rather than control the flow.
When I moved from El Paso to New York City in 1968, I brought with me perhaps a couple of dozen pairs of gloves. At least half of them were white, and I remember that one was an elbow-length pair of kid (leather) gloves. When I was in high school in the early 1950s, gloves were (along with hats) standard apparel for going to ladies teas, riding on an airplane or train, and going to church. The long kid ones were to wear when going to a formal dance in a long gown.
A lot of things happened in 1968, with the Hippies and all that — and wearing ladies gloves pretty much ended in the wake. My glove collection sat through the 1970s and into the 1980s in a drawer, unworn. In the mid-1980s I was working at a large Wall Street law firm. One of those Decembers a paralegal came to my desk to ask for a contribution to Santa Claus. She explained that the paralegals had gotten a “Letter to Santa Claus” from the Post Office and were collecting to answer the wish of a junior high school teacher in the South Bronx who had written it. The teacher wrote that the children Read More »
We still have school imbalance savage inequalities described by Jonathan Kozol in 1992. The imbalance is getting worse: Now, kids who have their own mobile Internet devices — laptops and smartphones — have a new, important advantage over youngsters in failing schools. The analog resources of public schooling are designed to let most students settle for a median of C+, like the high point on a bell curve. Things are very different at the ends of the bell curve. Their is deep failure and dropping out at one end. At the other end an elite is excelling with the help of Internet access through mobile devices that individual students own. Examples: private prep schools, a scattering of exceptional schools in wealthy districts, and homeschoolers.
The simple fix is to give every student his or her own mobile wireless access to the Internet.
Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt told the June 2009 graduates of Carnegie Mellon University that ubiquitous information is coming and that it is important because it is “a tremendous equalizer.” Dumping many billions of dollars on the bell curve system of schools we have now will not equalize the opportunity of students. Some students will still be in failing schools, most will be near the C+ average, a few will have every advantage. If all have devices they will be learning from the same virtual page, and in that they will be equal.
The new go-to public information medium is now the internet. That has happened because the truth about what was happening in Iran has been coming primarily through the internet.
For me, noticing the change was very direct. It was not the first such change I have experienced. In the 1940s and 1950s we waited for LIFE magazine to arrive to see pictures of the important events of the week before. Although we had two good newspapers in El Paso, Texas where I was then growing up, the news was largely local and the images were few and pretty grainy. LIFE’s broad, rich pages were the main medium for us to see our larger world. In the 1960s and 1970s, television brought us Walter Cronkite and the anchors who followed him to show and describe to us what was happening in the world. The role of TV as the go-to place for me when something was happening did not change again until this week.
The turning point for me was when I came across a tweet on #Iranelection that mentioned a woman having been shot in Tehran. I clicked through to YouTube and landed on the video of Neda’s death. I saw it — and watched it in horror — hours before it began to be mentioned in cable or television news, much less printed in a newspaper.
There are those who think our children should have what they learn pre-packaged in textbooks. I certainly appreciate having been able to learn from textbooks back in my schooldays — when books and magazines like LIFE were the only sources we had. That is no longer true. Children live in a world where the internet now dominates the dissemination of knowledge.
Because I linked the piece I wrote yesterday Give smartphones to Washington DC students, to the Washington Post article that prompted me to write in, the WP linked back to GoldenSwamp. Welcome to Post readers!
The same piece was accepted in this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists #178. Welcome Carnivalers! The lovely lady in the red hat is from the Carnival, hosted this week by Volker Hirsch.
“The reality in Washington, D.C., is that we continue to fail the majority of kids who are put in our care every day,” she said at a panel discussion last month. In a draft five-year action plan, introduced in October, she targets 2013 as the year when the D.C. student experience will be “dramatically different.”
The four years from now to 2013 is the standard length of high school! Yuk: an entering freshman this fall can hope to graduate from a dramatically different school in four years.
Are you thinking the kids would not use their smartphones to learn? Maybe all of them will not take full academic advantage of personal access to the internet. Yet dubious negative expectations cannot justify confining yet another 4-year crop of DC teenagers to the failing public high schools without internet access of their own. You can be very sure kids at the schools where the “important” people in Washington send them will have that access. The smartphones the public school students would use do not have the negative expectations of their owners that a lot of people in Washington have.
In the age of the internet, the censorship of curricula is getting more and more ridiculous. In the humanities or sciences, it is no longer the university where the most recent, vetted, and complete knowledge is available. Wherever we are on the political spectrum, I cannot imagine we would want to send our kids to a place where a curriculum gives them only a slice of a subject selected by the faculty.
There is some profanity in the video that reminds me of overhearing my little brother and his friend talking to each other when they were about 13-years-old. The voices you hear are real people, whose physical location could be anywhere on earth where there is a sufficient internet connection to play the massively multiplayer online game (MMO) World of Warcraft (WoW).
The scene you will watch in the video is played out by avatars, each representing and controlled remotely by a human player in WoW. You will see why the human resources industry has begun to pay attention to people whose resumes include proven leadership in games like WoW. Clearly the “dude” here will not want to put this incident on his resume.
One of the knee jerk responses to proposing learning on the internet is that schools provide socialization for students. The “dude” here may not think of his experience as socialization, but there is no doubt he learned a thing or two about organizing people — the hard way. Because his learning was virtual, only his avatar needs to fall on his sword. This virtual venue is emerging as a major aspect of education.
It is a safe guess that in the best public schools at least 80 percent of students have their own access to the internet through their laptop or smart phone. It is unlikely that even 20 percent of students in the worst public schools have such access. The 80/20 Rule is an expression of the power law, and here makes clear one of today’s education’s heels on the necks of non-elite kids.
Great pertinent news today is the new $99 price for a smart phone by Apple, last year’s iPhone. We have strained and groaned too long at leaving no child behind a standard line of mediocrity. We can now afford (at just $99 per child) to give them all a tool to pursue each’s own curiosity and inherent ability. How can we afford not to do that? Sure, there is more than the cost of the smartphone itself. You have to add about $1000 per year per student for a wireless plan so the internet can be browsed on the smartphone. The cost of public education is roughly $10,000 per year, so smartphone cost is around ten percent of that. It seems certain that smartphone costs will go down and that using the devices instead of printed textbooks will save a great deal of money.
Thinking about students in public schools as populating a bell curve masks the elitism. It makes the kids without the access to 21st century knowledge riches within the internet seem to be okay. We have assumed too long from the bell curve that they are in that safe middle somewhere. We feel good about trying to move some of them up the steep side of the bell curve. Yet I would bet my G3 that 80/20 individual internet access mirrors 80/20 school achievement.
It gets easier and cheaper to fix the inequity revealed by the power law: To provide every teacher and student with a mobile device to browse the internet. We have strained and groaned too long at leaving no child behind a standard line of mediocrity. We can now afford (at just $99 per child) to give them all a tool to pursue each’s own curiosity and inherent ability. How can we afford not to do that?
The Pareto Principle is an illustration of a “Power law” relationship, which also occurs in phenomena such as brush-fires and earthquakes. Because it is self-similar over a wide range of magnitudes, it produces outcomes completely different from Gaussian Distribution phenomena. This fact explains the frequent breakdowns of sophisticated financial instruments, which are modeled on the assumption that a Gaussian relationship is appropriate to—for example—stock movement sizes. (Bell curves are Gaussian.)
Think about this: Network science has shown that the internet follows what math calls the power law and Chris Anderson calls the long tail. Ant Wrangler Jake McKee illustrates that when people play in community spaces online, the 90-9-1 principle describes their participation: the power law again. Jakob Nielsen tells us: “In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.” AND: The knowledge education is meant to teach is a small world network, as such obeying the power law, as illustrated in Los Alamos’ new Map of Science.
Kids do not all have abilities in the same subjects at the same time. My hunch is that there are 20% of children who are good at each of the things we try to teach them, so we should find out what each child is good at and deliver enough of that to make him or her rise to the top 9% or even 1% in that subject. Doing that is operating within power law. Instead, by using the bell curve, our schools have frequent breakdowns because the Gaussian relationship is not appropriate.
Our grade level and standards model of schooling cannot operate by the power law, but long tail online learning is natural and will thrive in the open internet.
Why is ubiquitous information so important? Why is it so important that we have access to all this?
It’s a tremendous equalizer. In our lifetime literally — certainly in yours if not mine — essentially every human being on the planet will have access to every piece of information on the planet. This is a remarkable achievement. God knows what these people will do, and it’s going to be pretty amazing.
The CEO of Google is not talking about building universities on a physical campuses the way Andrew Carnegie and the Mellon family did in Pittsburgh in the boom times of the industrial age. He is telling us access to all information to all people will be through the internet.
The 2009 CMU graduates to whom Schmidt spoke are information-elites, having attended one of the world’s great universities where information is open and plentiful. Graduates in 2009 from most other universities and colleges have had less access to information through their school. The slide away from information equality is steep and fast from there to those who do not graduate or even attend traditional schools. There is no chance that we can provide ubiquitous information and the equality it delivers by building more schools across the planet.
The inequity of information delivery will be overcome! Ubiquitous information and the equality it will bring will be sped up by optimizing open access online during the five or so years ahead it will take for mobile internet access to spread to essentially everyone on earth.
The internet is a network platform in which humankind is embedding everything it knows. Educators who are building the future of learning are using the networked, embedded knowledge that the internet contains. It is important for educators to no longer hold the internet off judgmentally. Educators should be hands-on optimizing and connecting knowledge online. The image above shows the reason why: it is how networks connect.
The column going up the right side of the illustration with this post visualizes how knowledge grows in a network. A student’s mind is a network. The internet is a network. Knowledge is a network. It all meshes, and that is a beautiful thing about the new education.
Click this line to watch the video from which the right column is taken. Imagine as you watch that what is spreading is in a student’s mind. Connecting as a richer and richer network as the student learns is his understanding of biology, of the topics to the left of the column in the image above. (Actually the video depicts the spreading pattern of a Bluetooth mobile phone virus — but networks follow their own laws regardless of what is embedded in them.)
I made this illustration with boy and the K-12 ruler several years ago to show how school grades and standards chop apart ideas that need to connect to be understood. I added the right column today because I think it is a powerful visualization how open online content does the opposite of the traditional grades/standards chop chop. Networks connect ideas and deepen context causing learning.
