Published May-June 2007 in Educational Technology Magazine
Special Issue on Highly Mobile Computing
Volume XLVII, Number 3

Education’s Intertwingled Future
By Judy Breck, Author/Blogger

The author provides a look at the transformation the open Internet venue causes for knowledge resources from which students are expected to learn in their education. Knowledge content richly interacts within itself in the Internet venue. Mobiles will amplify this interconnectivity of cognitive content in powerful new ways. Changes are coming, and education should prepare for them.

In the July–August 2006 issue of this magazine, I wrote about the odd online absence that education has maintained compared to other major sectors of 21st century affairs. In this quotation from a recent book about mobile phones, again education is not in the mix:

Digital convergence brings four (previously) distinct industry sectors in collaboration/competition with each other. Thus, we have Media/Entertainment, PC/Computing, consumer electronics, and telecommunications industries all interacting more closely with each other than ever before. This version of digital convergence is happening all around us.

Although some educator-selected resources are brought in from the Internet through education’s walls of ivy, and some learning/teaching is conducted beyond those walls at a distance, the digital universe and education have not converged.

In my summer 2006 article, I said that educators may believe education does not belong in the open chaos of the emerging Internet and I wrote: “What is a serious educator to make of subject content created by non-pedagogues bouncing around Google instead of coming up through the channels of vetting, publication, and pre-selected Internet links that have been the tradition?”

The bouncing around on Google is tame compared to what is coming: What will a serious educator be able to make of an open mobile widget that kids learn from being shared virally by hundreds of thousands of students and other people? Think of the sort of sharing that happened when Diet Coke/Mentos videos were viewed by hundreds of thousands of people on YouTube and beyond.

Todd Richmond, who is a Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center, thinks big change for education is in the virtual winds. At a DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Media seminar at the Annenberg Center on October 19, 2006, Richmond predicted that education institutions will be transformed by a “perfect storm” like the one that hit the music industry. Seminar leader Howard Rheingold wrote in a description of Richmond’s presentation on the DIY Media Weblog:

The precipitating phenomenon that could turn open educational resources into a detonator of change would be the advent of digital learning objects that go viral, the “holy grail” of DIY media production; Richmond cited the Chinese Backstreet Boys video, viewed one and a quarter million times on YouTube, as an example of “going viral.”… “Resistance is futile,” believes Richmond: although existing educational institutions are not generally embracing a digitally transformed future, “the educational sector will be dragged into the future kicking and screaming by the next perfect storm.”3 Others have foretold that education would be changed by the coming of the digital age.

As far back as 1992, in his best-selling book School’s Out: Hyperlearning, the New Technology, and the End of Education, Lewis J. Perelman said that education would implode. Perelman was correct in his prediction—he saw from a distance of many years the same inevitability that Richmond sees. It is too bad that over that past fourteen years since Perelman wrote his book the education establishment has not engaged the digital world to work with it in forming 21st century learning. During those years the Internet arrived along with a generation born into the Web world. Richmond uses the phrase “perfect storm” to imply a powerful convergence of factors happening now. In the face of that, can education dig its heels in again? I think the rampant dismissal among today’s kids of education as irrelevant is the critical factor in the mix that will bring the storm soon and with force.

A good deal is said and written about how the perfect storm Richmond sees on the horizon will affect the social aspects of learning. The mobile phone is recognized as an important new tool of student social interaction. What follows here is not about social factors, but a look at the transformation the open Internet venue causes for knowledge resources from which students are expected to learn in their education. Knowledge content richly interacts within itself in the Internet venue. Mobiles will amplify this interconnectivity of cognitive content in powerful new ways.

One Mind Learning from One Web
The fact that computers carried in pockets made their way into the global communications picture in the first place as phones with tiny display screens must not confuse what these devices will soon do to make them fundamental to learning. That crucial feature is to browse the Internet. Although first attempts to browse with mobile phones have been very rough, there is no reason to suppose there will be an Internet out there specifically for PCs and some other combination of content sources for mobiles. Instead, mobiles are being modified to support browsing the Internet that PCs browse and efforts are underway to modify Web pages to interface effectively on mobiles.

As the language continues to develop for what happens online, the words Internet and Web are increasingly used interchangeably, as I have done in this article. A related term, “One Web,” is a key to realizing that mobiles, PCs, mainframes, kiosks, and other devices will all connect into the same online virtual universe.

The principle of the One Web, as supported by the World Wide Web Consortium (“W3C”) is to have “One Web…where Web technologies provide the means of accessing and interacting with content via and between all devices (computing, communications, PIM, entertainment, embedded, transportation, industrial, health care, etc.)…worldwide.” The education world needs to get on board here to engage the One Web for learning content, by encouraging their students to do so on their mobile devices.

As the mobile computer-in-the-pocket becomes the main channel by which students access and use the Internet, each of them will have a powerful new individuality in his or her connection to the online universe. Coming from the PC direction, as PCs have become mobile laptops, they too have made the individual’s connection to the Internet more individual. In education this is a big change because the practice has not been for students to have individual computers. They have shared PCs, moving from machine to machine during the class day.

In order for the mobile device to become the primary method for browsing, the principle of One Web content is pivotal to the future of global learning. To the extent that educational resources are deliverable by mobiles, they will be accessible to the more than half of the world that is likely to have a mobile but not have access to a PC. As the individual mobile devices carried by students worldwide increase in their ability to bring the content of the Internet into their owners’ hands, the content that has been maturing online over the past decade will be at the service of their minds.

DIY by Subject Experts
As the Internet developed and expanded, the primary and freshest sources of most knowledge that education is expected to teach moved to the Internet. While the education industry continued to supply mostly printed materials to schools, experts in knowledge subjects enthusiastically interpreted what they knew digitally and put their DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Web creations online. Some of the Websites created in this way were digitally a bit rough, but the vast majority are superb. Importantly, most of them are open content, free for anyone to use.

There are thousands of examples of DIY subject expert online pages. Almost every museum has open Web pages where curators describe treasures from their collections. NASA offers a spirited Web section for every project it undertakes. Archaeologists post their discoveries on their Websites often before they publish in print. Literature is broadly available online with commentary from poets and scholars. Frequently professors maintain Web pages and/or blogs in which they explain the areas of their field about which they know the most.

Up to now, finding these materials has been left pretty much to bouncing around in Google. As the Internet has matured, finding and linking DIY learning assets through searching techniques has becoming easier and more refined.

Many DIY assets are all already in place—tended by experts for the knowledge they explain—and ready to be browsed on mobiles as they are now on PCs. Like everything online, the DIY subject expert materials are made up of smaller modules assembled into Web pages. The smaller modules could become mobile widgets. Think: Leonardo’s sketches, videos from the Mars Rovers, a new skull from a China dig, a Browning poem with commentary.

These digital things are all out there waiting for the perfect storm to lift them into the education venue. The smaller nuggets of digital knowledge will be useable early, as the browsing by mobiles becomes more robust. As soon as a DIY method to modify content for mobile catches on, the subject experts who tend their content could spontaneously launch a tsunami of mobile learning content against the beaches of established education.

Viral: Infectious Knowledge
As knowledge moved online, it nestled into the Internet network structure. It patterned itself cognitively because knowledge naturally connects to other knowledge in an open network environment. Instead of being cubicled by grade, standard, and textbook type, when placed online subject material has been able to interconnect by its meaning. A Website about the pyramids of Egypt links to other Websites about history, engineering, mummification, and writing systems. A Website about DNA links to other Websites about genetics, molecular science, forensics, and biographies of Francis Crick and James Watson. Online, the DNA Website or forensic information Webpage effortlessly links to the mummification Webpage linked to the Egypt Website. Interlinking like that is unimaginable among the usual grade quarantined printed education materials.

Instead of being divided by school subject and grade level (unless these are imposed by Website makers) when knowledge is embedded in the open Internet it becomes viral, infecting related resources by linking to them. It is viral linking when the expert on the content at the Egyptian pyramids Website lists a link to DNA forensics on his mummification page. This idea-to-idea viral linking marvelously enriches knowledge for learning through academic subjects online. As sending nodes of ideas among mobiles intensifies, this rich resource will feed and intensify the perfect storm that is about to hit education.

Viral: Infecting People
Viral also means the activity of one person infecting another person, which has become very big in the online world. On October 8, 2006, the Financial Times published an interview with Chad Hurley, CEO of YouTube.com. Here is how the article begins:

FT: What type of content on YouTube is proving most popular?

Chad Hurley: What we’re finding is that since everyone has a chance to participate, you’re sometimes surprised at what’s entertaining people. So science experiments— people launching Coke cans or whatever with Mentos—now have an opportunity to entertain people.

If you have never seen a video of soda pop exploding upward from a bottle into which Mentos candies have been dropped, you owe it to yourself to watch one. Go to YouTube.com and search for “Mentos Diet Coke.” You will be given a selection of videos to watch to observe one of the most popular viral video phenomenon of 2005, and you will observe a little science.

The well-respected science Website stevespangler science.com has a full page devoted to explaining how to set off a Mentos geyser from a pop bottle and what makes the often self-soaking experiment work. The explanation begins: “You should know that there is considerable debate over how and why this works. While we offer the most probable explanations below, we also understand and admit that other explanation could be possible...and we welcome your thoughts.”7 Reading on, you will learn some mechanics, some chemistry, and a bit about food science.

The Mentos/Diet Coke and Chinese Backstreet Boys videos demonstrated Web objects gone viral, spreading through interconnected people into the Internet. Small viral items like the videos have a huge potential for migrating into thousands (or millions) of mobiles, moving between them as messages. Educators should be learning how to use this new means of spreading content to distribute the stuff of learning.

Mobiles
Japan, South Korea, Finland, Hong Kong, Norway, and the UK are among the mobile markets approaching saturation, where everyone has at least one mobile, including kids. The enormous markets of China and India are absorbing mobiles at quickening paces. Even though saturation is greatest in developed countries, the majority of mobile phones are owned by people in developing countries, where a high percentage of those mobile owners are youngsters and the stage of first using desktop computers is being largely skipped. As I write this, at least one billion people have access to the Internet by desktops and laptops and over 2.5 billion have mobiles. Enhancing the mobiles so they can browse the Internet is doable and being done. It seems increasingly less likely that everyone on the planet will ever have a stationary computer.

So far, the warp speed expansion of mobile networks within the world’s youngest generations has been pretty much ignored and abhorred by education. The education establishment has watched—and grumbled a lot—as students have honed their mobile skills by primarily social networking. Meanwhile, the devices the young people use are becoming increasingly effective in browsing the Internet. It will not be long before mobile student networks and online knowledge networks mesh. Things will then become cognitively viral.

In their book Mobile Web 2.0, Joakar and Fish describe: “…an open Web driven application capable of aggregating (mainly non-text) content from any phone anywhere in the world. The exchange of information takes place mainly via the Web.” What we would think of in these circumstances for education would be the nodes on the network being both students and knowledge—all open to interaction among all the nodes.

It is marvelous to envision the interplay between the network of DNA and mummy information—which would also be part of the network with Web pages as nodes—and the linking into the pattern to students. The students, using their mobile phones, would be connected through the Web to the other students and to the knowledge about DNA and about mummies. The viral interlinking of knowledge itself online is converged with students. A new kind of learning has emerged.

Interwingularity
In the 1960s, Ted Nelson foresaw the coming digital era with rare clarity. He coined words that became basic to its vocabulary: hypermedia, and virtuality. Recently, as the Internet’s inherent networked environment is being increasingly understood and utilized, another one of Nelson’s words has been popping up in the discourse. In 1976, Nelson wrote:

Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged, people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t. Everything is deeply intertwingled.

The definition of intertwingle derived from Nelson’s observation is, clearly, that intertwingled things are not hierarchical, categorizable, or sequential. For our purposes, the word also implies that things infect each other. As adventures in the virtual world move into the future, we will understand intertwingularity more fully. For now, it is plainly obvious that traditional education is deeply hierarchical, categorizable, and sequential. Those characteristics conflict with the fact that online knowledge, viral objects, mobile networking, and students are increasingly—and increasingly more deeply—intertwingled. For education to continue to respond to the Internet and students with mobiles by pretending it can keep on with lockstep learning hierarchies, categories, and students in set sequences creates painful costs for the dragging that must be done to pull learning into the future.

Why not intertwingle? Why does education not converge enthusiastically with the digital world? Shouldn’t educators call on the technical sector to enhance mobile devices into the primary digital tool of personal learning? Why don’t educators demand the core enhancement in optimizing mobiles be the facility to browse the Internet and exchange digital learning objects virally? Wouldn’t many woes about learning today be solved by education’s digital convergence that would harness full intertwingularity of students and online knowledge?

That convergence would include embracing the DIY learning resources already placed and maintained online by experts. Embracing means no longer spending billions of education dollars to duplicate in print the knowledge available at no cost online. Education can walk away from its obstructionist role of walling resources by publisher, grade, and standard. Education’s digital convergence will be real when intertwingularity is fully operational for learning.

These changes are coming, whatever education does. The forces of the storm that is roaring toward the education establishment are gathered and moving. The upgrading of the mobiles is underway and happening fast. The spread of mobile computers is also a foregone conclusion, with at least half of the world’s population expected to have them in a matter of months, and virtually all within the decade. Already, the majority of people who have the mobiles are in developing countries, where the handheld digital device is leapfrogging the need to build wired connectivity. Education intertwingularity is coming in the form of the perfect storm. In its wake, the global golden age of learning will dawn.