The website of The Independent in England has an interactive map through which they are inviting the public to help explore “What next for newspapers?” After many months of losing circulation and doors closing on one after another print newspaper, the journalism future debate has become very public.

I hope the education sector comes out of its haze very soon as well. The way learning is done is changing, and as the global emergence accelerates education will be at least as fundamentally challenged as journalism is now. I found it helpful to my thinking to use The Independent’s animated chart — while substituting in my own mind education issues and suggestions for the ones about journalism in the interactive.

Via: BuzzMachine by Jeff Jarvis

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.

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.

Wide-eyed baby looking at you here is a Ural owl chick who is growing up at the Tallinn Zoo in Estonia and was featured today at ZooBorns.
Photo by Eesti Ekspress, Vallo Kruuser

“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 of What 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.

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 in her class were very poor and would get almost nothing for Christmas. Could Santa help?

I decided to donate my gloves. My hands are small, and I figured the youngsters could at least get some warmth from them. Several weeks later, the paralegal who had solicited me in the first place came by my desk to thank me. She said the teacher had written to thank her team for collecting the gifts. The paralegal wanted me to know that my gift was a huge hit and the favorite over all the others. The kids went nuts over the white gloves that let them dress like Michael Jackson.

The image with this post is from a mid-1980s video from the time President Reagan welcomed Jackson to the White House. The glove in the image covers a hand clinging to the White House fence during Michael’s visit. Perhaps the glove is one I once owned. Yes, there is a Santa Claus.

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.

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.

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.

Something that could bring some potent immediate equality to the DC high school students is to give each of them a smartphone like The President and all the important people on Capitol Hill have — with full access to browse the internet. The smartphone in a student’s hand does not know what color she is or to what school he is assigned. The smartphone is unaware of who the student is who is browsing the internet’s vast knowledge. As I reported here last week, Google CEO told this year’s Carnegie Mellon graduates that “Information is a tremendous equalizer.”

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.