TEX2ALL

I want what technology wants. I want universal access and ubiquity. I want a diverse and open expression of technology. I want connected and connecting tools. I want technology to be customized and customizable. I want it to reflect human complexity.

Noted technology futurist, Kevin Kelly, has spent a considerable part of his adult life talking about what ‘technology wants’.

He likens it to what Richard Dawkins calls the ‘selfish gene’. Like our genes, it has its own ends, it evolves, and it never dies. I want to be part of that inexorable river. I want what technology is evolving toward--the singularity that Ray Kurzweil has written of-- that ever-accelerating and constantly improving world punctuated by wild, evolutionary leaps, leaps that are a part of humanity’s own evolution.

But there is a glitch. Learning is evolving everywhere in the world it needs to be-- except in our institutions of learning. And it isn’t as if this un-evolved condition was perpetuated by a lack of tools. It is the absence of vision, lack of a new way of learning that impedes our progress.

This new way of learning is represented partly by the work of Canadian elearning specialist, George Siemens. He calls it connectivism.

Connectivism

His point is that learning doesn’t match up to reality and that our context for learning has morphed dramatically, continuously, and complexly from what is was . Knowledge moves so quickly it has become hard to capture and process personally. We need the help of the network to connect us to a larger mind, the connected mind.

Taking a cue from modern inventory control, according to Siemens more and more often we learn as we go instead of in advance of our need.

My vision for learning technologies is planted firmly in Siemens’ new theories. As such it reflects a desire to not just put .

We have a new and renewed ground in which to learn online. Convergence,
",
mobility, ,
integration, ,
collaboration, ,
open source, ,
folksonomies,, and social networks " are just part of the new language used to discuss this changed world. This new reality needs new leaders.

It is daunting, too. The internet in its current form is only about 5000 days old yet consider how it is today--everything, everywhere, free, and unimaginable. The net is what mathematician Nicholas Taleb goldbard-on-taleb

calls a “black swan”. According to Taleb the notion of an actual black swan was an impossibility until one was discovered in Australia. Similarly, the internet has been both unforeseen and unforseeable. Impossible, if you will. I believe in the impossibility of this technology and want to help lead colleagues, students, and anyone willing to join with me in the march through the next 5000 days.

Vision is sovereign. It is owned in the now, but it guides us into uncertainty. As such a technological vision is an act of faith pulling us toward what is at best a murkily dynamic world. Let me cite an example of this inherent dynamism. Clay Shirky in his latest book, Here Comes Everybody

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introduces the idea of a ‘cognitive surplus’. Shirky observes that starting with the Industrial Revolution we were forced to manage a new asset. This asset had only been the province of royalty and the rich for most of human history, but now everyone had some of it--free time. And what did we do with it? According to Shirky we watched a lot of TV. In fact he argues that the sit-com provided what amounts to a “heat sink” to dissipate much of this leisure time. Or at least it did until the interactive and graphical Internet was invented.

Some of this surplus of time that we “invested” in TV is now being reinvested in folksonomic, interactive, social projects like Wikipedia. Shirky estimates that 100 million hours of human cognition has been spent on creating Wikipedia. That seems like a lot, but it is literally a drop in the bucket compared to how much we spend watching television in the U.S. every year--100 billion hours. Shirky puts it in another context. We spend 100 million hours each weekend just watching the ads on television!

How does this relate to my vision? If you can create a Wikipedia with this miniscule bit of cognitive surplus imagine what might happen to this connected and networked should even more of the cognitive surplus shift over to participation in and creation of new technologies? I count on this happening and I count on being one of the leaders ready to serve in the next 5000 days. I suspect that I will be more like Moses in that I may only capture a glimmer of the promise of this singularity, but I feel the moral obligation to try.

I even hesitate to call this a “vision statement”. ‘Vision’ is a privileged modality. Perhaps we should, like the late Dr. Randy Pausch suggests, valorize another one of our senses. In his now famous speech and book, The Last Lecture, Pausch describes a gimmick he once used to get his audience to remember its childhood dreams. He handed out Crayolas to each audience member as they walked in. At the appropriate moment in his speech he asked them to sniff the crayon and recall their childhood dreams. He created an ‘olfactory statement’ not a ‘vision statement’.

However you look at it or smell it or feel it or taste it, technology is a “meta-tool”, a universal recursive wrench. My vision is, penultimately, to discover and rediscover that vision as the knob on the kaleidoscope twists again and again. I say ‘penultimate’ because while we are always the last word in our life’s vision in the end we pass on the game to others. Our death is our last idea and with it we take our silence, but it is our vision, both lived and recorded, that is the vehicle that carries on. Technology enables our ideas to not only survive, but to evolve; therefore, I argue against final vision statements in another way: if this infinite game of learning is one of play and possibility, then (like the technology that serves and drives it) vision statements must also morph like Proteus. I hope this penultimate one serves my future and our futures well.

tellio :: Sep.01.2008 :: :: No Comments »