Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex

This is a great TED talk from Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist (that I’ve started to read and am enjoying immensely), summarizing some of the main ideas in the book.

There are many useful ideas and surprising facts and arguments presented here but the central concept is that the fundamental distinguishing characteristic of humans, that they trade and exchange things, leads to ever-increasing efficiencies of use of time and the (literal) breeding of innovation, in an ever-accelerating virtuous spiral that means the world gets to be a better place to live for nearly everyone nearly all the time, notwithstanding local variations and occasional reversals. His view of the emergent collective is particularly insightful and, though not as subtly argued as Bloom’s masterly ‘Global Brain’, makes a lot of sense and the simile that ideas literally reproduce sexually is memorable and worth examining. This is an original, poetic and compelling retelling of a very old idea that borrows heavily from Adam Smith and Leonard E. Read and that echoes many of the things W. Brian Arthur, Stephen Johnson, Kevin Kelly and others have been writing about technology and innovation recently. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.html

University of the People

The University of the People aims to be a truly open university, intended for those that cannot afford a university degree, especially in developing countries. It is not completely free but there is just a single enrolment fee and, soon, small fees for each online exam taken. For those that cannot afford the nominal fees, it links to a marketplace for micro-scholarships and offers some scholarships of its own, and offers a sliding scale of fees depending on where you come from (people from developing countries pay less). Entirely unaccredited so far, with only a couple of undergraduate degree programs, it has a way to go. Its website has an endearingly amateurish feel and the blurb rather vaguely describes a clunky and unimaginative pedagogical model, with online exams that are not going to win it friends or trust. Perhaps the most telling sign that it is not playing in the big league is a very unfortunate turn of phrase that is proudly trumpeted throughout the site, that it is ‘tuition-free’. However, inability to use the English language and dubious pedagogical underpinnings aside, the idea is very worthy, the economic model is interesting and the intentions seem good. An interesting and possibly complementary alternative to the much-hyped mechaMOOC phenomenon (I say ‘mechaMOOC’ because I want to distinguish the new breed of MOOCs coming out of Udacity, Coursera etc from the original connectivist MOOCs that are a very different and much cuddlier kind of animal).

Address of the bookmark: http://www.uopeople.org/

Interactive on-line formative evaluation of student assignments

I’ve referred people to this work by Heinz Dreher many times over the past few years but usually forget where the original paper resides, so here is a bookmark to this interesting research. It provides a useful literature review that covers some of the earlier work on automated free-text assessment from the 1960s onwards but, more interestingly, reports on Heinz’s own work on a system that helps markers and students by giving primitive but useful formative feedback.

I’m also fond of an older paper from the 1990s by Dave Whittington and Helen Hunt that compares a number of methods and suggests high correlations between human and automated markers, available at http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse590D/04sp/papers/whittington-hunt.htm

In all instances it is, of course, pretty easy to game the system once you know the algorithms it is using. However, as a sanity and consistency check, automated systems are a useful tool.

Address of the bookmark: http://espace.library.curtin.edu.au/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=20152&local_base=GEN01-ERA02

Medium and Branch

Biz Stone and Ev Williams, founders of Blogger and Twitter, have launched two new (invite only while in beta) sites. Both are accessible with a Twitter login. From what I can tell, Medium is primarily a curation/collection technology that uses collective processes (votes, apparently) to bring things to the fore, while Branch allows topic-oriented conversations to develop from Twitter. 

The really interesting thing for me about this, especially given the couple’s enormous success so far in designing winning technologies, is how neatly they fit with the taxonomy of social forms that Terry Anderson and I have developed and that, by happy chance, forms the backbone of a book we’re writing. There is a huge trend towards topic-oriented sites right now and away from net-oriented sites. This is about sets of people with shared common interests, not social networks. Social networks are (optionally) there in both the new tools and they are not going away any time soon, but the main social form that matters here is not the network, but the fact that a lot of people are interested in the same thing. Branch is particularly interesting as it allows invited people to talk about something: so far, very much like a traditional discussion-oriented group, acting as a neat way to make it easier for topic-oriented groups to form out of looser networks. However, others from beyond that group can follow the conversation, so it acts like the classic goldfish bowl (one of my favourite ways to liven up a classroom-based lecture) but on a grand scale.  

 

ps…

I’ve just been playing with Branch – wow. This is good: incredibly neat and smooth transition between sets, nets and groups, delightful interface. One thing that particularly stood out for me (because it confirms my feelings about the thinking behind Twitter and why it is not even close to being like Facebook) is a quote from Ev Williams at the branch http://branch.com/b/the-volatility-of-social-spaces

“I don’t consider Twitter to be a social space—primarily. It’s a utility for getting (and sometimes spreading) news, information, and entertainment, more than it is a hangout space like the mall. Some people, of course, use it primarily for socializing, and the line is blurry.

As for Facebook, while also a source of information, it is primarily social. Though, one of the things Kirkpatrick wrote about in The Facebook Effect was how Mark was intentional about not making FB “cool,” because coolness fades. He wanted it to be boring—but necessary.”

Address of the bookmark: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2012/aug/15/twitter-founders-new-branch-medium

McDonald’s as a learning technology

Whenever I visit a new country, region or city I visit McDonald’s as soon as I can to have a Bic Mac and an orange juice. Actually, in Delhi that turns into a Big Raj (no beef on the menu) and in some places I substitute a wine or a beer for the orange juice, but the food is not really important. There are local differences but it’s pretty much as horrible wherever you go.

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I inflict this on myself because The McDonald’s Experience should, on the whole, be a pretty consistent thing the world over: that’s how it is designed. Except that it isn’t the same. The differences, however, compared with the differences between one whole country or city and another, are relatively slight and that’s precisely the point. The small differences make it much easier to spot them, and to focus on them, to understand their context and meaning. Differences in attitudes to cleaning, attitudes to serving, washroom etiquette, behaviour of customers, decor, menu, ambiance, care taken preparing or keeping the food etc are much easier to absorb and reflect upon than out on the street or in more culturally diverse cafes because they are more firmly anchored in what I already know. Tatty decor in McDonald’s restaurants in otherwise shiny cities speak worlds about expectations and attitudes, open smiles or polite nods help to clarify social expectations and communication norms. Whether people clear their own tables, whether the dominant clientele are fat, or families, or writers, whether it’s a proletarian crowd or full of intelligentsia or a place that youth hang out.  Whether people smoke, whether they drink. How loud the music (if any) is playing. The layout of the seating. How people greet their friends, how customers are greeted, how staff interact. How parents treat their children. There’s a wide range of different more or less subtle clues that tell me more about the culture in 20 minutes than days spent engaging more directly with the culture of a new place. Like the use of  the Big Mac Index to compare economies,  the research McDonald’s puts into making sure it fits in also provides a useful barometer to compare cultures.

McDonald’s thus serves as a tool to make it easier to learn. This is about distributed cognition. McDonald’s channels my learning, organises an otherwise disorganised world for me. It provides me with learning that is within my zone of proximal development. It helps me to make connections and comparisons that would otherwise be far more complex. It provides an abstract, simplified model of a complex subject.

It’s a learning technology. 

Of course, if it were the only technology I used then there would be huge risks of drawing biased conclusions based on an outlier, or of misconstruing something as a cultural feature when it is simply the result of a policy that is misguidedly handed down from a different culture. However, it’s a good start, a bit of scaffolding that lets me begin to make sense of confusion, that makes it easier to approach the maelstrom outside more easily, with a framework to understand it.

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There are many lessons to be drawn from this when we turn our attention to intentionally designed learning technologies like schools, classrooms, playgrounds,  university websites, learning management systems, or this site, the Landing. Viewed as a learning technology about foreign culture, McDonald’s is extraordinarily fit for purpose. It naturally simplifies and abstracts salient features of a culture, letting me connect my own conceptions and beliefs with something new, allowing me to concentrate on the unfamiliar in the context of the familiar. Something similar happens when we move from one familiar learning setting to the next. When we create a course space in, say, Moodle or Blackboard, we are using the same building blocks (in Blackboard’s case, quite literally) as others using the same system, but we are infusing it with our own differences, our own beliefs, our own expectations. Done right, these can channel learners to think and behave differently, providing cues, expectations, implied beliefs, implied norms, to ease them from one familiar way of thinking into another. It can encourage ways of thinking that are useful, metacognitive strategies that are embedded in the space. Unfortunately, like McDonald’s, the cognitive embodiment of the designed space is seldom what learning designers think about. Their focus tends to be on content and activities or, for more enlightened designers, on bending the tools to fit a predetermined pedagogy. Like McDonald’s, the end result can be rather different from the intended message. I don’t think that McDonald’s is trying to teach me the wealth of lessons that I gain from visiting their outlets and, likewise, I don’t think most learning designers are trying to tell me:

  • that learning discussions should be done in private places between consenting adults;
  • that it is such a social norm to cheat that it’s worth highlighting on the first page of the study guide;
  • that teachers are not important enough to warrant an image or even an email link on the front page;
  • that students are expected to have so little control that, instead of informative links to study guide sections, they are simply provided with a unit number to guide their progress;
  • that the prescribed learning outcomes are more important than how they will be learned, the growth, and the change in understanding that will occur along the way.

And yet, too many times, that’s what the environment is saying: in fact, it is often a result of the implied pedagogies of the technology itself that many such messages are sent and reinforced. The segregation of discussion into a separate space from content is among the worst offenders in this respect as that blocks one of the few escape routes for careful designers. Unless multi-way communication is embedded deeply into everything, as it is here on the Landing, then there is not even the saving grace of being able to see emergent cultural behaviours to soften and refine the hegemonies of a teacher-dominated system.

Like McDonald’s, all of this makes it far more likely that you’ll get a bland salty burger than haute cuisine or healthy food.

Analogue Literacies (2011)

ABSTRACT: The continuous co-evolution of digital technologies and the skills needed to use them makes the concept of ‘digital literacy’ a slippery and moving target. Tools in themselves do not technologies make: it is the combination of phenomena, tools and purposes which, in a never ending and always accelerating dance, constantly shift what Stuart Kauffman calls the ‘adjacent possible’ to enable new and unforeseeable trajectories, both good and bad. Traditional literacies are based on an assumption that skills are transferrable and capable of improvement in incremental steps, that we can become experts in their application. Digital competencies, on the other hand, may (with some limited exceptions) become outmoded, unnecessary and defunct, sometimes in weeks or months rather than years, as the pace of technological change moves the goalposts as soon as we reach them. Often, a new generation of digital technologies will render our hard-earned skills redundant almost as soon as we have attained them, meanwhile opening out new vistas of adjacent possibilities that demand the acquisition of new competencies. The so-called ‘digital generation’ is no less immune to this effect than older generations, as witnessed by their enthusiastic but unreflective tendencies to embrace social media without regard to the consequences of persistent digital identity and emerging norms of privacy and public disclosure. In this paper I argue for a different way of thinking about digital literacy that is based on a richer understanding of technologies, following W. Brain Arthur, as assemblies of other technologies, both soft and hard, human and machine. I suggest that the need for literacy should not be focused on the hard, digital media but on the soft, malleable edges of the adjacent possible that each new technological/social/human assembly provides. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.code.ouj.ac.jp/sympo-2011/pdf/1_Jon_Dron_11.pdf

The Blog and the Borg: a Collective Approach to E-Learning (2003)

This paper describes the use of tools and procedures to encourage reflective learning in a blended-learning postgraduate course. Its ethos encourages self-organized collaborative learning with little taught theoretical content. Students use a variety of Internet-based communication technologies and reflect on their experiences in an online learning diary or “blog,” The course is successful but its limited theoretical foundations, and technical and organizational problems caused by its blended delivery mode have led to student anxiety and have affected learning. The problems have been overcome through structural and methodological changes, sometimes at the expense of compromising the course’s ethos. A new solution is proposed combining the use of blogs with CoFIND, a kind of “group mind amplifier,” leading to a technologically enhanced variant of Kolb’s learning cycle that may serve as an informative model for other technology-assisted courses.

 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.editlib.org/p/14972

On the stupidity of mobs (2006)

This paper explores the implications of social navigation used to assist online learning communities. It presents an experiment in social navigation employing a treasure map, comparing the behavior of users provided with social navigation cues and the behavior of those with no such cues. The experiment suggests that social navigation may cause poor decision-making in its users in two distinct ways. Some users may follow the actions of others (even poor ones), while others may actively try to behave differently. Neither strategy is useful at all times. The paper goes on to discuss approaches to limiting the dangers of such systems. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.iadis.net/dl/final_uploads/200602C035.pdf

PHD Thesis: Achieving self-organisation in network-based learning environments (2002)

Link to my thesis

This thesis is an investigation into how to exploit the unique features of computer networks (notably the Internet) to support self-organising groups of adult learners.

The structures of systems influence the behaviour of their parts whilst those structures are in turn influenced by their parts’ interactions. Effects of structural hierarchies in popular systems of education may lead to poor learning experiences for some students. An alternative way of organising such systems is to decentralise control and to allow a structure to emerge from the combined actions of learners: a self-organised learning environment.

The functionality of a teacher often has the largest effect on the dynamics of an educational system. This is therefore a good place to concentrate efforts to encourage emergent structures to develop in adult education. The thesis attempts to classify of what that functionality consists, abstracting the roles a teacher may perform.

The Internet (especially the World Wide Web) has more of a network than a hierarchical structure and, being a virtual space, provides relatively virgin ground on which a less centralised model of educational organisation might develop. The thesis considers how self-organised learning may arise in existing Internet-based environments. It identifies a key weakness of existing systems to adequately address the varied and ever-changing needs of learners.

A number of studies performed as part of this investigation centre on the construction of a series of software products explicitly aimed at enabling the self-organisation of learners. They achieve this through the adaptation and evolution of metadata at different structural levels, thereby dynamically adapting to learners’ needs as those needs develop.

The thesis concludes with a set of guiding principles for those seeking to build self- organisation into learning environments.

 

The Filter Bubble

Eli Pariser’s blog, with links to his good TED talk and brilliant book of the same name. The book provides a relentlessly well-written and hard-to-fault argument about the dangers of confirmation bias, as well as an evenly-handed discussion of the many benefits of personalization. The site offers a cut-down version of the advice offered in the book which is aimed to maintain the value of filters (which are useful and essential tools to deal with infoglut) without losing the essential diversity that filter bubbles can and do destroy. Excellent stuff, packed with fascinating and well-researched information, quotable sentences and thought-provoking analysis.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.thefilterbubble.com/