Welcome the 21st Century: Think Softly

Life is becoming increasingly faster and more complex – the scale, scope and inter-connectedness of things in unprecedented Although IT hardware and software provide both causes and solutions the most important factor to life in the 21^st century is within ourselves –  “wetware” or the way we think.

I’ve identified 2 “dimensions” of thinking which I think are important, one dimension is Hard Vs Soft thinking while the other dimension is Reductionist Vs Holistic thinking.

Hard thinking

You could almost call this concrete thinking – it’s a bounded, engineering style characterised by the application of existing definable, quantifiable, specific concepts and processes. In a nutshell it is thinking “inside the box” and applying known rules and procedures.

Soft Thinking

You could almost call this abstract thinking – it’s an unbounded, integrative and creative style characterised by insight and judgement. In a nutshell it’s “Wicked” thinking “outside the box”.

Reductionist thinking

This is characterised the use of analysis to simplify, predict and control. It’s a mechanistic approach and application of rules and procedures. In a nutshell it is thinking about the details.

Holistic thinking

This is characterised by the use of intuition and interpretation to see patterns, connections and relationships. In a nutshell in is thinking about the big picture.

People are naturally more comfortable with different styles of thinking and can apply different styles or mix of styles in different contexts. Different contexts and problems are better suited to different styles of thinking – use the right one and things can fit into place – use the wrong one and things seem like hard going and can result in stress, anxiety and dysfunction at both personal and organisational level.

The current UK MPs expenses news could be used to illustrate styles of thinking. Administration of expenses claims should have used hard reductionist thinking – analysis and application of procedures without creativity. The MPs in question seemed to be applying soft reductionist thinking – creative “accounting” and application of procedures to claim they did nothing wrong and it was all within the rules. It’s not easy to find hard holistic thinking but you could argue that those like Ed Milliband who argue parliamentary reform in terms of changing procedures are using hard holistic thinking. Those who argue for more radical political changes from proportional representation through to Government 2.0 ideas in the Us Now film would seem to be thinking in a soft holistic way.

As events, organisations and individuals become ever more interconnected (networked) then hard, reductionist ways of thinking become increasingly out of tune, inappropriate, unable to cope and even dysfunctional and damaging. Most often hard reductionist thinking just doesn’t see the rich bigger picture, opportunities and emergent properties of new systems until they are run over by them or left stranded.

Soft thinking is essential to cope with life in the 21^st century with its increasingly Unthinkable , interconnected, fast, complex, chaotic, emergent, and unpredictable behaviour.

Soft thinking is essential to thrive in the 21^st century – soft reductionist thinking is essential for innovation (to find the application of existing things in new ways) and soft holistic thinking is essential for invention (to create entirely new things).

Later in this series I hope to explore “soft” in education, technology and business.

Welcome To The 21st Century: The Beginning

The noughties are a new decade, century and millennium – the changes happening with technology and their impact on identity, culture and society really are this momentous.

One way to see these changes is with a straight historical contrast and you can see my rough work on twitter here.

The 20^th century can be seen as the peek of traditional ways of doing things that really do stretch back to the dawn of humanity – familiar things extrapolated to the extreme with mechanisation and automation and with extreme consequences to the environment we have now come to understand. I covered much of this in 20th Century Industrial Processes: Culture, Identity and Information

I characterise the past era as one of “concrete” thinking” – thinking and activity that is rooted in and characterised by a predominance of physical objects and events. Thinking that books are literature, newspapers are journalism and CDs are music. Thinking that schools and colleges are education. Thinking that the office is the workplace.

“Concrete” thinking goes deeper though – I also describe the past era as the era of “pyramids” – the design and construction of hierarchical, elitist and stable structures – the standard organisational model often manifest and symbolised by top floor executive offices.

I characterise the 20^th century as an era of super large scale manufactured production and personal consumption – the extreme end of the application of tools from the stone axe to the modern production line.

I characterise the 20^th century as an era of mediation, privacy, secrecy and obfuscation – a consequence of the elitist pyramid model to maintain stability and equilibrium and a Marxian interpretation of culture.

Technology developments are for the first time I think providing the opportunity to transcend traditional “concrete” ways of thinking and acting – my main focus is on Information technology but radical developments are taking place in all the sciences, leading new applications of technology and “unthinkable” effects and opportunities for humanity, culture identity and society.

I characterise the 21^st century as an era of “networks”, indeed the internet symbolises and facilitates “network thinking”. It’s an era of flat, integrated, dynamic, and emergent structures. The 21^st century is already and will be increasingly fast, complex, chaotic, uncertain and “organic”.

The 21^st century will be increasingly open, public and participatory – it will be an era of personal production where large organisations may consume the output of individuals but there will be increasing disintermediation and scope with individuals transacting directly.

In a nutshell I see the 21^st century as an era of software.

This blog is intended as the basis of a series exploring associated ideas, technology, cultural, educational themes etc.

Please add your comments.

20th Century Industrial Processes: Culture, Identity and Information

This blog takes a brief look at how industrial processes have shaped our culture, identity and our ideas of information.

The defining factor of the 20^th century was fossil fuel (especially oil) which today provides an energy equivalent to 22 billion slaves and allowed an exponential extension of 19^th century industrialism to do things faster, bigger and more. The 20^th century as an industrial age was dominated by material things, materialism and industrial processes – manufacture, distribution, consumption, disposal and the identity, political and power structure consequences of this.

Fossil fuel became abundant and cheap and 20^th century systems could afford to be energy intensive – the globalisation of material things became possible – the earth became a global factory. China for example could manufacture from raw materials transported from multiple countries using oil transported from multiple countries and then transport manufactured goods to multiple countries. Transportation is present at every stage – the energy and pollution costs are now apparent.

Politics and economics became focused on production and people’s identities became focused on consumption – we have become defined by what we have – the things we buy rather than the things we do or make. The consequences of political and economic power can be read from this.

Information is intangible and must be represented in some way and given that the Internet didn’t exist through most of the 20^th century then information was by necessity locked up in material forms of representation and the necessary 20^th century industrial systems associated with material things – energy intensive manufacture, distribution, consumption and disposal along with the political and power structure issues that result.

The 21^st century Internet provides a new perspective on 20^th century information – the energy intensive manufacturing and transportation costs involved and the advantages pertaining to those who own the means of production and distribution. Consider what is required to produce a magazine – from the felling and processing of trees to make paper to the printing and distribution and the eventual disposal and waste.

Information was constrained and limited by its physical embodiment in objects – it was expensive, scarce, difficult to change and to share. You may need to travel to a bookshop or library to get a book – there would only be a limited number of books, you couldn’t easily make and distribute your own book or comments on a book. The same issues apply to other forms of information such as audio and visual information – consider the industrial processes involved in the music business to manufacture and distribute CDs.

Embodying information in physical objects slows it down and freezes it – in the same way that paper is a dead tree you could regard a book as dead information – there is no interaction. It seems a bit extreme but you could regard a library like an information graveyard where you can go to read inscriptions on the tombstones – the books as tombstones – dead information.

Computers and software as information technology have themselves also been part of the 20^th century industrial production-consumption dynamic. Mainframes were born in the middle of the 20^th century and naturally created a centralised information and control model. Punk music and the personal computing trend both started in the late1970s as an attempt at personal production – both were eventually assimilated by the very mainstream industry processes they were a rebellious response to. Personal computing is dominated by major industry businesses. Software “production” is still dominated by manufacture, distribution and installation – it is partially “dead” software. Computers and anything digital are subject to rapid produce and consume cycles – we need ever faster machines to run ever bigger software. The irony is that the machines of the information age had become the epitome of the industrial age.

“High Anxiety” – Anxiety as a dimension in organisational culture

Many organisations appear to exhibit irrational behaviours and loss of function – this blog explores the application of psychological ideas about anxiety to the issues of organisational culture and change

Anxiety is the feeling of fear we all experience when faced with threatening or difficult situations. It helps us to avoid dangerous situations, makes us alert and motivates us to deal with problems. People have different responses to anxiety but for as many as 18% of Americans it can be a debilitating condition resulting in irrational behaviours and loss of function.

Recent research from Tel Aviv University  looked at abnormal behaviour of wild animals when held in captivity. “In the wild, animals perform automated routines, not rituals, but in captivity, the animals’ attention focus is on persevering rituals, with an explicit emphasis on performance – just like they had OCD.” I wondered how productive it might be to consider the artificial environments of organisations as “zoo like” – a “naked ape” type approach to organisational culture from the perspective of anxiety responses.

People at home, “out in the wild” can be quite willing and able to engage with new things, ideas and technology, yet at work, “in the zoo”, responses to similar things can be quite different – often defensive, avoidant and phobic or learned helplessness type responses to new things and change.

Processes are necessary for organisations to function but it seems to be the natural progression of organisations to add processes and process layers over time (bureaucracy). Many processes become rigid, self reinforcing and difficult to change and in some (or many) cases could be regarded as ritualistic with “attention focus is on persevering rituals, with an explicit emphasis on performance” rather than function – just as if the organisation had OCD  (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). As with OCD, organisations worry about not performing their rituals – they take comfort in the rituals themselves and make them increasingly elaborate (bureaucratic) over time.  It can be quite striking that ritualistic behaviour can be reinforced through process measures – marking and grading according to the performance of the rituals rather than the function – organisational “comfort blankets”.

Phobic and OCD responses are common but become a problem when they interfere with function – anxiety disorders often become problematic and evident with a change trigger event. Organisations also experience change trigger events which can expose anxiety like behaviours that interfere with necessary functional responses to change. Organisations need to be able to adapt to changes to their environment (competition, regulation, technology, economics etc) but for some organisations anxiety disorder can make them too rigid, phobic and ritualistic to change appropriately.

Organisations differ in their responses to change – for some it is a crisis yet for others it is an opportunity. The approach here is to look at this difference through the lens of anxiety – the argument is to reduce organisational anxiety using the techniques psychologists use to reduce anxiety with individuals.

The key problem with anxiety is the avoidance of situations which the sufferer   thinks will induce anxiety. The key behavioural treatment in this is to break the cycle of avoidance and demonstrate to the sufferer that “nothing bad happens”. Shock tactics make things worse, instead the sufferer is incrementally exposed to the anxiety inducing situation – building confidence and getting used (habituating) to the new situation. This technique is called ERP  (Exposure Response Prevention).

The common traditional organisational response to anxiety disorder like symptoms is either more avoidance (rituals, phobias and bureaucracy) or the high anxiety shock tactic – the “you are dysfunctional and must change” speech followed by command and control, top-down large scale process changes to do something to the organisation. Sometimes these approaches work but other times they can make things work.

Here I argue the case for low anxiety approaches to organisational culture and change. 

Some suggestions to reduce “organisational anxiety”

Change is often dealt with in big sudden jumps (the big initiative) like being thrown into the deep end to learn how to swim – this will usually lead to fear, anger and even trauma.

If change is managed in small achievable steps it is less feared and can even be enjoyed – learn how to swim in the shallow end first.

Change should be part of everyday life for everybody. Everyone is capable of trying something new – no matter how small. Explore and experiment “try it – you might like it”.

Fear of failure causes the anxiety sufferer to avoid trying and reinforces problems. Big change programs have big risks and big fears – as projects they often have problems due to anxiety responses that generate rituals and bureaucracy. Even worse however are the projects that don’t take place when people fear the consequences of failure.  

Smaller projects have smaller risks – if the consequences of failure are smaller then the risk of failure is smaller and people will be more willing to try. Also, if the consequences of failure are smaller then the amount of risk can be higher and the project more radical. 

Characteristics of a high anxiety organisation

Anxiety disorders are often accompanied by symptoms of fatigue and depression. A high anxiety organisation is rigid, defensive, tired and depressed; “running round in circles” performing comforting bureaucratic “rituals” and blaming others for failures. Once in this state it can be difficult to recover.

Characteristics of a low anxiety organisation
A low anxiety organisation is flexible, energetic and self-motivated. It has low bureaucracy, is willing and able to change and try new approaches. 

Background Research

General information about Learned Helplessness 
General information about Anxiety disorders

General information on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)  

General information on Phobia 

Video – Polar Bear in zoo exhibiting OCD like ritualistic behaviour

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) 

Exposure and Response Prevention 

Mel Brooks High Anxiety – Vertigo scene 

Mel Brooks singing High Anxiety 

PIE and MASH: a Lens For a Semantic Web

We are only a few weeks into the year and it already seems clear that one of the major trends will be integration activity to “orchestrate” information sources – to create lenses to MASH and focus information for our Personal Information Environments.

Activity Stream integration

 Social networks were a big factor in 2008 and social networkers were among the first off the blocks in 2009 to catch my attention with a meeting on  January 9th at the offices of Six Apart to discuss standards for activity streams. People belong to different social networks but cannot easily (if at all) communicate between these networks – solving this problem will be like the day when email users on different email systems could email each other.

News Stream Integration

Another early set of activities that caught my attention were the discussions about RSS overload and the need to deal with this somehow. RSS is an essential tool for pulling information into your environment but with the dramatic growth of the web even RSS has trouble coping. Michael Kowalchik describes how our feed readers and our use of them are based on the older email paradigm of inboxes and a must read all items attitude. Kowalchik says that both feed readers and our attitudes to information need to change -  ” people will increasingly want to experience information, not be slaves to it”. Kowalchik describes Mike Winner’s the “River of News Concept” which informed many news aggregators including Grazr – “the name “grazr” comes from, grazing information, not drowning in it.”

Activity and News Stream MASHING

Another item that caught my attention was the way the way on-line social media responded to the Hudson River Plane Crash. There have been many stories of the way news breaks first on social networks and about how the major news corporations make use of material from people camera phones but what caught my attention this time was the way in which social media itself could offer coverage. Kevin Sablan’s Almighty Link used storytlr to gather feeds from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Vimeo to create an aggregated “real-time “story”. He describes “the hard part was editing, or what Tim Windsor calls curating, the approximately 700 bits of information into some semblance of a disjointed story”. The result was “a stream of moments captured by individual storytellers, the  ”lifestream” not of a person, but an event.”  There was also a Hudsonplane Friendfeed room which could be regarded as a “web2.0 viralism mashup” equivalent of a newsroom of the event.

Beyond Google – The Real Time Web

Writing for RWW Bernard Lunn uses the web 2.0 response to the Hudson Plane Crash to illustrate the way in which the web has moved from IBM (mainframe) to Microsoft (client-server) to Google (on-line) and is now moving beyond Google’s grasp and into real time. He argues that “It’s the Real-Time Web that will unseat Google. This idea has been percolating for a while, but it took a plane landing in the Hudson River to make it obvious. Google cannot be real-time. It indexes the historical web, and it does it better and faster than anyone else.”

PIE and MASH a Lens For a Semantic Web

With all the activity and news streams flooding into my on-line environment I feel my river of news is more like a rapid – I want something to pre-process the streams and present me a river instead of a torrent. I want to be able to search and define sources; aggregate them and sort their presentation according to my own criteria. For example, I would like to input items on Cloud Computing from Twitter; Youtube; blogs and traditional news sources and web sites. The part that I think will develop this year is the difficult next step of pre-processing the information sources. Quantitative pre-processing tools exist – tools like Postrank will exam social bookmarking statistics, blog hits, referrals and comment quantities  to rank feeds but what I would like is some form of qualitative pre-processing – this is the difficult part – for what do I mean by Qualitative. At the moment my qualitative assessment of information is associated with people and recommendations. To find news I check Twitter first and see what my network is talking about, then I check the RWW and Mashable etc for RSS feeds. In terms of Quality I would need a way to weight feeds according to mentions of sources and people – not just numbers of hits.

In order to apply qualitative criteria to information sources either the information sources must carry additional information (meta data like tags,statistics, Microformats and RDFa) or a tool must be able to extract data from the context of the information source – how it is associated in the web – how richly it is associated and with what. I seem to be talking about the semantic web and this is not surprising as semantics (meaning) is largely about associations and relationships between things – the more meaningful something is the more deeply and richly it is associated with other things and meanings.

People are getting used to Personal Information Environments (PIE) – systems like iGoogle or Netvibes where you can suck in various information and display it in various ways.However, PIE tools look set for a revolution in 2009 if

 Marc Canter’s DiSo Dashboard proposal gains traction. By implementing DiSo dashboard  proposals popular PIEs could extend and integrate across social networks and Lifestream activity as well as RSS mega aggregation.

 

I’m hoping that tools will become smarter in 2009 and help me manage my information sources more meaningfully – I will be keeping an eye on the DiSo project in general and the DiSo Dashboard  idea in particular,

I Never make Predictions and Never Will: IT Predictions For 2009

William Gibson’s quote “The Future is Already Here – It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed” is a powerful and practical idea for working out what is going to happen in the short term – extrapolate from current edge and current trends. Using my crystal ball to throw the light of the recent past into the near future I see network effects creating exponential growth in certain areas and it is on these areas I have focused on below.

Cloud Applications Get Very, Very Good

Google Apps became serious in 2008 and improved as the year passed – they demonstrate the potential of on-line applications with new abilities that come naturally from being on-line (collaboration, web integration and data lookup), platform neutrality (work on Mac, Linux, Microsoft) and are free!

In 2009 Microsoft will be releasing some form of on-line application – the probable result will be to validate the model and expand the market. Microsoft’s activities will be influential and important to bring the cloud to the awareness of mainstream users. The next version of Office is expected to have “cloud additions” like Office Live – which allows you to store and share files in the cloud but you still need local Microsoft application software to use them -Software plus Service (Microsoft software plus Internet service). This approach is useful -Microsoft will be able to sell software (and this would be a compelling upgrade) and the “normal” Office user will get cloud access within the comfort zone of their familiar Office environment – the common Microsoft extend and embrace strategy. More interesting will be the browser based Microsoft office that is due out in 2009 although Microsoft say it will offer “light editing” of office files many expect it to be a very slick operator.

We need competition in the cloud but the scale and resources required needs major investment and infrastructure – competition in this area really needs to be among the really big companies (apologies to Zoho who have a very extensive and nice cloud suite). The competition between Google and Microsoft will be good for cloud applications and the expectation is that Google have major improvements planned as a response to Microsoft’s moves.

Although Google apps are already very good my expectation is that by the end of 2009 cloud applications will be very, very good.

Lifestreaming Becomes Mainstream

During 2008 Twitter achieved its billionth message (tweet) went exponential and was adopted almost everywhere e.g. in  Government, Politics, business.  Like many major developments Twitter is relatively simple and this is what has driven its growth – it is easy to start, easy to use, easy to use in different ways and is highly extendable, for example the Twitter API carries 10 times the traffic of the visible Twitter site – this is used by 3^rd party twitter user interfaces but also for systems interfaces – e.g. to feed into Facebook. A suggestion of what of what to expect is the way web sites and blogs are now embedding twitter streams and for a change Twitter themselves even produced Twitter badges to assist with this. Increasing participation is speeding up the Internet and simple lifestreaming systems like twitter give people a foot in the door and an important presence in a “Global Village” of 1.5 Billion that is growing at 20% per year. Whenever I come across someone I expect them to have Net presence – I expect them to have a Lifestreaming and a Blog. Network effects are important and as more people use Lifestreaming and Twitter in particular the more important it will become and the bigger it will become.

Devices Get And Use Senses

The Graphical User Interface (GUI) enriched and enhanced computing – it liberated us from the command line with a more natural mode of working and allowed “normal” people to work with computers. However, the very success of the GUI has blinkered our vision of other approaches.  As computers permeate our everyday lives and environments they need to be more responsive to our daily lives and environments. The Wii and the iPhone – both are less powerful in hardware terms than similar products but both have been wildly successful due to the new way they interact with the user and the environment and both have brought in a new set of users. The Google Mobile App for iPhone is already pretty amazing but even more suggests what will be possible. Consider the impressive list of interfaces already present on the iPhone – location (GPS), visual (screen, camera), audio (speaker, microphone), touch, tilt, proximity, vibration – we should expect further exploitation of these. Other manufacturers will be seeking to catch up and improve upon the iPhone – I think we will see some very impressive sensory applications for mobile devices in 2009 – I’m looking forward to be able to talk to and listen to the net e.g. “Phone – is there a traffic problem around here” and have it search traffic reports in my location and respond “yes – burst water main 1 mile ahead” for example. Microsoft tag and Amazon’s iPhone application suggest some ways in which we can use sensors in our smartphones. 

The Web Gets More Programmable

With the web getting more participative information is generated at a higher speed and in greater quantities – tools to manage and cope are essential and those tools need to get smarter – this could be more a wish than a prediction but there are signs that smarter tools (agents) will become available to us. The “ecology” developing around Twitter gives some good examples. Twitter provides only a simple web interface but the Twitter API is heavily exploited by third parties to provide a huge range of applications based around Twitter. These applications indicate what can be done for users –  Twitchboard which listens to your twitter account, and forwards messages on to other internet services based on what it hears or Shozu which provides a system to integrate many of your services from your mobile.  The more adventurous user may like to try Microsoft’s simple MASH creator Popfly while more advanced users may which to try Yahoo Pipes, the Yahoo Application Platform, Google App engine  or Microsoft’s Azure to create their own applications like this Twitter search using Google App engine or this Twitter search using Microsoft Azure. By the end of 2009 I am expecting to see more people using RSS, Integration services and even programming services.

Netbooks Go Massive

Small used to mean expensive but now small means affordable – the combination of economic problems and the need for mobility means that netbooks will be overwhelmingly popular – everyone I meet just loves them. The Asus Eee was like the punks who set a new fashion trend which was appropriated by the major fashion houses so that it became mainstream, now every manufacturer offers netbooks and there is now more of a continuum of models from the smallest to the largest so that the concept of netbook starts t lose meaning – is a 12in netbook really a netbook?

The Cloud Goes Massive

In the same way that mobile phones are given away as part of a network contract we see computers being given away as part of Internet contracts for what use is a computer without a network these days? With the Economic problems people will be choosing between computing (local compute power and applications) and networking – cloud computing is there at the right time to offer a solution with free (or relatively cheap) cloud services with free (or relatively cheap) local computing. Network effects will expend the cloud – as more people use it the more useful it becomes and the more people use it. Microsoft’s development of their Cloud services (Live), Office and Windows 7 will all “legitimise” the cloud for mainstream users and expand the market further.

I Never make Predictions and Never Will: Media Predictions For 2009

Many comment that in our on-line activities will leave little past, however it is certainly true that our recent past is better documented that ever before. You can access my twitter activity from this time last year here is my first tweet for example and you can see all my past blogs including my Predictions for 2008 to see how good, bad or ugly they were.

William Gibson’s quote “The Future is Already Here – It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed” is a powerful and practical idea for working out what is going to happen in the short term – extrapolate the current edge and current trends. Things usually get smaller, lighter, easier, cheaper and more functional and common place – computers and telephones are good examples of this. We must also beware of technological determinism – we have to consider the complex interaction of contextual factors (economy, culture etc) that can change the “trajectory” of any extrapolation.

Using my crystal ball to throw the light of the recent past into the near future – it all seems quite cloudy to me and everything I see is on-line. The big theme for the year will be on-line everything and as more go on line network effects will cause more to go on-line resulting in an explosive growth in on-line activity. Despite of (or maybe even due to) economic problems 2009 could be a significant year for the information age – when many 20^th century physical industrial activities are moved on-line.

Let’s try to focus some of this.

Media

The industrial processes of the 20^th century to represent, distribute and consume information will continue to disappear – information is intangible anyway and so is ideal for on-line virtualisation.

Audio: Audio set the example of how information can move away from the physical the stories of Napster and iTunes are now history and the Nokia music service of 12 months unlimited free perpetual but protected downloads takes this model almost as far as it can go. With music content “infinitely” copy-able and accessible monetization has to move to an incidental model of distribution deals and sponsorship.  The SeeqPod service indicates that on-line streaming/access could be a significant development. It will always be useful to have off-line copies of your favourite music but the advantages of streaming are there for everyone. For consumers there can be an “infinite” range to listen to on-demand without management – just search. For the industry on-line listens can be instrumented (pun intended) and monetised with “incidental” and direct marketing. There is of course better control – music can be published free at source (e.g. from Sony), with the publisher monetising through “incidental” services but also allowing 3^rd party API and streaming access for downstream services. I like the concept of on-line downstream “radio stations” such as Blip.fm, Lastfm and Pandora. Indeed Pandora offers an excellent example of the benefits of the on-line model in driving further interest by what could be described as audio surfing.

Video: Youtube and the iPlayer provides good examples of what we might expect in video. iPlayer has many advantages (on-demand view) especially with the BBC “transmitting” live on the net via iPlayer. Youtube in particular has become such a mainstream distribution method – standard TV channels, organisations, political parties and of course individuals are all there (e.g. BBC, Channel 4, Obama, Google and have a look at the Governator).

Words: Newspapers and magazines all have good on-line presence and for many their on-line activity is increasingly necessary and important. Pew research finds that the Internet has overtaken newspaper as a source of news for many people and for young people the Net is the main source of news. All the newspapers now offer excellent RSS feeds and various incidental services such as reader and journalist blogs, podcasts and various systems interfaces for systems such as Facebook and Twitter for example.  The New York Times indicates how “newspapers” may develop – with the news of their API development program to “make the NYT programmable. To start 2009 the NYT release Represent – it mashes geographical information with various web data to present information about the politicians who represent geographical areas in New York. Books I feel will also succumb eventually – the physicality of a book (cover, typeface etc) are much like the physicality of old vinyl records. During 2008 e-book readers became a lot better and the advantages for industry and consumers over paper became tangible. Although the e-book reader really is useable now it is another purchase and item to carry around and look after – I would prefer to access an books on my smartphone or laptop/netbook. I think that e-books will break the market in for consolidation onto standard equipment – a prediction for 2010 I recon.     

MASH Media

I can’t resist it but in 2009 “the medium is the message” (sorry). Possibly the biggest development in media will be the way it all gets mixed up – once they all share the same medium then they can mix and match. 2008 has seen the start of this and it is becoming increasingly common – 2009 will see a lot more of this. Already in 2008 we see newspapers with plenty of additional media content – the Guardian tech weekly for example has audio, video, blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc and text – the Bivings Report indicates just how active Newspapers are on the web – e.g. all have RSS feeds, 75% accept comments on articles and most now have free access.  Cross platform media outlet Current indicate how media may develop – in their US Election coverage they have been combining video coverage with input from Twitter, Digg and 12seconds.TV.

All this and I haven’t even covered how Youtube is going live and HD.

The message is – if you want media you need to get on-line.

Education: For Better, For Worse, For Change

There is something strange going on in education – It’s getting both better and worse at the same time.

Exam grades have been improving year on year and this summer students achieved the best exam grades so far in A levels and GCSEs while International studies place our students in the global top 10. However, when students answer questions from past decades they do worse than their historic counterparts.

It seems no one is happy – there is the usual argument about exam “quality” – Richard Pike for example  complains that science exams standards have been eroded and that first year chemistry students require remedial education, employers complain that graduates lack soft skills and students enjoyment of science and maths has dropped remarkably.

All these things are true because education is changing.

Information, knowledge and education are embedded within culture and society – the nature of our culture and society changes and have changed radically over the last 20 years. Information is the stuff of education but our relationship to information is very different from that of 20 years ago and even 10 years ago. Back in 1988 information was a relatively slow and scarce resource – “locked up” in papers and books. Today both students and teachers have “at your fingertips” Internet access to overwhelming amounts of information – today information is a fast and overloaded resource.

Methods of dealing with a resource that is slow and scarce are different to those needed to deal with a resource that is fast and overloaded. With slower moving scarce information education focused on the subject with deeper operations on the available information. With faster moving overloaded information education is focused on information with broader operations on the available information – the ability to find, filter, assess, use and communicate information

Michael Shayer found students today were better at tasks requiring quick, descriptive responses whereas students from the 1970’s were better at deeper more “complex” thinking. Shayer goes on to relate these changes to the changes in society and culture – “everything in the past 30 years has speeded up. It’s about reacting quickly but at a shallow level”. Information management and “soft” skills are often referred to as “dumbing down” but I would argue that they are just different and that they are as valuable and complex as the deeper subject skills many value more.

The one experiment that can’t be done is to observe how students from the 1970’s and 1980’s might cope with the information rich world of today. Our students, teachers and education system have adapted to the changes in society and technology. Today we use information technology as a tool for mechanical (e.g. simple arithmetic) and memory tasks to free time for information handling tasks such as research and the application of information to problems. Subject operation is different – instead of “deep” within subject questions we seek to operate more broadly and ask questions that relate subject knowledge to the world we live in.

The curriculum is seeking to adapt to changes in technology, culture and society. The Rose report  for primary education suggests that six broad “areas of learning” could replace individual subjects. Looking ahead to the year 2020 The Gilbert report for secondary schools calls for increasing curriculum breadth and more active, collaborative and creative learning. Looking at the global economy the Leitch report calls for Developing a culture of learning (integrating learning with life and work) and the development of communications, collaboration, research and problem solving skills.

The various sectors of society want different things from education and as a result no one is entirely happy. Universities want deeper “hard” subject knowledge and competence. Employers want subject competence but also want adaptable people with “soft” skills. Institutions want to be able to test and measure performance.  The government wants entrepreneurs and innovators. On the one hand society wants “hard”, measureable, “traditional” education yet on the other hand it wants “soft” and innovative education.

Somehow education must reconcile the need for measurable deep subject skills with the need for innovation which develops best on a broad base. The only answer is for the education system to be increasingly flexible and adaptive and to offer choices. One approach is through the personalisation of education suggested by Rammel together with a choice of learning/teaching/course/qualification styles.

The questions about education I am most interested in are:

What do students think?

What do students want?

Cloud the Issues

This blog discusses cloud computing in relation to organisational culture and the forms of cloud computing that may be adopted as a result.

The issues with cloud computing are the same issues that have existed on the Internet since it was created issues of identity as constructed through relationships to control and ownership. This shouldn’t be surprising as the term “cloud computing” is after all based upon the network symbol for the Internet.

Relationships to control and ownership are formed through specific requirements such as legal obligations and through psychology.   

Approaching Cloud – First Impressions describes some of the system types available for cloud computing – they can be regarded as if on a continuum from the more traditional “product on-site” approach (not really cloud) through to a fully MASHED DIY approach.

Those who wish or need to assert identity through strong control and ownership of information are unlikely to feel comfortable with the concepts of cloud computing and would be most comfortable with traditional “product on-site” adoptions. Such individuals or organisation may also find hosted products with appropriate Service Level Agreements acceptable.

 Those who are or can be more relaxed about control and ownership may feel  comfortable with approaches from mid range cloud services approaches from Microsoft live@edu or Google apps for education  through to the more extreme Mashup Corporation, Mesh Collaboration or ideas of Clay Shirky  in “Here Comes Everybody” which web 2 and cloud computing make possible.

One of the most frequently discussed issues when talking about the use of Cloud computing in teaching is that of ownership of teaching materials whether these belong to the organisation or to the teacher or some form of shared ownership in between. If the organisation exerts control and ownership over materials then an IT system which allows this control must be implemented – most likely product on-site installs, hosted systems or possibly an organisational controlled cloud system such as  Microsoft live@edu or Google apps for education . Where the individual control and ownership is agreed then teachers’ personal resources can be used and MASHED in. Where DIY MASHUP is used then the organisation has to consider what happens if/when the individual leaves, changes  or withdraws material and what that individual publishes in public space – these are as you might appreciate issues of identity as expressed through ownership and control.  It is easier to exert an identity if you control and own the medium and the collection of messages available on the medium. Organisations which allow a MASH of personal DIY lose the ability to control the messages – they have to trust their people and truly become the sum of the parts.

The advantage of exerting control is that you can exert a clear identity – a particular “mission statement” in a particular style. This suites a “command and control” style of management and is effective where there are clear objectives and outcomes – it is particularly suited to sectors where known repetitive and fixed operations are required. The disadvantage is that the organisation is less flexible than it could be – everything is pointed in the same direction and may not see the changes coming up behind – good for when you know where you are going but not suited for activities where you need to adapt to the unexpected – where you don’t know where you are let alone where you are going – by this I am referring to areas where invention, innovation and creativity are required.

Relaxing control and ownership offers the advantages of a dynamic flexible organisation defined by its members. This suites a flat, networked, “self organising” style of management  - such an organisation may be difficult to point in one direction but able to see in many directions, to generate multiple ideas and be flexible – such an organisation is best suited to invention, innovation and research. The disadvantage of course is that identity is expressed dynamically through the activity of members which can lead to fragmentation and anarchy.

All organisations are different and will accommodate and assimilate technologies and opportunities according to their unique culture. In my opinion education is about recognising individual differences and developing individual potentials and as such I argue that educational organisations should be relatively relaxed with control and identity – that they should be considering their unique approaches to personal DIY systems for the near future.  The technology exists and continues to develop but is the psychology there?

Approaching Clouds – First Impressions

Increasing amounts of our lives are mediated by IT and developments in educational, social and technical culture require organisations to develop systems to deliver expectations.

Back in June 2008 I wrote “MLE to PLE a framework for considering systems” which attempted categories approach and offer criteria to help evaluate systems.

This blog looks at the systems for learning being considered at EHWLC to meet expectations and my first impressions.

Product on-site

This is the traditional approach – purchase software and hardware and install in your systems centre. The system we have been having a look at is Microsoft Sharepoint.

In many ways Sharepoint presents the issues of any traditional product on-site system. I have found Sharepoint to be time consuming and overly complex. Due to the logistics involved (product “manufacture” and provision to customer sites) I have found Sharepoint to be out if date at the time of delivery. It offers a traditional perspective on web 2.0, focused on Office documents when what I am looking for is web page “in-situ” creation and editing where you only need a browser. We are trying to move away from the sharing and circulation of word documents and Excel spreadsheets yet Sharepoint encourages this – not surprising really. One advantage to Sharepoint is it’s tight integration with your internal organisational systems (if you are using Active Directory). However, with the increasing number of non-organisational users you may wish to include (e.g. franchise partners etc) this approach presents problems.

Product hosted

Instead of installing a product in your system centre this approach is to use the system centre of a 3^rd party to run (host) your system and access it via interfaces across the Internet. The 3rd party can offer business continuity and security. This approach offloads the work of running the data centre systems but presents the limitations of the product. The system we are considering is the ULCC hosted/serviced e-learning.

We have only just started looking at the ULCC hosted service. I am hoping that it errs more towards a service rather than hosting a product. One of the problems of a product on-site is that we are all so busy that finding the enormous amount of time required to get a system on the scale we are considering started up is very difficult. With the ULCC e-learning services we hope to be able to contract technical implementation time to the service providers so that actually provisioning a service becomes a possibility. One of the major areas I will be looking at are the Interfaces we can use to interface with our other systems

Service – Cloud (Organisational)

With this model you use the system centre of a 3^rd party to run (host) your system but are not concerned about the technology behind the service – your focus is on the service itself. We have been experimenting with two cloud services for many months Microsoft live@edu  and Google apps for education  

Neither of these systems is fully ready yet and neither offer all I want or in a format I want but the potential is fantastic. For both these systems we have batch provisioned user accounts from files that can be generated by our MIS systems and both systems are very easy to administer. Both systems provide services which Microsoft and Google offer on their cloud sites (blogs, email, collaborative workspaces etc).

Organisational DIY

If you are lucky enough to have your own programmers this approach is to use your own specialists to program and design your own system. This could be on-site, hosted or in the cloud. We are working with Centime  with this approach. We have identified a great deal we would like to work on such as RSS feeds, interfaces, web page “in-situ” creating and editing etc. A major problem is the time and resources required to engineer these features.

Personal DIY – pure MASH

With this approach we use and integrate whatever people (learners and staff etc) choose to use. W e have been developing awareness and skillsets in many cloud systems for storage, blogging, feed aggregation, website creation etc.

I have found this approach fast moving, dynamic and exciting. The main problem has been with the “paradigm” – most users are unfamiliar and seem uncomfortable with freedoms and self responsibility of a personal DIY approach to their IT. Another problem has been with integrating the diverse systems into something coherent.

First Impressions

My first impressions are that none of the systems offers a complete solution of what I would like to see.

- A system that is inclusive of all our potential users – current staff, students and partners but also potential users and those who have left us (alumni).

- A system that is extremely easy to use and administer

- A system that provides data interfaces for college systems to use (something to identify the user to the system plus associated data)

- A system that is dynamic – easily and quickly able to change (agile)

The full Personal DIY MASHUP approach is I feel the direction we need to point ourselves in and to use those systems that help us to move in that direction.

Microsoft Sharepoint is too complex, slow to change and backward looking but is likely to have a place in a limited traditional organisational deployment perhaps as a development of our staff Intranet and replacement of the Pool drive.

Microsoft live@edu  and Google apps for education  - I have a “philosophical” problem with these – why provision college associated Microsoft live or Google accounts when people can do this themselves. Does a student really want to use a college associated email (e.g. martin.king@gspace.wlc.ac.uk ) for the rest of their lives. More likely is that these services can be used for a traditional secure project in the cloud and this is where our early experiments with these systems have taken place e.g. departmental collaborative space and calendars.

For me this leaves a combination of Organisational DIY (Centime) or service/hosted systems (ULCC hosted/serviced e-learning) provisioned in such a way to facilitate – pure MASH personal DIY.

As a test of these and one of the first projects I would like to look at is the replacement of college provisioned student email with students own email.