David Jennings (combined feed)

Round-up of recent and current work

2013年11月14日 15:48:42 +0000

In the four-minute video below, I describe how a small charity created a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for over 1,000 people. This was the open course in Technology Enhanced Learning (ocTEL) which I managed from inception to completion of its first run. This is one of a set of films about projects that the Association for Learning Technology has recently published.

ocTEL is one of the major projects I've been working on over the past year. Here are some others.

For Myscience, which runs the national Science Learning Centres and National STEM Centre, I co-wrote an Online Strategy for the continuing professional development which they provide to teachers. My company was the lead contractor for a team including Seb Schmoller, David Read, Dominic Tinley and Jonathan Drori. Having got approval to proceed the strategy from Myscience's stakeholders, we are now exploring how we might help with implementation.
The work that I mentioned last year to provide support to support to learned societies considering the transition to Gold Open Access publishing is now available. The publishing businesses of learned societies operate in a complex ecosystems with a rich variety of disciplinary traditions and institutional histories. Being helpful is not always as easy as it might seem.
Following last year's work for the Higher Education Academy — to reorient their online resources to make them more useful to teaching communities of practice — Knowledge Integration won a contract to implement a new repository and take forward some of the recommendations. I am helping them ensure that the implications of this for the user experience are borne in mind.
My main current project involves the creation of another large-scale online course for adult learners. The Citizens' Maths project aims to develop free and open online maths course that could support hundreds of thousands of learners. The first run of the first part of the course is scheduled to be next summer. The project page has more details. I am the project manager.

Meanwhile, I had hoped to revamp this website this year, but it is now likely to be some time into 2014 before this happens. It still runs on the same Movable Type platform as it did ten years ago. If you know anyone who understands the details of making the transition to Wordpress (including maintaining old URLs so that inbound links here are not broken), please ask them to get in touch. I will pay well for the right kind of help. And once that transition is complete, more frequent blogging will follow.

Give My Regards To Eighth Street (Exact Change) by Morton Feldman

2013年2月03日 23:01:36 +0000

djalchemi's review: "There's a widely-quoted anecdote near the start of this book where Morton Feldman shows John Cage a string quartet he has written. Cage looked at it a long time and then said, "How did you make this?" In a very weak voice Feldman answers, "I don't know how I made it." Cage is excited and delighted by this response. I confess I haven't read all the essays in this book, but have put them aside. After reading a third or a half, I came to the conclusion that Feldman really didn't know how he made his compositions, and I felt some sympathy for his old teacher who replied to his explanations with "Morton, I don't understand a word you're saying." That's not to say his essays are uninteresting, but they are frequently opaque and their relation to either his music or to familiar (to me) cultural reference points is often oblique. I shall marinate myself in more of his music and then see if I feel moved to dip into more of the essays."

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk

2012年11月28日 23:09:37 +0000

djalchemi's review: "I've been meaning to read this book for 20 years or so since I first heard of it and its strong reputation. It's easy to put off reading about Wittgenstein because it feels like it's going to be hard work. If I'd realised how long the book was, I might never have started. But I dipped into the Kindle 'free sample' version on a whim, and was hooked -- even when I downloaded the full version, I had no idea that it was 670 pages worth. Happily the book keeps pulling you forward, weaving together a man, his times and his ideas, all clearly and expertly portrayed. And what a man, what times, what ideas! I cannot think of a better biography I've read, and it's given me both strength and desire to want to tackle Wittgenstein's original writings, which have been taunting me from my shelves for many a year."

Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity by David Lynch

2012年11月18日 21:36:59 +0000

djalchemi's review: "You don't have to be a fan of David Lynch's films to like this book, but it surely helps. It begins and ends with Lynch's reflections on his 30+ years' practice of Transcendental Meditation (TM). The gist is a development of Flaubert's dictum "Be regular and orderly in your life... so that you may be violent and original in your work" that goes on to another level, literally, in its appreciation of how meditation has allowed Lynch to tap into a Unified Field (his italics) of consciousness. His account is not out of sync with the testimonials of other advocates of TM, but (a) it clearly operates at a level beyond language, and Lynch's own descriptions don't really come to terms with this: they remain mostly superficial and repetitive, and (b) as someone who's done a course in TM and not had the same experiences he claims, he makes it all seem like falling off a log, so has no guidance for those like me that don't get it straight away. The book is written as a series of short observations, few of which are more than two pages, and, aside, from TM, cover various autobiographical comments about how various ideas in Lynch's work emerged, plus a range of values that he holds dear. These generally aren't very detailed (though he does admit he has no idea what the box and the key are about in Mulholland Drive), so you don't need to be an obsessive fan, but if you don't know or care much for his films, you may want to skip through them even faster than I did."

Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! by Douglas Coupland

2012年11月10日 14:50:56 +0000

djalchemi's review: "From the title, I expected that this book was mostly going to give us Coupland's take on the significance of McLuhan's work. There is a little of that, but only a little, and in a footnote on page 147 Coupland makes clear this is a "general biography with limited space" (it turns out the title is quoting the words scripted for McLuhan's cameo in Annie Hall by Woody Allen). It's interesting both in terms of the short insights Coupland does have space to include, and, if you're a Coupland fan like me, it's clear that some of the qualities that he praises in McLuhan are ones that he has sought to emulate in his own novels. Not bad, could have been better."

Galileo's Daughter: A Drama of Science, Faith and Love by Dava Sobel

2012年11月10日 14:30:08 +0000

djalchemi's review: "I read this on the recommendation of my friend Fred, and because I'm fascinated by the ructions that went on as the heliocentric view of the solar system gathered momentum (I'd recommend John Banville's Doctor Copernicus and Kepler, and Koestler's Sleepwalkers). I was generally disappointed. The book took me four months to finish, albeit with a break. The slant you get on Galileo is much less about his skills as a savvy dramatist and self-publicist -- see Paul Feyerabend's take -- and much more humble and pious, shown particularly through his relationship with his elder daughter (his two other children remain in the background, in Galileo's thoughts and feelings as well as in this account, if Sobel is right). The book takes a long time to get going: it feels like the first half is scene-setting. What I found most interesting was the account of Galileo's meticulous attempts to avoid precisely the fate that eventually befell him. He got everything signed off in triplicate by the church, having schmoozed everyone up to and including the pope, before he published. But apparently the pope needed a scapegoat, or something to make him look strong and distract attention from other political problems, so Galileo was persecuted and imprisoned (mainly as a guest of indulgent and sympathetic dukes and bishops) despite his best efforts. What annoyed me was that this volte face by the papacy is dealt with very quickly and superficially -- while we get pages and pages of what's growing in the convent garden, or what's happened in Galileo's wine cellar. The central, defining dramatic turn of events on which Galileo's personal story hangs is left underexplained."

What I did last summer

2012年10月02日 16:51:23 +0000

To state the obvious, I have blogging block — a fairly chronic case of it. The reasons for this, and my abortive attempts to overcome it, are fascinating from one perspective; self-indulgent from another. Therein lies part of the riddle that has undone me. Suffice to say, for now, that I still believe in the value of reflective writing about experience, and of sharing half-formed thoughts as part of a conversation with people who share my interests. I plan to get back to it.

Lest you imagine that I have just been convolving with my navel these past months, here's a quick resumé of recent and current projects:

Working with University of Derby Online to explore the feasibility of developing online Access to HE provision. This was a small project and in one sense it focused on a very specific question within quite a restricted canvas. In another sense it raised big issues about how to make Higher Education more accessible, less rigid and better suited to the lives of people who weren't 'bred' to be full-time students. More agile, in my terminology.
Working with the Higher Education Academy to advise how to reorient their online resources to make them more useful to the diverse communities of practice — across HE teaching — that the Academy supports.There are subtle, but profound, changes afoot as national agencies navigate the transition from publisher-cum-gatekeeper role to being more facilitative in the era when open online resources are distributed and abundant.
Managing a project to identify the support that scholarly socities need to make the transition to Gold Open Access publishing, which has been given a shot in the arm in the UK by the Finch Report. Our project then aims to commission or produce resources to help meet those needs for support. I'm project manager on behalf of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), who have been commissioned by the Open Access Implementation Group.
Also for ALT, I'm managing the Open Course in Technology Enhanced Learning project (the website hasn't been formally launched yet, so no link, but you can find it if you dig). This is also aimed at teachers in higher education, encouraging them to explore the ways they could use technology in their teaching. The course is a MOOC — Massive Open Online Course. The soul of MOOCs, whether saintly or demonic, is hotly contested at the moment, especially among learning technologists, so it's an interesting time to be designing such a course. It's due to run next year.

For all but one of these projects, I've been working with my regular collaborator Seb Schmoller. While I've been working on them — and I was also fortunate enough to be invited on two holidays this summer — my work on Agile Learning has moved on to the back burner. Most recently I got the Agile Learning wiki to the point where almost stands by itself as an introduction to the principles and practice. I also wrote a series of articles for New Media Knowledge — here's the round-up that points to the three main articles. I expect to stay with the agile theme for as long as I continue to do anything that could pass as work, but for now the Agile Learning blog, twitter, Facebook and Google+ (!) are lying mostly fallow until the season changes.

A Lot of Hard Yakka by Simon Hughes

2012年6月02日 19:11:58 +0000

djalchemi's review: "I bought this book on the strength of its reviews and reputation, looking for some insight into the heroically unglamorous life of the county cricketer. I was disappointed that what I got was mostly a string of rather predictable 'humorous' anecdotes about some of the personalities in the game during the time Hughes played it. The insights, when they come, are mostly petty is-it-any-wonder grumbles about the administration of English cricket or fatuous one-line observations like "Ultimately, professional cricket is entertainment, a spectacle with performers." I considered putting it to one side about a third of the way through, but did read to the end. I wish now I'd spent that time finding another, better book on the subject. Measured against a book like Dean Wareham's Black Postcards -- another memoir of a unstarry career in a field obsessed with stars -- Hughes's account is both lightweight and a long, repetitive slog."

Tom Phillips and A Humument: Essays, notes

2012年5月22日 22:22:40 +0000

A year ago, almost to the day, I got an email out of the blue from Lucy Shortis, who runs the office of my favourite artist, Tom Phillips. She said some nice things about a very old blog post of mine, and asked if I would consider writing a "short biography of Tom" for a new website for him. I drummed my fingers on my desk for half an hour before replying, thinking it might seem creepily over-keen to accept the challenge within five minutes. Still, I was round at the studio to discuss the work with Lucy the next morning, a Saturday.

I already had several books of Tom Phillips' work, none of which I'd given as much attention as I would have wished. (I used to think of these enormously rich works as resources to keep me alert in my retirement. Via this commission, I enjoyed the luxury of bringing forward a few weeks of that retirement.) One of the first things I did was track down and buy some more of his books. To a dabbling hobbyist like me, Aspects of Art was particularly useful in providing a concise, straightforward account of both Tom's perspective and the grammar of art history that he draws on.

It took me weeks of research before I felt ready to start writing, and, thus when I did I was so marinated in the rich play of ideas in Tom's work, that I couldn't quite bring myself to write a 'straight' biography. My first attempt was well over the word limit and so wide of the mark that I had to put it to one side. No matter. Try again. With a little guidance from Lucy, I came up with this attempt which went live with the new website a couple of weeks ago. Moreover, Lucy was kind enough to indulge me by finding a home for my original essay.

The new website is one of a series of happenings this month that mark Tom Phillips' 75th birthday. (There's a neat symmetry about this number for me, since I first encountered Tom's work at his 1987 exhibition in Sheffield, "50 Years of Tom Phillips, 100 Years of the Mappin Art Gallery".) Other birthday events include two exhibitions in London and the publication of the fifth edition of Tom's book A Humument, which he's been working on for 46 years and counting.

Regarding the last of these, I pitched to The Spectator to write an article about A Humument and you can read it in the current edition of the magazine or online. Once again, my first draft of this went way over the word limit and included playful embellishments that had to be cut for publication. Now I've gone back to that draft to create a "Director's Cut" version. Like most Director's Cuts, it's by no means better than the version where I had my wings clipped: it rambles along down several diversions; it has pretentious flourishes; its editing is baggy. If you want a decent overview of A Humument, read the Spectator piece. If you're part of the niche audience that's interested in a few of the many different directions in which A Humument leads, this is for you.

The artist Tom Phillips will be 75 on 24th May. Alongside two new exhibitions and the launch of a new website to mark this milestone, he is publishing the Fifth Edition¹ of his "treated Victorian novel", A Humument. When he began work on it, over 45 years ago, Phillips was himself unsure about this unusual work, which inhabits a limbo between coffee table art book and Finnegans Wake. Apparently he initially only worked on it in the evenings, having "resolved not to squander precious daylight hours of work time on what he suspected may be a wild all consuming folly." It could have been a dated Sixties curio, but it has endured, and somehow seems to have anticipated successive generations of thought about image, text and meaning, right up to the iPad era.

Revision is the essence of A Humument, or, as the book itself says, "the changes are the method." From the beginning the text was reworked by being drawn over, cut up, highlighted and re-sequenced, repurposed and generally subjected to every adulteration you could imagine. Each edition since 1980 has between 40 and 100 pages revised from the previous one.

Some backstory may be useful to explain what is going on here. Legend has it that, in 1966 and under the influence of ideas about chance operations, Phillips committed to take as the foundation for his next work the first book that he could find for threepence. That book, discovered second-hand in a shop on Peckham Rye, was a long-forgotten Victorian romance novel in journal form, A Human Document by W.H. Mallock. Phillips set about effacing the pages of this book with sketched line drawings and gouache swathes of colour.

Alongside cut-ups and fold ups, one of the trademarks of a A Humument is the "rivers in the type", as Phillips calls them, the thin lines of white page left untouched by his drawing, which join disparate phrases, words or part-words from across the original text into new phrases and blank verse. From these rivers emerge Phillips' own poetry² along with, for example, lines from Samuel Beckett that Phillips has found "lying latent" in Mallock's novel.

In the mid-sixties William Burroughs was advancing the idea that the quasi-random manipulation of texts could tap into subconscious cognition, putting you in touch with what you know but do no know that you know, and thus predict the future. To the extent that Phillips‘ makes any claims to divining the future, he does so with a mischievous wink, but he has spoken of taking A Humument to Burroughs (then resident in London) to seek his opinion. During an eight hour visit without food, drink or even a seat, Burroughs made several suggestions that hadn't occurred to Phillips³. Whether any of these made it into later versions is unclear.

Via John Cage, another advocate of chance, Phillips was introduced to the I Ching and the idea of a text that could be consulted at random. Mallock's A Human Document became Phillips' I Ching. "Its vocabulary is rich and lush and its range of reference and allusion large. I have so far [1980] extracted from it over one thousand texts, and have yet to find a situation, statement or thought which its words cannot be adapted to cover." As well as A Humument, it has formed the basis of Phillips' opera (Irma, first performed in 1973), found its way into several of the illustrations he made for his translation of Dante's Inferno (1983).

When postmodernism became the talk of the Reviews sections, with its motifs of intertextuality, deconstructing narratives and the erasure of the author, it was as though A Humument was already there, ready-made, saying "welcome aboard". Phillips had been familiar with the ideas of people like Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Umberto Eco from the beginning of his work on the book, but he has always seemed to approach his adventures in this field with a twinkle in his eye rather than arch of his brow. He wanted, he wrote, to "do" structuralism, rather than to talk about it.

"The reader changes the book / That book changes the reader" read the rivers of type on the back of the new edition, while the flyleaf says the book is considered the "defining masterpiece of postmodernism", in a quote attributed to Bill Hurrell. The reader is invited to do a little work to appreciate the wit of Hurrell's claim.

And over the last decade and a half A Humument has taken on parallel lives, first on the web and then with its own iPad app (including a chance-driven "oracle" feature — referring back to the I Ching again — that digitally combines two pages, "your fate and fortune to divine"). The publisher and designer James Bridle, who has articulated some of the freshest ideas about where books might be going in the era of digital ink, says of Phillips' Humument project, "I've always used it as an example of something which has always been perceived as intrinsically physical, inseparable from that form, but where in fact the author, from the very beginning, has always wanted to do something more with it, which has only been possible with the advent of the digital edition."⁴

Lest it should seem that A Humument be a literary Zelig — blending into powerful ideas of the time while remaining enigmatically nondescript — be in no doubt that it has a strong sense of longstanding traditions of bookcraft. And it's not afraid to mess with them. Notionally it is the story of frustrated love for Irma (who is native to Mallock's original text) felt by Bill Toge (a protagonist of Phillips' invention). In both this narrative, and some visual motifs of obelisks and arches, it parallels the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an elaborately decorated and illustrated work, first published in 1499. I confess I've never been able to follow the story. This may be partly down to the fact that A Humument is also haunted by the ghost of Tristam Shandy. Furthermore, recent revisions feature a smaller profile for Toge⁵, since his appearances are restricted to those pages where the words "together" or "altogether" feature in Mallock's original text, and these pages have now been exhausted.

Throughout the many incarnations of A Humument in physical and digital forms, and its derivatives in opera, song and painting, what it lacks in narrative coherence is more than compensated for by Phillips' deft and uncanny ability at meaning making. He has developed an intuitive knack for adding layers, links and echoes of other works (his own and others). "So the changes made the book continue," runs the text. How much of what passes for originality is in fact a continuous layering and revision of what has gone before? I asked a friend if he could express this in proper metre: A Humument exhumes text long-forgot; tells how the compost of antiquity, lies under all originality.

Footnotes

Technically there are now six editions: one published by Tetrad Press in 1973, followed by five editions published by Thames & Hudson in 1980, 1987 ("First revised"), 1998 ("Second revised"), 2005 ("Fourth") and 2012 ("Fifth").
For example, My story of a soul’s surprise, a soul / which crossed a chasm in whose depths I find / I found myself and nothing more than that, which Phillips uses in his Inferno book.
Phillips discussed this visit in conversation with his friend and publisher, Hansjörg Mayer at the ICA on 24 November 20071124, ICA.
James kindly gave me this quote while working on his review of A Humument, which you can read here.
I wrote this on the basis of Tom Phillips' comment in the 2005 Postscript to the Introduction of the Fourth Edition, "One new tendency that announces itself in the present reworking is what seems to be the beginning of a slow farewell to Bill Toge who has now made an appearance on every page that offered him a nominal home." However, the (completely new) Introduction to the Fifth Edition restates the self-imposed rule that "Toge should appear on every page that included the words 'together' or 'altogether'". Perhaps, then, Toge's appearances do not lessen in number, but rather diminish in significance. To check this my comparing successive editions would require more painstaking scholarship than I have had time for so far.

Suicide of the West by Richard Koch

2012年3月05日 11:41:46 +0000

djalchemi's review: "Given the scope that the authors, Richard Koch and Chris Smith (yes, that Chris Smith, the one in the House of Lords), set themselves, this is a brilliantly lucid and concise book that takes in the last two millennia of Western civilisation and gives a none-too-rosy assessment of how that civilisation is a victim of its own success, destroying itself from the inside. On page 2, they set out their stall: "We ask four questions: Is there anything special about western civilisation? Why has it been so successful? Why is it now threatened? Will it survive?" And that's exactly what they do. In fact they give pretty plausible answers to all but the last of those questions. Step by step, the book assesses the contribution to West of science, liberalism, optimism, Christianity, individualism and growth. I have nowhere near the competence as a historian to argue with the detail of the case they make in each of these areas, but they seem fairly convincing. I grew up under the influence of post-modernism and its "incredulity towards grand narratives" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postmodern_Condition), so I'm inclined to be wary of the neatness of the analysis in the book, and how it all ties together in one big sweep. Still, it was difficult to find fault. There were only two things about the book that left me unsatisfied. First, on growth, the authors broadly stick to orthodoxy: "The issue with growth is not whether it is desirable – of course it is" while trying to argue that post-industrial growth of the creative economy won't be harmful the way industrial growth has been over the past 200 years. "For those of us who fear the suicide of the West, economic developments are the most benign counter-indicator. Except, that is, for the looming shadow of ecological suicide," they write. But they duck that shadow. Second, the prognosis for how to avoid Western civilisation caving in on itself is broadly that we should keep calm and carry on. Don't let the grumpy intellectuals and the media dampen our hereditary optimism; don't let post-Newtonian science undermine our faith in certainty and the scientific method; don't enforce liberalism on non-Western states, because that undermines liberal values themselves -- and so on. These different tendencies for Western values to be followed to the point where they eat their own foundations seem so endemic that Koch and Smith's exhortation to go Back to Basics on the Grand Project comes across as unconvincing, even to them."

Deskilling Learning? On "strong" and "weak" agile learning

2012年3月02日 16:15:37 +0000

Having saddled myself with the agile learning term, one of the hazards I can't complain about is having to explain it: What does it really mean? What's different about it? What's agile about it. There's a working definition of the key elements on the agile learning wiki, which I continue to develop slowly and sporadically. Recently I've been reflecting on some more nuanced, but still half-formed, ideas, which feel more like blog-conversations than wiki-definitions. These are partly prompted by reading Douglas Rushkoff's excellent Program or Be Programmed (which deserves a blog post of its own), and also by the Learning Analytics course, devised by George Siemens and colleagues, which I'm currently participating in (and blogging about in detail over here).

What I'm toying with at the moment is a distinction between "weak" agile learning and "strong" agile learning. This is after John Searle's distinction between "weak" and "strong" artificial intelligence, but I suspect this kinship may be tenuous and, certainly, vainglorious. They might equally well be called, say, pragmatic agile learning and principled agile learning — or something else.

Weak agile learning is based on whatever works, as long as it's within the definition. Analytics, automated processes, traditional tutor-led power relationships are all fine if they're open (as in open educational resources), collective and flexible.
Strong agile learning is committed to the values of making everything — process, resources, algorithms and the context in which the learning is framed — visible, transparent and manipulable to the learner. So it's taking a more radical definition of openness.

The weak version allows for things like intelligent curriculums, gamification and personalisation by the provider. The strong version wants to trust in learners' intelligence and give them the information and the data to personalise their own experiences.

Pragmatically, I'm drawn to the weak version. I distrust purism, believing every oyster needs some grit (for most of my three decades as a vegetarian, I've eaten meat a few times a year). But ethically and aesthetically I feel the strong version needs shouting about, because gung-ho enthusiasm for the Big Data/Scientific Management seems to be leading down a dangerous path. Let me explain.

Why do people insist on using big data and AI techniques to add more intelligence and power to the provision of learning? Why not focus more on the receiving and acting-on end? Well, we know why, don't we? It's because the receiving and acting end is unruly and unpredictable. But what's the end game of trying to build all the intelligence into the provision? If it were successful, then the education system would have succeeded in deskilling the act of learning. Yes, deskilling learning so that anyone can do it without thinking or stressing too much* — what kind of oxymoron is that? It's not sustainable, in that it doesn't lead to robust, resilient learners who can deal with genuinely messy, unpredictable circumstances.

I suspect it's not achievable, either, because learners too are messy and unpredictable. What they take in is affected by all sorts of environmental contingencies — the state of their blood sugar, hormones, preoccupations with tonight's football match, or what they learned in another subject yesterday — and a million other factors that are beyond the modelling capabilities of any Intelligent Tutoring System. Sometimes they learn against the grain, wilfully or tacitly detecting that the tutorial agenda is at variance with their own, and thus taking away the opposite lesson to the one intended. The strong version of agile learning doesn't fight this, but celebrates it, encouraging learners to adapt and own their own learning paths — by all means in dialogue with, or under the guidance of, a tutor. Of course, they will make mistakes. Sometimes they freewheel down the path of least resistance; others they bite off more than they can chew and get well and truly stuck. In the long run, they learn from these mistakes. They not follow a steady, incremental path, but they emerge better able to learn in world that hasn't been tailored to their needs.

Weak agile learning says that if building the world's smartest tutor provides quick, accessible and flexible learning opportunities, let's do it. Strong agile learning worries that this is a Pyrrhic victory: learners win the battle of achieving short-term objectives, but lose the war of becoming resourceful and independent lifelong learners. The drive towards intelligent tutors and curriculums falls into the trap that Nicholas Negroponte identifies in his foreword to Beyond the Hole in the Wall: Discover the Power of Self-Organized Learning (click on "Look inside" to read the foreword):

Learning and teaching are not symmetrical. They are not the flip sides of the same coin, in spite of the fact that almost all papers and conversations on education assume they are.

The working assumption is this: solve teaching and you will get learning. Even if true in part, it addresses only some kinds of learning and never really attempts to understand the learning of learning itself.

I could go on. There are many links my mind wants to make. But I'm trying to take a leaf out of Clive Shepherd's blogging book, and keep my posts to an hour and a few hundred words, rather than half a day and a few thousand words.

* I know that intelligent curriculums and personalised tutorials would deliver challenges, but they'd always be challenges with just the right amount of stress to motivate without intimidating — a kind of stress-free stress.

Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff

2012年3月02日 13:21:30 +0000

djalchemi's review: "This is the best book I've read about the promise, perils and ethics of living online. It's short and concise, but frequently profound in the conclusions it draws. Rushkoff has a deep sense of what it means to "be digital" and work extensively with thinking machines. He communicates what's at stake in terms of our relationships, connectedness and anxieties, without lapsing into crude "internet makes us stupid" scaremongering. Here is for example on the black magic of web searching: "With computers and networks, unlike our calculators, we don’t even know what we are asking our machines to do, much less how they are going to go about doing it. Every Google search is—at least for most of us—a Hail Mary pass into the datasphere, requesting something from an opaque black box. How does it know what is relevant? How is it making its decisions? Why can’t the corporation in charge tell us?" Highly recommended."

Notes on Emergent Learning

2012年1月23日 17:44:18 +0000

As part of updating the wiki on agile learning, I've been reading up on Emergent Learning. As long ago as 2004, Michael Feldstein was arguing that "Emergent Learning" is an oxymoron. In brief, his argument was that the term was being used very loosely to describe any circumstance where learning emerges as a by-product of collective activity. Certainly that looseness still exists in some accounts. However, I'm interested in digging into a couple of examples where the term may be applicable in the strict sense to which Feldstein is committed. It turns out that this leads to some counter-intuitive conclusions.

Here is the nub of Feldstein's argument:

[S]ome philosophers of mind suggest that consciousness is an emergent property of brains. Each individual neuron is simply a mechanical switch responding to triggers in its immediate environment. But when you string a bunch of these switches together in the right way, you suddenly have an aware being. The neurons aren’t individually conscious; it’s the brain as a collective entity that posesses the emergent property of consciousness.

When people talk about "emergent learning" these days, this is not generally what they mean. What they generally mean is some form of rapid consensus-building in which a group of people can share observations and make coordinated decisions without any one person filling the role of executive command and control. This is, no doubt, an important phenomenon to understand and try to cultivate. However, it is not emergence. A democratic decision-making process is not sufficient for an action to be called "emergent." Almost by definition, if you have the kind of self- and group-awareness that is usually entailed when we use the word "learning", you can’t have emergence. You can say that a colony of ants "learns" what the best foraging strategy is, but it is the colony as a whole that "learns," not the individuals. If the individual ants were able to learn the best foraging strategy, communicate it throughout the hive, and consciously arrive at a consensus, then their adaptive foraging would not be an emergent behavior. So "emergent learning" as the term is currently being used is actually an oxymoron.

Remember this: none of the ants has learnt, or knows, the strategy, but collectively they can put it into action. If you look at the case studies in this recent Special Issue of the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning on "Emergent Learning, Connections, Design for Learning," it's clear that the learning and knowledge of individuals remains the primary focus. "Emergent" in this context seems to be another way of describing the knowledge and skills — some of them tacit — that individuals accrue from taking part in self-organised and/or very fluid learning experiences.

By contrast, look at this from A New Culture of Learning by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown. It doesn't use the term "emergent learning" but nevertheless describes the kind of collective (not individual) mastery that Feldstein insists is the mark of true emergence. So here emergent learning would not be an oxymoron?

In World of Warcraft, one of the most successful multiplayer games ever, groups of players battle fictional monsters (not one another) in extremely complex group actions called raids. A group [or guild] of 25 players, for example, will need six to eight hours, on average, to complete most raids. Raids require intense coordination, concentration, and participation from each and every member of the team.

To advance, players experiment within the game and draw from external information sources to construct a very sophisticated learning environment. They create standards and tools for measurement that rely on advanced mathematics, build statistical models and intricate programs for data processing, and conduct after-action reviews and teamwide performance evaluations. And they do it for fun in a social context. …

Guilds like the Garden Gnome Liberation Army (gla), a collection of more than 100 players who twice-weekly engage in complex raids, sit at the intersection of the two elements that make up the new culture of learning. They are intensive and complex learning collectives that are deeply invested in constructing, utilizing, and managing large-scale knowledge economies (the information network). In order to succeed, every single member of the guild must take an active, constant, and enthusiastic role in learning information about the game, his or her character class, and the battles, fights, and challenges they will face. At the same time, the space of the world itself is fluid, changing, and dynamic. It presents players with boundaries within which they search for success through trial and error, finding idiosyncratic solutions to complicated problems. Solutions are not discovered so much as they are organically grown (as in a petri dish).

Gamers bring these two elements together through play.…

gla members… would spend months advancing through a particular raid with only incremental success each week. Eventually, the guild would have a breakthrough and suddenly be able to succeed at something that it had been failing to accomplish until then. At that point, a major shift had occurred, and in everyone’s mind, the goal had become achievable. And shortly thereafter, usually, the raid would succeed, seemingly without effort.

So what changed? Not the gear the players possessed or their own skill levels and talents. Instead, there was a collective shift in imagination. As the fight unfolded one last time, the players—though dispersed all over the globe—had managed to completely synchronize their endeavors. Yet no one could articulate why they could do so on that day and not before. The knowledge acquired to defeat the boss and complete the challenge was principally tacit. [my emphasis]

So there you have it, I think. A group of people who have met a collective challenge without any of them really knowing how they did it. Exactly what we need to tackle climate change, to take one example of many challenges so complex that no one mind can hold all facets at once. Absolutely useless in a school, of course: no one would pass the exam, and parents and government would be clamouring for new leadership.

How do we reconcile this paradox, when our ideas about competence are so rooted in individual articulation and 'mastery'? I started struggling with this about a year ago when I asked When should we eat our brains? It won't be a surprise that I haven't worked out an answer yet. Can you help me with any pointers?

In the meantime, I'll leave you with something from Sugata Mitra, who, following his celebrated "Hole in the Wall" experiments, clearly gets the idea of emergence in the Feldstein's strict sense. His work just possibly points a way to how we can have truly emergent learning and the kind of measurable individual results that administrators fetishise. The following extract is taken from this transcript of the closing minutes of this video lecture, after Mitra has presented many examples of children in groups answering questions in what he calls Self-Organised Learning Environments:

So what does it all mean? What's the theory then? Why is it happening this way? Well I have a suspicion, and I'm just going to leave it as a thought with you. Self-organising systems. A self-organising system is one where the structure of the system appears without intervention from the outside. A number of educationalists have said this in many different ways. Hayek used to call it "spontaneous order". People have called it "learning comes from the inside".

But I think it is the terminology of physics that will explain it. That the system structure, when you allow a system to self-organise, the structure appears without explicit intervention from the outside. The other thing which happens in self-organising systems is emergence. The appearance of a property that's previously not observed as a functional characteristic of the system. Which is why we find a lot of things very surprising. We say "How could this have happened?" Because emergent systems are always astonishing. An example of a physical emergent system for example is a dust devil. You're sitting around, and there's a breeze and all of that and suddenly like a magic, like a miracle, a little dust devil arrives, and it moves around as though it knows where it's going.

So that's an emergent phenomenon. I have a suspicion that what we have stumbled onto in all of these experiments is a self-organising system in that physical sense. That education, if it is a self-organising system, then learning is its emergent phenomenon, therefore you cannot make it happen. You can set the stage and allow it to come, when it will. It will take I think at least five years of experiments more to actually be able to prove it, but I am going to try, because I think it's worth trying this. Once we suspect that there is a strong physical basis for how this kind of learning is happening. And that to me is the future of learning.

School it Yourself: Review of The Edupunks' Guide and How to Set Up a Free School

2011年12月20日 12:12:45 +0000

We're in one of those periods when real change in education might be possible. This doesn't happen very often. Here's why. Education is probably the single most powerful means by which our societies and our cultures reproduce themselves — institutions, values, character and differentials… the works. Hence the number of interest groups with a stake in education is enormous. Of all the culture-breeding channels available to those in power, education is in principle the one that lends itself most readily to engineering and design. However, in practice, everyone sticks the oar in and change is piecemeal, compromised and fragile.

So it's rare for sufficient powerful forces to align and overcome the drag of inertia. Now is such a time, and I think we're just seeing the beginnings of changes that may take a decade or two to work through. Donald Clark writes of technology enabling "more pedagogic change in 10 years than in the last 1,000 years". Then there's the impact of economic retrenchment and austerity on learning, which I've been writing about on and off for over two years, arguing that cases where people have to "make do" in their learning may have something to teach us about how to improve more "advanced" techniques.

On top of factors like these (the full set would be a whole essay in itself), there's a cultural mood that has arisen from year-upon-year of different kinds of disruption — from hurricanes and ash clouds, through financial punch-drunkenness to the effects of technology reaching the professional middle classes for the first time. We don't believe in the return of business-as-usual any more; we don't trust the age-old educational conveyor belts to drop us off at the right spot in the factory.

In different ways we're questioning the educational provision that's been handed down, and wondering if we couldn't do better ourselves. Let's explore what I mean by that by looking at two "How To" e-books about education, published in recent months. In many ways they're chalk and cheese. One's American, the other British. One is a student's-eye view, the other a parent and school-builder. One is very "2.0" in its sensibility, arguing that students can remix their learning experiences from multiple sources. The other is, well, the mischief in me would like to call it Web 0.0, but really it's from a place as yet uncolonised by either software or version numbers, so let's christen it "RLP" (Received Learning Practice or Revised Latin Primer). In one of the very few passages where Young articulates what he thinks should actually go on inside a school, he describes a visit to an independently run Swedish school,

[The Children] were assembled in rows behind wooden desks and… the teacher was standing at the front of the class clutching a piece of chalk. It was as if we'd stepped through a portal in space and time and found ourselves in a typical English grammar school in the 1950s… it was exactly what we wanted the West London Free School to be.

But these texts — The Edupunks Guide to a DIY Credential by Anya Kamenetz and How to Set Up a Free School by Toby Young — also share many things in common. Both are digital-only, which is just as well since their (virtual) shelf life could be measured in weeks rather than years. That both are tied so specifically to their national contexts in late 2011 — respectively, the structure of college education and nascent alternatives in the USA, and current policy and personnel at the UK Department for Education — may be testament to how tightly education is bound into society when you want to tinker with it. It also makes it a challenge to articulate where the two books might intersect. But let me try.

The Edupunks' Guide to a DIY Credential

Anya Kamenetz arrives at DIY alternatives to traditional education via her study of student loan debt. Two thirds of college graduates in the US, 36 million people, owe an average of 27,000ドル to pay back the costs of their education. Her books Generation Debt and DIY U persuaded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund Kamenetz to write a practical guide for would-be students who don't want to run up such big liabilities.

And that's what she's delivered. There's no mention of pedagogical theory, of Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, Paulo Freire or Thomas Jefferson, as there was in DIY U. The Edupunks' Guide gives short, journalistic portraits of a range of alternative ways to get some formal or informal accreditation. Some of them are fairly orthodox: there's a section on "How to Find a College". A few are well-established such as the Western Governors University approach to accreditation based on competence rather than any compulsory study (incidentally this is exactly the model that the Thatcher government was aiming for when it created National Vocational Qualifications in the UK via its 1986 White Paper).

The most interesting case studies in the Guide, though, are the recently established, experimental, pathfinder initiatives like College Unbound, P2PU (Peer to Peer University) and Uncollege. These are grassroots organisations, invariably driven by small numbers of passionately committed individuals. When the founders move on, the initiatives may fade, to be replaced by new ones. And that's OK. Edupunks aren't setting out to create the new Oxford University, or even Open University. Still, it's hard to escape the impression that this field is still very new.

Today's Edupunks are very much pioneers. Perhaps aware of that, Kamenetz often can't seem to decide whether she's writing for the tiny vanguard who are asserting full control of their own learning, or for the rather larger hinterland of students who just want to do college on a tight budget with a savvy attitude. As an example of the former, Kamenetz profiles Weezie Yancey-Siegel, who wants to "try out more of a self-designed, experiential approach to learning…to create something new and spark further social change in the area of education, social media, global citizenship, and general do-gooding". Her chosen path to achieving this includes, inter alia, watching TED videos and reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I met Weezie, at a London DIY University event, and got the strong impression that she was crafting a genuinely challenging and pioneering education for herself out of these disparate experiences. She's exceptional, and a great role model for other self-directed learners, who, Kamenetz acknowledges, need to be self-motivated with good time management skills. But one thing Weezie is not: she's not a template that any significant number of students will be reproducing any time soon.

I like Kamenetz's division, in DIY U, of educational innovators into artisans, merchants and monks. The artisans gradually change things from within. The merchants are the people who see Higher Education's strife as an opportunity to make money. The monks write blog posts packed with old movie clips and argue late into the night in pubs after conference sessions. They want to liberate knowledge from the university altogether. With The Edupunks' Guide Kamenetz took a fair bit of flak from the monks. When she announced the title, months before publication, the academic credited with coining the term "Edupunk" publicly washed his hands of it, decrying a "vision of education as a wholesale gutting of publicly funded institutions and replacing them with some groovy YouTube vidoes [sic]… and powerpoint slides".

Stephen Downes argued that Kamenetz has "a very naive understanding of education" while her How To guides are "superficial and misleading". She is very evidently a journalist, not an educator or theorist. I defended her against some of Stephen's criticisms, however, on the basis that, if DIY education is ever going to be more than a handful of exceptional individuals, it needs journalists to have a shot at explaining it, and bringing home the practical implications without the full theoretical and historical baggage. I wrote then, "That seems to be part of the natural cycle of how change happens: how radical ideas gain traction, get absorbed into the mainstream, but lose some of their radicalism in the process." On the evidence of this guide, however, the Edupunks still have some way to go before their influence on the mainstream is felt.

How to Set Up a Free School

Toby Young is a celebrity journalist who was lead proposer and co-founder of the West London Free School, the standard bearer for UK Education Secretary Michael Gove's Free Schools initiative. Young's How to Set Up a Free School is part of a new series of Penguin Shorts ebooks. Also in the series is a title, How to be a Rogue Trader, which raises the question of whether we're dealing with practical guidance here or just diverting, makes-a-change-from-a-night-at-the-theatre, School of Life-style entertainments.

Young's text convinces that he is sincere, and that all the tart barbs at individuals (mainly fellow journalist Fiona Millar) and groups (unions, civil servants) are there for flavour. Furthermore he wants to encourage us to follow in his footsteps. At the end of the book he writes, "I hope I haven't put you off" and offers to come and talk to parent groups to advise and encourage.

Still, reflecting on Young's 25,000 words left me pretty pessimistic about the merits of parents aiming to follow in his footsteps (and this isn't just an abstract question for me: I have a child approaching school age and don't think much of the state or private schools in our area). Firstly, the successful campaign that Young and his team mounted feels like a one-off. Secondly, the rewards of success seem likely to be short-lived.

As with most successful pioneers, the defining genius of Young and the team behind West London Free School was timing. He astutely piloted a slalom course between an outgoing Labour government — luke warm about the idea but helpful in getting to know the terrain — and an incoming Conservative administration who saw Free Schools as a flagship policy and were correspondingly keen to have a showcase up and running as soon as. (It can't have done any harm that there is barely a thin sheet of vellum between Toby Young's RLP pedagogy and Michael Gove's Authorised King James Version, notwithstanding the latter's protestations about liking technology as much as he likes Tennyson.) So keen were they, and so short of alternative credible proposals, that a little bit of extra facilitation and fast-tracking would surely have been the order of the day.

And I don't begrudge that. But I strongly suspect that the West London course is no longer navigable: that, faced with a rising tide of proposals, the opposite of fast-tracking applies. The Author's Note that precedes the main text more or less lays this out: "Given how complex the set-up process has become, I'm worried that the policy will be hijacked by large, professional organisations and my reason for writing this book is to try and give parent groups a fighting chance." What follows this note is a candid and often shrewd assessment of all the barriers and hazards that stand in the way of Free School proposers. It suggests that parent groups will be fighting against extraordinary odds. Or in the author's wife's words, 'Most people reading this will think, "Bugger me, I had no idea it was so difficult."'

Yet if they succeed? Young also sets out what Free Schoolers can do to insulate their creations from interference by less sympathetic politicians whose time will surely come. Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) were the Tories' last attempt to take a part of the learning infrastructure and liberate it from the cloying hands of the state it into local private governance. TECs lasted eleven years (1990-2001) before those same hands clawed them back. My hunch is that free schools will last longer, but not a lot longer. Yet during their lifespan they will have their wings clipped and their differences elided in the name of benchmarking and best practice.

The catch is that it's not the politicians going through their revolving doors that will suck the life out of Free Schools; it's the inescapable logic of bureaucratic rationality that applies as much under a market-inclined administration as a state-inclined one. The Tories would struggle to sanction, with a straight face, the expansion of the Department for Education that would be required to give every Free School application the West London treatment. So, with more free school applications to deal with, the Department must either make the rules less flexible and negotiable, or take multiple identikit applications from larger entities, or both.

TECs were actually prohibited by John Major's government from merging into chains or franchises. It seems inevitable that Free Schools will do exactly that as the big, well-backed operations absorb smaller ones when the latter find themselves struggling with cashflow. They will lose the individual character of their founders' vision. Diversity and sensitivity to local context will give way to corporate standards and block negotiating power. For, unlike the rest of the state sector, Free Schools contract directly with the Department for Education, rather than via intermediate layers. They are are tethered to the government on a tighter leash than any other kind of school. And they call them Free? Bugger me, after all that, it turned out to be pointless.

Really free schooling

I'm sceptical about the prospects for either Edupunks or Free Schools to become the kind of systemic change that I speculated about at the start of this piece. The Edupunk path, at least in practice and for the moment, is one of exceptionalism. The Edupunk pioneers are by and large the lone rangers of learning, and confine themselves to the margins rather than the mainstream almost by definition. Free Schools are an odd mix: ostensibly a welcome shift towards a more self-reliant culture in education, they turn out to be anything but free, and quite possibly just the latest in a series of vain attempts to reform public services through managerialist tinkering (something the UK has suffered from Conservatives and Labour for two decades now).

Both Edupunks and Free Schools polarise opinion. That's a good way to get written about in blogs and other media, but it’s a terrible way to change education because it alerts and mobilises the opposition. Cue gridlock and inertia. Much better to advance quietly and without ruffling feathers, as the Open University has done over the last 40 years, and as home educators may be doing now.

So what can we salvage from these two How Tos? The most interesting ideas are those embedded in some of the start-up social enterprises in the Edupunks' Guide — from College Unbound and P2PU, mentioned above, to those with serious financial backing, such as the University of the People and the Saylor Foundation (with a 100ドル million bequest from entrepreneur Michael Saylor). Many of them combine the pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootlaces approach of peer learning with creative use of Open Educational Resources (of which those produced by the likes of MIT and the OU are best known).

If we call this "hacking" the education system, then we polarise opinion again, so can we just agree that it makes sense for new educational forms to feed on the fruits of old ones? Can we further agree with the thrust of the present government's policy that innovation in education is too important to be left to government? So, while we're at it, how about reclaiming the word "free" and building schools that don't depend on government contracts to survive?

This would be anathema to the likes of Toby Young, of course. That's OK, he's got a contract to keep him busy for at least seven years. No need to throw out everything in his guide, though. I have in mind a syncretic melding of the neighbourhood independence of Free Schools with the agile marshalling of ever more sophisticated (and often free) learning tools and resources.

Ideally these really free schools would require neither the capital funding of fixed, dedicated premises nor the near-full-time parental commitment of home education. They might evolve, quietly, out of the self-organised after-school activities that teach parents the whys and wherefores of building simple, powerful learning environments. Lightweight and easy to assemble, really free schools might pop up and fade away according to local demand, contracting in specialist tuition when needed, via a School of Everything-style network. They'd repurpose educational resources in ways that their creators did not foresee. "Schooling as in fish, not as in meting out discipline," as I wrote in one of my rare tweets.

Ecology and disaster relief professionals already have a low-cost village construction set and village in a box. Free school edupunks should turn their attention to building a school-in-a-box kit. Anyone like to see if we can make one?

What's holding Open Access publishing back?

2011年10月04日 14:01:42 +0000

As a small business working in knowledge-intensive, research-driven areas, I've got first-hand experience of the frustrations caused by mainstream research publishing: you find a research paper that looks useful, but it costs 30ドル to read the 15 pages if you haven't got some kind of institutional subscription. These costs keep going up, and even institutions are having to look critically at what they can afford, in what is known as the serials crisis. Recently George Monbiot stirred up a small storm by drawing attention to this — see one angry reaction, for example.

The Open Access movement in academia has been working for decades to overcome the kinds of problems I experience. As the name suggests, Open Access is committed to all research publications (and sometimes data too) being freely available to anyone for the public good. Momentum has grown in recent years as online tools have made the editorial and distribution functions of publishing much more agile. Nevertheless, there's still a sense among many Open Access advocates that progress is stalling, or at least not nearly as rapid as it might be.

At the start of the summer I was commissioned, along with Seb Schmoller and Nicky Ferguson, to do a quick piece of work to understand why Open Access was not sweeping all before it. Given the short deadlines, the brief we were given was tightly focused: after a brief literature review, we spoke only to researchers in chemistry and economics.

This constraint was frustrating in one or two senses. Palpably, of course, our literature search was less comprehensive than it would have been had Open Access been the rule rather than the exception. But at least that didn't prevent me finding Gale Moore's survey of faculty awareness and attitudes towards Open Access at the University of Toronto. I was struck there by her observations:

While scholars are central, they are only one part of a scholarly communication ecosystem that includes publishers, librarians, university administrators as well as scholarly societies, associations, funding agencies and others. Today, as the economic, social and cultural landscape is being transformed by the turn to the digital that is evident in phrases such as the networked information society or the digital economy, it is timely to ask how does this turn affect scholars and other members of the scholarly communication ecosystem on which so much depends. How aware are scholars of the opportunities and challenges posed by the digital, networked environment in which they are situated, and the implications for their activities and those of others in the system? Are they aware of how the activities of others in the ecosystem affect them? [my emphasis]

"Scholarly communication ecosystem" — there's that word again. Now here's the real frustration. Despite this acknowledgement of the wider context of research publication, almost all the research on how to spread Open Access — including Moore's and our own — seems to focus on researchers and not on the other players in the ecosystem.

To be fair, Nottingham's Centre for Research Communications, who commissioned our work, have included Pro Vice Chancellors of research and Head Librarians in their own work. They report very little awareness of Open Access and its benefits among these groups. They quote one enlightened Vice Chancellor, who backs up case that the issue has been bottled up as specialist technical concern: "The issue of open access is being narrowly contained as a research issue around publications… We have been a victim of compartmentalisation." Can you point me to research on the awareness and attitudes towards Open Access among publishers, librarians, university administrators, scholarly societies, associations and funding agencies?

As we wrote in our report, there seems to be a skew in the research on Open Access diffusion towards studying the attitudes and motivations of the "talent" in the research world, rather than the "managers" and middle (wo)men. I wonder if this is just another case of a general purblindness we have to the workings of intermediaries that leaves us unsympathetic and unappreciative of the value they add. Think of the crude musicians-versus-record-labels terms in which music industry crises are habitually framed, ignoring the wider ecosystem of publishers, managers, promoters, radio, reviewers, fan organisations.

One other key insight for me that we tried to draw out in the report is that "the main reason authors and researchers might want to make their work openly accessible — 'to maximise their research impact' — is also the main reason they give for having it published in journals that are not openly accessible." There are all sorts of issues with the metrics for research impact in general and the Research Excellence Framework in particular, some of which the report touches on. However, I think I may have stumbled on one possible explanation of this paradox, through an interview with a Chemistry Professor. What became clear from talking to him was that he had a set of more nuanced ways of building his impact and reputation. It's not surprising, really: who would imagine that a high-status career could be boiled down to a single measure? Reputation is built in multiple currencies. Some of them have a quick return on investment, others have career-long latencies. Researchers may be able to exchange between currencies, to some degree, and exchange rates vary. This is from the interview:

Speed is the deciding factor for me, especially if it's something that I want to stake my claim and say that I'm the first one to have thought of this [laughs]. I think for the more traditional stuff I would go to the conventional journals, where I work in a specific area and I'm known there.

And this is how we interpreted it in the report:

Here there is the "pioneer" currency of reputation — the ability to plant one’s stake in new territory for future reference — and another "contributing to the tradition" currency. The former is not expected to have an immediate impact, so doesn’t need to be widely read or cited, but represents an investment with the chance of big rewards if subsequent work shows it to be important — in which case a paper in a "conventional journal" can cite it as a demonstration of prescience and cutting edge work.

If this investment, exchange and accumulation of reputation is what is most important for the research ecosystem — not just for individuals but for the institutions that both back them and trade on their reputations — then having sophisticated and accurate metrics for reputation, with these metrics embedded in incentive frameworks, could be an important lever for change.

Those are just a couple of things that particularly resonated for me. See the full report on Centre for Research Communications page or go direct to the PDF version.

Photo licensed from dullhunk under creative commons.

On ecosystems, Adam Curtis and positions of power

2011年9月01日 21:07:43 +0000

I have a chronic habit of reaching more for biological metaphors for to help describe how we inhabit a world of abundant technology and media. Two decades ago, when I was working on large IT systems in the civil service, Ian Franklin and I suggested a shift from thinking about these systems as engineering interventions to a more organic, gardening-style approach. We got short shrift. Kevin Kelly took this thinking much further, and more rigorously, than I ever have in Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines… (large public sector IT systems, "out of control" — hmmm…). But I've come back to it in writing about foraging and discovery, a central metaphor in my book. And the read-across from the natural world is very clear in my work on Ken Thompson's SwarmTribes platform.

I don't claim anything unique or especially prescient about about this interest in eco/bio ways of talking about things. You could tell it was becoming commonplace, if not mainstream, when Becta announced plans for a "content ecosystem" for learning (pdf). The plans themselves were old school, top-down and centralised with negligible scope for organic evolution based on selection and feedback. Practice and terminology rarely develop in sync.

With a much grander scope than technology platforms for learning, Adam Curtis, the documentary film maker and blogger, did a demolition job on the ecosystem idea during his recent BBC series All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. It's a good thing to have your cherished notions challenged and put under the microscope, particularly by someone who you might expect to be sympathetic, like Curtis. I don't think Curtis's critique is watertight, but — as Alan Kay famously said of the Macintosh user interface — it's good enough to be worth criticising.

I was on holiday when the ecosystems film (episode 2 of 3 in the series) was broadcast. I had to follow the cat-and-mouse game between YouTubers and copyright owners to see it. At the time of writing, the full episode is available here:

The film is titled "The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts". Curtis wrote his own text precis of its argument and Wikipedians offer another. There are blog posts here, here and (most interesting but mainly because it takes off in a different direction) here.

I'm going to pick out two strands of Curtis's argument and one question it seems to beg. There's more to it than this, but these are the points that most interest me in my appropriation of eco/bio terminology and concepts.

1. Are ecosystems unstable?

In Curtis's version, many of us like to think in terms of ecosystems because ecosystems offer a model that is self-organising, free of centralised control — there is no one entity "in charge" — and yet they seem directed to return towards stability, balance and equilibrium. Via the kind intellectual archaeology that he has made his trademark, Curtis traces this model back to a botanist called Arthur Tansley early in the 20th century, who, in turn, took the ideas of self-regulation from Freud's self correcting psychodynamic processes, all working in service of "great universal law of equilibrium".

Curtis boldly states that this "law" is wrong: nature is not stable (watch from 41 minutes in). The evidence from studies of wolf and moose populations in the 1970s showed that these populations fluctuated without ever settling to equilibrium. And other research also showed more flux than stability.

Well. According to Wikipedia, Curtis studied evolutionary biology at university. I didn't, but surely even a cursory familiarity with the field suggests that whether you see stability or chaotic fluctuation depends on the frame you choose for your data collection. Equilibrium clearly does occur at some levels. For hundreds of thousands of years, the Earth keeps its temperature more stable than changes in the sun's radiation might lead you to expect. Then it 'flips' into a glacial era, and stays more or less stable in that state for a long time, before flipping back again. At a quite different level, our own bodies experience stability in many respects (such as body temperature and overall chemistry) while undergoing continuous change through growth and ageing and weathering illnesses that disrupt equilibrium temporarily.

Can we agree that nature includes domains of stability, chaos and flux, all of which interact with each other dynamically?

Whether the term 'ecosystem' is appropriate in all the contexts in which it is used is open to question. Scientists like James Lovelock seem wary of the vagueness of referring to ecosystems beyond biology, ecology and Earth system science. To some extent this is surely down to their hypersensitivity to what is lost in translation when technically precise terms are applied more generally. But such translation is part and parcel of all metaphorical thinking, and perhaps 'ecosystem' has become a kind of boundary object.

We can argue the toss on terminology and the fine grain of concepts, but can we agree that nature includes domains of stability, chaos and flux, all of which interact with each other dynamically? Where and how you focus determines which of these will seem most dominant. Where you place the boundaries of the 'system' in an ecosystem is crucial.

2. Does systems thinking ignore power?

For Curtis, it's not just that the concept of ecosystems-in-equilibrium does not fit the evidence from ecology: he has two further, related criticisms. Firstly, it is bogus to believe that that thinking in terms of ecosystems somehow captures the wisdom of nature and the natural order. Secondly, that thinking in these terms blinds us to the exercise of power, especially by those who already have it.

Curtis says there's more system and not so much eco in ecosystem. Far from having its roots in nature, the language of feedback mechanisms and self-regulation is actually the language of machines. He's right that the field that defined itself through its studies of systems thinking and self-regulation is cybernetics. Cybernetics, according to Curtis, is "a computer's eye view of the world". And, thanks to our post-William Gibson perspective, where cyber is the prefix of disembodied virtuality, it's easy to go along with this. But long before Gibson and cyberspace were even conceived, the cyber prefix was in fact derived from the ancient Greek word for a steersman — not a number-crunching machine, but an active, sentient human making his way by adjusting his actions to adapt to unfolding circumstances, Quite organic, then.

The language of feedback mechanisms and self-regulation is actually the language of machines

This skirmish over what counts as natural and right, and what is artificial and suspect, is part of running battle that has been waged throughout the history of ideas. I'm not going to settle it in a blog post.

Curtis makes the case that applying cybernetic/eco systems thinking to society cannot encompass the role of power and politics. Hence it doesn't give the whole picture. One solution to this would be simply to say "OK, let's add power to the model, just add another feedback loop". One reason Curtis rules this out may be that the commitment to self-regulation in ecosystems should not admit regulation by "outside" forces like politics. In his portrayal, ecosystems = natural forces, while power = human forces, and he honours the Cartesian/Enlightenment divorce that set humans outside nature.

Tellingly, Curtis titled his film "The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts" (taken from Arthur Tansley's reaction to what he saw as the misapplication of his early ideas about ecosystem self-regulation). What we now know about ecosystems is that they are messy and impure, riven by forces at many levels. Of course, vegetation isn't a system apart from the rest of the organic, and inorganic, world (in Lovelock's Earth-as-ecosystem Gaia hypothesis rocks and oceans play important regulatory roles).

Again, if Curtis's criticism of ecosystem models stems from them being 'vegetational', I'm tempted simply to correct this by adding the 'animism' of power, as well as any other forces that might be missing.

But in order to do that, I have to heal that Cartesian rift and make humans a part of nature rather than set apart from it. Curtis would say I risk falling into another trap here: the science of seeing ourselves as part of nature and natural equilibrium, he says, can easily be used by those in power to maintain the status quo. This is exactly what led Tansley to protest about 'abuse of vegetational concepts' when an early advocate of apartheid sought to justify white supremacy in terms adapted from Tansley's ideas about ecosystems.

Is this risk unique to ideas such as Tansley's? Surely not. Show me the metaphors for social organisation that have never been used in this way, the ideas so pure and unequivocal that lead those in power to buckle at the knees and surrender. Don't people in power resourcefully adapt whatever beliefs, values and research findings have currency to suit their own ends? There's a whole field of study into how they do that. I don't buy the idea that recognising my position within nature automatically leads to my becoming a cog in someone else's machine.

The science of seeing ourselves as part of nature and natural equilibrium can easily be used by those in power to maintain the status quo.

Saying that ecosystems models can be are no more prone to abuse than other models is not to dismiss the cases where they have been used and abused. We must stay alert to the question: Whose interests have actually been served by ecosystem and cybernetic approaches? Adam Curtis's film helps do this, as does work like Fred Turner's (Turner appears briefly in the film). This analysis goes back at least as far as Cameron and Barbrook's Californian ideology, which described a syncretic convergence of free love, free software and free markets, and it continues up to Brian Appleyard's reflections on Curtis's film:

… the idea of the ecosystem echoed the idea of the global mechanised markets. It also threatened our existence as active, involved individuals by turning us into mere nodes in a network. We would have no power over this network, we would merely have to be its janitors, ensuring its efficient and stability. It is this politically quietist view that leads to the cult of managerialism, the dominant and — Curtis and I agree — probably most pernicious ideology of our time.

It's one of the paradoxes of open democracy that it is often in the interests of power to be less than transparent about its own existence. "Don't shoot me, I'm only the piano player." The power that hides itself avoids stimulating resistance and opposition. Hence the appearance of managerialism, even when the managers are serving vested, ideological interests.

3. If not ecosystems, then what?

I'm not yet convinced by Adam Curtis's case for dismissing ecosystems models as a way of understanding at least some parts of society. When you pick it apart there are a several points at which it could unravel. And he offers no alternative framework for mapping the complex interactions of dynamic societies. "Follow the power" is not enough. This spoof of Curtis's approach is a caricature, but accurately points to the sleight of hand he uses in his storytelling craft (it's also quite funny, if you've seen the original films).

But let's admit, with Curtis, that thinking in terms of ecosystems has its limitations. First we need models that explain and predict flux as they do self-regulation. Not just the dynamics within a system, but the forces and events that morph the very boundaries and constitution of the system.

The power that hides itself avoids stimulating resistance and opposition.

Second, and related to this, we need the conceptual means to step outside the system in order to change the system. This balances out our awareness of the complex web of power in which we are embedded, which may make us feel less able to change things and challenge existing power. As Curtis himself puts it at the end of his film,

What we are discovering is that if we see ourselves as components in a system, then it is very difficult to change the world. It is a very good way of organising things — even rebellions — but it offers no ideas about what comes next. And just like in the communes, it leaves us helpless in the face of those already in power in the world.

The move outside the system is not without hazard, however. It's the Cartesian break of human from nature, again; the move to Planet Craft in Stewart Brand's terms when he says "We are as gods and have to get good at it". It's a cut-the-crap, don't-get-bogged-down-in-details attitude. Very male, and flirting with hubris. The risk with trying to improve the world, as John Cage reminded us, is that you will only make matters worse.

The Whys and Wherefores of Creativity and Sharing: Review of Making is Connecting

2011年8月16日 16:04:56 +0000

One of the beauties of David Gauntlett's Making is Connecting is the way it develops a fundamentally simple idea with successive layers of richness and power. The cover captures the kernel of the book: the core thesis that making (with hands and brain, resourcefully) is connecting (in terms of relationships, meaning, learning); the context that extends from scissors and thread to YouTube; and the ethos of the personal, handmade artefact captured in the stylish smudge that subverts the sleek sans-serif typeface.

One of the perils of writing anything related to Web 2.0 over the last four years is being painted into a corner opposite Andrew Keen and his Cult of the Amateur broadside against the threats to the hieratic hierarchy of professional power. In this case I think the comparison is justified, because Making is Connecting is everything that The Cult of the Amateur was not. Where Keen reductively polarises and thins out the issues he addresses, Gauntlett's treatment is embodied, his points rounded out with substance and complexity. Where Keen uses "amateur" as term of haughty derision, Gauntlett gives us back a fleshed out sense of the word, capturing the care and dedication that come when people make things for love, not money.

Regular readers of this blog with good memories may remember that David Gauntlett is a friend of mine. I interviewed him a year ago when he was writing Making is Connecting. (On the same morning, as well as interviewing me for this blog, David also interviewed me about my blogging on another site for his book — you may be thinking I only review books I've been interviewed for, but I promise that's not true.)

In that 2010 interview, I complimented David on his plain speaking style and how he makes his ideas accessible. That holds true throughout Making is Connecting: it's rare for a book to cite Adorno and Horkheimer while still remaining readable, but this one does. Of Ivan Illich — one of David Gauntlett's guiding lights, along with the likes of William Morris, John Ruskin and Richard Sennett — he says "his writing feels earthy, and engaged with real things." The same could be said of David himself, and I confess I envy him in this.

Making is Connecting is about how to engage creatively with the world, using accessible tools to make things. What Gauntlett takes from Illich, he says, is that making changes everything — including, I think, people's sense of themselves, their relationships, and their capacity to effect change independent of any "external authority". The shift from sit-back to lean-forward media has been widely covered in the last decade and a half, but David Gauntlett situates it in a wider social and cultural history. Where writers like Clay Shirky and David Weinberger articulate the areas where the Net brings about a step change in public life, Gauntlett draws attention to the continuities. Over the course of a generation everything has changed; over centuries, some ideas and themes persist or recur.

This is where the knitting and the lefty artisans from the 19th century come in. Knitting, along with other craft and DIY skills, are "popularly seen as a bit boring" but are actually enablers and carriers of key attributes of society: resilience, self-expression and identity, creativity and social capital. Gauntlett is not afraid to call things as 'good' or 'bad'. He does this without becoming preachy or hectoring: the tone is mostly fraternal, occasionally avuncular.

It's Web 2.0 and the home made media like podcasts and YouTube video that give Making is Connecting its topicality. While Gauntlett clearly champions the fit-for-amateurs qualities of these media, and explains their value in depth through examples and analysis, he is not so much of an evangelist that he is blind their limitations.

Where Gauntlett is critical of Web 2.0 he draws heavily on Jaron Lanier, who offers a more nuanced and closely-informed analysis than Andrew Keen. Sometimes, though, I feel Gauntlett follows Lanier in being too hasty to dismiss some of the ideas around Web 2.0. I'm sceptical about some of the claims made for the "hive mind" (and I hope I'm not blind to Web 2.0's downsides, either), but I feel Gauntlett is too hasty and too glib in dismissing it, by taking Ray Kurzweil as its advocate. Ray Kurzweil is that rare beast, a flesh-and-blood straw man, a living, breathing (for now) caricature. Whether we call it a hive mind or not, the implications of having connections between brains almost as dense and large in scale as the connections within brains are not going to become clear for a generation or two.

If this aspect of connecting is covered too superficially for my taste, the chapter on Robert Putnam's theory of social capital feels too ponderous. This is the one part of the book where I thought I was reading a book aimed at being a staple of the media studies degree course.

Back when I interviewed David Gauntlett I asked if the connection he was making between 19th century craft and 21st technology was in some a repudiation of what much of the 20th century stood for. He replied,

In terms of "rolling back 150 years", it's not really about that, but maybe it is about re-connecting with the kind of everyday creativity which may have flourished more in the past, and which doesn't flourish in a consumerist, TV-watching society.

Point taken, and it's possible to argue that people of my generation have spent all our careers trying to repeal the excesses of Fordist mass production and one-way mass media (cf my last book review again). Still, I'm uneasy about whether we're throwing out a baby with the bathwater. I also want to unpick David Gauntlett's assertion that "[Stewart] Brand's work helps us trace a direct path from William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, to its heir, the countercultural movement, and on to the internet and Web 2.0" (page 52-53). From my reading of Stewart Brand and the counterculture, this connection feels post-hoc and partial — though perhaps that's just because Brand feels, culturally, so deeply embedded in the postwar US Beats-and-Buckminster-Fuller context that feels so distant from Morris in Victorian Britain.

At one level this doesn't matter: Gauntlett is perfectly at liberty to cherry pick the elements that help build his Making is Connecting agenda. At another level, I think perhaps it does. Are we getting the whole story about creativity here? I want to say Yes to William Morris and John Ruskin. But Yes, too, to Andy Warhol, who put a frame around images of mass produced soup cans, while also effacing craft and personality in the making of these images, and challenged to say that these were not creative and worth celebrating.

Making is Connecting puts the case for a virtuous circle of co-creation, self-expression, self-reliance, sharing, formation of meaning and identity and community bonding. I don't argue with David Gauntlett that this is a good thing, and that we should be thinking in our work, online and offline, how to create the conditions where this circle of creativity can flourish.

To the extent that I have any reservation about this, it may be a purely intellectual one, of little or no practical consequence. It hinges on the models of making/creating and of sharing/connecting that seem to underpin, tacitly, this prescription for embodied wholesomeness. Firstly there's the idea that creating something imbues it, if not with the essence of your soul as in the full-on Romantic ideal, then at least with a little bit of your identity, your unique touch. Secondly, there's the idea that, when you share the thing you made, it communicates something of you, or carries some intended message — and in the reciprocity of sharing you forge this connection out of which resilient communities emerge.

What of unintended message and unconscious slips? What of disembodied or impersonal creativity where what the thing make slips loose from the mooring of your self? This is where I thought of Andy Warhol — and also of John Cage. Consider Cage's epiphany when he realised, after hearing the sounds of his own nervous system and blood circulation in an anechoic chamber, that he could create sound and music without intention. He realised he was at a crossroads where he could make music he intended or music that was unintended, and he chose the latter path for the rest of his career. "My work became an exploration of non-intention", he wrote using chance mechanisms as a way of trying to keep his ego out of the creative process.

That making and creativity without human subjectivity is the norm, not the exception, is nowhere more evident than in the example of evolution. Evolution demonstrates how random mutations, completely free from the designs of a Ruskinian craftsperson, have generated profound creativity, when combined with the challenges of survival. Yet these mutations are themselves "failures" or imperfections in the "uncreative" process of copying genetic information.

So what? As I say, I'm not myself sure whether this reservation matters at all. Perhaps it is simply orthogonal to the message of David Gauntlett's book. I don't think it takes away from the book's prescription for taking part in creative, playful activities that engage our bodies and minds physically at the same time as they situate our identities socially. Making is Connecting practises what it preaches in being a straightforward, practical argument for that. (And it still leaves scope for more discursively-minded readers to wander off down random rabbit holes.)

[Disclosure: I showed David Gauntlett a draft of this review. While declining to argue with my more critical points, he corrected a misquotation, flagged a couple of points of interpretation and emphasis, and alerted me to just how shabby my original ending was. I made changes to try to address each of these.]

Touch Not the Cat by Mary Stewart

2011年8月15日 14:09:45 +0000

djalchemi's review: "This isn't the kind of book I usually read, but I picked it up on a whim and enjoyed it. I liked the way the story gradually unfolds, including some elements which are guessable without being obvious, some that completely blindside the reader, and one or two that are left hanging almost until the last page. It's very well paced, especially as the last third of the book hastens towards a dramatic dénouement. I know next to nothing about Mary Stewart, the author, except that she also wrote a trilogy of books about Merlin -- the kind of thing that would normally send me running a mile in the opposite direction. But happily the magic/fantasy element in Touch Not The Cat is kept on a tight rein, and I might read something else by her, one day."

Round-up of recent writing in other places

2011年8月01日 17:42:01 +0000

Agile learning: How 'making do' can evolve into 'making good' is my latest attempt at developing and honing what I mean by agile learning and why it's important. Written for the newsletter of the Association for Learning Technology, it's aimed at the ALT constituency which is mostly people in Higher and Further Education along with a scattering of commercial learning tech companies — and, at just over 2,000 words, it's reasonably long. One of the ideas I use as props is the learning ecosystem. Since I wrote this, Adam Curtis's TV essay picking apart the ecosystem metaphor has been broadcast in the UK. I like having my premises challenged, sometimes, and hope to explore this in a forthcoming post.

Also for ALT I contributed a short presentation to the Making the Most of Informal Learning webinar. You can watch and listen to the full recording: best experienced from the beginning (which, oddly, starts at 1 hour 9 mins on the clock) with Jane Hart and Charles Jennings presenting before me, then I come on when the clock says 1 hour 40 mins. You can also download my slides, though they make little sense without the accompanying ramblings.

I'm one of the friends of New Public Thinking, another of Dougald Hine's many interventions into learning and intellectual culture. My contribution so far is called When Should We Eat Our Brains? It's a sceptical look at the idea that getting a bunch of clever people to "co-create" is the answer to any and every problem.

The open source movement has got us into the habit of believing that "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow". But lots of the problems we face are very different from debugging software. Solving them is more like unpicking knots. The more hands and eyes you devote to unpicking a knot, all at once, the tighter the knot gets.

This piece is a kind of companion to another I wrote last year for The Future We Deserve book, which, frustratingly, has yet to be published. You can see what I submitted, which pulls the lens even further back to ask whether we have what it takes to husband the planet, comparing the prognoses of Stuart Brand and James Lovelock.

On a completely different note, here's my review of a Trembling Bells gig in Lewisham.

Finally, I'm blogging more frequently (though erratically as ever) on the Agile Learning amplify site, plus occasionally on the Everything Unplugged group site.

Bumble bee photo by tassie.sim, licensed under Creative Commons.

The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness by Mark Rowlands

2011年6月20日 21:11:31 +0000

djalchemi's review: "There are some profound ideas in this book. Right near the beginning, Rowlands sets out his central distinction between us apes who can't help but weigh and balance, and see things in instrumental terms towards longer term goals. The wolf, he says, doesn't count the cost. The weaker passages are when we get more philosopher and less wolf. Then it all gets a bit School of Life (you know: morals and codes adumbrated with a bit of choice name dropping). Rowlands says he's a big fan of Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being, but the former's treatment of Nietzsche's ideas of eternal return is not woven into his story with anything like the elegance of the latter. When Rowland is reflecting (on) his own career he gets a bit boring and boorish. But the bits where he follows the animal, to use Harold Garfinkel's phrase, make the book worth reading."

The Wrench (Abacus Books) by Primo Levi

2011年4月08日 18:27:12 +0000

djalchemi's review: "I bought this after hearing potter Edmund de Waal talk about how The Wrench had inspired and validated his choice of a career where he makes things with his hands (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zdh3v). It's structured simply, as a series of stories told by a rigger to a chemist as share 'dead time' on their respective assignments in 1970s Russia. The stories are about work building cranes, derricks, bridges and similar structures in various corners of the world. The trials of working with inhospitable clients, climates and co-workers, plus the conflicts of taking pride in work without copping the blame when things go wrong. Without being able to put my finger on the attractions of these stories, I devoured them (I was supposed to be reading and reviewing another book at the time). That they made me think of my father's early career as a civil engineer may have had something to do with it."

Purpos/ed: What's the purpose of education

2011年3月18日 11:00:23 +0000

This post is my contribution to an ongoing project organised by purpos/ed, "a non-partisan, location-independent organization aiming to kickstart a debate around the question: What’s the purpose of education?" This was initiated by Doug Belshaw and Andy Stewart.

When I signed up to make the 38th contribution at the fag end of an already-extended process, I knew that it would be almost impossible to say anything original (well done, Simon, for trying), so I planned to focus on framing and connecting what had already been said. The process of doing that led me in a challenging direction.

This week, I read all the contributions that preceded this one. Two dimensions emerged fairly early on in this reading, shown in my figure below. Admittedly this is crude; not everything fits, and some occupy more than one place within it. But the differences are worth drawing out.

Probably the most common phrase in this debate is some variation on "fulfilling individual potential" (e.g. Jan, Lou, Mark, Zoe). I guess this reflects a focus on increasing people's self-determination, and who can argue with the desirability of that? Yet it misses the idea that individuals should strive to be part of something bigger than themselves.

That was introduced in Keri's initial reference to the good society, touched on by Mark's exhortation to root out injustice, and elaborated by James' call for "a system of education that can begin to undo the harm that we have done to the world" (also referencing Fred).

On the other dimension, we've seen education described as the means to help people perform roles better, be happier and better people, create a better life. Again, it's hard to disagree with making things better — but how useful is this description of purpose? We need to go to the next level to explain how education can help.

The opposite pole on this dimension would be to specify target measures whose achievement would be a proxy for the societal returns from education. Unsurprisingly, given the prevailing reaction to targets-and-assessment culture in educational circles, no purpos/ed piece has leant strongly towards this end of the spectrum. Yet surely we need to articulate some of the intermediate steps of how education makes things better, rather than just claiming that it does?

Another recurring theme is about developing the appetite and the skills to keep learning. As Tom and Lisa have pointed out, we're born with appetite; in practice it seems that education sometimes does more to diminish than to sustain that desire.

The West may soon need the resilience and adaptability that comes from keeping learning "muscles" in shape. We, the generation writing purpos/ed, are fortunate to have lived our lives in peace and relative affluence. We've had the luxury of framing our goals in terms of personal fulfilment. We have never been tested by times of mass crisis.

This is not the case for other societies and other times. Every year 20 million people die before their time because of poverty: their potential is unfulfilled. That's about a third of all deaths, and education is making slow progress in bringing that number down.

The sad truth is our children are unlikely to be as lucky as we have been, and may face urgent, chronic problems. They may find fulfilment by solving those problems, but their prime concerns could be lower down Maslow's infamous hierarchy.

Before the first Purpos/ed post was written, I jotted down my own off-the-cuff answer: "the purpose of education is to aid our meditation on purposes — what should we do, why and how?". I know that's a bit glib, but it adds a reflexive twist to this debate: how sophisticated and sensitive to changing context are our education systems and discourse? I worry we may be in for a rude awakening when the education squabbles of the Easy Times are shown up as an irrelevant sideshow when the Hard Times bite.

My hunch is that we're going to have to shift the centre of gravity of education from the top left of the figure above to the bottom right.

650 words (sorry!)

p.s.

It's a tough job, and a canny art, to orchestrate an online debate that is spread out over time and multiple blog locations. Kudos to Doug and Andy for taking it on. I have to say, I'm not sure that the approach in setting the question has drawn out the best in the participants. Taking it head-on by asking us all to answer "What is the purpose of education?" risks two problems: one is that we all trip up over each others' toes, trying to say in similar things in different ways; or the converse, that we talk past each other — unable to reconcile our diverse perspectives and experiences in the space of 500 words, we just ignore them and stick to what makes sense from our own position.

If doing something like this again, I'd look closely at the many other online "brain-pooling" exercises that there out on the web. John Brockman's edge.org, for example, frames questions in ways that draw out the unique specialisms of the respondents while also building a rich, diverse picture when you put them all together. See, for example, How is the Internet changing the way you think? or What will change everything?. Maybe something like "What single change to our educational institutions would make them better?" (or, reflexively, "What do you think is the most important question facing education now?"!)

On the positive side, though, my advance anxiety about what I was going to find to say in this post fuelled another post — questioning the more/better brains approach to solving our problems — which is over on the New Public Thinking blog.

Open, trusting, generous: review of Monkeys With Typewriters, a book on leadership

2011年1月27日 23:45:14 +0000

As I made my way through the first third of Monkeys with Typewriters, I was vaguely aware of a tut-tutting from my inner voice, an occasional rolling of my inner eye. "Sheesh, this social media stuff wants to be seen as shiny, new and transformative," they seemed to be saying, "but really it's just another episode in the gradual chipping away at the old Fordist, Taylorist, command-and-control model of the enterprise."

Then I reached page 64, where one of Jemima Gibbons' interviewees argues that, in social media, technology has caught up with ideas that have been around for a generation. Aha! My inner head (?) nods in approval. Who is this shrewd commentator that Jemima has consulted? It's me. Yep, that's me all over: conjuring thoughts that seem original to me, only to find that I've been singing the same old song for years (Jemima interviewed me in 2008).

So that's the disclosure out of the way, and, for helping out as an interviewee, I got a free copy of the book. Jemima and I have moved in similar circles in London since around 2003, when we were both part of Ecademy's now-defunct Media Playground group and when Jemima led Cass Creatives at City Business School. She lists an impressive total of 48 interviews as part of the research for Monkeys with Typewriters, and round about a quarter of them are from what could be loosely called the London social media scene. But (forgive the pun) Jemima also casts her net wide enough to take in key web entrepreneurs from the US (Ross Mayfield, Craig Newmark, Jason Fried, Tim O'Reilly), academics and writers (James Boyle, David Weinberger) and some corporate managers (BT's J.P. Rangaswami, IBM's Gina Poole and Luis Suarez, BBC's Richard Sambrook). There's even one old management visionary from a previous generation, in the shape of Shell's Arie de Geus.

What emerges from this journalistic approach is a very people-centred approach to the topic of leadership and management. You could even say that — in the style of a social network — the story of the book is based around profiles. Certainly Monkeys with Typewriters is very much concerned with the character of leaders in the Web 2.0 world, as its chapter headings — Passion, Openness, Listening, Generosity — suggest. In this way, Jemima really succeeds in giving a humane sense of what's involved in dealing with this new world: she's concerned as much with feelings as with ideas.

But what is the message that common or garden managers will take away from Monkeys with Typewriters? This is where, at the risk of flogging the same point I started with, the song remains pretty much the same. To be a good leader, the story goes, you have to give up control, abandon management by metrics, and learn to trust the people you lead. Business writers have been saying this for almost as long as artists have been trying to shake up the bourgeoisie. Brian Eno once responded to the latter, saying "those poor bourgeoisie: everyone's always trying to shake them up; why don't they give them a little space…" Managers, it seems to me, face a similar dilemma, caught between these repeated exhortations to loosen up and let their people develop their own fully-rounded solutions, on the one hand, and, on the other, ever-present pressures to demonstrate that their commands are as lean and effective as they could possibly be.

We need to recognise that we will never live in a world of completely frictionless communication and totally flat organisations. A big part of the challenge is having the vision to lead people through the many knotty tensions where openness, trust and generosity are most under threat.

At it's best, Monkeys with Typewriters has an ethical inner voice that reminds me of Charles Handy's guides to the future of work from a couple of decades ago, The Age of Unreason and The Empty Raincoat. Handy was a contemporary of Arie de Geus at both Shell and the London Business School, so perhaps that's no coincidence.

Do we need an agile learning community of practice?

2011年1月17日 16:25:46 +0000

Here's are the slides for the presentation I gave last Friday at the Be Bettr conference.

Agile Learning community of practice

View more presentations from davidjennings.

Click through to the slideshare page to read the speaker notes for each slide. From my position on the stage, I didn't feel that the delivery was my finest hour, so you're not missing much by not having been there… But the question in the title slide is a genuine, open one for me, so I'd be very grateful for any thoughts and comments, either here, privately or via twitter.

See also Patrick Hadfield's reflections on his involvement in putting together the Unplugged newspaper. [Update, 20 January: and Paul Miller's record of his presentation, which preceded mine.]

Unplugged! The Agile Learning newspaper

2011年1月06日 23:02:53 +0000

Here are the copies of the Agile Learning newspaper, of which I took delivery this afternoon.

You can read the full text at the foot of this post, after the links which augment the physical version of the newsletter, including the unabridged versions of the interviews.

If you'd like to keep in touch and find out more about the ideas in the newspaper, there are several things you can do. Tell us what you'd like to see next via the Agile Learning survey. Follow Agile Learning on Twitter, Amplify or Facebook. And if you're near London, please join our meet-up group on Facebook or GroupSpaces.

Editorial

My background to the interviews — earlier blog posts on this topic: 1, 2, 3, 4
Fred Garnett's overview

Here are the full versions of the interviews (they're 3-5 times as long as the versions in the newspaper, which could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your orientation):

Tools for agile learning

Towards lightweight learning (Lucy Johnson) — Blogger
Commonplace books 2.0 (David Jennings) — TiddlyWiki, TiddlySpot hosted service, Steven Johnson on commonplace books
DIY social networks for schools (Lucy Johnson) — Ning

Join us at the Unplugged Meet-ups

Patrick Hadfield's personal account — Join the group & attend the meet-ups

Credits:

Editorial: Fred Garnett, Ian McCleave, Lucy Johnson, Patrick Hadfield, Tony Hall, and me
Google Goggles image
Constipated face

Limited copies of the newsletter will be available at these events in the next few days: Tuttle Club tomorrow, the TEDxOrenda event next Wednesday, the Be Bettr conference next Friday, a few spots at the Learning Without Frontiers conference — and, of course, the next few Unplugged meet-ups.

If you're not in London and desperately want a physical copy of the newspaper, just send me a stamped, self-addressed A4 envelope at this address. Please be quick, as there aren't many copies.

Agile Learning Newspaper: Unplugged!

View fullscreen.

Can we make a newspaper about self-organised learning?

2010年12月09日 16:17:48 +0000

I'm still digesting the eight interviews I've done on these pages in recent months under the Agile Learning banner. (I know, I know: if I haven't digested them yet, how must you feel?) A few kind souls say there's some valuable stuff in them, and a handful have even taken on the challenge of producing a newspaper that uses the interviews as a starting point.

This is an experiment — which means it may fail to achieve the goals we have in mind now, but equally it may lead to other outcomes we haven't anticipated. The immediate goal we have in mind is to have the newspaper ready by the second week in January, for distribution to attendees at the Learning without Frontiers and Be Bettr conferences. (I'm also speaking at the latter, but don't let that put you off registering — only £10 with the discount code "b3b3ttr" on the registration page.)

We will be editing the interviews to be much shorter and aiming to present them in a more fun, irreverent style, a little more lively than their dry presentation here.

We had an initial meeting to kick this off yesterday (pictured). Fancy joining in? This is an open project with no money changing hands, aside from the physical production costs of the newspaper which I'm underwriting from DJ Alchemi. We may have one or two face-to-face meetings in London, but most activities will be coordinated via a wiki along with email, twitter and suchlike. Help with creative layout design would be especially welcome, so if you know anyone…

The Blue Moment: Miles Davis's Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music by Richard Williams

2010年10月18日 11:49:22 +0000

djalchemi's review: "Not an exhaustive review of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (that occupies just one chapter), so much as a tracing of --and meditation on -- a loose school of music from the 1940s to the present day. The line starts with Gil Evans, George Russell and the "birth of the cool" in jazz, makes its way through Kind of Blue and Miles' second great quintet to Coltrane, minimalism, the Velvet Underground, Soft Machine, Brian Eno and ECM. It's a line, not a story -- and not a particularly straight line at that. Williams gives himself freedom to go off on extended riffs that relate little, if at all, back to Kind of Blue. In particular his treatment of Terry Riley is extended, and fascinating stuff. Williams' account of Brian Eno is as authoritative as you'd expect from someone who's championed Eno's work from the very beginning. My enjoyment of jazz is pretty superficial. This book (in a similar way to Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful) both showed me the direction to deeper appreciation and reconciled me to remaining forever pretty shallow."

The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death by Timothy Taylor

2010年7月24日 19:48:16 +0000

djalchemi's review: "This is only the second book I've read by an archaeologist (the first was Steven Mithen's Singing Neanderthals) - are they all this good, I wonder? Taylor takes us on a tour from cannibalism, via human sacrifice to people who have been put to death multiple times (to keep their souls from escaping) and interred in bogs where their bodies will not decompose. From these changes, he infers how ideas of the soul, of what it means to be "socially dead" - and indeed what death and mortality are - have evolved. Basically, until we stopped eating our dead relatives and started seeing their intact dead bodies on a regular basis, we weren't confronted so much with the inevitability of our own death. Now, though, we're more likely to experience "visceral insulation", being cut off from the brute physicality of dead bodies and inert tissue. "Human material culture... gains inertia and begins to kick back against its creators, creating unintended new realities," says Taylor (p 212): the practice of preserving the corpses of the dead creates an awareness of death as an ubiquitous inevitability, and ultimately leads to the idea of an afterlife, which in turn affects burial practices from then on. It took me a long time to work through this book, and perhaps that's partly to blame for me feeling that it's not as coherent as, say, The Singing Neanderthals. There's a recurring thread of argument that we underestimate the harshness - what we'd call 'savagery' from our point of view - of previous human behaviour and beliefs. But overall, The Buried Soul feels like a tour, rather than a story or a theory."

Housekeeping: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson

2010年7月12日 22:37:51 +0000

djalchemi's review: "I read this because I loved the film so much, 20+ years ago. Lots of very lyrical passages, and some interesting repeating themes. Many times people are observed inside lighted buildings at night -- and in one case a lighted train -- and conversely the people inside see only their reflections in the windows. It's a gentle meditation on the life of transients (i.e. drifters) which could also be read in terms of life as transience. But I missed the unique warmth that director Bill Forsyth gave to the principal characters in the film version."

Digital Gothic: A Critical Discography of Tangerine Dream (Music) by Paul Stump

2010年6月03日 18:35:07 +0000

djalchemi's review: "You have to be a fan to make your way through this book. The way it's organised makes it a little tedious by the latter stages unless you really care what the author thinks of Tangerine Dream's albums in the 1990s. Some of my assessments of TD's albums are quite different to Stump's: he writes off Hyperborea, which I consider a highpoint, while raving about other work that I found pedestrian. So sometimes it's difficult to know how much to trust his opinions about the albums I haven't heard. The book clearly lacks the critical input of an editor, and, as a consequence, sometimes goes off down tendentious avenues that serve more to show off Stump's reading list (which is the standard one that all contributors to The Wire have been drilled in) than to explain anything about the music."

Bill Bruford: The Autobiography by Bill Bruford

2009年4月05日 19:48:25 +0000

djalchemi's review: "It's typical of Bruford -- and of this book -- that he eschews the temptation for some natty play on words involving sticks or skins or some such and chooses the title "The Autobiography". If you're looking for tittle-tattle about the personalities of 70s rock and 80s/90s/00s jazz, this is the wrong place. Instead the book starts off with an honest attempt to describe the challenges, rewards, and everyday struggles of a musician who, over 40 years, has chosen to play to audiences of 20,000 and also to audiences of 200. It ends with a good 50 pages explaining how, after all those years, Bruford has had enough -- in fact, more than enough. He's fallen out of love with his profession and seems genuinely ill at ease that he can't impress (and I'm not making this up) a Wimbledon Estate Agent at a party. What drives him, he says, is the gaining the respect of his peer group, which includes other professional drummers, but also, bizarrely, home counties airheads. I was disappointed, too, that he made no comparison between his experience and that of his 30-year-old son, also a professional drummer. Evidently he wanted to protect the family's privacy."

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin

2009年4月05日 19:39:30 +0000

djalchemi's review: "These days many business books, at around 80,000 words, feel like they're a third longer than they need to be. This one is much shorter -- probably around the length a decent business topic requires -- but still manages to be twice as long as the ideas warrant. That's not to say that there aren't some good ideas, and occasional wise advice, in this book. But it's stretched out with homespun homilies and vacuous exhortations, and too much repetition. Worst of all, it's a call-to-arms for the jabbering classes, and doesn't care to consider what would actually happen if everyone (and the book insists that its messages apply to everyone) actually took it seriously. Lord save us from a world where everyone is a marketer!"

How to Be Free by Tom Hodgkinson

2009年2月05日 15:03:12 +0000

djalchemi's review: "I agree with 90% of Hodgkinson's book, and was kind of pleased to find that I live my live in line with 75% of it. It's really just some well-worn situationist, anarchist and green ideas, warmed up and made palatable for Observer readers. It's another of those books that outstays its welcome: after you've read two thirds of it, you can predict exactly where each chapter is heading just from its title."

What Are Children For? by Laurie Taylor

2008年10月03日 23:47:25 +0000

djalchemi's review: "I found this intellectually interesting, but -- as father of an 8-week-old child -- emotionally rather disappointing. I guess I would have felt that my expectations had been better managed if the authors hadn't left it until around page 100 out of 140 to tell us that answering the question of the book's title is really quite hard, and not something that they felt able to tackle directly."

K Foundation Burn a Million Quid by Chris Brook

2008年9月21日 19:30:56 +0000

djalchemi's review: "A brief introductory account of the various abandoned ideas for desecrating 1ドルm that the K Foundation set out with, followed by an edited selection of reactions to the showing of the film of the burning. Convincingly puts the case that Drummond and Cauty weren't entirely sure of the significance of what they'd done, and wanted to get multiple, contradictory responses to it -- which is certainly what they got. Illustrated with stills from the film, this book only takes 2-3 hours to read, but will make you think for longer."