For fifteen years, we’ve been arguing that the digital revolution will challenge many fundamental aspects of the university. We have not been alone. In 1997, none other than Peter Drucker predicted that big university campuses would be “relics” within thirty years.

Universities are losing their grip on higher learning as the Internet is, inexorably, becoming the dominant infrastructure for knowledge — both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people — and as a new generation of students requires a very different model of higher education. The transformation of the university is not just a good idea; It is an imperative, and evidence is mounting that the consequences of further delay may be dire.

Read the full essay here.

The first piece that planted a seed of doubt about the universality of social media was “Understanding Users of Social Networks,” written by Sean Silverthorne in Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. Silverthorne discussed research by Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski on how men and women use social networks differently and how Twitter use is different from either Facebook or MySpace use. What really stuck with me was his analysis of the differences in the populations of Facebook and MySpace, specifically their geographic bases. Pikorski’s analysis of a dataset of 100,000 MySpace users shows that they live mostly in smaller cities and communities in the south and central parts of the country, including “Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Florida. . . not anywhere near the media hubs (except Atlanta) and far away from those elite opinion-makers in coastal urban areas.” It still boasts some 70 million members, so my conclusion is that claims that MySpace is “dead,” it seems, may be coming mostly from the media hubs where Facebook rules.

In the second piece, “a rough, unedited crib” of danah boyd‘s talk to the Personal Democracy Forum on June 30, 2009, titled “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online,” Boyd asks her audience to do her a favor during her presentation: “I want you to step away from the techno-hyperbole for just a moment and think about issues of inequality and social stratification with me. I want you to think about the ways in which technology is not equally available or equally transformative.”

boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, discusses some results of her research into differences between teenage Facebook and MySpace users and some of the reasons teens use one or the other. Boyd comments, “Choice isn’t about features of functionality. It’s about the social categories in which we live. It’s about choosing sites online that reflect ‘people like me.’ And it’s about seeing the ‘other’ site as the place where the ‘other’ people go.” She also notes the “condescending” attitude of teens who use Facebook towards teens who use MySpace: “Teens who use MySpace may lament teen Facebook users as ‘stuck-up’ or ‘goodie two-shoes’ or the ‘good kids.’ But they’re not nearly as harsh in their language as Facebook users are of those who use MySpace.”

boyd discusses some explanations for the “divide” between the two groups as well, which I won’t do justice to in this short post, but strongly recommend that you read the entire piece for those. (Note the explanatory material at the top, clarifying the audience for this talk, and keep it in mind when reading it.) Summing up some takeaways, Boyd says: “Social media does not magically eradicate inequality. Rather, it mirrors what is happening in everyday life and makes social divisions visible. What we see online is not the property of these specific sites, but the pattern of adoption and development that emerged as people embraced them. People brought their biases with them to these sites and they got baked in.”

Finally, a conversation with my friend, who’s deep into and fluent in social media and Enterprise 2.0, got into who’s left out of social media and Enterprise 2.0 – actually, I guess I am talking about Life 2.0. Do the most interested parties, who know the most about and are most invested in Life 2.0 include a broad social strata of the U.S.? My sense – I lack any data so this entire post may be dismissed – is no, they do not. (Developing such data might be an interesting research project, IMO; if anyone knows of such research, please point me to it.) My belief is that they should.

And for me, the key to getting people involved in the power and potential of Life 2.0 lies in education. The more exposure young people have to life outside their social groups and their environment, the better for them and for us. If we believe in collaboration as a good way to tap into the best of everyone, it won’t do if “everyone” is just “people like us.”

While browsing the CoSN website (which, by the way, is loaded with resources for educators looking to bring technology into their schools), I came across a really great video called “Learning to Change, Changing to Learn“.

The video itself is simple, interviewing a handful of young people about the impact of technology on their lives. What’s amazing is some of the insight in their answers.

Here are some of my favourite quotes:

“If I didn’t have computers, I would say a lot of my hobbies that make up most of my time, I wouldn’t have. Because, well, I learned Japanese, and I learned a lot of that through the Internet.”

“That’s the cool thing about technology. You can change things whenever you want.”

“When you have access to everything, you learn how to know yourself better because you are forced to decide what to use and what not to use.”

“What we’re doing in gaming – coordination and communication – is very similar to what we’re doing at school. In the game, we have to talk to each other, we have to coordinate what we’re going to do in order to make sure that we do it well.”

And my personal favourite:

“I would say that being able to experiment with technology, is really what makes it technology. If people didn’t sit there and experiment with test tubes back in the days of Newton, nothing would have happened. It’s paving the way for us to move forward as a species and a civilization.”

The video can be seen here.

This problem is undoubtedly complicated, but one of the reasons why many American youth are unmotivated and not learning well is that they’re bored in school. They’re grown up in a fast paced, challenging digital world, with the Internet, mobile devices, video games and other gadgets. They watch less television than their parents did and TV is typically a background activity. They are a generation doesn’t like to be broadcast to and they love to interact, multi-task and collaborate. Yet, when they get into the classroom, they’re faced with stale textbooks and lectures from teachers who are still using a nineteenth century innovation, chalk and blackboard.

American classrooms need to enter the 21st century. Thousands of teachers agree. Earlier this year, several important educational groups urged the president and Congress to spend nearly $10 billion to improve technology in the classroom, and ensure teachers know how to use computers most effectively.To show the way, I suggest the president take a look at a modest country across the Atlantic that’s turning into the world leader in rethinking education for the 21st century.

That country is Portugal. Its economy in early 2005 was sagging, and it was running out of the usual economic fixes. It also scored some of the lowest educational achievement results in western Europe.

So President Prime-Minister Jose Socrates took a courageous step. He decided to invest heavily in a “technological shock” to jolt his country into the 21st century. This meant, among other things, that he’d make sure everyone in the workforce could handle a computer and use the Internet effectively.

This could transform Portuguese society by giving people immediate access to world. It would open up huge opportunities that could make Portugal a richer and more competitive place. But it wouldn’t happen unless people had a computer in their hands.

In 2005, only 31% of the Portuguese households had access to the Internet. To improve this penetration, the logical place to start was in school, where there was only one computer for five kids. The aim was to have one computer for every two students by 2010.

So Portugal launched the biggest program in the world to equip every child in the country with a laptop and access to the web and the world of collaborative learning. To pay for it, Portugal tapped into both government funds and money from mobile operators who were granted 3G licenses. That subsidized the sale of one million ultra-cheap laptops to teachers, school children, and adult learners.

Here’s how it works: If you’re a teacher or a student, you can buy a laptop for 150 euros (U.S. $207). You also get a discounted rate for broadband Internet access, wired or wireless. Low income students get an even bigger discount, and connected laptops are free or virtually free for the poorest kids. For the youngest students in Grades 1 to 4, the laptop/Internet access deal is even cheaper — 50 euros for those who can pay; free for those who can’t.

That’s only the start: Portugal has invested 400 million euros to makes sure each classroom has access to the Internet. Just about every classroom in the public system now has an interactive smart board, instead of the old fashioned blackboard.

This means that nearly nine out of 10 students in Grades 1 to 4 have a laptop on their desk. The impact on the classroom is tremendous, as I saw this spring when I toured a classroom of seven-year-olds in a public school in Lisbon. It was the most exciting, noisy, collaborative classroom I have seen in the world.

The teacher directed the kids to an astronomy blog with a beautiful color image of a rotating solar system on the screen. “Now,” said the teacher, “Who knows what the equinox is?”

Nobody knew.

“Alright, why don’t you find out?”

The chattering began, as the children clustered together to figure out what an equinox was. Then one group lept up and waved their hands. They found it! They then proceeded to explain the idea to their classmates.

This, I thought, was the exact opposite of everything that is wrong with the classroom system in the United States.

The children in this Portuguese classroom were loving learning about astronomy. They were collaborating. They were working at their own pace. They barely noticed the technology, the much-vaunted laptop. It was like air to them. But it changed the relationship they had with their teacher. Instead of fidgeting in their chairs while the teacher lectures and scrawls some notes on the blackboard, they were the explorers, the discoverers, and the teacher was their helpful guide.

Yet too often, in the U.S. school system, teachers still rely on an Industrial Model of education. They deliver a lecture, the same one to all students. It’s a one-way lecture. The teacher is the expert; the students are expected to absorb what the teacher says and repeat. And students are supposed to learn alone.

Teachers often feel that this is the only way to teach a large classroom of kids, and yet the classroom in Portugal shows that giving kids laptops can free the teacher to introduce a new way of learning that’s more natural for kids who have grown up digital at home.

First, it allows teachers to step off the stage and start listening and conversing instead of just lecturing. Second, the teacher can encourage students to discover for themselves, and learn a process of discovery and critical thinking instead of just memorizing the teacher’s information. Third, the teacher can encourage students to collaborate among themselves and with others outside the school. Finally, the teacher can tailor the style of education to their students’ individual learning styles.

It’s not easy to change the model of teaching. In fact, this is the hard part. It’s far easier to spend money, as Portugal did, to put Internet into the classroom and equip the kids with laptops. ( By now, half of high school students now have them, as do four in 10 middle school students.)

Yet Portugal has been careful to invest in teacher training to capitalize on the possibilities of the laptops in schools. They’re also thinking of creating a new online platform to allow teachers to work together to create new lessons and course materials that take advantage of the interactive technology. Through this collaboration, the Portuguese school system will create exciting new online materials to educate children. Lots of ideas are already making their way into Portuguese classrooms, says Mario Franco, chair of the Foundation for Mobile Communication, which is managing the e-school program. There are 50 different educational programs and games inside the laptops the youngest children use. The laptops are even equipped with a control to encourage kids to finish their homework and score high marks. If they do, they get more time to play.

It’s too early to assess the impact on learning in Portuguese schools. Studies of the impact of computers in schools elsewhere have been inconclusive, or mixed. One key problem is that simply providing computers in schools is not enough. Teachers facing a classroom of kids with laptops need to learn that they are no longer the expert in their domain; the Internet is.

Yet Portugal is on a campaign to reinvent learning for the 21st century. The technology is only one part of that campaign. The real work is creating a new model of learning.

I believe this could help the U.S. revive students’ interest in school and perhaps keep them in school long enough to graduate, and even go to college. It would be a substantial investment. It’s estimated that the total cost of giving a computer to each student, including connection to networks, training, and maintenance, is over $1,000 per year.

Yet after seeing the promise of the exciting classrooms in Portugal, I’m convinced it is worth it. Your child should be so fortunate.

The move from people to pigeons as carriers was important in that all the sudden there was a task performed over a distance that could now be automated. Nowadays, instantly sending a message to someone on the other side of the world is trivial — but that doesn’t mean that modern technology has yet been exhaustively used to solve older problems.

There’s plenty of old technology that still works — works well enough in fact that no one has bothered to replace it with a better, more efficient alternative. Here are a small list of examples:

• The Steam Engine. A.K.A. nuclear power. It’s pretty much the same principle, just instead of burning coal or wood to boil water and use the steam to move turbines, it’s nuclear fission. We’ve supplemented an old technology with new components, but the base principle hasn’t changed in 300 years.
• Physics. More accurately, Newtonian Physics. It’s easy to forget that just as things like steam engines and the internet are tools, so are ideas like laws of Physics. The set of tools for modeling the Physical world that Newton and his contemporaries invented were, and are, extremely useful and accurate. They’re also inaccurate and have been superceded by ones that take into account a larger picture of the universe.
• Government. The oldest governments of today were built for a different world, structured to address different issues, for people with different priorities. The election of representatives worked well for people whose lives were spent largely on farms and in factories, unable to travel the distances required to participate in the democratic process. The stability that has made governments reliable in the long run also makes them resistant to change, after all, you go with what you know. Governments are, to their credit, now adapting to involve citizens in the process of running their country, but it’s necessarily a slow-going process as this new technology is tested and accepted.

In the business space, the drive of competition should drive the constant reevaluation of all technological assumptions in favor of more efficient alternatives. But the same might not be true in other areas of society.

In the three examples above, all work well in their native context, especially Newtonian Physics. If you’re calculating how long it takes to fly between Toronto and New York, you don’t need to take into account relativity, so there’s an argument that, in that context, the older tool is just fine. This leads us to the question: should we be aggressively looking for ways to apply new technology to everything in our world, constantly re-evaluating old problems with modern eyes and modern problem solving skills? Or were some problems solved well-enough the first time, and we should focus our attention on other areas?

Similarly, when you look at your day to day life, how many of the tools and technologies that you use everyday seem like little more than sleeker versions of Historic designs — what items are missing from my list?

Don’s post yesterday, “Will universities stay relevant?”, sparked some interesting discussion around the idea that our education system is in crisis. Given Mike’s innovative perspective on teaching, I sent him the article and asked for his feedback. To be clear, Don addressed the university system and Mike’s perspective comes from teaching high school, but I still thought it would be interesting to hear what his experience has been like in the classroom.

With his permission, I’ve posted some of his email response here, which he also published on his blog “Teaching, Technology & More“:

“You must understand that students like yourself are not the norm in terms of being in touch with the digital world and having the passion to use the tools available to them in the pursuit of knowledge.  Most of these students head off to university (and our new inflated grading system is making it easier) with little self-initiative and passion for learning.  I have been using technology in the classroom for 3 years now but I still fall back to the lecture style often because most of my students are not mature enough to embrace student-directed project based learning.

That being said, the first two years of university (as I recall them) are designed to “weed out” those who really do not belong, so to speak.  Although most of my professors in the 80′s and early 90′s used the lecture style, their classrooms became more open to critical thought and discussion after second year.  From what I am told, this is still the case.

Right now, I have reached a point in my classroom where I cannot proceed any further with student-driven methods due to lack of technology and support.  We do not have the bandwidth nor the requisite hardware in place to allow students to develop their critical thinking skills using web based applications.

I sympathize with the universities somewhat.  Many of these professors grew up without technology and are now being pushed to adopt it.  The process will take time and embracing a digital pedagogy does not ensure critical thinking skills will be developed.  The passion for learning must come from the students and that passion is something that transcends generations.

What I mean to say is students, like yourself, who have a passion for learning always embrace the latest technology the world has to offer to enhance their critical thinking skills and understanding of concepts.  The fact that you are using Twitter, etc. to accomplish this is no different than a student in the early 1980′s using one of the first computers to be more productive or a student in the 1950′s using a slide rule to do the same.

We need to work on fueling the passion for learning if we want to produce a generation of critical thinkers.  I try to use technology to inspire students to become passionate about knowledge.  The technology on its own is merely a conduit to critical thinking.  The passion for learning must come from within.”

I argued that is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn. The reaction on Twitter, mainly from students has been enormously positive. So far two academics have written critiques of my views at the Edge.

However because the Edge does not enable readers to comment, I’d like to know what you think. Please read a summary below and then check out the Edge article and let the world know what you think here on Wikinomics.com.

The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still common. It’s part of a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education.

Students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities are to remain relevant, they will have to change.

Professors will have to abandon the traditional lecture, and start listening and conversing with the students — shifting from a broadcast style and adopting an interactive one. They should be encouraging students to discover for themselves, and learn a process of discovery and critical thinking instead of just memorizing the professor’s store of information. They need to encourage students to collaborate among themselves and with others outside the university. Finally, they need to tailor the style of education to their students’ individual learning styles.

Some leading educators are calling for this kind of massive change; one of these is Richard Sweeney, university librarian at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He says students are smart but impatient. They like to collaborate and they reject one-way lectures. While some educators view this as pandering to a generation, Sweeney is firm: “They want to learn, but they want to learn only from what they have to learn, and they want to learn it in a style that is best for them.”

This is not fundamentally about technology per se. Rather it represents a change in the relationship between students and teachers in the learning process.

In the old model, teachers taught and students were expected to absorb vast quantities of content. Education was about absorbing content and being able to recall it on exams. You graduated and you were set for life – just “keeping” up in your chosen field. Today when you graduate you’re set for say, 15 minutes. If you took a technical course half of what you learned in the first year may be obsolete by the 4th year. What counts is your capacity to learn lifelong, to think, research, find information, analyze, synthesize, contextualize, critically evaluate it; to apply research to solving problems; to collaborate and communicate.
This challenge to the existing order raises a deeper issue — the purpose of the university

“The time has come for some far reaching changes to the university, our model of pedagogy, how we operate, and our relationship to the rest of the world,” says Luis M. Proenza, president of the University of Akron.

He asks a provocative question: Why should a university student be restricted to learning from the professors at the university he or she is attending? True, students can obviously learn from intellectuals around the world through books, or via the Internet. Yet in a digital world, why shouldn’t a student be able to take a course from a professor at another university?

Proenza thinks universities should use the Internet to create a global centre of excellence. In other words, choose the best courses you have and link them with the best at a handful of universities around the world to create an unquestionably best-in-class program for students. Students would get to learn from the world’s greatest minds in their area of interest – either in the physical classroom, or online. This global academy would be also be open to anyone online. This is a beautiful example of the collaboration I described in the book I co-authored, Wikinomics.

The digital world, which has trained young minds to inquire and collaborate, is challenging not only the lecture-driven teaching traditions of the university, but also the very notion of a walled-in institution that excludes large numbers of people. Why not allow a brilliant grade 9 student to take first-year math, without abandoning the social life of his high school? Why not deploy the interactive power of the internet to transform the university into a place of life-long learning?

Share your thoughts here.

There’s a couple really neat elements to this. First, the majority of all translations in this project are staffed by volunteers…

These volunteers have doubtless, seen a particular video and thought, “I want to help share this with the world.” Currently there are video translations in over 40 languages, and more than 1100 volunteer translators. All translations are peer-reviewed for accuracy, and are expected to follow a style guide for consistency across video translations. From an incentive perspective, volunteers are provided with recognition for their work, and can even create translator profiles in order to build up a TED identity, where their contributions are tracked. This is an entirely sustainable project because the workforce/volunteers benefit from getting involved, and this involvement is made easy using technology that simplifies the process. Benefits include the inherent satisfaction from translating a video discussion you’re interested in, as well as the professional reward of contributing to the well known and esteemed TED community.

What impresses me about this project, is not just the scope, but the way in which it uses technology in a simple and effective way to help so many people across the world. From a technical standpoint, here is what is in TED’s first May release (from the TED website):

Along with subtitles, every talk on TED.com now features a time-coded, interactive transcript, which allows users to select any phrase and have the video play from that point. The transcripts are fully indexable by search engines, exposing previously inaccessible content within the talks themselves. For example, searching on Google for “green roof” will ultimately help you find the moment in architect William McDonough’s talk when he discusses Ford’s River Rouge plant, and also the moment in Majora Carter’s talk when she speaks of her green roof project in the South Bronx. Transcripts will index in all available languages.

The initial launch incorporates:

• Subtitles on every talk (available in English and any translated language)
• Interactive transcript (available in English and any translated language)
• Language-specific index pages featuring all the talks translated in that language
• Translations for headlines and talk descriptions
• The Translator Dashboard, allowing a bird’s-eye view on talks available for translation or review
• My Translations: a personalized page within each translator’s member profiles that shows the translations to which a translator has contributed
• Ability to sync user accounts between TED and dotSUB, allowing seamless transfer of data for translators

Perhaps what I like most about this project, is that TED is only the beginning – this ‘opening up’ of the world’s knowledge can only gain momentum and spread in other applicable settings. My colleague, Daniela Kortan, recently discussed Academic Earth in the context of a discussion on how the model for learning is changing. Academic Earth and other similar offerings can look to what TED is doing here, and say “that is the way, this is the direction for the future, so that we too can more effectively share our knowledge.” As we in society begin to better equip people with the tools to more effectively learn, more and more people will gain access to the same wealth of knowledge, inspiration, and a world-changing resource – information. Because, as we all know, knowledge is power.

As an example, a recent study by Skidmore economist Sandy Baum and the College Board, approximates the real lifetime value of a college degree at about $300,000. This estimate is based on the assumption that those with college degrees earn an average of $20,000 more per year than non-graduates, and takes into account the average cost of tuition and books, as well as annual inflation over a forty-year career. This estimate is down from previous calculations of an approximately $1 million payback. Mind you, this is for undergraduate degrees. It begs the question: What about more specialized and more expensive graduate degrees (expensive both in terms of tuition and opportunity costs)?

MBA degrees are a specific point of contention. While conventional wisdom will have people flooding into MBA schools, there is also a sense that maybe professionals should seek to upgrade through less conventional, more productive means. Indeed, the sheen associated with an MBA is tarnished by the fact that many of the financial decision makers that perpetrated the economic downturn were themselves alumni of some of the most respected business schools.

Some recent interviews I’ve done seem to corroborate these findings. Fast Company staff writer and author of Generation Debt, Anya Kamenetz says:

“I’ve never been an advocate of people going back to school and incurring large amounts of educational debt just to have a degree. [...] I’m very interested in what the long term developments are going to be because I think that higher education has been resistant to really fundamental types of innovation and change for far too long. We’ve seen information technology sweep every other industry and raise productivity and raise the potential of what you can accomplish. I think that in higher ed, they’re still working off a 14th century model. It’s lecture classes and it’s seminars and it’s educational requirements that don’t necessarily match where the jobs are these days. So, I think that you’re going to see a lot more students and families re-evaluating the other options out there; whether that be online education, vocational programming, certification programs, or programs that are run by employers. I think it’s actually going to be a fantastic area of growth for the next decade and a half or so.”

Penelope Trunk, author of Brazen Careerist is more colorful in her analysis of the value of graduate programs:

“People are going to grad school for stuff that has no bearing on the workplace. It’s not like we have more critical thinking because somebody knows the history of the little War of the Roses, right? And so, who cares? I don’t see any corporation placing a premium on any kind of graduate degree, except a top 25 business school degree. I mean most MBAs are from shitty schools so they don’t place a premium on that. Most law schools are shitty and people have to go into some other profession besides law because their degree is so bad. If you get a Masters in French and then try to get a marketing position, you’re penalized. You’re actually penalized because you look like you don’t have a clue about how to manage your life because you just spent four years learning French and you’re not using it. To me that just screams obsessive with details, scared to go out into the job market, and purposeless. I mean, I just don’t think anyone is placing a premium on graduate degrees.”

From what I’m hearing, it seems as though college age students are making important decisions about where they’re going to invest education dollars. Some of them are backing into junior colleges or community colleges; others are choosing to forgo higher education because of their financial situations. This would be especially true if their Boomer parents are now struggling with layoffs or delayed retirement. On the demand side of the equation, numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics suggest that overall, the United States will need 18 million new college degree holders by 2012 to cover job growth and replace retirees but at current graduation rates, the country will be six million short. Will this trend towards delaying or abstaining from higher education reinforce the impending knowledge gap among entry-level workers? Some interesting food for thought…

This reality looks to soon be a thing of the past. In a couple of days, Wolfram (the people behind the MathWorld resource site) will be launching Wolfram|Alpha, a “computational knowledge engine” that can answer factual questions — essentially deriving new conclusions and results from existing web pages and documents (read the engine’s introduction here).  ReadWriteWeb recently got a chance to play with Alpha, and they seemed very impressed:

In today’s demo, for example, Stephen Wolfram searched for “internet users in europe,” or “weather oakland” – two queries that most users would also use in Google or any other search engine.

Where Alpha exceeds, is in the presentation of its “search” results. When asked for how many internet users there are in Europe, for example, Alpha returned not just the total number, but also various plots and data for every country (apparently Vatican City only has 93 Internet users).

Another query with a very sophisticated result was “uncle’s uncle’s brother’s son.” Now if you type that into Google, the result will be a useless list of sites that don’t even answer this specific question, but Alpha actually returns an interactive genealogic tree with additional information, including data about the ‘blood relationship fraction,’ for example (3.125% in this case).

Similarly, I.B.M. has developed a system that is also able to compute knowledge. In an amusing move, they’ll be introducing the technology to the world by having it compete on Jeopardy!:

In a demonstration match here at the I.B.M. laboratory against two researchers recently, Watson (the system) appeared to be both aggressive and competent, but also made the occasional puzzling blunder.

For example, given the statement, “Bordered by Syria and Israel, this small country is only 135 miles long and 35 miles wide,” Watson beat its human competitors by quickly answering, “What is Lebanon?”

Moments later, however, the program stumbled when it decided it had high confidence that a “sheet” was a fruit.

Missteps aside, these are exciting developments, and represent the introduction of computing to a higher level of information. Initially systems could only compute numeric data presented in very strict formats; this remained the paradigm for a very long time. Only recently has the development of extracting in-text relationships from so-called “unstructured data” made forays into mainstream technology — but such data still required human interpretation and understanding. These parallel developments from Wolfram and I.B.M. take the interactions between machines and information that next step further — which, despite being considerably more technically complicated, is likely to greatly simplify human interaction with computers.

Contra-Happiness: Feeling Pizzled

You may not know the word, but you probably have felt pizzled before. Actually, you probably have felt pizzled at some point today. Stolze explains that feeling pizzled is an adverse effect of our Web 2.0 world: “People sometimes forget the hierarchy of communication. An example of disregard for the hierarchy is ignoring a face-to-face conversation to communicate digitally. For example, you are having a conversation with someone, but all of a sudden they are looking at their Blackberry, or answering ‘very important’ phonecalls. When the person we are talking to does this we feel pizzled – both pissed off and puzzled.”

Pro-Happiness: The Web as the World Wide Window and a Global Campfire

“In my research nearly all respondents answer that the Web has enriched their lives in two ways,” said Stolze. “The first one being that they consider it their window to the world. There’s no doubt that the democratizing of knowledge has had a positive impact on the way people go through life. From deep thoughts on philosophy to things like finding a restaurant’s phone number or looking up a user review on IMDB. The second reason is that the Web is a perfect place to find people who are like you – to set up a discussion without the risk of being judged by your looks, skincolor or clothes. We are a social species and we have this deep need to be part of a group. The Internet has become the perfect place to gather around this new global campfire.”

 Debateable: We have fewer deep, face-to-face realtionships because of the Web

The other side of the “ease of interaction” coin is concern over the extent to which we carry out relationships online, as opposed to face-to-face. Stolze doesn’t discount this concern: “There is a disconnect between our number of ‘friends’ and the number of deep connections we have. This is called friendship inflation. Simple economic law says that when there is more of something, the individual value decreases.” Stolze does agree, however, that while an abundance of Web 2.0 friendships will cause some of us to disregard the importance of deep, traditional friendships, an equal, if not greater, number of us will use the Web to strenghten existing strong ties and develop new ones. In referring to online communication with close friends, Stolze says, “The best emails are the ones that say: ‘Hey Jim, let’s have lunch this Friday. Same place?’”

Contra-Happiness: Information Overload

The Web provides us with more, and cheaper, information than ever before. Stolze is finding that perhaps we have access to too much information, and that it might have serious negative effects. He says, “We mistake information for inspiration and think more is better. The result is that we spend hours of surfing, lurking for information. If you search Google for the word ‘information’ you get over 3 billion results. Constantly being presented with more information than we have the ability to look through can cause stress, which contributes to depression.”

The Conclusion…

Stolze’s book, How to Survive Your Inbox, will be released, in Dutch, this coming June, but he gave me a preview of the conclusion: “In my research, I found that I was not able to prove, scientifically, that the Web makes us happy. I would say that the answer is no, given my results. What the data does allow me to say is that not being connected to the Internet makes you unhappy. It’s kind of the new hygiene.” 

While too little Web action makes us unhappy, there certainly is a point where, well, too much is too much. Fortunately, Stolze provides guidelines for keeping our Web consumption at a healthy level. Check out his TED presentation on 5 Ways the Internet can make us happier and his answers to my questions on responsible use below.

On Responsible Use

Perron: Does a Blackberry belong in the bedroom?

Stolze: Surely not…Don’t take your Blackberry or your iPhone into the bedroom.

Perron: How do you know when you have reached an unhealthy level of online activity?

Stolze: When you’re Twittering [aka Tweeting] from the bathroom.

-Many thanks to Jim Stolze for his time and insight.

For many, the answer could be yes, says Kevin Carey, policy director of Education Sector, a Washington think tank.  Writing in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Carey argues that both industries are in the business of creating and communicating information.

It’s clear that newspapers are in a death spiral. The Tribune Company, owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, is bankrupt, as is the owner of the The Philadelphia Inquirer. The Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are gone, and the San Francisco Chronicle may not last the year. The New York Times’ debt has been downgraded to junk.

All of this is happening despite the fact that the Internet has radically expanded the audience for news. Millions of people read The New York Times online, dwarfing its print circulation of slightly over one million. The problem is that the Times is not, and never has been, in the business of selling news. It’s in the print advertising business. For decades, newspapers enjoyed a geographically defined monopoly over the lucrative ad market, the profits from which were used to support money-losing enterprises like investigative reporting and foreign bureaus. Now that money is gone, lost to cheaper online competitors like Craigslist. Proud institutions that served their communities for decades are vanishing, one by one.

(As I’ve always said, leaders of old paradigms have the greatest difficulty embracing the new.  Why didn’t Gannett create The Huffington Post?  Why didn’t NBC invent YouTube?  Why didn’t AT&T launch Twitter?  Yellow Pages should have built Facebook and Microsoft should have come up with Google.  And Craigslist would have been a perfect venture for the New York Times.)

So far there is no Craigslist equivalent in the education industry, says Carey. That’s because teaching is more complicated than advertising, and universities are sitting behind government-backed barriers to competition, in the form of accreditation. “Anyone can use the Internet to sell classified ads or publish opinion columns or analyze the local news. Not anyone can sell credit-bearing courses or widely recognized degrees.”

Doubtless universities today are as confident as newspapers were ten years ago.  The confidence by some is justified. “Tony liberal-arts colleges and other selective private institutions will do fine, as will public universities that garner a lot of external research support and offer the classic residential experience to the children of the upper middle class.”

But less-selective private colleges and regional public universities, by contrast - the higher-education equivalents of the city newspaper - are in real danger. To survive and prosper, says Carey, universities need to integrate technology and teaching in a way that improves the learning experience while simultaneously passing the savings on to students in the form of reduced tuition.

One thing for sure.  The smartest students want to get an “A” without having ever done to the lectures.  They understand that there are better ways of learning than being the passive recipient of a one-way, one size fits all, teacher-focused model where the student is isolated in the learning process.  When the cream of the crop of an entire generation is boycotting the formal model of pedagogy, the writing is in the wall.

In searching (the Web) for thinkers who have given thought to a correlation between happiness and our use of the Web, I found Jim Stolze‘s Virtual Happiness Project. Stolze’s research question – Does the Web make us happy? – is the focus of this post, the first of two on the topic of the Web and human happiness.

Stolze postulates that our romance with the Web (which has only grown stronger with the level of interactivity that characterizes Web 2.0) is fuelled by our need to interact with others. Stolze observes that, i) being social makes us happy; ii) the Web facilitates social interaction; and iii) unsurprisingly, we have readily adopted the Web.

If the Web facilitates the social interactions that make us so happy, does the Web itself make us happy? I realize in full that this is an incredibly simple, broad, and highly ambitious research question. It is, however, a question that deserves contemplation and serious academic attention, particularly since any child born today will likely grow up online, bathed in bits, figuratively speaking.

Immediately, a number of examples pro (a CBS report on internet addiction) and contra (an earlier post on how the power of the Web is being harnessed by therapists to treat clients) the Web’s ability to elicit happiness come to mind. 

Is this a debate that comes to the common, but anticlimatic, conclusion, “like anything, it can be good in moderation?” Or will we able to say, conclusively, that humans are happier living with the Web?

Read Part Two

Unable to pinpoint all the barriers to widespread adoption of EMR, I got in touch with Dr. Nadine Gebara, Resident, currently at University of Toronto. I asked her why our health care institutions have been so slow in digitizing their info - something libraries started doing almost 20-years ago. I quickly learned that the barriers to EMR are greater and more deeply engrained than I had imagined.

Initially, I suspected that resistance on the part of physicians had something to do with hospitals’ slow move to EMR, but Dr. Gebara’s experience suggested otherwise: “I have seen very little resistance on the part of health care workers. There’s actually some frustration among physicians about not having adequate EMR systems. Overall, attitudes towards electronic records are overwhelmingly positive given the clear benefits to efficiency and ease of access to critical information.”

While EMR promises clear long-term benefits to efficiency and quality of care, government is reluctant to spend on the technology. The investment in EMR is seemingly a no-brainer. Sure, it’s expensive in the short-term, but soon enough we’ll see increased efficiency, more care to more people, and health care providers happy not to have to sift through piles of paper records to find critical information.

The “no-brainer” status I assigned to an investment in EMR was challenged as I continued to explore the issue with Dr. Gebara.

“There are a handful of companies offering EMR products and platforms [like this one and this one, or just look here for a comprehensive list]. Hospital A, for example, might use one platform, but Hospital B down the street uses a different one. It’s great that they are using EMR, but the problem we run into is that you generally cannot share data between the two systems,” she said. 

The fact that different platforms cannot be integrated creates uncertainty around what the outcome and ROI of any wide-scale (and expensive) EMR initiative might be. Inability to clearly estimate and articulate the benefits of EMR hampers efforts to secure government funding. And, quite simply, ”lack of funding is the greatest barrier to universal EMR.”

One (partial) solution would be for government and health institutions to select a single platform so that data can be shared in any hospital in any region.  But, if the government selects one service provider, do they not create an illegal monopoly in the industry?

Without government intervention, leaders in EMR technology will just have to emerge over time. With fewer players in the field and more hospitals adopting the same platforms, scalability and the ability to share data between hospitals will increase. In turn, the case for EMR funding will strengthen. Unfortunately, this implies simply waiting for the fittest platform to emerge. If that’s the case, then we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for universal EMR. 

Adoption of Wikinomics principles on the part of the health informatics industry (referring to companies building and providing EMR platforms and services), however, would speed the journey to easily integrateable platforms. My guess is that the first company from within the EMR space who breaks down silos and produces a platform that integrates with others will be dominating the field when EMR arrives in full force – sooner, rather than later.

The Flat Classroom Project is currently working in partnership with Don Tapscott on the Net Gen Education Challenge, linking students, educators, parents and business leaders around the world. Check out the joint initiative at netgened.grownupdigital.com.)

This blog post is in response to an invitation from Jeff Plaman at International School Beijing’s 7 Steps Towards 21st Century Education Ning, to write about global collaboration in order to raise awareness of possibilities and to share my enthusiasm for making connections and working across boundaries and borders. I often write about connective living as an educator, eg A Day in the Life, and try to emphasise the need to develop a personal learning network in order to make these connections happen. It is through connections and communications using Web 2.0 and other tools that collaboration opportunities can emerge.

I am often asked how I got started in global collaborative projects, and I am then asked how others can come on board as well. My history in classroom Internet-based, global goes back about 12 years with Global SchoolNet and Cyberfair, iEARN, and now more recently co-developing Flat Classroom Projects. However let’s not drag up the past, let’s focus on NOW and how the reader of this blog (You!) can get involved by joining and/or creating a 21st century global project, and all that entails!

Please note this is written specifically from my point of view and includes the work and projects I have been involved in so is therefore fairly narrow, but at the same time I think progressive.

Concept

The ability to connect, communicate and collaborate with educators and students in all parts of the world using common online tools has changed the way I teach in the classroom, as well as changed the way I work as an administrator. A 21st century educator is connected, communicates in a reliable and responsible way, and ‘flattens’ the walls of their classroom in appropriate ways to enhance the educational learning experience of all. Therefore, every topic, every unit of work, every opportunity needs to be reviewed in terms of how it can be made relevant through external contact and collaboration. Gone are the days where it was too difficult to bring the world into the room. You, the teacher, are only limited by your imagination! With tools such as Skype, wikis, blogs, Elluminate etc there is no excuse for not staging a real-time or asynchronous link-up to support your curriculum objectives. There is also no excuse any more for not participating in a global project, a more deliberated, designed, planned and executed approach to collaboration via the Internet.

I have written many times in the past about the concept of global collaboration.

• How to Flatten Your Classroom talks about taking that first step by connecting with others, then taking the next step and implementing a project
• Beyond the ‘wow’: Embed the flat learning experience for sustainability talks about going beyond the ‘wow’ factor and engagement and pedagogical shift
• Our flat classroom workshop outline via this blog post, and via our workshop wiki

Power and Practice

I equate practice with power. If you are practicing collaboration you have the power to change the world, one classroom at a time. The power of learning in a social and extended context, yet in a safe and supportive environment is achievable. I think sometimes schools and teachers give up too easily, put this in the ‘too hard’ basket too readily. Some blog posts about this include:

• My 2020 Vision for Global Collaboration, where I give more of the history of my involvement in global, collaborative projects, and talk about the ideals of embedding this into the curriculum, develop digital citizenship skills, unblock tools etc
• The Year of Global Collaboration 3.0, where I talk about the evolution of global collaboration to the 3.0 status. Let me copy the main points again here:

Global Collaboration 3.0

• Fully engaged teachers who communicate with all participants (other teachers and other students)
• Use of Web 2.0 tools for communication and interaction (networking) and for creation
• Different global classrooms work together on a theme/project and become one classroom
• Common assessment objectives
• High expectations for connectivity and collaboration on teachers and students (it is not enough to email once a week!)
• Extended community partners included in the project (other educators, experts)
• Output may be individual or class/school based but includes input from others
• Output uses multimedia and attempts to make a difference to the immediate or extended environment
• Teacher and/or student initiated, student-centered learning

Further to the idea of practice here are a list of resources for the Flat Classroom Projects over the past 2+ years

• Portal for all Flat Classroom Projects, including Horizon Project, Digiteen and the new Net Generation Educationproject with Don Tapscott
• Flat Classrooms Ning: an educational network for educators
• Flat Classroom Conference Ning

Also, here is a current presentation showing the 7 Steps to a Flat Classroom:

The magic of collaboration comes from seeing students andteachers find their own voice and take charge of their own learning. It comes from being given choices and ownership and empowerment of their learning path. In the blog post “The conference that changed lives” I share the amazing power of bringing together people from around the world, students and teachers who came to Qatar for a face-to-face gathering and the magic that occurred before, during and after this event. This post also shares the 4 student videos that came from the winning teams, and is witness to the power of collaboration of strangers. The video that opens the Flat Classroom Conference, found on the Ning, details the development of a collaboration between myself and Vicki Davis that has changed our lives, created a pedagogically significant body of work, and encouraged others globally to reach out and make this happen.

Finally, I think the recent blog post “Take One Hour to Go Beyond Reflections“, comes towards sharing the impact and true magic of global collaboration, when it shares artifacts and responses to the Flat Classroom Conference event.

Here are some quotes from professors in the article:

“Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark…Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.”

“I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C…That is the default grade. They see the default grade as an A.”

“Students often confuse the level of effort with the quality of work. There is a mentality in students that ‘if I work hard, I deserve a high grade.’ “

Quotes from students:

“I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade…What else is there really than the effort that you put in?”

“If you put in all the effort you have and get a C, what is the point?…If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.”

“I feel that if I do all of the readings and attend class regularly that I should be able to achieve a grade of at least a B.”

What are your thoughts on this? Have you experienced a similar disconnect in the workplace?

Why not? They rely on an archaic and inefficient mode of teaching.

Prison education (personal development courses, GED, and post-secondary courses) rely on correspondence via travel (by educators to correctional facilities) and old-school postage. Computers are rare and the use of the Internet, or even Intranets, is prohibited.  

This story suggests that decreased funding for prison education in the United States makes it increasingly  difficult to successfully implement prison education via traditional correspondance. It explains that efficient, interactive prison classes – in which the students and professor interact through live video feeds – have the potential to vastly increase the odds that an inmate will start and complete courses or even an entire degree.

Open University (OU), a largely online-correspondence UK institution, has 1,400 student-inmates in 148 prisons. Officials from the school are calling for greater adoption of technology by prisons to facilitate the inmates’ learning. Anne Pike, Teaching Fellow in OU’s Offender Learning Program believes that, “If (inmates) are going to be rehabilitated into the modern world, offenders must access modern technologies. It is necessary for employment as well as coping with the fast pace of life. ” (Read the rest here).

If we wanted to use modern, common technology to provide enhanced education to prisoners we could (after cutting through all of the red tape). It could be done efficiently and at a high level of quality. The question is, do we want to?

For the inmate on Death Row guilty of the type of crime we try not to think about, the use of a computer or Internet is a priveledge lost, and deservedly so. But think of the marginalized 18 year-old serving a 3 year term for a robbery - a robbery that he committed, perhaps, to get cash to pay for food or health care bills. Assuming that this 18 year-old enrolls in some educational program in prison, should he receive an inefficient and expensive “snail mail education,” or should he have the opportunity to develop himself through an efficient and relevant education that harnesses the power of common computer technology?

I look foward to hearing your take on this issue.

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It seems that a quick way to get the public talking about much needed educational reform may be as simple as pushing back the time of the morning bell.

This week, Toronto’s English language public school board, the TDSB, announced that at least one local high school, Eastern Commerce Collegiate Institute, will be starting classes later than ever next September – 10 am – in order to better accommodate students’ learning patterns, biological development and evolving lifestyle demands (such as part-time evening employment).  As you can imagine, the announcement has been met with vocal reaction - both for and against - but one of the most unfortunate side effects to come from the decision has been the amount of generational bias and “in my day” attitude that seems to have emerged against Net Generation students. 

A few choice comments left on The Toronto Star‘s (one of Canada’s largest newspapers) article follow below:

When the cart drives the horse

Why just start classes at 10:00 to accomodate the teenagers? We should adopt other accomodations: teach Facebook instead of Math, play Warcraft instead of studying literature and teach “chilling” instead of Science? Now, seriously, the teenagers have their world and their fun stuff but it is the education system who should teach them values, not the other way around. – petrache

 Discipline is the Difference

I have probably seen 10,000 CV’s, 2.000 interviews and hired 800 people in my career. I have absolutely no time for applicants who demonstrate a lack of discipline. In fact, I seek out evidence of poor self discipline. Most of the employers I know do the same thing. Eastern Commerce is certainly on my DNH (Do Not Hire) list! – Herschell Hollywood

 Work to be done

The work should be done when it is required, not when you feel like working. Due to a deadline of monday, I will be working until the work is done. I do not particularly want to work right now and it is not my optimal work time, but I will work to meet my deadline. This was required when I went to high school, college and university and served me well in the first few years after school when my company (a tech startup in the 90s) loaded me with more work than I could really handle. Deadlines were set and many times my work day started at 7 am, ended at 2am and it was not uncommon for the office to be full in the middle of a Saturday night. My wife (working today) had similar experiences both earlier in her career and now and would tell you (as HR) that informing your manager that it is inconvenient to start early will not get you ahead. This is one reason that I resent so many people who complain about the wealthy.  – Expat in the USA

While I don’t propose to be an expert on adolescent mental health and development, based on my personal experience and nGenera’s research on the Net Generation in the workforce and next generation education delivery, I think it may be time for more Boards to investigate alternative learning strategies, such as the one proposed for Eastern C.I..  A number already have a similar late start system in place and I am encouraged by the Toronto Board’s willingness to experiment with the standard 9am – 3pm day. 

Is 10am – 4pm definitely the right answer?  Likely not, but it presents students with another option, and those who choose to embrace the offering will hopefully be the ones who need it the most – not to surf Facebook for an extra hour in the evening, or to stay up later playing WOW as many opponents fear will happen, but rather to work their part-time job, or even simply to get that extra hour of sleep that so many of us, young and old, crave. (Let alone the benefits that can come from adept Internet usage or the skills that can be gained from MMORPG)

Are we failing our next generation by allowing for a later start, when so many of us have already been at work for number of hours?  Does this mean we’re pushing back “adulthood” and the need to just get used to early morning starts?  Maybe “adulthood” as defined by just learning to deal with it is being delayed - but is that such a bad thing?  Nobody has proposed shorter days, just ones that are rearranged to harness students’ proposed maximum potential. 

I guess only time will tell the merits of the late start for Eastern C.I., but one thing is for sure – having all classes start at 9 am or earlier simply because that’s the way it’s always been done, doesn’t make sense -particularly to the Net Generation, known for their scrutiny of information and who will enter a workforce that features increasingly flexible work arrangements.  I imagine the flexible work day faced similar criticism when it was first proposed, but that seems to be working out just fine (read: one of the fastest growing and most sought after employment trends) for many.

I think Herschell Hollywood might miss out on some top talent with such a brazen attitude, but hey, with 000s of resumes still to go, I’m sure he’ll be fine…unless he ever needs to hire one of those undisciplined Net Geners.

The UCLA  research team found that while activities like reading books produced significant activity in regions of the brain controlling language, reading, memory and visual abilities… web search task produced significant additional activity in separate areas of the brain controlling decision-making and complex reasoning (only in experienced web users).

Left: Brain activity while reading a book (experienced web surfer)

Right:Brain activity while surfing the web (experienced web surfer)

Lead researcher and study author Dr. Gary Small, director of the UCLA Center of Aging notes, “Just a simple, everyday computer task seems to be activating neural circuits… It’s possible that this is something that strengthens our brains as we do it.”

Now this research is focused around surfing the Web, but I wonder if activities using Web 2.0 tools such as social networking or even tagging and signing up for RSS feeds would have similar benefits while, at the same time, offering a more interactive medium.

I know sitting in front of a computer all day surfing the web or playing video games isn’t ‘good for you’,  but at least for middle aged and older individuals, sitting in front of a computer has its benefits.

For further information on this study please see these related BBC and Yahoo! articles.

In order to explore the problem, the authors look at a dataset of almost 10 million videos on YouTube, submitted by 579,471 people, as of April 30 2008. The key finding is that while one might look at a “digital commons” as a traditional public good, the individuals contributing to the digital commons may perceive their activity as a private good. In this mindset, they’re not necessarily getting money, but rather attention, which can essentially be looked at as a “currency” they are collecting. I would personally call this benefit reputation, as I believe it is the ability to build one’s reputation that is driving the majority of crowdsourcing activity, but it’s essentially the same point.

Now I won’t get into the nitty gritty of how they ran the test – but if you are fluent in things like alphas, p-values, and logs, the write up is fairly interesting (and quite short). I would like to highlight an interesting contrast in the findings though. As one would expect, the researchers found that when attention is low (i.e. few people watching your videos), productivity (i.e. # of videos you upload) drops, and in many cases wastes away to nothing. At this end of the spectrum, individuals compare themselves mostly to the performance of others. Increases in attention have the opposite effect (i.e. more people watching = higher propensity to upload)… and at this end of the spectrum, individuals compare themselves to their own previous benchmarks.

In other words, “bad” is determined in relation to others, but “good” is determined in relation to one’s previous record. Could be an interesting tidbit of information for people looking to grow their own crowdsourcing platform…

Ten days after mailing the physical copy of the report to Carleton, Moufid emailed the 32 students whose accounts had been completely compromised, and informed them that the school had been made aware of the attack on security, and had decided to ignore it. One of the students happened to be an intern at a CBC newsroom, and her supervisor found the story to be interesting — it grew from there. Carleton said that they only received the package the same day that Moufid emailed the 32 students, leaving them with no time to do anything at all.

Moufid’s attack came from recognizing a substantial logical flaw in Carleton’s user authentication system: that once someone has access to a compromised email account, they have direct access to just about everything else. After seeing this design flaw, Moufid worked backwards, using what he knew about the Carleton systems, to figure out his point of attack, which turned out to relate to the Campus ID cards.

Once word was out that Carleton was looking for the hacker, Moufid promptly turned himself in. Carleton did not elect to expell him, but instead made it a condition of his continued presence at school that he claim to have lied about alerting the school to the security issue, among several other punishments.

While my heart goes out to Mouffid, I think he could have handled the situation in a much more delicate manner, Universities are built on reputation, and don’t respond well to students taking direct, public attacks on their reputations.

Since I’m still a student, this story hits home for me. Not because I intend to break into my school’s security system, but because someone else may have already, and my school could be sweeping it under the carpet. As the two links to wikileaks above point out, once the information is out there, it’s out there, and there won’t be a broom large enough to clean up the mess so that no one finds out.

As for how a university expects to have a population comprised almost entirely of the leaders of tomorrow, and be able to repress information that that population has access to, I’m not sure — I don’t see it happening. By ignoring Moufid, and then trying to discredit him (assuming that Moufid had given them plenty of notice), Carleton has set a precedent that will deter future students from bringing forth security issues: it paints their options as either allowing the insecurities to remain (by being ignored when hilighted), or receiving harsh penalties for trying to bring those security flaws to light.

I don’t mean to be hard on Carleton, it just happens to be the school where this incident happened, but it could just have easily been anywhere else. Universities need to make sure that they’re properly prepared for, or at least open to the idea of, uncomfortable situations such as these when the powers that be aren’t the ones with all of the answers.

Members of the net generation will scrutinize everything to make sure that it meets their standards, including especially the security systems that their universities provide. When you’ve got the architects of the security systems of tomorrow on hand, and they’re happy to find the holes in your current security system for you, it seems only prudent to seriously entertain their suggestions.

What is a studbook? I’ll let the FAQ at Studbooks.org, answer that one:

A studbook is literally a register in which the origin (descent) and characteristics of the registered animals of one race or species are drawn up. In case of the ESF, this concerns a group of reptile and amphibian species. A studbook can arrange a number of things: management of an animal species in captivity, countering inbreeding by working with breeding programmes and knowledge collection and publication.
This means that the studbook keeper keeps track of which animals are being cared for at which location and which animals reproduce, the goal of this being to guarantee the genetic health of the population on the long term. Animals and their offspring can be exchanged between (aspiring) studbook members, with the studbook keeper possibly playing a mediating / advising role. The studbook keeper can be consulted if there are questions regarding the husbandry and breeding of the species.
Once a year, the studbook keeper publishes an annual report, in which mutations and successes of the past year are noted.

The FAQ also explains why studbooks are important:

Especially for species that are in danger of extinction (in captivity and/or in the wild), it is vitally important to keep the gene pool of the population as broad as possible. The smaller the population, the bigger the chance of risks that come with inbreeding. With every individual animal that dies in a small population (such as the European captive population), part of the genetic variation disappears that is necessary for a genetically healthy population. The same applies for an animal that does not reproduce: this individual is genetically `dead` for its populations future existence, unless an effort is made to breed with the individual.
The collection and transfer of knowledge means that an effort is made to collect, and eventually publish, as much information as possible about the husbandry and breeding of a studbook species. This way, one person can be consulted instead of `the wheel having to be reinvented` again and again.

In essence, through collaboration, these zoology “dating sites” can best match breeding pairs based on data captured in various sources and tabulated in a common space. Steve Feldman, spokesperson for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums which oversees the majority of studbooks for exotic species in the United States was quoted in the Sunday New York Times ”to paraphrase an old Jeff Foxworthy joke, it’s important that your family tree forks. This way we can have a genetically diverse population.”

Now aside from being a $5.3 billion, 27-kilometre underground tunnel, the Large Hadron Collider is also a partial product of an innovative and collaborative environment supported by the use of wikis. Not surprising given CERN was home to Tim Berners-Lee and the invention of the Web. The link between the origins of the Web and the wiki are strong, given that (according to Berners-Lee), “the idea behind the Web was not just that it should be a big browsing medium. The idea was that everybody would be putting their ideas in, as well as taking them out.”

Jump ahead two decades and today CERN employs approximately 3,500 people with a broader membership of partners increasing the total to 10,000 researchers and scientists across 500 institutes in 56 countries, a heck of a network.

About a year ago, Vincenzo Cammarata, a graduate student at the University of Lugano, emailed me a copy of his Masters thesis (Wikibility of Innovation Oriented Workplaces) which takes an in-depth look at CERN and its collaborative activities. He notes, “CERN can be defined as the hub of an enormous Social Network: for its large number of members, for the knowledge that is owned inside of each silo, and for the big need for collaboration and subsequently knowledge transfer.” He dives into an analysis of how wikis have supported the LHC project for knowledge management and knowledge transfer across its global network, as well as for software and network development. CERN users note that the use of wikis significantly increased the quantity of materials shared and, more important, the quality of final outputs. Not a small consideration given the investments being made, and the outputs desired. Evidently, there are also definite limits to the usefulness of the wiki, and users make note of its use to supplement rather than replace other forms of communication.

And so regardless of the outcome of tomorrow’s sub-atomic particle smashup, the lessons CERN offers regarding the impact of collaborative tools and collaboratve activity are pretty impressive. Their ability to bridge global and organizational divides to hasten the development of frameworks around which the LHC was built should in theory yield not only significant time and cost savings but more importantly should help shed light on where we came. No small feat.

You can read the CERN case study and Wibility of Innovation Oriented Environments thesis here, thanks Vincenzo!

The site gives users instructions on how to identify objects and then lets the community go wild. Members are given access to high-resolution photos of outer-space. Everyone is then allowed to identify the objects, and if enough members concur the classification is accepted. The format is similar to Wikipedia.

This site is a great example of the power of open source communities. There are literally endless amounts of celestial objects to be identified. With the help of everyday people, scientists are able to chart the night’s skies with speed and accuracy that was never before possible.

If you are looking for a new hobby check out Galaxy Zoo, and you can become an astronomer without ever leaving your living room.

Based on our early conversations, I’m already convinced that we’ll surface a whole new set of meaty themes that shed new light on the emerging wiki world. But If the experience is anything like writing the last book, those themes will probably not be apparent until we’re more than 50% through the writing process!  So that’s where you, and the broader the wikinomics community, come in.

Over the next 9 months or so, I’ll be using be using this blog to share some nuggets of insight and intrigue from our ongoing research. Your job is to flood us with comments pointing to related research, people and examples, as well as your thoughts on nascent themes.

I’ll kick things off this week with a tid-bit from Peggy Sheehy, a library media specialist and instructional technology facilitator in Ramapo Central School District at Suffern Middle School. With the help of her colleagues and a “visionary” school administration, Peggy is leading Suffern Middle School into the future of education with a virtual learning space called Ramapo Islands on the Teen Grid in Second Life.

Peggy is just one of a growing community of teachers who believe that immersive virtual environments could provide the foundation for a powerful new pedagogy–a form of learning where, as Educause CEO Diane Oblinger put it, “students participate in and experience the ways a particular discipline thinks about and solves problems—as a scientist, an architect, an artist, an entrepreneur, an engineer, and so on.”

Peggy had a lot of interesting things to share when we spoke (as did all of the other educators we have spoken to recently), but one observation really caught my attention. It seems that when students enter the virtual environment of Second Life they drop many of the inhibitions that might have otherwise have prevented them from participating fully in a real world classroom.  Teachers and students engage in a deeper level of discourse while many of the social and economic divides that often isolate students are set aside, at least for a brief interval. Here’s how Peggy describes it.

“Every single teacher that has participated with his or her class in Second Life, bar none, have reported back to me that the number one thing they noticed is that all their students are now participating. . .

Students say to us, “We like participating in Second Life because we don’t feel like if we say something kids are going to make fun of us later, or you know get that look from somebody across the room . . .

[And] teachers are getting to know their students because of this deeper level of discourse in ways and in levels that they just don’t usually have, they’re seeing whole other sides of their students. . .

When the discussions begin, when collaboration begins, when they’re starting to work on projects, you’ll notice half of the time that the “reluctant participant” is engaged and is participating to the fullest. What the kids say to us is that in Second Life we don’t know who the rich kids are, who the smart kids are, who the football team is, who the kid with the Hollister clothing is …everybody is kind of starting out on equal footing.”

You can see a machinima video documenting their experiences and the ramapo island blog is a good way to keep up with the latest developments. For a nice example, see this post describing how two teachers at Suffern used a virtual flea market in SL to help teach students about budgets and managing their money. The students were given 100 Linden dollars and a list of items they needed to purchase while staying within their budget.

We’d love to hear about any experiences you have had (as an educator, parent, student or administrator) with Second Life or other collaboration tools in an educational setting. Can virtual worlds and other digital communication tools help level the educational playfield by giving students a heightened sense of freedom of expression? Can teachers use these tools to better accomodate a diversity of personalities and learning styles? What new challenges and divides might these technologies raise?