(H/T Dilbert.com)

It seems the world is getting more complicated isn’t it? I’m sure 500 years ago most of the information people knew was gained mostly firsthand. They knew things like a trade, or farming from actually doing it. They knew about people based on their interactions with them. Still, even then we tended to group ideas into certain categories.

A typical example of this would be found in politics.  People have been organizing into political parties for as long as we have had governments. A political party is a group of people who have certain beliefs in common. This can be useful in political campaigns because if your party is popular, you can just say you are affiliated with them without having to introduce yourself to the voters in detail. They just assume that you have the same ideas as the party. That’s Proxy Thinking because the voters don’t have to think about a candidate, they can just apply preconceptions to them.

Another example of how we see the group rather than the person is with credentials. A person with a Nobel Prize can still be wrong can’t they? And yet, many people in society look at where you went to school and what degree you got as a proxy of your value. Nowhere is this more evident than in academia itself. That has a deep level of proxy thinking. Have you a Ph.D? Have you published? Are you tenure? Are you just a TA or Adjunct? It’s a vicious pecking order that relieves the participants of actually having to listen to someone else’s idea who isn’t on the same academic strata. How many of you had a college professor who was never wrong (in their own mind)?

I think with the rise of mass social media in the last 10 years there is a trend towards doing this more and more in society. People just are too busy I guess to form their own opinions. They seem happy to just lump people in together rather than treat them as individuals. Often these beliefs are imported from trusted news sources. By trusted I don’t mean they are actually truthful, it’s just that some people trust them and believe what they say. So, if you get your news exclusively from The Daily Show for example, you will have a certain opinion of things. Or if you watch just Fox News you will get a different take. Neither one is exclusively the truth however because they are catering to their own audiences. With so many choices in information sources, people are becoming more selective, but they are selecting sources that reinforce their own beliefs. If I agree with almost everything on the Daily Show, I stop questioning what they tell me. I have then outsourced my thinking to them, or with my new term, I am thinking by proxy. They do the thinking, I just internalize it. It’s fast food thinking.

I noticed this happening last year in the election because I was never able to have a good conversation with somebody with opposing political views. Every time I tried to, I just got a mash up of talking points that I had previously read online. It wasn’t that they disagreed with what I was saying, they didn’t even listen because I had already been grouped with the enemy by their sources of information. This is important because if you regard the other person as evil then you won’t even listen to the message. Why would you?

You can either destroy the message or the messenger. Destroying a person is infinitely easier than destroying an idea. This is especially true in this day and age where people don’t even listen to the argument. If you go back even 30 years you will see actual debates where the opponents did not attack each other personally.

Here’s an example.

You just don’t see that on TV that much anymore.

Rather than promote the truth, the Internet has split our culture into several different ideological shards. None of them are really thinking about the truth, they are just following the pack and attacking who they are told.

This then brings me to school. How many times in school are students allowed to question what they are told? How many times are they allowed to question the sources of the information? Never as I recall it. There wasn’t time to develop information yourself. Instead it is just learn this, test, learn this, test. Pay attention, do your work, this is right, this is wrong, just absorb it. The test is coming, there’s no time to think, just learn! It is the nature of mass education. I’m hoping that we can come up with a better system that will allow each person to do their own thinking, rather than giving somebody else a proxy to do the thinking for us. I’m not sure the country will survive without it.

“An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.” - Thomas Jefferson

 

When I was going through my Masters program in Education Technology, I several classes where we used Second Life as an instructional medium. Most people who have used it think it’s cool but ultimately it’s not the true virtual reality we had hoped it would be. One of the primary reasons for this is the quality of graphics and the lack of human expressions of the avatars. Here’s a video showing Second Life, if you have never seen it before.

This lack of fidelity has some parallels in complaints teachers have with online learning. Namely, you can’t really interact with your students like you can in the classroom. I feel however that the future of online learning will take place in virtual spaces like Second Life rather than via a video chatroom. Turns out, technology is moving forward to increase the fidelity and realism of the experience.

I came across this story (H/T Kurzweil AI) that talks about how Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life has created some new technology to enhance how the avatars online will work. Here’s a video.

Obviously the face is not realistic but it’s just a demo. This ability to match what your face is doing is impressive. Now, couple this technology with this level quality of a face and you have a very cool avatar for use in online learning. To go further, couple this with Google’s new technology where it can realtime translate your voice and you have a virtual avatar that can communicate to anyone in the world, in your own native language. (see Realtime Voice Translation Moves Closer)

It’s still a few years off but the technology has been proven here. Awesome!

Disruptive Innovation as Myth

I think that Audrey Watter’s Hack Education blog is one of the best education technology blogs out there. She is very prolific and is doing it because she wants to (like me). I wish I was as good a writer. That being said though, I think she is wrong about a recent blog post she wrote. Here’s why.

The post is entitled The Myth and the Millennialism of Disruptive Innovation. I invite you to go read the whole thing. I’m going to take some of that post and provide a counter argument here.

I’ve read her post several times now so I think I can correctly summarize her argument. She is claiming that people who say that disruptive innovation is going to inevitably change education are as wrong as the people who claimed that Y2K was going to end the world. Disruptive Innovation is a term coined by Harvard Business professor Clayton Christensen in his 1997 book the Innovator’s Dilemma. I haven’t read it yet but I did read another of his books called Disrupting Class (see my review here). A disruptive innovation is a technology that enables a new business model that then destroys a competitor’s business model. This happens by a new innovation being applied to the fringe of an existing market. Gradually it eats into the market of the company until it eventually takes away the core market too. An example of this is Japanese small cars in the 1970s were only a small market but have gradually eaten deeply into the American car makers core markets.

In order for this to happen several conditions need to be present.

1. Customers need to be willing to switch to a competitor.
2. The market must have unserved or underserved customers.
3. The market must be free to a certain extent. It is hard to disrupt a government sanctioned monopoly.
4. The new business model must be one that the existing market leaders can’t or won’t adopt into their own business model.

Ok so with that ground work out of the way, let’s look at Audrey’s argument.

Audrey has a MA in Folklore so it makes sense that a myth analogy comes to her mind. She correctly notices that many, many new products try to push themselves as a disruptive innovation. This is marketing as myth. It seems that every company wants to make their product more amazing that it actually is. Apple is a classic offender here because all of their products are “magical”. Still, a theory misappropriated does not invalidate the theory itself.

She continues for quite a while about how people believe in the end of the world and tries to tie that into the belief in disruptive innovation. I would like to point out that most of the people who believe in disruptive innovation are the ones who would benefit from it the most. It’s harder to believe in it when things are going great…

Adjustments…

Audrey then has a section where she points out that since 1997 when the original book was published, many of the predictions have not come true. She relates how Mr. Christensen has since refined his theory to try to account for this.

Not so fast, the organization now says. Hybrid innovation. “Blended learning.” A little bit online and a little bit offline. And while middle- and high schools (and colleges, although that isn’t the subject of this latest white paper) might offer opportunities for “rampant non-consumption,” — that is, classically, an opportunity for “disruption” — “the future of elementary schools at this point is likely to be largely, but not exclusively, a sustaining innovation story for the classroom.” Computer hardware and software and Internet-access in the classroom, as those of us who’ve been thinking about education technology for decades now keep saying, won’t necessarily change “everything.” (Go figure.)

What is slowing innovation in school down is the fact it is a government program. If the US post office was a private business it would have gone out of business years ago. Instead it just gets more money. The cost of public education has gone up tremendously in the last 30 years and yet the cry is always for more money. Spending more money on education does not mean kids will learn more.

Ok so let’s go back to the idea that disruptive innovation will destroy public education. Here are the four conditions I see for disruptive innovation to take hold.

1. Customers need to be willing to switch to a competitor.

I believe most parents want their kids to do well. If they had a chance to switch their kids to a way of learning that clearly demonstrated better outcomes than public school, I bet they would. Especially if it was cheaper. Right now the main competitors are homeschooling and private schools. For homeschooling to really blossom you would need a parent not working for a long time. Oh wait… we are in the longest stretch of high unemployment since the Great Depression and it isn’t getting better. As students leave, schools will close. (see Hack Education)

2. The market must have unserved or underserved customers.

“only 37 percent of respondents said public schools provided an ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ education.”source

People aren’t satisfied with their public schools and if you believe as I do that learning is lifelong then there is actually a huge pool of underserved customers. Radically different forms of learning will get their start in continuing education and the developing world most likely.

3. The market must be free to a certain extent. It is hard to disrupt a government sanctioned monopoly.

The government education system will defend itself from competitors but as long as you are just nibbling around the edges they don’t care too much. Of course sometimes they do. One of President Obama’s first acts when he was elected was to kill a small voucher program in Washington DC.

4. The new business model must be one that the existing market leaders can’t or won’t adopt into their own business model.

So what happens if somebody demonstrates a new way of learning that can allow each child to reach their own potential? Of course that supposes such a method exists but does anyone want to make an argument that the current method of mass public education is the best way to learn?

When a new way of learning comes out can public education adopt it? I doubt it because of one simple fact: the main purpose of public education is not to educate children. It is to sustain the public education system. This is not to take away from the many dedicated teachers who strive to reach kids every day. I feel bad for them because their hands become more tied with each new federal program. (see What If Schools Don’t Change and The Guidance System Of Education)

Agitating for End Times

Let’s finish up with the last section of Audrey’s blog post. Up to now she has been putting forth an argument against the inevitability of disruptive innovation. The fun thing about predicting the future is it takes a while to know if you are right or not. She could be right, time will tell. (Of course will we recognize disruptive innovation if/when it happens?)

I wish however she had ended with the previous section because in this last part she talks about how Mr. Christensen founded his own institution based on his theory and they *gasp* make money!!

You see when you are trying to change minds about an idea you can either go after the message or the messenger. Refuting the message takes time to lay out an argument, which Audrey did a good job of. I disagree with her argument but she at least took the time to make one.

This last section then puzzles me. The tone she uses says to me she clearly doesn’t see Mr. Christensen as having motives beyond making money. When you accuse somebody of false motives, you don’t have to refute their position at all because anything they say is automatically untrustworthy. In my opinion it weakens her article because she is saying essentially “this point of view is wrong, and here’s why, but that doesn’t matter because they are deceitful anyway”. This is intellectually lazy, which Audrey clearly is not. Not only that but it cuts off all further debate on the issue and we clearly need more debate about education, not less.

I hope my argument at least will provoke some thought, as a good debate should. I don’t believe I can be accused of having a false motive here as I have nothing to gain. Indeed, I don’t offer my credentials nor even my real name prominently on this site as I want my ideas to stand on their own.

If Audrey Watters does read this, I hope it helps further her thinking on this matter and I wholeheartedly encourage her to keep up the good work!

 

Google

Wow this was a really busy week in terms of technology announcements. Both Google and Microsoft have had big media events lately. I haven’t really been covering it because A) other sites can report the news better than I can and B) I wanted to think about the implications. This post covers the implications as I see it with special emphasis on education.

Google had their big developer conference last week but a few other things have quietly come to light about their overall strategy. Remember, Google is a software maker who also makes hardware. Apple is the opposite, therefore it is only natural that Google and Apple will do different things and have different priorities.

Google has been big into machine learning ever since their founding. They want to search index the whole world (and then show you ads about it) so they have a big focus on getting their systems to understand more than just text. Recently they have unveiled their progress in this.

• First, they have introduced conversational search. You can ask Google a question via voice, and it will remember what you last asked it. This permits you to ask a search question like “find a nearby Italian restaurant”, and if you don’t like what it gives you to say “find another one”. It knows what it last searched for so your response makes sense. This is a huge improvement in search and will find itself into phone assistants to like Siri and Google Now.
• Second, when you upload photos onto Google+, it will use machine learning to categorize them for you based on what is in the photos. For example, if you upload a photo of you on a motorcycle, you can search on Google for pics of my motorcycle and it will show them to you. There is a vast amount of information contained in photos and videos. Google is going to index it all, therefore the amount of searchable info on the net will increase by orders of magnitude.
• Third, Google Glass is starting to have Apps made for it. One of the biggest uses for it will be to use the camera and tie it to data in realtime. For example, you can be at a conference and meet someone you met from last year. The camera will do facial recognition on them and remind you all about them. This is part of the extended mind I have written about before.

Here’s a video showing conversational search.

What this adds up to is Google’s determined effort to catalog the world and put it at your fingertips. This is a multi pronged effort that is now starting to bear fruit.

XBox One

All this is software but what about hardware? This week Microsoft unveiled XBox One, their new game console.

There are big write ups at Gizmodo and at Ars-Technica about the new console. Basically it will be much better than the XBox 360 but what caught my attention was these different quotes.

“…the intro video for the new Xbox has users saying that the new Xbox is going to “recognize my name, my voice, my movies” and know what you like.”

“The creepiest part of the Kinect demo was when the system used a combination of the RGB and IR cameras to detect my pulse rate just by looking at my face. Not only that, but the system could tell when I was smiling and/or looking away from the screen and tell which of two controllers I was holding, even as I handed one off to the demonstrator (a process the PR rep said worked by “magic”).”

Here’s a video about these new capabilities if you are interested.

Kinect is a motion tracking camera that comes with the new XBox. It is not just a camera though, it also has a range finder built into it so it can know how far away things are. It has three times the resolution than the older model with the XBox 360. This lets it do a whole lot more detection of things. Couple this with always on voice recognition and you have a high tech piece of surveillance gear in your living room aways watching you.

The important take way from this is technology is it is cheap enough and reliable enough to be put into a relatively cheap, mass produced piece of consumer electronics. If it makes it into the living room, then it can be anywhere else too. If you put all of this together, can’t your XBox take your pulse, determine if you are sick and then Google show you ads for doctors? lol I’m joking but the technology now exists to do this.

I think it’s just a matter of time before this technology starts to be applied to education. Imagine teaching a live class online and having the system tell you how excited your students are. How does it know? Because each of the students are having their pulse measured by their game systems. Faster pulse means more excitement. Imagine a student raising their hand and having a notification popup for the teacher on the other end. The video screen would then split to show the student and teacher having a video conversation. This stuff can happen now folks.

I have talked at length that in order for learning to occur, you just need a source of information and someone willing to learn it. You don’t need a student wellness center, a dorm, a cafeteria, nor a Deputy Associate Dean of Diversity Coordination and Facilitation (I made that last one up. Or did I?). (see The Empty School: A Thought Experiment)

I have also talked quite a lot about how anything information based that is organized along physical proximity lines is going to be broken up and reorganized. I call this idea the Theory of Disaggregation. In my mind, there is no reason why schools should exist in a location. They should exist as an idea online but not a physical location.

Therefore it comes as no surprise to see an edtech startup like PopExpert. (H/T Techcrunch)If you are trying to learn something you can learn a lot yourself online but sometimes you just want to talk to an expert right? PopExpert is a new site where you can hire experts in a number of fields who will do a live video chat with you to teach you something. It’s still starting up but I imagine things like this will be huge in the future. Imagine you are fixing your toilet. You see something you don’t understand. You can try to do a web search for it, but if all else fails you can connect up with an expert for a few minutes to give you advice. They can even look at your problem via video.

Any industry that is primarily information based can use this technology. As I see it, this adhoc, peer to mentor relationship system is very disruptive to the ways we have learned previously. Awesome.

Are you ever totally consumed by something? Young people these days seem to be totally involved in social media, video games and other forms of entertainment. I’m sure every teacher wishes their students would be even 1/10th as interested in their own educations. Well, there are some students who are like that, but they aren’t in school…

From the Chronicle of Higher Education comes a story called What Professors Can Learn From ‘Hard Core’ MOOC Students.

Some of the people in the article are taking as many as 7 MOOC classes at once.

Nearly 100 students using Coursera, the largest provider of MOOCs, have completed 20 or more courses. And more than 900 students have finished 10 or more courses, according to the company. That means taking several courses at a time, and racing through as many lecture videos and robot-graded assignments as possible to collect certificates that carry no official credit.

Note that last part; they get no official credit. That’s weird. If you don’t get credit then why do it?

Most are driven mainly by curiosity rather than the desire to show off their certificates to any potential employer, and none has paid for a verified certificate.

There are several other things I found interesting because I have speculated about such things before. First, curiosity drives learning. (see Driven By Curiosity) Second, they are more concerned with their professor than the university offering the course.

When the students talked about the MOOCs they’ve taken, they usually mentioned the professor first. They sometimes couldn’t remember the name of the university offering the course.

I wrote about this already. (see When Teachers Become Rockstars)

Another things the students commented on is they like to have text instruction rather than video because it is easier to go back and find content they want to review. This I think will change when there are accurate machine generated transcripts.

Finally, the article asks the question are students learning as much in MOOCs as they would in a traditional course. This is a bad question. A better question would be what is the rate of return on the investment in time and money? The students are learning a lot because they want to learn it. They are doing it in an environment that is low pressure because a bunch of money isn’t on the line. Turns out, I wrote extensively about this too. (see Searching for a New Model For Learning – Part 4 )

Disruptive innovation doesn’t come down from the top, it comes up from the bottom, like this. Awesome!

There are a handful of technologies I consider society changing in the next 5-10 years. An example of these from the past 10 years is the smartphone. One of these transformative technologies is augmented reality. This is a blending of the Internet with the real world. I think of it like a sixth sense for people in that they will have expanded memories and will be able to be knowledgeable about virtually anything, when needed.

This video is an interview with someone who seems to share my opinion on how big this technology will really be. Enjoy.

(H/T Singularity Weblog)

It is common knowledge that the rate of innovation in technology has been accelerating over the past few decades. Actually it goes back much further than that but let’s keep things simple. So why has the rate of innovation been accelerating? Because the major innovation now is in software, not hardware. Let me explain.

It used to be that we lived in a hardware world. If you bought a machine, it had buttons and dials on it that allowed you to control it’s operation. If a new feature was invented for that machine, you had to buy a new one. This meant that new innovations had to propagate slowly through society as people naturally replace their stuff. A good example is to compare a smartphone with a dumb phone.

Evolution of the Cell Phone

A dumb phone can only do what it has buttons to do. A smartphone can get apps and do many things. A smartphone is actually a computer that can also make phone calls. For the iPhone, Apple didn’t just release the hardware, they also released a lot of software tools that developers can use to make apps. Likewise, when Google released their Google Glass hardware, they also released a software development kit so people can start making apps for it. Then when a new app is released, everyone can update literally overnight. You don’t have to wait till people buy new phones for new features. It’s amazing.

So this enables innovation at the speed of the Internet. A side effect of this is sometimes new innovations can take advantage of existing hardware unexpectedly. I have written a lot lately about the Age of Big Data. This is where computers start to understand the world around them and therefore can digitize what they see. Much of this can be done with our existing hardware so it can just creep up on us. Here’s an example.

I read this article in Fast Company called The Fridge Has Eyes: Cara Gives Anything With A Camera Powers To See Faces, Age, Gender, and More. It is about a startup company creating a product called Cara which can interpret video to be able to derive meaning from it. Mostly this is used to watch people. From the article, here are some of the uses people want to use it for:

In a car, one request proposed, real-time facial detection could monitor a driver’s attention, alerting him if he falls asleep.

In a fast-food restaurant, it could track how many people are standing in line.

In a house, it could help control the temperature based on who is home.

In a bar, it could keep tabs on the gender ratio (though startup SceneTap already does so using a similar technology).

It could even make a toy smile back.

So this is pretty cool so far but this last quote is also significant.

What separates Cara from IMRSV’s previous billboard technology and others like it–and makes it a potential game changer–is that any developer with any webcam can use it for $39.99 per month.

That’s cheap and it can work with any webcam. So how long until an educational company comes up with a system that uses cameras in the classroom to take attendance, and determine who is paying attention? Maybe it can also assess comprehension based on the expression on somebody’s face?

This technology is coming quickly and it won’t take buying a new machine to do it. It might just happen overnight.

(H/T Dilbert)

I agree there is probably a correlation between ADHD and the other things with creativity. Too bad so often it is snuffed out with medication in schools. The comic below is a fake Calvin and Hobbes but is very sad nonetheless. We have to find a way to deal with children with learning issues to help them develop to their fullest potential. I don’t see how you can do this in a classroom.

Fake Calvin and Hobbes

When I started this blog back in Jan 2010, I was trying to investigate how education will change based on new technology. However, when I work on a big problem like that I tend to expand my view to look for root causes. This lead me into the ideas that our education system should reflect the society it is in, and that society has changed a lot since the current education system was created. The biggest changes in society I believe are being driven by my theory of disaggregation, which I define as how society is being reorganized from one based on physical proximity of resources, to one based on information relationships.

I’ve written about 855 posts so far and so when an idea comes along that I haven’t thought of I feel like I missed something. I also get excited. Here’s what I missed.

(cc) kiss kiss bang bang

First came Kickstarter. It is a website that allows people to propose projects and have people contribute funding to help get the project started. What makes this different is it takes the role of a bank or investor. Next came Bitcoin. This is a digital currency. People can actually buy them and they go up and down in price but they are not controlled by any government.

This past week came news of Amazon.com creating their own currency. You can buy Amazon Coins with real money and then buy Apps and such on Amazon.com. This isn’t really that big of a deal because it’s just an abstraction of real money. You can see this any time you go to a video game arcade (yes they are still around). When you go there you buy Tokens from a machine. It helps hide the real cost of the games.

But what finally blew my mind is this story from Singularity University Beyond Banks? Peer-to-peer lending is on the upswing, Google dives in. It’s a great article that talks about new businesses that allow people to lend money to other people without the intermediary of the banks. I mean, why not? Turns out, like Amazon.com proved, you don’t have to have a store to sell things. Perhaps you don’t have to have a building to be a bank? It’s the disaggregation of finance and somewhat blindsided me. Still, it makes perfect sense according to my theory.

As the big banks add more fees and offer zero interest rates, perhaps people will start moving to alternatives? We will see.