Thursday Mar 13, 2008
As you saw from my last post, Sun held its annual Worldwide Education & Research Conference (WWERC) two weeks ago. (Check out some of the coverage in the blogosphere, especially some of the blogs from our Sun Campus Ambassadors.) As I was preparing for my presentation
at the conference, I rediscovered Revolutionary Wealth, a book by two of my favorite authors, Heidi and
Alvin Toffler. Back in the early 1980s, Alvin Toffler first coined the concept of "prosumers": the idea that consumers become involved in the production process. As prescient
as Toffler was, I'm sure even he couldn't have imagined how
open source, community development and social networking technologies make "prosumption" possible on an unprecedented scale. (It irks
me that Donald Tapscott, who wrote Wikinomics, claims to have coined this term and concept, but I digress.)
Anyway, the Tofflers have written a beautiful chapter about
education that everyone should read. Here's an excerpt:
"Mass
education designed for the industrial age meets the needs of neither
the pre-industrial village nor the post-industrial future. Rural
education—indeed , all education—has to be totally
reconceptualized. Today technology offers educators a tool for
customizing education to the diverse cultures and needs of small groups
and even individuals."
We are approaching a time when we will be
able—inexpensively—to put in every village some kind of computer
connected in some way to the outside world. A time when children, given
the chance, can, as we saw in India, teach themselves to access the
Internet. A time when multiplayer gamers can advance their own learning
through distant online mentors.
This time isn't in the future. It's here now. At the ERC last week, I sawit. Aaron Walsh, director of the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative, showed a demo of a virtual world in which students can meet at the Valley of the Kings in Egypt and explore the pyramids instead of just reading about them. They can walk through the tombs, look around, and even fly through the air to see things up close that they couldn't necessarily see in the real world.
The creators of this lesson have figured out how to bring multiple digital media sources together in the same virtual world, thus creating an even more interesting way to learn by accident and discovery instead of rote memorization and regurgitation. This new way of bring the virtual world to the real world—and real worlds to the virtual—may be one of the best examples so far of providing the personalized and individualized learning that the Tofflers talk about in their book.
Organizations like the New Media Consortium are exploring ways to use these new technologies to advance learning. On February 24, NMC announced a $250,000 two-year
collaboration with Sun to launch the Open Virtual Worlds
Project, an effort that is aimed at making it easier to learn, work,
and exchange ideas in virtual space. The project will develop a range
of standards-based, portable open-source educational spaces, content,
and objects, and use them to extend Sun's open source Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland platforms. It's an exciting time to be involved in education, that's for sure.
Monday Feb 25, 2008
In
the original Tower
of Babel story, all the humans on earth spoke a single language
and lived in a single place. They decided to build a structure that
would reach into the heavens and implicitly show that humans were as
powerful as God. Well, God had other plans. He invented a multitude
of languages and scattered the people across the world. The Tower of
Babel project was abandoned.
In the 21st century remake of
this story, humans accidentally invented social network sites.
Millions of people, primarily college-aged adults, join the
communities. They start engaging in the communities in an attempt to
build as large a “Friends” list as possible. Well, it's hard to
interact with millions of people, so members create groups within
these larger communities. (Facebook
now hosts thousands of groups
appealing to every interest conceivable, from Burritos
in Oxford to Friends
of the Sun Microsystems Foundation.) Sometimes they create
separate communities altogether, such as LinkedIn
(for professional networking). In fact, many people lose confidence
in these new "Towers of Babel" and try to leave them, only
to discover that leaving
isn't as easy as joining.
Yet social networking as a
technology is a powerful extension of the quintessential human
strategy of banding together for a common interest. Think of the
cavemen, who had to work as a team to take down the larger and more
powerful wooly mammoths. How can organizations—be they corporate or
academic—use this technology without losing the trust of their
members? As Facebook and MySpace attempt to become a platform upon
which others build their communities, what assurances do we need that
our members won't be exploited beyond their willingness to be
exploited? Should we instead build our own communities on stand-alone
technology platforms where we can assure our members are protected?
Answering these questions is one of the key objects of our
annual Worldwide Education & Research Conference this week in San
Francisco . We've got an incredible array
of speakers on the power and limits of communities. We're
streaming the main
presentations over the Web if you want to watch in real time (the
link will be live on February 27), and we'll make them available
asynchronously for later playback as well.
The first Tower of
Babel didn't work out so well because of divine intervention. Perhaps
these modern-day Towers can be effectively harnessed for productive
use, but not without changing the fundamental compact that exists
between a community and its members. Because unlike the real world,
it's much easier to scatter on the Web if the Tower starts to
crumble.
By the way, here's the original story from the Book
of Genesis:
And the whole earth was of one language, and of
one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east,
that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
And they said one to another, Come, let us make brick, and burn them
thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for
mortar. And they said, Come, let us build us a city and a tower,
whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we
be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord
came down to see the city and the tower, which the children builded.
And the Lord said, "If as one people speaking the same language
they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be
impossible for them." Come, let us go down, and there confound
their language, that they may not understand one another's
speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face
of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is
the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there
confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord
scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
(Image: The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1563), courtesy of Wikipedia.)
Thursday Oct 04, 2007
“What do you do for a living?”
It's a typical American question that was posed to me in an atypical
setting and by an audience that for me, answers the question “Why do
you care so much about today's students, since they don't buy your
products?”
I volunteer as an Assistant Scoutmaster
for my son's Boy Scout troop and go to summer camp for a week immediately
following the Fourth of July. The camp food is awful, so one
night I convinced my 12-year-old to do the
horseback-ride-sleep-under-the-stars experience. He didn't know that
my real motivation was gastronomic: the ride included a real steak
barbecue rather than Sysco processed food.
The camp employees who prepped the horses, led
us on our ride and cooked the food are known as Wranglers.
My stereotype of “wranglers” is that they're not the sharpest
tools in the shed; otherwise they'd be doing something else. Also,
at Boy Scout camp you never really know the age of the staff, as they
span from high school to post-college. Between the dirt and natural
variation in maturity I had no idea how old our wranglers were.
When we sat down to eat, we made small talk, and the lead wrangler eventually asked me the “What do you do for a
living” question. When I evasively answered that I was in “the
computer business,” it set off an interesting conversation. He
admitted that he didn't know anything about computers but that one of
the other wranglers did and was actually writing a video game. All of
a sudden my son became very interested because he is very much into
video games and has been “writing” the story for a RPG. (I'm
still not quite sure what an RPG is, but I learned it stands for “role-playing game.”) The game-writing wrangler wouldn't disclose any
details of his game—or about his staff of 18 people—because we hadn't signed non-disclosure agreements. (Where are the
lawyers when you need them?)
At this point, the third wrangler, who
had remained silent so far, asked where I worked. When I told him
that I worked at Sun, the conversation took another twist. He began
to tell me things I didn't even know about my company and its
technology as it relates to Internet gaming. He then educated me
about the pros and cons of Java vs. Microsoft's Silverlight vs.
Macromedia something or other. I was amazed how much he knew about
all three–and he wasn't even the future video game designer mogul!
When dinner was over, I just had to ask
how old these wranglers were. The future media game mogul was 17.
The future industry analyst was 15. My effort to avoid camp food
became a real-life example of why we at Sun care about today's students even
though they don't directly buy our products. Today's student is
tomorrow's developer, customer and decision-maker. That much became
clear to me that night under the stars.
Thursday Sep 20, 2007
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