The Machine is Us/ing Us

1 comment March 9th, 2007

Outdoctrination: Society, Children, Technology and Self-Organization in Education by Sugata Mitra

Professor Sugata Mitra presented two weeks ago at LIFT an engaging presentation about remoteness and the quality of education. Remoteness not only in geographic sense, but also the remoteness from means, materials and education in general. Professor Sugata has suggested that in many countries (not only those typically associated with third world countries), the schools in remote areas suffer from what he quoted “not good enough”: not good enough teachers, nor not good enough educational technologies.

The first is mostly caused by problems like teacher’s retention, or how can we as society attract more teachers to those almost abandoned areas, and second, for reasons like the preference of affluent urban schools in detriment of the more remote schools for piloting technologies. How apparently in good schools with excellent (or at least rather motivated) teachers and students, the EI is many times perceived as over-hyped and under-performing in the educational values. In Professor’s Mitra opinion, and something I personally believe in, the particularities of the less fortunate and remote schools implies that they should be the ones actually, experimenting and be targeted by the pilots with educational technologies.

States should be actively searching and testing alternatives to primary education, whether schools don’t exist, or simply aren’t enough, schools where teachers aren’t available or aren’t the “best ones”. According to the experiments Professor Sugata conducted along the years, he not only discovered but also helped prove that children are particularly well adapted to self learning and organization.

The Kalkaji, Mandantusi and the “Hole in the Wall“ experiments all seem to enforce this precise idea. The concept of the experiments, were simple: embed a PC into a hole in some remote location; places where children didn’t have much or no contact with technologies. “Et voilá!” the results were not only surprising, but they ended up helped raising more questions than real answers. For instance, the language in which the computers were running didn’t seem important for the interaction, in some cases it even helped demonstrate in a matter of hours/days, how children can actually learn some vocabulary (approx. 200 different words), all of them extrapolated from the simple interaction with the machine.

In a matter of 7 hours of interaction with the PC on the Kalkaji Experiment, 17 youngsters were already browsing in Internet, proving that children and teenagers can actually be self educated. This is more or less common fact, but the truth is that we all keep forgetting how simple this can be and actually happen on a regular basis. According to his presentation, during the Mandantusi, where the PC wasn’t actually connected to the internet, but was only packed with a large collection of CD’s and DVD’s, and an experiment, were the target audience didn’t had any previous education in english, on the post experience interviews, most of the investigators were more or less surprised with requests like “a better processor and nicer mouse”"!!

The Hole in the Wall project not only helped prove the fact that youngsters and teens can be self taught, but also helped understand a bit of more of the self-learning process. As an example of the results from this experiments, Mitra quoted that personal connections have a deep impact on the learning process: 6-13 yo seemed to learn better when integrated in groups, regardless of their education as a whole, the results were quite uniform in groups with different background. This project also documented the kind of stuff students were using the PC for: basic windows functions, browsing, gaming, chatting, email, music download, painting, learn from educational material and other computer based activities.

Natural systems seem to be self organized, from Chaos seems to arise the order, we all now the paradigm, but what matters to this professor and should also matters for a a lot of people on the education structures is how can we seemly make the transition from the current educational model to the self-organizing model. So should we just be “letting happen” or should we look at self organizing, natural, systems and try to improve from there our current models? Well there’s no master plan yet, but Professor Sugata Mitra did leave some key ideas for the sake of the Primary Education 2.0:

• Remotness affects que quality of eductation;
• Remote locations should be taken care first;
• Values are adquired, doctrine and dogma are imposed;
• Learning is a self-organized process;
• to address remoteness, values and violence;

In his opinion the only form to actively solve the remoteness problems of education is thru Outdoctrination, or self-organization, which makes me wonder if this would actually workout in the Portuguese case, or if we could reproduce it on a larger level and maybe try to educate other generations of citizens thru a massive self-learning network and always on system?

Note: Bruno and Stephanie also posted their notes (much, much sooner then I) about Professor Mitra presentation at LIFT, in case you’re interested just follow the links to their blogs!

2 comments February 28th, 2007

Collective Intelligence inside the enterprise by Lee Bryant

UPDATE: Lee, just posted his own notes plus the presentation PDF file.

Lee Bryant’s actually presented on of the most interesting presentations I’ve watched during LIFT, his presentation was about how to effectively collect and empower knowledge inside companies. Lee is founder of HEADSHiFT.COM a social software consulting focussed on the development of social tools for the work environment.

Most of his premisses are based on a set of general thoughts: we should just be re-factoring the factory, but “we should also be using technology to feed our minds instead of the machines”! Tools should serve people’s actions, not the other way around. People are better and have greater power in activities like pattern matching. Most IT systems (definitely) don’t understand the way we work, the way our brain works! People have peripheral vision and intuition, abilities we’ve always used on our life’s, abilities that aren’t only hard to achieve but their also quite hard to emulate on the computer level. Based on this small set of thoughts we’re simply wasting way to much knowledge on the enterprise and large organizations today!

So the question Lee posed was what can technology do to stop the waste? The now so called web 2.0, is actually giving place to a more accepted “social web” and with it, we’re witnessing the birth of a new set of tools: The Social Tools: tools like wikis, blogs, bookmark sharing sites like del.icio.us, cms’s, and a whole bunch more tools and websites, what Social Tools have in particular is that they intrinsically harness the network effect to get better along the way, feeding themselves on what people do while using them, in particular with the information people produce by using them.

So what’s the definition of the new enterprise IT working environment, the “enterprise 2.0″?

The IT infrastructure for the next generation of enterprises, those companies that will effectively use employees power as competitive advantage, will certainly for sure master social tools, as a mean to harness knowledge and effectively share it across all their structure dimensions. These social tools will need to create an ecosystem of information, data and will depend on a connected infrastructure that facilitates the idea or notion of information everywhere or ever present information scenario. Participation is mandatory, not only with the purpose of sharing information, but also because internal staff reputation will probably be built upon those contributions.

Lee also mentioned one important feature, these so called social tools must effective have to ensure their success: subscription and aggregation. Together their the only way you can actually be acknowledged and get to know, what’s being made and updated on your enterprise universe.

In general today’s companies are searching for better internal understanding, more effective and better collaboration, better decisions. In general we’re talking about gathering and optimizing the Collective Intelligence. CI already exists in some defined communities today, like Wikipedia, Digg, Slashdot, etc. and it reflects their native cultures and norms, and in large companies, they’re just like most of those communities, they have the “man power” to scale and take advantage of these collective intelligence gathering tools. CI represents both a challenge and an opportunity for the IT departments within those companies. Too much time and knowledge is being wasted today’s, which reinforces the idea of possible massive savings in terms of productivity, effective work, increased peripheral vision, reduce duplication and extend the work relationships in a more closer and personal matter: people might contact themselves directly instead of depending on the rigid structures most companies have to get in touch with someone.

With all this information sharing inside and outside of the enterprise, another problem arises, how can we effectively sort out what to read, or even write? Individuals, groups and divisions inside the companies work as funnels: on a typical day you might have 100 items suggested by your social network, from those, 10 might be sufficiently important for you to link or tag them, but in the end you’ll only write/blog about one entirely. So social reading and filtering drives relevance! Others can also share what you blog, link or tag, information is most probably finding you these days instead of the other way around if you already take part on such groups.

Lee’s presentation left some nice tips towards the CI in the enterprise: start by deploying some social tools, tools that allow you to have feeds everywhere for everything, so that people might subscribe what interests them and be notified as soon as new information is available. Create ways of adding value to your online library, tools like social news-readers, allowing people to recommend and share bookmarks and documentation between them. Allow people to create internal blogs, as a window to their functions and work inside the company. Tools that not only share collections and remixes of other documents, posts, etc, but also allow some sort of social search driven by attention data and link authority.

So, as you can see, software isn’t enough, to reach the second wave adopters, not you or me, but the remaining working force, we need to actually create localized or situated apps like Lee mentioned, applications that are designed not to change behavior, but to extend the already existing workspaces, in a sense that they facilitate and augment todays tasks, having always in mind the collective intelligence harness that their supposed to collect and redistribute.

In the end, it’s all about context and engagement.

Add comment February 18th, 2007

30 years from Apple

This banner got me curious:

any ideas?

2 comments January 2nd, 2007

Sun BlackBox

Miguel just sent me the email alerting to it, but I couldn’t resist to actually write about it here, Sun just release what seems to be a self contained portable datacenter:

After today, you’ll never look at an ordinary shipping container quite the same way again. Project Blackbox is a prototype of the world’s first virtualized datacenter–built into a shipping container and optimized to deliver extreme energy, space, and performance efficiencies.

Designed to address the needs of customers who are running out of space, power and cooling, Project Blackbox gives customers a glimpse into the fast, cost-effective datacenter deployments coming in the near future–where thinking out of the box means putting an IT infrastructure in a box.

I can’t stop thinking about the whole list of possibilities for its use, from war conflicts to international aid missions there’s a whole lot of situations to choose from. I actually haven’t read the policies of its use,if its just a demo product or something to be used only by Sun, but one thing is for certain, these are indeed great times, one we can already pack an entire datacenter into a container box.

Check out some more use scenarios Sun just put up online for its use.

1 comment October 18th, 2006