edublogs

If the Army sees the potential in Facebook, why not schools?

When social networks were still finding their feet among their key demographic a few years ago, I was a keen advocate of formal learning institutions and their staff keeping out of those spaces, certainly not using them as social learning environments. danah's research backed this up and the concept of teachers creating "creepy treehouses" was enough to knock that desire of some on the head.

Seeing how the US Army has harnessed Facebook for a mix of both informal communication and leadership is opening up the question again in my mind, as the demographic using Facebook rises well into the 30s and Twitter's growth started with an older demographic and is only now appearing to edge southwards to early 20 year olds and teens (thanks to my wholly unscientific research - danah, if you're not busy this summer...).

It's particularly pertinent as Local Authorities charged with improving the prospects of their learners and staff in an increasingly technological age do not cease to become ever more Machiavellian in their desire to clamp down on any communication about the realities of being a teacher or learner in their patches.

On the Facebook blog this morning says Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Arata (link to his FB page):

Allowing our audience — including our soldiers — to connect and communicate through social networking is still considered risky business by some, and we do face unique challenges. The risks to operations security felt by some, or the fears that our soldiers will post "unbecoming" information, are outweighed by increased communication and sharing.

From an institution that in 2000 wouldn't allow unfettered access to email (and before that whose "Full Metal Jacket" reputation preceded it), one of the most traditional public institutions with the most apparently valid potential for killing communication to those back home has come a long way. And it also shows how far schools and teen learners working within them have to go before their life cycles start matching the real world.

What is it that Facebook brings the military? It allows family to keep in touch with minimal effort through a great deal of the deep ambient intimacy of the status update:

Facebook is also giving a platform for sharing of skills and advice between recruits:

It also allows senior members of staff in the military to, quickly and easily, without disrupting the flow of their day, update via cellphone or laptop on what (non-secret) operations they are undertaking. What exactly does an army Colonel do? Well, now you can 'follow' them and find out. It will almost certainly make a few more people aspire to doing something different or improving their act not just in seeing what superiors and, above all, seeing what peers are up to.

While intranets and VLEs provide a structured learning environment for teacher-defined groups of learners, they do not provide very well (or at all) for friends-of-a-friend (FOAF) communication, happenstance connections and temporary windows in on what FOAFs are up to. They are designed for preset activity with preset groups, despite the admirable efforts of talented creative individuals to shoehorn them into other more enticing uses. It's hard to argue that, in terms of how kids connect within the school environment with school-like material and contacts, things have really moved on since the likes of my students blogging and podcasting from their French trip in 2003 (the 2004, 2005 and Auschwitz blog remain). The fun serendipitous connections are happening very much outside the school boundaries, and the school institution itself remains largely blind to this. The knock-on effect is that school and what it should stand for - learning - are also blind to learners outside the schooling complex.

Now, at Channel 4 the Education department has worked with great skill over the past two years to create learning opportunities in the social networks and spaces where young people hang out (think Battlefront, YearDot, Routes.... There has been little attempt to make these interactions fit into schooling per se. At 4iP, where many of our products and services involve learning of some description, we continue this 'non-school' of thought.

I wonder: is there mileage for schools in looking at what the Army is achieving here and for what purposes, and seeing if there are unmet needs in the schooling environment which could be supported by social networking services and platforms which are increasingly better embedded in society? Or is this something in which only others outside the formal schooling environment are prepared to invest?

Pic: Full Metal Jacket

Should we all be saying 'no' more often?

Educators have a reputation for generally saying 'yes' to doing things they are asked to carry out. The expectation is that if a peer or more senior member of staff asks or tells, the teacher does. It's not a healthy place to be. We need to say no more often.

To be honest, I hate saying no, most of the time. Yet, in my current job: of the 400 or so ideas I've seen in the last six months, only about 4% have resulted in a development of that idea.

Everyone else got a 'no'.

Most have had the heave-ho within minutes or days, some have had an instant yes, but there's a troublesome group in the middle, about 30% of ideas at a guess, that need looked at in more detail before being sure if they're worth taking forward. This group of ideas need at least a day's worth of thinking done by the company proposing the idea and a day or more of my time. It's only when we do the figures, work out the business case, see the approach action-by-action, explore the legal and compliance risks, that we realise the idea is a dodo. All that "for nothing".

What I wonder, sometimes, is whether it's worth just pushing back on anything that is not a clear 'yes' at the first sighting. Those "might work" ideas nearly always fail to get through the hurdle of being 'spec-ed' out, yet involve a disproportionate amount of thinking to get them to a point where we can ever know if they're likely to work.

However, there's always that grumble that maybe, just maybe, one might be saying 'no' to the best idea since sliced bread.

Seth Godin suggests we're indeed better off saying no more often to pick out the obvious gems the moment they appear:

You can say no with respect, you can say no promptly and you can say no with a lead to someone who might say yes. But just saying yes because you can't bear the short-term pain of saying no is not going to help you do the work.

Saying no to loud people gives you the resources to say yes to important opportunities.

What do you think - are we right to say 'yes' to the "might work" ideas to see if we can discover a hidden gem, or are we better to concentrate only on those 4% we feel instantly happy with?

Pic: No Way Out

Mark Earls: Why are good ideas important?

Many people think that those who like change are diseased with neophilia, instead of concentrating on the things that matter in the here and now. On the face of it they're right. Most new ideas fail. But Mark Earls' PSFK presentation last month puts forward a very good case for why ever-seeking change is a Good Thing.

Earlier, I blogged a short talk from John Cleese outlining the physical and emotional conditions of coming up with great ideas. Here, Mark concentrates more on processes you can employ all the time, strategies even for your organisation or yourself.

Even small changes end up normally taking generations to happen. Heinz took 123 years to turn the label on their bottle around to the 'right' way - because we need to store our bottle on its lid to get any out [compare the old bottle with the current one]. They had spent many creative conversations debating it, but had never turned that into action.

New ideas help us test our old ideas
The lesson here for me is that we need to test out our own ideas first, before convincing people that they might be worth trying. Just do it, rather than think about stuff in the abstract. Mark picks up on an interaction between Lloyds' innovation blokey and the peer-to-peer lending bank, Zopa. The Lloyds man asked: "Would my market be changed by peer-to-peer banking?" This wasn't the first thought of the guys creating Zopa, who saw banking as about people, money as a means to be entertained and live better, money as a social experience. The man from Lloyds, when thinking about Zopa, saw it as a bottom-line business. He missed the point and as a result missed an opportunity to see the real threat to their business: not understanding how people relate to each other around money, as well as how they relate with money itself.

Explore the future
Ogilvy's website runs with a tagline from their founder:

"Encourage innovation. Change is our lifeblood, stagnation our deathknell."

They run Ogilvy Labs where they can play with unknown stuff and let their clients see what could happen. This is all done on the basis that you won't know what they future might hold until you play. It's the concept I've battled to get across with naysayers of new technologies (and pedagogies) in the education world: "You don't know what you don't know you don't know."

Everything's hacked
It is now rare or unlikely altogether that there is such a thing as an original. 90% of products fail in their first year in the UK and given that most new products are modeled on old ones, this will not change any time soon. There are two main things to bear in mind when hacking someone else's stuff:

• Improve or adapt (read the history of the board game Monopoly, and how the serious Quaker version of Monopoly which was designed to teach the shortcomings of desiring too much property was made better and more entertaining by the Parker Brothers). Nearly everything out there is a hack, something that's been broken up and made better.
• Reapply from the outside - take something from one market and apply it to your own. Notice everything and ask yourself "what's the offer here to solve a problem?"

Embrace opportunities when they come up
We sit on opportunities, keep them secret instead of doing something to get it out there. One of the hardest things to do is make quick decisions when subject to an overwhelming (and often limitless) choice. Delve into 20 minutes of Barry Schwartz on the Paradox of Choice to understand this one. Yet, when a photographer is faced with 20-50 versions of the 'same shot', they are uncannily quick at ascertaining which shot is 'the' shot. Try it yourself - lots. Like a photographer, quick innovative thought takes practice (and occasionally getting it wrong) before being a creative bone you can rely on.

Entrepreneurs in this way have "memories of the future" - things feel familiar the first time you see them because you're constantly thinking about change.

Make your company more interesting
Change is fascinating, challenging, interesting. Making your workplace interesting will make people want to work there more and better. Logical, really.

Creative next steps
When you're faced with a challenge, a potential outside change, a new idea, ask yourself the following questions, and ask those around you, too:

1. What does this challenge?
2. How can I participate/play?
3. What's the offer in this thought for me? (not if they're right or wrong)
4. Where do these things suggest things are going? and what can I do now?
5. How might engaging with this make people's jobs more interesting?

Dopplr's Matts on designing sites that no-one has to visit

Over on 38minutes, the creative community I helped create for Scottish and Northern Irish webpreneurs, I've been blogging a lot about what makes online services, communities, apps and APIs attract, retain and turn into some kind of value the interactions of the people out there.

The last post I wrote was a summary of some gems of wisdom in the two Matts (Biddulph and Jones) behind travellers' site Dopplr.com, lifted from the transcript of their talk at last year's dConstruct conference (you can listen along, too). Here are my own highlights that potential 4iP developers and those working on web-based services for young people might bear in mind as they develop their ideas and products:

On a web of data

"Find one bit of catalytic information that you can inject into a bunch of other arenas."

"Flickr is a mainframe. It's a big, giant machine that stores loads of stuff, and by storing lots of stuff in the same place, we get economies of scale out of it.

"And from there, we come to pretty much where we are now, which is having seen the power of combining massive amounts of information from many sources—the enormous, sort of easy group-forming power, the zero-coordination power of things like tagging, and linking, and all these things used properly—is we get to this realization of the original vision of the web, which is the web is not just a sort of teletext or view data system.

"It's a web of data. It was designed as that right from the start. And everyone's dear friend Tom Coates talks in wonderful detail about the way that we are now starting to design not just for our web sites, not just for that little bit you're seeing in your browser, but for the re-use of data, and realizing that data crosses the boundaries of sites. And sites open up access to that data and allow the easy recombination of it with other sites, are themselves benefiting from it.

"And to quote another of our—this is a friend's quote, a talk, by the way—another of our respected friends, Matt Webb. He's been talking recently about movement as a paradigm for the way the web is going. "So the web, when we started out, the web was a physical thing. You went to a site, you hang out on a forum. We had destinations, and people tried to build portals, places that could be almost physical sort of arcologies—places you could go and put your online life.

"And then we moved from this web page era into the era of web applications—the sort of the power-lifter, the Internet as magnifier of your individual capabilities—gives you superpowers and power-ups, and lets you do things over great distances, access knowledge that you can't immediately access from your physical environment.

"And that's the stuff that's evolving now. But as we are able to move from site to site, we get away from the arcology—the individual approach to sites. We are moving around sites, as is our data. And something that Matt said in a presentation recently, which I think is a really wonderful concept, is that your web service is a finite-state machine that executes on your users."

On distributable media

"A guy called Martin Lindstrom said, "The genius of a coke bottle is when it smashes into a thousand pieces, you still know it's a coke bottle.""

On delighters

"...Delighter is a world that I learnt from a guy who used to run the W Hotels in New York and in San Diego. And he used to say that delighter is a term evolved from the hotel industry or the hospitality industry. Where you put something into somebody's experience or into a room, but you do it in such a way that it creates nothing but absolute joy and delight.

"And the example that he used, which stuck with me for ages, was the rubber duck. If you go into a hotel room and there's a rubber duck already in there. You will go, "Oh, rubber duck. Cool." If you go into the hotel room on your second night there when you had been shopping all day and it's been raining. And you are naked and you really want to bat, and there's a rubber duck. You will be incredibly delighted. At least that's the theory. So we are always trying to find the rubber duck that we can put into the experience where we can.

"And one of the things that I really like about the logo is that, almost entirely dependably, people don't notice that the colors are changing until like two or three months in. And they go, "Oh! The colors are changing. Why are the colors changing?" And you set up all your vanity alerts on Dopplr on surmise and things like that. And they go, "Oh, just nice, the colors are changing" and, "Why are the colors changing?"

"So then we go and talk to them and say, "Hey, this is why the colors are changing. It reflects what you are doing around the world. And these are city colors that are referring to where you are around the world. They go, "Ah, that's really nice. I really like that."

"And then apparently another month later they go, "And you did it in the favicon.""

On the language of 'Friends'

"But the thing that's kind of bubbling up in my mind is that soon, we may have to kind of say this: that a lot of the reasons that we are tying up ourselves in knots is because of language. Because so much is tied on to the notion of friendship, the intimacy, the kind of transitiveness of friendship, what you're able to share, and what you wouldn't with certain people. And then how does that move to friends of friends?

"And all of the things that he was talking about—I mean, very fantastic things to be able to do with information. But using that word "friend" just kind of takes it to something in our monkey brain, kind of just goes, "Oh, I need to collect a dollhouse of friends, or I need to be very careful about how I handle this."

"So I'm kind of thinking very carefully about this at the moment. One of the things that we started off at Dopplr—when we started off Dopplr, we tried to keep to it—is that we never use the word "friend." We always talk about the informational relationship. We talk about the kind of switchboard pipe that you're connecting to somebody that you trust.

"And we talk about the information that's going, and we talk about the level of trust, and we talk about what's going to happen, but we don't judge whether that is your friend, your bank manager, your boss, your archenemy, whoever it is. And it just makes life a hell of a lot easier."

Really. Seriously. If you're making any kind of online platform in the coming months go and read/listen to it all. I'll be asking questions later... ;-)

Other posts you might like:

• Adam Gee on the challenges of commissioning web-only platforms and content
• Matt Locke's Commissioning for attention

Pic from dConstruct 2008

Ken Robinson's The Element: reincarnating creativity

Ken Robinson's "The Element" gets launched in the UK this week. It's a superb tome, and one that every educator, employee or entrepreneur should read, if only to check that they themselves are in the right place personally and professionally. Do your natural talents and passions meet at the same time and place, or are you plugging away at the wrong thing completely? Ken's book contains no simplistic lists of things one must do to survive the 21st century - it's Johnny Bunko for the over-educated.

Update: The RSA have now featured a film of his Element Lecture from February 2009.

Many of the messages will be familiar to those who have viewed his famous TED talk which proclaims, rightly in this blogger's opinion, that schools kill creativity. Why? Here's some of the stimulus from Ken's book along with some of my own observations, thoughts and inaccurate takes on the world of education.

Schools are built for, and in the image of, the industrial revolution
Schools are not only built for an industrial revolution past but also in its image - my first ever teaching placement in the most deprived area of Scotland was marked by every period of learning being 53 minutes long, something more like a chicken processing plant's shifts than a stimulating learning environment, with students batched by age and subject to standardised tests for quality before shipping to the real world. Conformity has thus always had a higher value than diversity. Disciplines on offer are subject to a hierarchy (maths and native language, followed by the sciences with music and the arts chasing the coattails).

Creativity and standardised testing can't share the same bed
We know this set of unchanging givens is killing creativity not just in high schools, though generally to a much lesser degree in primary schools, but also in Higher Education establishments. As the number of school leavers not in employment, education or training (NEET) creates a political headache for governments around the world, they are failing to tackle the continued problem in universities and colleges where the numbers also falling into the NEET category are surpassing the figures for high schools.

From recent personal experience of the 'creative output' of some UK Higher Education institutions I can vouch for a killing of creativity, independent thought and entrepreneurship, as hoardes of undergraduates and MScs fight to conform to what university markers want to see and take advantage of the spread of 'cramming courses' at the expense of pursuing personal passions at their best effort. When working on personal projects that are put forward for commissioning (i.e. asking for several £00,000s from the likes of 4iP) or for national and international media and technology prizes, the constraints of the learning environment ("a one-month unit using only x or y software") are used to justify downright poor propositions. Where's the passion that makes them stay up until 11pm and be up at 5.30am to work on their Big Idea? (These are the times 11 year olds at the New York KIPP schools regularly keep to tackle their learning, something about which they, at least, are passionate).

I said earlier that elementary schools have largely escaped this struggle for conformity, but even this elevated position is being gnawed away by standardised tests and curricula. Nothing in the past three years has made me more depressed about the state of education in England than hearing a young Wolverhampton child, part of a PDA-in-the-classroom project, saying that his prime goal from learning was to "get a five" - I still have no idea what "a five" is, but I have a feeling that it's not something that inspires me.

The death of entrepreneurship
This desire to "get a five" or to gain the best possible SAT test result is based on a wrong assumption, both in the creation of such tests and their perceived value in the wider world, particularly in the growing creative sector (worth £50b a year in the UK). Malcolm Gladwell's (right) Outliers, which I read immediately after Robinson's Element, offers a great counterpart in where creative success comes from in the first place. It explores the element of chance, background and opportunity in one's success, but also the need for a serious superhuman degree of practice at something before you reach the beginning of your prime, somewhere, that is, in the region of 10 years or 10,000 hours of passionate practice.

In the schooling environment we still see in most countries' high schools and higher education establishments, it's rare that the personal passion of a young person is given the chance to steer activity, resource and time in order that they might get close to achieving that 10,000 hours quicker. But it's not all the fault of institutions' structures and strictures.

More often than not, the successful student pictures themselves working in the 'safety' of faceless institutions rather than taking their passions and ideas to market themselves. History shows more entrepreneurs who were not successful students making it in the relative unsupported privacy of their entrepreneurship. Most students fail to realise, as Robinson puts it so well, that a degree these days is not so much a passport to a good job and salary, but a visa, something that needs renewed on an ever more frequent basis. But institutions and Governments are not particularly vocal in promoting this fact, thus encouraging the self-perpetuating myth that going to univesrity is better than going to college which is better than following a passion that, while you're willing to spend every waking hour working on it, might not lead to anything.

What is it that needs to change? Clue: It isn't curriculum or assessment
Nearly every country I've worked in for the past three years, from India to China, New Zealand to the states and provinces of Canada and the USA, from my native Scotland to our neighbours in England and Wales, is fiddling with two things: curriculum and assessment. Technology is often seen as the means of making teaching and learning better. I don't want to tackle here whether it does, but one thing is sure, as Arthur C Clarke (via Sugata Mitra) put it: "If a teacher can be replaced by a computer, then they should." This doesn't mean that all teachers should be replaced by computers, of course. It doesn't even mean that poor teachers should be, really. What it does highlight is that the myth an education system has no poor teachers or even a large hump of mediocre teachers needs to be met head on.

We also need to recognise that, largely, those teachers who use technology the most effectively and lead the way with its use are also, by and large, excellent teachers with or without the technology.

This helps us see what many of us appreciate already: the one biggest element of improving education, making learning more creatively inclined and entrepreneurial, is the teacher. It's not curriculum, class sizes (though smaller class sizes make the teacher's life easier) or even assessment. This is something I've been reporting back from research for two years (and which I've been blown out on more times than I can count). It's not about letting students lead the way with technology and "show us teachers" how it's done. Students are generally quite narrow in their knowledge of how to harness technology or creative venture.

No, it's how teachers and parents teach that is important. It is, to use a piece of edu-jargon, pedagogy, both at school and at home.

Yet no national strategy - and I would love to be corrected - headlines pedagogy as the key factor. Think about it: A Curriculum for Excellence (Scotland); No Child Left Behind (assessment: USA); New Zealand's curriculum is about values, competences, subject areas... Also, there's no large educational business à la Pearson that places its centre of gravity around pedagogy forcing the issue with superb pedagogy-based programmes of change, and with good reason - the business of standardised testing, where pedagogy must play second fiddle to cramming and passing the test, is worth in the USA between $1.2 and $5 billion per year per state. How much is teaching the teachers worth? Currently, a lot less.

Fundamental change through Brains Trusts
When I was having a post-panel-session chat with Clay Shirky (I was on the panel and he was the first question-asker of the day) he talked about my current place of employment not in terms of what it was, but in terms of who was in it: "What a brain trust you guys have there", he said. What did he mean? He meant that the organisation employed what it felt were the best people for the job of moving its business forward, and left them to get the hell on with it. The result of feeling that you're part of this brains trust is that you strive more than you ever have to be the best in the world. How many times has someone called the teachers in your school a "brains trust"? Or, for that matter, the management team? Or the parents? Or the students? How many times a day are you aware that you're goal is to be the best in the world?

When we were developing eduBuzz for students and teachers in East Lothian, we centred it around the people, not the platform or the politique of the education authority's management (who, in some schools and particularly in the early days, riled against what we were doing). In a LIFT talk last year, I made the point of saying that its success as a project was probably down to the fact that it offered an immediate change from the importance placed on the school - school boards, school achievement, school councils - and moved it instead onto a level where individuals - people - were the focus. People, not institutions and paper-borne structures, are the sole way to help individuals find their element, nurture it and take advantage of that for the greater good. It's just that most people who have ound their element have had to go and create their own institutions or projects to find a like-minded tribe - education institutions where one is packed away by age and ability, ability determined through standardised tests, are not the place to find fellow tribesmen and women who want to be the best in the world.

It's the nurturing of the brains trust in one's place of work or place of learning that counts the most if we are to improve learning. Schools are pretty poor at identifying talents that are not testable, yet alone nurturing it (this happens thanks to the actions of individual teachers rather than a systemic ability and framework to nurture talent, in the same way as, say, a broadcaster like Channel 4 does; there, the raison d'être is to nurture alternative voices and new talent, with a budget and infrastructure built more or less solely around this. My own department, for example, manages some £50m of public and private money to nurture new talent in online, mobile and gaming media alone.).

Making sure that our current and future students in schools and higher education establishments are capable of entrepreneurship in many areas of their lives, of coming up with solutions that marry new technology (bringing with it new possibilities we could not have before thought through) with strong understanding of design to tackle issues that really matter is the number one task to ensure that they can fully participate as citizens. Simply providing access to part of that equation is not enough: broadband for all without understanding for all, community without happenstance on a global scale, a child's creativity without understanding of the potential technology brings.

Pic: How Intelligent Are You? |   Malcolm Gladwell   |   C4 Offices

Ken Robinson's The Element   |   Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers

UK Government Research: Web 2.0 does improve learning

New research from Scotland and the UK Government shows that Web 2.0 and gaming can and do make a difference to educational attainment and student experience.

Since the birth of most "web 2.0" technology in the past six years I've been there gathering and even doing some of the research into whether it offers up any improvements on pedagogy and/or student experience in the classroom. It's not stopped healthy questioning of the validity of data, normally in midflow during a keynote, but there has always been a layer of distrust in stats and research that has not been peer reviewed, to the extent that there has been a great excuse for the lack of change by haughty educators and States that don't want to make the effort.

So I'm delighted that colleague Derek Robertson and University of Dundee researcher David Miller have, through their large-scale study, found that playing 20 minutes of Dr Kawashima's Brain Training every day is much more likely to improve attainment and speed of calculation in mathematics (up to 50% faster than the control group). Their results are to be peer-reviewed, hence the frustrating but necessary wait for the graphs, stats and data.

Furthermore, Becta's research into Web 2.0's impact in the classsroom, for which I presented the opening keynote at the expert seminar earlier this year, has just been completely published, and shows

• Web 2.0 helps to encourage student engagement and increase participation – particularly among quieter pupils, who can use it to work collaboratively online, without the anxiety of having to raise questions in front of peers in class – or by enabling expression through less traditional media such as video.
• Teachers have reported that the use of social networking technology can encourage online discussion amongst students outside school.
• Web 2.0 can be available anytime, anywhere, which encourages some individuals to extend their learning through further investigation into topics that interest them.
• Pupils feel a sense of ownership and engagement when they publish their work online and this can encourage attention to detail and an overall improved quality of work. Some teachers reported using publication of work to encourage peer assessment.

You can read the full research report online, which includes some input from myself and colleague Matt Locke at Channel 4. The recommendations state that all teachers need to be given more significant time to do more complex work with Web 2.0 in their classrooms, directing students learning in these tools. It also, thankfully, helps us see realistically what students do with technology.

Above all comes the caveat that we must not over romanticise what young people are capable of doing with technology without the structure of learning and teachers acting as guides on the side.

Fascinating stuff on which to start building more daring policies. Essential reading for all those who lament the lack of interest in new technologies from "those up top".
Pic from David Muir, his blog is here.

Looking two times the distance back to forecast the future

"Hunt for Bin Laden: Experts Agree: Al Quaeda leader is Dead or Alive". Yossi Vardi's photoshopped CNN reportage was certainly amusing but was, above all, a completely accurate forecast. What forecasters mustn't do is try to eliminate the uncertaintly from our futures.

Paul Saffo, formerly of the Institute of the Future, shares some of his secrets and insights from his main job: forecasting the future.

The Information Revolution is over. This is the Media Revolution
Everything in the knowledge and information world is uncertain. The information revolution is done, gone, in the past. We are now gripped by a media revolution - media is information that goes deep down and makes a difference in our life. It's also a shift within this field, from mass media to a very strange new world of personal media. Indeed, it's what my new job is all about - making the convergence of media count and make amplification have a new, almost reversed sense.

Even the information devices of old are now media devices. 1998 saw the first ring tone sold, and 2005 it had become a $2b business, accounting for 10% of the music business. Cell phones are entertainment media devices that happen to be communication devices. They are not information devices.

As Jane McGonigal, still at the Institute of the Future, has repeated: you need to look back twice as far back to see what's ahead. It might not be repeated, but the future will rhyme with it. If we peer back to the 1950s we see huge experimentation in mass media, in ways the television could be used, developed, enhanced. Today's use of the web is probably not even a bump on the landscape compared to what we will use our discoveries today for tomorrow.

When television emerged in the 1930s, it took some 20 years until it began to take off. Time-sharing (through email) took time from its first developments in the late 70s to become accepted in the 90s. Technology takes time to take hold, but in recent history technology is taking less and less time to make an impact:
This means that email and internet apps are nowhere near the peak of their activity.

Never mistake a clear view as a short distance
The challenge for those trying to predict the future is that, at one stage on the uptake curve you're made to look foolish as no-one joins you in the adoption of the technology. After a while, you give up on that bandwagon and think about what is worth betting your efforts on next. Just as you give up on it everyone else starts to adopt. You therefore look foolish twice over. I've written off many a fashion faux pas on that S curve theory.

SecondLife is one such maligned technology - I've managed to hit the middle part of that S Curve about a dozen times in the past three years, and have kept on it; something's afoot in this space. Paul believes it has a smell of the 20 year S Curve in it. He mentions the Cisco SecondLife meetings that my now-Cisco colleague John has talked about before. Likewise, in the nineties publishers would have scoffed if you said that something like the MacBook Pro Nano would make reading books online or on a computer doable - and enjoyable.

The changing nature of innovation
The next big thing is not the semantic web - it's sensors and robots
1950s TV - Broadcast
1980s Time-sharing - Email
1990s Cient sharing - WWW
2000  P2P - Napster
2010  Sensors - Smartifacts

Sensors will lead to smartifacts, robots that can make life easier, more enjoyable, more connected... Think of the current indicators: Roomba, the first robots to kill a human in the war on terror in Yemen in 2002, Nabaztags, robots that drive cars more safely than us... The indicators are already in place, though I think we're probably missing it for the immediate ideas and opportunity that the web is offering in 2008.

We're moving from TV to the web, from the living room to everywhere, from watching and consuming to participating and creating, from few and large organisations to many and small individuals.

We are moving at a tumbling rate from the Consumer Economy where buying and selling rule, to, markedly in the past two weeks, an economy where there are new actors in a Creator Economy. Google makes the perfect example of the success of the Creator Economy. It costs $0 to subscribe to Google, the usage charges are $0 and every time we use it we make it better. That last part is the cost - our search string contributes to the richness of what, in days past, would have been the Manufacturer. The question is, do we care if the $ cost is zero and the [heart] cost is information?

One forecast is looking a dead cert: the future's looking like one heck of a ride.

Quinn's photo of Paul Saffo.

Paul Saffo speaking at the ebic Thought Leader conference, Berlin, at which I am later speaking on the futures panel.

Blue Sky Thinking in Canada

We're heading towards the end of a marathon week in Canada, firstly in Alberta and now in Saskatchewan, working with educators, administrators and leaders of learning to think about some new ways we could inspire tomorrow's generations.

All the links from the past week which I've mentioned, examined or peeled back in my workshops can be found under the big Canada grouping in my online bookmarks. Within that, one can just click the small + sign next to any additional category that takes your fancy to narrow down the options. Happy researching and, above all, tell us here how you get on.

Image of Saskatchewan

Don't send out a press release to say you landed on the moon

Over the past three years at Learning and Teaching Scotland I've seen significant change in the way things have been done, largely thanks to the humble blog and the voices behind them. By pressing the need for authenticity in what's said, rather than some glossy, postcard format marcoms message ruling us all, we've seen the beginnings of a healthy little blogosphere in LTS Towers, both externally and, in true iceberg fashion, internally, under the glossy surface.

There are undoubtedly non-believers in all this authentic-voice-stuff that still remain (we're a Government body, this project is too big to allow the simple message we've created to leave people's minds, we need to make sure people use the correct acronym [is it CfE, aCfE or ACE?]) but, by and large, especially since this summer's Inspiration Sessions and Mike Coulter's work in-house, there is an ever increasing chance that if you want to find out more about the people behind the policy, the implementation, the ideas or the websites, that they have a blog. You can converse with - no offence intended - the horse's mouth. From professional development experts to web services, the magazine to the gaming guys, the geeks to the boss, it's covered. If you want to see behind the scenes at the Scottish Learning Festival, be our guest, and see the stand designs, the podcast preps and even take a look at how well (and not so well) the Festival is doing. LTS is well on its way to finding and sharing its voice.

And here's the crunch. People I know will object to this blog post, as they have objected to so many others. It makes them uncomfortable. They wonder if I'm talking about them in the para above. Or am I? Good. It's vital that the politic that got me a job with the education agency remains, for a month or two more at least, in people's heads: all anyone wants from a non-governmental body, a government, an organisation, a company is complete and utter authenticity. No compromises. No jargon. No marcoms crap that gets in the way of what really matters: "what are you doing to help me, and how can I help you?"

If you're still left thinking this is rubbish, and that traditional 20th Century corporate communications have a place in this connected world, then go read Seth Godin's superb rundown of NASA's best ever spokesperson, and then think about what watchlists need to be created, press releases junked and bloggers befriended. Happy blogging, folks.

Pic: Neil Armstrong

Summarising UK child internet use on Connected Live

Just before summer I set about digesting about 500 pages worth of research that, for the first time really, told us about the attitudes on the net of young people and their parents. You can read it over the next week at Connected Live.

Given that most of us at this time of year have our minds on other things, I thought it would be worthwhile publishing a week-long series of posts which helps you make sense of what the research is telling us. You can find a new post every day under the Research category or simply add Connected Live's feed address to your aggregator (and read the instructions on how to do this for this blog).

Let us know, too, if this is helpful to you and if you or your school and Local Authority adapt your practices based on it.