Tli Ny

Connections and Conversations: What Happens to Content? George Siemens April 9, 2008 Presented to: Technology Leadership Institute Briarcliff Manor, NY

A quick look back

Why failure?

The cycle of change

What does technology do?

Information

Interaction

Networks

Déjà Vu all over again?

Bold predictions of tomorrow’s world

For each successful but humble beginning...

Many, many, bold, failed visions

Darryl Zanuck :

demise of television (1946)

Ken Olson (DEC):

Why would anyone want a computer at home?

Louis-Sebastien Mercier :

all learning in four books

Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms.

They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems.

And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney.

Newsweek, 1995

Education’s battle with new tools

New tools resisted...negative impact on learning

futurelab: 2020 and beyond

A quick look back

Why failure?

The cycle of change

Information

Interaction

Networks

Why do promises fail?

Duplication of existing approaches, new medium

We make learners use different tools, different processes, different contexts

A quick look back

Why failure

The cycle of change

Information

Interaction

Networks

“ Revolutions are not easy on us”

Design and the Elastic Mind

Mass education designed for the industrial age meets the needs of neither the pre-industrial village nor the post-industrial future...indeed, all education - has to be totally reconceptualized.

-Alvin Toffler “Revolutionary Wealth”

3

New ideas require new structures

Gombrich, 1950, p.379

Film - 1940s

Television - 1950s

Programmed instruction - 1960s

Systematic instructional design - 1970s

Computers - 1980s

The Internet - 1990s

Social networks & Web 2.0 – 2000s

Richard Schwier

Associative trails

As we may think, Vannevar Bush - 1945

We cannot evolve to adapt fast enough

So

We extend ourselves through technology

Distributed Intelligence

Information/learning/knowledge not only “in our head”

Wittgenstein, Spivey, Salomon, Vygotsky, etc.

Regime transition

“ Development and coordination of a vast array of complementary tangible and intangible elements”

Paul A. David (2000)

Fischer (2006)

How we interact with information today creates our structures

Our structures preserve, and help us to makes sense of, information

But...

Our structures also influences future affordances

And...

Our information structures inhibit progress

A quick look back

Why failure?

The cycle of change

Information

Interaction

Networks

What is the role of technology?

Loosening transitory pull of structures created based on how we have previously interacted with information and each other

Technology encapsulates current ideas

Shepherd

...and to connect

...and to interact

Our devices

2.7 billion mobile phones

800 million cars

850 million PCs

1.5 B phones

1.5 B TV sets

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2007/01/putting_27_bill.html

A quick look back

Why failure?

The cycle of change

Information

Interaction

Networks

Capacity to stay current

New tools to extend ourselves to stay current, to function, in our climate

Information Explosion

From 1550-1750

Daniel Rosenberg

“ Confusing and harmful abundance of books"

Conrad Gesner 1545

How have people sought to curb information growth?

More books

Encyclopaedia's

Ignore books

Categorize and select

Different strategies within context (reading)

New approach all together...

As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe

Diderot

Information is the currency & barometer of humanity’s progress

What do we do now with information?

create

re-create

co-create

Associative trails between information

The attributes of information dictates a new approach, not fine-tuning existing approach

A quick look back

Why failure?

The cycle of change

Information

Interaction

Networks

here

there

now

then

Social context

Participatory sense-making

(De Jaegher & Di Paolo)

Associative trails between people

A quick look back

Why failure

The cycle of change

Information

Interaction

Networks

Welcome to complexity

Uncoupling cause-effect

Multiple factors interacting

Diversity and emergence

Knowing today means accepting ambiguity and uncertainty

Information is networked

Communication is networked

Learning is networked

“ More than anything else, being an educated person means being able to see connections so as to be able to make sense of the world and act within it in creative ways.”