Futures Book Club

Just had a great discussion at the first monthly "Futures Book Club". This is a follow on of the Los Angeles Future Salon which has not met again since John Smart and Iveta Brigis left for SFO.

We talked about the internet's current and future influence on culture and society. We discussed how we learn, how our mind adapts, how our vocabularies are changing possibly making access to classical literature less accessible.

We covered computer languages, programmings as Haiku, and limits to servers hosting virtual worlds. We weighted the merits of security, trust, metrics, markets, entertainment, commerce, using social capital, viral presence, Trumors, and what a society needs to know vs. what a society thinks it needs to know. We also share our thoughts about what seems to be the problem facing todays schools teaching in a digital, interconnected world.

We mentioned the Singularity and what in technology makes it more difficult for governments to govern or makes it easier for them to control. We talked about the military's use of simulations and the changing mindset of a trained and/or highly trained soldier.

Randal mentioned how, in the past, HAM radio operators where similar to the internet users in that they spent long hours physically isolated and yet had an international relationships with a great many people sharing many ideas, often filtered through a three character "key code".

Some thoughtful questions raised:

• Twitter raised the important question: "What are you doing now?"
• "What is it possible to do in this culture and not elsewhere?"
• "What are we going to be in 30 years?"
• "In 5 years, will we, with a sensor attached to us, think to Google a query and receive the answer back?" and if so, "Would every MBA student see this as a business advantage at every business meeting and want one?"
  [Would a remote assistant monitoring by cell phone be able to do the same thing?]
• "What's our internet future?" Korea's CY World as an example of ~89% usage.
• "Will taking risks and constant change become a natural skill for the next generation?"

See you all next time.

Justin Rattner's Talk Summarized

Jeremy Kemp has summarized Justin Rather's talk "Virtual Worlds – The Rise of the 3D Internet".

http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=RattnerIDF

School Ideals suffering through Hyperinflation

Every day when I drop off my children at the local public school, I see armies of their fellow schoolmates swarming the school in the morning trailing rolling backpacks. This daily performance reminds me of the photos I saw, when I was back in school, of Germans pushing wheelbarrows of cash to buy a loaf of bread during Germany's period of hyperinflation (historical photo on this web page).

I couldn't help imagining, with information so fluid in this digital age, why these "digital natives" were toting around so many reams of paper, cardboard, and larger books than ever before. (The books are larger because they need the color photos, illustrations, and aesthetic white space to keep the interest of today's youth). The children also must tote writing paper, writing tools, parent-teacher correspondence, etc. It seems so obvious that a single electronic device would do well for them, as envisioned by the OLPC group. And, because the information is paper based (like Germany's paper money which they kept printing more and more of thinking that more of the printed stuff would solve their problems), it's value to the students and society is decreasing exponentially even while the student is exerting energy, consuming time, losing their posture, and losing skeletal structural soundness while dragging the stuff around.

Obviously this "burden of Atlas" on the students is designed to benefit the schools and the curriculum designers rather than the students themselves. Why not have small booklets for each chapter (like Singapore Math)? Or, one set textbooks for home and one set for school? The cost for the school is for the benefit of the publishers of the book rather than in the actual cost of the manufacturing of it. The publishers even add the extra cost to the schools to make the covers glossy, colorful, and sparkled and then the schools make the children immediately cover th book so the children don't damage them. Even still, they get pencil marking and normal wear and tear. The children should be eager to markup and "tag" the content (in a del.icio.us sense) to make it more personal and interesting and make it their own, but they're told "thou shalt not!"

I've never understood how educational organizations expect the students to internalize and value the knowledge they're learning, if they cannot permanently own the information on the medium by which it's deliver to them. "Look but don't touch" their told. I think all they are told they need to know should be part of their life long portfolio. Even after school, if what they've learned becomes known to the school to be outdated, the school should update their former student's life long portfolio with the corrected information. If the schools don't follow up, did they really want all their students from the beginning to know "the truth" of the world around them? It's certainly easier and less expensive to do this digitally.

If the knowledge and skills which the schools teach are so important that the students are expected to remember them for the rest of their lives, why is that information copyrighted? Why are schools so dependent on copyrighted materials if this knowledge and these skills are so important and so pervasive and essential in society? Anyone should be able to teach this stuff and generate the materials from memory. I'm being just a little sarcastic at the irony.

I like how Seymour Paper tried to reformulate the issue in terms of trying to compare "paper based" learning with "digit content based" learning and compare them as just different mediums rather than "new and expensive" vs. "old and trusted". We can then evaluate them in terms of whom each medium benefits, who really pays for it, and who endures the non-monetary costs.

Croquet Software Demo Movie (August 2007)

Here's an online demo of Croquet and short descriptions about what it can do. It seems a little light on why it's important to teach and communicate in this way.

The Croquet team does well at demonstrating how text, numbers, 2D and 3D graphics, worlds, and external applications are all manipulated at an equal level of control and importance in this environment, which is not so true in most any other 3D environment. However, they don't demonstrate that the underlying programming rules and logic are just as easily manipulated as the visual artifacts! But, that's really too much for just one demo.

QWAQ on the move at Intel Developer Forum

Andreas Raab writes to the developer list this notice. I hope this helps their visibility and that of Croquet.

Slightly OT here but for those of you who want to see Croquet in action,
check out keynote by Justin Rattner from Intel's developer forum in San
Francisco this morning:

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/events/idffall_2007/webcasts.htm

The topic is "The rise of the 3D Internet" and Croquet is featured both
in the talk in general (as an example of P2P collaboration environment)
and live via a Qwaq Forums demonstration (about 15mins into the talk).

Also, a link to the press release of the Qwaq/Intel collaboration:

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20070920corp_a.htm
http://www.qwaq.com/press/release_2007-09-20.html

I hope this helps their visibility and that of Croquet.

Enterprise 2.0 & eLearning 2.0 ... the one and the same or a marriage?

Dan Farber posts about Enterprise 2.0 and the discussion he moderated.

Web 2.0 for the enterprise: Wisdom of the employees

This raised an interesting question in my mind. With Web 2.0 tools for conducting business and an emphasis on informal processes for conduction business leveraged by these tools, the goals of these two techniques seem to be merging. Perhaps the "social scripting" which Jon Udell mentions allowing more dynamic scripting of business tools will help turn the social talk into social action.

I know corporations don't accept 3D simulations much as yet, but I don't think they can resist for too long. Enterprise 2.0 and eLearning 2.0 is good for bottom up, less expensive material, but top down is good for keeping a big picture to reduce fragmentation of information, identify gaps in the knowledge set about the domain, and working together toward a common goal.

So, how to we leverage the knowledge of the crowd without going back to a top down system to keep unity and context? Here again is why I believe simulations will be important. What one submits via the Web 2.0 tools, would still need to be placed within the context of the simulations, so every participant can see where they might be headed as an organization and how & why their contributions help. It's easy to assume everyone has the same mental model of what's going on if they are all reading the same text posts, the same calendar, and same numbers in the same spreadsheets, but that assumption is often wrong simply due to the timing of communications, the people we have the most exposure to, and our own built-in biases from different personal experiences, among many other reasons.

Simulations also help use measure what we individually and collectively believe the future will bring and be able to compare it against what actually comes to pass. Then we can drill down further to see which rules we assume to be in force where mistaken.

Seems like much of the fun is yet to come.

Why 3D and simulations? One answer: "Educational Uses of Second Life"

Here's a nice video done in Second Life explaining a bit of why 3D and simulations help self-directed and organized learning, titled "Educational Uses of Second Life".

Parry - Repost

Just attended Tony Karrer's talk on eLearning 2.0.

He has inspired me to blog more often.

So many ideas, so little time to type them all.

I mentioned my B.I.M. (Building Intelligence Model) as a metaphor for how a simulation summarizes large amounts of fast, dynamic, ever changing information like the information in the future that's awaiting us.

An analogy I should have used to help Tony understand my perspective comes from my experience in IT. The ERP systems I've installed and maintained for manufacturing corporations gave me a unique perspective of the company, one only afforded to top executives. I see the GL, AR, AP, Inventory flow, Shipping, Receiving, and a good amount of the communication between departments. From this bird's eye view, an ERP system looks like a simulation. One where budgeting is how one "replays" the game. The company looks like a living organism with a heartbeat (monthly reporting) and circulatory system that nourishes or withers departments of the company (cash flow). It moves and changes, searching for food (markets), reacting to an ever changing environment.

Would it be easier to quickly understand what a company does and how it functions by ....
A) Reading dozens of spreadsheets representing the changing, quantifiable aspects of the company?
B) Reading assorted emails of company employees?
C) Reading brochures about the company?
D) Reading the book of policies and procedures (in their current state) generated by the company?
E) Watching a documentary about the company?
F) Walking the floor?
G) Watching a visual, animated simulation of the company with labels for appearing function and animated actor?

Which of the above helps answers all five questions of "who, what, where, when, how, and why" the best?

I suspect simulations would be best at each of these.