Watching top down messaging disempowered by network laws

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Posted on 10th May 2010 by Judy Breck in Next | Obamaschool | Politics

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Controlling the message from the top down used to work very well, giving great power to tyrants who were good at message control. Times, though, have changed: the internet releases unlimited messages to flow freely outward from individuals, creating patterns of ideas, discourse, debate, and dissent.

The youth singing in the video above are indoctrinated by a song imposed upon them by Adolf Hitler — responding to ideas delivered top-down from The Furher. Today’s youth download personal preferences from thousands of songs online — listening to them individually, not singing them in groups. Against this background it is a jolt to read these words by Barack Obama from a speech yesterday:

“You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank all that high on the truth meter,” Obama said at Hampton University, Virginia.

“With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation,” Obama said.

He bemoaned the fact that “some of the craziest claims can quickly claim traction,” in the clamor of certain blogs and talk radio outlets. . . .

“Education… can fortify you, as it did earlier generations, to meet the tests of your own time,” he said.

Is Obama telling the graduates that education somehow provides the right amount of information — instead of too much? Does he say educators should decide what information ranks high on the “truth meter”? — what song kids should sing? The fact of the matter is that these questions will answer themselves, following network laws.

The devices kids now have in their hands are the greatest deterrent ever known to propaganda [known in the 21st century as message managing].

Information — managed by network laws — will continue to flow from many, many individual sources. Much of it will be junk; a lot of it will be untrue. But the flow will also contain the all of the kernels of accurate facts — the truth will freely flow.

Top down tyranny of thought is becoming impossible because what is accurate and true finds itself bubbling on its own the the top of the truth meter. Google proves that network laws themselves move the best stuff to the top.

One of the most fascinating aspects of upcoming elections is watching the increasingly ineffective efforts of team Obama  and other politicians to control the message by sending it down from the top against the upward flow of everybody’s ideas. The same phenomenon is gaining momentum in education as top down standards and centralized curricula and textbooks lose their relevancy to kids who are learning from browsing the internet with their handheld devices.

Think outside the bundle for network learning

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Posted on 8th May 2010 by Judy Breck in Mobiles

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Let’s pretend the bundled asparagus above is first one kind of thing and then another kind of thing. The two kinds of bundles to imagine the asparagus represents are HUGE obstacles to 21st century learning.

First let’s say the bundles are educational resources such as textbooks, curricula, and grade standards. Each stalk of asparagus represents something like fractions, polynomials, cell mitosis, the planets, and classic short stories. Pedagogues and publishers have divided the stalks by subject, into math, biology, astronomy, and literature. All the stalks for each of the subjects have been gathered together and bundled — bound and held together. The individual topics like cell mitosis are stuck in one of the bundles and cannot be found or linked openly online.

Second let’s say the bundles are students. They have been sorted out by grade, gifts, scores, etc. and bundled together. The bundles of students have then been placed in a pile that we will think of as a particular school. In this image of two schools (one on the left, one on the right), students of different color go to different schools.

Webster’s gives us this definition: bundle — a number of things fastened together into a mass or bunch convenient for handling or conveyance.

This is a disturbingly vivid metaphor for actual schooling — especially public schools in the United States and those with rigid grade standards in Europe and many other places.

UNBUNDLING AND CONNECTING

Bundling of educational resources makes them incompatible with the open internet because the medium is a network. Nodes are needed for fractions to connect with other fraction resources and polynomials, mitosis and the rest to link to their related knowledge. Knowledge needs to be unbundled for it to be useful online.

There is now a quick and easy release for a student now experiencing schooling in a bundle: handschooling. Give a student a smartphone so she can connect on her own to the knowledge she wants to learn that is unbundled in the open internet. She will begin feeling less like a piece of asparagus, and become a scholar.

Network dynamics can mirror ideas in learning

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Posted on 5th May 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | Learnode | Next

To begin to understand something as complex as the American Revolution, seeing the main players and events in different contexts is key. One needs to study how Adams and Jefferson honed their ideas, how Washington dealt with the Redcoat strategies, and what Revere did to make sure the Minutemen answered the call of April 19, 1775.

The boy in the illustration above can link together explanations of each of these aspects — in fact of just about any of hundreds of facts, outcomes, opinions, and people who interacted to bring about the Shot Heard Around the World.

A core aspect — if not THE core aspect — of 21st century education is this new phenomenon: network dynamics allow a learner to interact with the internet dynamically, mirroring what is needed to grasp related ideas into the learners own networking thought in his or her mind.

Schooling used to be to bring teachers and books that had knowledge to a place, then bring students to that place to acquire the knowledge made available by the teachers and books. It is now a simple matter for a student to connect directly  and individually with everything known by humankind. That is terrific. But uber-terrific is that the network where the student interacts with the knowledge being learned is dynamic, emerging patterns of ideas that the student’s mind can reflect, manipulate, and learn.

Human networking blinds educators to the internet’s prime gift to learning

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Posted on 3rd May 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | Next | Schools we now have

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Until educators see the difference between human learning networks and knowledge networks the internet’s biggest gift to education will continue to be missed. Sure, it is great for students to network among each other in their lessons. But forget that for a bit and look here at something else.

In the illustration above some to of the relationships of historical events and factors are linked in a network. You are not looking at something a textbook can do: what you see takes an open network to form the relationships and emergent patterns! Until the 21st century no such medium for studying knowledge existed. Now look at what has happened:
- Everything known by humankind is embedded in the open internet!!
- The internet is an unlimited network of nodes that can be linked by relationships, right or wrong.
- Spontaneously — through use by knowledgeable people — the best patterns of links emerge so everybody can find them (the core idea of Google).

No one even knew these kinds of networks existed until 1998 when they were discovered. For the past decade, network science has become a major factor in many other sciences. Biology is a prime example. The American Revolution image above was adapted from the cover of the current issue of the Journal of Cell Research.

So where are the educators? Mostly they are chopping up subject knowledge into grades and standards, and printing them in textbooks . When they talk about education networks it is in terms of people — not how nodes of knowledge relate to explain The Shot Heard Around the World. Educators are long overdue in using the natural network ability to organize, vet, and emerge human knowledge.

RESPONSE TO COMMENT ONE: Only stuff like some living molecules and human knowledge — stuff that is inherently, structurally a network — will form patterns in an open network matrix as we now have in the internet. Pedagogy, for example, is seldom network compatible. The stunning surprise education has missed so far is how what we know and teach is, itself, a network. But then, that makes sense when you think about it: what we know is the product of the human mind, which is a network too. Human knowledge — like relationships in the American Revolution — learned by the mind from the internet is a matter of mirroring between two networks. Gorgeous!

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