Golden Swamp - 1111 Entries  

The GoldenSwamp post last week pointing out that students with mobiles can decide for themselves whether to watch President Obama’s speeches was included in Carnival of the Mobilists #190 at wipJAM.

Having written some articles, edited a special issue, and being a Contributing Editor for Educational Technology Magazine, I am proud to pass along news of the publishing company’s big step into open content.

For nearly 50 years, Educational Technology Publications has been a choice publisher of those doing the finest, most up-to-date thinking in the education field. On its website the company reports having been at the forefront of every important new trend in the development of the field throughout the past five decades.

Now they have jumped to the forefront of the open content trend in publishing. Publisher Lawrence Lipsitz writes to me in an email: “we are now placing all pages of all of our more than 300 books published since 1969, including even the most recently published books, both in-print and out-of-print books, with the GoogleBooks program, available for full-text search and reading. Every page of every book. Close to 200 are “live” now, with Google processing the remainder daily. In the first ten days, there were about 25,000 page views (with only some of the books available for viewing at the time). This is all open and free.”

The turmoil about whether President Obama’s speech to school kids next Tuesday should be heard by them is growing, reports the Associated Press today. There is a long list of adults wrangling over the decision: White House spokespeople, Department of Education leaders, governors, mayors, school district heads, school principals, and parents — to name the main ones.

So far, I have read nothing that has mentioned the idea of a student herself or himself deciding whether to watch the speech. Yet any kid at school with a smartphone can browse to the White House website to watch and listen to what the President has to say — that is if students where he or she is are allowed to use their smartphones in school. Undoubtedly a video of the speech will be available essentially forever after it is given, so there is no chance of no option to watch. But should/must classes stop what they are doing and sit in rows watching Obama’s speech to them?

When I was in school in 1940s and 1950s, censorship of electronic media was not much of an issue. Our intercom system at Austin High School in El Paso, Texas was installed in about 1950. I recall April 11, 1951, the day that Douglas MacArthur’s famous parting speech to Congress was piped in and regular teaching and learning was put on hold to listen. I remember I was in the girls’ dressing room next to the gym, standing and listening as he said: “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away…”You can hear what I heard on YouTube.

Whether you think it is a good idea for schools to pipe in President Obama — or it was a good idea for such an indelible impression to have been made on my young mind as a famous general told Congress what he thought — for us as mobilists this incident highlights a major bend in the road of education just ahead. It was a huge change when I was in school to be able to pipe a president, general, or politician into a classroom live. The fact that kids are rapidly getting individual access to the wide live world is an even bigger change.

The issue that is causing the turmoil about next week’s speech is whether it should be forced on students, and who makes that decision. The big issue just ahead is who has the power or right to tell kids what they must watch individually. I think there is a new civil liberty: the freedom to access the open internet. When a message is piped into a whole class or school, supervisors must decide whether to do it. But when each student can watch individually, can/should the school force them to watch something?

Of course, this issue is far larger than whether to force students to watch a particular politician. What about forcing kids to learn standard curricula using matching textbooks? If a student wants to learn more science, history, literature and the rest online, and get certified for achievement online, can/should schools force her to pass state approved tests? Individual mobiles are about to put learning choice into student hands.

It is hard to find learning materials when you put them online as PDFs. I have said that we need to unbundle the material that is stuck inside of PDFs and optimize it for search engines small piece by small piece. This new video from Sunlight Foundation explains briefly that when your stuff goes online you should use XML, Eric says here why XML is better that PDF.

Peggy Anne Salz of MSearceGroove is this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists host. Her Best & Brightest Carnival of the Mobilists #189 was illustrated with the lovely poster shown here. She honored GoldenSwamp’s entry, Mobile opens the sky for women with this review:

Post of the week goes to Judy Breck at Golden Swamp for prompting us to see mobile as a tool (for change) rather than a technology. Access to the mobile Internet gives everyone – particularly women suffering in isolation – a voice, allowing them to connect with people and peers who can amplify their message and fight their cause. Thanks, Judy, for reminding us why mobile is amazing and why we must strive to bridge the digital divide.

It is stunning that this first of its kind image and description of how it was taken can be studied by anyone with an internet browser — almost immediately upon its discovery. It will be many months at least before this new insight into and picture of molecules will be delivered to students in a printed textbook.

The machine in the illustration is an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) explained by physicist Ethan Siegel at his StartsWithABang blog. Siegel describes how the AFM works: “Basically, you make a tiny, sharp, atomic needle that you move over the top of a molecule. When you approach different atoms in a molecule, the electric forces either attract or repel the needle. As the needle moves up and down, the handle that it’s attached to feels forces and torque. So, all you have to do is measure these tiny changes in force and torque, and you can image the molecule beneath it.”

The gray inset image is what the AFM let’s us see. Siegel comments that: “You can even see that the electrons like to live on the outside edges of the carbon rings, and that there are fourteen tiny hydrogen atoms bonded to the carbon atoms at various points. What an amazing picture; the entire molecule is only 1.4 nanometers across!”

The inset image is from BBC’s report of 8/28/09 titled “Single molecule’s stunning image.” Several developing concepts are highlighted in the BBC report, each of them offering potential for nano technologies where work will be done at the molecular level. A post at Gizmodo by Jack Loftus explains why what is displayed in the inset images is a stunning breakthrough: “That B&W structure is an actual image of a molecule and its atomic bonds. The first of its kind, in fact, and a breakthrough for the crazy IBM scientists in Zurich who spent 20 straight hours staring at the ’specimen’—which in this case was a 1.4 nanometer-long pentacene molecule comprised of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms.”

Next week the new book Half the Sky, on the plight and progress of the world’s women, will be released. Last spring I had the privilege of hearing the journalist power couple coauthors Nicholas Kristoff and  Sheryl WuDunn talk about some of amazing women whose stories are in the book. The image with this post is from last weekend’s New York Times Magazine article by Kristoff and WuDunn. In the photo are Saima Muhammad, shown with her daughter Javaria (seated), who lives near Lahore, Pakistan. She was routinely beaten by her husband until she started a successful embroidery business.

I have pre-ordered Half the Sky— whose title is based on a Chinese saying that “women hold up half the sky.” Perhaps the authors have mentioned mobile as they look to the future for the situations where women have been isolated and confined. Let’s think about that a bit here.

Imagine what it would mean to each of the women in the photo above to have a smart phone that accesses the internet tucked away in a pocket. One or more of them already may. I would bet that Saima uses at the least a personal cellphone in her embroidery business. In Jump Point, Tom Hayes predicts that by 2011 there will be 3 billion people individually connected into the internet. Let’s guess that by 2015 a couple of billion more will be added. By then the world’s population will be past 7 billion, they say. Far more than half the population will carry with them a mobile connection to what Hayes calls the network culture. Do the math: most women will have a mobile connected to the internet.

Mobiles will be ubiquitous before another generation of baby girls grow up. Cries for help will reach not just within earshot, but around the world. Girls once forbidden to go to school will carry with them direct access to anything they want to learn. Women will be connected with commerce and possess a tool of entrepreneurial equality — male brawn balanced by female e-connectivity. It can take generations for attitude change to evolve, but the trap of isolation transforms into open sky immediately when she slips a mobile device into her pocket.

August greetings from the GoldenSwamp where a New York City hot spell has everyone, including the frogs, taking a break. A lot of our Carnival bloggers seemed to have hopped offline too, since the number of posts this week dipped. But what came in is brimming with ideas and information. Let’s jump in:

Gerrit Visser writes at Howard Rheingold’s SmartMobs about a press announcement that “Layar Reality Browser 2.0 Launched Globally.” Gerrit sketches some details for this free application on your mobile phone which shows what is around you by displaying real time digital information on top of reality though the camera of your mobile phone.

Ajit Jaokar post at OpenGardens is titled “Nokia’s mass market iPhone strategy is unlikely to work and Dave Stewart can never be the missionary man ..” After affirming that he is a long term of Nokia, Ajit proceeds with telling analysis.

Dennis Bournique at WAPReview provides his usual insightful comments on this subject: “US Prepaid Data Options – Making the Most of a Bad Lot” and concludes with some recommendations from this veteran mobile blogger.

Jose Colucci at MobileStrategy, who blogs as a Canadian consumer of financial services, sets out: “12 Reasons Why Canadian Banks Should Really Offer Mobile Services.” It is a beginning of a series on this mobilist blog that will surely have application not only in Canada.

Since it is the Frog Days of Summer and rules are suspended, (and there are not many submissions) there follow two posts by different authors from Little Spring Design (LSD).

Chris Nemeth, who is a first time contributor, writes on the LSD blog about “^location – adding in context to your content”— giving us location carets and lat-long irrelevance … hours before Twitter announces lat-long API.

Steven Hoober, LSD Senior Interaction Designer, analyzes “sustainability of the mobile industry.” I have encountered before these edgy LSD thinkers in the Lawrence, Kansas mobile design hotbed, and recommend Steve’s evaluations and his speculations about the unforeseen and unpredictable.

And finally, a post from me, Judy Breck, at my GoldenSwamp blog: Enjoy “Snow leopard kittens romping.” As I have written this blog since 2005 to give reasons for using the internet in education, nothing has been as persuasive in that cause as showcasing what is out there online to explore and learn as these kittens and their Mom do. Watch them on your mobile via YouTube and hold in your hand a mobile window for learning unimaginable before our time.

So Carnival #188 is done. Have a some happy frog days of summer, and jump over next week to MSearchGroove for Carnival of the Mobilists #189. And a note of thanks for the frogs to my great-grandfather Milo Roblee, who was a sewing machine sales rep in the 1880s. He was based in Topeka, Kansas not far from where the LSD team now designs for mobile. The frogs are from a sales flyer. When Milo was a young guy, he was an 1866 version of a twitterer —as you can see from the transcription of a diary he kept.

Realizing our education methods have grown out of reductionist times, gives us perspective to glimspe a deep flaw. In his automaton duck, unveiled in 1739, Jacques de Vaucanson boasted the needed duck parts were there for the contrivance to digest and defecate. As Jan Riskin describes, in his time there was “growing confidence, derived from ever-improving instruments, that experimentation could reveal nature’s actual design.”

Think, then, of this comparison: a digesting-duck curriculum for a school subject includes a set of standard parts, so that after a student works through it, she can pour forth its meaning. Online networking of the subject is a lot messier, like life. The deep rooted conviction in education that standard units of knowledge can be assembled to cause learning dates to the time of the digesting duck, when reductionism was infiltrating every intellectual field.

Like a living duck, the internet rejects dissected units of ideas, and provides instead a new matrix for knowledge that is complexly interrelated, as is knowledge itself. Melanie Mitchell begins her wonderful new book Complexity, A Guided Tour with this explanation of reductionism from Douglas Hofstadter’s classic Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid:

REDUCTIONISM is the most natural thing in the world to grasp. It’s simply the belief that “a whole can be understood completely if you understand its parts, and the nature of their ’sum.’” No one in her left brain could reject reductionism.

These snow leopard kittens from the Seattle Zoo were are featured today on ZooBorns.com. The exciting world they are exploring is made richer for us all by being able to wander more and more through our wonderful world, virtually.

CreatureCast Episode 1 from Casey Dunn on Vimeo.

This 8-minute video on iridescence in squid contains nuggets of insight into several scientific topics: cells, visible spectrum, animal behavior, and more. As you watch the sketches, you listen in as two biologists, Sophia Tintori and Alison Sweeney, discuss how and why squid use iridescence.

In my last post I wrote that incoming content from the internet is key to education. This video from CreatureCast.org is a way to let a shining squid into the studies at a school or on an individual student’s mobile device — offering interesting and enlightening knowledge.

Via SEED Daily Zeitgeist

Some things to think about come to mind. You may think of others, but here is my quick list: 1. If the white dots stay inside and don’t mix, they don’t get enriched by connecting to “what’s out there online.” 2. The white dots bouncing around inside are limited only to themselves, and could miss some key stuff. 3. If every school has to pay for and maintain its own white dots, doesn’t that multiply content costs? 4. Why not just use the network itself, with all the white dots coming in from the new media of the 21st century?

And did you notice: the white dots are shown only flowing OUT of the school. OER is usually discussed as a university or other expert institution releasing (opening) its content. My points above allude to what is a far greater potential in open networking of what is known. Respect for incoming content is key. When all places of learning are open to the global networked knowledge commons learning will have transformed into its impending golden age.

Science fiction master author William Gibson tells us he was being evocative—not predicting the future—when he described cyberspace, a word he coined, in his classic novel Neuromancer. Yet many of us think of the internet as something like these words by Gibson in that 1984 book: Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

In 1984 when these phrases first hit paper, the engulfing global internet was not on any visionary’s radar. Yet Gibson’s word has come to define the location of the internet—bringing along some dystopic baggage many people have not shed.

George Orwell’s novel titled 1984, that gave us the frightening image of Big Brother watching us, was written in what the literati call the dystopian genre — dark, wretched, fearful, the opposite of utopian. William Gibson, who coined cyperspace, is a cyberpunk, which is dystopian. Somehow we have gotten stuck with a word with a dystopian heritage to name the setting of our future. Yet the real cyberspace is hardly a consensual hallucination, though it is experienced daily by billions. The complexity there is turning out to be a marvelous reflection of human thinking. Clusters of data have proven to be fundamental to network science that was not discovered until 1998. Hum . . . what has happened here?

The reality is this: No dystopia is necessarily ahead, quite the opposite is proving to be true. Cyberspace is turning out instead to be the platform for a dawning global golden age.

My grandniece, shown above filling some time on her Mom’s back by connecting to cyberspace is likely to live into the 22nd century. The virtual venue she is already experiencing is being constructed not by the weirdness of cyberpunk but by the wonderfulness of the golden swamp. The mechanisms that make this so will be a major theme of this blog from now on.

David Wiley and Stephen Downes spent three and half hours the other day talking about OER (open educational resources). These are the links I have scanned from which I gather that OER is not having its best days:

Downes, Downes, Wiley

For the record, I think a lot of OER is something academics do to reposition their pedagogy from the analog education era. OER tends to be bundled in courses and curricula and further boxed up into PDFs. The content of OER is seldom really open — urls for interesting content are not online and if they are, not tagged for search engine spiders. The content in OER that most students and teachers would like to use is the many nodes of stuff to learn within the bundles. To fix this disconnect the bundles do not even have to be disturbed. Just put a second version of them online and SEO the nodes within. OER needs SEO (search engine optimization).

To my point, there is a recent PLoS (Public Library of Science)  article about why they are providing a new metric for assessing citations of articles instead of journals (that is nodes instead of bundles).

Grist to chew on in future OER discussions . . . .

A global golden age is trickling across our threshold and will very soon pour in through our doors and windows engulfing us all. This tsunami is grand news. Beginning today what I will write here will be sketches of what the golden swamp is bringing and changing.

Since I began this blog over five years ago, I have focused on what the golden swamp means for education. The time has come to broaden the scope because much, much more is about to change. The education aspect, which is huge, will continue to be a theme.

In the golden swamp, everyone on earth will have access to everything that is known. What is known becomes a freely exercised civil liberty in which we all learn from the same page. Literacy will be for all practical purposes universal. The political, economic, creative, social, and other aspects of the golden age of the virtual swamp  will be new and exciting, and we will look at their vanguards here.

So what is the golden swamp? Although it does not exist physically — only virtually — the golden swamp is very real. It is not yet half a century old. It will be shared by everyone on earth. The golden swamp is the virtual ecology that emerges in the open internet. The laws there are network effects. The individual is empowered; the tyrant is enfeebled.

Welcome to the new sketches from the golden swamp. To understand the real and brighter future than the mainstream muck, this is a place to jump in.