Tag Archives: Education

Systems Thinking & The Internet of Things

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Everything and everyone connected everywhere. The Internet of Everything becomes a ginormous pulsating organism? social structure? ecosystem? Whatever its nomenclature, it will be a system of non-linearity increasingly obvious in a world where most humans prefer their explanations in simpler linear predictability.

Some posit that this ubiquitous interconnectedness will be evident in 10 years. In traditional education terms, that’s equal to 4 years at college, 4 years of high school and two years surviving junior high. So we can think of those 6th-graders, 12 years and straining to reach the anticipated glories of adulthood. By the time that they finish with another decade of formal education, we can easily imagine them as facile participants in this digitally-connected world. Guessing the number and power of connected computers that will be part of their lives is about as difficult as determining the number of gum balls in a pickle jar. The iPhone5 has the processing power of the Apollo Guidance Computer. Your car already has upwards of 50 computers and millions of lines of code. My refrigerator has a usb port.

How can we ensure that our imaginary 6th-grader will reach 2025 with the abilities of a system thinker? How often will simulations and modeling be part of that decade of education? When will visualization and other transformations of data become as requisite as writing? When will our student learn to code and explore the properties of feedback loops?

Preparing humans for successfully living in a dynamically interconnected world won’t be accomplished by adhering to a machine-age mental model of education that continues to treat learning as a collection of isolated and linear events. Making sense of the continual dynamics emerging from the Internet of Everything will require thinking more holistically than most people now do. Transitioning from the now to the expected should have started yesterday.

An attic for everyone

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Data and information are swamping us.  So what – that’s old news, you say. But if you’re on the data service providing end at a college or university, you are only too aware of the insatiable storage demands of your clientele. The cause is simple – the handy, obvious physical restraints of the past are gone. Remember file cabinets stuffed from front to back and books piled on the floor when the shelves were filled? With the exception of true hoarders, we determined what to keep and what to discard on a rolling basis over time.

The digital world entices us with freedom from physical constraints. Much like Groundhog Day, our digital lives unfold in an endless pattern of create, acquire and save that occurs without deterrents. The cost of choosing what to keep and what to trash is much too high – it requires what is now most rare – our focused attention. So we never actually delete.  We might curate, but that only brings some things into focus; the others remain waiting in the background. Editing happens with revision histories, not wadded papers discarded in the bin. Emails marked as read continue scrolling downward into a deepening well of messages. Meanwhile your local data center struggles to satisfy the insatiable demand for storage.

Amazon announced Glacier today offering 1 GB for 1 penny per month. Lease as much as you need for a very low price. The catch – it is named appropriately. It is archive storage. If you want to retrieve something, plan on it taking hours rather than minutes.  But this seems to be a reasonable decision point that all of us could make as we confront our data – put it into the attic or leave it out in the room.

MTV Algebra and Lifetime History

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In the eighties, publishers and media companies talked incessantly about synergy among their various products. Disney was (and remains) a master – movies begat toys and amusement rides while amusement rides begat movies, costumes, more toys and books.  Creating content was expensive and profits were much better when that content could be re-purposed in as many ways for as many potential audiences as possible. But throughout that period and until lately, such efforts focused on the trade and consumer markets. Now the New York Times alerts us to developments in the latest hot market for media companies – the K-12 classroom.

The textbook is becoming the Techbook according to the Discovery Channel.  Yes, the cable regular (and News Corp) is moving beyond streaming video to creating a variety of highly interactive texts designed to engage students and expand market share. Reporters Brooks Barnes and Amy Chozick tell us that given the declining revenues of media companies, “Education is emerging as an answer, largely because executives see a way to capitalize on the changes that technology is bringing to classrooms — turnabout as fair play, given the way that the Web has upended major media’s own business models.”

Every year at this time, many college and university campuses come to life after a fairly dormant summer. Hundreds, and in some places thousands, of new first years or frosh begin their journey toward a baccalaureate degree. Increasingly those students will arrive having experienced years of a digitally-enhanced (or at least infused) educational experience that will no longer be evident once they matriculate to higher learning. The disconnect between cable channel versions of a high school textbook and one that has been authored by a faculty member for a university seminar is going to loom very large indeed.