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Return to Archives Spring-Summer 2009, Vol. 8, Issue 1
The Digital Optimist
By George Lorenzo
The past
three months have been challenging.
Two important anchor clients changed plans, leaving me with near
“empty pockets.” A horrible and
sad tragedy occurred very close to where we live, and a number of things
went awry on a personal level. Consequently we renewed our gratefulness
to be alive and healthy. Life is good with all its twists and turns.
It’s just that the twists and turns have been going in the wrong
direction lately. The only thing you can do is continue plugging along,
trying to change the course of things to come. Reading and watching the
news tells me I am obviously not alone.
On Finding Work
There’s
plenty of advice and editorializing these days about what you can do
when you’re your work-for-pay diminishes.
One piece of advice I found very interesting came from Peter
Bergman’s “How We Work” blog on February 6, titled
“Need to Find a Job? Stop Looking So Hard.”
Bergman posits that “you’ll be
out of a job for a while,” no matter how hard you apply yourself to
reworking and sending off your resume. The same theory applies to
companies like me who have seen a drop in work.
So, what
should you do? The answer is
“stop trying so hard.” After your resume is completed, don’t spend too
much more time on it because your resume is not going to get you a job.
After you completed all of your company’s marketing materials, don’t
keep trying to reinvent them thinking that it will get you more
business. Instead, notes Bergman,
“spend all of your time with people at lunch, on the phone, going for
walks. Finding a new job or new clients is all about human
relationships.”
Taking
Bergman’s advice, I concluded that one way to build more and better
human relationships was to make everything I write open and free to the
public, instead of trying to sell subscriptions and PDF documents.
So, I revamped this once
paid-subscription-based newsletter, making it free, and I re-launched
the Guide to Online MBA Programs website, publishing a free, 20-chapter
eBook that I used to sell online as a PDF download. There’s now an
abundance of information easily accessible and free to anyone who visits
the new EdPath.com website, including a special section about the
writing, editing, research and publishing services I offer through the
parent company for all this, Lorenzo Associates, Inc. This took a lot of
trial and error web designing, and, after much grinding of teeth and
head scratching, the new EdPath.com website looks darn good.
To
further build relationships, I started to call and e-email all my
friends and colleagues in the field of higher education, letting them
know about the new website and explaining how I am also searching for
any writing, editing, research and publishing assignments if they happen
to know of anybody who might need such services. I also started a blog
about online MBA programs, am looking into starting a social network
about this same topic, and I started using LinkedIn more effectively for
making more connections with people in the field of higher education.
The results thus far have been
extremely positive.
On Being Cynical
Next I
had to figure out what to write about for this current issue of EdPath.
I have been woefully lacking in the writing department lately.
As an
education writer, I have interviewed well over 1,000 educators over the
past nine years. We have talked about online learning and teaching [on
numerous levels], electronic portfolios, information literacy, the
globalization of higher education, how software works [or does not
work], education governance issues, and, of course, the weather [a
result of living in Buffalo, NY].
Many of
the issues we talked about as far back as 2001 are still on the drawing
boards, with educators having the same conversations over and over and
over again. Results are often non-existent, dollars are wasted, and
there are always too many people voicing highly disparate opinions that
ultimately stall progress. Sorry, working in higher education does have
its cynical side, just like working in the corporate sector.
Revisiting Curtis Bonk
Then, of
course, there is a lot of progress and innovation going on that helps to
erase the cynicism. Take, for
instance, the work of Curtis Bonk. I
wrote about the unpretentious and fun-loving Curt in the
June 2006 issue of
EdPath after listening to his keynote address at the State
University of New York 2006 Conference on Instructional Technologies.
His presentation was titled “OOPS, Did You Mean to Share
That? Open Source, Open CourseWare, and the Learning Objects of Tomorrow.”
He had mentioned to me at lunch that his presentation was the beginning
of a book. Three years later, and here it is: “The World is Open: How
Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education,” published by Jossey-Bass
and scheduled for release in July 2009.
Curt has
dramatically expanded upon his popular keynote, offering a rich
explication of 10 “WE-ALL-LEARN” trends/openers that are driving today’s
freely accessible education learning tools, resources and methods. In a
similar fashion to Thomas Friedman’s World is Flat motif, Curt describes
10
“converging
educational openers” that comprise “a seismic wave of educational possibilities.”
You can
pre-order “The World is Open” through all the major online booksellers.
Curt kindly supplied me with a
preview copy. There’s also a website located at
http://worldisopen.com/.
I could easily write many pages about Curt’s work, as it
hits upon all of the latest and most interesting developments in our new
world of education. I’ll try not to be too wordy.
A Global Perspective on eLearning
As
someone who writes frequently about online learning, I was particularly
interested in his #2 educational opener about fully online and blended
learning environments, titled “E-Demand Around the Globe.”
Here Curt covered the status of online and blended education in
K-12, in for-profit and nonprofit higher education, and internationally.
“We are still in the midst of the first wave of online teaching and
learning,” Curt writes. “Some are in a state of transition to a second
wave.”
In this
chapter and every other chapter, Curt gives the reader a thorough view
with precise and exceptional examples, quotes from innovators in the
field, research results from both academic papers and the popular press,
along with notes and conversations form his prodigious number of
personal experiences that are a direct result of his travels around the
world giving presentations as well as attending them.
It’s a nice mix that maintained
my interest.
He shows
an uncanny ability to document a seemingly endless number of instances
and landscapes where the open education doers of the world are
contributing to our global learning curve.
From the student blogging about
her archeology dig project to the many innovators involved with building
and sharing open libraries, open courses and open software, there are
plenty of engaging stories about people in action on the “Web of
Learning,” creating new pathways to knowledge for all of us.
In short, readers get exposed to
a great number of education sources that they may have never knew about.
The next
thing that struck me about Curt’s book was his frequent sprinkling of
simple, yet meaningful, messages: “The invitation to learn exists at a random
mouse click;” “anyone can learn anything from anyone at anytime;”
the trend toward sharing
educational resources is “fueling change in education and opening new
doors to optimism and human potential.” Treasures and Traps
For another point of view, the last chapter grabbed my attention. Titled
“The Treasures and Traps of this Open Learning World,” Curt outlined
some of the serious issues and challenges we as a human race are dealing
with on our Web-based planet.
For example, the Open
Learning World is creating a global citizenry of Internet access haves
and have- nots, and thus putting the onus on us to figure out what we
are going to do about it before we become a planet with a unhealthy gap
between the educated and uneducated. In addition, there’s a growing
amount of online plagiarism happening at colleges and universities. Low
quality and amateurish content is pervasive online. Privacy and
copyright issues are a long way from being resolved. Plus, we are,
perhaps, becoming overly reliant on the Web for everything, making us
“lazy learners.” Classified online information is more easily getting
into the hands of the wrong people. There’s
a growing need to help teachers learn how to use educational
technologies and the Internet for sound instructional purposes. The same
holds true for students – teaching them digital and information literacy
skills continues to be a challenge that does not look to be resolved
easily or quickly. Bascially, all is not well in the world. It never is.
On Being Optimistic
Despite such undertows, we can and should be optimistic.
Sharing and interacting globally
has become the norm; support
is instantaneous;, friendship networks are there when you need them; Web
2.0 and other emerging technologies are further customizing learning to
the individual; and
a great deal more, as defined in
Curt’s book, continues to take us through new and exciting open teaching
and learning vistas. In short,
and with another meaningful phrase – I’ll call them Curtisms - “these
are highly novel and interesting educational times.”
Read about these times, and more,
in Curt’s book. You will not be disappointed. More Stops Along the Optimistic Trail
Which takes me to another notable stop along the Educational Pathways
trail - the always interesting annual
Horizon Report. Every educator should read this year’s
report, and past years, if only to keep abreast of some of the more
interesting modern education technologies currently at our doorsteps.
The
report is published through the collaborative efforts of the New Media
Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). Below is a
quick and short synopsis of what NMC and ELI claim [with a few of my own
comments] are the latest and greatest teaching, learning, research, and
creative expression technologies [including
time-to-adoption/likelihood of
entering the mainstream prognostications]. Incidentally, as a very
beneficial add-on, there are numerous links throughout the report to
examples, on many levels, relevant to each technology:
Mobiles (time to adoption is one year or less):
Our handhelds have become mini laptops with enough capacity to
access the Internet at increasing speed and run more applications than
ever before imagined, resulting in an increased use of mobiles in
educational settings. For example, Seton Hall University has an
SHUmobile initiative that is engaging people to contribute
to “the evolution of mobile technologies and to the advancement of
teaching, learning and campus life at Seton Hall University.”
An
at&t/iPhone3G advertisement on the back page of today’s [May 10] New
York Times Magazine kind of says it all. It promotes this mobile
device’s 25,000 applications that its users have downloaded more than
800 million times “in every category from games to business.”
Unfortunately, the plans and actual phone costs are a bit pricey for me.
The same goes for the Kindle
reading device, which is another mobile gadget I’d love to have but
simply can’t afford. I can only
assume and hope that these things will come down in price in the
not-too-distant future.
Cloud Computing (time to adoption is one year
or less):
Without going into a great deal of explanation, cloud computing
is the virtualization of
applications that are run effectively and efficiently on a cluster of
computers/servers and made available to either a specific group or to
anyone and everyone online. Gmail, YouTube, Flickr,
Blogger, Facebook, etc. are all examples of cloud computing. For
one example of an educational purpose, see the case in point of how
YouTube was used in a
media culture course at
Pitzer College.
I was
surprised to see that
“The Big Switch,” by Nicholas Carr was not mentioned in the
Horizon Report’s further
reading list about cloud computing. Carr’s
book is a great primer for anyone who wants to get a firm understanding
of the past, present and future of cloud computing. Geo-Everything (time to adoption is two to
three years):
It has become easy to capture the location coordinates of objects,
events, and people. Today’s
mobile devises and web-based services can capture and display this
so-called “geo-locative” data, resulting in new online services and
projects such as Global
Positioning System (GPS)
child locator handheld devices, and the
Degree Confluence Project, which is attempting to post pictures
of
all the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the
world. The pictures, along
with a narrative describing the adventures it took to get to the
intersections, are posted on this web site, thus creating an organized
sampling of the world.
For more
detailed information about so-called “Geo-Everything,” see Peter
Morville’s book,
“Ambient Findabilty,” published by O’Reilly (2005). The Personal Web (time to adoption is two to
three years):
The bottom line is that we can easily modify what we do online to be
more consistent with our personal needs and wants.
We can create personal blogs and social networking sites; we can
microblog; we can organize and share our web links; we can self-publish
eBooks, and much more.
For instance, it is noted in the Horizon Report that
“instead
of purchasing textbooks, students in Advanced Library Research courses
at Buffalo State College are required to buy a USB flash storage drive.
They install the Firefox web browser and a set of portable applications
on the drive, which becomes their research tool. The
course website provides basic information about using social
bookmarking tools and portable applications.”
To state
the obvious and to be lazily succinct here, the Personal Web as it
relates to education certainly has unlimited and
too-numerous-to-calculate possibilities that are truly innovative and
exciting.
Semantic-Aware Applications (time to adoption
is four to five years):
The notion of a semantic web has
been around since Tim
Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989. A
2001 article in Scientific American that was co-authored by
Berners-Lee envisions a Semantic Web that is “an extension of the
current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better
enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.”
The
Horizon Report goes on to say that the Semantic Web
eventually might be able to “help people solve very difficult
problems by presenting connections between apparently unrelated
concepts, individuals, events, or things — connections that it would
take many people many years to perceive, but that could become obvious
through the kinds of associations made possible by semantic-aware
applications.” The Report then provides a good number of solid examples
that fit this billing.
For a
very recent example of Semantic-Aware applications, see the
Wolfram|Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine – slated to go live by
end of May 2009. This semantic-aware application has been getting a lot
of press. It was toted, according to a
recent article in the Technology Review, as a competitor to the
Almighty Google. The
New York Times called it “a powerful new service that can answer a
broad range of queries,” adding that it “has become one of the most
anticipated Web products of the year.”
The Chronicle also posted an article about this service, quoting the
creator of the project, physicist Stephen Wolfram, as saying that his
primary goal is “to make expert-level knowledge accessible to anyone
anywhere, anytime.” Smart Objects : (time to adoption is four to
five years):
Another term for this is
“identification technology.” Smart
objects have unique identifiers that connect the physical world with the
information world. Barcode systems utilized by retailers are a good
example. The next level above relatively simply barcode technology is
called
radio-frequency identification (RFID)
, which enhances our ability to track physical objects. RFID systems are
currently being used by major retailers, such as Wal-Mart. Some of the
primary utilities of such systems are to –
as
Peter Morville explains in his book
Ambient Findability
–
“streamline logistics, reduce
costs, stop theft, and improve demand forecasting accuracy.”
Currently
smart object technology has not reached the education sector to any
significant degree. The Horizon Report does, however, identify a number
of promising projects in this realm, such as the Illinois Institute of
Technology’s
“Tinkering Space” project, a University of Arkansas
simulated hospital environment project that is using RFID
technology, and a
Purdue University Nanotechnology Center project that deals with
needle-sized wireless devices that can be injected into tumors to tell
doctors the precise dose of radiation received and to
locate the exact position of tumors during treatment. On Being Pessimistic [or the Negative Side
Effects of Our Overly Digitized World]
I landed on a March 2009 Sun Magazine Q & A piece –
“Computing The Cost:
Nicholas Carr On How The Internet is Rewiring our Brains,” by Arnie Cooper. As the title suggests, Cooper
asked Carr a lot of relevant and interesting questions about Internet
usage and its side effects.
The short synopsis view of this Q & A is that we are becoming
“pancake people,” which is a phrase taken from Richard Foreman’s
play “The Gods Are Pounding My
Head.” In essence, Foreman
says we are becoming less complex and meaningful human beings due to our
over-reliance on the instant-information-overload conduit commonly known
as the World Wide Web. Like a pancake, our brains are “spread wide and
thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the
mere touch of the button.”
Carr concurs, saying that we have “no intellectual depth, because
there’s little need to contain information within our heads when it’s so
easy to find with a mouse click or two.”
Based on my personal experience, I have to concur with Foreman and Carr.
I am constantly online conducting research for a good number of writing
projects . I have an enormous amount of information flowing into my
brain at rapid-fire rates pretty much on a daily basis off the web and
via e-mail. A few days later, it’s not unusual for me to forget what I
discovered online. As Carr
explains, the end result of living in this kind of online environment
day after day is that we
simply collect and view too
much information and do not practice enough thoughtfulness.
“I certainly want information,
but information isn’t an end unto itself. Human intelligence is the
ability to make sense of that information,” Carr says.
This notion of too much work conducted online as being harmful to our
intellectual well being is nothing new for Carr. In an article titled
“Is Google Making Us Stupid,” [published in the July/August 2008 issue
of the Atlantic], he explained how he felt that the great deal of time
he has spent online, for more than a decade now, has
contributed to the remapping of
the neural circuitry in his brain. “I’m not thinking the way I used to
think,” he writes. “I feel it most strongly when I am reading.” Instead
of easily immersing himself in a book or lengthy article, Carr claims he
can no longer spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose
because his concentration starts to drift after a few pages. “The deep
reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” What Now?
Both the Sun Magazine and Atlantic articles are excellent pieces of
journalism that can help you revaluate how the Internet might have
unhealthy consequences – which brings me back to the mention of Peter
Bergman at the beginning of this piece.
Bergman suggests we spend only one to two hours a day looking for a job
or trying ardently to get more clients via our computer workstations,
and spend the rest of our time building human relationships. Include
other people in some of the things you would normally do alone. For
example, he says, “join a garden club or a reading or meditation group.
Write something that other people need,” such as a blog. Do some pro
bono work. Join an exercise group. Try to join some non-profit boards
and provide your services to them.
All these kinds of human-relationship-building activities offer a
better chance for getting a job or a new client.
“Nobody wants to hire someone [or a company] who needs to be
hired to survive. Depressed is not attractive. People want to hire
engaged people who are passionate and excited about what they’re doing.
Jobs come from being engaged in the world and building human
connections.”
So, at the end of this “Digital Optimist” column I ask myself, what now?
It’s sunny and warm outside, so the answer is “go for a walk.” There I
will contemplate what my next steps will be. There’s a small book store
along the way where I helped to form a writer’s group that would meet
every two weeks to discuss each other’s works in progress. We disbanded
some time ago. Perhaps it is time to revive the group, or start a
totally new one.
Return to Archives Copyright. All rights reserved. Lorenzo Associates, Inc., P.O. Box 74, Clarence Center, NY 14032. |
