Author: JP

I now have a name for the boy in the photograph. A location. A date. And a small piece of evidence that may help me find out who has the rights to the photograph, so that I can acquire a large print, or even the rights to the photograph itself. Amazing what the blogosphere and the web can do. More when I know more.
Who knows, maybe in a few years’ time, or maybe sooner, I will be able to move my cursor over any photograph to find out who has the rights to it and how to contact that person or persons; maybe even the price, or a Creative Commons watermark. Wouldn’t that be nice?

There’s a very interesting article in the latest issue of ACM Interactions, titled Digital Libraries for the Developing World. I think it’s a must-read for people interested in education, in opensource or in the developing world. [While I am a member of the ACM, my access to this article was on a public-domain basis using Google, so I believe I’ve done the right thing in linking to it.]
Written by  Ian H. Witten of the University of Waikato, New Zealand, it makes a number of very important points :

• The failure of “traditional” publishing and distribution mechanisms in the developing world, in the context of making useful, often critical, public domain information easily accessible
• The sheer waste this represents
• Why decoupling publishing and distribution costs from intellectual property charges is an imperative as a result
• The sheer complexity of dealing with obsolescent software, obsolete hardware, sparse network and internet connectivity and multiple languages
• The problems of having to design for fixed and removable media
• The problems of having to design for online and offline
• The problems of inadequate power
• The issues that come up in training and maintenance
• Why opensource software becomes an imperative as a result
  

Ian, I am told, is Director of the  New Zealand Digital Library Project, which brought us Greenstone. If you haven’t seen what they do, it’s worth a look.

The issues raised by this article are stark, given the backdrop they are painted against. In the developed world, it is sometimes difficult to see all this with the correct perspective. We get hung up over the commercials related to “the internet” and digital rights and intellectual property. The context provided by Ian is a good and pragmatic explanation of why the internet needs to be saved, why paths shouldn’t be polluted, why we have to get DRM and IPR right, why opensource platforms are critical.

The so-called “commercial” world can learn from all this as well. Necessity and Mother and Invention all in the same sentence. Instead of Not and Invented and Here.

Thank you Ian. Thank you ACM.

Thank you everyone for your comments on my previous post on this subject. I’m working through them and learning from them.

In the meantime, I’d like to extend the conversation on just one theme within the comments:

Motivation.

I think it’s at the heart of the nature-versus-nurture debate.

Imagine going into Google and trying to find something. Imagine being told that you’ve failed because the first item returned was not the item you were looking for (or “meant” to be looking for, under orders of “management”).

Well, that’s what we do. We expect people to get things right first time, or “our way”. We have a blame culture so deeply ingrained in us that we behave that way without necessarily being aware of our actions and their consequences.

Back to Google. And in a roundabout way, back to group selection and evolution. Eric Beinhocker, in The Origin of Wealth, speaks of a “simple, but profoundly powerful, three-step formula — differentiate, select, and amplify — the formula of evolution”.

So that’s what we do when we use something like Google. When we put the search term in and peruse the results, we are in the differentiation stage. Then, when we find what we want, we are at the selection stage. Finally, as we dig deep into the selected result, trace other references, follow other links, we are at the amplification stage. We make the information evolve.

Or you could call it learning.

First you experiment. Little by little, failure by failure. You learn from those failures. Adapting as you go. Until something works, at which point you “scale it out”.

But that’s not what happens in real life. We make a big deal out of the lives of people like Einstein and Edison and Churchill and Lincoln and Franklin, hoping that our children pick something up as a result. Or maybe we use Gates and Jobs as the role models.  These role-models’ lives were littered with little mistakes, little failures, a need to pick themselves up, learn and grow.

But we then surround our kids with Blame Cultures. And Nannification. And Because-I-Say-So.
Every time I hear someone say “Fear and greed” I shudder, because all I see is a manifestation of Stick and Carrot. And we call ourselves civilised and evolved.

Fear and greed are not ways to motivate people. Especially children, but true for all people.

I don’t want to over-generalise, I know there are many exceptions. But that’s what they are, exceptions.

If the fear-and-greed blame culture was not bad enough, consider what else we do:

Nannification.

Now, rather than induce a blame culture, we prevent any mistakes being made. We made the mistakes, so we won’t let you. Wow. We are civilised and evolved, aren’t we?

Life is about about love and about learning. Both these carry risk, both these require vulnerability. We need to teach the connection between an action and its consequences, and the need to take individual responsibility for those actions, not prevent the actions. Instead, the way we’re going, we are well on the way to passing laws that ban driving within five miles of home (since most car accidents take place within that radius) or, even worse, ban spending time with your family and friends (since  most murders are committed by those people). Utter tosh.

And if blame-cultures and nannification weren’t bad enough, what else do we do?

Because-I-Say-So. So let’s get this right. We want our children to be educated, to discover their potential, to learn, to develop and extend that potential. And we send them to school so that they learn all this.
And what do they see at home or at work? Why must I do this? Because I say so. Why does this work this way? Because that’s the way it is. Because.

Children aren’t stupid. Grown-ups aren’t stupid either. We all learn. Part of that learning is to pick up signals from the environment we’re in. And the environment says “Don’t do anything. Don’t make a mistake. Don’t ask any questions. Don’t take any risks. In fact we won’t let you take risks”. Loud and clear, aye-aye sir, ten-four, roger, wilco and out.
Those are the motivational signals we send them. And then we wonder why motivating them is so hard.

Motivation is key. Sure, some element of motivation is innate, some element of emotional intelligence and the ability to plan for and acquire delayed gratification is also innate, some understanding of altruism and group dynamics is also innate.

But I think all this is a lot less innate than people assume it is. Our assumptions are just copouts.

In a book called How Children Fail, written in 1964, John Holt says, when talking about effective schools:

The researchers then examined these schools to find what qualities they had in common. Of the five they found, two struck me as crucial: (1) if the students did not learn, the schools did not blame them, or their families, backgrounds, neighbourhoods, attutudes, nervous systems, or whatever. They did not alibi. They took full responsibility for the results or nonresults of their work. (2) When something they were doing in the class did not work, they stopped doing it, and tried to do something else. They flunked unsuccessful methods, not the children.

Wonderful stuff.

They flunked unsuccessful methods, not the children.

For teachers read managers or leaders. For children read staff or team.

Flunk the method, not the person.

So that’s what I think about motivation. Yes there is something innate, but even a Tiger Woods needed the guidance and support and encouragement of his parents to become Tiger Woods.

Teach people to believe in themselves. Build them up, not cut them down. Encourage them. Help them discover their potential. Help them reach their potential.

Of course, besides the “innate” argument there are some other real-world constraints. There are some things for which you need certain physical attributes, like height and strength, and not all physical attributes can be acquired or trained for legally. There are some things where the local environment doesn’t have the facilities, and we need breakthroughs there. I believe that this often happens with role models; that there wasn’t much interest in Germans and pro golf until Langer, and not much in pro tennis in Sweden till Borg. So physical attributes and local facilities and role models, if absent, can hamper the nurture process.

But that’s what it is, a hampering of the nurture process. Not something we can cheaply and lazily put down to “nature”,.

Some of you may be offended by the strength of this post, some by the motherhood-and-apple-pie, some by the sickly-sweet-ness. My apologies, this is something I feel really passionate about, and it is not my intention to offend or upset.

In a recent post titled On Control, I wrote about what happened to LIFE Magazine in 1972; in it I referred to a number of quotes from something called Dirck Halstead’s Platypus Papers.

As an aside, I asked if anyone knew where I could find my favourite LIFE photograph, one that has eluded me for three decades. And amazingly, based on my description alone, (search engines eat your heart out!) one of you managed to find the precise one. Thank you again, Zigzackly.

Here’s a thumbnail of the image; full attribution to Gerald Waller (though I remember the original credit as Wahler not Waller) and to Life Magazine and to the Red Cross and anyone else who’s entered the fray in those three decades, image posted by me on a fair-use basis. In fact I”ll go further. Whoever owns the rights to that photograph, if you see this then please contact me so that I can buy it off you and make the photograph available to the world.

The thumbnail really doesn’t do it justice. So please follow this thread, as suggested by Zigzackly, to see the full-scale image for yourself. Then you will understand why I love the photograph.

I followed that thread immediately, found the larger image, and felt great. Reunited. Then today I decided to rummage further, see whether I can find ways to order a large print. And was bemused to find that the site I went to was moderated by …. the very same Dirck Halstead I borrowed quotes from.

So I tried to find out more about Dirck Halstead, and have some reason to believe he lives in …. Austin, Texas.

Which is where I was when I wrote the post. I’ve contacted Dirck by e-mail just in case he can help.

Regular readers will know that I have a thing about education, and that my dream is to build a school from scratch as and when I have no role to play in traditional enterprise. A school that makes use of social software and Moore and Metcalfe and Gilder; that knows how to create value from “globalisation and disintermediation and the internet” (as Ken Ohmae said a few decades ago in The Borderless World); that works like an efficient charity, with 95% of the income being used for the purpose it was designed for (to teach and to learn) rather than “administration and management”.

I have been extremely impressed with what I have heard and seen about ARK, a meta-charity that treats all the funds it generates as investments with a measured social return and low administrative costs; I believe that something similar can be done in education. A model where we treat school funds as investments with a clearly defined social return (you can call it educational return if you wish) and have a clear basis for keeping administrative costs appreciably low. But I digress.

One of the reasons I have such a passion for education (I have many reasons, but this time I am concentrating on just one) is an out-and-out belief in nurture being more important than nature. I am not a fan of The Bell Curve or related works and ideas.

You can imagine my delight when I chanced across this article in the August issue of Scientific American. [And thank you, Scientific American, for not hiding it behind a DRM wall. And thank you for bothering to ask me, via a simple survey, whether I was a subscriber or not when I looked at it, and if so what I subscribed to. Do share your results when you have them, if only to prove that subscriber recommendations are an incredible marketing process, particularly when unhampered by DRM walls].

The article, headlined The Expert Mind and subtitled Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well, is well worth a read. It goes through why chess could be “the Drosophila of cognitive science” in terms of measurement, synthesis, scope for laboratory experimentation and repeatibility, ease of observation in natural environment, many things. I’m personally also very keen on the fact that it is cognitive and as language- and culture-independent as possible; there’s a lot of good stuff in it that relate to apperception and Gladwellian Blink, on stored-and-recallable knowledge rather than pure analytical power, even on memory and chunking theory.

There’s also some solid backing to the Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration argument, to the importance of perseverance, to the importance of an early and strong motivation.

But what did it for me was the coda to the article. I quote:

Instead of perpetually pondering the question “Why can’t Johnny read?” perhaps educators should ask “Why should there be anything in the world he can’t learn to do”.

For educator read manager or mentor or whoever. This is not just about schools. But it is about education.

Nurture.