Author: JP

musing about education and learning useful things

This is one more of those vulnerable posts, where I share something close to my heart. There is every risk that some of you will disagree violently, flame me, stop reading my blog. There is every risk that some of you will think less of me because of the things I say. I think of this blog as a community, a place where I know many of the regular readers personally, a place where I can share things like this without fear. For those of you I know less well, and for those of you I do not know, please bear with me.

I loved school. I loved the thought of going to school, of spending time there, being with friends there, working, playing. I loved everything about school. Being at school was something I really looked forward to. It was a wonderful time, and I was privileged enough to be able to spend nearly 15 years in one Jesuit institution, from primary school through to university: St Xavier’s Collegiate School, Calcutta.

It was one of those places that truly deserved being called an institution. There was something about it that was destined to transcend time; it was a living piece of history by the time I got there, at which point it was barely a hundred years old. A wonderful location, a wonderful set of building and grounds, and wonderful staff. We were privileged to have some really great teachers. [It was with some sadness that I learnt of the death of Thomas “Tommy” Vianna a few weeks ago, he was one of those greats. [Tommy Vianna, Requiescat In Pace].

During my time there, as with many others, I had some purple patches, there were times when I was first in class, times when I played well for class and school teams, times when I excelled at something or the other. Of course I remember them well. But there were many times where I did not excel, sometimes because I hadn’t worked at all; sometimes despite my working really hard; and sometimes because I just wasn’t drawn or attracted to whatever it was I was being asked to do.

I remember talking to my maths teacher when I was about fifteen, a time when my sole interest was to become a maths professor, aspiring to do all the things that someone in high school in the early seventies would want to do: grow a beard and long hair; walk around in jeans and t-shirts reading books like Godel, Escher, Bach (which hadn’t actually been published then); learn to play guitar; do something meaningful in the theory of numbers in the footsteps of Ramanujan; and of course solve Fermat’s Last Theorem. Not just solve it, but solve it elegantly, elegantly enough to fit into the margins of a book on Diophantine equations. Maybe smoke a pipe. Have some pastis. Lovingly restore a 16th century book.That sort of thing.

My “hippie maths professor” reverie was rudely interrupted by said maths teacher, who pointed out where he was living, what he was earning, how hard things were. He was adamant that I should go nowhere near teaching; instead, I was to spend time making money; money that I could then plough back into education at a later stage.

And I guess I listened to him. Which is why, when I retire, I will build a school. For sure. It’s something I think about every day. There is something about the sheer inclusiveness that a good education brings; I detest the thinking behind The Bell Curve, I believe with all my heart that everyone has potential; of course social, economic and environmental factors affect every individual’s ability to develop and reach and extend that potential, but not in the way bell-curvers think.

That belief in the power of education is the reason why I got involved in School Of Everything; there is something very fulfilling about the premise behind SoE; I’m also very excited about the possibility that we can create a mechanism to unlock trapped potential amongst people who are otherwise unable to participate, usually because of generation or gender.

That belief in the power of education is the reason why I joined BT; I have this deep-seated belief that ubiquitous, affordable connectivity is an absolute must-have as we strive to improve health, education and welfare worldwide, as we strive to make the world a better place, as we strive to become better stewards of what we have. As we strive to change ourselves.

So I spend a lot of time thinking about education, about what it really means. Not dictionary definitions, not semantic arguments. What does “education” mean to me?

It’s not about “committing to memory and vomiting to paper”.

It’s not about learning to sit tests. It’s not even about learning to pass tests.

These things are useful, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient for us to be able to be anything, do anything.

So what is it about?

I think it’s about these things:

  • learning how to learn, which involves a lot of watching and listening
  • learning how to love, which involves even more watching and listening
  • learning how to lose, which involves quite a lot of watching and listening
  • learning how to be with yourself, which also involves a lot of watching and listening
  • learning how to be with other people, which also involves ….watching and listening
  • learning how to solve problems, which also involves ….. watching and listening
  • remembering what you’ve seen and heard, and being able to assimilate it
  • learning how to express yourself in word and deed, how to take the things you’ve learnt and do something with them

The more specialised the things you watch and listen to, the more you’re acquiring a particular skill. Sometimes there’s more watching, sometimes there’s more listening. Whenever I had to concentrate to see or hear or express something, I really felt for people who couldn’t, people who didn’t have the full use of their sensory equipment, people who didn’t find it easy to deal with their feelings. I’ve always had a sneaking admiration for people who are autistic, more specifically people with Asperger’s, because there’s a part of me that feels I belong there.

Just musing. What does “education” mean to you?

Incidentally, this post was triggered by my reading today’s Randall Munroe special:

At the back of my mind was all the recent kerfuffle caused by the publication of Don Tapscott’s recent book, a subject I shall revert to later.

Incidentally, if any of you prefer to take the discussion offline, DM me via http://twitter.com/jobsworth

Going with the flow

I nearly did myself an injury when I saw this:

Randall Munroe is a truly gifted individual. We need to knight him. Or something.

So make a New Year’s resolution you’ll actually keep to. Read xkcd every day. You won’t regret it.

My thanks to Dawn Foster for tweeting it to my attention. [By the way, Dawn, I’m still jealous. Still haven’t met anyone else whose blog is an anagram of their name!]

Freewheeling about excavating information and stuff like that

Do you remember enterprise application integration? Those were the days.  First you paid to bury your information in someone’s proprietary silo, then you paid to excavate it from there, then you paid again to bury it again in someone else’s silo. Everybody was happy. Except for the guys paying the bills.

I went to see the guys in Osmosoft yesterday, it’s always a pleasure visiting them. At BT Design, our approach to innovation has a significant community focus: Web21C, now integrated into Ribbit, was formed on that basis; both Osmosoft as well as Ribbit  are excellent examples of what can be done with open multisided platforms.

While I was there, I spent some time with Jeremy Ruston who founded the firm and leads the team. Incidentally, it was good to see Blaine Cook there, I hadn’t seen him since he joined BT. Welcome to the team, Blaine.

When it comes to opensource, Jeremy’s one of the finest brains I know, we’re really privileged to have him. We got to talking, and somehow or the other, one of the topics that came up was the ways and means we have to figure out if someone’s any good, in the context of hiring. After all, there is no strategy in the world that can beat the one that begins “First hire good people”.

When you’re hiring people with experience, the best information used to come from people you knew who’d already worked with her or him. Nothing beats a good recommendation from a trusted domain. You can do all the interviews you want, run all the tests you can find, do all the background searching you feel like; over time, the trusted domain recommendation trumps the rest.

Now obviously this does not work when the person has not worked before, where there is no possibility of a trusted domain recommendation. Which is why people still use tests and interviews and background checks.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Jeremy brought up an issue that he’d spoken to me about quite some time ago, something I’m quite keen on: the use of subversion commit logs as a way of figuring out how good someone is.

And that got me thinking. Here we are, in a world where people are being told: Don’t be silly and record what you do in Facebook; don’t tell people everything you do via Twitter; don’t this; don’t that; after all, the bogeyman will come and get you, all these “facts” about your life will come back to haunt you.

As a counterpoint to this, we have the opensource community approach. Do tell everyone precisely what you are doing, record it in logs that everyone can see. Make sure that the logs are available in perpetuity. After all, how else will people find out how good you are?

Transparency can and should be a good thing. Abundant transparency can and should be a better thing, rather than scarce transparency. Right now we have a lot of scarce transparency; people can find out things about you, but only some people. Which would be fine, if you could choose who the people were. Do you have any idea who can access your credit rating? Your academic records? Do you have any idea who decided that?

Scarce information of this sort leads to secrets and lies and keeps whole industries occupied. Maybe we need to understand more about how the opensource community works. Which, incidentally, is one of the reasons why BT chose to champion Osmosoft.

An aside: David Cushman, whom I’d known electronically for a while, tweeted the likelihood of his being near the new Osmosoft offices around the time of my visit, so it made sense to connect up with him as well. It was good to meet him, and it reminded me of something I tweeted a few days ago. How things change. In the old days relationships began face to face and over time moved into remote and virtual and electronic. Nowadays that process has been reversed. Quite often, you’ve known someone electronically for a while, then you get to meet them. Intriguing.

Finally, my thanks to gapingvoid for the illustration, which I vaguely remembered as “Excavation 47”. It was a strange title so it stuck. Which reminds me, I have to start saving up to buy one of his lithographs, they’re must-haves.

Hallelujah chorus: time to lay down a generation challenge?

I can’t help smiling at the news that there are likely to be three separate versions of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah in the charts shortly, including two in the top three:

  • The Alexandra Burke version, the X Factor winner’s single (likely to be No 1)
  • The Jeff Buckley version, the one that people my age think is the best version (likely to be No 3)
  • The original Leonard Cohen version, which I still stay loyal to (likely to be No 30 or so)

Three versions of the same song in the charts, twenty-four years after the original was released. Who’da thunk it?

Why was I smiling? Because an imp of mischief got to me. I began to wonder. Shall we use the web to make the Jeff Buckley version number 1? Against all odds? Wouldn’t it be a fitting posthumous tribute to a master musician? Wouldn’t it be more of a good thing for the songwriter? And wouldn’t it be a fun thing to try?

So. Are we up for it? Can we make the Jeff Buckley version number 1?

Incidentally, there have only been two instances where number 1 and number 2 were by the same artists (the Beatles in 1964 and Usher in 2004). There has never been an instance where No 1 and No 2 are the same song, by two different people. We have the chance to help make history while having some fun across different generations: I cannot imagine anyone buying both versions next week….

Dancing to Leonard Cohen and related pursuits

There are many ludicrous things about DRM: the belief that the internet was designed to be a distribution mechanism for film and music and nothing else; the belief that it is okay to treat everyone as a criminal; the willingness to chisel artists through patently unfair contracts, while making out that those self-same artists are victims of the general public, the “criminals”; the belief that the creation of artificial scarcities will not be met by artificial abundances. But that’s not what this post is about.

One of the most ludicrous things about DRM, however, is the benighted attempt to sustain a historical distribution model by time-separating geographies. In the past, both for films as well as for music, it was defensible while remaining unpalatable.

Let’s take film. In order to keep production costs down, each film would have a finite number of prints made, and these prints would have to be sent around the world. So, while I was growing up, by the time a new film made it to India, it was marked by scratches and cuts and noughts and crosses. The condition was not really germane, the real problem was the time. Films arrived in India a long time after they were released in the US or UK.

When it came to music, something similar happened. LPs and singles were stamped locally from masters, and there must have been a finite number of masters made. And as usual India had to wait for the masters to arrive before the records could be stamped and released. As a result, “western” music arrived in India some time after the US or UK release.

We had the Sixties, yes, but not at the same time as everyone else. With the advent of digital media, there is no reason to time-separate markets, no reason for India to see a film later than the US. The primary reason, the protection of historical distribution models, is an outrage. The oft-quoted primary reason, the need to stamp out piracy, is inane: piracy would drop substantially if release was same-time worldwide.

But that’s not the point of this post either.

The point of the post is this: In the Sixties and early Seventies, for all the reasons quoted above, western music arrived late to India. Which meant that, for example, someone like Leonard Cohen was very popular for most of the 1970s.

I was thirteen when the Seventies began. Now I like Leonard Cohen. A lot. I have a signed first edition of Beautiful Losers, I have every album he’s ever made, I count Famous Blue Raincoat as one of my top 25 songs ever. [There’s something haunting, something deeply satisfying, about the lilting cadence of and-then-Jane.Came.By-with-a-lock-of-your-hair. She-said.That-you-gave-it-to-her. The-night. That-you-planned-to-go-clear. Did you ever go clear?]

Yes, I like Leonard Cohen.

It feels strange to think that tonight, as the UK gears itself for that momentous occasion, the X Factor Finals, children born after Cohen’s children were born are going to sing along to songs written by him. Hallelujah has been chosen as the debut song for the contest’s winner.

Actually, this generation has it easy. My generation, we had to dance to Leonard Cohen, whisper sweet nothings to the girls we were courting while trying to figure out how to look “cool” while “dancing” to Cohen.