Not using NotWavingButDrowning

Before ConfusedofCalcutta, this blog was meant to be called NotWavingButDrowning. Why? Two reasons. One, because I really like Stevie Smith’s poem, there’s something about it. And two, I thought it was a strong metaphor for what we face with information.

So I went ahead and bought the domain name. But could I figure out for sure which particular set of permissions I needed to use a domain name that quoted four words in sequence from a poem written probably sixty years ago by someone who died thirty-five years ago? So it lies unused. One day….

Martin Geddes commented on something I’d said earlier, and is someone I “know” through the web and (I shudder to admit it) e-mail, trying to make sense of bad law around that marshy and smelly mess where telco meets internet meets regulator meets cableco. He keeps an interesting multilogue going here.

[Martin, I agree with you. But people really get wound up when I point out the zillion reasons why e-mail is bad. It’s a long hard fight.]

Back to my NotWaving point. I’m used to believing that man spends maybe 3.5 hours a day “consuming information” and that this figure has stayed pretty constant over the last forty years. Say since Moore. During that time, but particularly after the Web, the amount of information that can be consumed has grown by multiple orders of magnitude. There’s probably a Someone’s Law out there telling me that rate of growth.

Something’s gotta give, and each of us needs ways of attracting information, filtering it, retaining what we choose to, enriching it, passing it on. We need better search and syndication and collaboration and communication and visualisation and and and.

None of this is new to anyone out there, I’m sure. What was new to me was how complicated all this was. The internet and telco and ICANN and net neutrality and governance stuff. The IPR and Digital Rights and Mickey Mouse Acts and “just what is patentable” stuff. The incumbent vendors and their lock-ins and proprietary formats and permissioning and authentication issues. How easy it was to build accidental walled gardens inside organisations, to augment the ones we already have.

And the ones we have are called e-mail and proprietary content management and. I shall stop there.

Lonely impulses of delight

One of my favourite poems is Yeats’ “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”.

Extremely powerful. When I was 15, and I read it for the first time, what really struck me was that the airman flew because he loved flying. Not because of glory or honour or duty or war or pestilence or whatever. He loved flying.

I love working with information. And in a digital world, with costs of reproduction and transmission tending towards zero, we can really make a difference to our world today and tomorrow, particularly in education. Which is why I’m excited about reading Judy Breck’s book; I’ve been trudging around her site and like a lot of what I see. Take a look.

Thanks for the heads-up, Judy. [Another serendipitous meeting through blogs].

Risk aversion versus betrayal aversion

Interesting piece in Harvard Magazine, as a sidebar to an article on The Marketplace of Perceptions. Thanks to Muzeview for pointing it out to me.

I have to confess I’d never even heard of Harvard Magazine until I read the post on Muzeview. Only goes to show.

 

On education and peer respect

I guess it’s fashionable to knock the education systems of today in comparison with prior ones, and every generation does it. In which case there is no point my joining in.

I do think that things have changed. And the change that most intrigues me here, which affects individuals, companies, schools, healthcare, even software, is to do with our motives. We spent a long time believing that Maslow ruled, and there was no better theory for the bulk of the 20th century. Until Driven. Which I read just about as often as I read The Social Life of Information and The Cluetrain Manifesto and Emergence and The Borderless World.

Nohria and Lawrence make many good points, but there’s one thing about their four-driver model that has never ceased to intrigue me. [The drivers are: The drive to acquire, the drive to learn, the drive to bond and the drive to defend].

As with Maslow, three of the drivers, to acquire, to learn and to defend, can be made to work in hierarchical as well as non-hierarchical models. But my gut feel is that the drive to bond does not.

Bonding is a lateral thing to do, a sideways activity.

And ever since I watched Joi Ito’s HeckleBot in action, I have wondered about the use of something similar in education. Particularly in inner cities (you can take the boy out of Calcutta but you can never take Calcutta out of the boy) youth are pretty disenchanted with everything and everyone. The only thing that drives them is peer respect and recognition. They feel disenfranchised from anything else.

What would happen if every class had a hecklebot-blog standing alongside the teacher? I wonder.

And tomorrow’s gonna be a brighter day

…there’s gonna be some changes tomorrow, it’s gonna be a brighter day

Jim Croce, 1943-1973, “Tomorrow’s gonna be a brighter day”

Again, one of my favourite singer-songwriters. I can still remember my shock at learning of his death the very day I bought my first Croce album. It was 29th September 1973, and as I was walking out of the record shop the manager said “Did you know he died a week or two ago? “. I was devastated.

Sometimes people tell me that I’m too optimistic, that my ideas and thoughts and beliefs are too utopian, that I look too often for good in people.

And guess what, I’m going to stay that way. Rock on, Jim.