the human network

Introduction: In The Beginning

Back in the 1980s, when personal computers mostly meant IBM PCs running Lotus 1*2*3 and, perhaps, if you were a bit off-center, an Apple Macintosh running Aldus Pagemaker, the idea of a coherent and interconnected set of documents spanning the known human universe seemed fanciful.  But there have always been dreamers, among them such luminaries as Douglas Engelbart, who gave us the computer mouse, and Ted Nelson, who coined the word ‘hypertext’.  Engelbart demonstrated a fully-functional hypertext system in December 1968, the famous ‘Mother of all Demos’, which framed computing for the rest of the 20^th century.  Before man had walked on the Moon, before there was an Internet, we had a prototype for the World Wide Web.  Nelson took this idea and ran with it, envisaging a globally interconnected hypertext system, which he named ‘Xanadu’ – after the poem by Coleridge – and which attracted a crowd of enthusiasts intent on making it real.  I was one of them.  From my garret in Providence, Rhode Island, I wrote a front end – a ‘browser’ if you will – to the soon-to-be-released Xanadu.  This was back in 1986, nearly five years before Tim Berners-Lee wrote a short paper outlining a universal protocol for hypermedia, the basis for the World Wide Web.

Xanadu was never released, but we got the Web.  It wasn’t as functional as Xanadu – copyright management was a solved problem with Xanadu, whereas on the Web it continues to bedevil us – and links were two-way affairs; you could follow the destination of a link back to its source.  But the Web was out there and working for thousand of people by the middle of 1993, while Xanadu, shuffled from benefactor to benefactor, faded and finally died.  The Web was good enough to get out there, to play with, to begin improving, while Xanadu – which had been in beta since the late 1980s – was never quite good enough to be released.  ‘The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good’, and nowhere is it clearer than in the sad story of Xanadu.

If Xanadu had been released in 1987, it would have been next to useless without an Internet to support it, and the Internet was still very tiny in the 1980s.  When I started using the Internet, in 1988, the main trunk line across the United States was just about to be upgraded from 9.6 kilobits to 56 kilobits.  That’s the line for all of the traffic heading from one coast to the other.  I suspect that today this cross-country bandwidth, in aggregate, would be measured in terabits – trillions of bits per second, a million-fold increase.  And it keeps on growing, without any end in sight.

Because of my experience with Xanadu, when I first played with NCSA Mosaic – the first publicly available Web browser – I immediately knew what I held in my mousing hand.  And I wasn’t impressed.  In July 1993 very little content existed for the Web – just a handful of sites, mostly academic.  Given that the Web was born to serve the global high-energy-physics community headquartered at CERN and Fermilab, this made sense.  I walked away from the computer that July afternoon wanting more.  Hypertext systems I’d seen before.  What I lusted after was a global system with a reach like Xanadu.

Three months later, when I’d acquired a SUN workstation for a programming project, I immediately downloaded and installed NCSA Mosaic, to find that the Web elves had been busy.  Instead of a handful of sites, there were now hundreds.  There was a master list of known sites, maintained at NCSA, and over the course of a week in October, I methodically visited every site in the list.  By Friday evening I was finished.  I had surfed the entire Web.  It was even possible to keep up the new sites as they were added to the bottom of the list, though the end of 1993.  Then things began to explode.

From October on I became a Web evangelist.  My conversion was complete, and my joy in life was to share my own experience with my friends, using my own technical skills to get them set up with Internet access and their own copies of NCSA Mosaic.  That made converts of them; they then began to work on their friends, and so by degrees of association, the word of the Web spread.

In mid-January 1994, I dragged that rather unwieldy SUN workstation across town to show it off at a house party / performance event known as ‘Anon Salon’, which featured an interesting cross-section of San Francisco’s arts and technology communities.  As someone familiar walked in the door at the Salon, I walked up to them and took them over to my computer.  “What’s something you’re interested in?” I’d ask.  They’d reply with something like “Gardening” or “Astronomy” or “Watersports of Mesoamerica” and I’d go to the newly-created category index of the Web, known as Yahoo!, and still running out of a small lab on the Stanford University campus, type in their interest, and up would come at least a few hits.  I’d click on one, watch the page load, and let them read.  “Wow!” they’d say.  “This is great!”

I never mentioned the Web or hypertext or the Internet as I gave these little demos.  All I did was hook people by their own interests.  This, in January 1994 in San Francisco, is what would happen throughout the world in January 1995 and January 1996, and still happening today, as the two-billion Internet-connected individuals sit down before their computers and ask themselves, “What am I passionate about?”

This is the essential starting point for any discussion of what the Web is, what it is becoming, and how it should be presented.  The individual, with their needs, their passions, their opinions, their desires and their goals is always paramount.  We tend to forget this, or overlook it, or just plain ignore it.  We design from a point of view which is about what we have to say, what we want to present, what we expect to communicate.  It’s not that that we should ignore these considerations, but they are always secondary.  The Web is a ground for being.  Individuals do not present themselves as receptacles to be filled.  They are souls looking to be fulfilled.  This is as true for children as for adults – perhaps more so – and for this reason the educational Web has to be about space and place for being, not merely the presentation of a good-looking set of data.

How we get there, how we create the space for being, is what we have collectively learned in the first seventeen years of the web.  I’ll now break these down some of these individually.

I: Sharing

Every morning when I sit down to work at my computer, I’m greeted with a flurry of correspondence and communication.  I often start off with the emails that have come in overnight from America and Europe, the various mailing lists which spit out their contents at 3 AM, late night missives from insomniac friends, that sort of thing.  As I move through them, I sort them: this one needs attention and a reply, this one can get trashed, and this one – for one reason or another – should be shared.  The sharing instinct is innate and immediate.  We know upon we hearing a joke, or seeing an image, or reading an article, when someone else will be interested in it.  We’ve always known this; it’s part of being a human, and for as long as we’ve been able to talk – both as children and as a species – we’ve babbled and shared with one another.  It’s a basic quality of humanity.

Who we share with is driven by the people we know, the hundred-and-fifty or so souls who make up our ‘Dunbar Number’, the close crowd of individuals we connect to by blood or by friendship, or as co-workers, or neighbors, or co-religionists, or fellow enthusiasts in pursuit of sport or hobby.  Everyone carries that hundred and fifty around inside of them.  Most of the time we’re unaware of it, until that moment when we spy something, and immediately know who we want to share it with.  It’s automatic, requires no thought.  We just do it.

Once things began to move online, and we could use the ‘Forward’ button on our email clients, we started to see an acceleration and broadening of this sharing.  Everyone has a friend or two who forwards along every bad joke they come across, or every cute photo of a kitten.  We’ve all grown used to this, very tolerant of the high level of randomness and noise, because the flip side of that is a new and incredibly rapid distribution medium for the things which matter to us.  It’s been truly said that ‘If news is important, it will find me,’ because once some bit of information enters our densely hyperconnected networks, it gets passed hither-and-yon until it arrives in front of the people who most care about it.

That’s easy enough to do with emails, but how does that work with creations that may be Web-based, or similarly constrained?  We’ve seen the ‘share’ button show up on a lot of websites, but that’s not the entire matter.  You have to do more than request sharing.  You have to think through the entire goal of sharing, from the user’s perspective.  Are they sharing this because it’s interesting?  Are they sharing this because they want company?  Are they sharing this because it’s a competition or a contest or collaborative?  Or are they only sharing this because you’ve asked them to?

Here we come back – as we will, several more times – to the basic position of the user’s experience as central to the design of any Web project.  What is it about the design of your work that excites them to share it with others?  Have you made sharing a necessary component – as it might be in a multi-player game, or a collaborative and crowdsourced knowledge project – or is it something that is nice but not essential?  In other words, is there space only for one, or is there room to spread the word?  Why would anyone want to share your work?  You need to be able to answer this: definitively, immediately, and conclusively, because the answer to that question leads to the next question.  How will your work be shared?

Your works do not exist in isolation.  They are part of a continuum of other works?  Where does your work fit into that continuum?  How do the instructor and student approach that work?  Is it a top-down mandate?  Or is it something that filters up from below as word-of-mouth spreads?  How does that word-of-mouth spread?

Now you have to step back and think about the users of your work, and how they’re connected.  Is it simply via email – do all the students have email addresses?  Do they know the email addresses of their friends?  Or do you want your work shared via SMS?  A QRCode, perhaps?  Or Facebook or Twitter or, well, who knows?  And how do you get a class of year 3 students, who probably don’t have access to any of these tools, sharing your work?

You do want them to share, right?

This idea of sharing is foundational to everything we do on the Web today.  It becomes painfully obvious when it’s been overlooked.  For example, the iPad version of The Australian had all of the articles of the print version, but you couldn’t share an article with a friend.  There was simply no way to do that.  (I don’t know if this has changed recently.)  That made the iPad version of The Australian significantly less functional than its website version – because there I could at least past a URL into an email.

The more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes.  The more students use your work, the more indispensable you become to the curriculum, and the more likely your services will be needed, year after year, to improve and extend your present efforts.  Sharing isn’t just good design, it’s good business.

II: Connecting

Within the space for being created by the Web, there is room for a crowd.  Sometimes these crowds can be vast and anonymous – Wikipedia is a fine example of this.  Everyone’s there, but no one is wholly aware of anyone else’s presence.  You might see an edit to a page, or a new post on the discussion for a particular topic, but that’s as close as people come to one another.  Most of the connecting for the Wikipedians – the folks who behind-the-scenes make Wikipedia work – is performed by that old reliable friend, email.

There are other websites which make connecting the explicit central point of their purpose.  These are the social networks: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and so on.  In essence they take the Dunbar Number written into each of our minds and make it explicit, digital and a medium for communication.  But it doesn’t end there; one can add countless other contacts from all corners of life, until the ‘social graph’ – that set of connections – becomes so broad it is essentially meaningless.  Every additional contact makes the others less meaningful, if only because there’s only so much of you to go around.

That’s one type of connecting.  There is another type, as typified by Twitter, in which connections are weaker – generally falling outside the Dunbar Number – but have a curious resilience that presents unexpected strengths.  Where you can poll your friends on Facebook, on Twitter you can poll a planet.  How do I solve this problem?  Where should I eat dinner tonight?  What’s going on over there?  These loose but far-flung connections provide a kind of ‘hive mind’, which is less precise, and knows less about you, but knows a lot more about everything else.

These are not mutually exclusive principles.  It’s is not Facebook-versus-Twitter; it is not tight connections versus loose connections.  It’s a bit of both.  Where does your work benefit from a tight collective of connected individuals?  Is it some sort of group problem-solving?  A creative activity that really comes into its own when a whole band of people play together?  Or simply something which benefits from having a ‘lifeline’ to your comrades-in-arms?  When you constantly think of friends, that’s the sort of task that benefits from close connectivity.

On the other hand, when you’re collaborating on a big task – building up a model or a database or an encyclopedia or a catalog or playing a massive, rich, detailed and unpredictable game, or just trying to get a sense of what is going on ‘out there’, that’s the kind of task which benefits from loose connectivity.  Not every project will need both kinds of connecting, but almost every one will benefit from one or the other.  We are much smarter together than individually, much wiser, much more sensible, and less likely to be distracted, distraught or depressed.  (We are also more likely to reinforce each others’ prejudices and preconceptions, but that’s another matter of longstanding which technology can not help but amplify.)  Life is meaningful because we, together, give it meaning.  Life is bearable because we, together, bear the load for one another.  Human life is human connection.

The Web today is all about connecting.  That’s its single most important feature, the one which is serving as an organizing principle for nearly all activity on it.  So how do your projects allow your users to connect?  Does your work leave them alone, helpless, friendless, and lonely?  Does it crowd them together into too-close quarters, so that everyone feels a bit claustrophobic?  Or does it allow them to reach out and forge the bonds that will carry them through?

III: Contributing, Regulating, Iterating

In January of 2002, when I had my first demo of Wikipedia, the site had barely 14,000 articles – many copied from the 1911 out-of-copyright edition of Encyclopedia Britannica.  That’s enough content for a child’s encyclopedia, perhaps even for a primary school educator, but not really enough to be useful for adults, who might be interested in almost anything under the Sun.  It took the dedicated efforts of thousands of contributors for several years to get Wikipedia to the size of Britannica (250,000 articles), an effort which continues today.

Explicit to the design of Wikipedia is the idea that individuals should contribute.  There is an ‘edit’ button at the top of nearly every page, and making changes to Wikipedia is both quick and easy.  (This leaves the door open a certain amount of childish vandalism, but that is easily reversed or corrected precisely because it is so easy to edit anything within the site.)  By now everyone knows that Wikipedia is the collaboratively created encyclopedia, representing the best of all of what its contributors have to offer.  For the next hundred years academics and social scientists will debate the validity of crowdsourced knowledge creation, but what no one can deny is that Wikipedia has become an essential touchstone, our common cultural workbook.  This is less because of Wikipedia-as-a-resource than it is because we all share a sense of pride-in-ownership of Wikipedia.  Probably most of you have made some small change to Wikipedia; a few of you may have authored entire articles.  Every time any of us adds our own voice to Wikipedia, we become part of it, and it becomes part of us.  This is a powerful logic, an attraction which transcends the rational.  People cling to Wikipedia – right or wrong – because it is their own.

It’s difficult to imagine a time will come when Wikipedia will be complete.  If nothing else, events continue to occur, history is made, and all of this must be recorded somewhere in Wikipedia.  Yet Wikipedia, in its English-language edition, is growing more slowly in 2010 than in 2005.  With nearly 3.5 million articles in English, it’s reasonably comprehensive, at least by its own lights.  Certain material is considered inappropriate for Wikipedia – homespun scientific theories, or the biographies of less-than-remarkable individuals – and this has placed limits on its growth.  It’s possible that within a few years we will regard Wikipedia as essentially complete – which is, when you reflect upon it, an utterly awesome thought.  It will mean that we have captured the better part of human knowledge in a form accessible to all.  That we can all carry the learned experience of the species around in our pockets.

Wikipedia points to something else, quite as important and nearly as profound: the Web is not ‘complete’.  It is a work-in-progress.  Google understands this and releases interminable beta versions of every product.  More than this, it means that nothing needs to offer all the answers.  I would suggest that nothing should offer all the answers.  Leaving that space for the users to add what they know – or are willing to learn – to the overall mix creates a much more powerful relationship with the user, and – counterintuitively – with less work from you.  It is up to you to provide the framework for individuals to contribute within, but it is not up to you to populate that framework with every possibility.  There’s a ‘sweet spot’, somewhere between nothing and too much, which shows users the value of contributions but allows them enough space to make their own.

User contributions tend to become examples in their own right, showing other users how it’s done.  This creates a ‘virtuous cycle’ of contributions leading to contributions leading to still more contributions – which can produce the explosive creativity of a Wikipedia or TripAdvisor or an eBay or a RateMyProfessors.com.

In each of these websites it needs to be noted that there is a possibility for ‘bad data’ to work its way into system.   The biggest problem Wikipedia faces is not vandalism but the more pernicious types of contributions which look factual but are wholly made up.  TripAdvisor is facing a class-action lawsuit from hoteliers who have been damaged by anonymous negative ratings of their establishments.  RateMyProfessors.com is the holy terror of the academy in the United States.  Each of these websites has had to design systems which allow for users to self-regulate peer contributions.  In some cases – such as on a blog – it’s no more than a ‘report this post’ button, which flags it for later moderation.  Wikipedia promulgated a directive that strongly encouraged contributors to provide a footnote linking to supporting material.  TripAdvisor gives anonymous reviewers a lower ranking.  eBay forces both buyers and sellers to rate each transaction, building a database of interactions which can be used to guide others when they come to trade.  Each of these are social solutions to social problems.

Web2.0 is not a technology.  It is a suite of social techniques, and each technique must be combined with a social strategy for deployment, considering how the user will behave: neither wholly good nor entirely evil.  It is possible to design systems and interfaces which engage the better angels of nature, possible to develop wholly open systems which self-regulate and require little moderator intervention.  Yet it is not easy to do so, because it is not easy to know in advance how any social technique can be abused by those who employ it.

This means that aWeb2.0 concept that should guide you in your design work is iteration.  Nothing is ever complete, nor ever perfect.  The perfect is the enemy of the good, so if you wait for perfection, you will never release.  Instead, watch your users, see if they struggle to work within the place you have created for then, or whether they immediately grasp hold and begin to work.  In their more uncharitable moments, do they abuse the freedoms you have given them?  If so, how can you redesign your work, and ‘nudge’ them into better behavior?  It may be as simple as a different set of default behaviors, or as complex as a set of rules governing a social ecosystem.  And although Moses came down from Mount Sinai with all ten commandments, you can not and should not expect to get it right on a first pass.  Instead, release, observe, adapt, and re-release.  All releases are soft releases, everything is provisional, and nothing is quite perfect.  That’s as it should be.

IV: Opening

Two of the biggest Web2.0 services are Facebook and Twitter.  Although they seem to be similar, they couldn’t be more different.  Facebook is ‘greedy’, hoarding all of the data provided by its users, all of their photographs and conversations, keeping them entirely for itself.  If you want to have access to that data, you need to work with Facebook’s tools, and you need to build an application that works within Facebook – literally within the web page.  Facebook has control over everything you do, and can arbitrarily choose to limit what you do, even shut you down your application if they don’t like it, or perceive it as somehow competitive with Facebook.  Facebook is entirely in control, and Facebook holds onto all of the data your application needs to use.

Twitter has taken an entirely different approach.  From the very beginning, anyone could get access to the Twitter feed – whether for a single individual (if their stream of Tweets had been made public), or for all of Twitter’s users.  Anyone could do anything they wanted with these Tweets – though Twitter places restrictions on commercial re-use of their data.  Twitter provided very clear (and remarkably straightforward) instruction on how to access their data, and threw the gates open wide.

Although Facebook has half a billion users, Twitter is actually more broadly used, in more situations, because it has been incredibly easy for people to adapt Twitter to their tasks.  People have developed computer programs that send Tweets when the program is about to crash, created vast art projects which allow the public to participate from anywhere around the world, or even a little belt worn by a pregnant woman which sends out a Tweet every time the baby kicks!  It’s this flexibility which has made Twitter a sort of messaging ‘glue’ on the Internet of 2010, and that’s something Facebook just can’t do, because it’s too closed in upon itself.  Twitter has become a building block: when you write a program which needs to send a message, you use Twitter.  Facebook isn’t a building block.  It’s a monolith.

How do you build for openness?  Consider: another position the user might occupy is someone trying to use your work as a building block within their own project.  Have you created space for your work to be re-used, to be incorporated, to be pieced apart and put back together again?  Or is it opaque, seamless, and closed?  What about the data you collect, data the user has generated?  Where does that live?  Can it be exported and put to work in another application, or on another website?  Are you a brick or are you a brick wall?

When you think about your design – both technically and from the user’s experience – you must consider how open you want to be, and weigh the price of openness (extra work, unpredictability) against the price of being closed (less useful).  The highest praise you can receive for your work is when someone wants to use it in their own. For this to happen, you have to leave the door open for them.  If you publish the APIs to access the data you collect; if you build your work modularly, with clearly defined interfaces; if you use standards such as RSS and REST where appropriate, you will create something that others can re-use.

One of my favorite lines comes from science fiction author William Gibson, who wrote, ‘The street finds its own uses for things – uses the manufacturer never imagined.’  You can’t know how valuable your work will be to someone else, what they’ll see in it that you never could, and how they’ll use it to solve a problem.

All of these techniques – sharing, connecting, contributing, regulating, iterating and opening – share a common thread: they regard the user’s experience as paramount and design as something that serves the user.  These are not precisely the same Web2.0 domains others might identify.  That’s because Web2.0 has become a very ill-defined term.  It can mean whatever we want it to mean.  But it always comes back to experience, something that recognizes the importance and agency of the user, and makes that the center of the work.

It took us the better part of a decade to get to Web2.0; although pieces started showing up in the late 1990s, it wasn’t until the early 21^st century that we really felt confident with the Web as an experience, and could use that experience to guide us into designs that left room for us to explore, to play and to learn from one another.  In this decade we need to bring everything we’ve learned to everything we create, to avoid the blind traps and dead ends of a design which ignores the vital reality of the people who work with what we create.  We need to make room for them.  If we don’t, they will make other rooms, where they can be themselves, where they can share what they’ve found, connect with the ones they care about, collaborate and contribute and create.

I: Paper, works

At the end of May I received an email from a senior official at the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development.  DEECD was in the midst of issuing an RFP, looking for new content to populate FUSE (Find, Use, Share, Education), an important component of ULTRANET, the mega-über-supremo educational intranet meant to solve everyone’s educational problems for all time.  Or, well, perhaps I overstate the matter.  But it could be a big deal.

The respondents to the RFP were organizations who already had working relationships with DEECD, and therefore were both familiar with DEECD processes and had been vetted in their earlier relationships.  This meant that the entire RFP to submissions could be telescoped down to just a bit less than three weeks.  The official asked me if I’d be interested in being one of the external reviewers for these proposals as they passed through an official evaluation process.  I said I’d be happy to do so, and asked how many proposals I’d have to review.  “I doubt it will be more than thirty or forty,” he replied.  Which seemed quite reasonable.

As is inevitably the case, most of the proposals landed in the DEECD mailbox just a few hours before the deadline for submissions.  But the RFP didn’t result in thirty or forty proposals.  The total came to almost ninety.  All of which I had to review and evaluate in the thirty-six hours between the time they landed in my inbox and the start of the formal evaluation meeting.  Oh, and first I needed to print them out, because there was no way I’d be able to do that much reading in front of my computer.

Let’s face it – although we do sit and read our laptop screens all day long, we rarely read anything longer than a few paragraphs.  If it passes 300 words, it tips the balance into ‘tl;dr’ (too long; didn’t read) territory, and unless it’s vital for our employment or well-being, we tend to skip it and move along to the next little tidbit.  Having to sit and read through well over nine hundred pages of proposals on my laptop was a bridge too far. I set off to the print shop around the corner from my flat, to have the whole mess printed out.  That took nearly 24 hours by itself – and cost an ungodly sum.  I was left with a huge, heavy box of paper which I could barely lug back to my flat.  For the next 36 hours, this box would be my ball and chain.  I’d have to take it with me to the meeting in Melbourne, which meant packing it for the flight, checking it as baggage, lugging it to my hotel room, and so forth, all while trying to digest its contents.

How the heck was that going to work?

This is when I looked at my iPad.  Then I looked back at the box.  Then back at the iPad.  Then back at the box.  I’d gotten my iPad barely a week before – when they first arrived in Australia – and I was planning on taking it on this trip, but without an accompanying laptop.  This, for me, would be a bit of a test.  For the last decade I’d never traveled anywhere without my laptop.  Could I manage a business trip with just my iPad?  I looked back at the iPad.  Then at the box.  You could practically hear the penny drop.

I immediately began copying all these nine hundred-plus pages of proposals and accompanying documentation from my laptop to the storage utility Dropbox.  Dropbox gives you 2 GB of free Internet storage, with an option to rent more space, if you need it.  Dropbox also has an iPad app (free) – so as soon as the files were uploaded to Dropbox, I could access them from my iPad.

I should take a moment and talk about the model of the iPad I own.  I ordered the 16 GB version – the smallest storage size offered by Apple – but I got the 3G upgrade, paired with Telstra’s most excellent pre-paid NextG service.  My rationale was that I imagined this iPad would be a ‘cloud-centric’ device.  The ‘cloud’ is a term that’s come into use quite recently.  It means software is hosted somewhere out there on the Internet – the ‘cloud’ – rather than residing locally on your computer.  Gmail is a good example of a software that’s ‘in the cloud’.  Facebook is another.  Twitter, another.   Much of what we do with our computers – iPad included – involves software accessed over the Internet.  Many of the apps for sale in Apple’s iTunes App Store are useless or pointless without an Internet connection – these are the sorts of applications which break down the neat boundary between the computer and the cloud.  Cloud computing has been growing in importance over the last decade; by the end of this one it will simply be the way things work.  Your iPad will be your window onto the cloud, onto everything you have within that cloud: your email, your documents, your calendar, your contacts, etc.

I like to live in the future, so I made sure that my iPad didn’t have too much storage – which forces me to use the cloud as much as possible.  In this case, that was precisely the right decision, because I ditched the ten-kilo box of paperwork and boarded my flight to Melbourne with my iPad at my side.  I poured through the proposals, one after another, bringing them up in Dropbox, evaluating them, making some notes in my (paper) notebook, then moving along to the next one.  My iPad gave me a fluidity and speed that I could never have had with that box of paper.

When I arrived at my hotel, I had another set of two large boxes waiting for me.  Here again were the proposals, carefully ordered and placed into several large, ringed binders.  I’d be expected to tote these to the evaluation meeting.  Fortunately, that was only a few floors above my hotel room.  That said, it was a bit of a struggle to get those boxes and my luggage into the elevator and up to the meeting room.  I put those boxes down – and never looked at them again.  As the rest of the evaluation panel dug through their boxes to pull out the relevant proposals, I did a few motions with my fingertips, and found myself on the same page.

Yes, they got a bit jealous.

We finished the evaluation on time and quite successfully, and at the end of the day I left my boxes with the DEECD coordinator, thanking her for her hard work printing all these materials, but begging off.  She understood completely.  I flew home, lighter than I might otherwise have, had I stuck to paper.

For at least the past thirty years – which is about the duration of the personal computer revolution – people have been talking about the advent of the paperless office.  Truth be told, we use more paper in our offices than ever before, our printers constantly at work with letters, notices, emails, and so forth.  We haven’t been able to make the leap to a paperless office – despite our comprehensive ability to manipulate documents digitally – because we lacked something that could actually replace paper.  Computers as we’ve known them simply can’t replace a piece of paper. For a whole host of reasons, it just never worked.  To move to a paperless office – and a paperless classroom – we had to invent something that could supplant paper.  We have it now.  After a lot of false starts, tablet computing has finally arrived –– and it’s here to stay.

I can sit here, iPad in hand, and have access to every single document that I have ever written.  You will soon have access to every single document you might ever need, right here, right now.  We’re not 100% there yet – but that’s not the fault of the device.  We’re going to need to make some adjustments to our IT strategies, so that we can have a pervasively available document environment.  At that point, your iPad becomes the page which contains all other pages within it.  You’ll never be without the document you need at the time you need it.

Nor will we confine ourselves to text.  The world is richer than that.  iPad is the lightbox that contains all photographs within it, it is the television which receives every bit of video produced by anyone – professional or amateur – ever.  It is already the radio (Pocket Tunes app) which receives almost every major radio station broadcasting anywhere in the world.  And it is every one of a hundred-million-plus websites and maybe a trillion web pages.  All of this is here, right here in the palm of your hand.

What matters now is how we put all of this to work.

II: Pad, works

Let’s project ourselves into the future just a little bit – say around ten years.  It’s 2020, and we’ve had iPads for a whole decade.  The iPads of 2020 will be vastly more powerful than the ones in use today, because of something known as Moore’s Law.  This law states that computers double in power every twenty-four months.  Ten years is five doublings, or 32 times.  That rule extends to the display as well as the computer.  The ‘Retina Display’ recently released on Apple’s iPhone 4 shows us where that technology is going – displays so fine that you can’t make out the individual pixels with your eye.  The screen of your iPad version 11 will be visually indistinguishable from a sheet of paper.  The device itself will be thinner and lighter than the current model.  Battery technology improves at about 10% a year, so half the weight of the battery – which is the heaviest component of the iPad – will disappear.  You’ll still get at least ten hours of use, that’s something that’s considered essential to your experience as a user.  And you’ll still be connected to the mobile network.

The mobile network of 2020 will look quite different from the mobile network of 2010.  Right now we’re just on the cusp of moving into 4^th generation mobile broadband technology, known colloquially as LTE, or Long-Term Evolution.   Where you might get speeds of 7 megabits per second with NextG mobile broadband – under the best conditions – LTE promises speeds of 100 megabits.  That’s as good as a wired connection – as fast as anything promised by the National Broadband Network!  In a decade’s time we’ll be moving through 5^th generation and possibly into 6^th generation mobile technologies, with speeds approaching a gigabit, a billion bits per second.  That may sound like a lot, but again, it represents roughly 32 times the capacity of the mobile broadband networks of today.  Moore’s Law has a broad reach, and will transform every component of the iPad.

iPad will have thirty-two times the storage, not that we’ll need it, given that we’ll be connected to the cloud at gigabit speeds, but if it’s there, someone will find use for the two terabytes or more included in our iPad.  (Perhaps a full copy of Wikipedia?  Or all of the books published before 1915?)  All of this still cost just $700.  If you want to spend less – and have a correspondingly less-powerful device, you’ll have that option.  I suspect you’ll be able to pick up an entry-level device – the equivalent of iPad 7, perhaps – for $49 at JB HiFi.

What sorts of things will the iPad 10 be capable of?  How do we put all of that power to work?  First off, iPad will be able to see and hear in meaningful ways.  Voice recognition and computer vision are two technologies which are on the threshold of becoming ‘twenty year overnight successes’.  We can already speak to our computers, and, most of the time, they can understand us.  With devices like the Xbox Kinect, cameras allow the computer to see the world around, and recognize bits of it.  Your iPad will hear you, understand your voice, and follow your commands.  It will also be able to recognize your face, your motions, and your emotions.

It’s not clear that computers as we know them today – that is, desktops and laptops – will be common in a decade’s time.  They may still be employed in very specialized tasks.  For almost everything else, we will be using our iPads.  They’ll rarely leave our sides.  They will become so pervasive that in many environments – around the home, in the office, or at school – we will simply have a supply of them sufficient to the task.  When everything is so well connected, you don’t need to have personal information stored in a specific iPad.  You will be able to pick up any iPad and – almost instantaneously – the custom features which mark that device as uniquely yours will be downloaded into it.

All of this is possible.  Whether any of it eventuates depends on a whole host of factors we can’t yet see clearly.  People may find voice recognition more of an annoyance than an affordance.  The idea of your iPad watching you might seem creepy to some people.  But consider this: I have a good friend who has two elderly parents: his dad is in his early 80s, his mom is in her mid-70s.  He lives in Boston while they live in Northern California.  But he needs to keep in touch, he needs to have a look in.  Next year, when iPad acquires a forward-facing camera – so it can be used for video conferencing – he’ll buy them an iPad, and install it on the wall of their kitchen, stuck on there with Velcro, so that he can ring in anytime, and check on them, and they can ring him, anytime.  It’s a bit ‘Jetsons’, when you think about it.  And that’s just what will happen next year.  By 2020 the iPad will be able to track your progress around the house, monitor what prescriptions you’ve taken (or missed), whether you’ve left the house, and for how long.  It’ll be a basic accessory, necessary for everyone caring for someone in their final years – or in their first ones.

Now that we’ve established the basic capabilities and expectations for this device, let’s imagine them in the hands of students everywhere throughout Australia.  No student, however poor, will be without their own iPad – the Government of the day will see to that.  These students of 2020 are at least as well connected as you are, as their parents are, as anyone is.  To them, iPads are not new things; they’ve always been around.  They grew up in a world where touch is the default interface.  A computer mouse, for them, seems as archaic as a manual typewriter does to us.  They’re also quite accustomed to being immersed within a field of very-high-speed mobile broadband.  They just expect it to be ‘on’, everywhere they go, and expect that they will have access to it as needed.

How do we make education in 2020 meet their expectations?  This is not the universe of ‘chalk and talk’.  This is a world where the classroom walls have been effectively leveled by the pervasive presence of the network, and a device which can display anything on that network.  This is a world where education can be provided anywhere, on demand, as called for.  This is a world where the constructivist premise of learning-by-doing can be implemented beyond year two.  Where a student working on an engine can stare at a three-dimensional breakout model of the components while engaging in a conversation with an instructor half a continent away.  Where a student learning French can actually engage with a French student learning English, and do so without much more than a press of a few buttons.  Where a student learning about the Eureka Stockade can survey the ground, iPad in hand, and find within the device hidden depths to the history.  iPad is the handheld schoolhouse, and it is, in many ways, the thing that replaces the chalkboard, the classroom, and the library.

But iPad does not replace the educator.  We need to be very clear on that, because even as educational resources multiply beyond our wildest hopes –more on that presently – students still need someone to guide them into understanding.  The more we virtualize the educational process, the more important and singular our embodied interactions become.  Some of this will come from far away – the iPad offers opportunities for distance education undreamt of just a few years ago – but much more of it will be close up.  Even if the classroom does not survive (and I doubt it will fade away completely in the next ten years, but it will begin to erode), we will still need a place for an educator/mentor to come into contact with students.  That’s been true since the days of Socrates (probably long before that), and it’s unlikely to change anytime soon.  We learn best when we learn from others.  We humans are experts in mimesis, in learning by imitation.  That kind of learning requires us to breathe the same air together.

No matter how much power we gain from the iPad, no matter how much freedom it offers, no device offers us freedom from our essential nature as social beings.  We are born to work together, we are designed to learn from one another.  iPad is an unbelievably potent addition to the educator’s toolbox, but we must remember not to let it cloud our common sense.  It should be an amplifier, not a replacement, something that lets students go further, faster than before.  But they should not go alone.

The constant danger of technology is that it can interrupt the human moment.  We can be too busy checking our messages to see the real people right before our eyes.  This is the dilemma that will face us in the age of the iPad.  Governments will see them as cost-saving devices, something that could substitute for the human touch.  If we lose touch, if we lose the human moment, we also lose the biggest part of our ability to learn.

III:  The Work of Nations

We can reasonably predict that this is the decade of the tablet, and the decade of mobile broadband.  The two of them fuse in the iPad, to produce a platform which will transform education, allowing it to happen anywhere a teacher and a student share an agreement to work together.  But what will they be working on?  Next year we’ll see the rollout of the National Curriculum, which specifies the material to be covered in core subject areas in classrooms throughout the nation.

Many educators view the National Curriculum as a mandate for a bland uniformity, a lowest-common denominator approach to instruction, which will simply leave the teacher working point-by-point through the curriculum’s arc.  This is certainly not the intent of the project’s creators.  Dr. Evan Arthur, who heads up the Digital Educational Revolution taskforce in the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, publicly refers to the National Curriculum as a ‘greenfields’, as though all expectations were essentially phantoms of the mind, a box we draw around ourselves, rather than one that objectively exists.

The National Curriculum outlines the subject areas to be covered, but says very little if anything about pedagogy.  Instructors and school systems are free to exercise their own best judgment in selecting an approach appropriate to their students, their educators, and their facilities.  That’s good news, and means that any blandness that creeps into pedagogy because of the National Curriculum is more a reflection of the educator than the educational mandate.

Precisely because it places educators and students throughout the nation onto the same page, the National Curriculum also offers up an enormous opportunity.  We know that all year nine students in Australia will be covering a particular suite of topics.  This means that every educator and every student throughout the nation can be drawing from and contributing to a ‘common wealth’ of shared materials, whether they be podcasts of lectures, educational chatrooms, lesson plans, and on and on and on.  As the years go by, this wealth of material will grow as more teachers and more students add their own contributions to it.  The National Curriculum isn’t a mandate, per se; it’s better to think of it as an empty Wikipedia.  All the article headings are there, all the taxonomy, all the cross references, but none of the content.  The next decade will see us all build up that base of content, so that by 2020, a decade’s worth of work will have resulted in something truly outstanding to offer both educators and students in their pursuit of curriculum goals.
Well, maybe.

I say all of this as if it were a sure thing.  But it isn’t.  Everyone secretly suspects the National Curriculum will ruin education.  I ask that we can see things differently.  The National Curriculum could be the savior of education in the 21^st century, but in order to travel the short distance in our minds between where we are (and where we will go if we don’t change our minds) and where we need to be, we need to think of every educator in Australia as a contributor of value.  More than that, we need to think of every student in Australia as a contributor of value.  That’s the vital gap that must be crossed.  Educators spend endless hours working on lesson plans and instructional designs – they should be encouraged to share this work.  Many of them are too modest or too scared to trumpet their own hard yards – but it is something that educators and students across the nation can benefit from.  Students, as they pass through the curriculum, create their own learning materials, which must be preserved, where appropriate, for future years.

We should do this.  We need to do this.  Right now we’re dropping the best of what we have on the floor as teachers retire or move on in their careers.  This is gold that we’re letting slip through our fingers. We live in an age where we only lose something when we neglect to capture it. We can let ourselves off easy here, because we haven’t had a framework to capture and share this pedagogy.  But now we have the means to capture, a platform for sharing – the Ultranet, and a tool which brings access to everyone – the iPad.  We’ve never had these stars aligned in such a way before.  Only just now – in 2010 – is it possible to dream such big dreams.  It won’t even cost much money.  Yes, the state and federal governments will be investing in iPads and superfast broadband connections for the schools, but everything else comes from a change in our behavior, from a new sense of the full value of our activities.  We need to look at ourselves not merely as the dispensers of education to receptive students, but as engaged participant-creators working to build a lasting body of knowledge.

In so doing we tie everything together, from library science to digital citizenship, within an approach that builds shared value.  It allows a student in Bairnsdale to collaborate with another in Lorne, both working through a lesson plan developed by an educator in Katherine.  Or a teacher in Lakes Entrance to offer her expertise to a classroom in Maffra.  These kinds of things have been possible before, but the National Curriculum gives us the reason to do it.  iPad gives us the infrastructure to dream wild, and imagine how to practice some ‘creative destruction’ in the classroom – tearing down its walls in order to make the classroom a persistent, ubiquitous feature of the environment, to bring education everywhere it’s needed, to everyone who needs it, whenever they need it.

This means that all of the preceding is really part of a larger transformation, from education as this singular event that happens between ages six and twenty-two, to something that is persistent and ubiquitous; where ‘lifelong learning’ isn’t a catchphrase, but rather, a set of skills students begin to acquire as soon as they land in pre-kindy.  The wealth of materials which we will create as we learn how to share the burden of the National Curriculum across the nation have value far beyond the schoolhouse.  In a nation of immigrants, it makes sense to have these materials available, because someone is always arriving in the middle of their lives and struggling to catch up to and integrate themselves within the fabric of the nation.  Education is one way that this happens.  People also need to have increasing flexibility in their career choices, to suit a much more fluid labor market.  This means that we continuously need to learn something new, or something, perhaps, that we didn’t pay much attention to when we should have.  If we can share our learning, we can close this gap.  We can bring the best of what we teach to everyone who has the need to know.

And there we are.  But before I conclude, I should bring up the most obvious point –one so obvious that we might forget it.  The iPad is an excellent toy.  Please play with it.  I don’t mean use it.  I mean explore it.  Punch all the buttons.  Do things you shouldn’t do.  Press the big red button that says, “Don’t press me!”  Just make sure you have a backup first.

We know that children learn by exploration – that’s the foundation of Constructivism – but we forget that we ourselves also learn by exploration. The joy we feel when we play with our new toy is the feeling a child has when he confronts a box of LEGOs, or new video game – it’s the joy of exploration, the joy of learning.  That joy is foundational to us.  If we didn’t love learning, we wouldn’t be running things around here.  We’d still be in the trees.

My favorite toys on my iPad are Pocket Universe – which creates an 360-degree real-time observatory on your iPad; Pulse News – which brings some beauty to my RSS feeds; Observatory – which turns my iPad into a bit of an orrery; Air Video – which allows me to watch videos streamed from my laptop to my iPad; and GoodReader – the one app you simply must spend $1.19 on, because it is the most useful app you’ll ever own.  These are my favorites, but I own many others, and enjoy all of them.  There are literally tens of thousands to choose from, some of them educational, some, just for fun.  That’s the point: all work and no play makes iPad a dull toy.

So please, go and play.  As you do, you’ll come to recognize the hidden depths within your new toy, and you’ll probably feel that penny drop, as you come to realize that this changes everything.  Or can, if we can change ourselves.

I: The Drive to Connect

Recently I spent a weekend in Melbourne visiting my good friends Darren and Leah, whom I’ve known since I first moved to Australia.  Last December they conceived, and in early September Leah will give birth to their first child.  They’re excited and a bit scared – just like most first-time parents. Knowing it would be my last visit before their lives changed irrevocably, we enjoyed our weekend all the more, and talk inevitably shifted to The Right Way To Raise A Child.  There are theories upon theories, everything from controlled crying, to cosleeping, to carrying the child continuously for its first eighteen months of life, to teaching preverbal children sign language, to Steiner’s theories about the acquisition of reading and writing skills, and on and on.  For as long as there have been parents, there have been theories about the right way to raise a child.  We look back upon our grandparents and they seem almost barbarians to us: corporal punishment, children seen and not heard, spare the rod and spoil the child, everything that modern behavioral psychology tells us can warp and damage a child, turn them from positive and loving into neurotic and perpetually unhappy individuals.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, for some of us, this process of beggars maiming their own children so they can be better beggars came to a stop.  We wised up, stopped hitting our children, and started to respond to them as beautiful and unique individuals.  This is rather interesting in itself because, on occasion – and sometimes more than just on occasion – children are monsters.  They are self-centered, narcissistic, greedy, unthinking, unfeeling, controlling, manipulative, and ugly.  Yet this is as it should be; we accept behavior from children that would be shunned in an adult precisely because they are children.  We teach them the bounds of acceptable behavior, and we do this by interacting with them.  Alone a child will never learn self-control, or courtesy, or any affection for others.  It is only because we are social that we can impart the social graces.

That social part of us goes back far beyond our origin as a species, up the family tree at least ten million years, to Proconsul, the common ancestor of gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and humans.  Our ancient forbears had social graces of their own; we know this because all of the species descended from them have unique social capabilities.  This social capacity has been the cornerstone of our success.  Humans hunt in groups, forage in groups, share childbirth and childcare.  It is nearly impossible for a single adult to give birth and raise a child entirely on their own.  Our socialization is the safety net that allows humans to be children far longer than any other species, acquiring the enormous range of knowledge required to be wholly functional and well-integrated participants in civilization.  It’s a self-reinforcing loop: we spend a long time as children so we can become productive members of a culture whose offspring spend a long time as children.  Natural selection in action.

Our social capacity is the one thing that natural selection has always worked to optimize.  The most effectively socialized people have been able to use their social skills to make their way in the world, ensuring that they would live to pass those skills along to their children.  Nature has made us naturals.

In early September, when Leah gives birth, her child will know what to do without being taught, without being shown: that child will begin to form a deepening connection with the one person in her universe – Leah.  That bond will set the tone for all of the other human connections that follow.  Attachment theory – yet another of the popular theories of childhood development – rests the entire psychosexual development of the adult on this bond.  If it is interrupted, or corrupted, or simply does not exist, the child has little hope of normal development.  The connection to the mother is the primary connection.  As only makes sense.

As that child grows into a consciousness greater than that of the mother-child relationship, she recognizes the presence of her father.  This relationship will never have the same essential depth of her first relationship, but it represents the first echo; its form betrays the patterns of intimacy between mother and child.  Even if this relationship is fraught with difficulties, if the primary relationship is secure, the child will survive emotionally intact.  But should this relationship also prove secure, it will reinforce the child’s sense of emotional security.

And so it goes.  The child’s world will expand to encompass grandmother and grandfathers, aunts and uncles, and – with a bit of luck & time – siblings.  Each of these bonds will echo the primary bond, with opportunities within each of them for the child to explore her ever-increasing capability to connect, to communicate, to collaborate.  We know that these bonds are fundamental to our nature, that they sit within the prefrontal cortex, the newest part of our brains, the part which is freakishly bigger than in chimpanzees or gorillas.  We have a lot of room for these bonds, so as she grows up they come to fill her head.  In a very real sense, she carries around within her a miniature, interactive version of each person she has made a connection with.  We are finite, and these miniatures are terrifically rich and complex creations, so we can only find space between our ears for about 150 people, a physical limit known as ‘Dunbar’s Number’, after the anthropologist who discovered this rule nearly 20 years ago.  We can know more than 150 people, but we won’t know them well.

At least, that’s how it used to be.  For all of human history, until about three years ago, we were fundamentally constrained by our biology.  Now, with the rise of ‘social networks’ – which, I want to remind you, are not new in any way – we’ve accelerated our innate capabilities with the speed and power of computers, and amplified them with the reach of a global network which, in both Internet and mobile versions, touches nearly five billion people.  We can maintain some form of connection with several hundred – even thousands – of others.  This isn’t easy; it requires care and attention that could be directed to other, often more important things – such as driving a car, or listening to your partner at dinner, or doing your homework.  Nothing comes for free, and just because we can establish connections with thousands of others doesn’t mean we can manage those connections meaningfully.

This is the knife-edge of the present, because many of us – and certainly many of your students – are establishing far-flung networks of connections, but don’t wholly understand the cost/benefit relationship that comes with these networks.  We can give ourselves a pass on this – after all, this sort of thing simply wasn’t possible just a few years ago – but it’s a dilemma that will become a permanent fixture of 21^st century life.  We want to be able to ‘multitask’, to do everything at once, with everyone, everywhere, but studies show that the divided mind is incapable of depth.  We want to be connected, but we don’t want to be interrupted.  We want to be the life of the party, but we also want time to think.

This is the world of 2010.  This is how children present themselves as they enter secondary school.  And it’s only going to become more connected.  Leah’s child will grow up in a world which has begun to fetishize human connection.  We will manage those connections digitally, from the time we’re born until the moment we shuffle off this mortal coil.  This means that each child you encounter is not just one child, but the visible representative of an entire network that surrounds them, stretching outward, connecting them to friends and classmates and family, and finally, at the core, to mom.  This has always been the case, but it has always been implicit and inferred rather than explicit and immediately present.  Given that a child acquires their first mobile sometime between grade 3 and grade 7 (and that age is dropping) that network is always at arms reach, ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice.

How will these connections be used?  We have only the dimmest sense of that.  This is all so new and so raw there are no protocols, no learned behaviors, nothing that can be passed down from parent to child, or teacher to student, about the right way to behave, the right way to put all of this connectivity to work.  What we have now is chaos, as we cross a turbulent boundary between the calm but disconnected and internal world of the ‘before time’, and the unexpected, hyperconnected and immediate world of the present.

II: Call Centre

At the beginning of June, the London-based National Literacy Trust released a report with a stunning finding: kids were more likely to own a mobile (86%) than a book (73%).  I personally believe this finding highly suspect – all the children I know own tens or hundreds of books, that being how they learned to read – but it does point to the scale of the transformation underway, and how frightened we have become.  Another segment of the public is debating the death of the printed book, you are beginning to distribute textbooks in electronic form on your student’s laptops, and all of that is contributing more to the disappearance of the book than anything that might be caused by the sudden multiplication in human connectivity.

That multiplication begins somewhere between year 3 (on the low end) and year 10 (at the high end), when a child acquires their first mobile.  The age at which the child receives the handset frames the experience for the child: in year 3 the mobile is nearly always used to call mommy or daddy for a ride home from soccer practice, or a pickup from a friend’s party, or in case of emergencies.  It is not yet a fully realized social tool because these children don’t yet think in those terms.  But the device itself has a catalyzing effect on the bond between the child and her parents.

The maturation of the child into an adult can be characterized as a movement from complete dependence to complete independence.  Along the way the child explores all sorts of strategies to assert and maintain independence, starting with the ‘terrible twos’ and coming to a conclusion (one hopes) with the final send-off to university.  In the beginning, the child doesn’t want to be left alone, except on her terms.  By the teenage years, a hypersensitivity to embarrassment causes the child to flee from the parent in many public situations.  Underneath all of it, the strong, healthy, nurturing bond between parent and child gives her the belief that she can explore her freedom in safety.

That bond has been amplified and accelerated by the presence of the mobile.  Where the child would formerly have to ‘go it alone’, now she can turn to mom or dad with the press of a few buttons.  Any situation she finds confronting can instantly be elevated.  The cavalry is always on call, always available to come to the rescue.

Child psychologist and researcher Sherry Turkle recently made a cogent argument that this ‘tethered’ relationship leads to an extended period of infantilization in the child.  Always connected, the child never fully individuates, never ‘cuts the cord’ which binds the parent to the child.  I can see Turkle’s point – I even agree with it – but I would like to suggest that this entire process of individuation is very recent, an artifact of the last hundred years.  Before that, most families lived in close quarters for most of their lives.  Mom and dad were always available to solve a problem because they were always nearby.  In this sense, the mobile handset has retrieved a state of affairs which our highly mobile era of automobiles and jet travel had pushed into obsolescence.  And even more so: in the village the child could still wander some distance from the home; in 2010, home is no further away than the time it takes to dial mom.

The connectivity of the mobile is bilateral, and reinforces the relationship on both sides.  Parents have never before had the ability to stay continuously connected to their children, so we have no frame to help guide them into a healthy expression for this newfound capacity.  For some parents the lure of this connectivity is so strong it overwhelms whatever instinct they might have to allow their children to individuate naturally.  They become the child’s constant companion, ‘hovering’ nearby, either physically or virtually.  This phenomenon – ‘helicopter parenting’ – has become a topic of conversation in the United States, where it was first noticed, and where it is appearing with increasing frequency.  The helicopter parent manages the child’s life more-or-less completely, using a combination of strategies – some physical, and some virtual – to place the child within a protective cocoon.  The vicissitudes of the real world never impinge on that cocoon; the child is safe and protected every moment of the day.

Why would anyone opt for such a parenting strategy?  Here I’ll go out on a bit of a limb, and propound a theory in the absence of any proof – but a theory which can be put to the test.  The new field of sociobiology attempts to map observed behaviors in the animal kingdom to strategies for reproductive success.  For instance, it tackles the thorny problem of altruism – which vexed Darwin a hundred and fifty years ago – by observing that altruistic behavior tends to favor closely-related individuals.  Your genes may receive no immediate benefit from your selfless acts, but the genes of your sisters and their offspring probably will.  Sociobiology explains why a population of sterile worker bees will toil until mortally exhausted for their queen.

One of the key concepts in sociobiology is the idea of ‘genetic investment’; the greater the genetic investment, the stronger the relationship between parent and offspring.  Fish have tens of thousands of offspring, and release them to their fates.  Humans have just a handful – generally just one at a time – and consequently have a huge genetic investment.  I strongly suspect that the observed cases of helicopter parenting are, in the largest part, the parents of a single child.  The entire genetic investment is being wagered on a single throw of the dice.  This would naturally amplify any tendency toward the expression of highly protective behaviors – preserving the genetic investment.  When that becomes coupled to and amplified by the mobile, we get the world of 2010, where parents are now so tethered to their children that Forbes magazine recently reported on another and somewhat more disturbing phenomenon: Parents are now making follow-up calls to recruiters who have interviewed their children.  Some children even bring mom along on the job interview.

I’m not making that up.

We may be amused by these sorts of excesses, but they’re to be expected.  They’re a natural outcome of two intersecting trends: the decline in fertility, and the rise of hyperconnectivity.  When you have everything riding on a single child, you’re willing to assume a lot of the risk yourself.

This also means that the parent-child connection has assumed an immediacy and potency never before possible.  It is as if the child has the parent with them at all times, in every situation.  This is changing the nature of all of the child’s relationships, in particular those within the classroom.  A story related to me last year by a Victorian school administrator sums up this state of affairs perfectly: one day a teacher was giving one of her students a hard time because that student hadn’t completed his homework assignment.  During this verbal chewing out, the student carefully took his mobile out of his backpack, then dialed it.  He said hello to his parent, and then just after he said, “You listen to the bitch,” held the handset next to the teacher’s mouth.

I’m not making that up, either.

In that moment, the entire power relationship in the classroom, in the school, in the culture gets short-circuited.  That’s what networks do – they find a way around any neat systems or hierarchies or rules that they have no use for.  If that network happens to belong to a fourteen year-old with poor study habits and an attitude problem, then the fact that the homework assignment wasn’t completed is suddenly no longer his problem.  It has been elevated.  It has burst out of the cozy confines of the teacher-student relationship, and overflowed into all of the other connections that student chooses to invoke: parents, siblings, relatives, friends, and so on.  It is as if every student walks into the classroom equipped with a panic button which can instantly bring the educational process to a screaming halt.  If that panic button is connected to a parent already neurotically hypersensitive to anything which could disrupt the careful cocooning of the child, the educational process will break down from stresses it was not designed to accept.

That is the world we have walked into.

Many of you have specific policies in your schools regarding the use of mobiles, protocols over where and how and when and why they can empower students.  Some of you even ban mobiles outright.  Let me be clear: all of your policies are for naught.  All of your protocols mean nothing.  Any child who tastes the empowerment that comes with the network will not ever willingly surrender that empowerment.  If you try to suppress it, you will simply ensure that it will show up somewhere else, in a form that you can not control.

Your only solution is to make peace with the network, to embrace it and the new power relationships which it engenders.  In order to do that we must have a good think about how the network can be used to tame the network, about how you can empower yourselves.  You’re going to need to fight fire with fire.

III: Cry Havoc

So what do we do?  Issue teachers with mobiles and press them to sign up for Facebook accounts?  If only it were that straightforward.  If it were, I could send you out of here with marching orders, a battle plan that would bring a certain, sweet victory.  But this is not that kind of war.  This is a guerilla conflict, where progress is measured in inches and only after a long, hard slog.

By the time a student lands on your doorstep, they will have been connected – hyperconnected, really – for several years.  They will have forged and strengthened the bonds that tie them to their parents and their peers.  They bring that into every interaction with you, a classic example of asymmetric warfare.  You’re outmatched, outgunned and outwitted, not because you’re weak or dull, but because there are a lot more of them than there are of you.  They’re starting to recognize this, and put it to work.

You can not ban the mobile.  It’s here to stay, and it’s increasingly indispensable.  You can not sever the connections that come with the mobile, or Facebook, or Twitter, or text messaging, or whatever flavour-of-the-month gets invented tomorrow afternoon.  You can’t even reasonably hope to downplay their influence within the classroom.  They’re becoming too potent, and they will leak into your pedagogical spaces by any means necessary.

You must engage.  But we can not hand you a teenager and ask you to suddenly engage with them.  That simply won’t work.  Building the bond takes time; it’s a labour of love and an exercise in trust-building.  The best mentors and teachers know this and practice it within their classrooms.  But the classroom is suddenly everywhere.  The network has swept in, swept through, and blown down the classroom walls.  Educators and students are immersed in an ‘educational field’, something like a magnetic field, where amazing educational resources lie at tip of fingers, at the end of our hands.  We may worry about the accuracy of Wikipedia, but no one argues about its impact.  Anyone who has seen iTunes University, or downloaded an educational podcast knows about this ‘educational field’.  Education is freely available.  That is not in short supply.  What is in short supply – and always has been – is that moment of human contact, the connection which produces the transfer of insight, of skills, and understanding that won’t come from any webpage, however brilliant, or any podcast, however well-produced.

Students are connected as never before, but few of those connections lead to understanding.  This is the failure and the challenge of our generation.  It is a failure because we let the school grow up outside of the network, where we should have been binding the two together at every point.  It is our challenge because unless we do begin the hard work to knit these two together, we will see formal education become increasingly irrelevant in the presence of an ever-more-potent educational field.

Because the network is everywhere, the school is everywhere.  Because the school is everywhere, the hard-and-fast boundaries between school and the rest of life, as we live it in modern-day Australia, must collapse.  The idea that school is something that happens ‘over here’, while the rest of life is lived ‘over there’ doesn’t make sense anymore.  Given that the connections a child establishes from her earliest years persist throughout her lifetime, shouldn’t some of those connections – arguably, the second most important, after family – be to educators and educational resources?  These connections would become the core of the mentoring bond, which rises to work in partnership with the parental bond, a constant nurturing force throughout the passage into adulthood.

This is not the way we think of education today.  It’s not the way we think of culture today.  Yet it is the way culture is being practiced.  Helicopter parents are proof positive of this.  They represent a leading edge of a new wave of cultural forms which are the consequential result of hyperconnectivity.  Plug people together and they will behave differently.  Plug institutions into people and the people will transform those institutions.

We must begin somewhere.  Giving kids laptops is interesting and important but entirely insufficient.  We must give kids a reason to connect, something beyond pure sociality (which is also important but outside of the task at hand).  We must give them a reason to connect with knowledge.

We’re very lucky, because just at this moment in time, the Commonwealth has gifted us with the best reason we’re ever likely to receive – the National Curriculum.  Now that every student, everywhere across Australia, is meant to be covering the same materials, we have every reason to connect together – student to student, teacher to teacher, school to school, state to state.  The National Curriculum is thought of as a mandate, but it’s really the architecture of a network.  It describes how we all should connect together around a body of knowledge.  If we know that we should be teaching calculus or Mandarin or the Eureka Stockade rebellion, we have an opportunity to connect together, pool our knowledge and our ignorance, and work together.  We can use our hyperconnectivity to hyperempower our ability to work toward understanding.

Again, this is not the way we’re used to working.  We ask kids to collaborate on their projects, but a broader collaboration – which doesn’t end with the student, or the classroom, or the school, or the state – has remained frustratingly beyond our grasp.  It doesn’t even have a location in time; collaboration is not something that has temporal boundaries.  We collaborate while we have a need to do so, not because it’s ‘collaboration time’.  The network intrudes everywhere and everywhen.

Collaboration begins as soon as the child can communicate, though it is informal and ad-hoc.  As educators we need to think about how to begin the process of formal collaboration in pre-kindy.  At first, collaboration is a network between parents and carers and educators, but as the child progresses through the educational system, that network extends to other educators, other students, and other resources as the child has need.  The network constructs itself around the child at the same time the child is busily building her own network.

If we build an educational system which can do this (and I honestly don’t know that there’s any educational system, anywhere in the world thinking in these terms) we will have solved the problem of hyperconnective asymmetry.  We will be as connected as our students, we will be connected to them from long before they become our students, and will remain connected with them long after they have been our students.  School will not be a boundary.  It will be a gradient through which children move on their passage to adulthood, and, even then, will not leave them behind, because these connections open the doorway to lifelong learning.

Let me leave you with a warning, and a promise.  First the warning: If we simply try to make the teacher the locus of all of this hyperconnectivity, they will collapse from the over-connectivity.  Teachers are not switchboards; it is not up to them to hear every problem, arbitrate every dispute, or make every opening.  In a network the burden should be distributed – to other students, other teachers, other mentors, other parents, and other schools.  That means that power is going to be distributed very differently in the classroom.  It won’t always be clear who has the power.  That may look like chaos, but it will be a fecund chaos, where real learning takes place.

The helicopter parent is a herald of a new type of connectivity, which both empowers and infantilizes in equal measure.  As we come to embrace this more comprehensive connection, we will find ourselves both hyperempowered and disempowered.  Some things will not work, others will work far better than before.  It all comes back to the child, who always has the drive to connect.  It is in her genes.  It is all she is about.  If we can harness that drive to connect to the desire to learn, we will have comprehensively solved the problem of education in the 21^st century.  We will have created a platform for life-long learning, for a cradle-to-grave immersion in the educational field.  It’s worth working toward.  It restores the balance we lost as soon as we began to hyperconnect.  We’re near enough now to see the goal.  We have the vision.  All we need now are the will and the persistence to reach toward that promise.

Here’s my AISWA keynote.  The text is here.  Enjoy!

And here’s the Question & Answer session that followed:

I: The Educational Field

We live today in the age of networks.  Having grown from nothing just fifteen years ago, the network has become one of the principal influences in our lives.  We trust the network; we depend on the network; we use the network to make ourselves more effective.  This state of affairs did not develop gradually; rather, we have passed through a series of unpredicted and non-linear shifts in the fabric of culture.

The first of these shifts was coincident with the birth of the Web itself, back in the mid-1990s.  From its earliest days the Web was alluring because it represented all things to all people: it could serve as both resource and repository for anything that might interest us, a platform for whatever we might choose to say.  The truth of those earliest days is that we didn’t really know what we wanted to say; the stereotype of the page where one went on long and lovingly about one’s pussy carries an echo of that search for meaning.   The lights were on, but nobody was home.

Drawing the curtain on this more-or-less vapid era of the Web, the second shift began with the collapse of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s.  The undergrowth cleared away, people could once again focus on the why of the Web.  This was when the Web came into its own as an interactive medium.  The Web could have been an interactive medium from day one – the technology hadn’t changed one bit – but it took time for people to map out the evolving relationship between user and experience.  The Web, we realized, is not a page to read, but rather, a space for exploration, connection and sharing.

This is when things start to get interesting, when ideas like Wikipedia begin to emerge.  Wikipedia is not a technology, at least, it’s not a specific technology.  Wikis have been around since 1995, nearly as old as the Web itself.  Databases are older than the Web, too.  So what is new about Wikipedia?  Simply this: the idea of sharing.  Wikipedia invites us all to share from our expertise, for the benefit of one another.  It is an agreement to share what we know to collectively improve our capability.  If you strip away all of the technology, and all of the hype – both positive and negative –from Wikipedia, what you’re left with is this agreement to share.  In the decade since Wikipedia’s launch we’ve learned to share across a broad range of domains.  This sharing supported by technology is a new thing, and dramatically increases the allure of the network.  What was merely very interesting back in 1995 became almost overpowering in the years since the turn of the millennium.  It has consistently become harder and harder to imagine a life without the network, because the network provides so much usefulness, and so much utility.

The final shift occurred in 2007, as Facebook introduced F8, its plug-in architecture which opened its design – and its data – to outside developers.  Facebook exploded from a few million users to over four hundred million: the third largest nation in the world.  Social networks are significant because they harness and amplify our innate human desire and capability to connect with one another.  We constantly look to our social networks – that is, our real-world networks – to remind us who we are, where we are, and what we’re doing.  These social network provide our ontological grounding.  When translated into cyberspace, these social networks can become almost impossibly potent – which is why, when they’re used to bully or harass someone, they can lead to such disastrous results.  It becomes almost too easy, and we become almost too powerful.

A lot of what we’ll see in this decade is an assessment of what we choose to do with our new-found abilities.  We can use these social networks to transmit pornographic pictures of one another back and forth at such frequency and density that we simply numb ourselves into a kind of fleshy hypnosis.  That is one possible direction for the future.  Or, we could decide that we want something different for ourselves, something altogether more substantial and meaningful.  But in order to get that sort of clarity, we need to be very clear on what we want – both direction and outcome.  At this point we are simply playing around – with a loaded weapon – hoping that it doesn’t accidentally go off.

Of course it does; someone sets up a Facebook page to memorialize a murdered eight year-old, but leaves the door open to all comers (believing, unrealistically, that others will share their desire to mourn together), only to see the overflowing sewage of the Internet spill bile and hatred and psychopathology onto a Web page.  This happens again and again; it happened several times in one week in February.  We are not learning the lesson we are meant to learn.  We are missing something.  Partly this is because it is all so new, but partly it is because we do not know what our own intentions are.  Without that, without a stated goal, we can not winnow the wheat from the chaff.  We will forget to close the windows and lock the doors.  We will amuse ourselves to death.

I mention this because, as educators, it is up to all of us to act as forces for the positive moral good of the culture as a whole.  Cultural values are transmitted by educators; and while parents may be a bigger influence, teachers have their role to play.  Parents are simply overwhelmed by all of this novelty – the Web wasn’t around when they were children, and social networks weren’t around even five years ago.  So, right at this moment in time, educators get to be the adult cultural vanguard, the vital mentoring center.

If we had to do this ourselves, alone, as individuals – or even as individual institutions – the project would almost certainly fail.  After all, how could we hope to balance all of the seductions ‘out there’ against the sense which needs to be taught ‘in here’?  We would simply be overwhelmed – our current condition.  Fortunately, we are as well connected, at least in potential, as any of our students.  We have access to better resources.  And we have more experience, which allows us to put those resources to work.  In short, we are far better placed to make use of social media than our charges, even if they seem native to the medium while we profess to be immigrants.

One thing that has changed, because of the second shift, the trend toward sharing, is that educational resources are available now as never before.  Wikipedia led the way, but it is just small island in a much large sea of content, provided by individuals and organizations throughout the world.  iTunes University, YouTube University, the numberless podcasts and blogs that have sprung up from experts on every subject from macroeconomics to the history of Mesoamerica – all of it searchable by Google, all of it instantaneously accessible – every one of these points to the fact that we have clearly entered a new era, where we are surrounded by and saturated with an ‘educational field’ of sorts.  Whatever you need to know, you’re soaking in it.

This educational field is brand-new.  No one has made systematic use of it, no teacher, no institution, no administration.  But that doesn’t lessen its impact.  We all consult Wikipedia when we have some trivial question to answer; that behavior is the archetype for where education is headed in the 21^st century – real-time answers on-demand, drawn from the educational field.

Paired with the educational field is the ability for educators to establish strong social connections – not just with other educators, but laterally, through the student to the parents, through the parents to the community, and so on, so that the educator becomes ineluctably embedded in a web of relationships which define, shape and determine the pedagogical relationship.  Educators have barely begun to make use of the social networking tools on offer; just to have a teacher ‘friend’ a student in Facebook is, to some eyes, a cause for concern – what could possibly be served by that relationship, one which subverts the neat hierarchy of the 19^th century classroom?

The relationship is the essence of the classroom, that which remains when all the other trivia of pedagogy are stripped away.  The relationship between the teacher and the student is at the core of the magical moment when knowledge is transmitted between the generations.  We now have the greatest tool ever created by the hand of man to reinforce and strengthen that relationship.  And we need to use it, or else we will all sink beneath a rising tide of noise and filth and distraction.

But how?

II: The Unfinished Project

The roots of today’s talk lie in a public conversation I had with Dr. Evan Arthur, who manages the Digital Education Revolution Group within the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations.  As part of this conversation, I asked him about educational styles, and, in particular, Constructivism.  As conceived by Jean Piaget and his successors across the 20^th century, Constructivism states that the child learns through play – or rather, through repeated interactions with the world.  Schema are created by the child, put to the test, where they either succeed or fail.  Failed schema are revised and re-tested, while successful schema are incorporated into ever-more-comprehensive schema.  Through many years of research we know that we learn the physics of the real world through a constant process of experimentation.  Every time a toddler dumps a cup of juice all over himself, he’s actually conducting an investigation into the nature of the real.

The basic tenets of Constructivism are not in dispute, although many educators have consistently resisted the underlying idea of Constructivism – that it is the child who determines the direction of learning.  This conflicts directly with the top-down teacher-to-student model of education which we are all intimate familiar with, which has determined the nature of pedagogy and even the architecture of our classrooms.  This is the grand battle between play and work; between ludic exploration and the hard grind of assimilating the skills that situate us within an ever-more-complex culture.

At the moment, this trench warfare has frozen us in a stalemate located, for the most part, between year two and year three.  In the first two years education has a strong ludic component, and students are encouraged to explore.  But in year three the process becomes routinized, formalized and very strict.  Certainly, eight-year-olds are better able to understand restrictions than six-year-olds.  They’re better at following the rules, at colouring within the lines.  But it seems as though we’ve taken advantage of the fact that an older child is a more compliant one.  It is true that as we advance in years, our ludic nature becomes tempered by an adult’s sensibility.  But humans retain the urge to play throughout their lives – to a greater degree than any other species we know of.  It could very well be that our ability to learn is intimately tied to our desire to play.

If we are prepared to swallow this bitter pill, and acknowledge that play is an essential part of the learning process, we have no choice but to follow this idea wherever it leads us.  Which leads me back to my conversation with Dr. Arthur.  I asked him about the necessity of play, and he framed his response by talking about “The Unfinished Constructivist Project”.  It is a revolution trapped in mid-stride, a revelation that, somehow, hasn’t penetrated all the way through our culture.  We still insist that instruction is the preferred mechanism for education, when we have ample evidence to suggest this simply isn’t true.  Let me be clear: instruction is not the same thing as guidance.  I am not suggesting that children simply do as they please.  The more freedom they have, the more need they have for a strong, stabilizing force to guide them as they explore.  This may be the significant (if mostly hidden) objection to the Constructivist project: it is simply too expensive.  The human resources required to give each child their own mentor as they work their way through the corpus of human knowledge would simply overwhelm any current educational model, with the exception of homeschooling.  I don’t know what the student-teacher ratio would need to be in a fully realized Constructivist educational system, but I doubt that twenty-to-one would be sufficient.  That’s the level needed to maintain a semblance of order, more a peacekeeping force than an army of mentors.

There have been occasional attempts to create a fully Constructivist educational system, but these, like the manifold utopian communities which have been founded, flourish briefly, then fade or fracture, and do not survive the test of time.  The level of dedication and involvement required from both educator/mentors and parents is simply too big an ask.  This is the sort of thing that a hunter-gatherer culture has no trouble with: the entire world is the classroom, the child explores it, and an adult is always there to offer an explanation or story to round out the child’s knowledge.  We live in an industrial culture (at least, our classrooms do), where there is strict differentiation between ‘education’ and the other activities in life, where adults are ‘educators’ or they are not, where everything is highly formal, almost ritualized.  (Consider the highly regulated timings of the school day – equal parts order from chaos, and ritual.)  There could never be enough support within such a framework to sustain a Constructivist model.  This is why we have the present stalemate; we know the right thing to do, but, heretofore, we have lacked the resources to actualize this knowledge.

That has now changed.

The educational field must be recognized as the key element which will power the unfinished Constructivist revolution.  The educational field does not recognize the boundaries of the classroom, the institution, or even the nation.  It is simply pervasive, ubiquitous and available as needed.  Within that field, both students and educator/mentors can find all of the resources needed to make the Constructivist project a continuing success.  There need be no rupture between years two and three, no transformation of educational style from inward- to outward-directed.  Instead, there can and should be a continual deepening of the child’s exploration of the corpus of knowledge, under the guidance of a network of mentors who share the burden.  We already have most of the resources in place to assure that the child can have a continuous and continually strengthening relationship with knowledge: Wikipedia, while not perfect, points toward the kinds of knowledge sharing systems which will become both commonplace and easily created throughout the 21^st century.

Sharing needs to become a foundational component in a modern educational system.  Every time a teacher finds a resource to aid a student in their exploration, that should be noted and shared broadly.  As students find things on their own – and they will be far better at it than most educators – these, too, should be shared.  We should be creating a great, linked trail behind us as we learn, so that others, when exploring, will have paths to guide them – should they choose to follow.  We have systems that can do this, but we have not applied these systems to education – in large part because this is not how we conceive of education.  Or rather, this is not how we conceive of education in the classroom.  I do a fair bit of corporate consulting, and this sort of ‘knowledge capture’ and ‘knowledge management’ is becoming essential to the operation of a 21^st century business.  Many businesses are creating their own, ad-hoc systems to share knowledge resources among their staff, as they understand how important this is for professional development.

This is a new battle line opened up in the war between the unfinished constructivist project and the older, more formal methods of education.  The corporate world doesn’t have time for methodologies which have become obsolete.  Employees must be constantly up-to-date.  Professionals – particularly doctors and lawyers – must remain continuously well-informed about developments in their respective fields.  Those in management need real-time knowledge streams in order recognize and solve problems as they emerge.  This is all much more ludic than formal, much more self-directed than guided, much more juvenile than adult – even though these are all among the most adult of all activities.  This disjunction, this desynchronization between the needs of the world-at-large and the delivery capabilities of an ever-more-obsolete educational system is the final indictment of things-as-they-are.  Things will change; either education will become entirely corporatized, or educators will wholly embrace the unfinished Constructivist project.  Either way the outcome will be the same.

Fortunately, the educational field has something else to offer educators beyond the near-infinite supply of educational resources.  It is a network of individuals.  It is a social network, connected together via bonds of familiarity and affinity.  The student is embedded in a network with his mentors; the mentors are connected to other students, and to other mentors; everyone is connected to the parents, and the community.  In this sense, the formal space of the ‘classroom’ collapses, undone by the pressure provided by the social network, which has effectively caused the classroom walls to implode.  The outside world wants to connect to what happens within the crucible of the classroom, or, more specifically, with the magical moment of knowledge transference within the student’s mind.  This is what we should be building our social networks to support.  At present, social networks like Facebook and Twitter are dull, unsophisticated tools, capable of connecting together, but completely inadequate when it comes to shaping that connection around a task – such as mentoring, or exploring knowledge.  A second generation of social networks is already reaching release.  These tools display a more sophisticated edge, and will help to support the kinds of connections we need within the educational field.

None of this, as wonderful as it might sound (and I admit that it may also seem pretty frightening) is happening in a vacuum.  There are larger changes afoot within Australia, and no vision for the future of education in Australia could ignore them.  We must find a way to harmonize those changes with the larger, more fundamental changes overtaking the entire educational system.

III: The National Curriculum

Underlying fear of a Constructivist educational project is that it would simply give children an excuse to avoid the tough work of education.  There is a persistent belief that children will simply load up on educational ‘candy’, without eating their all-so-essential ‘vegetables’, that is, the basic skills which form the foundation for future learning.  Were children left entirely to their own devices, there might be some danger of this – though, now that we live in the educational field, even that possibility seems increasingly remote.  Children do not live in isolation: they are surrounded by adults who want them to grow into successful adults.  In prehistoric times, adults simply had to be adults around children for the transference of life-skills to take place.  Children copied, imitated, and aped adults – and still do.  This learning-by-mimesis is still a principle factor in the education of the child, though it is not one which is often highlighted by the educational system.  Industrial culture has separated the adult from the child, putting one into the office, the other into the school.  That separation, and the specialization which is the hallmark of the Industrial Age, broke the natural and persistent mentorship of parenting into discrete units: this much in the home, this much in the school.  If we do not trust children to consume a nourishing diet of knowledge, it is because we do not trust ourselves to prepare it for them.  The separation by function led to a situation where no one is responsible for the whole thread of the life.  Parents look to teachers.  Teachers look to parents.  Everyone, everywhere, looks to authority for responsible solutions.

There is no authority anywhere.  Either we do this ourselves, or it will not happen.  We have to look to ourselves, build the networks between ourselves, reach out and connect from ourselves, if we expect to be able to resist a culture which wants to turn the entire human world into candy.  This is not going to be easy; if it were, it would have happened by itself.  Nor is it instantaneous.  Nothing like this happens overnight.  Furthermore, it requires great persistence.  In the ideal situation, it begins at birth and continues on seamlessly until death.  In that sense, this connected educational field mirrors and is a reflection of our human social networks, the ones we form from our first moments of awareness.  But unlike that more ad-hoc network, this one has a specific intent: to bring the child into knowledge.

Knowledge, of course, is very big, very vague, mostly undefined.  Meanwhile, there are specific skills and bodies of knowledge which we have nominated as important: the ability to read and write; to add and subtract, multiply and divide; a basic understanding of the physical and living worlds; the story of the nation and its peoples.  These have very recently been crystallized in a ‘National Curriculum’, which seeks to standardize the pedagogical outcomes across Australia for all students in years 1 through 10.  Parents and educators have already begun to argue about the inclusion or exclusion of elements within that curriculum.  I was taught phonics over forty years ago, but apparently it’s still a matter of some debate.  The teaching of history is always going to be contentious, because the story we tell ourselves about who we are is necessarily political.  So the adults will argue it out – year after year, decade after decade – while the educators and students face this monolithic block of text which seems to be the complete antithesis of the Constructivist project.  And, looked at one way, the National Curriculum is exactly the type of top-down, teacher-to-student, sit-down-and-shut-up sort of educational mandate which is no longer effective in the business world.

All of which means its probably best that we avoid viewing up the National Curriculum as a validation, encouraging us to continue on with things as they are.  Instead, it should be used as mandate for change.  There are several significant dimensions to this mandate.

First, putting everyone onto the same page, pedagogically, opens up an opportunity for sharing which transcends anything before possible.  Teachers and students from all over Australia can contribute to or borrow from a wealth of resources shared by those who have passed before them through the National Curriculum.  Every teacher and every student should think of themselves as part of a broader collective of learners and mentors, all working through the same basic materials.  In this sense, the National Curriculum isn’t a document so much as it is the architecture of a network.  It is the way all things educational are connected together.  It is the wiring underneath all of the pedagogy, providing both a scaffolding and a switchboard for the learning moment.

Is it possible to conceive of a library organized along the lines of the National Curriculum?  Certainly a librarian would have no problem configuring a physical library to meet the needs of the curriculum.  It’s even easier to organize similar sorts of resources in cyberspace.  Not only is it easy, there’s now a mandate to do so.  We know what sorts of resources we’ll need, going forward.  Nothing should be stopping us from creating collective resources – similar to an Australian Wikipedia, and perhaps drawing from it – which will serve the pedagogical requirements of the National Curriculum.  We should be doing this now.

Second, we need to think of the National Curriculum as an opportunity to identify all of the experts in all of the areas covered by the curriculum, and, once they’ve been identified, we must create a strong social network, with them inside, giving them pride of place as ‘nodes of expertise’.  Knowledge is not enough; it must be paired with mentors who have been able to put that knowledge into practice with excellence.  The National Curriculum is the perfect excuse to bring these experts together, to make them all connected and accessible to everyone throughout the nation who could benefit from their wisdom.

Here, once again, it is best to think of the National Curriculum not as a document but as a network – a way to connect things, and people, together.  The great strength of the National Curriculum is, as Dr. Evan Arthur put it, that it is a ‘greenfields’.  Literally anything is possible.  We can go in any direction we choose.  Inertia would have us do things as we’ve always done them, even as the centrifugal forces of culture beyond the classroom point in a different direction.  Inertia can not be a guiding force.  It must be resisted, at every turn, not in the pursuit of some educational utopia or false revolution, but rather because we have come to realize that the network is the educational system.

Moving from where we are to where need to be seems like a momentous transition.  But the Web saw repeated momentous transitions in its first fifteen years and we managed all of those successfully.  We can absorb huge amounts of change and novelty so long as the frame which supports us is strong and consistent.  That’s the essence of the parent-child relationship: so long as the child feels it is being cared for, it can endure almost anything.  This means that we shouldn’t run around freaking out.  The sky is not falling.  The world is not ending.  If anything, we are growing closer together, more connected, becoming more important to one another.  It may feel a bit too close from time to time, as we learn how to keep a healthy distance in these new relationships, but that closeness supports us all.  It can keep children from falling through the net of opportunity.  It can see us advance into a culture where every child has the full benefit of an excellent education, without respect to income or circumstance.

That is the promise.  We have the network.  We live in the educational field.  We now have the National Curriculum to wire it all together.  But can we marry the demands of the National Curriculum with the ludic call of Constructivism?  Can we create a world where literally we play into learning?  This is more than video games that have math drills embedded into them.  It’s about capturing the interests of a child and using that as a springboard for the investigation of their world, their nation, their home.  That can only happen if mentors are deeply involved and embedded in the child’s life from its earliest years.

I don’t have any easy answers here.  There is no magic wand to wave over this whole uncoordinated mess to make it all cohere.  No one knows what’s expected of them anymore – educators least of all.  Are we parents?  Are we ‘friends’?  Where do we stand?  I know this: we stand most securely when we stand connected.

I: Sharing

This is the era of sharing. When the histories of our time are written a hundred years from now, sharing is the salient feature which historians will focus upon. The entirety of culture, from 1999 forward, looks like a gigantic orgy of sharing.

This morning I want to take a look at this phenomenon in some detail, and tie it into some Australian educational ‘megatrends’ – forces which are altering the landscape throughout the nation. Sharing can be used as an engine to power these forces, but that will only happen if we understand how sharing works.

At some level, sharing is totally familiar to us – we’ve been sharing since we’ve been very small. But sharing, at least in the English language, has two slightly different meanings: we can share things, or we can share thoughts. We adults spend a lot of time teaching children the importance of sharing their things; we never need to teach them to share their thoughts. The sharing of things is a cultural behavior, valued by our civilization, whereas the sharing of thoughts is an innate behavior – probably located somewhere deep in our genes.

Fifteen years ago, Nicholas Negroponte characterized this as the divide between bits and atoms. We have to teach children to share their atoms – their toys and games – but they freely share their bits. In fact, they’re so promiscuous with their bits that this has produced its own range of problems.

It was only a decade ago that Shawn Fanning released a program which he’d written for his mates at Boston’s Northeastern University. Napster allowed anyone with a computer and a broadband internet connection to share their MP3 music files freely. Within a few months, millions of broadband-connected college students were freely trading their music collections with one another – without any thought of copyright or ownership. Let me reiterate: thoughts of copyright or piracy simply didn’t enter into their thinking. To them, this was all about sharing.

This act of sharing was a natural consequence of the ‘hyperconnectivity’ these kids had achieved via their broadband connections. When you connect people together, they will begin to share the things they care about. If you build a system that allows them to share the music they care about, they’ll share that. If you build a system that allows them to share the videos they care about, they’ll share that. If you build a system that allows them to share the links they care about, they’ll share them.

Clever web developers and entrepreneurs have built all of these systems, and many, many more. For the first time we can use technology to accelerate and amplify the innate human desire to share bits, and so, in a case of history repeating itself, we have amplified our social and sharing systems the way the steam engine amplified our physical power two hundred years ago.

In the earliest years of this sharing revolution, people shared the objects of culture: music, videos, jokes, links, photos, writing, and so on. Just this alone has had an enormous impact on business and culture: the recording industries, which were flying high a decade ago, have been humbled. Television networks have gotten in front of the Internet distribution of their own shows, to take the sting out of piracy. Newspapers, caught in the crossfire between a controlled system of distribution and a world where everyone distributes everything, have begun to disappear. And this is just the beginning.

In 2001, another experiment in sharing started in earnest: Wikipedia encouraged a small community of contributors to add their own entries to an ever-expanding encyclopedia. In this case contributors were asked to share their knowledge – however specific or particular – to a greater whole. Although it grew slowly in its earliest days, after about 2 years Wikipedia hit an inflection point and began to grow explosively.

Knowledge seems to have a gravitational quality; when enough of it is gathered together in one place, it attracts more knowledge. That’s certainly the story of Wikipedia, which has grown to encompass more than three million articles in English, on nearly every topic under the sun. Wikipedia is only the most successful of many efforts to produce a ‘collective intelligence’ out of the ‘wisdom of crowds’. There are many others – including one I’ll come to shortly.

One of the singular features of Wikipedia – one that we never think about even though it’s the reason we use Wikipedia – is simply this: Wikipedia makes us smarter. We can approach Wikipedia full of ignorance and leave it knowing a lot of facts. Facts need to be put into practice before they can be transformed into knowledge, but at least with Wikipedia we now have the opportunity to load up on the facts. And this is true globally: because of Wikipedia every single one of us now has the opportunity to work with the best possible facts. We can use these facts to make better decisions, decisions which will improve our lives. Wikipedia may seem innocuous, but it’s really quite profound.

How profound? If we peel away all of the technology behind Wikipedia, all of the servers and databases and broadband connections of the world’s sixth most popular website, what are we left with? Only this: an agreement to share what we know. It’s that agreement, and not the servers or databases or bandwidth which makes Wikipedia special, and it’s that agreement historians will be writing about in a hundred years. That agreement will endure – even if, for some bizarre reason, Wikipedia should cease to exist – because that agreement is one of the engines driving our culture forward.

Another example of sharing, just as relevant to educators, comes from a site which launched back in 1999 as TeacherRatings.com. Like Wikipedia, it grew slowly, and went through ownership changes, emerging finally as RateMyProfessors.com, which is owned by MTV, and which now boasts ten million ratings of one million professors, lecturers and instructors. This huge wealth of ratings came about because RateMyProfessors.com attached itself to the innate desire to share. Students want to share their experiences with their instructors, and RateMyProfessors.com gives them a forum to do just that.

Just as is the case with Wikipedia, anyone can become smarter by using RateMyProfessors.com. You can learn which instructors are good teachers, which grade easily, which will bore you to tears, and so forth. You can then put that information to work to make your life better – avoiding the professors (or schools) which have the worst teachers, taking courses from the instructors who get the highest scores.

That shared knowledge, put to work, changes the power balance within the university. For the last six hundred years, universities have been able to saddle students with lousy instructors – who might happen to be fantastic researchers – and there wasn’t much that students could do about it except grumble. Now, with RateMyProfessors.com, students can pass their hard-won knowledge down to subsequent generations of students. The university proposes, the student disposes. Worse still, the instructors receiving the highest ratings on RateMyProfessors.com have been the subjects of bidding wars, as various universities try to woo them, and add them to their faculties. All of this has given students a power they’ve never had, a power they never could have until they began to share their experiences, and translate that shared knowledge into action.

Sharing is wonderful, but sharing has consequences. We can now amplify and accelerate our sharing so that it can cross the world in a matter of moments, copied and replicated all the way. The power of the network has driven us into a new era. Sharing culture, knowledge, and power has destabilized all of our institutions. Businesses totter and collapse; universities change their practices; governments create task forces to get in front of what everyone calls ‘something-2.0’. It could be web2.0, education2.0, or government2.0. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that something big is happening, and it’s all driven by our ability to share.

OK, so we can share. But why? How does it matter to us?

II: Greenfields

Before we can look at why sharing matters so much in this particular moment, we need to spend some time examining the three big events which will revolutionize education in Australia over the next decade. Each of them are entirely revolutionary in themselves; their confluence will result in a compressed wave of change – a concrescence – that will radically transform all educational practice.

The first of these events will affect all Australians equally. At this moment in time, Australia lives with medium-to-low-end broadband speeds, and most families have broadband connections which, because of metering, fundamentally limit their use. This is how it’s been since the widespread adoption of the Internet in the mid-1990s, and it’s nearly impossible to imagine that things could be different. The hidden lesson of the last fifteen years is that the Internet is something that needs to be rationed carefully, because there’s not enough to go around.

The Government wants us to adopt a different point of view. With the National Broadband Network (NBN), they intend to build a fibre-optic infrastructure which will deliver at least 100 megabit-per-second connections to every home, every school, and every business in Australia. Although no one has come out and said it explicitly, it’s clear that the Government wants this connection to be unmetered – the Internet will finally be freely available in Australia, as it is in most other countries.

How this will change our usage of the Internet is anyone’s guess. And this is the important point – we don’t know what will happen. We have critics of the NBN claiming that there’s no good reason for it, that Australians are already adequately served by the broadband we’ve already got, but I regularly hear stories of schools which block YouTube – not because of its potentially distracting qualities, but because they can’t handle the demand for bandwidth.

That, writ large, describes Australia in 2009. Broadband is the oxygen of the 21st century. Australia has been subjected to a slow strangulation. Once we can breathe freely, new horizons will open to us. We know this is true from history: no one really knew what we’d do with broadband once we got it. No one predicted Napster or YouTube or Skype, no one could have predicted any of them – or any of a thousand other innovations – before we had widespread access to broadband. Critics who argue there’s no need for high-speed broadband have simply failed to learn the lessons of history.

Now, before you think that I’m carrying the Government’s water, let me find fault with a few things. I believe that the Government isn’t thinking big enough – by the time the NBN is fully deployed, around 2017, a hundred megabit-per-second connection will simply be mid-range among our OECD peers. The Government should have accepted the technical challenge and gone for a gigabit network. Eventually, they will. Further, I believe the NBN will come with ‘strings attached’, specifically the filtering and regulatory regime currently being proposed by Senator Conroy’s ministry. The Government wants to provide the nation a ‘clean feed’, sanitized according to its interpretation of the law; when everyone in Australia gets their Internet service from the Commonwealth, we may have no choice in the matter.

The next event – and perhaps the most salient, in the context of this conference – is the Government’s commitment to provide a computer to every student in years 9 through 12. During the 2007 election, the Prime Minister talked about using computers for ‘math drills’ and ‘foreign language training’. The line about providing computers in the classroom was a popular one, although it is now clear that the Government’s ministers didn’t think through the profound effect of pervasive computing in the classroom.

First, it radically alters the power balance in the classroom. Most students have more facility with their computers than their teachers do. Some teachers are prepared to work from humility and accept instruction from their students. For other teachers, such an idea is anathema. The power balance could be righted somewhat with extensive professional development for the teachers – and time for that professional development – but schools have neither the budget nor the time to allow for this. Instead, the computers are being dumped into the classroom without any thought as to how they will affect pedagogy.

Second, these computers are being handed to students who may not be wholly aware of the potency of these devices. We’ve seen how a single text message, forwarded endlessly, can spark a riot on a Sydney beach, or how a party invitation, posted to Facebook, can lead to a crowd of five hundred and a battle with the police. Do teenagers really understand how to use the network to their advantage, how to reinforce their own privacy and protect themselves? Do they know how easy it is to ruin their own lives – or someone else’s – if they abuse the power of the network, that amplifier and accelerator of sharing?

Teachers aren’t the only ones who need some professional development. We need to provide a strong curriculum in ‘digital citizenship’; just as teenagers get instruction before they get a driver’s license, so they need instruction before they get to ‘spin the wheels’ of these ubiquitous educational computers.

This isn’t a problem that can be solved by filtering the networks at the schools. Students are surrounded by too many devices – mobiles as well as computers – which connect to the network and which require a degree of caution and education. This isn’t a job that the schools should be handling alone; this is an opportunity for all of the adult voices of culture – parents, caretakers, mentors, educators and administrators – to speak as one about the potentials and pitfalls of network culture.

Finally, what is the goal here? Right now the students and teachers are getting their computers. Next year the deployment will be nearly complete. What, in the end, is the point? Is it simply to give Kevin Rudd a tick on his ‘promises fulfilled’ list when he goes up for re-election? Or is this an opening to something greater? Is this simply more of the same or something new? I haven’t seen any educator anywhere present anything that looks at all like an integrated vision of what these laptops mean to students, teachers or the classroom. They’re bling: pretty, but an entirely useless accessory. I’m not saying that this is a bad initiative – indeed, I believe the Government should be lauded for its efforts. But everything, thus far, feels only like a beginning, the first meter around a very long course.

Now we come to the most profound of the three events on the educational horizon: the National Curriculum. Although the idea of a national curriculum has been mooted by several successive governments, it looks as though we’ll finally achieve a deliverable curriculum sometime in the early years of the Rudd Government. There’s a long way to go, of course – and a lot of tussling between the states and the various educational stakeholders – but the process is well underway. It’s expected that curricula in ‘English, Mathematics, the Sciences and History’ will be ready for implementation in the start of 2011, not very far away. As these are the core elements in any school curriculum, they will affect every school, every teacher, and every student in Australia.

A few weeks ago I got the opportunity to share the stage with Dr. Evan Arthur, the Group Manager of the Digital Education Group at the Commonwealth Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. During a ‘fireside chat’, when I asked him a series of questions, the topic turned to the National Curriculum. At this point Dr. Arthur became rather thoughtful, and described the National Curriculum as a “greenfields”. He went on to describe the curriculum documents, when completed, as a set of ‘strings’ which could be handled almost as if they were a Christmas tree, ready to have content hung all over them. The National Curriculum means that every educator in Australia is, for the first time, working to the same set of ‘strings’.

That’s when I became aware that Dr. Arthur saw the National Curriculum as an enormous opportunity to redraw the possibilities for education. We are all being given an opportunity to start again – to throw out the old rule book and start over with another one. But in order to do this we’ll have to take everything we’ve covered already – about sharing, the National Broadband Network, the Digital Education Revolution and the National Curriculum, then blend them together. Together they produce a very potent mix, a nexus of possibilities which could fundamentally transform education in Australia.

III: At The Nexus

Our future is a future of sharing; we’ll be improving constantly, finding better and better ways to share with one another. To this I want to add something more subtle; not a change in technology – we have a lot of technology – but rather, a change of direction and intent. We could choose to see the National Curriculum as simply another mandate from the Federal government, something that will make the educational process even more formal, rigorous, and lifeless. That option is open to us – and, to many of us, that’s the only option visible. I want to suggest that there is another, wildly different path open before us, right next to this well-trodden and much more prosaic laneway. Rather than viewing the National Curriculum as a done deal, wouldn’t it be wiser if we consider it as an open invitation to participation and sharing?

After all, the National Curriculum mandates what must be taught, but says little to nothing about how it gets taught. Teachers remain free to pursue their own pedagogical ends. That said, teachers across Australia will, for the first time, be pursing the same ends. This opens up a space and a rationale for sharing that never existed before. Everyone is pulling in the same direction; wouldn’t it make sense for teachers, students, administrators and parents to share the experience?

Let’s be realistic: whether or not we seek to formalize this sharing of experience, it will happen anyway, on BoredOfStudies.org, RateMyTeachers.com, a hundred other websites, a thousand blogs, a hundred thousand Facebook profiles, and a million tweets. But if it all happens out there, informally, we miss an enormous opportunity to let sharing power our transition to into the National Curriculum. We’d be letting our greatest and most powerful asset slip through our fingers.

So let me turn this around and project us into a future where we have decided to formalize our shared experience of the National Curriculum. What might that look like? A teacher might normally prepare their curriculum and pedagogical materials at the beginning of the school term; during that preparation process they would check into a shared space, organized around the National Curriculum (this should be done formally, through an organization such as Education.AU, but could – and would – happen informally, via Google) to find out what other educators have created and shared as curriculum materials. Educators would find extensive notes, lesson plans, probably numerous recorded podcasts, links to materials on Wikipedia and other online resources, and so forth – everything that an educator might need to create an effective learning experience. Furthermore, educators would be encourage to share and connect around any particular ‘string’ in the National Curriculum. The curriculum thus becomes a focal point for organization and coordination rather than a brute mandate of performance.

Students, already well-connected, will continue to use informal channels to communicate about their lessons; the National Curriculum gives the educational sector (and perhaps some enterprising entrepreneur) an opportunity to create a space where those curriculum ‘strings’ translate into points of contact. Students working through a particular point in the curriculum would know where they are, and would know where to gather together for help and advice. The same wealth of materials available to educators would be available to students. None of this constitutes ‘peeking at the answers’, but rather is part of an integrated effort to give students every advantage while working their way through the National Curriculum. A student in Townsville might be able to gain some advantage from a podcast of a teacher in Albany, might want to collaborate on research with students from Ballarat, might ask some questions of an educator in Lismore. The student sits in the middle of an nexus of resources designed to offer them every opportunity to succeed; if the methodology of their own classroom is a poor fit to their learning style, chances are high that they’ll find someone else, somewhere else, who makes a better match.

All of this sounds a lot like an educational utopia, but all of it is within our immediate grasp. It is because we live at the confluence of a broadly sharing culture, and within a nation which is getting ubiquitous high-speed broadband, students and educators who now have pervasive access to computers, and a National Curriculum to act as an organizing principle. It is precisely because the stars are aligned so auspiciously that we can dream big dreams. This is the moment when anything is possible.

This transition could simply reinforce the last hundred years of industrial era education, where one-size-fits-all, where the student enters ‘airplane mode’ when they walk into the classroom – all devices disconnected, eyes up and straight ahead for the boredom of a fifty-minute excursion through some meaningless and disconnected body of knowledge. Where the computer simply becomes an electronic textbook for the distribution of media, rather than a portal for the exploration of the knowledge shared by others. Where the educator finds themselves increasingly bound to a curriculum which limits their freedom to find expression and meaning in their work. And all of this will happen, unless we recognize the other path that has opened before us. Unless we change direction, and set our feet on that path. Because if we keep on as we have been, we’ll simply end up with what we have today. And that would be a big mistake.

It needn’t be this way. We can take advantage of our situation, of the concrescence of opportunities opening to us. It will take some work, some time and some money. But more than anything else it requires a change of heart. We must stop thinking of the classroom as a solitary island of peace and quiet in the midst of a stormy sea, and rather think of it as a node within a network, connected and receptive. We must stop thinking of educators as valiant but solitary warriors, and transform them into a connected and receptive army. And we must recognize that this generation of students are so well connected on every front that they outpace us in every advance. They will be teaching us how to make this transition seem effortless.

Can we do this? Can we screw our courage up and take a leap into a great unknown, into an educational future which draws from our past, but is not bound to it? With parents and politicians crying out for metrics and endless assessments, we are losing the space to experiment, to play, to explore. Next year, the National Curriculum will land like a ton of bricks, even as it presents the opportunity for a Great Escape. The next twelve months will be crucial. If we can only change the way we think about what is possible, we will change what is possible. It’s a big ask. It’s the challenge of our times. Will we rise to meet it? Can we make an agreement to share what we know and what we do? That’s all it takes. So simple and so profound.

Slides for this talk are available here.