the human network

I.  My, How Things Have Changed

When I came to Australia six years ago, to seek my fame and fortune, business communications had remained largely unchanged for nearly a century.  You could engage in face-to-face conversation – something humans have been doing since we learned to speak, countless thousands of years ago – or, if distance made that impossible, you could drop a letter into the post.  Australia Post is an excellent organization, and seems to get all of the mail delivered within a day or two – quite an accomplishment in a country as dispersed and diffuse as ours.

In the twentieth century, the telephone became the dominant form of business communication; Australia Post wired the nation up, and let us talk to one another.  Conversation, mediated by the telephone, became the dominant mode of communication.  About twenty years ago the facsimile machine dropped in price dramatically, and we could now send images over phone lines.

The facsimile translates images into data and back into images again.  That’s when the critical threshold was crossed: from that point on, our communications have always centered on data.  The Internet arrived in 1995, and broadband in 2001.  In the first years of Internet usage, electronic mail was both the ‘killer app’ and the thing that began to supplant the telephone for business correspondence.  Electronic mail is asynchronous – you can always pick it up later.  Email is non-local, particularly when used through a service such as Hotmail or Gmail – you can get it anywhere.  Until mobiles started to become pervasive for business uses, the telephone was always a hit-or-miss affair.  Electronic mail is a hit, every time.

Such was the business landscape when I arrived in Australia.  The Web had arrived, and businesses eagerly used it as a publishing medium – a cheap way of getting information to their clients and customers.  But the Web was changing.  It had taken nearly a decade of working with the Web, day-to-day, before we discovered that the Web could become a fully-fledged two-way medium: the Web could listen as well as talk.  That insight changed everything.  The Web morphed into a new beast, christened ‘Web 2.0’, and everywhere the Web invited us to interact, to share, to respond, to play, to become involved.  This transition has fundamentally changed business communication, and it’s my goal this morning to outline the dimensions of that transformation.

This transformation unfolds in several dimensions.  The first of these – and arguably the most noticeable – is how well-connected we are these days.  So long as we’re in range of a cellular radio signal, we can be reached.  The number of ways we can be reached is growing almost geometrically.  Five years ago we might have had a single email address.  Now we have several – certainly one for business, and one for personal use – together with an account on Facebook (nearly eight million of the 22 million Australians have Facebook accounts), perhaps another account on MySpace, another on Twitter, another on YouTube, another on Flickr.  We can get a message or maintain contact with someone through any of these connections.  Some individuals have migrated to Facebook for the majority of their communications – there’s no spam, and they’re assured the message will be delivered.  Among under-25s, electronic mail is seen as a technology of the ‘older generation’, something that one might use for work, but has no other practical value.  Text messaging and messaging-via-Facebook have replaced electronic mail.

This increased connectivity hasn’t come for free.  Each of us are now under a burden to maintain all of the various connections we’ve opened.  At the most basic level, we must at least monitor all of these channels for incoming messages.  That can easily get overwhelming, as each channel clamors for attention.

But wait.  We’ve dropped Facebook and Twitter into the conversation before I even explained what they are and how they work.  We just take them as a fact of life these days, but they’re brand new.  Facebook was unknown just three years ago, and Twitter didn’t zoom into prominence until eighteen months ago.  Let’s step back and take a look at what social networks are.  In a very real way, we’ve always known exactly what a social network is: since we were very small we’ve been reaching out to other people and establishing social relationships with them.  In the beginning that meant our mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers.  As we grew older that list might grow to include some of the kids in the neighborhood, or at pre-kindy, and then our school friends.  By the time we make it to university, that list of social relationships is actually quite long.  But our brains have limited space to store all those relationships – it’s actually the most difficult thing we do, the most cognitively all-encompassing task.  Forget physics – relationship are harder, and take more brainpower.

Nature has set a limit of about one hundred and fifty on the social relationships we can manage in our heads.  That’s not a static number – it’s not as though as soon as you reach 150, you’re done, full.  Rather, it’s a sign of how many relationships of importance you can manage at any one time.  None of us, not even the most socially adept, can go very much beyond that number.  We just don’t have the grey matter for it.

Hence, fifty years ago mankind invented the Rolodex – a way of keeping track of all the information we really should remember but can’t possibly begin to absorb.  A real, living Rolodex (and there are few of them, these days) are a wonder to behold, with notes scribbled in the margins, business cards stapled to the backs of the Rolodex cards, and a glorious mess of information, all alphabetically organized.  The Rolodex was mankind’s first real version of the modern, digital, social network.  But a Rolodex doesn’t think for itself; a Rolodex can not draw out the connections between the different cards.  A Rolodex does not make explicit what we know – we live in a very interconnected world, and many of our friends and associates are also friends and associates with our friends and associates.

That is precisely what Facebook gives us.  It makes those implicit connections explicit.  It allows those connections to become conduits for ever-greater-levels of connection.  Once those connections are made, once they become a regular feature of our life, we can grow beyond the natural limit of 150.  That doesn’t mean you can manage any of these relationships well – far from it.  But it does mean that you can keep the channels of communication open.  That’s really what all of these social networks are: turbocharged Rolodexes, which allow you to maintain far more relationships than ever before possible.

Once these relationships are established, something beings to happen quite naturally: people begin to share.  What they share is often driven by the nature of the relationship – though we’ve all seen examples where individuals ‘over-share’ inappropriately, confusing business and social channels of communication.  That sort of thing is very easy to do with social networks such as Facebook, because it doesn’t provide an easy method to send messages out to different groups of friends.  We might want a social network where business friends might get something very formal, while close friends might that that photo of you doing tequila shots at last weekend’s birthday party.  It’s a great idea, isn’t it?  But it can’t be done.  Not on Facebook, not on Twitter.  Your friends are all lumped together into one undifferentiated whole.  That’s one way that those social networks are very different from the ones inside our heads.  And it’s something to be constantly aware of when sharing through social networks.

That said, this social sharing has become an incredibly potent force.  More videos are uploaded to YouTube every day than all television networks all over the world produce in a year.  It may not be material of the same quality, but that doesn’t matter – most of those videos are only meant to be seen among a small group of family or friends.  We send pictures around, we send links around, we send music around (though that’s been cause for a bit of trouble), we share things because we care about them, and because we care about the people we’re sharing with.  Every act of sharing, business or personal, brings the sharer and the recipient closer together.  It truly is better to give than receive.  On the other hand, we’re also drowning in shared material.  There’s so much, coming from every corner, through every one of these social networks, there’s no possible way to keep up.  So, most of us don’t.  We cherry-pick, listening to our closest friends and associates: the things they share with us are the most meaningful.  We filter the noise and hope that we’re not missing anything very important.  (We usually are.)

In certain very specific situations, sharing can produce something greater than the sum of its parts.  A community can get together and decide to pool what it knows about a particular domain of knowledge, can ‘wise up’ by sharing freely.  This idea of ‘collective intelligence’ producing a shared storehouse of knowledge is the engine that drives sites like Wikipedia.  We all know Wikipedia, we all know how it works – anyone can edit anything in any article within it – but the wonder of Wikipedia is that it works so well.  It’s not perfectly accurate – nothing ever is  – but it is good enough to be useful nearly all the time.  Here’s the thing: you can come to Wikipedia ignorant and leave it knowing something.  You can put that knowledge to work to make better decisions than you would have in your state of ignorance.  Wikipedia can help you wise up.

Wikipedia isn’t the only example of shared knowledge.  A decade ago a site named TeacherRatings.com went online, inviting university students to provide ratings of their professors, lecturers and instructors.  Today it’s named RateMyProfessor.com, is owned by MTV Networks, and has over ten million ratings of one million instructors.  This font of shared knowledge has become so potent that students regularly consult the site before deciding which classes they’ll take next semester at university.  Universities can no longer saddle student with poor teachers (who may also be fantastic researchers).  There are bidding wars taking place for the lecturers who get the highest ratings on the site.  This sharing of knowledge has reversed the power relationship between a university and its students which stretches back nearly a thousand years.

Substitute the word ‘business’ for university and ‘customers’ for students and you see why this is so significant.  In an era where we’re hyperconnected, where people share, and share knowledge, things are going to work a lot differently than they did before.  These all-important relationships between businesses and their customers (potential and actual) have been completely rewritten.  Let’s talk about that.

II.  Linked Out

Of all the challenges you face in your professional practice, the greatest of them comes from a website that, at first glance, seems completely innocuous.  LinkedIn is the “professional” social network, where individuals re-create their C.V. online, and, entry by entry, link their profiles to other people they have worked with over the years.

Just that alone is something entirely new and very potent.  When a potential employer sees a C.V., they don’t see the network of connections the candidate created at every position – a network which tells the employer much of what they need to know about the suitability of the candidate.  Suddenly, all of this implicit information has been revealed explicitly.  An employer can ‘walk the chain’ of associations, long before a candidate submits any references.  The LinkedIn profile is the reference, quite literally.

This means that a LinkedIn profile is more valuable than any hand-crafted C.V., because it is, on the whole, a more accurate read of the candidate.  A candidate’s connections tell you everything about who the candidate is.  They certainly tell you more than a list of hand-picked referees ever could.  LinkedIn is simply a better way of doing business.

This means that LinkedIn has caught on like a bushfire in Big End of town.  Throughout the nation, employers look for the LinkedIn profile of potential candidates, and these profiles carry more weight than any words from the candidate, or a recruiter, or, really, anyone else.  This transformation happened suddenly over the last 12 months, as businesspeople reached a critical mass of involvement with LinkedIn.  LinkedIn benefits from the ‘network effect’: the more people who create profiles on LinkedIn, the more valuable the service becomes – because it’s more likely you’ll find someone’s profile there.  That, in turn, makes it more likely another individual will create a LinkedIn profile, making it more valuable, etc.  It also means that any candidate without a LinkedIn profile is immediately suspect – what’s he or she trying to hide?

LinkedIn become the new standard in recruiting.  But don’t look too closely, or you’ll get scared.  LinkedIn takes one of the things the recruiter brings to the table – an extensive and wide-ranging set of contacts – and reproduces that electronically in such a way that anyone can take advantage of them.  In other words, everyone is now on a much more equal footing.  The time and energy you have dedicated to building up those networks can now be matched by someone spending a lot less time on it – someone who is employing the latest tools.

The big worry, from here forward, is that recruiters as we have known them will be obsolesced by social networking technologies.  As we get further into the social media revolution, and these tools become more refined, many of the functions of the recruiter-as-networker, recruiter-as-matchmaker, and recruiter-as-talent-finder will be subsumed into these social networks.  Already I can dial and tune searches on LinkedIn to give me, say, a list of electrical engineers who work in Melbourne.  That’s a list I can work from, if I’m doing a personnel search.  I can message those folks through LinkedIn, to find out if they’re interested in a conversation about a potential opportunity.  The platform provides the basic set of capabilities to amplify my effectiveness – without any substantial investment.

People will begin to ask why they need recruiters.  People are already beginning to ask this question, as they see the social network providing the same capabilities – and for free.  This is something that should scare you a little bit, because it shows you that recruiting, as we’ve known it, has about as much life expectancy as a buggy-whip maker did in 1915.  There are still a few years left in which recruiting will be a profitable business, but after that it will simply be overwhelmed by social networking tools which can amplify the powers of the average person so effectively that recruiting simply becomes another task on offer, like sending a message or posting a photo.

As people are drawn together over social networks, they get a better sense of the talents of those around them.  This talent-spotting used to be the sine qua non of the recruiter.  Now that each of us can manage connections far beyond the natural limit of 150, we each learn our respective strengths.  We use systems like LinkedIn to help us keep tally of those strengths.  We use the tools to deploy those strengths.  Everything happens because the tools empower us.  But will they empower us so much that recruiters become redundant?

You need to have a good think about your business, and about the way you practice your business.  You need to have a good look at the tools – particularly LinkedIn, but also Twitter and Facebook.  You’ll learn that these tools are good at some things, and lousy at others.  Here’s the question: are you good at the things the tools aren’t?  Tools are no substitute for relationships.  Even though the tools give us some false sense of relationship, it’s not the real thing.  Recruiting is the real thing.  But, is that enough?

III.  Social Media Gods

In times long past – and by this, I mean just five years ago – recruiters were the masters of the Rolodex.  You survived and thrived by knowing everybody, everywhere, with talent, and everybody, everywhere, who needed that talent.  That in itself is quite a talent.  But that talent is no longer enough.  It is, however, the springboard to get you to the next level.

Fasten your seatbelts.  You’re about to get launched headlong into the future.  I want you to imagine a time – let’s say, tomorrow afternoon – when the average person now has quite extraordinary Rolodex capabilities, courtesy of the social networks, and where you, the masters, have gone beyond that into regions undreamed of.  Imagine being able to take each of your contacts, and use those as starting points for new contacts within new networks.  You’d have an inner ring of close contacts – just as you do today, but multiplied by the capabilities of the tools to support and nurture these contacts.  Outside that inner ring, you’d have consecutive rings of contacts-to-contacts, and contacts-to-contacts-to-contacts, and so on, all the way out until the network simply becomes too diffuse and too difficult to maintain.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it echoes the famed ‘six degrees of separation’, a theorem that provides that we are all just six people away from any other person on the planet.  Australia is a lot smaller than the world; within any particular domain of expertise, there’s really only one or two degrees of separation, whether that’s in filmmaking, medicine, or software engineering.  There just aren’t that many of us.  Fortunately, that means that our networks aren’t deep: we can more-or-less know everyone involved in our field, with the help of a good Rolodex.

You have more than a good Rolodex.  You have the new tools; you can build a Rolodex of Rolodexes, one Rolodex per discipline, and use that to track everybody, everywhere, who matters.  In this future, that is really tomorrow afternoon, you’ve so leveraged your network resources that each of you sits in the middle of a vast web, and each time there’s a twitch upon a thread, you know about it, because that information is shared throughout your networks, and finds its way toward your receptive ears.

You’re going to need good tools to make this ambitious project a reality, and you’re going to need them for two entirely contradictory reasons: first, to be able to listen to everything going on everywhere, and second, because that chaotic din will deafen you.  You need tools to help you find out what’s going on, but, more significantly, you need tools to help you winnow the wheat from the chaff.  Being well-connected means bearing the burden of drowning in pointless information.  Without the right tools, as you grow your networks you will simply sink under the noise.

What tools?  They barely exist today.  Google Alerts is one tool that will help keep you abreast of news as it is created on the net.  Within the next few months, Google will begin to digest the endless ‘feeds’ created by Facebook and Twitter users, and you’ll be able to search through those as well.  But again, there’s just too much there.  You likely need a more professional tool, such as Sydney’s own PeopleBrowsr, to sift through the wealth of information that will be generated by your ever-more-encompassing networks of networks.

I should point out – for the more entrepreneurial among you – there is now a market for tools that recruiters need to become better recruiters: tools that harness the networks.  Such tools will need to be designed by someone who understands the recruiting business and the network. That means it could be one of you.  You could partner with a Google or a PeopleBrowsr, or strike out on your own.  If you don’t do it, one of your competitors – either in Australia or overseas – certainly will.

The first half of my advice is simply this: build your networks.  Build them out to unimaginable reaches.  Use the tools to leverage your capabilities.  Use the tools as if your livelihood depended upon it.  Because it does.  Behind you are a new generation, unafraid to use the tools to build their networks up.  When you go head-to-head against them, those with the best networks – and the best tools – will tend to win.  That’s what the next decade looks like, as we transition from the Rolodex to the social network: more and more business will go to the well-networked.  So really, there is no choice: adapt or die.

There’s another face to this, one that turns itself outward.  Sure, you’ve created this vast and nationwide network to feed you information.  But you’ve got to do more than listen.  You must present yourself within the network.  You must be present.  Many people and most companies think that they can use social media as an advertising medium.  Plenty of firms set up Facebook pages and Twitter accounts and post lots of advertising messages to an ever-decreasing number of followers.

People don’t want to get spammed.  They don’t want to hear your marketing messages over a communications channel that they consider personal.  So please, don’t make this mistake.  In fact, I’ll go even further – don’t think of the Web as an advertising medium.  Sure, it had a few good years where a business presence online was simply a great way to get your marketing materials out there inexpensively, but those days are over.  Today everything is about engagement.  Engagement begins with conversation.

Conversation is a tricky thing: on the one hand it’s the most natural of human capabilities; on the other hand, it’s fraught with disaster.  Social media amplifies both sides of this equation.  There are more places for more conversations than ever before, and more opportunities for these conversations to run off the rails.  Here are some simple rules of thumb which should keep you out of trouble:

1. Only go where you’re invited.  No one likes a salesman who sticks their foot in the door.
2. Participate in a conversation from a place of authenticity.  Let people know who you are and why you’re there.
3. Spend time building relationships.  Social media is a lot like friendship – it takes time and investment and a bit of love to make it work.
4. Be consistent.  Invest time every single day, or at least with regularity.  If you can’t do that, it’s probably better you do nothing at all.

Where are these conversations happening?  All around you: on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and YouTube and Flickr and thousand blogs.  They’re happening all the time, everywhere.  You probably want to spend some time investigating these conversations before you participate.  That’s known as ‘lurking’, and it’s the foundation of successful net relationships.  Having an appreciation and an understanding of a community before you participate within it shows respect.  Respect will be reciprocated.

That’s about it for today – and frankly, that’s quite a lot.  I’ve asked you to re-invent yourselves for the mid-21^st century.  I’ve asked you to become the gods of social media, to translate your natural role as connectors and facilitators into a greatly amplified form, just so you can remain competitive.  I’m not saying that this transition will happen overnight.  You have at least a few years to become adept with the tools, and a few more to build out those nationwide networks.  But I can promise this: at the close of the 2^nd decade of the 21^st century, recruiting will look entirely different.

Every social network has a few individuals who are ‘superconnected’, who have many more connections than their peers within the network.  Those individuals are the glue who keep the network held together.  This is your natural role.  The challenge, moving forward, is to remain extraordinary when everyone around you becomes superconnected themselves.  It will take some work, and some time, but it can be done.  Good luck.

I.  My, How Things Have Changed

When I came to Australia six years ago, to seek my fame and fortune, business communications had remained largely unchanged for nearly a century.  You could engage in face-to-face conversation – something humans have been doing since we learned to speak, countless thousands of years ago – or, if distance made that impossible, you could drop a letter into the post.  Australia Post is an excellent organization, and seems to get all of the mail delivered within a day or two – quite an accomplishment in a country as dispersed and diffuse as ours.

In the twentieth century, the telephone became the dominant form of business communication; Australia Post wired the nation up, and let us talk to one another.  Conversation, mediated by the telephone, became the dominant mode of communication.  About twenty years ago the facsimile machine dropped in price dramatically, and we could now send images over phone lines.

The facsimile translates images into data and back into images again.  That’s when the critical threshold was crossed: from that point on, our communications have always centered on data.  The Internet arrived in 1995, and broadband in 2001.  In the first years of Internet usage, electronic mail was both the ‘killer app’ and the thing that began to supplant the telephone for business correspondence.  Electronic mail is asynchronous – you can always pick it up later.  Email is non-local, particularly when used through a service such as Hotmail or Gmail – you can get it anywhere.  Until mobiles started to become pervasive for business uses, the telephone was always a hit-or-miss affair.  Electronic mail is a hit, every time.

Such was the business landscape when I arrived in Australia.  The Web had arrived, and businesses eagerly used it as a publishing medium – a cheap way of getting information to their clients and customers.  But the Web was changing.  It had taken nearly a decade of working with the Web, day-to-day, before we discovered that the Web could become a fully-fledged two-way medium: the Web could listen as well as talk.  That insight changed everything.  The Web morphed into a new beast, christened ‘Web 2.0’, and everywhere the Web invited us to interact, to share, to respond, to play, to become involved.  This transition has fundamentally changed business communication, and it’s my goal this morning to outline the dimensions of that transformation.

This transformation unfolds in several dimensions.  The first of these – and arguably the most noticeable – is how well-connected we are these days.  So long as we’re in range of a cellular radio signal, we can be reached.  The number of ways we can be reached is growing almost geometrically.  Five years ago we might have had a single email address.  Now we have several – certainly one for business, and one for personal use – together with an account on Facebook (nearly eight million of the 22 million Australians have Facebook accounts), perhaps another account on MySpace, another on Twitter, another on YouTube, another on Flickr.  We can get a message or maintain contact with someone through any of these connections.  Some individuals have migrated to Facebook for the majority of their communications – there’s no spam, and they’re assured the message will be delivered.  Among under-25s, electronic mail is seen as a technology of the ‘older generation’, something that one might use for work, but has no other practical value.  Text messaging and messaging-via-Facebook have replaced electronic mail.

This increased connectivity hasn’t come for free.  Each of us are now under a burden to maintain all of the various connections we’ve opened.  At the most basic level, we must at least monitor all of these channels for incoming messages.  That can easily get overwhelming, as each channel clamors for attention.

But wait.  We’ve dropped Facebook and Twitter into the conversation before I even explained what they are and how they work.  We just take them as a fact of life these days, but they’re brand new.  Facebook was unknown just three years ago, and Twitter didn’t zoom into prominence until eighteen months ago.  Let’s step back and take a look at what social networks are.  In a very real way, we’ve always known exactly what a social network is: since we were very small we’ve been reaching out to other people and establishing social relationships with them.  In the beginning that meant our mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers.  As we grew older that list might grow to include some of the kids in the neighborhood, or at pre-kindy, and then our school friends.  By the time we make it to university, that list of social relationships is actually quite long.  But our brains have limited space to store all those relationships – it’s actually the most difficult thing we do, the most cognitively all-encompassing task.  Forget physics – relationship are harder, and take more brainpower.

Nature has set a limit of about one hundred and fifty on the social relationships we can manage in our heads.  That’s not a static number – it’s not as though as soon as you reach 150, you’re done, full.  Rather, it’s a sign of how many relationships of importance you can manage at any one time.  None of us, not even the most socially adept, can go very much beyond that number.  We just don’t have the grey matter for it.

Hence, fifty years ago mankind invented the Rolodex – a way of keeping track of all the information we really should remember but can’t possibly begin to absorb.  A real, living Rolodex (and there are few of them, these days) are a wonder to behold, with notes scribbled in the margins, business cards stapled to the backs of the Rolodex cards, and a glorious mess of information, all alphabetically organized.  The Rolodex was mankind’s first real version of the modern, digital, social network.  But a Rolodex doesn’t think for itself; a Rolodex can not draw out the connections between the different cards.  A Rolodex does not make explicit what we know – we live in a very interconnected world, and many of our friends and associates are also friends and associates with our friends and associates.

That is precisely what Facebook gives us.  It makes those implicit connections explicit.  It allows those connections to become conduits for ever-greater-levels of connection.  Once those connections are made, once they become a regular feature of our life, we can grow beyond the natural limit of 150.  That doesn’t mean you can manage any of these relationships well – far from it.  But it does mean that you can keep the channels of communication open.  That’s really what all of these social networks are: turbocharged Rolodexes, which allow you to maintain far more relationships than ever before possible.

Once these relationships are established, something beings to happen quite naturally: people begin to share.  What they share is often driven by the nature of the relationship – though we’ve all seen examples where individuals ‘over-share’ inappropriately, confusing business and social channels of communication.  That sort of thing is very easy to do with social networks such as Facebook, because it doesn’t provide an easy method to send messages out to different groups of friends.  We might want a social network where business friends might get something very formal, while close friends might that that photo of you doing tequila shots at last weekend’s birthday party.  It’s a great idea, isn’t it?  But it can’t be done.  Not on Facebook, not on Twitter.  Your friends are all lumped together into one undifferentiated whole.  That’s one way that those social networks are very different from the ones inside our heads.  And it’s something to be constantly aware of when sharing through social networks.

That said, this social sharing has become an incredibly potent force.  More videos are uploaded to YouTube every day than all television networks all over the world produce in a year.  It may not be material of the same quality, but that doesn’t matter – most of those videos are only meant to be seen among a small group of family or friends.  We send pictures around, we send links around, we send music around (though that’s been cause for a bit of trouble), we share things because we care about them, and because we care about the people we’re sharing with.  Every act of sharing, business or personal, brings the sharer and the recipient closer together.  It truly is better to give than receive.  On the other hand, we’re also drowning in shared material.  There’s so much, coming from every corner, through every one of these social networks, there’s no possible way to keep up.  So, most of us don’t.  We cherry-pick, listening to our closest friends and associates: the things they share with us are the most meaningful.  We filter the noise and hope that we’re not missing anything very important.  (We usually are.)

In certain very specific situations, sharing can produce something greater than the sum of its parts.  A community can get together and decide to pool what it knows about a particular domain of knowledge, can ‘wise up’ by sharing freely.  This idea of ‘collective intelligence’ producing a shared storehouse of knowledge is the engine that drives sites like Wikipedia.  We all know Wikipedia, we all know how it works – anyone can edit anything in any article within it – but the wonder of Wikipedia is that it works so well.  It’s not perfectly accurate – nothing ever is  – but it is good enough to be useful nearly all the time.  Here’s the thing: you can come to Wikipedia ignorant and leave it knowing something.  You can put that knowledge to work to make better decisions than you would have in your state of ignorance.  Wikipedia can help you wise up.

Wikipedia isn’t the only example of shared knowledge.  A decade ago a site named TeacherRatings.com went online, inviting university students to provide ratings of their professors, lecturers and instructors.  Today it’s named RateMyProfessor.com, is owned by MTV Networks, and has over ten million ratings of one million instructors.  This font of shared knowledge has become so potent that students regularly consult the site before deciding which classes they’ll take next semester at university.  Universities can no longer saddle student with poor teachers (who may also be fantastic researchers).  There are bidding wars taking place for the lecturers who get the highest ratings on the site.  This sharing of knowledge has reversed the power relationship between a university and its students which stretches back nearly a thousand years.

Substitute the word ‘business’ for university and ‘customers’ for students and you see why this is so significant.  In an era where we’re hyperconnected, where people share, and share knowledge, things are going to work a lot differently than they did before.  These all-important relationships between businesses and their customers (potential and actual) have been completely rewritten.  Let’s talk about that.

II.  Breaking In

The most important thing you need to know about the new relationship between yourselves and your customers is that your customers are constantly engaging in a conversation about you.  At this point, you don’t know where those customers are, and what they’re saying.  They could be saying something via a text message, or a Facebook post, or an email, or on Twitter.  Any and all of these conversations about you are going on right now.  But you don’t know, so there’s no way you can participate in them.

I’ll give you an example I used my column in NETT magazine.  My mate John Allsopp (a big-time Web developer, working on the next generation of Web technologies) travels a lot for business.  Back in June, on a trip the US, he decided to give VAustralia’s Premium Economy class a try.  He was so pleased about the service – and the sleep he got – he immediately sent out a tweet: “At LAX waiting for flight to Denver. Best flight ever on VAustralia Premium Economy. Fantastic seat, service, and sleep. Hooked.”  That message went out to twelve hundred of John’s Twitter followers – many of whom are Australians.  It was quickly answered by a tweet from Cheryl Gledhill: “isn’t VAustralia the bomb!! My favourite airline at the moment… so roomy, and great entertainment, nice hosties, etc.”  That message went to Cheryl’s 250 followers.  I chimed in, too: “Precisely how I felt after my VA flights last month: hooked. Got 7 hours sleep each way. Worth the price.”  That message went out to fifty-two hundred of my followers – who are disproportionately Australian.

Just between the three of us, we might have reached as many as seven thousand people – individuals who are like ourselves – because like connects to like in social networks.  That means these are individuals who are likely to take advantage of VAustralia the next time they fly the transpacific route.  But here’s the sad thing: VAustralia had no idea this wonderful and loving conversation about their product was going on.  No idea at all.  You know what they were involved in?  An ad-agency dreamed-up ‘4320SYD’ campaign, which flew four mates to Los Angeles for three days, promising them free round-the-world flights on the various Virgin airlines if they sent at least two thousand tweets during their trip.  VAustralia – or rather, VAustralia’s ad agency – presumed that people with busy lives would spend some of their precious time and attention following four blokes spewing out line after line of inane chatter.  Naturally, the campaign disappeared without a trace.

If VAustralia had asked its agency to monitor Twitter, to keep its finger to the pulse of what was being said online, things could have turned out very differently.  Perhaps a VAustralia rep would have contacted John Allsopp directly, thanked him for his kind words, and offered him a $100 coupon for his next flight on V Australia Premium Economy.  VAustralia would have made a customer for life – and for a lot less than they spent on the ‘4320SYD’ campaign.

Marketers and agencies are still thinking in terms of mass markets and mass media.  While both do still exist, they don’t shape perception as they did a generation ago.  Instead, we turn to the hyperconnections we have with one another.  I can instantly ask Twitter for a review of a restaurant, a gadget, or a movie, and I do.  So do millions of others.  This is the new market, and this is the place where marketing – at least as we’ve known it – can not penetrate.

That’s one problem.  There’s another, and larger problem: what happens when you have an angry customer?  Let me tell you a story about my friend Kate Carruthers, who will be speaking with you later this morning.  On a recent trip to Queensland, she pulled out her American Express credit card to pay for a taxi fare.  Her card was declined.  Kate paid with another card and thought little of it until the next time she tried to use the card – this time to pay for something rather pricier, and more sensitive – only to find her card declined once again.

As it turned out, AMEX had cut her credit line in half, but hadn’t bothered to inform her of this until perhaps a day or two before, via post.  So here’s Kate, far away from home, with a crook credit card.  Thank goodness she had another card with her, or it could have been quite a problem.  When she contacted AMEX to discuss the credit line change – on a Friday evening – she discovered that this ‘consumer’ company kept banker’s hours in its credit division.  That, for Kate, was the last straw.  She began to post a series of messages to Twitter:

“I can’t believe how rude Amex have been to me; cut credit limit by 50% without notice; declined my card while in QLD even though acct paid”

“since Amex just treated me like total sh*t I just posted a chq for the balance of my account & will close acct on Monday”

“Amex is hardly accepted anywhere anyhow so I hardly use it now & after their recent treatment I’m outta there”

“luckily for me I have more than enough to just pay the sucker out & never use Amex again”

“have both a gold credit card & gold charge card with amex until monday when I plan to close both after their crap behaviour”

Kate is both a prolific user of Twitter and a very well connected individual.  There are over seven thousand individuals reading her tweets.  Seven thousand people who saw Kate ‘go nuclear’ over her bad treatment at the hands of AMEX.  Seven thousand people who will now think twice when an AMEX offer comes in the post, or when they pass by the tables that are ubiquitously in every airport and mall.  Everyone one of them will remember the ordeal Kate suffered – almost as if Kate were a close friend.

Does AMEX know that Kate went nuclear?  Almost certainly not.  They didn’t make any attempt to contact her after her outburst, so it’s fairly certain that this flew well underneath their radar.  But the damage to AMEX’s reputation is quantifiable: Kate is simply too hyperconnected to be ignored, or mistreated.  And that’s the world we’re all heading into.  As we all grow more and more connected, as we each individually reach thousands of others, slights against any one of us have a way of amplifying into enormous events, the kinds of mistakes that could, if repeated, bring a business to its knees.  AMEX, in its ignorant bliss, has no idea that it has shot itself in the foot.

While Kate expressed her extreme dissatisfaction with AMEX, its own marketing arm was busily cooking up a scheme to harness Twitter.  It’s Open Forum Pulse website shows you tweets from small businesses around the world.  It’s ironic, isn’t it?  AMEX builds a website to show us what others are saying on Twitter, all the while ignoring about what’s being said about it.  Just like VAustralia.  Perhaps that’s simply the way Big Business is going to play the social media revolution – like complete idiots.  You have an opportunity to learn from their mistakes.

There is a whole world out there engaging in conversation about you.  You need to be able to recognize that.  There are tools out there – like PeopleBrowsr – which make it easy for you to monitor those conversations.  You’ll need to think through a strategy which allows you to recognize and promote those positive conversations, while – perhaps more importantly – keeping an eye on the negative conversations.  An upset customer should be serviced before they go nuclear; these kinds of accidents don’t need to happen.  But you’ll need to be proactive in your listening.  Customers will no longer come to you to talk about you or your business.

III.  Breaking Out

The first step in any social media strategy for business is to embrace the medium.  Many business ban social media from their corporate networks, seeing them as a drain of time and attention.  Which is, in essence, saying that you don’t trust your own employees.  That you’re willing to infantilize them by blocking their network access.  This won’t work.  ‘Smartphones’ – that is, mobiles which have big screens, broadband connections, and full web browsers – have become increasingly popular in Australia.  Perhaps one third of all mobile handsets now qualify as smartphones.  Apple’s iPhone is simply the most visible of these devices, but they’re sold by many manufacturers, and, within a few years, they’ll be entirely pervasive: every mobile will be a smartphone.  A smartphone can access a social network just as easily – often more easily – than a desktop web browser.  Your employees have access to social networks all day long, unless you ask them to leave their mobiles at the front desk.

Just as we expect that employees won’t spend their days sending text messages to the friends, so an employer can expect that employees are sensible enough to regulate their own net usage.  A ‘net nanny’ is not required.  Mutual respect is.  Yes, the network is a powerful thing – it can be used to spread rumor and innuendo, can be used to promote or undermine – but employees understand this.  We all use the network at home.  We know what it’s good for.  Bringing it into the office requires some common sense, and perhaps a few guidelines.  The ABC recently released their own guidelines for social media, and they’re a brilliant example of the parsimony and common sense which need to underwrite all of our business efforts online.  Here they are:

•                do not mix professional and personal in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute,

•                do not undermine your effectiveness at work,

•                do not imply ABC endorsement of personal views, and,

•                do not disclose confidential information obtained at work.

There’s nothing hard about this list – for either employer or employee – yet it tells everyone exactly where they stand and what’s expected of them.  Employers are expected to trust their employees.  Employees are expected to reciprocate that trust by acting responsibly.  All in all, a very adult relationship.

Once that adult relationship has been established around social media, you have a unique opportunity to let your employees become your eyes and ears online.  Most small to medium-sized businesses have neither the staff nor the resources to dedicate a specific individual to social media issues.  In fact, that’s not actually a good idea.  When things ‘hot up’ for your business, any single individual charged with handling all things social media will quickly overload, with too much coming in through too many channels simultaneously.  That means something will get overlooked.  Something will get dropped.  And a potential nuclear event – something that could be defused or forestalled if responded to in a timely manner – will slip through the cracks.

Social media isn’t a one-person job.  It’s a job for the entire organization.  You need to give your employees permission to be out there on Facebook, on Twitter, on the blogs and in the net’s weirder corners – wherever their searches might lead them.  You need to charge them with the responsibility of being proactive, to go out there and hunt down those conversations of importance to your and your business.  Of course, they should be polite, and only offer help where it is needed, but, if they can do that, you will increase your reach and your presence immeasurably.  And you will have done it without spending a dime.

Those of you with a background in marketing have just broken out in cold sweat.  This is nothing like what they taught you at university, nothing like what you learned on the job.  That’s the truth of it.  But what you learned on the job is what VAustralia and AMEX are now up to – that is, complete and utter failure.  But, you’re thinking, what about message discipline?  How can we have that many people speaking for the organization?  Won’t it be chaos?

The answer, in short, is yes.  It will be chaos.  But not in a bad way.  You’ll have your own army out there, working for you.  Employees will know enough to know when they can speak for the organization, and when they should be silent.  (If they don’t know, they’ll learn quickly.)  Will it be messy?  Probably.  But the world of social media is not neat.  It is not based on image and marketing and presentation.  It is based on authenticity, on relationships that are established and which develop through time.  It is not something that can be bought or sold like an ad campaign.  It is, instead, something more akin to friendship – requiring time and tending and more than a little bit of love.

This means that employees will need some time to spend online, probably a few minutes, several times a day, to keep an eye on things.  To keep watch.  To make sure a simmering pot doesn’t suddenly boil over.

That’s the half of it.  The other half is how you use social media to reach out.  Many companies set up Twitter and Facebook accounts and use them to send useless spam-like messages to anyone who cares to listen.  Please don’t do this. Social media is not about advertising.  In fact, it’s anti-advertising.  Social media is an opportunity to connect.  If you’re a furniture maker, for example, perhaps you’d like to have a public conversation with designers and homeowners about the art and business of making furniture.  Social media is precisely where you get to show off the expertise which keeps you in business – whatever that might be.  Lawyers can talk about law, accountants about accounting, and printers about printing.  Business, especially small business, is all about passion, and social media is a passion amplifier.  Let your passions show and people will respond.  Some of them will become customers.

So please, when you leave here today, setup those Facebook and Twitter accounts.  But when you’ve done that, step back and have a think.  Ask yourself, “How can I represent my business in a way that invites conversation?”  Once you’ve answered that, you’ve also answered the other important question – how do you translate that conversation into business.  Without the conversation you’ve got nothing.  But, once that conversation has begun, you have everything you need.

Those are the basics.  Everything else you’ll learn as you go along.  Social media isn’t difficult, though it takes time to master.  Just like any relationship, you’ll get out of it what you put into it.  And it isn’t going away.  It’s not a fad.  It’s the new way of doing business.  The efforts you make today will, in short order, reward you a hundred-fold.  That’s the promise of network: it will bring you success.

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.

Keynote for the Digital Fair of the Australian College of Educators, Geelong Grammar School, 16 April 2009. The full text of the talk is here.

I: The Universal Solvent

I have to admit that I am in awe of iTunes University. It’s just amazing that so many well-respected universities – Stanford, MIT, Yale, and Uni Melbourne – are willing to put their crown jewels – their lectures – online for everyone to download. It’s outstanding when even one school provides a wealth of material, but as other schools provide their own material, then we get to see some of the virtues of crowdsourcing. First, you have a virtuous cycle: as more material is shared, more material will be made available to share. After the virtuous cycle gets going, it’s all about a flight to quality.

When you have half a dozen or have a hundred lectures on calculus, which one do you choose? The one featuring the best lecturer with the best presentation skills, the best examples, and the best math jokes – of course. This is my only complaint with iTunes University – you can’t rate the various lectures on offer. You can know which ones have been downloaded most often, but that’s not precisely the same thing as which calculus seminar or which sociology lecture is the best. So as much as I love iTunes University, I see it as halfway there. Perhaps Apple didn’t want to turn iTunes U into a popularity contest, but, without that vital bit of feedback, it’s nearly impossible for us to winnow out the wheat from the educational chaff.

This is something that has to happen inside the system; it could happen across a thousand educational blogs spread out across the Web, but then it’s too diffuse to be really helpful. The reviews have to be coordinated and collated – just as with RateMyProfessors.com.

Say, that’s an interesting point. Why not create RateMyLectures.com, a website designed to sit right alongside iTunes University? If Apple can’t or won’t rate their offerings, someone has to create the one-stop-shop for ratings. And as iTunes University gets bigger and bigger, RateMyLectures.com becomes ever more important, the ultimate guide to the ultimate source of educational multimedia on the Internet. One needs the other to be wholly useful; without ratings iTunes U is just an undifferentiated pile of possibilities. But with ratings, iTunes U becomes a highly focused and effective tool for digital education.

Now let’s cast our minds ahead a few semesters: iTunes U is bigger and better than ever, and RateMyLectures.com has benefited from the hundreds of thousands of contributed reviews. Those reviews extend beyond the content in iTunes U, out into YouTube and Google Video and Vimeo and Blip.tv and where ever people are creating lectures and putting them online. Now anyone can come by the site and discover the absolute best lecture on almost any subject they care to research. The net is now cast globally; I can search for the best lecture on Earth, so long as it’s been captured and uploaded somewhere, and someone’s rated it on RateMyLectures.com.

All of a sudden we’ve imploded the boundaries of the classroom. The lecture can come from the US, or the UK, or Canada, or New Zealand, or any other country. Location doesn’t matter – only its rating as ‘best’ matters. This means that every student, every time they sit down at a computer, already does or will soon have on available the absolute best lectures, globally. That’s just a mind-blowing fact. It grows very naturally out of our desire to share and our desire to share ratings about what we have shared. Nothing extraordinary needed to happen to produce this entirely extraordinary state of affairs.

The network is acting like a universal solvent, dissolving all of the boundaries that have kept things separate. It’s not just dissolving the boundaries of distance – though it is doing that – it’s also dissolving the boundaries of preference. Although there will always be differences in taste and delivery, some instructors are simply better lecturers – in better command of their material – than others. Those instructors will rise to the top. Just as RateMyProfessors.com has created a global market for the lecturers with the highest ratings, RateMyLectures.com will create a global market for the best performances, the best material, the best lessons.

That RateMyLectures.com is only a hypothetical shouldn’t put you off. Part of what’s happening at this inflection point is that we’re all collectively learning how to harness the network for intelligence augmentation – Engelbart’s final triumph. All we need do is identify an area which could benefit from knowledge sharing and, sooner rather than later, someone will come along with a solution. I’d actually be very surprised if a service a lot like RateMyLectures.com doesn’t already exist. It may be small and unimpressive now. But Wikipedia was once small and unimpressive. If it’s useful, it will likely grow large enough to be successful.

Of course, lectures alone do not an education make. Lectures are necessary but are only one part of the educational process. Mentoring and problem solving and answering questions: all of these take place in the very real, very physical classroom. The best lectures in the world are only part of the story. The network is also transforming the classroom, from inside out, melting it down, and forging it into something that looks quite a bit different from the classroom we’ve grown familiar with over the last 50 years.

II: Fluid Dynamics

If we take the examples of RateMyProfessors.com and RateMyLectures.com and push them out a little bit, we can see the shape of things to come. Spearheaded by Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both of which have placed their entire set of lectures online through iTunes University, these educational institutions assert that the lectures themselves aren’t the real reason students spend $50,000 a year to attend these schools; the lectures only have full value in context. This is true, but it discounts the possibility that some individuals or group of individuals might create their own context around the lectures. And this is where the future seems to be pointing.

When broken down to its atomic components, the classroom is an agreement between an instructor and a set of students. The instructor agrees to offer expertise and mentorship, while the students offer their attention and dedication. The question now becomes what role, if any, the educational institution plays in coordinating any of these components. Students can share their ratings online – why wouldn’t they also share their educational goals? Once they’ve pooled their goals, what keeps them from recruiting their own instructor, booking their own classroom, indeed, just doing it all themselves?

At the moment the educational institution has an advantage over the singular student, in that it exists to coordinate the various functions of education. The student doesn’t have access to the same facilities or coordination tools. But we already see that this is changing; RateMyProfessors.com points the way. Why not create a new kind of “Open” school, a website that offers nothing but the kinds of scheduling and coordination tools students might need to organize their own courses? I’m sure that if this hasn’t been invented already someone is currently working on it – it’s the natural outgrowth of all the efforts toward student empowerment we’ve seen over the last several years.

In this near future world, students are the administrators. All of the administrative functions have been “pushed down” into a substrate of software. Education has evolved into something like a marketplace, where instructors “bid” to work with students. Now since most education is funded by the government, there will obviously be other forces at play; it may be that “administration”, such as it is, represents the government oversight function which ensures standards are being met. In any case, this does not look much like the educational institution of the 20th century – though it does look quite a bit like the university of the 13th century, where students would find and hire instructors to teach them subjects.

The role of the instructor has changed as well; as recently as a few years ago the lecturer was the font of wisdom and source of all knowledge – perhaps with a companion textbook. In an age of Wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter this no longer the case. The lecturer now helps the students find the material available online, and helps them to make sense of it, contextualizing and informing their understanding. even as the students continue to work their way through the ever-growing set of information. The instructor can not know everything available online on any subject, but will be aware of the best (or at least, favorite) resources, and will pass along these resources as a key outcome of the educational process. The instructors facilitate and mentor, as they have always done, but they are no longer the gatekeepers, because there are no gatekeepers, anywhere.

The administration has gone, the instructor’s role has evolved, now what happens to the classroom itself? In the context of a larger school facility, it may or may not be relevant. A classroom is clearly relevant if someone is learning engine repair, but perhaps not if learning calculus. The classroom in this fungible future of student administrators and evolved lecturers is any place where learning happens. If it can happen entirely online, that will be the classroom. If it requires substantial presence with the instructor, it will have a physical locale, which may or may not be a building dedicated to education. (It could, in many cases, simply be a field outdoors, again harkening back to 13th-century university practices.) At one end of the scale, students will be able work online with each other and with an lecturer to master material; at the other end, students will work closely with a mentor in a specialist classroom. This entire range of possibilities can be accommodated without much of the infrastructure we presently associate with educational institutions. The classroom will both implode, vanishing online, and explode: the world will become the classroom.

This, then, can already be predicted from current trends; as the network begins to destabilizing the institutional hierarchies in education, everything else becomes inevitable. Because this transformation lies mostly in the future, it is possible to shape these trends with actions taken in the present. In the worst case scenario, our educational institutions to not adjust to the pressures placed upon them by this new generation of students, and are simply swept aside by these students as they rise into self-empowerment. But the worst case need not be the only case. There are concrete steps which institutions can take to ease the transition from our highly formal present into our wildly informal future. In order to roll with the punches delivered by these newly-empowered students, educational institutions must become more fluid, more open, more atomic, and less interested the hallowed traditions of education than in outcomes.

III: Digital Citizenship

Obviously, much of what I’ve described here in the “melting down” of the educational process applies first and foremost to university students. That’s where most of the activity is taking place. But I would argue that it only begins with university students. From there – just like Facebook – it spreads across the gap between tertiary and secondary education, and into the high schools and colleges.

This is significant an interesting because it’s at this point that we, within Australia, run headlong into the Government’s plan to provide laptops for all year 9 through year 12 students. Some schools will start earlier; there’s a general consensus among educators that year 7 is the earliest time a student should be trusted to behave responsibility with their “own” computer. Either way, the students will be fully equipped and capable to use all of the tools at hand to manage their own education.

But will they? Some of this is a simple question of discipline: will the students be disciplined enough to take an ever-more-active role in the co-production of their education? As ever, the question is neither black nor white; some students will demonstrate the qualities of discipline needed to allow them to assume responsibility for their education, while others will not.

But, somewhere along here, there’s the presumption of some magical moment during the secondary school years, when the student suddenly learns how to behave online. And we already know this isn’t happening. We see too many incidents where students make mistakes, behaving badly without fully understanding that the whole world really is watching.

In the early part of this year I did a speaking tour with the Australian Council of Educational Researchers; during the tour I did a lot of listening. One thing I heard loud and clear from the educators is that giving a year 7 student a laptop is the functional equivalent of giving them a loaded gun. And we shouldn’t be surprised, when we do this, when there are a few accidental – or volitional – shootings.

I mentioned this in a talk to TAFE educators last week, and one of the attendees suggested that we needed to teach “Digital Citizenship”. I’d never heard the phrase before, but I’ve taken quite a liking to it. Of course, by the time a student gets to TAFE, the damage is done. We shouldn’t start talking about digital citizenship in TAFE. We should be talking about it from the first days of secondary education. And it’s not something that should be confined to the school: parents are on the hook for this, too. Even when the parents are not digitally literate, they can impart the moral and ethical lessons of good behavior to their children, lessons which will transfer to online behavior.

Make no mistake, without a firm grounding in digital citizenship, a secondary student can’t hope to make sense of the incredibly rich and impossibly distracting world afforded by the network. Unless we turn down the internet connection – which always seems like the first option taken by administrators – students will find themselves overwhelmed. That’s not surprising: we’ve taught them few skills to help them harness the incredible wealth available. In part that’s because we’re only just learning those skills ourselves. But in part it’s because we would have to relinquish control. We’re reluctant to do that. A course in digital citizenship would help both students and teachers feel more at ease with one another when confronted by the noise online.

Make no mistake, this inflection point in education is going inevitably going to cross the gap between tertiary and secondary school and students. Students will be able to do for themselves in ways that were never possible before. None of this means that the teacher or even the administrator has necessarily become obsolete. But the secondary school of the mid-21st century may look a lot more like a website than campus. The classroom will have a fluid look, driven by the teacher, the students and the subject material.

Have we prepared students for this world? Have we given them the ability to make wise decisions about their own education? Or are we like those university administrators who mutter about how RateMyProfessors.com has ruined all their carefully-laid plans? The world where students were simply the passive consumers of an educational product is coming to an end. There are other products out there, clamoring for attention – you can thank Apple for that. And YouTube.

Once we get through this inflection point in the digital revolution in education, we arrive in a landscape that’s literally mind-blowing. We will each have access to educational resources far beyond anything on offer at any other time in human history. The dream of life-long learning will be simply a few clicks away for most of the billion people on the Internet, and many of the four billion who use mobiles. It will not be an easy transition, nor will it be perfect on the other side. But it will be incredible, a validation of everything Douglas Engelbart demonstrated forty years ago, and an opportunity to create a truly global educational culture, focused on excellence, and dedicated to serving all students, everywhere.

I: Out of Control

Our greatest fear, in bringing computers into the classroom, is that we teachers and instructors and lecturers will lose control of the classroom, lose touch with the students, lose the ability to make a difference. The computer is ultimately disruptive. It offers greater authority than any instructor, greater resources than any lecturer, and greater reach than any teacher. The computer is not perfect, but it is indefatigable. The computer is not omniscient, but it is comprehensive. The computer is not instantaneous, but it is faster than any other tool we’ve ever used.

All of this puts the human being at a disadvantage; in a classroom full of machines, the human factor in education is bound to be overlooked. Even though we know that everyone learns more effectively when there’s a teacher or mentor present, we want to believe that everything can be done with the computer. We want the machines to distract, and we hope that in that distraction some education might happen. But distraction is not enough. There must be a point to the exercise, some reason that makes all the technology worthwhile. That search for a point – a search we are still mostly engaged in – will determine whether these computers are meaningful to the educational process, or if they are an impediment to learning.

It’s all about control.

What’s most interesting about the computer is how it puts paid to all of our cherished fantasies of control. The computer – or, most specifically, the global Internet connected to it – is ultimately disruptive, not just to the classroom learning experience, but to the entire rationale of the classroom, the school, the institution of learning. And if you believe this to be hyperbolic, this story will help to convince you.

In May of 1999, Silicon Valley software engineer John Swapceinski started a website called “Teacher Ratings.” Individuals could visit the site and fill in a brief form with details about their school, and their teacher. That done, they could rate the teacher’s capabilities as an instructor. The site started slowly, but, as is always the case with these sorts of “crowdsourced” ventures, as more ratings were added to the site, it became more useful to people, which meant more visitors, which meant more ratings, which meant it became even more useful, which meant more visitors, which meant more ratings, etc. Somewhere in the middle of this virtuous cycle the site changed its name to “Rate My Professors.com” and changed hands twice. For the last two years, RateMyProfessors.com has been owned by MTV, which knows a thing or two about youth markets, and can see one in a site that has nine million reviews of one million teachers, professors and instructors in the US, Canada and the UK.

Although the individual action of sharing some information about an instructor seems innocuous enough, in aggregate the effect is entirely revolutionary. A student about to attend university in the United States can check out all of her potential instructors before she signs up for a single class. She can choose to take classes only with those instructors who have received the best ratings – or, rather more perversely, only with those instructors known to be easy graders. The student is now wholly in control of her educational opportunities, going in eyes wide open, fully cognizant of what to expect before the first day of class.

Although RateMyProfessors.com has enlightened students, it has made the work of educational administrators exponentially more difficult. Students now talk, up and down the years, via the recorded ratings on the site. It isn’t possible for an institution of higher education to disguise an individual who happens to be a world-class researcher but a rather ordinary lecturer. In earlier times, schools could foist these instructors on students, who’d be stuck for a semester. This no longer happens, because RateMyProfessors.com effectively warns students away from the poor-quality teachers.

This one site has undone all of the neat work of tenure boards and department chairs throughout the entire world of academia. A bad lecturer is no longer a department’s private little secret, but publicly available information. And a great lecturer is no longer a carefully hoarded treasure, but a hot commodity on a very public market. The instructors with the highest ratings on RateMyProfessors.com find themselves in demand, receiving outstanding offers (with tenure) from other universities. All of this plotting, which used to be hidden from view, is now fully revealed. The battle for control over who stands in front of the classroom has now been decisively lost by the administration in favor of the students.

This is not something that anyone expected; it certainly wasn’t what John Swapceinski had in mind when founded Teacher Ratings. He wasn’t trying to overturn the prerogatives of heads of school around the world. He was simply offering up a place for people to pool their knowledge. That knowledge, once pooled, takes on a life of its own, and finds itself in places where it has uses that its makers never intended.

This rating system serves as an archetype for what it is about to happen to education in general. If we are smart enough, we can learn a lesson here and now that we will eventually learn – rather more expensively – if we wait. The lesson is simple: control is over. This is not about control anymore. This is about finding a way to survive and thrive in chaos.

The chaos is not something we should be afraid of. Like King Canute, we can’t roll back the tide of chaos that’s rolling over us. We can’t roll back the clock to an earlier age without computers, without Internet, without the subtle but profound distraction of text messaging. The school is of its time, not out it. Which means we must play the hand we’ve been dealt. That’s actually a good thing, because we hold a lot of powerful cards, or can, if we choose to face the chaos head on.

II: Do It Ourselves

If we take the example of RateMyProfessors.com and push it out a little bit, we can see the shape of things to come. But there are some other trends which are also becoming visible. The first and most significant of these is the trend toward sharing lecture material online, so that it reaches a very large audience. Spearheaded by Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both of which have placed their entire set of lectures online through iTunes University, these educational institutions assert that the lectures themselves aren’t the real reason students spend $50,000 a year to attend these schools; the lectures only have full value in context. This is true, in some sense, but it discounts the possibility that some individuals or group of individuals might create their own context around the lectures. And this is where the future seems to be pointing.

When broken down to its atomic components, the classroom is an agreement between an instructor and a set of students. The instructor agrees to offer expertise and mentorship, while the students offer their attention and dedication. The question now becomes what role, if any, the educational institution plays in coordinating any of these components. Students can share their ratings online – why wouldn’t they also share their educational goals? Once they’ve pooled their goals, what keeps them from recruiting their own instructor, booking their own classroom, indeed, just doing it all themselves?

At the moment the educational institution has an advantage over the singular student, in that it exists to coordinate the various functions of education. The student doesn’t have access to the same facilities or coordination tools. But we already see that this is changing; RateMyProfessors.com points the way. Why not create a new kind of “Open University”, a website that offers nothing but the kinds of scheduling and coordination tools students might need to organize their own courses? I’m sure that if this hasn’t been invented already someone is currently working on it – it’s the natural outgrowth of all the efforts toward student empowerment we’ve seen over the last several years.

In this near future world, students are the administrators. All of the administrative functions have been “pushed down” into a substrate of software. Education has evolved into something like a marketplace, where instructors “bid” to work with students. Now since most education is funded by the government, there will obviously be other forces at play; it may be that “administration”, such as it is, represents the government oversight function which ensures standards are being met. In any case, this does not look much like the educational institution of the 20th century – though it does look quite a bit like the university of the 13th century, where students would find and hire instructors to teach them subjects.

The role of the instructor has changed as well; as recently as a few years ago the lecturer was the font of wisdom and source of all knowledge – perhaps with a companion textbook. In an age of Wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter this no longer the case. The lecturer now helps the students find the material available online, and helps them to make sense of it, contextualizing and informing their understanding. even as the students continue to work their way through the ever-growing set of information. The instructor can not know everything available online on any subject, but will be aware of the best (or at least, favorite) resources, and will pass along these resources as a key outcome of the educational process. The instructor facilitates and mentors, as they have always done, but they are no longer the gatekeepers, because there are no gatekeepers, anywhere.

The administration has gone, the instructor’s role has evolved, now what happens to the classroom itself? In the context of a larger school facility, it may or may not be relevant. A classroom is clearly relevant if someone is learning engine repair, but perhaps not if learning calculus. The classroom in this fungible future of student administrators and evolved lecturers is any place where learning happens. If it can happen entirely online, that will be the classroom. If it requires substantial darshan with the instructor, it will have a physical local, which may or may not be a building dedicated to education. (It could, in many cases, simply be a field outdoors, again harkening back to 13th-century university practices.) At one end of the scale, students will be able work online with each other and with an lecturer to master material; at the other end, students will work closely with a mentor in a specialist classroom. This entire range of possibilities can be accommodated without much of the infrastructure we presently associate with educational institutions. The classroom will both implode – vanishing online – and explode – the world will become the classroom.

This, then, can already be predicted from current trends; once RateMyProfessors.com succeeded in destabilizing the institutional hierarchies in education, everything else became inevitable. Because this transformation lies mostly in the future, it is possible to shape these trends with actions taken in the present. In the worst case scenario, our educational institutions to not adjust to the pressures placed upon them by this new generation of students, and are simply swept aside by these students as they rise into self-empowerment. But the worst case need not be the only case. There are concrete steps which institutions can take to ease the transition from our highly formal present into our wildly informal future. In order to roll with the punches delivered by these newly-empowered students, educational institutions must become more fluid, more open, more atomic, and less interested the hallowed traditions of education than in outcomes.

III: All and Everything

Flexibility and fluidity are the hallmark qualities of the 21st century educational institution. An analysis of the atomic features of the educational process shows that the course is a series of readings, assignments and lectures that happen in a given room on a given schedule over a specific duration. In our drive to flexibility how can we reduce the class into to essential, indivisible elements? How can we capture those elements? Once captured, how can we get these elements to the students? And how can the students share elements which they’ve found in their own studies?

Recommendation #1: Capture Everything

I am constantly amazed that we simply do not record almost everything that occurs in public forums as a matter of course. This talk is being recorded for a later podcast – and so it should be. Not because my words are particularly worthy of preservation, but rather because this should now be standard operating procedure for education at all levels, for all subject areas. It simply makes no sense to waste my words – literally, pouring them away – when with very little infrastructure an audio recording can be made, and, with just a bit more infrastructure, a video recording can be made.

This is the basic idea that’s guiding Stanford and MIT: recording is cheap, lecturers are expensive, and students are forgetful. Somewhere in the middle these three trends meet around recorded media. Yes, a student at Stanford who misses a lecture can download and watch it later, and that’s a good thing. But it also means that any student, anywhere, can download the same lecture.

Yes, recording everything means you end up with a wealth of media that must be tracked, stored, archived, referenced and so forth. But that’s all to the good. Every one of these recordings has value, and the more recordings you have, the larger the horde you’re sitting upon. If you think of it like that – banking your work – the logic of capturing everything becomes immediately clear.

Recommendation #2: Share Everything

While education definitely has value – teachers are paid for the work – that does not mean that resources, once captured, should be tightly restricted to authorized users only. In fact, the opposite is the case: the resources you capture should be shared as broadly as can possibly be managed. More than just posting them onto a website (or YouTube or iTunes), you should trumpet their existence from the highest tower. These resources are your calling card, these resources are your recruiting tool. If someone comes across one of your lectures (or other resources) and is favorably impressed by it, how much more likely will they be to attend a class?

The center of this argument is simple, though subtle: the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. You extend your brand with every resource you share. You extend the knowledge of your institution throughout the Internet. Whatever you have – if it’s good enough – will bring people to your front door, first virtually, then physically.

If universities as illustrious (and expensive) as Stanford and MIT could both share their full courseware online, without worrying that it would dilute the value of the education they offer, how can any other institution hope to refute their example? Both voted with their feet, and both show a different way to value education – as experience. You can’t download experience. You can’t bottle it. Experience has to be lived, and that requires a teacher.

Recommendation #3: Open Everything

You will be approached by many vendors promising all sorts of wonderful things that will make the educational processes seamless and nearly magical for both educators and students. Don’t believe a word of it. (If I had a dollar for every gripe I’ve heard about Blackboard and WebCT, I’d be a very wealthy man.) There is no off-the-shelf tool that is perfectly equipped for every situation. Each tool tries to shoehorn an infinity of possibilities into a rather limited palette.

Rather than going for a commercial solution, I would advise you to look at the open-source solutions. Rather than buying a solution, use Moodle, the open-source, Australian answer to digital courseware. Going open means that as your needs change, the software can change to meet those needs. Given the extraordinary pressures education will be under over the next few years, openness is a necessary component of flexibility.

Openness is also about achieving a certain level of device-independence. Education happens everywhere, not just with your nose down in a book, or stuck into a computer screen. There are many screens today, and while the laptop screen may be the most familiar to educators, the mobile handset has a screen which is, in many ways, more vital. Many students will never be very computer literate, but every single one of them has a mobile handset, and every single one of them sends text messages. It’s the big of computer technology we nearly always overlook – because it is so commonplace. Consider every screen when you capture, and when you share; dealing with them all as equals will help you work find audiences you never suspected you’d have.

There is a third aspect of openness: open networks. Educators of every stripe throughout Australia are under enormous pressure to “clean” the network feeds available to students. This is as true for adult students as it is for educators who have a duty-of-care relationship with their students. Age makes no difference, apparently. The Web is big, bad, evil and must be tamed.

Yet net filtering throws the baby out with the bathwater. Services like Twitter get filtered out because they could potentially be disruptive, cutting students off from the amazing learning potential of social messaging. Facebook and MySpace are seen as time-wasters, rather than tools for organizing busy schedules. The list goes on: media sites are blocked because the schools don’t have enough bandwidth to support them; Wikipedia is blocked because teachers don’t want students cheating.

All of this has got to stop. The classroom does not exist in isolation, nor can it continue to exist in opposition to the Internet. Filtering, while providing a stopgap, only leaves students painfully aware of how disconnected the classroom is from the real world. Filtering makes the classroom less flexible and less responsive. Filtering is lazy.

Recommendation #4: Only Connect

Mind the maxim of the 21st century: connection is king. Students must be free to connect with instructors, almost at whim. This becomes difficult for instructors to manage, but it is vital. Mentorship has exploded out of the classroom and, through connectivity, entered everyday life. Students should also be able to freely connect with educational administration; a fruitful relationship will keep students actively engaged in the mechanics of their education.

Finally, students must be free to (and encouraged to) connect with their peers. Part of the reason we worry about lecturers being overburdened by all this connectivity is because we have yet to realize that this is a multi-lateral, multi-way affair. It’s not as though all questions and issues immediately rise to the instructor’s attention. This should happen if and only if another student can’t be found to address the issue. Students can instruct one another, can mentor one another, can teach one another. All of this happens already in every classroom; it’s long past time to provide the tools to accelerate this natural and effective form of education. Again, look to RateMyProfessors.com – it shows the value of “crowdsourced” learning.

Connection is expensive, not in dollars, but in time. But for all its drawbacks, connection enriches us enormously. It allows us to multiply our reach, and learn from the best. The challenge of connectivity is nowhere near as daunting as the capabilities it delivers. Yet we know already that everyone will be looking to maintain control and stability, even as everything everywhere becomes progressively reshaped by all this connectivity. We need to let go, we need to trust ourselves enough to recognize that what we have now, though it worked for a while, is no longer fit for the times. If we can do that, we can make this transition seamless and pleasant. So we must embrace sharing and openness and connectivity; in these there’s the fluidity we need for the future.

Recorded in New York City, 23 June 2008 – the day before I delivered “Hyperpolitics, American Style” at the Personal Democracy Forum. A wide-ranging discussion on hyperconnectivity, hyperpolitics, media, hyperdistribution, and lots of other fun things.

Many thanks to Mark for getting it up!

My brief keynote to the ICT Roundtable of the TAFE Sydney Institute. Recorded on Wednesday, 13 August 2008. Many thanks to Trish James and Stephan Ridgway for arranging the audio recording!

Recorded at “The Digital Education Revolution”, Adelaide, on Monday 2 Monday 2008. It’s a video presentation of the talk that was published on this blog.

Many thanks to the folks at the Australian Council for Educational Research, Education.AU, and Kerryank for her most awesome audio recording.

Introduction: Constructing a Child

In November of 1998, I attended a conference on technology and design in Amsterdam, and brought along two mates itching for an excuse to visit Europe. We all stayed at the flat of my good friends, Neil and Kylin. I dutifully attended the conference every day as the rest of them went out carousing through the various less-reputable quarters of Amsterdam, and we all had a great time. As Kylin tells it – given that she was the only woman on this Cook’s Tour – when we departed, we left a lingering residue of testosterone in their flat, and (if they calculated correctly) the very day after we departed for Los Angeles, they conceived their daughter Bey.

In February 1999, Neil and Kylin emailed all their friends, telling us of their plans to move – immediately – from Amsterdam to Florida. No explanation given. Through some weird intuition, I figured it out: Kylin was pregnant. I called her, and put the question to her directly. “How did you know?” she gasped. “We’ve been keeping it top secret.”

I don’t know how I knew. But I was overjoyed: I’m part of a generation who waited a long, long time to have children – my own nephews weren’t born until 2001 and 2002; none of my close friends had children in 1999. Neil and Kylin were the first.

It got me to pondering, as I ran a little thought experiment: what would the world of their daughter, still in utero, look like? What would her experience of that world be?

A month earlier, my friend Terence McKenna had challenged me to write a book. “You mouth off enough,” he suggested, “so maybe you should get it all down?” When he laid that challenge before me, I had no idea what I’d write a book about.

Somehow, as soon as I heard about Kylin’s pregnancy, I knew. I had to write a book about the world that child would grow up into, because that world would look nothing like the world I had been born into back in 1962. That child wouldn’t need this book. Her parents would.

A few months later I attended another conference, at MIT, where I heard psychologist Sherry Turkle talk about her work with young children. Turkle has been exploring how technology changes children’s behaviors, and, in this specific case, she’d taken a long look at a brand new toy: in fact, that season’s “hot” toy, the “Furby”.

Furby is an electromechanical plush toy, capable of responding to various actions by the child, but Furby also presents the child with demands – to be fed, to be played with, to be put to sleep when tired. More than interactive, the Furby presented children with some of the qualities we recognize as innate to living things. Would a small child recognize furby as inanimate, like a doll, or animate, like a pet?

From research in developmental psychology we know that children develop the categories of “inanimate” and “animate” when they’re around four years old. The development of these categories is a “constructivist” process – children do not need to be taught the difference between these two states; rather, they intuit the difference through continued interactions with animate and inanimate objects. Thus, an object, like Furby, which displays characteristics associated with both categories, should pose quite a philosophical conundrum for a small child.

Turkle put the question to these children: is Furby like your puppy? Is it like your doll? These children, little philosophical geniuses, gave her an answer she never expected to receive. They said it’s like neither of them. It is a thing itself, something in-between. They had no name for this third category between animate and inanimate, but they knew it existed, for they had direct experience of it.

This was my penny-drop moment: constructivism states that all children learn how the world works through their interactions within it. And we had suddenly changed the rules. We had infused the material world with the fairy dust of interactivity, creating the Pinocchio-like Furby, and, in so doing, at created a new ontological category. It is not a category that adults acknowledge – in fact, many adults find Furby slightly “creepy” precisely because it straddles two very familiar categories – but, in another generation, by the time these children are our age, that category will have a name, and will be accepted as a matter of course.

This is what Neil and Kylin – and, really, parents everywhere – need to know: the world has changed, the world is changing, and the world’s going to change a whole lot more. We may be the first beneficiaries of this great upwelling of technology, but the lasting benefits will be conferred upon our posterity, for it is changing the way they think. Their understanding to the world is, in some ways, utterly different from our own. And, just now, just over the last year or two, we’ve thrown a new element into the mix. We’re gracing ourselves with a new kind of connectivity – I call it “hyperconnectivity” which turbocharges some of the most essential features of human beings. This newest frontier – which did not exist even a decade ago – is what I want to focus upon this morning.

I: Who Are We?

We human beings are smart. Very smart. So smart we run the joint. But there’s a heavy price to be paid for all those brains. To start with, our heads our so big that we very nearly kill our mothers in the act of giving birth. Human births are so dangerous that we’re the only species we know of which can’t handle the act of birth alone.

We need others around – historically, other women – assisting us in the process. This point is essential to our humanity: we need other people. There is no way that a human, alone, can survive.

Yes, there are a few isolated incidence of “wolf boys” and Robinson Crusoe-types, battling against the odds in an indifferent or inimical environment, but, for far longer than we have been human, we have been social.

You can go back through the tree of life, a full eleven million years, to Proconsul, the common ancestor of gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and humans, and that animal was a social animal. It’s in our genes. It’s what we are. But why?

The answer is simple enough: eleven million years ago, those of our ancestors with the best social skills could most dependably count on help from others. That help was essential to their survival. That help allowed them to live long enough to pass those social genes and social behaviors along to their children. That help was essential, once our brains grew big enough to create trouble in the birth canal, for the next generation of human beings to come into the world. Cleverly, nature has crafted a species which, from the moment of the first birth pangs, must be social in order to survive. That pressure – a “selection pressure”, as it’s known in biology – is probably the essential, defining feature of humanity.

In an article in the May 17 2008 issue of New Scientist, an author rhapsodized about the end of “human exceptionalism”. Ethology and zoology have taught us that all of the behaviors we consider uniquely human do, in fact, exist broadly among other species. Whales have culture, of a sort. Chimpanzees use gestures to communicate their needs and wants, just like a child does. Dolphins have names. But each of these species, smart as they may be, deliver their young unassisted. They do not need help from their fellows to enter this world.

We are delivered by social means, and live our entire lives in a social order. What was essential at birth becomes even more important as an infant and toddler: because of our huge brains we remain helpless far longer than any other species.

A mother caring for a newborn infant has a full-time task on her hands. She can not devote her energies to finding food or shelter. Her attention is divided, but mostly focused on her child. Here again, the strong bonds of socialization create an environment where women (again) will altruistically bear some of the burden for mother and newborn. This altruism is reciprocal: as other women bear children, these mothers, with older children, will bear some of the burden for them.

This means that the mothers best able to forge strong social bonds with other women will have the most help at hand when they need it. This means, al things being equal, their children will be more likely to survive, and the chain of genes and behaviors gets passed along to another generation. This is another selection pressure which has, over millions of years, turned us into thoroughly social animals.

An interesting point to note here is that women have always had stronger selection pressures toward social behavior than men. I will come back to this.

Given that so much of our success is based upon our ability to socialize with others, and given that additional social skills confer additional advantage which increases selection success, as we evolved into our modern form – Homo Sapiens Sapiens – natural selection tended to emphasize our social characteristics. Being social has ever been the best way to get ahead.

In the last million years, as our brains grew explosively – as one scientist put it, “perhaps the most improbable event in all of evolution, anywhere” – much of the potential of all that new gray matter was put to work for social benefit. The “new brain” or neocortex, which is the most dramatically enlarged portion of the human brain, seems to be the area dedicated to our social relationships.

We know this because, in 1992, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar compared the average troop size of gorillas and chimpanzees against the average tribe sizes of humans. He found that there was a direct correlation between the volume of the neocortex in these three species and their average troop or tribe size. This value, known as “Dunbar’s Number”, is roughly 20 for gorillas, who have the smallest neocortex, about 35 for chimpanzees, and – for us lucky human beings, who have the greatest selection pressures on our social behavior – just under one hundred and fifty. We may not be entirely exceptional, but we’re doing quite well.

Essentially, inside of each one of our heads, there are a hundred and fifty other people running around. Yes, that sounds a bit crowded (particularly when they’re up partying all night long with their mates), but it’s actually imminently practical. These “little people” inside our heads are models of each person we know well: our family, our friends, our colleagues. For each of these people we build mental model which helps us to predict their behavior. (It isn’t really them, but rather, our image of them.) This predictive capability smoothes our social interactions. We know how to interact with people whom we have in our heads; with others we remain demure, reserved – in a word, predictable. Only with intimacy do we express the quirks of behavior which make us unique, only with intimacy do we take note of them in others.

We all know more than a hundred and fifty people. Some folks on FaceBook and MySpace claim thousands of “friends”. But most of these folks aren’t in our heads. There’s a simple rule you can use, to tell whether one of these folks is in your head: I call it the “sharing test”. Let’s suppose you see something – on the Web, in the newspaper, on the telly – that is so meaningful (funny, or poignant, or just so salient to whatever passions drive you), and in the next moment you think, “Wow, I know Dazza would really enjoy that.” And you flip the link along in an email. Or you send Dazza a text message with, “Hey, mate, did you see that thing just now on TEN?” And if he didn’t see it, you ring and fill him in. It’s that moment of unrestrained sharing – it feels almost automatic, and it’s entirely an essential part of what we are – which defines the most visible quality of those people inside our heads.

Every time when we share something with those little people in our head, we reinforce that relationship; we strengthen the social bonds which tie us to one another. Fifty thousand years ago this had enormous practical benefits: sharing where the best fruit grew – or the location of a predator in the tall grass – kept everyone alive and healthy. The selection pressure for sociability made us expert at sharing.

It’s interesting to watch this behavior as expressed by children; in some ways they share automatically – children love to share their experiences. In other situations – such as with a favorite toy – children must be taught to share, to override the natural selfishness of the singular animal, overruling that intrinsic behavior with the altruistic behavior of the social human. Sharing is one of the most important lessons parents teach their children, and if that lesson is poorly taught, it leaves a child at a permanent disadvantage.

While our genes make us sociable, our sharing behaviors are more software than hardware; this is why they must be taught. It takes time for any child to learn that lesson, just as it took quite a while for humans, as a species, to learn it. Geneticists know that human beings haven’t changed at all in at least 60,000 years, but civilization didn’t kick off in a meaningful way until about ten thousand years ago.

This has been an a bit of a puzzler for paleoanthropologists, but a new theory – which I also read about in New Scientist – seems to make sense of that gap: while we had the raw capacity for civilized behavior long ago, it took us 50,000 years to write the cultural software for civilization. Over those years, as we learned about ourselves and our world, our behavior changed and we taught these changes to our children, who improved upon them, passing those changes along.

In short, our entire species spent a long time in primary school (and might even have been kept back a few grades) before graduation. The incredible wealth of cultural learning – which we don’t really even reflect on, because it seems so essential and obvious to us – was painstaking developed across two thousand generations.

Our secondary studies, as a species, included that most unique of human institutions: the city. The earliest cities, such as Jericho and Çatal Höyük, already housed thousands of inhabitants – far beyond the reach of Dunbar’s Number.

That in itself presented a singular challenge for humanity, because, as near as we can tell, humans in pre-civilization lived in a perpetual state of war – the “war of all against all” – waged against all those not in their own tribes.

At the end of May 2008, we saw photos of a newly discovered tribe in the far reaches of the Amazon, who reacted to the presence of an aircraft by firing bows at it. Human beings possess an inherent xenophobia, and the boundaries those in the “in group” conform to the limits of Dunbar’s Number.

Given this, how did we all come to live together in ever-greater numbers? Simply this: the cultural software of civilization provided a greater selection advantage than that afforded by the tribal order which preceded it. Civilization is a broader form of sharing, where altruism is replaced by roles: the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. In civilization we share the manifold burdens of life by specializing, then we trade these specialized goods and services amongst ourselves. And it works.

Civilized human beings live in greater numbers, with greater population density, than pre-civilized cultures. It does not work perfectly: we have crime and poverty precisely because there are people in our cities who can fall through the “safety net” of civilized society. These eternal blights are the specific diseases of civilization. Yet the upsides of this broader and more diffuse form of sharing so outweighed the downsides that these evils have been tacitly acknowledged as the “price of progress.”

So things continued, merrily, for the last ten thousand years. Cities rose and fell; empires rose and fell; cultures and languages and entire peoples rose up suddenly, only to vanish just as quickly. All along the way, we continued adding to our cultural software. We learned – fairly early on – to record our learning in permanent form. We codified the essential elements of the software of civilization in laws and commandments.

We experimented with every form of human social organization, from the military dictatorship of Sparta, to the centralized bureaucracy of China, to the open democracy of Athens, to the chaotic anarchism of the Paris Commune. At each step along the way, we passed these lessons along, in a unbroken chain, to the generations that followed.

We are the children of nearly five hundred generations of civilization. The lessons learned over that immense span of time have brought us to the threshold of a revolution as comprehensive as that which obsolesced our tribal natures and replaced them with more civilized forms. Once again, the selection pressures of sociability force us into a narrow passage, toward another birth.

II: Where Are We Going?

We know that our amazingly comprehensive social skills are located in the newest part of our brain; we also know that they are among the last capabilities to mature during our cognitive development. Our sociability depends upon so much: a strong command of language, the ability to empathize and sympathize, the ability to consider the wants and needs of others, the ability to give freely of one’s self – altruism. At any point this complex and delicate process can be interrupted, by nature or by nurture.

My own nephew, Alexander, was diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder at the end of 2005. For leading-edge brain researchers, autism represents a natural failure of the brain’s inherent capability to model the behavior of others. The hundred and fifty people running around inside of the head of someone with an Autism Spectrum Disorder are shaped differently than the ones running about in mine; they still exist, but they are not (in an admittedly subjective assessment) as complete. Now that we know roughly what autism is, we work with these children intensively, because, while they lack certain inherent features we associate with normalcy, these children, if diagnosed early enough, can learn to become much more sensitive to the world-views and feelings of others.

My nephew attended a state-of-the-art pre-school in his San Diego suburb, where autistic children and “normal” children (such as his year-younger brother, Andrew) mix freely, because it is now known that the autistic children can and will learn necessary social skills through this continuous interaction. Alexander has now been mainstreamed, while my younger nephew remains as a “peer” in this school, showing other children how to be a fully socialized human being.

Then there are the children who have suffered neglect or abuse. Not having been nurtured themselves, they have not learned how to nurture others. This deficit manifests as emotional withdrawal, or in anti-social behaviors. Children who have not received love can not find it within themselves to love others. It is not that love is learned, per se, but rather, that we learn to recognize it as others demonstrate it toward us. The drive to connect with another human being, although entirely inherent, can be so confused, or so atrophied through disuse (these areas of the brain, if under-stimulated, will die away, leaving the child with a permanent deficit), that the child essentially becomes locked into a solitary world, unable to initiate or maintain the social relationships essential to success.

None of us are perfect; all of us feel embarrassment and disappointment and awkwardness in a range of social situations. Yet those sensations, of themselves, are proof our normalcy: we sense our social shortcomings. We had little awareness of our social nature when we were young. Only as we matured, turning the corner into tweenhood, did we rise into an awareness of the strong social bonds which form the largest part of our experience as human beings. For each and every one of us, this is a painful experience.

The brain, furiously making connections between regions which have been developing from before birth, integrates our comprehensive understanding of human behavior, our own emotional state, and our perceptions of the actions and emotions of others to create a model of how we are viewed by others, our “social standing”. It is this that natural selection has driven us to optimize: individuals with the highest social standing get the lion’s share of attention, affection and resources.

In particular, this burden lies heaviest on young women, who have the additional selection pressure (now more-or-less vestigial) driving them to form the social bonds of altruism with their peers which would, in prehistoric times, lead to greater help with childbearing and child-rearing. Young women emerge into a social consciousness so rich and so complex it makes young men look nearly autistic in comparison.

It is the reason why young woman invest themselves so wholly in their looks, in their friends, in their cliques, in the “in group” and the “out group”. Films like Heathers (one of my personal favorites) and Mean Girls tell tales as old as humanity: the rise into social consciousness of that most social of all the animals on the planet – the young woman.

It also provides some explanation for why young women are often emotionally overwrought. It isn’t just hormones. It’s the rising awareness of a vast social game that they don’t know how to play, with rules taught only through trial and error. Every mistake is potentially fatal, every success fleeting. And each of these moments of singular significance are amplified by a genetic imperative, a drive to connect, which leaves them helpless. Resistance is futile, and engagement only brings more learning, and more pain.

Oh, and we just made things a whole lot more complicated.

This generation of young adults, coming of age just now, have access to the best tools for connection and communication created by our species.

A few years ago, these kids, bounded by proximity and temporality, took their cues from their immediate peers. But now these connections can be forged via text messages, or MySpace pages, or YouTube videos, and so on. An average fifteen year-old girl might send and receive a hundred text messages in a single day and think nothing of it. Her inherent drive to connect has been freed from space and time; she can reach out everywhere, at any time; she can be reached anywhere, anytime. We have added a technological dimension – an intense and comprehensive acceleration – to a wholly natural process.

During the two hundred years of the industrial revolution, we amplified our capability for physical work. Steam engines and electric motors replaced muscle. As we moved from physical labor to monitoring and control of our machines, our capacity for work exploded, transforming the world. Still, these changes were entirely external. They did not affect our nature as social beings, but simply extended our physical capabilities. Now – just now – we have moved beyond the physical extension of our capabilities into a comprehensive amplification of our social nature. The mobile and the Internet are already transforming the human world as utterly as the steam engine transformed the landscape; but this transformation is happening in eighth-time.

The transition to industrialization, which took about a hundred years to complete, seems slow when compared to the rise of the Human Network, which will take about fifteen years, end-to-end.

Already, half of humanity owns a mobile phone; within about three years, three-quarters of the planet will own a mobile. That’s everyone except for the most desperately poor among us. No one, anywhere, expected this, because no one reckoned on this most basic of all human drives – the need to connect. The mobile is the steam engine, the electric motor, and the internal combustion engine of the 21st century: every bit of the potential framed by each of these enormous innovations now rests comfortably in the palm of three and a half billion hands.

Getting the tools for the amplification of our social natures is only half the story. That’s just hardware. What really counts is the software. And that’s why we turn, at the end of this tale, to Bey, the child conceived by Neil and Kylin, back in the last days of 1998.

III: Who Will Lead the Way?

Hardware is not enough. We spent fifty thousand years in idle, despite the best cognitive hardware on the planet, before anything truly interesting occurred. We are ensuring that every single person on Earth has a connection to the Human Network, but that doesn’t mean any of us know how to use it. Still, we are learning. And humans excel at learning from one another.

A recent study run with young chimps and toddlers showed that the chimps surpassed the toddlers in their cognitive capabilities, but that the toddlers far surpassed the chimpanzees in their ability to “ape” behavior. Humans learn by mimesis: the observation of our parents, our peers, our mentors and teachers. (Which is why the injunction, “Do as I say, not as I do,” never works.) As such, we closely observe each other to learn what works, and we copy it. This mimetic behavior, which used to be constrained by distance, has itself become a global phenomenon. Whatever works gets copied widely. It could be a good behavior, or a bad behavior: the only metric is the success of the behavior. If it achieves its ends, it will be observed and copied, widely and nearly instantaneously.

It took us two thousand generations to build up the cognitive software for civilization, as individual tribes made the same discoveries, independently, but lacked the means to share them. Even the diffusion of agriculture depended more on the migration of whole peoples than the dissemination of knowledge.

Today, a clever tip finds its way onto YouTube in minutes, a rumor can sweep through a nation in the time it takes to forward a text message, and a blog post can cut billions off the valuation of a publicly listed firm. We are “hyperconnected,” but, newly delivered into this state of being, we are still quite immature.

We know how to be social beings, but never before have we been globally and instantaneously social. For this reason, we are learning – and each of are intensely involved in this education. We are learning from ourselves, applying the lessons of our own socialization, to see if these lessons work in this new world. That’s pure constructivism. We are learning from each other, watching our peers as intently as any young woman would, when desperately trying to defend her position in an ever-more-competitive social circle. That’s pure mimesis. Together they’re a potent combination, and, when multiplied by the accelerator of the Human Network, it means we’re learning very rapidly indeed. Learning is never complete: ignorance is a permanent feature of the human condition. That said, competence can come quickly, when the students are wholly engaged in learning. As we are.

This means that, in another two or three years, when Bey is old enough to get her first mobile phone, at precisely the moment that she begins to awaken to her intense cognitive capabilities as social animal, those abilities will have been so comprehensively rewritten and transformed by the new software of sociability that she will find herself suddenly both intensely empowered and, most likely, entirely overwhelmed.

Bey will be among the first children who become socially aware within a world where the definition, rules and operating principles of the social universe have utterly changed. That transformation will not be complete, by any means, but it will be far enough along that the basic features and outlines of 21st century social civilization will be present.

This is the only social world that she will ever know. For her, social connections will not end with the classroom and the home. Social connectivity is already edging toward a state where everyone is directly connected to everyone else, all six point eight billion of us, a world where each of us can directly forge a relationship with everyone else. Bey will not know any of the boundaries we consider natural and solid, the boundaries of the classroom, the suburb, the family, or the nation: under the pressure of this intense hyperconnectivity, all of those boundaries dissolve, or are blown over. Only connect. Connection is all that matters. The social instinct, hyperempowered and taken to an entirely new level by hyperconnectivity, is rewriting the rules of culture.

This world looks utterly alien to us, yet it is already here. Author William Gibson says, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” We have moments of hyperconnectivity – as in the thirty-six hours after the Sichuan earthquake, when text messaging and other tools for hyperconnectivity spontaneously created a Human Network, sharing news of the tragedy and working to locate missing people. Such moments are becoming more frequent, gradually merging into a continuum.

But what about Bey? What lessons can we offer her? She will learn everything she can from everyone, everywhere. She will span the planet for best practices in sociability, because she can, and because she must. She will outpace us in every way, because the simultaneous emergence of the Human Network and her own social capabilities makes her potent in ways we can’t wholly predict. Her powers will be greater, but that also means that her crash will be more spectacular – apocalyptic, really – when she tries something, and fails.

We do know this: just as Furby created a new ontological class of being, a nether zone between animate and inanimate which children instinctively recognized and embraced, Bey will be living a new ontology of sociability, connection and relationship. These girls, just on the verge of becoming young women, will lead the way into this new world. They will be the first masters of the Human Network.

I want to close this essay with both a warning — and a hope. The warning is simply this: these young women will be vastly more powerful than we are. Harnessing the immense energies of the Human Network will be, quite literally, child’s play to them. If they sense they are being wronged, and can build a network of peers who concur in this assessment, you will need to watch out, because they will have the capacity to destroy you with a word. We already see students threatening educators with damage to their reputations; multiply that a billion-fold and you can sense the potential for catastrophe. I am not saying that this will inevitably happen, only that it can.

At the same time, despite their thermonuclear potential, it would be a mistake to handle these kids too delicately. Children are all passion, but lack wisdom. Adults have plenty of wisdom, but, all too often, we lack passion.

We need to build strong relationships with these children, using the Human Network of hyperconnectivity, so that each of us can infect the other. We need their passion to move forward without fear in a world where the human universe has shifted beneath our feet. They desperately need our wisdom to guide them into healthy and stable relationships throughout the Human Network. To do this, we need to bring these kids inside our heads, and we need to get ourselves into theirs, so that, together, we can make sense of a world so new, and so different, that we all seem but little children in a big world.