The web gives us a critical advantage over this virus

As we come to terms with the news that UK schools are about to close for what could be six months, I find myself reflecting on how lucky we are.
Imagine if this had happened before the mass adoption of the web?

When I was at school there was no internet. A pc was a rarity. Mobile phones unheard of.
I would not have been able to order what I needed online - and there certainly was no opportunity to experience e-learning, virtual classrooms or any of the other digital innovations education has been dancing with, but will now have to adopt on a mass and 'business-as-usual' scale. Imagine facing the next six months without any of that.

Of course, the same is true of business.

The web allows us to continue to trade, to continue to meet and do deals, to collaborate on ideas, concepts, prototypes, launch strategies and projects of all kinds.
We are exceptionally lucky that Covid19 comes at a time when we have the technology to physically self-isolate WHILE socially connecting. This is the only time in history that has been possible.
The web has given us a critical advantage vs this virus.
We can continue pretty much every aspect of trade and education. We can maintain our economic progress. We can do it while improving our relationship with our planet.

All  we have to do is get over the shock and get used to a few new tools.

We can do this.

Enabling achievement vs hitting your KPIs

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash

GCSE exam results filled the UK media today, telling its once-a-year story of joy and heartbreak. The arguments over the KPIs have been more intense this year amid changes in the way exam results are calculated.
Which prompted
me to return to a regular question when faced with how to measure something.
I asked a teenager what she thought education was for?
'To help you pass exams,' she said.
But it's not, is it?
Education is a lifelong thing. We acquire new skills and capabilities to be able to achieve things. Education is to enable us to achieve the things we seek to achieve.
The exam result is not the thing we are seeking to achieve.
The same is true of so much poor wisdom applied to the selection of our business KPIs. Too often they provide a distraction from the thing we are seeking to achieve and become an end in themselves.
Next time you are tasked with designing or setting kpis, remember how exams can so easily fail the goals of education.

Bringing the school report into the 21st century

Image via WikipediaHow do you monitor your child's educational progress at school? For most of us touch points are few and far between - a parents evening coupled with a report once a term.

There are digital means by which kids get their progress regularly encouraged and monitored - things such as Mathletics for example.

But I think there are greater possibilities to be accessed if we take a more holistic approach.
I'm thinking of your child's school progress updated live and recorded in a personal url shared between you, the child and your teachers.

This borrows heavily from ideas such as the personal url for health records - a place where your healthcare data is recorded and shared with the patient and their doctors; a place where the patients can give rapid and direct feedback to their doctors about what treatment is working, what isn't - and where the anonymised data in aggregate can be used to inform the wider medical community leading to improvements in effectiveness for all.

It is an approach being seriously considered by the UK's national health service, according to Macrowikinomics, for example.

Applied to education, parents could get more direct involvement with the child's progress - be able to identify slow-downs, strenghts and weaknesses and where their input could help most.

And again, in aggregate the data could help inform the wider education community in what works and what doesn't and how to be more effective for all kids - in much closer to real time than we have been used to.

The approach makes data live, useful and change enabling - rather than silo'd and gathering dust on a shelf.

Related articles

• Prevent Medical Errors With Health Records (everydayhealth.com)
• Slow Going For The Electronic Health Records Movement (zocdoc.com)

2020 vision

I know. I'm meant to review the last decade or predict what'll happen in the next year around this time.

Thing is, I'm not going to follow the rules, because for the years following 2009 it simply wouldn't be appropriate to follow rules which may have applied up to this point.

We're in for a big change: Where the noughties were a decade of discovery, the teens will be a decade of realisation. And not discovery of new tech. The future isn't digital; it is self-organised.

The noughties were when we discovered our self-organising power - little by little. And new models started to emerge.

But we are embarking on 10 years in which people all over the globe will realise the self-organising power now at their fingertips - and start turning that realisation into the world they want; niche by niche.

Which means everything you know is up for grabs. Everything.

Everything that is organised or mediated can and will be disrupted by this.

That's pretty much every aspect of society, then. (image courtesy Life Archive on google)

As the realisation dawns, you can be certain no one will be talking about 'social media' anymore. They will just get on with using the best ever set of tools and platforms to communicate: With each other, find each other, form groups, act.

They won't wait to be directed. They will simply come together and debug their world. Niche by niche. The edge in action.

Which is bad news for those who would organise and those who would mediate.

It's not just traditional media, advertising, marketing etc that's going to be replaced. Even the 'new media' stuff that relies on central organisation is threatened. Traditional search (for example) is already being replaced for many by collaborative filtering.

Ubiquitous, always-on computing will arrive as the enabler. Digital social tools which allow us to express meta data beyond silos (including language) will emerge to enable all of us to find all of us when we need each other most. Those tools and platforms which fulfil those roles most successfully will be those with the best chance of commercial success.

And by 2020 we will have the tech and the will to make communities of purpose the primary form of organisation: adhoc self-forming groups brought together to collaborate - driven by common purpose.

The self-organised future will begin taking shape, new structures for education, law, government - all the aparatus of the state - will emerge. And as they do the state itself, as a formalised centrally-controlled collective based on geography, will submerge.

This new form of organisation will over-ride more traditional methods primarily because it provides a more effective tool for the allocation of increasingly scarce resources. But also because people like doing stuff together. It's a better fit with the reality of our social selves.

Lowest common denominator models will disappear wherever communities of purpose can self-organise (which is pretty much everywhere and anytime).

One example? Mass party politics will decline. New democracy will formulate in open systems - with collaboration delivering a better fit, niche by niche,

In repeatedly failing to understand the cross-border collaboration of 'their' people, our national leaders remind us of the failure of lowest common denominator politics and broad and assumed national interests.

The issue of global warming may prove a key catalyst. We gave our leaders the chance to sort things out with their big, broad, one-size fits all policies (they found that none did).

In a decade of realisation we move beyond being passive consumers in all aspects of our lives - government policy included.

We won't sit back and wait for the centre's solution. Instead we quietly and determinedly get on with wikifixing our world - collaborating across borders, ignoring the fictional silos the nation state has imagined and attempted to impose.

The impact of the edge on the centre has the potential to be cataclysmic. If change from without happens faster than change from within, something will tear. Fundamental organisational change is hard to imagine as a gentle process.

Judging when to cede control will be a key skill for leaders of all organisations in the coming years. Protecting the vulnerable, another.

My daughter has just finished her first term of traditional schooling. I have to wonder if she will complete her education (what a curious pre-network phrase...) within a similar lowest-common-denominator structure. And if she doesn't - then how does the morph from old to new happen? With a meeting of a parents collective and nods of assent - or with teachers manning the barricades?

There is much to consider; much I (and we) could strive to predict.

Instead, in the words of BBC Childrens TV long gone (and with more than a nod to Clay Shirky's Gin-swilling tales of newly industrial London), Why Don't You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead? Start inventing the self-organised future - niche by niche - with someone you care about, today.

By 2020 a person's worth will be valued by what they share, not what they keep. That may be the most significant shift of all.

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• Now Entering The Second Dark Age? (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
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Clay Shirky on scoring collaboration in education

Another day, another part of my interview (the fourth) with Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody). And today's topic is education.

Clay rates the question (which came from Rebecca Caroe via twitter) as one of THE toughest and most important facing our generation.
It is "How do we examine and score collaboration in education?"

Clay is an educator himself - at NYU. He believes there is a collision between the internal message in colleges and universities, which values and encourages collaboration, and the external message - which is that the education system does quality control of individual minds. (image via flickr by kokeshi)

He has no quick fix, but instead believes finding the right solution will be "the work of a generation".

Watch the video below.
See him in person here. Buy his book, here.




I'm speaking at Widget Web Expo in London today. If you're there, come and say hi!

Unfinished symphonies

I met with a group of media and journalism students at Birmingham City University last week. It's something I'd like to repeat. I was interested in how they look at the career ahead of them (entrepreneurial or corporate and or how they could be mixed) and in the approach of people who are genuinely digital natives when it comes to building web services which serve the community first.

But my greatest learning came when we discussed working practices.
I've often heard research quoted about how digital natives, those who have grown up with multi-channel experiences all around them, are able to 'cope' with several different streams of information all at once.
For example, in the UK, the place you are most likely to find mobile television consumed is in the home, often in front of another TV, while the user is also browsing a magazine, listening to music and indulging in an IM chat with friends on their laptop.
The argument goes that this ability to multi-task in this respect is hard-wired in to us as we grow up and can't be changed later no matter how we juggle.

But what I found in conversation with these students is that they ALL (including switched-on course organiser Paul Bradshaw) find it necessary to tune out when they want to really focus on completing a task.

For example, when writing a dissertation (against a deadline) they all agreed that they have to turn off email, IM, TV, radio, music... everything.

Which is nice, because I find that's true of me too. And I'm 42. Perhaps it is universally true?
For example, recently I had to complete a presentation from scratch to finished powerpoint in two hours. I shut down email and twhirl (my twitter client of preference), detached myself from google reader etc etc.
And I got the job finished.

And that's the revelation for me.
When we need to complete, to finish, to put a full stop on, we need to focus... to get the job done.

And we all understand this. We all see the value in ending the process, in getting a final result. I guess we like to complete.

But that's not the way the networked world works. And it's not the best fit with the networked world. It therefore is not the best way to release value in the network.

The networked world is about collaboration, sharing, being connected, evolving an idea not hunting it down, putting a bullet through its head, stuffing and mounting it.

Perhaps this is why I can have other channels open while I write this blog post. A blog post is never finished. If other ideas feed into it, even while it is being written, they are welcome and add value. A blog post is less mine than it is ours. Your comments, interpretations, links to and from, create what it really IS on the network. I just provide a stub. It is always unfinished. It is always evolving.

In the networked world this is true of everything. It's why clever businesses regard themselves and their products as 'always in beta'. Being 'finished' suggests it is the best it can possibly ever be. That no one else can improve on it. It's a kind of thinking built on the centre-out, broadcast/mass industrial hegemony.

Blogs and wikis allow documents to always be in beta. Open source allows software to always be in beta.
Keeping our channels open mean our ideas can always be in beta.

Kind of fits the human condition - and particularly our identity - we're all in beta too.

That doesn't mean you never act, you just act knowing you do so on the latest best guess and not that it may change later but that it WILL change later.

It also raises questions for how we reward. Instead of rewarding greedy introspection, how can we better reward and encourage thinking outloud? In companies and in our educational establishments?

We've placed a great deal of store on 'ownership' when it comes to taking responsibility within organisations. How far has that infected how ideas and often projects are treated?

Beep-beep, beep-beep - my degree certificate just arrived

Now you can do a complete degree course on your mobile. Only in Japan... for now.

Lessons in education 2.0

I share this because I can. If you've got kids, you may decide you should, too.



Is education really so out of touch with the needs of the people it serves? It's hard for me to say with certainty. It feels like it is - but it's a long time since I was in the classroom!

Kids brought up as part of constantly connected communities, for whom interaction and mmprg are second nature, for whom participation and the need to shape, share and mash-up are ingrained... the church pews of education seem so wrong. The listen-while-I-speak model so out of date.

This is another thought-provoking video by Michael Wesch at Kansas State.

It's about much more than education, isn't it?

First spied on Confused of Calcutta.

The power of the network: For doctors and cops

Networks create value. It's the lesson of Reed's Law (Group Forming Network Theory, see resources) and one which is repeatedly being demonstrated by the success of numerous social networking sites.
Ubiquity, allowing the constantly connected community, makes the value still greater.
And often it seems we talk about the business benefits of this model - the way it enables a new ecology of co-creators - converged prosumers (see Media is the New Way of Doing Business).
But there are other, more transparently beneficial, areas the same thinking should be applied to.
I'm thinking of the medical profession, police forces - education, too?
Anyone going through medical treatment will know you'll see a succession of highly trained individuals. Typically you'll have to describe your symptoms over and over. Typically it gets written down on paper. And while professionals within a department or even at a certain strata within that department, may discuss case studies, they won't connect with others on the other side of the same hospital (or even 'above' and 'below' themselves) - who may have seen the same patient previously or learned something useful from another experience with a patient.
Imagine if doctor A had shared with doctor B about patient X. And symptom Y rang a bell for doctor B because he'd shared with doctor C on a previous occasion. Simply, allowing for emergent intelligence in the network should result in more accurate, swifter diagnoses. That cuts costs for the medical service and heals the patient faster.
Win/Win - new value created by the network.
If networks of professionals beat the best individual professional in predicting the stock market (see Reingold's Smart Mobs), shouldn't they also be better at healthcare? At policing? At educating our children?