One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”
A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.
Soon, machines could twitter as much as people. Corey Menscher, a graduate student at New York University, developed the Kickbee, an elastic band with vibration sensors that his pregnant wife wore to alert Twitter each time the baby kicked: “I kicked Mommy at 08:52 PM on Fri, Jan 2!” Mr. Menscher is now considering selling the product.
Pairing sensors with Twitter leads some to think Twitter could be used to send home security alerts or tell doctors when a patient’s blood sugar or heart rate climbs too high. In the aggregate, such real-time data streams could aid medical researchers.
This quote helps understand why Twitter is changing things:
“Twitter reverses the notion of the group,” said Paul Saffo, the Silicon Valley futurist. “Instead of creating the group you want, you send it and the group self-assembles.”
More and more professionals I speak with are echoing the idea that the University should not be in the e mail business. Some even project that as broadband becomes more prevalent via mobile, that providing IP access will diminish, too. Frederic Lardinois column in April 10′s Read Write Web says:
Schools, for the most part, aren’t able to keep up with the speed of innovation on the web anyway, and the fact that many college-run email systems have fallen far behind the innovation curve has driven a lot of students to just forward their school email to a commercial account anyway.
The ideas are spreading, as Lardinois points out:
The logical next step, then, is to simply stop providing .edu email addresses to students – and a number of schools are actually considering this move. Last month, at The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Technology Forum, Steven Zink of the University of Nevada in Reno announced that his campus plans to stop providing students with a college email system altogether.
How will high-speed internet get to small towns? One example can be found in Carroll, a city of 10,000 in west central Iowa that is being completely rewired with fiber optic cable. It’s an $11 million project that will be mostly funded with a $10 million loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “It will be a total overbuild,” said Wesern Iowa Networks CEO Steve Frickenstein.
WIN officials estimate that Internet speeds will be 10 to 20 times faster with their fiber than what most businesses and homes in Carroll have now. Chuck Deisbeck, chief operating officer with WIN, says the company’s fiber lines will allow customers to receive many forms of voice and video, from television (with an unlimited potential for channels and programming) to phone service to new products that WIN plans to unveil soon. The overbuild is expected to be finished by spring 2010.
The T Mobile advert (notice the British accent) from Liverpool Station is a brilliant way to show what Social Networks look like to those in them and especially those outside of them. I shared this in a presentation today:
What I also particularly like is the end, when it is all said and done, the people move on, as they have with Friendster and perhaps MySpace.
