Quickthink

As I have written before, I am a huge consumer of online media. I love it and I rely on it every day. And I am learning from it. How much? I don’t have a reliable metric for that. But I do notice that I am able to do several key activities better than I used to. So I suspect that I am learning faster than I did in the bad old days before the digital world opened up for me.

And what activities are those?

The first is search. In the old days, I was less curious than I am now. And I had a lower tolerance for new things. Why? Because my curiosity had far less stimulation. And every now and then I would get very excited about a new thing that tended to dominate my thoughts for quite a while. Now I get that stimulation on a regular basis. I am more of a connoisseur of curiosity and I act on it. Acting on it gives me experience in how to look for stuff - what I call “search” as an activity. As I do more search I get better at it. And as I think about it, I look for ways to do search even better still. Most important, the more I value search, the less easily distracted I am by my own prejudices (manifestations of a desire to own knowledge rather than use it).

The second is interpretation. The more stuff I take in, the more challenged I am in understanding its importance over time. And the more I practice interpretation, the better I become at it. This has opened the door for better participation in dialogue. And it has made me a better listener. Yes, there is a virtuous circle here. I am much easier to get along with than I used to be. And I am happier for it.

The third is follow up. In the old days, it seemed a lot of stuff just seemed to happen. Suddenly Ronald Reagan was elected. Suddenly there was a computer on my desk. Suddenly the Soviet Union collapsed. You get the idea. These days, I am much more aware of the future impacts of stories that are unfolding around us. I am more engaged in the longer view of things. And more accepting of risk. So, does hurricane Sandy tell us that in fifty to one hundred years New York may be under water? Maybe it does. And maybe not depending on a huge number of factors that are now at work. So many amazing stories!

The fourth is sharing. In the old days, one read books, magazines and newspapers. That was nice. But there was a limit to how much one could exchange that input with others. And with less sharing, one had less skill in how to share. So, yes, I was known as a guy who talked too much. These days, I blog. And the more I blog, the more I realize how sharing helps me learn. How? By forcing me to put into words what I am thinking. And when I don’t blog, I miss it. As more people share better, we get closer to Steve Johnson’s and Matt Ridley’s vision of paradise on earth where more and better exchanges lead to more and better ideas.

So, better search, better interpretation, better follow up, better sharing. Exciting stuff for me. And this is changing my taste for input. I am much less excited than I used to be about opinion (as an end point rather than a starting point for a story). And therefore, I am much less excited about mainstream media, which is full of opinion. I am much more excited by breaking stories. Notice I said “breaking stories” and not “breaking news”. Breaking stories are things that are creating new story lines that I can follow for my own purposes. And for this purpose, a platform like Hacker News is far more useful than grand newspapers like NYT. And Hacker News is free. NYT is not. Go figure.

So here is an analogy. Learning how to manage information is a bit like learning how to manage personal finance. Fred Wilson writes about two dimensions in personal finance - “flow” (actually he means “net flow”) - income (inflow) minus costs (outflow)  and “balance” (snapshots of your liquid assets - bank balances and such). Right. So how does that apply to managing information? We retain a certain amount of valuable information that we think is important. This is not unlike the balance in your bank account. And at the same time, we have inflow - what I am talking about above. We have outflow too. Sometimes, this is outright rejection (saying “no” to a request for our attention). It also happens when demands on our focus (what we call work or other events, like crisis) as well as distractions (what we call play) wash out information.

As Fred wisely points out, to become proficient at managing our personal finances, we need to manage flow and balance issues. The same is true for our learning capacity.  Rigidly clinging to a fixed set of beliefs reflects perhaps, an over reliance on balance issues and reduces our capacity to understand flow issues. Similarly, gorging on input may reduce our capacity to understand what we take in and let go of. Scientific method is supposed to help us become more efficient in managing the “flow” and “account balance” of information. Experiment rather than worship as activity focus points. At least this is what Richard Feynman kept going on about. And I think he was right. Moreover, practicing learning increases our capacity to manage flow and balance issues.  Dan Coyle talks about better use of practice. Study Hacks put this into practice in a rather amazing way.

The bottom line here is my optimistic view that one can learn how to learn better. This means that humankind can learn how to build better institutions that facilitate this, so that over time, what we call “normal” reflects a much higher level of learning capacity than we accept now.  This, my friend, is the great challenge of the 21st century. I hope that I have the chance to see this play out over the next decades. And I hope that my son (and your sons and daughters too) benefit from this in ways that I cannot yet dream of.

These are tough times for a lot of folks.  Unemployment, underemployment, lost hope and so on. When you are in the middle of this, it is hard to look outside of the box. To see the larger picture.

But there is one. And here it is — around the globe, people are  slowly but surely finding ways to learn what they need to learn to become more successful. As Mathew Ingram writes for Giga, Internet facilitates this.

So where will it take us? Well, if history is any guide, the expansion of learning will accelerate the rate of new idea generation and adaption. The world will be better off. Moreover, as folks use learning more, they will learn how to learn better. A virtuous circle.

So hold onto your hat. Things may not look great in November, 2012. But the good times are coming.

FOLLOW -  Here is an example of what I am talking about. Millions of kids are now taking online courses in all sorts of subjects. This makes them smarter, but how do they market that added smartness? In the old days, you talked about your GPA and degree. That is still ok, but it doesn’t capture the above added credential. As NYT reports,

… this points toward a world where nontraditional credentials become more valuable.

Right. Digital badges.

Tech Dirt offers a very interesting glimpse of an argument about the future of education.

We hear quite a bit about education platform building where one teachers can reach many students (one to many). And if the teacher is highly skilled, it is argued that this gives more students access to great teaching. This is not a bad thing. But it is not the best thing either. Why? Let’s think this through.

We should start by addressing this rather tough question. How do we learn more effectively? Study Hacks offers a model (that I happen to like).  Sutdy Hacks argues that there are three stages. The first is a mapping stage, where we learn the big picture (the lay of the land). The second is a practicing stage, where we use what we have seen. The third is an insight building stage, where we start to teach what we know in order to see gaps and fill these gaps with new and more innovative connections. Study Hacks argues that we need to take the time to get to and use stage three to experience the most effective learning.

That means that just listening to more great lectures is not enough. We need more and better practice tools - and (as tech dirt argues) we need tools that put students in the role of teacher — get them to perform at stage 3.

Great stuff!

We just finished up our basic negotiation training programme here in Tartu, and what fun it was! Part of the fun was adding a new wrinkle to the course. We have always talked about how to build the skill sets one needs to negotiate more effectively. These include cognitive and communication skills. But we have added a model for how this skills building looks. How to do skills building over time. Great!

This morning, I noticed this NYT article that talks about businesses that offer cognitive skills building programmes. My take on this - they work. We can learn how to get smarter and we should work on this over time. I would go farther - we should help our kids understand this too, as a life long challenge. This is, after all, the 21st century. It is time to start acting like it is.

Scott Young talks about these three ideas in a post about how to learn faster and better. I like this very much because the 21st century will be all about learning faster and better. So if we can master the process of learning, we will have an advantage in living better. It is also helpful because it shows us when we are wasting time. If we are not mentally mapping, practicing or teaching - we are not engaged in a learning process.

Series cognitive skills building stuff! Great!

I made the point yesterday in the “navigation” course that I was teaching at the Estonian Euromanagement Institute that the 21st century will be as different from the 20th century as the 20th century was from the 19th. How?

Well, before considering that, think about the 19th century and how old fashioned it seems to us now. State sanctioned slavery? Horse drawn carts? Women can’t vote? Right. And what was so modern about the 20the century? Machines? World Wars? Ideology? Suburbs? Well, I could go on and on. But if I am right, a lot of that stuff will seem rather funny to mid to late 21st century people.

What is changing? I argue that the engine of 20th century progress was the rapid spread of knowledge. The key to success in that environment was education. You were what you knew. So is knowledge now less important? Perhaps yes, in relative terms. Because with internet and peer to peer networking, the rate of development of knowledge is accelerating way beyond what was possible in the silly old 20th century. It is not enough to have learned something. To be successful, you need to be ready to build on that learning through dynamic networks of really smart people.

Here is the catch. To do that, you need to be part of a network. In the 21st century, you are who you are connected with. You can get a sense of this in Fred Wilson’s post today and the video by Steve Johnson that he embeds.

Enjoy!

Of course, this is relative. Serena Williams just won the US Open. But on the men’s side? And other than the Williams sisters? The US used to have a bunch of people at the very top. No longer.

According to NYT, the reason is simple.  Just look at a sport where the US dominates - basketball. Every school in America (pretty much) gets their kids playing the sport. It is a place where kids from any and all backgrounds mix. What about tennis? Well … no such effort is made to get everyone playing. They get into the sport if they can afford it. And so you get a much more limited number of kids who play with passion. Who dream of being a pro someday.

There is a take away here that goes way beyond winning at professional tennis. If a country wants to be a world leader in a given field — any given field — like tech or biotech or whatever, introduce the field in school at an early age. And make that a universal introduction.

Hey! Estonia may start doing that with computer programming! Way to go! But could we take this to the next step? What about after school programming clubs? Fred Wilson has an idea for that.

So what could government do better to stimulate innovation? According to Tech Dirt, the Brookings Institute did a crowdsourcing study to ask people what they thought was most important. And it turns out that more support for

“Education and learning topped the list. The top three items as per your voting, in order, were:

1. Have educational resources developed with taxpayer dollars be licensed under creative commons license
2. Encourage classes in critical thinking, analysis, statistics, and financial literacy in K-12 schools.
3. Encourage more open access to data collected through federal grant dollars

It appears that more open information in education, as well as better, more practical education programs were what had people most interested.”

If the challenge is to accelerate learning, upgrading learning tools has to be high on the list of priorities. Makes sense, non?

The joke in the title is not that one hasn’t heard about books (though perhaps in the future humankind will find the idea of a “book” to be quaint). It is instead to pose the question what IS a book? What makes a thing into a book, as opposed to a manuscript?

The question is important for those interested in making learning more efficient. Books have served that purpose for a long time. But as the flow of information accelerates and the demands on learning grow, one looks to squeeze more out of the “book” experience. To do that, we need to think about how a book works.

So - what is a book? Well, check out mathigon and then ask the question once more. I came away from the site with the idea that at least part of the job that a book should do is to inspire us to learn. To get us engaged in the process of learning. This means that the information flow should be modulated in a particular way.

Regular readers of Qt will know that I have been tracking education reform issues for quite a while. What have I learned? Well, there is a lot of talk about how to make our schools better. But when I see a quote like this, I get nervous

There is little question that our children are living in a world that is not simply oblivious to their needs, but is actually damaging them.”

From a NYT book review

Ouch. Assuming that we have the resources, isn’t our first priority to fashion a world that nurtures our kids?

And what would be nurturing? Well, at the outset, how about sharing with them how to be a success in life. Not how to score higher on standardized tests. But how to lead a great life after they turn out the lights in the testing room? What does that look like? I like Seth Godin’s hierarchy for success. I think he has it right.