thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

As many readers know there has been a internet blackout on a number of very large websites like wikipedia and WordPress.com and .org on 18th of Jan.

As Clay Shirky sees it – SOPA & PIPA are designed to “raise the cost of copyright compliance” for amateurs by changing the burden of proof so that pretty much all content not owned by “Big Media” is blocked.

The method – use the domain name system to block access – even though technically this is unlikely to work at all. Unfortunately there are other issues better explained elsewhere where the sides-effects and consequences will cause much confusion and collateral damage.

We are used to producing as well as consuming and digital technology allows us to do this when we share content that we originate, that we find and sometime what we change on the way through. (Creative commons licensing is an intelligent attempt to manage content rights.)

My summary – whatever the merits of copyright protection (and clearly that system is very broken) SOPA is not the way to fix it.

Also once a piece of legislation like this is passed it becomes much easier to foist it on smaller countries like NZ especially with the present government (via ACTA).  Remember the debate over the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act 2011. Sadly many of the politicians in NZ had no real clues at the time but these issues need much smarter thinking as they are part of a much wider agenda.

John C. Dvorak on SOPA: Don’t Get Suckered by What Comes Next
John says SOPA is a sideshow for another bill

“This is so that the real bill, Senate S.968. The Patrick Leahy “Protect IP Act of 2011? will pass — while all the nuts argue about and then celebrate victory over SOPA.

The House will quickly agree and rubber-stamp the Senate bill which, according to those fighting these bills, is about 96 percent as terrible.

This is a disaster waiting to happen.

Nobody is focusing attention on this parallel bill. Watch this scam get executed like clockwork.”

Last week was the annual TED conference 2011 in Monterey. Would have loved to be there but lucky for us David Cowan was and he wrote up his TED Talks 2011 guide over here - David said

“The 2011 speaker lineup lived up to prior years. You can never tell beforehand which ones will be the classics; this year the standouts turned out to be General Stanley McChrystal, dinosaur hunter Jack Horner, transplant surgeon Anthony Atala, Slate columnist Kathryn Schulz, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, poet Sarah Kay, Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim, and fourth grade teacher John Hunter.”

Read more of David Cowan’s guide to TED Talks 2011 over here David rated Salman Khan’s talk as 8/10

In watching the talk I was reminded about 3 ideas that have emerged as themes for me in recent times.

• Idea 1- Salman Khan says Let’s use video to reinvent education: (more below)
• Idea 2- Changing Education Paradigms – Education outside school by way of travel, exploration and rich media if extremely valuable but can be very distracting. (see Ken Robinson talk below)
• Idea3  -Many of us have huge trouble getting work done at work because of too many meetings or other “work” processes that stop us from being as productive as we can be. (see Jason Fried: Why work doesn’t happen at work – video link and my comments below.)

Salman Khan on flipping the classroom.

After he did some videos for his cousins – “they preferred him on YT to in person” – because they can learn from him at their own time and own space.

“He shows the power of interactive exercises — and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do you “homework” in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

(Recorded at TED2011, March 2011, in Long Beach, California. Duration: 20:27)

Most intriguing we get to see Bill Gates ask Salman a bunch of questions about “the future of education” from about 17 mins onwards.

Ken Robinson on Changing Education Paradigms

I saw that Sir Ken Robinson was in Palmerston North for the Inspired Impact Teachers Conference education conference back in January 2011*. I was reminded of the animated talk given by Sir Ken Robinson at the RSA last year. (* if you were there – I would love to hear about it.)

Watch at 4:26 for some thoughts from Ken on the way that our children get all kinds of great stimulation from a huge number of sources and then when they get to school they are penalised for finding the typical class room experience boring or too slow for them.

“Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth. …besieged by information.. and we penalise them for getting distracted… from what – boring stuff at school for the most part”

Of course, there are many great teachers and parents out there doing their best for their children to help develop skills and strategies for managing all of the great resources available.

To me Khan’s work represents another step away from the book based learning that I experienced at school.

My daughter was lucky that her teacher brought a pigs brain along to school recently so that the 9 and 10 yr olds could get their science right up close and tactile. We have since supplemented that with videos and books but the shock and delight of having that physical object in the classroom will be treasured by most.

In my post last year 500m in Sight I mentioned the Digital Nation documentaries. There is an episode at the end which gives examples of video use in schools.

It is not just children that need help with managing distractions and over stimulation from media or work processes or general daily routines as Jason Fried explains.

Jason Fried on How Work doesn’t get done at work.

Work day becomes a series of work moments. Watch the excellent video below and for further reading check Paul Graham’s essays on the differences between managers and makers which I wrote about over here..

• What do you all think about these 3 ideas?
• Are Salman Khan, Sir Ken Robinson and Jason Fried onto something we need to care more about?
• How then – do we manage our time and resources better for ourselves, our work and our families?
• Important or not?

Footnote: After I wrote this post I found another example of a teacher using video to flip the classroom that was written about by Daniel Pink in September last year. That teachers name is Karl Fisch and he appears to be using the same approach as Salman Khan.

At this stage I haven’t researched the possible connections between Fisch* and Khan or if there are even any. Ideas can break out simultaneously anywhere but I do think that videos like the TED Talks series make a huge contribution to the spread of ideas.

As it turns out we have written about Fisch before as he made the video for Shift Happens. I really liked a more recent post on his blog where he talks about some of these ideas being developed in medical education as The Learning Studio.

Your homework: Chris Anderson: How web video powers global innovation

Until very recently the trade-off between richness and reach with media and communications tools on the internet has seen mixed results but we are very close to some exciting breakthroughs.

This means news is old when it gets through the media process as savvy consumers have already engaged to some extent in a myriad of ways (mostly online) and this alters the secondary ripples and impacts as well.

The difference between a one to many message and a conversation will continue to be endlessly debated across a range of media and platforms.  It has become much clearer that the overlap between micro-blogging (clogging ?) tools, mobile phones, other user generated content and mainstream media is now producing social dividends and all kinds of unintended and positive consequences.

Social capital has its own momentum and we see everything from instant tweets on earthquakes and elections to a scary washing machine with 15 thousand fans on facebook. Most mainstream media is filtered by the editorial process to become more of a news product. This is good for manicured medium but for a real-time news ticker social media tools are raising the stakes and in a very good way.

Twitter, Facebook blogs and other instant commentary now allows real time crowdsourcing for the equivalent of a live cross on camera – only better online for the most part. I was reminded of some of this when I heard a news item on radio about how Twitter had delayed a crucial update so as not to interrupt the flow of news from Iran.

That this was a news item is interesting in itself but ironically the Twitter maintenance had been and gone by the time the news got on the radio and that was very stale news to the Twitterati who had all moved on hours before.

There were three insightful perspectives I took notice of this week regarding the rise of social capital in these ways.

David MacGregor captured some of these dimensions reproduced below: (Thanks David)

“The social media phenomenon really does change my perception of the way forward. I have less and less regard for brand messages that are virtuoso – you know the kind I mean – the spectacular set pieces of yesteryear, film making fetishism in microcosm. Today I am more like to be receptive to messages that have far greater relevance and, oftentimes, utility – which might be expressed by the facility for me to understand more or engage more with the message personally.

The scale of my engagement is relative. The simple facility to comment or offer and opinion is sometimes sufficient and demonstrates the thought that I, like other people, want to be heard and acknowledged, rather than simply being yelled at or sung a silky siren song by spruikers.”

David writes very well on this an many other related topics. He also notes that all of this discussion is much less compartmentalized than it used to be. And that is a good thing in my view.

“I find it difficult to separate marketing, advertising and brands from society as whole. A challenge for business is surely to overcome the ‘them and us’ model of mass communications to really open the way for more inclusive dialogues.”

Nat Torkington on National Radio caught my ears with his comments on the role of Twitter and other micro-blogging formats in Iran. What was particularly good was the way he managed to make “secure open web proxies” sound interesting and also kept the listeners from being distracted by the mechanics in that wonderful mellifluous mode of his.

Less mediation is also highly attractive to celebrities. Micro blogging of tweets via re-tweeting has helped make a difference and we will continue to hear about the ramifications of all this.

TN: Technology with Nat Torkington from Thursday Technology expert and  Nat Torkington discusses online dating scams as well as Twitter’s role in the Iranian election protests.(duration:14mins 28secs)

The impact of these new technologies on groups and individuals is sounding a bit more like the second wave of alternative media as foreshadowed all those years ago by Noam Chomsky. In a sense we have now the tools to manufacture dissent.

Clay Shirky manages to summarise many of these key points about the rise of social capital and media activism over at TED Talks.

Clay says:

“New technologies are enabling new kinds of cooperative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done in business, science, the arts and elsewhere, as an alternative to centralized and institutional structures, which he sees as self-limiting.

In his writings and speeches he has argued that “a group is its own worst enemy.”
Shirky is author of Here Comes Everybody.

One point Clay makes is the increase in professional amateurs – something we wrote about some time back and was a topic for another great TED talk by Charles Leadbeater which was  called “The rise of the amateur professional” see the 19minute video on TED. Charles said

“Passionate amateurs, using new tools, are creating products and paradigms that companies can’t.”

If the video embed doesn’t display on your device try this TED link for Clay Shirky.

As Clay notes we are watching “The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.” How to cross pollinate conversations and mass media in real time. We now have a “many to many”  communications channel.

Note: Local TV stations has all improved their websites recently as they finally begin to understand they are less TV and multi-channel amplicasting is bigger ironically just as viewership on their broadcasts drop – their website traffic is going up and changing the business.

Amplification of tweets gives rise to far more authentic news sources than we have seen – ever!  Citizen reporting has flow on effects and when those stories follow the news we begin to see social transformation.

Asynchronous media and the amplification of all the surrounding content eco-systems is a big deal and we should be using this for good connections. Consumers are producers are consumers. The network itself is ubiquitous and omnipresent.

There are no single messages any more and media participation is higher than ever. Media revolution is here.

What do you think ? My twitter ID is @dialogCRM feel free to tweetback.

As always you can tweet this below and leave a comment or reply to the tweet for this post on Twitter. You can also engage directly with the three / four sources I have used today.

• To follow and engage with David on Twitter go to @joegreenz
• To follow and engage with Nat on Twitter go to @gnat
• To follow and engage Nat on Twitter go to @CShirky
• To follow and engage withTED on Twitter @TEDchris