The best we can do is offering and promoting alternatives. It's not easy and it's time consuming, but it's rewarding and for a good cause.

Jon,

Thanks for sharing this slides. Do you also have an audio recording, by any chance?

I was particulary intrigued by the soft vs hard technologies and pedagogy as technology.

Cheers,

Gerald

Thanks Gerald. Alas, it was 2am in the morning (actually 2:20- things were running late) and I forgot to press the Record button!

There's a link on slides 21 and 22 to a paper that explains most of that - it's an older paper and my thoughts have evolved a little since then, but it gives the general gist (nb. despite appearances to the contrary on the website, it is not in Italian!).

Jon,

I understand. I did a presentation for some folks in Europe once at 3am my time. It was quite challenging to have a productive day thereafter.

Thanks for the paper. I look forward to reading it.

On a separate note, I just finished The Systems Bible. Thanks for the recommendation.

Jon,

This post is very timely (at least for me).

I have been feeling the same as you report in your field. I began teaching adults (way back when) because I was incredibly curious and inspired about learning (and still am). That curiosity led me to teaching adolescents and that led me to my current career as a teacher educator.

But like you, I see the whole enterprise as being an inherently cross disciplinary one. I am not only a teacher of teachers. I am a learner and have broad (and even some deep) interests. 

I wholeheartendly agree with this:

We don't need disciplines any more, especially not in a technology field. We need connections. We don't need to change our image. We need to change our reality. I'm finding that to be quite a difficult challenge right now.

Thanks.

Very cool. Thanks for sharing.

Your perspective on blockchains is very interesting, in particular the distributed nature of the digital tech.  I am wondering how crypto-washing of money and information will affect bandwidth and the actual environment where the network energy is being exploited? How can blockchains efficiently (CPU) track open e-book versions and associated layered information (i.e., annotations)? Would an open DNA/GPS content tagging standard be more efficient on the network?

PS. Blockchain crypto-stratedgy seems like a game of trivial pursuit on implosion, while the actual world is exploding.

I don't think blockchain will be useful in tracking as such - quite the opposite. Even the evil Erudition Digital approach relies on different mechanisms to perform its dirtier deeds. The big idea is that it makes it possible to wrap up other tools and standards (including those to implement intentional decay) fairly robustly without requiring a central server or authority, without (necessarily) disrupting the traditional economics of publication, including the rights of buyers to resell, gift, or mutilate their purchases.

In my scenario, blockchain doesn't have to eat power to quite the extent that it does in Bitcoin because it is only used to manage a single, indivisible (transferable) resource a finite - and usually low - number of times. A book is not like a currency: there is no profit to be made for end users from mining new books. At a wild guess, I suspect that the environmental impact would be significantly lower than that of traditional books, averaged out over time, once you factor in transportation and storage costs as well as the more obvious embodied energy costs of deforestation and production. It might even be not much higher (and possibly lower) than the current centralized approach, which still consumes quite a bit of bandwidth, storage, and processing power, not to mention sustaining armies of managers of such systems, with all the associated costs involved.

And yes, ideally, books would all be open and we could use tools (that already exist in most ebook standards) to add glosses or whatever metadata we liked. Right now, a 'purchase' of a DRM-encumbered ebook is no more than a provisional rental, with the added burden that sellers can arbitrarily choose to disable our access to it at any time as, most famously, Amazon did to readers of 1984. Combined with the ability of publishers to impose a range of conditions on how long we can read it, where we read it, on what device we read it, and so on, not to mention their creepy ability to track what, how, when, and where we read, it's a raw deal for consumers. In return we get very little: mainly, the potential to receive updates and, what a blockchain-based approach would give us for free, the ability to annotate and share annotations. All of this is available from DRM-free works such as those published by Tor or O'Reilly, (or, for that matter AU Press) that are thriving without such ugliness, so the added constraints are the result of pure greed, not business necessity. That said, in the near future, it is unlikely that we are going to stop most publishers from jealously protecting their wares with DRM (though it could happen: the music industry has, with reluctance and huge caveats, mostly reversed course on that). Although it would, if done well, prevent them from exploiting the technologies in new ways to make even more money, using blockchain with DRM and a decay mechanism would still allow publishers to make money the same way that they have always done, and for people to actually own the books they buy.

Jon,

I am so glad you responded to this article. It has been festering under my skin all week and I haven't had the chance to blog about it (yet).

I completely agree with the issue primarily being a structural one about teaching and learning instituions. It also strikes me that (not surprisingly) it is about control on the part of the instructor (or fear of loss of control).

The other component missing is the idea that learners are individuals with individual needs and motivations.

Cheers.

Good points, Gerald. It is indeed a lot to do with controlling pedagogies. And, like so many such studies, these looked at average effects but, to the best of my knowledge, I have never met an average student.

Jon,

Agreed. And thanks for the reminder to start The End of Average.

Gerald