About six months ago, due to a major change in my own personal situation, I moved back into my mother’s house. Fortunately, she lives in a big house and I moved into the downstairs part of it where it is pretty much self contained and self sufficient. I have my own bedroom, loungeroom, bathroom and study area, so things could be a lot worse.

What I’m finding fascinating though is just how little time I spend watching TV or listening to the radio these days. In the past 6 months I think I have watched TV about 4 times, and only then because I was completely bored. I don’t even have a radio, except the one in my car and I never listen to that. Instead, I have been listening to a lot of podcasts which I subscribe to via the iTunes directory. For entertainment I watch a lot of video blogs, again sourced largely via download through the iTunes directory and viewed using my Mac or my video iPod. I even get regular news and weather reports directly on my 3G mobile phone via the 3 mobile web service, called Planet 3, and rarely read an actual newspaper anymore. I have a large number of RSS feeds that deliver customised news and information directly to my computer. And all that extra time I used to spend watching TV is now used to create content rather than consume it, and instead I find myself blogging, podcasting, writing and editing my own media.

And it’s not just me… tonight, my kids are here visiting. My 15 year old son Alex is sitting at his laptop watching a vodcast of the Chaser’s War on Everything, and will probably go play a video game of some sort in a minute. My 12 year old daughter Kate is using my video iPod to watch a few episodes of Family Guy, and before firing up the iPod she spent some time updating her new blog.

The TV is not on. There’s no radio. And we don’t even buy the newspaper.

This whole “Long Tail” concept is really hitting home to me. I am seeing and experiencing the reality of this huge shift away from the delivery of traditional media content by conventional means like TV, radio and newspapers. Alex was telling me the other day how he read that all of the major TV stations in Australia are experiencing a large decline in ther viewership. It’s no surprise that newspapers and magazines are selling in smaller numbers than ever before. And radio stations are stuggling to maintain listeners. Traditional media is in big trouble…

Meanwhile, we keep seeing an explosion in the number of people using the Internet as their main source of news, information and entertainment. Blogging and podcasting are growing exponentially. Mobile phones are moving into the delivery of full broadband-type services and are selling by the hundreds of millions.

My own kids are a living example of just how much the nature of information flow has changed in the last few years. They are no strangers to this… they live out on the long tail of cultural change. They are just typical kids, and this is their world. And yet I know that many of their teachers are blissfuly unaware of just how much their world has changed. Many hardworking, well meaning teachers are completely unaware of the magnitude of these changes. For my own kids and thousands more like them, going to school means turning up and being taught using a methodology and a mindset that is essentially the same as it ever was with very little acknowledgement that things have changed as dramatically as they actually have.

If these sorts of changes do not represent a fundamental shift in the way our society works, then I don’t know what does. I fail to see how people can not recognise this huge cultural paradigm shift that has taken place, and that our world and the way we communicate and learn has changed irrevocably.

technorati tags:longtail, media, podcasting

Do you have kids?  Do you teach kids?  Are you a kid?

Teenage Affluenza is a serious disease that is inflicting many of our young people.  World Vision have put together this short video explaining a little about it…  it’s about 5 minutes long, but well worth the watch.

Seriously though, seeing the point made in this video makes one really aware of just how lucky we are in the developed world, and ought to be a wake up call for many of us.

My Linda sent me an email today with a wonderful quote from Eric Hoffer about the nature of learning…

“In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”

It’s so true. As educators we talk a lot about the importance of being a lifelong learner, but to actually BE a lifelong learner is sometimes tough. It means accepting that what you don’t know far outweighs what you do know; it requires the mental muscle to always be curious and asking questions about the world and how it works; and it means being mature enough to regularly put your ego aside and freely admit that you really don’t know the answer to most things. Funnily enough, the group of people that I often see struggling with this idea more than most are teachers. We seem to espouse the lifelong learning ideal, but many of us still like to always be in control and feel like we at the top of the food chain when it comes to the learning process. It’s an interesting paradox.

Seymour Papert once wrote,

“So the model that says learn while you’re at school, while you’re young, the skills that you will apply during your lifetime is no longer tenable. The skills that you can learn when you’re at school will not be applicable. They will be obsolete by the time you get into the workplace and need them, except for one skill. The one really competitive skill is the skill of being able to learn. It is the skill of being able not to give the right answer to questions about what you were taught in school, but to make the right response to situations that are outside the scope of what you were taught in school. We need to produce people who know how to act when they’re faced with situations for which they were not specifically prepared.”

I came across that quote from Papert about 10 years ago, and as a teacher it changed everything for me. I suddenly “got it”. It crystallised exactly what the role of education should be, and how the industrial age classroom where we learnt facts in order to regurgitate them on a test, would never be able to meet the real needs of 21st Century learners who live in a world where many of the jobs we are supposedly preparing them for after school have not even been conceived of yet.

Being a lifelong learner is tough because it is so relentless. There is always something new to learn or some new idea to explore. It’s not a now-and-then thing. It’s an always-on, 24/7 sort of thing that you either embrace or you don’t. You can’t be a lifelong learner occasionally.

And the people who do this and take the risks and spend their life catching up on the endless list of things they don’t yet know, they will reap the rewards. And in all likelihood, they will be the ones who end up creating our future.

To quote George Bernard Shaw…

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world while the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

I’m willing to bet that the unreasonable man of which Shaw spoke was a good example of a lifelong learner.

technorati tags:papert, lifelong, learning

Here is a wonderful article by Dale Spender that I found in the Sydney Morning Herald this week.  It talks about the changes taking place in our schools and while Spender’s work has always been unashamedly pro technology for education, it’s nice to see a piece like this being printed in the mainstream media.  We certainly need to be having this discussion.

The full article can be found here, but here is a snippet..

Contrast this with the confident “digital natives” who are now the students in our schools. These are the children of the information age for whom the screen, not the page, comes first. Far from being passive recipients of existing knowledge, digi-kids have learnt by doing - by trial and error, and problem solving. It is not the right answer that they want; it is the right question they are after as they fearlessly try any of the new gadgets or applications. They are completely at ease with computers and the internet, and with accessing, creating and distributing ideas and information.

The members of the digital generation are also physically active and often noisy as they collaborate, send messages, do podcasts and wait for replies (or fan mail). The youngest of them coolly click the mouse to search out the Wiggles and solve puzzles and problems; they create new words and signs, and scan their screens seeking friends, experiences - and information.

The point is that literacy itself has changed.

Yes Dale, that is the point… that’s the point exactly.  Thanks for the article.

My apologies for the long delay between blog posts… things have been a bit upside down in my world lately as I deal with a little more change than I can comfortably get my head around.

Speaking of change, I can always rely on Karl Fisch’s blog to link me up with amazing resources that make it just so obvious why the world is changing and why our schools must start to embrace that change. The more I see of the schools I have worked in, the more I worry about just how much we don’t “get it”, and how dangerously irrelevant we are becoming to the digital generation.

This video in particular just gave me goosebumps when I saw it…

Time magazine recently announced that the person of the year for 2006 is in fact… me! And you. And all those other bloggers, podcasters, and users of the ever expanding range of Web2.0 tools. Apparently, Time magazine thinks we are having such an impact on the world that we have been collectively recognised as “Person” of the Year. Thank you, thank you very much.

When Time produced this issue, they wanted to have a mirror on the cover to reflect back the image of the person holding it. To this end they had a supplier in Minnesota provide them with nearly 7,000,000 pieces of reflective Mylar to stick on the cover. That’s a lot of Mylar! (Ironically, the people about whom the article was written are probably more likely to read it online anyway.)

Of course, if you happen to own an iSight-enabled Mac, not only do you have obviously better taste than your Windows-toting brethren, but you can take advantage of a very neat little trick that only iSight enabled Macs can do. Head on over to Dan Woods’ blog and you can see the Time cover the way it really ought to have looked. With you on it!

Congratulations fellow bloggers!

I’ve been reading Thomas Friedman’s book “The World Is Flat” and have been finding it a compelling and interesting read. I think he has really clearly identified and explained the trends and convergences that have brought us to what is arguably one of the most important inflexion points in world history.

If you get a chance to read the book I suggest you do so. In the meantime, you might like to have a look at this video (http://mitworld.mit.edu/play/264/) of Friedman giving a speech to a group of students and staff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In this talk he gives an excellent overview of the book and explains some of its key ideas. The speech lasts about 75 minutes in total and its the sort of thing you need to really sit and watch in its entirety, but well worth it. Maybe watch it instead of TV one night…

There’s a lot of talk in the music industry about how to protect music from copyright infringement and illegal use. Record companies as a whole were fairly slow to give in to the whole music download idea because they see it as a threat to their empires… for years the record companies had an exclusive stronghold on the production and distribution of music. As the world has gotten flatter and the gap between an idea in a musician’s head and the release of that musical idea to a waiting public has gotten smaller, cheaper and easier, the role of the record company has shrunk in importance.

So as we’ve witnessed the rise of digital music across the Internet, we’ve also seen the record companies fight tooth and nail to hang on their ivory towers. They’ve used their legal muscle to crush filesharing services like Napster and Morpheus, while others such as Limewire have so far somehow managed to avoid being taken down. The reasoning goes that if people are allowed to share music files with each other then they won’t buy CDs and the artists can’t get paid. (Perhaps more importantly, the record company execs won’t be able to afford a new Lexus.) Truth be told, if anything, people seem to be listening to more music than ever, and across a much wider range of musical styles and tastes. In that sense, there are plenty of bands and musicians for whom the ability to distribute their music digitally without the interference of the big record companies has meant they actually get their music out to more people, not less. And not just for free either… for many musicians that extra exposure means they end up selling more of their music as well.

So a couple of years ago Apple comes along with iTunes and says, “Hey, let’s do this right… let’s create a huge online collection of music, let’s charge people a fair price for each song (US99 cents), and let’s put a DRM in place that is actually fair and reasonable.” DRM, or Digital Rights Management, means that each song file has metadata embedded into it that makes the file self-aware - it knows what devices it lives on, knows how many times it has been burnt to CD, and keeps track of its own usage. The Apple DRM, called Fairplay, was quite a coup and I’m sure that getting the record companies to agree with it was somewhat due to the infamous Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field - a name given to the way that Jobs always seems to be able to convince people to believe things and do things that they would never have imagined they’d agree to.

Apple’s lead with iTunes was followed (as usual) by others, such as Rhapsody, The Zune Marketplace, Amazon, and a host of other operations that now sell music legally. By and large these online music stores are profitable and seem to sell a lot of music. If you walk into any classroom though, and ask the kids how many of the songs they have on their MP3 players have been bought, it is a tiny percentage. Mostly they just look at you with a confused expression and say “How many have I bought? Why would want to do that when I can just download them off the Net for free?”

DRM prevents music files from being endlessly shared. After a certain number of sharings, or a certain number of plays, or after being placed on a certain number of devices, the files just stop working. That won’t make the kids happy but it should keep the record companies happy, and more importantly the artists get paid and so keep making music.

However, the songs that are floating around the Net’s many filesharing services at the moment are generally devoid of any DRM. They CAN be copied and shared an infinite number of times, if not legally then at least without any real technical barriers to doing so. So if the songs “out there” in cyberspace are not DRMed, and are open to illegal sharing, then where do they come from?

And then tonight, as I was ripping one of my CDs into iTunes so I could listen to it on my iPod, it struck me that the source of all these illegal files is probably the very same place that the record companies are desperately trying to hang onto… CDs.

The irony is that if record companies would drop the whole CD distribution model and just accept - no, embrace - the digital downloading of music then all the music files in cyberspace would eventually be DRMed, since the source for non-DRM files would basically dry up. Would you share your DRMed music? I’m not sure I would want to share my legal music collection over a filesharing network if I knew that I would be giving away the rights to listen to it myself. As long as the record companies insist on hanging onto the control of their market and insist on selling musical bytes encoded onto plastic disks which they seem to feel are more real and therefore easier to control, but much easier to rip as non-DRMed files for sharing online, then we should continue to have an ongoing source for non-DRMed music.

Let’s hope they never wake up to this.