DJALCHEMI
An individual brew of learning, culture and technology

Culture and Learning: response to consultation paper

A couple of months ago the UK think tank Demos published a consultation paper with the title Culture and Learning: Towards a New Agenda. The paper aims to challenge cultural professionals and educationalists "to provide a new and coherent direction for creative learning and for encouraging creativity through culture", and the consultation period runs until next Tuesday.

I find it a curious intervention, because in some ways it seems to be swimming against the tide. There is a strong emphasis on centralisation and standardisation, the favoured interventions of old-school bureaucrats.

Hat tip to Bridget McKenzie whose own response to this consultation brought it to my attention. And following her lead in making her response public, here is mine, organised according to the six issues that the paper encourages us to address.

Against Method in Innovation

I've signed up for NESTA's Innovation Edge conference in a few weeks. Though I'm looking forward to what promises to be a stimulating day, I'm kind of surprised that the abstract concept of innovation remains so popular with policy makers and agencies.

Using innovation as a catch-all term to cover a wide range of changes in products, services and organising creates the expectation that these changes share important characteristics and, critically, may share similar solutions. But do they, should they, or could they? To take the relatively narrow domain of integrated IT, on the one hand you have the Apple approach; on the other open source. How much do they have in common? Not an awful lot.

Perhaps my wariness and scepticism comes from being exposed, at an impressionable age, to Paul Feyerabend's "anything goes" approach to scientific method. Feyerabend didn't deny the value of method; he was arguing against hidebound adherence to any particular set of rules and methods. He argued for a more laissez-faire approach to combining multiple approaches, and being prepared to bend the rules when circumstances encouraged it.

If you want to wind people up, you refer to this way of thinking as epistemological anarchism. If you want to calm and reassure, you're better off talking of methodological pluralism. I'm hoping to hear both at Innovation Edge, which takes place in London on 20 May this year, and is free to attend (but places are limited and require registration).

The Age of the Free MP3 Player

This is the season where many bloggers are providing their predictions for the year ahead. I tend to opt out of these because a year is both too long and too short to foresee many types of change, which are like rainstorms or earthquakes: you know one's coming, but you don't know quite when or where until the early warning signs appear. I'm more of a Long Bets man, so today I'm going to revisit something I've touched on occasionally in the past, most recently nearly two years ago: the falling price of MP3 players and the possible implications for listening/buying experiences.

In the last year or so there's been a growing wave of music being distributed on USB sticks — the picture is of Radiohead's 6-album "boxed set" in its USB version, which, at $160 or £79.99, somehow cost twice as much as the CD version of the same albums. The problem with these products is that, once you've copied the data off the stick, the stick is just… a stick. You can keep it on a shelf, back-up your homework or your novel on it, forget about it in the glove compartment or loan it to a friend who forgets it in his glove compartment. It's a piece of plastic with some data on it.

But add a player to it, and it has a different kind of value. Now you just have to bring your own headphones (or powered speakers) and you've got all you need to keep you entertained for as long as six Radiohead albums turn you on (about 15 minutes in my case, but these people may differ).

Looking for examples of social networking for professional development

I'm copying here something I've just added to the OpenRSA blog, relating to some work I'm doing in collaboration with Seb Schmoller:

I'm looking for examples of organisations (or looser affiliations of individuals) who are using social software for professional development. Does anyone have any suggestions that I could follow up?

By social software I mean social networks (e.g. Facebook, Ning), blogs, wikis, shared bookmarks etc. And professional development can mean many things, but I'm mostly interesting in enhancing intrinsic job-specific skills on the one hand and broader scouting of collaborative/entrepreneurial opportunities on the other. The organisations could be membership-based, employers, educators or just self-organising networks.

The selfish part of this is that it relates to some work I'm doing for the National College for School Leadership, who are interested in extending the way they use social software with their constituency of school leaders. I'm happy to feed back the lessons from any leads that anyone gives me and share them with readers of this blog. Look forward to hearing from you if you can recommend any suitable examples (with contact details if possible). Our immediate deadline is 18th January, but happy to continue the discussion beyond then…

Any suggestions welcome, either via comments here, or private communication.

Does the nature of social networks limit their growth?

One idea in John Naughton's 02007 round-up/02008 predictions struck me: that social networks like MySpace and Facebook "are likely to peak because ego-centric social networking is intrinsically limiting: after you've 'befriended' everyone you know, what else is there to do?". He continues,

Next year will see mass outbreaks of a Facebook fatigue, as busy professionals realise they are wasting an hour or more a day on essentially mindless activities. By contrast, activity-based networking sites, such as Flickr.com, will continue to prosper, for the simple reason that they are not self-limiting in the way that ego-centric services are.

On Flickr, as long as you maintain your interest in photography, you will always have more photos you can upload share. On Last.fm, there will always be more music to discover and listen to.

But Naughton's suggestion that there's nothing to do on Facebook and MySpace ignores the role on social networks of people who make it their business to aggregate people, broker new collaborations or create messages that people will want to share. A minority of these are precious: latch onto their coattails and you will get good introductions to fascinating people. The majority are poisonous: once they have your details they will besiege you with all kinds of message and pokes that are either tiresomely self-promotional or bemusingly random.

The sad fact is that it's the bores that drive the most visible and aggressive growth in activity, so the likes of MySpace and Facebook tend to encourage them. But fast growth leads to fast fatigue. We might all be better off if the social networks would nurture the gold dust few who do networking really well.

Animating the future of population and cities

One of those happy synchronicities has alerted me to two different ways of presenting information information about population growth. And, to compound the coincidence, the same topic was raised in a discussion with David Puttnam that I attended in the same week as I discovered them.

First is this video, which was featured in the Long Now Foundation blog. The animation of population growth from year 00000 to 02020 (Common Era) runs from 0:45 through to 3:35. The quickening pulse rate is a bit hammy, especially as the visuals alone tell a pretty compelling story (hint: wait until the last few seconds).

A more recent treatment of the same situation, but projecting from 02000 to 02100, and focusing particularly on our biggest cities comes from the site 19.20.21. The basic premise and story here is that there will be 19 cities in the world with 20 million (or more) people in the 21st century.