rebarbarised

DRAFT: How to School it Yourself

We're in one of those periods when real change in education might be possible. This doesn't happen very often. Here's why. Education is probably the single most powerful means by which our societies and our cultures reproduce themselves — institutions, values, character and differentials… the works. Hence the number of interest groups with a stake in education is enormous. Of all the culture-breeding channels available to those in power, education is in principle the one that lends itself most readily to engineering and design. However, in practice, everyone sticks the oar in and change is piecemeal, compromised and fragile.

So it's rare for sufficient powerful forces to align and overcome the drag of inertia. Now is such a time, and I think we're just seeing the beginnings of changes that may take a decade or two to work through. Donald Clark writes of technology enabling "more pedagogic change in 10 years than last 1,000 years. Then there's the impact of economic retrenchment and austerity on learning, which I've been writing about on off for over two years, arguing that cases where people have to "make do" in their learning may have something to teach us about how to improve more "advanced" techniques.

On top of factors like these (the full set would be a whole essay in itself), there's a cultural mood that has arisen from year-upon-year of different kinds of disruption — from hurricanes and ash clouds, through financial punch-drunkenness to the effects of technology reaching the professional middle classes for the first time. We don't believe in the return of business-as-usual any more; we don't trust the age-old educational conveyor belts to drop us off at the right spot in the factory.

In different ways we're questioning the educational provision that's been handed down, and wondering if we couldn't do better ourselves. Let's explore what I mean by that by looking at two "How To" e-books about education, published in recent months. In many ways they're chalk and cheese. One's American, the other British. One's student's-eye view, the other a parent and school-builder. One is very "2.0" in its sensibility, arguing that students can remix their learning experiences from multiple sources. The other is, well, the mischief in me would like to call it Web 0.0, but really it's from a place as yet uncolonised by either software or version numbers, so let's christen it "RLP" (after the Revised Latin Primer).

But these texts — The Edupunks Guide to a DIY Credential by Anya Kamenetz and How to Set Up a Free School by Toby Young — also share many things in common. Both are digital-only, which is just as well since their (virtual) shelf life could be measured in weeks rather than years. That both are tied so specifically to their national contexts in late 2011 — respectively, the structure of college education and nascent alternatives in the USA, and current policy and personnel at the UK Department for Education — may be testament to how tightly education is bound into society when you want to tinker with it. It also makes it a challenge to generalise from the two books. But let me try.

The Edupunks' Guide to a DIY Credential

Anya Kamenetz arrives at DIY alternatives to traditional education via her study of student loan debt. Two thirds of college graduates in the US, 36 million people, owe an average of $27,000 to pay back the costs of their education. Her books Generation Debt and DIY U persuaded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund Kamenetz to write a practical guide for would-be students who don't want to run up such big liabilities.

And that's what she's delivered. There's no mention of pedagogical theory, of Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, Paulo Freire or Thomas Jefferson, as there was in DIY U. The Edupunks' Guide gives short, journalistic portraits of a range of alternative ways to get some formal or informal accreditation. Some of them are fairly orthodox: there's a section on "How to Find a College". A few are well-established such as the Western Governors University approach to accreditation based on competence rather than any compulsory study (incidentally this is exactly the model that the Thatcher government was aiming for when it created National Vocational Qualifications in the UK via its 1986 White Paper).

The most interesting case studies in the Guide, though, are the recently established, experimental, pathfinder initiatives like College Unbound, P2PU (Peer to Peer University) and Uncollege. These are grassroots organisations, invariably driven by small numbers of passionately committed individuals. When the founders move on, the initiatives may fade, to be replaced by new ones. And that's OK. Edupunks aren't setting out to create the new Oxford University, or even Open University. Still, it's hard to escape the impression that this field is still very new.

Today's Edupunks are very much pioneers. Perhaps aware of that, Kamenetz often can't seem to decide whether she's writing for the tiny vanguard who are asserting full control of their own learning, or for the rather larger hinterland of students who just want to do college on a tight budget with a savvy attitude. As an example of the former, Kamenetz profiles Weezie Yancey-Siegel, who wants to "try out more of a self-designed, experiential approach to learning…to create something new and spark further social change in the area of education, social media, global citizenship, and general do-gooding". Her chosen path to achieving this includes, inter alia, watching TED videos and reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I met Weezie, at a London DIY University event, and got the strong impression that she was crafting a genuinely challenging and pioneering education for herself out of these disparate experiences. She's exceptional, and a great role model for other self-directed learners, who, Kamenetz acknowledges, need to be self-motivated with good time management skills. But one thing Weezie is not: she's not a template that any significant number of students will be reproducing any time soon.

I like Kamenetz's division, in DIY U, of educational innovators into artisans, merchants and monks. The artisans gradually change things from within. The merchants are the people who see Higher Education's strife as an opportunity to make money. The monks write blog posts packed with old movie clips and argue late into the night in pubs after conference sessions. They want to liberate knowledge from the university altogether. With The Edupunks' Guide Kamenetz took a fair bit of flak from the monks. When she announced the title, months before publication, the academic credited with coining the term "Edupunk" publicly washed his hands of it, decrying a "vision of education as a wholesale gutting of publicly funded institutions and replacing them with some groovy YouTube vidoes [sic]… and powerpoint slides".

Stephen Downes argued that Kamenetz has "a very naive understanding of education" while her How To guides are "superficial and misleading". She is very evidently a journalist, not an educator or theorist. I defended her against some of Stephen's criticisms, however, on the basis that, if DIY education is ever going to be more than a handful of exceptional individuals, it needs journalists to have a shot at explaining it, and bringing home the practical implications without the full theoretical and historical baggage. I wrote then, "That seems to be part of the natural cycle of how change happens: how radical ideas gain traction, get absorbed into the mainstream, but lose some of their radicalism in the process." On the evidence of this guide, however, the Edupunks still have some way to go before their influence on the mainstream is felt.

How to Set Up a Free School

Toby Young is a celebrity journalist who was lead proposer and co-founder of the West London Free School, the standard bearer for UK Education Secretary Michael Gove's Free Schools initiative. Young's How to Set Up a Free School is part of a new series of Penguin Shorts ebooks. Also in the series is a title, How to be a Rogue Trader, which raises the question of whether we're dealing with practical guidance here or just diverting, makes-a-change-from-a-night-at-the-theatre, School of Life-style entertainments.

Young's text convinces that he is sincere, and that all the tart barbs at individuals (mainly fellow journalist Fiona Millar) and groups (unions, civil servants) are there for flavour. Furthermore he wants to encourage us to follow in his footsteps. At the end of the book he writes, "I hope I haven't put you off" and offers to come and talk to parent groups to advise and encourage.

Still, reflecting on Young's 25,000 words left me pretty pessimistic about the merits of parents aiming to follow in his footsteps (and this isn't just an abstract question for me: I have a child approaching school age and don't think much of the state or private schools in our area). Firstly, the successful campaign that Young and his team mounted feels like a one-off. Secondly, the rewards of success seem likely to be short-lived.

As with most successful pioneers, the defining genius of Young and the team behind West London Free School was timing. He astutely piloted a slalom course between an outgoing Labour government — luke warm about the idea but helpful in getting to know the terrain — and an incoming Conservative administration who saw Free Schools as a flagship policy and were correspondingly keen to have a showcase up and running as soon as. (It can't have done any harm that there is barely a thin sheet of vellum between Toby Young's RLP pedagogy and the Michael Gove's Authorised King James Version.) So keen were they, and so short of alternative credible proposals, that a little bit of extra facilitation and fast-tracking would surely have been the order of the day.

And I don't begrudge that. But I strongly suspect that the West London course is no longer navigable: that, faced with a rising tide of proposals, the opposite of fast-tracking applies. The Author's Note that follows the book's dedication at the beginning more or less lays this out: "Given how complex the set-up process has become, I'm worried that the policy will be hijacked by large, professional organisations and my reason for writing this book is to try and give parent groups a fighting chance." What follows this note is a candid and often shrewd assessment of all the barriers and hazards that stand in the way of Free School proposers. It suggests that parent groups will be fighting against extraordinary odds. Or in the author's wife's words, 'Most people reading this will think, "Bugger me, I had no idea it was so difficult."'

Yet if they succeed? Young also sets out what Free Schoolers can do to insulate their creations from interference by less sympathetic politicians whose time will surely come. Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) were the Tories' last attempt to take a part of the learning infrastructure and liberate it from the cloying hands of the state it into local private governance. TECs lasted eleven years (1990-2001) before those same hands clawed them back. My hunch is that free schools will last longer, but not a lot longer. Yet during their lifespan they will have their wings clipped and their differences elided in the name of benchmarking and best practice.

The catch is that it's not the politicians going through their revolving doors that will suck the life out of Free Schools; it's the inescapable logic of bureaucratic rationality that applies as much under a market-friendly administration as a state-friendly one. The Tories would struggle to sanction, with a straight face, the expansion of the Department for Education that would be required to give every Free School application the West London treatment. So, with more free school applications to deal with, the Department must either make the rules less flexible and negotiable, or take multiple identikit applications from larger entities, or both.

TECs were actually prohibited by John Major's government from merging into chains or franchises. It seems inevitable that Free Schools will do exactly that as the big, well-backed operations absorb smaller ones when the latter find themselves struggling with cashflow. They will lose the individual character of their founders' vision. Diversity and sensitivity to local context will give way to corporate standards and block negotiating power. For, unlike the rest of the state sector, Free Schools contract directly with the Department for Education, rather than via intermediate layers. They are are tethered to the government on a tighter leash than any other kind of school. And they call them Free? Bugger me, after all that, it turned out to be pointless.

Really free school syncretism

I'm sceptical about the prospects for either Edupunks or Free Schools to become the kind of systemic change that I speculated about at the start of this piece. The Edupunk path, at least in practice and for the moment, is one of exceptionalism. The Edupunk pioneers are by and large the lone rangers of learning, and confine themselves to the margins rather than the mainstream almost by definition. Free Schools are an odd mix: ostensibly a welcome shift towards a more self-reliant culture in education, they turn out to be anything but free, and quite possibly just the latest in a series of vain attempts to reform public services through managerialist tinkering (something the UK has suffered from Conservatives and Labour for two decades now).

Both Edupunks and Free Schools polarise opinion. That's a good way to get written about in blogs and other media, but it’s a terrible way to change education because it alerts and mobilises the opposition. Much better to advance quietly and without ruffling feathers, as the Open University has done over the last 40 years, and as home educators may be doing now.

So what can we salvage from these two How Tos? The most interesting ideas are those embedded in some of the start-up social enterprises in the Edupunks' Guide — from College Unbound and P2PU, mentioned above, to those with serious financial backing, such as the University of the People and the Saylor Foundation (with a $100 million bequest from entrepreneur Michael Saylor). Many of them combine the pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootlaces approach of peer learning with creative use of Open Educational Resources (of which those produced by the likes of MIT and the OU are best known).

If we call this "hacking" the education system, then we polarise opinion again, so can we just agree that it makes sense for new educational forms to feed on the fruits of old ones? Can we further agree with the thrust of the present government's policy that innovation in education is too important to be left to government? So, while we're at it, how about reclaiming the word "free" and building schools that don't depend on contracts with the Department for Education to survive?

This would be anathema to the likes of Toby Young, of course. That's OK, he's got a contract to keep him busy for at least seven years. No need to throw out everything in his guide, though. I have in mind a syncretic melding of the neighbourhood independence of Free Schools with the agile marshalling of supported by ever more sophisticated (and often free) learning tools and resources.

Ideally these really free schools would require neither the capital funding of fixed, dedicated premises nor the near-full-time parental commitment of home education. They might evolve, quietly, out of the self-organised after-school activities that teach parents the whys and wherefores of building simple, powerful learning environments. Lightweight and easy to assemble, really free schools might pop up and fade away according to local demand, contracting in specialist tuition when needed, via a School of Everything-style network. They'd repurpose educational resources in ways that their creators did not foresee. "Schooling as in fish, not as in meting out discipline," as I wrote in one of my rare tweets.

Ecology and disaster relief professionals already have a low-cost village construction set and village in a box. Free school edupunks should turn their attention to building a school-in-a-box kit. Anyone like to see if we can make one?

Rough notes on the history of the classroom

These notes were prepared for our Everything Unplugged meeting on Wednesday. Level 5 of Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 8XX, 10.30am-12.30pm — all welcome, free of charge.

In the course of our discussion about "natural learning" we asked, Do some people think classrooms are a natural way to organise learning? This led to some speculative theorising about the history of the classroom and how long its current form had prevailed. Here are some notes I made from an hour or so's rooting around on the web, as a backdrop to further discussion.

There's a book Silences & Images: The Social History of the Classroom (History of Schools and Schooling, Volume 7) by Ian Grosvenor, Martin Lawn, Kate Rousmaniere (editors), published in 1999 but it's not cheap to get hold of. Google Books entry

Potted (early) history of education

Cribbed from Wikipedia

• Prehistory: assumed to be oral tradition; stories, legends, folklore, rituals, and songs
• Advent of agriculture, leading to settlements, tools (including writing tools?), more specialisation of roles and division of labour. Starting in about 3500 BC, various writing systems were developed in ancient civilizations around the world.
• Middle East ancient civilisation "Only royal offspring and sons of the rich and professionals such as scribes, physicians, and temple administrators, went to school. Most boys were taught their father's trade or were apprenticed out to learn a trade. Girls had to stay home with their mothers to learn housekeeping and cooking, and to look after the younger children."
• India "Vedic education included: proper pronunciation and recitation of the Veda, the rules of sacrifice, grammar and derivation, composition, versification and meter, understanding lalala of secrets of nature, reasoning including logic, the sciences, and the skills necessary for an occupation. Some medical knowledge existed and was taught. There is mention in the Veda of herbal medicines for various conditions or diseases, including fever, cough, baldness, snake bite and others. Education, at first freely available in Vedic society, became over time more discriminatory as the caste system, originally based on occupation, evolved."
• China "During the Zhou Dynasty (1045 BC to 256 BC), there were five national schools in the capital city, Pi Yong (an imperial school, located in a central location) and four other schools for the aristocrats and nobility, including Shang Xiang. The schools mainly taught the Six Arts: rites, music, archery, charioteering, calligraphy, and mathematics. According to the Book of Rituals, at age twelve, boys learned arts related to ritual (i.e. music and dance) and when older, archery and chariot driving. Girls learned ritual, correct deportment, silk production and weaving."
• Greece "In the city-states of ancient Greece, most education was private. In Athens, during the 5th and 4th century BC, aside from two years military training, the state played little part in schooling. Anyone could open a school and decide the curriculum. Parents could choose a school offering the subjects they wanted their children to learn, at a monthly fee they could afford. Most parents, even the poor, sent their sons to schools for at least a few years, and if they could afford it from around the age of seven until fourteen, learning gymnastics (including athletics, sport and wrestling), music (including poetry, drama and history) and literacy. Girls rarely received formal education."
• Rome "At the height of the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire, formal schools were established, which served paying students (very little in the way of free public education as we know it can be found).[41] Normally, both boys and girls were educated, though not necessarily together.In a system much like the one that predominates in the modern world, the Roman education system that developed arranged schools in tiers... Only the Roman elite would expect a complete formal education. A tradesman or farmer would expect to pick up most of his vocational skills on the job. Higher education in Rome was more of a status symbol than a practical concern."

Typically students spend 15,000 hours in classrooms by the end of secondary education.

The interior of the Francis M. Drexel School in Philadelphia from The Public schools of Philadelphia: historical, biographical, statistical by John Trevor Custis, published in 1897, p. 435 (original numbering) - out of copyright. Available at Google Books. Notice the gaslights in the classrooms and the moveable classroom walls that have been folded up and stored. where I got this image

Commentary

Embodied Education: Reflections on Sustainable Education by Marcus Bussey:

Teaching is the most natural thing in the world. It is something human beings do as part of being human. When done naturally it is simply a generous moment when experience is shared either verbally or through demonstration. Teaching only became ‘unnatural’ when it was institutionalised and consequently professionalised (see Miller 2006). With the invention of the classroom something fundamentally human was lost. Heidegger would say that we had imposed a technical rationality on a human process (Heidegger 1992). Foucault would have it that teachers became jailors of the mind (Foucault 1995) while Sarkar would claim that love was missing from the classroom (Sarkar 1998). Postman, on the other hand, would say teaching had lost its deeper meaning (Postman 1996) and O’Sullivan confirms this, pointing to the impoverished worldview that underpins materialist educational culture (O'Sullivan 1999). However we construct it, teaching has been diminished and its spontaneity, its creativity and its joy drained away.

Such a depiction of course, can be said to be romantic and ahistorical. Premodern teaching, as Ivana Milojević demonstrates, could often be violent and dehumanising — associated with the whip and authoritarianism (Milojević 2005). Similarly, the 'natural' tag can be challenged – after all what is natural?

Fred Garnett:

If you look at Plato's original Academy, you can see he did not set up the same Academic model that we think of. The Academia was the building where, say, Socrates sat and debated subjects, a nearby Orchard (later cut down by the Romans for materials) allowed learner discussions and a Gymnasium provided physical exercise. Arguably learning was seen as instruction, conversation and activity in formal, informal and non-formal contexts, but we only retain the formal part, call it Academic and ascribe it to Plato to validate it. So even our notion of "Academic" is misunderstood and used spuriously to support a false position of power in formal education, whereas LGCs were designed as complementary processes into the original model. See this brief overview of how the Academia came into being.

Donald Clark on lecturing Lecturing in the 14th century just meant reading, in the C16th it took on a sense of instruction. In the C21st lecturing has a pejorative sense "don't lecture me!"

Claim (unreferenced) that lecture was invented in 4 AD or before

 

Are job selection methods actually measuring 'ability to identify criteria'?

Candidates try to squirrel out what they are being asked to do, or even who they are being asked to be, and funnel their energies towards that. When the situation is ambiguous, a so-called “weak” situation, those better at squirrelling – those with high “ability to identify criteria” (ATIC) - will put on the right performance, and those that are worse will put on Peer Gynt for the panto crowd.

Some people are better at guessing what an assessment is measuring than others, so in itself ATIC is a real phenomenon. And the research shows that higher ATIC scores are associated with higher overall assessment performance, and better scores specifically on the dimensions they correctly guess. ATIC clearly has a 'figuring-out' element, so we might suspect its effects are an artefact of it being strongly associated with cognitive ability, itself associated with better performance in many types of assessment. But if anything the evidence works the other way. ATIC has an effect over and above cognitive ability, and it seems possible that cognitive ability buffs assessment scores mainly due to its contribution to the ATIC effect.

via bps-occupational-digest.blogspot.com

Lesson from this (and note to self, after just applying for a job for the first time in 20 years): don't rely on the job spec and person spec. Do more research. Phone people and squirrel out what they really want. Maybe you don't even have to ask direct questions (it's not a cognitive, analytical skill), just get a feel for the vibe.

Wait a hundred years for a collapse, and then avert it

John Kay writes of the financial crisis of 2008,

The political left offered no diagnosis or new ideas, and it gained no electoral advantage. Instead, across Europe, the parties that had waited a century for capitalism to collapse under its own contradictions congratulated themselves that such collapse had been averted by the injection of incredible amounts—trillions of dollars—of taxpayer funds into the banking system.

in Prospect, Issue 186, August 2011.

A salutary lesson pithily expressed, don't you think?

Dealing with pressure when it matters

As a Surrey County cricket fan, I've been following Jade Dernbach's career as a bowler for around four years. If I'm honest, I've been surprised at how quickly he's made it into the England team over the last nine months or so — I'd have projected that he needed to wait and develop for at least one more season. But he got the call-up to play with the England Lions in the West Indies over the winter, got plenty of wickets, then an opening emerged, and he grasped it.

Still, I was nervous when he got handed the ball to bowl the penultimate over in the series-decider against Sri Lanka this afternoon, with the opposition needing 17 runs from 12 balls with two wickets remaining. Jade can be great "at the death", but he can also be erratic: there was a chance that his first three balls would go for 10 and the game would effectively be over. He evidently wasn't as nervous as me, because he never got to bowl that third ball: he took the two wickets in the first two balls. Not "game effectively over"; game over, full stop. Attaboy. 

The text commentator at Cricinfo appeared to be sceptical at first, too:

Dernbach, what are you made of? In his first series he has a huge task here.

48.1	Dernbach to Mathews, OUT, slower ball has done for Mathews! Dernbach screams to the heavens! Great delivery! Mathews was completely deceived, played much too early, lost one hand off the bat and it looped to Bresnan at short third man who held on. Brilliant innings but it might not be enough
	AD Mathews c Bresnan b Dernbach 62 (102m 64b 6x4 0x6) SR: 96.87 That could just about be the final blow. That 15-run partnership between Anderson and Dernbach at the end of the England innings has been pivotal.

48.2	Dernbach to Malinga, OUT, bowled him! Dernbach is appealing at first but realises soon enough he's won the match for England! Spearing yorker bursts under the bat and rattles the stumps! England go wild, the crowd goes wild! Cook has pulled off victory in his first series as full-time captain
	SL Malinga b Dernbach 6 (6m 2b 0x4 1x6) SR: 300.00

[Picture taken from a Murdoch-owned media company without permission. I bet they never take anything without permission. Oh, wait.] 

Robert Fripp's aims in keeping a diary

The Aims Of The Diaries.

Public Aims:

1.    To engage the listening community at an earlier stage of the creative process than is commonly available.
2.    To inform the listening community of the practicalities of that process.
3.    To de-mystify the process which is, essentially, practical.

 

Private Aims:

1.    To encourage the Diarist to recapitulate their experience.
2.    To provide the Diarist with a pointed stick.
3.    To expose the Diarist to public ridicule.

Comments:

1.    We continue to have a Romantic notion of the artist: a special creature set apart from common humanity, one favoured by the Muse.

These Diaries indicate the mundane nature of the lives of artists: their simple, human and practical concerns. These Diaries remove the mystification that we project onto the artists, their lives and activities. The creative process is shown as being straightforward, ordinary and practical.

At this point, with the commonplace nature of the artists’ work revealed, the creative process may appear more remarkable than before: how can ordinary people like these give rise to work which moves and touches us?

Then, we find a new and deeper respect for the benevolence of the creative impulse: it succeeds despite these people, not because of them.

2.    Much commentary on the lives and work of artists is projection: unfounded, uninformed, without data, without direct experience, based on what we believe the lives of artists to be. Most commentary by “fans” is based on ignorance, rooted in personal prejudice, like and dislike. This is commentary from The Basement.

The enthusiast is better informed, able to engage with the process in the moment, and suspend the immediate rush to judgement. This is the view from the garden floor.

The connoisseur understands: they know, feel and sense the currents at work in the creative process. They have themselves undergone a training, but in listening and “appreciation” rather than in performance. This is the view from the floor above the garden room.

3.    The recapitulation of experience, in the form of diarism, is a way to digest the impressions that life, and our living of it, naturally provides. The Diarist reviews th

via www.dgmlive.com

...and in the continuation from this (which my Typepad plugin has unhelpfully truncated) "Maintaining a diary is a process of engagement with oneself... that invites the Diarists to move beyond their natural lassitude, to go further than the merely comfortable"

Please could you give me feedback on this draft

If you could give me any comments or other feedback on this draft article by Thursday, I'd be very grateful! I've written it for the newsletter of the Association for Learning and Technology, so the audience is mostly learning technology professionals in Higher Education and Further Education.

Comments welcome either in the comments field below or by email to me, david at alchemi-dot-co-dot-uk. Many thanks!

---

Like the future, the impact of a colder climate is not evenly distributed. I guess there must be some areas where current economic challenges are experienced as business-as-usual, plus some pressure to trim a bit of excess fat. But many of the people I speak to have a sense that we are going through — or just heading into — a period that is qualitatively different from the cyclical ebbs and flows that education has gone through over the past decades.

My sample is in no way balanced of representative but last year I interviewed people involved in learning from a home educator to a university professors, and from a social software entrepreneur to a photographer who is committed to helping people learn yet refuses to see this as teaching (recorded on my blog, and collated in abridged form in a self-published newspaper). I was trying to do two things: to get a sense of what might be common across these different contexts, and to get a sense of the longer sweep of change, beyond the horizon of recent funding cuts.

Changes bred of necessity and opportunity

This article is a reflection on what I am calling "agile learning", drawing on some of the themes that emerged from these interviews. Hopefully this term is fairly self-explanatory: agility involves letting learners manage, direct and adapt their learning with minimum constraint. It is not intended as another packaged solution, with proprietary paraphernalia of trademarks and methodologies; more an umbrella term to allude to the particular kinds of invention that are bred of necessity in a challenging climate.

Over the space of 10-20 years, learning activities that were once marginal and supplementary will move into the mainstream as institutions lose their historical monopoly on the capability to process and share resources. We are already seeing what self-organising groups can accomplish with powerful tools but without formal lines of command.

What happens if and when the resources in the commons outstrip those controlled by gatekeepers as a matter of course? If Wikipedia is seen in some quarters as an irritant — its use to be cautioned and policed – imagine how learning might feel if the wiki model were to pass a tipping point, and classrooms to be seen as rare and peripheral events.

Neil Young's manager to fan blogger: Do you have a life?

Elliot: You need to lighten up. You guys take this stuff way too seriously. It's only music.

Neil's just a musician. He's not an economist. Or a politician. Or a CEO.

Your musical hero can't be the solution to your problems.

So let me ask you a question. Do you have a life? What's the deal?

TW: Oh yeah. I'm happily married man and all that stuff. We feel quite fortunate and lucky to do what we do. To give back to the Neil community all the love and affection they've given to us over the years.

Thankful for all that we've learned from our fellow fans that have helped to try and make us us all better people.

You know. Celebrate the music. The passion. The community.

It's actually a lot of fun. That whole "keep on bloggin' 'til the power goes out. Battery's dead. Twist & shout."

That sort of idea.

Elliot: No, really. Seriously. C'mon. Why?

TW: Well, in a way, Neil changed our lives.

I've never really discussed this before. But long ago, someone broke my heart. I found a lot of solace and comfort in his music. His songs helped me make it through a difficult time.

I know this sounds corny. I just kept searching for a heart of gold. I truly believed she was out there and that I could be happy the rest of my life with her once I found her.

And I did find my heart of gold one day. And I've never been happier since. Love and only love.

Elliot: Well, good for you both.

So, are you recording this and going to bootleg this also? (bemusedly)

TW: No, probably just put it up on my little bloggie thingie...

via neilyoungnews.thrasherswheat.org

Fascinating exchange between Neil Young's manager and best known fan blogger. It starts off with a detailed discussion of ticketing issues on Neil Young tours: the proportion of tickets that are priced highly, what impact this has on touts, and on audience attention. Then the manager turns the tables...

How thinking for others can boost your creativity

The next time you're struggling to solve a creative problem, try solving it for someone else. According to Evan Polman and Kyle Emich, we're more capable of mental novelty when thinking on behalf of strangers than for ourselves. This is just the latest extension of research into construal level theory, an intriguing concept that suggests various aspects of psychological distance can affect our thinking style.

It's been shown, for example, that greater physical and temporal distance lead us to think more abstractly, such that you're more likely to solve a problem if you imagine being confronted by it in a far-off place and/or at a future time (read Jonah Lehrer's take on what this says about the importance of holidays). Now Polman and Emich have shown that social distance can have the same psychological benefit.

via bps-research-digest.blogspot.com

This makes sense intuitively (which is always a warning sign: the dangers of being drawn to research that backs up hunches and prejudices are legion). It explains why I can surprise myself with my usefulness at solving problems as a mentor or advisor. The surprise comes from the painful awareness of how useless and ineffectual I am at dealing with my own, similar dilemmas.

How more free stuff makes us poorer, allegedly

The internet, on which he has a lot to say, has had enormous benefits, but a striking amount of online activity is free and internet businesses create few new jobs (and displace lots of others). The result is growth in utility without much of a contribution to GDP, which would be fine except that countries and people have bills to pay, on things like health care, pensions, and government debt. Complicating matters is the fact that the fastest growing contributors to measured GDP—the government, education, and health sectors—deliver returns that are very difficult to measure. This suggests, he says, that rich world GDPs are likely overstated; we're poorer than we thought.

via broadstuff.com

Well this is terrible... GDP isn't rising because too many things are free! So a profession emerges and builds a measure that some might argue was wrong-headed to start with. As things change, it becomes clear that it's getting less and less useful measure. And what conclusion does this lead the commentators to? (No, not that we should just forget that GDP was ever invented.) They conclude things must be getting worse because lots of things are happening that don't register on their measuring instruments.

How terrible is it that so many valuable things are increasingly freely available? Well if you've got a vested interest in charting the gap between rich and poor, it's pretty bad, evidently.