War of the Worlds: The Human Side of Moore's Law (technology, culture, and education commentary)

There is a technology war coming. Actually it is already here but most of us haven't yet notice. It is a war not about technology but because of technology, a war over how we as a culture embrace technology. It is a war that threatens venerable institutions and, to a certain extent, threatens what many people think of as their very way of life. It is a war that will ultimately and inevitably change us all, no going back. The early battles are being fought in our schools. And I already know who the winners will be.

The real power of Moore's Law lies in what the lady at the bank called "the miracle of compound interest," which has allowed personal computers to increase in performance a millionfold over the past 30 years. There's a similar, if slower, effect that governs the rate at which individuals are empowered by the technology they use. Called Cringely's Nth Law of Computing (because I have forgotten for the moment what law I am up to, whether it is five or six), it says that waves of technological innovation take approximately 30 years - one human generation - to be completely absorbed by our culture. That's 30 years to become an overnight sensation, 30 years to finally settle into the form most useful to society, 30 years to change the game.

The key word here is "empowerment." Technologies allow us to overcome limitations of time, distance, and physical capability, but they only empower us when they can be gracefully used by large, productive segments of our society. The telephone was empowering when we all finally got it. Now it is the Internet and digital communications.

Let's be clear about what we're measuring here. It has very little to do with specific technologies and everything to do with our adaptation to technology as a culture. What Cringely's Nth Law of Computing predicts is our rate of adaptation to technological life. This happens not at the rate technologies are developed but at the rate we are capable of broadly absorbing them. We've seen this sort of thing before, of course. I used to work in user interface design and noticed long ago that it took about a decade for every new interface standard to be absorbed by technical culture. This dates back a lot longer than most of us might guess, all the way back to microfilm readers in the 1960s. Older engineers couldn't stand reading microfilm while younger engineers found it effortless. Same for microfiche, which followed microfilm. The same effect could be found in typing: older people - mainly men - wouldn't adapt to it, but those who used a typewriter in high school or college quickly learned they could not live without it. Ditto for computers, first with batch processing, then time-sharing terminals, then command-line PCs, then graphical user interfaces, and now emerging mobile platforms. Each new technology is difficult for the older generation and easy for the younger, which explains why I am a PC master but a texting idiot. I'm just too damned old.

Here, buried in my sixth paragraph, is the most important nugget: we've reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools.

I came to this conclusion recently while attending Brainstorm 2008, a delightful conference for computer people in K-12 schools throughout Wisconsin. They didn't hold breakout sessions on technology battles or tactics, but the idea was in the air. These people were under siege.

I started writing educational software in 1978. The role of instructional technology has changed since then from a gimmick to a novelty to an effort to an essential component of any curriculum. Kids can't go to school today without working on computers. But having said that, in the last five years more and more technical resources have been turned to how to keep technology OUT of our schools. Keeping kids from instant messaging, then text messaging or using their phones in class is a big issue as is how to minimize plagiarism from the Internet. These defensive measures are based on the idea that unbound use of these communication and information technologies is bad, that it keeps students from learning what they must, and hurts their ability to later succeed as adults.

These are kids who have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. But far more important, there is emerging a class of students whose PARENTS have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. The Big Kahuna in educational discipline isn't the school, it is the parent. Ward Cleaver rules. But what if Ward puts down his pipe and starts texting? Well he has.

Andy Hertzfeld said Google is the best tool for an aging programmer because it remembers when we cannot. Dave Winer, back in 1996, came to the conclusion that it was better to bookmark information than to cut and paste it. I'm sure today Dave wouldn't bother with the bookmark and would simply search from scratch to get the most relevant result. Both men point to the idea that we're moving from a knowledge economy to a search economy, from a kingdom of static values to those that are dynamic. Education still seems to define knowing as more important than being able to find, yet which do you do more of in your work? And what's wrong with crimping a paragraph here or there from Cringely if it shows you understand the topic?

This is, of course, a huge threat to the education establishment, which tends to have a very deterministic view of how knowledge and accomplishment are obtained - a view that doesn't work well in the search economy. At the same time K-12 educators are being pulled back by No Child Left Behind, they are being pulled forward (they probably see it as pulled askew) by kids abetted by their high-tech Generation Y (yes, we're getting well into Y) parents who are using their Ward Cleaver power not to maintain the status quo but to challenge it.

This is an unstable system. Homeschooling, charter schools, these things didn't even exist when I was a kid, but they are everywhere now. There's only one thing missing to keep the whole system from falling apart - ISO certification.

I've written about this for years and nobody ever paid attention, but ISO certification is what destroyed the U.S. manufacturing economy. With ISO 9000 there was suddenly a way to claim with some justification that a factory in Malaysia was precisely comparable to an IBM plant on the Hudson. Prior to then it was all based on reputation, not statistics. And now that IBM plant is gone.

Well reputation still holds in education, though its grip is weakening. I know kids from good families who left high school early with a GED because they were bored or wanted to enter college early. Maybe college is next.

MIT threw videos of all its lecture courses - ALL its lecture courses - up on the web for anyone to watch for free. This was precisely comparable to SGI (remember them?) licensing OpenGL to Microsoft. What is it, then, that makes an MIT education worth $34,986? Is it the seminars that aren't on the web? Faculty guidance? Research experience? Getting drunk and falling in the Charles River without your pants? Right now it is all those things plus a dimensionless concept of educational quality, which might well go out the window if some venture capitalist with too much money decides to fund an ISO certification process not for schools but for students.

The University of Phoenix is supposedly preparing a complete middle and high school online curriculum available anywhere in the world. I live in Charleston, SC where the public schools are atrocious despite spending an average of $16,000 per student each year. Why shouldn't I keep my kids at home and online, demanding that the city pay for it?

Steve Jobs rejects the idea of Apple making or distributing e-books because he says people don't read books. He's right, book readers are older. Young readers graze. They search. Look how they watch TV. Steve didn't say people are stupid or we're all going to Hell in a handbasket. He just said we don't read books.

Technology is beginning to assail the underlying concepts of our educational system - a system that's huge and rich and so far fairly immune to economic influence. But the support structure for those hallowed and not so hallowed halls has always been parents willing to pay tuition and alumni willing to give money, both of which are likely to change over a generation for reasons I've just spent 1469 words explaining. We are nearing the time when paying dues and embracing proxies for quality may give way having the ability to know what kids really know, to verify what they can really do, not as 365th in their class at Stanford but as Channing Cringely, who just graduated from nowhere with the proven ability to design time machines.

The biggest problem I see with researching for information on a huge search engine is that the capability of limiting information is present. Demonstrate how commie Red China can limit internet browsing to their list of approved sites. The same can be done worldwide and there is much talk about how to limit content and information available even here in America. Of course, the reasons given are the noble “protecting the children” arguement.

Truth is, people have been manipulating history books for decades and now a whole generation has access to comparitive history beyond the brick and mortar school and it’s books. That scares educators because they can no longer control the ciriculum and it reduces their legitimacy and importance. Socialism cannot be taught if the children have access to contrasting content.

"Knowledge is power" is now become a threat, because what passes for knowledge is but a shell of it and can be created on the fly and delivered en masse to...anyone, regardless of motive.

First of all a threat to what? What, if it's based in Truth, needs defense?

It seems to me that certain things are self evident and if certain institutions are being overturned or seeing their foundations crumble then perhaps they weren't that closely based upon Truthful principles afterall.

You'd have some form of gatekeeping (censorship)in place to protect us from ourselves?

IMO it's already way too late to try putting the cork in the bottle. Look at Tibet the Chinese are trying to choke off information and yet somehow in this wired up world it seeps through the cracks like water carrying away what is meant to contain it.

You'd have some form of gatekeeping (censorship)in place to protect us from ourselves?

Oh, the dreaded "c" word. I guess I'd better go get my asbestos suit....

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It's caveat emptor like never before. And when you can't trust that your mates are all on the same page, you can kiss real progress goodbye for a long, long time.

Being able to search is founded on a knowledge base that tells you that you need to search, that a search of a particular sort may be useful, and the whether the result are meaningful.

Good point. One can be "educated" in that one can find lots of information about a particular thing, but real education is comprehensive and requires one to put things in context. A truly educated person wants to understand a topic and not just lazily "graze" for random or convenient details.

A student brought up on typical leftist propaganda might be vaguely aware that Japan and the U.S. were on opposite sides during WWII, and, looking for evidence of U.S. "war crimes," he might be able to find out a lot of information about Hiroshima. This will confirm his belief in alleged U.S. war crimes and he will stop his inquiry there. He will know nothing about the goals of the Japanese Empire. He will know nothing about Japanese atrocities in China and other places. If told of such atrocities, he will dismiss it as irrelevant to the matter of alleged U.S. war crimes. Furthermore, he will see the Hiroshima bombing as having nothing to do with other events of WWII, but then he may tie in Hiroshima with the war in Iraq. Someone might be able to search for facts but be willingly ignorant of the larger picture.

Maybe I’m missing something here. The author states as fact that “K-12 educators are being pulled back by No Child Left Behind” without any context or exposition. Is this a generally accepted fact? Or is it so within the context of the article’s topic?

A saw from the home schoolers, is that if you want to simulate the public school experience in the home, take your kid to the bathroom, blow smoke in his face, swear at him, beat him up, and take his lunch money.

There are plenty of other ways to gain social experience than sitting in classrooms.

A delightful, wonderful paragraph! No time to go further on it though ...

My kids never went to school. My 3 entered community college at the ages of 13, 12, and 13. All finished Calculus III by the age of 15, and all their college general courses.

My prediction:

Even the brink and mortar college can be dumped for much of the routine stuff ( and that includes Calculus III). There are on-line law schools now, and in my opinion even a lot of medical school could be done on-line.

Government school:

Government schools are NOT about educating children. They ARE about maintaining a government white-collar jobs program for collage grads with the lowest SAT and GRE scores on campus.

This guy is a savant and actually understands the dynamic of technology as a container of society. Media analyst Marshall McLuhan said 50 years ago that technology is assimilitated when it becomes invisible, part of the gestalt background rather than an object of the attention of learning. but I think sodiety’s learning curve is faster than 30 years. The death of TV and the birth of the computer as both entertainment and information center is a smooth transition, much like the advent of the remote control tuner was a smooth transition. Anything that increases the efficiency of extant technology is a smooth transition.

Yep, schools are dead. All we need is for governments to close their physical plant schools, issue every newborn a laptop and wifi, and unleash the battalions of game programmers to create the new game- “Grades 1- 16”. Burn your textbook digests, they are cartoon programming. The online Library of Alexandria has all the original source materials. For the first time in history any human can teach himself anything.

OK, I'm back. Nobody said anything about putting a cork back in any bottle. Tibet and China? This is my point exactly! You frame your response according to the "hot story." That's what "hot media" does. Does that make it knowledge, or opinion, or some hybrid? It's caveat emptor like never before. And when you can't trust that your mates are all on the same page, you can kiss real progress goodbye for a long, long time.

I chose China/Tibet because I felt it illustrates the point about information/knowledge that it is flowing at a greater rate today than ever before. What is it really? just thought forms. Neither hot nor cold.

We can attempt to capture these forms in a body of knowledge say a book or school of thought but given the environment today it's often obsolete before it makes it to a shelf or university faculty.

I agree it's real slippery out on these rocks but as ObiWan told Luke "Trust the Force" when it comes to this blizzard of information. I believe we have enough intuitive sense to sort this stuff out individually and collectively. As I see it how you see progress gets down to whether the glass is half full or empty.

Yep, schools are dead.

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The NEA and AFT just doesn’t know it yet! Neither do the government school defenders on this board.

Fantastic article.

I told my kids they only needed to learn 3 things in school: Math, Reading, Research skills. They can teach themselves everything else they need from those 3 building blocks.

Math; learn as much as you possibly can.

Reading; as fast as possible, as much comprehension as possible.

Research skills; finding what you want to know, even when you don’t exactly know what you want to know. You might call it flexibility.

If you can do that, you have the world in the palm of your hand.

I can’t comment on the ISO aspects of the article - it’s outside my purview, however, every other aspect of the article is spot on. I’ve actually been considering the amazing shift that’s occurred in the last 20 years and how it is slowly leaving me behind. I’m a software developer and have been on a computer almost full time since I was 11 yet I feel out of touch now.

The kids I know all complain about the traditional college text-book. They think it is a rip off. Most of these are $100 - $175 and are required for classes. Used books from the previous years classes are scarce. Where do they all go?

What's going on between the publishing industry and colleges? A CD/DVD format would be a lot less costly (and profitable).

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