1. From Comments to Links
I came to thinking about the nature of writing in a weblog via a brief exploration of the issues surrounding comment spam. Dave Sifry's Blog comment spam solutions and the coming arms race caused me to turn off commenting here in EDN. This wasn't a spur of them moment decision and has been something I've wrestled with for a while now. Turning comments off means that unless someone else has their own weblog, they will not be able to "comment" on my writing directly in my weblog, but they can connect to it via embedded links in their entries to permalinks in my weblog, or via trackback. Both of these techniques are important, but different. I won't quote from the entry here, but it is worth taking a moment to read it if you haven't already.

Of course, the first thing one might ponder is the loss of interaction that may occur by not allowing visitors to add comments. And some very valuable comments have been added. My own experiences with comment spam here have been limited since I started closing down commenting on older entries. While this step helps limit the comment spam problem, it also creates an assumption that older entries are less likely to be commented on than newer entries. While statistically this may be true, I believe it's a bad assumption from a writing perspective. The archives are part of the flow of writing and the author's mental landscape and are always integral to the present moment. The archives are just as "present" as today's entry.

Ross Mayfield's Comment Spam Solution: 1) turn comments off; 2) move discusion to a Tribe; 3) leave trackback on. This is good and, if you check out the comments to the entry, controversial advice. My take on it is this: turning off comments does not make a weblog less invitational, but it does require new ways of connecting. Tribe will take some time to explore, but it is clear that the effective use of trackback will play an important role in linking weblogs (as well as the internal linking of entries by the author - a technique not used very much as far as I can see).

[Other interesting entries on comment spam: 1. Feld Thoughts' Spyware is officially out of control: Extension to spyware. 2. Rick Klau's Comment spam: Comment registration solution; automated commenting.]

2. From Links to Maps
At the same time, merely tracking back to internal entries and entries in other weblogs is not a complete solution. A trackback link can simply act as a pointer, much like a bibliographic entry in a book. An embedded link to a permalink in my weblog may be used as a means to reference to a quotation, or as encouragement for the reader to navigate directly to the site. It is at this point that we often see the word "conversation" coming into play. As a metaphor, the connection across a geography of weblog entries may be lightly referred to as a conversation. However, I wonder if links across internal entries and/or mutliple weblogs really constitute a conversation simply by virture of the fact that links are present, or does it have more to do with how thoughts and ideas change across these links? I sense that it is the latter that is a more profitable exploration.

Providing visualizations of weblog "conversations" via the mapping of linkages can be helpful in seeing the geography of links. Judith Meskill's Visualizing Weblog Conversations makes reference to Mary Hodder's research at Berkley. One important design idea in her work is to rescue items from archive oblivion by overcoming the chronological bias inherent in weblogs. I would add that it is primarily the responsbility of the weblog author to prevent items from falling into archive oblivion. I would further add that it is the weblog author's responsibility to provide an adequate context (not merely quote+link) their own use of links by discussing how it impacts on them personally.

3. From Mapping to Archiving
The ideas that I have referred to have more to do with the author's approach to writing, than the tools for writing provided by weblogs (although they cannot really be separated - it's an issue of priority). In simple terms, the weblog author can:

A. Be conscious of their own internal geography of entries while writing, trackback and/or link to these entries, and provide adequate context for the link. Weblog authors that are sensitive to their own archives are easy to spot;

B. Be aware (as much as possible) of the external geography of related entries by other authors, trackback and/or link to these entries, and provide adequate context for the link in their own writing (not merely quote+link);

C. Review and revise the weblog archive, including renaming entries, re-writing old entries into new ones when appropriate, and deleting entries that no longer have relevance. Yes - deleting past entries.

All of this means that weblog authors are searching their own site as much as, and perhaps more than, their readers. Writing new entries, then, is an invitation to search the archives.

4. From Archiving to Prospecting
It's interesting to note that it is often the most dominant aspects of a technology that we spend the most time trying to design ways around. Weblog technology embeds certain kinds of defaults that a writer must be aware of, for example, the chronological presentation of "entries." The most obvious signs of this are dated entries as well as the presence of a calendar in a sidebar. This gives a weblog a natural sense of currency, a valued commodity in an information society. However, and this may sound a little too obvious, it is also good to remember that this ease of chronological organization is also a limitation.

In EDN, I have not displayed a calendar nor I have displayed a listing of the archive. Why? I just don't see a purpose for them. Perhaps this is a personal bias, but I never explore calendars and archive listings on other weblogs. I do, however, pop words into the search tool to see what comes up. I'd rather explore weblog archives in this way since the actual dates of entries are irrelevant to me, at least in the early exploration stages.

The archives are made dynamic by the amount of attention we give them. A category provides a way to view a cross-section of entries that have been tagged by the author as belonging to a certain class. The use of the search tool provides a way draw out entries from the archives according to common words and phrases. And the list goes on: trackback, comments, hyperlinks, permalinks, and so on. Each of these tools are ways of referring to the weblog archives in different modes.

5. From Prospecting to Writing

"To start right is certainly an essential. I have proved this too many times to doubt it. Twenty-five or thirty years ago I began a story which was to turn upon the marvels of mental telegraphy. A man was to invent a scheme whereby he could synchronize two minds, thousands of miles apart, and enable them to freely converse together through the air without the aid of a wire. Four times I started it in the wrong way and it wouldn't go. Three times I discovered my mistake after writing about a hundred pages. I discovered it the fourth time when I had written four hundred pages - then I gave up and put the whole thing in the fire."
Mark Twain On Writing and Publishing

---

"New" Approaches to Learning - Key Questions Raised
Lisa poses three questions about learning that are critical:

1. In our attempts to make learning more relevant and accessible, are we really just re-learning stuff we already know?

2. Has our language of abstraction and jargon completely obliterated common-sensical and ancient approaches to learning?

3. Have we known the best way all along? / Have we really just forgotten?

---

In our attempts to make learning more relevant and accessible, are we really just re-learning stuff we already know? My unhelpful and simplistic response to this is, "Yes, we are." A response like this is unhelpful because it limits possibilities for the idea of "re-Learning." In other words, while there may be a repetitive aspect to it, perhaps there are also variations taking place in this "re-Learning" that lead to new insights. At the same time, I would say that our obsession with ideas about "accessibility," especially in the sense that more accessibility is often equated with something that is better for us, is amiss. Accessibility begs the question, "What should we be making accessibile and why should it matter?" - a question that naturally leads us into the realm of relevance and identity, both of which have private and public domains.

I suppose it’s good that we’re remembering… it’s just sad that it took us so long. And it’s sad that we have to convince people that the old ways are really good and proven ways to learn and not some newfangled approaches that will soon be yesterday’s news." Lisa Galarneau

This resonated with me. When I look at the writing I've done I would have to say that there is little "new" in it in the sense of something that hasn't already been talked about it. But much of it is "new" to me in the sense of finding my own way in the unavoidable lifelong pilgrimage of learning that we all experience by default. Ideas about narrative came to me not through books but through interaction with my students a long time ago and eventually became something that I now constantly explore. Without recognizing the tension between what I was told to teach as an educator and how I saw my students as unique individuals on their own journey, connecting that back to my own educational experiences, and attempting to reduce that tension in my own work, I wonder if narrative would have become important to me.

Ideas about memory and remembering are vitally important to learning. In Memory: Therapeutic Forgetting? I wrote responded to the psychological notion of memory with the idea of "therapeutic remembering." One of the greatest weaknesses in our thinking about memory is that we sometimes assume that memory is dominated by the brain/mind. It isn't as Candace Pert clearly demonstrates. A complimentary and vital perspective on memory has been developed by Timothy Findley, which I have yet to write about.

Has our language of abstraction and jargon completely obliterated common-sensical and ancient approaches to learning? Let's take one common and popular phrase and have a look at it. The phrase, "Learning by doing", it seems to me, is innovative only in the sense that it captures something we must have forgotten. There are many phrases like this: authentic learning; learning is social; learning is individual; learning starts with what we already know; learning how to learn; and so on. Each of these phrases points backward toward the past as an attempt to reclaim something we already knew, but forgot. If we were to collect all these phrases we would wind up with a very long list of notions about learning that may or may not have value in the sense of actually making use of them to build a better life.

In October of 2003, I wrote an entry entitled Learning How to Learn Learning in response to the confluence of adjectives that are designed to focus the word "learning" in specific ways. Often, the adjectives are used as a gateway to providing a method or process that can be used to move learning along a certain path. In addition, these adjectives are often a means to counter-balance a perceived weakness or bias in an exisiting, or status quo, approach to learning.

For example, take the phrase Learning by doing. I must admit that my response to this phrase is simply, "So what." Do we even need to say that learning has something to do with doing? And if we have a need to say it, then why? Perhaps academics and educators having spent to much time in theoretical abstraction find it useful to reclaim this domain of learning as their own. Often what they are really saying has little to do with learning, and far more to do with educating by doing and training by doing. It's an unfortunate sign of our times that ideas about learning are often closely, and incorrectly, associated with ideas about education and training.

The phrase learning by doing also leads us to questions about relevance and identity. Learning by doing what? And why should I, or anyone else, believe that this "doing" matters? It isn't hard to see that a lot of "doing" in the 20th century was not necessarily beneficial to humankind even though this "doing" was obviously deeply interconnected to learning, and less connected to education and training. At the same time, we can (and need to spend more time "doing" this) cull together the lessons from these mistakes as well as spend far more time capturing and communicating the postives in our world.

I really don't think we need more lists of learning is's, learning as's, learning by's, and learning whatevers. Nor do we really need more adjectives + learning = theories unless our interest in learning as abstraction. I've done my own share of this and the phrase has always been something far less than the thing I've tried to aim it at. The reason for this is that while I have thought about building the logical context of my own "learning whatevers" I have often not thought enough about the practical reality of them. This is one of the reasons I began to focus my work on building environments rather than methods and models quite a while ago. It was at this point in my career that I consciously decided to let go of my own assumptions about curriculum, instructional design and especially evaluation.

This shift required a broad understanding of narrative. Ideas about storytelling are useful, but "telling" isn't enough. John Seely Brown states:

Why storytelling? Well, the simplest answer to your question is that stories talk to the gut, while information talks to the mind. You can't talk a person through a change in religion or a change in a basic mental model... It doesn't seem to work if you just try to tell them what to think. They have to internalize it. They have to own it. So the question is: ... how do you get them to live the idea?

While I doubt John meant this as literally as I am about to interpret it, there are some important caveats to be made about the above quote. The notion of equating stories with something in the gut and information with something of the mind is incorrect and dangerously misleading. Information is not something exclusive to the mind, nor is a story something exclusive to the emotions. It's how to the work together that matters. The question, "How do you get them to live the idea?" is important. I would rephrase the question to, "How can people find ways of integrating power narratives into their own living?" since it leads us away from the "how to you get them orientation.

The problem to my thinking is that we start at the wrong point of entry. If stories and narratives are so powerful, and I believe they are, then shouldn't they literally be one critical point of entry into learning. Not discussions, ideas, theories and research about the power of storytelling, but the actual stories themselves. Isn't it somewhat odd that there are so many people talking about the power of storytelling, without ever telling a story?

This is an issue Lisa clearly picked up on in her entry and eloquently integrated her own story with a some connections outward to more theoretical approaches.

I’m having dinner with my new friend (his name is Piripi) on Thursday. He’s offered to make me a piece of tribal art and teach me a bit about Maori culture. So I’m inviting some English friends over and we’ll have Mexican food and listen to Piripi’s stories. I can’t wait. Lisa Galarneau

I'm hooked. During my visit to New Zealand a couple of months ago I had the great pleasure of viewing a Maori presentation. Unfortunately, that was the only experience I had with that culture - and I must admit I was horrified to find inane and ignorant comments being made in the audience about the "primitive" nature of the culture (yes - they were fellow North Americans). I can only assume that they failed to realize how primitive and lacking they were underneath the facade of modernity. They seemed to wrpped up in their own story to hear anyone else's.

One of the things we need to do is to ensure that we understand story as being subordinate to narrative. That is to say, we can tell stories without ever forming a narrative.

Have we known the best way all along? / Have we really just forgotten?

I'm unsure about what the best way is, but when I explore the lives of people like Erik Weihenmayer, Dan Eldon, Jean Vanier and many others I somehow sense that I am in the presence of "the best ways." Perhaps organizations like The Foundation For Better Living help us to reclaim aspects of life we have forgotten about or have become isolated from. I feel that I am being not only reminded about aspects of my own life through these stories, sometimes literally and other times figuratively, but also there is a sense of a call to action.

If am seeking narrative as a source for learning, then I must somehow be exploring and relating the context of other people's lives into my own, however these experiences are communicated to me. Finding experiential connections that form the basis for taking action to change, update, improve my own life and those around me is the critical and most illusive link. Of course, if I have these experiences inside a curriculum this becomes extremely difficult. The onslaught of information, schedules and assessment makes it next to impossible to simply have the time to pursue this regardless of how motivated I might be. Further complicating this is the fact that inside a curriculum I am subserviant to its demands and if I discover new insights and a relevancy emerges it is unlikely that I will have the freedom to do much about it concrete terms. The absence of narrative in learning creates a sense of isolation and separation in education largely because a curriculum does not really respect how we learn the things we value the most, but how we get educated in the things those that created it value the most. And shoving all the technology in the world, regardless of the hopes and aspirations we attach to it, into this system will not change it in any meaningful way.

The Foundation for a Better Life: Good News Section contains a wealth of personal and authentic stories unified by the ideal of promoting values that help people to live a better life. This would make an excellent "default mode" for the news media instead of what we are constantly bombarded with from day to day, and it is also an excellent way to gather and explore patterns in narratives that may help inform our own lives.

I was quite impressed by the "About" section, and since the FBL asks us to spread the word, I am happy to share their message here (hilites are mine):

The Foundation for a Better Life is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization started in 2000. The programs and projects of the Foundation are non-commercial and are solely humanitarian endeavors; the Foundation does not seek nor accept contributions or donations of any kind and is privately funded. The Foundation supports the belief that each individual is entitled to personal dignity and self-respect and that most individuals are willing, when given the opportunity, to take personal responsibility for their actions and well-being. The Foundation also believes that capable people may also benefit from encouragement and reminders from time to time. Generally people who have the opportunity and the ability will make appropriate common sense decisions which will have a positive and uplifting effect on themselves, their community, and their country.

The mission of The Foundation for a Better Life, through various media efforts, is to encourage adherence to a set of quality values through personal accountability and by raising the level of expectations of performance of all individuals regardless of religion or race. Through these efforts, the Foundation wants to remind individuals they are accountable and empowered with the ability to take responsibility for their lives and to promote a set of values that sees them through their failures and capitalizes on their successes. An individual who takes responsibility for his or her actions will take care of his or her family, job, community, and country.

The Foundation for a Better Life creates public service campaigns to communicate the values that make a difference in our communities-values such as honesty, caring, optimism, hard work, and helping others. These messages, communicated utilizing television, theatres, billboards, radio, internet, etc., model the benefits of a life lived by positive values. The Foundation encourages others to step up to a higher level and then to pass on those positive values they have learned. These seemingly small examples of individuals living values-based lives may not change the world, but collectively they will make a difference. And in the process help make the world a better place for everyone. After all, developing values and then passing them on to others is The Foundation for a Better Life.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Foundation for a Better Life does not sell posters of its billboards. Neither does the Foundation sell copies of its Public Service Announcements. You are welcome to print off personal copies of the billboards from our web site.

Schools may request posters of billboards in our current inventory by e-mailing the Foundation under the "Contact Us" heading. Please include a contact person, school name and address and why the posters are being requested. Each request will be considered separately.

The Foundation for a Better Life is not affiliated with any political groups or religious organizations.

We appreciate the wonderful support from the media.

If you are affiliated with a television station, theatre exhibitor or outdoor advertising company and are interested in receiving information about participating in The Foundation for a Better Life's public service campaign, please e-mail the Foundation using the "Contact Us" form. Include your name, company and contact information (including phone number).

Film Reflecting Life captures the essence of the approach taken at Platinum Image. The mission of the company is, "Platinum Image is committed to producing high quality, socially conscious film and digital video projects." The phrase socially conscious stands out in my mind and "Looking for Angelina" is a good example of what this means.

"Looking for Angelina" is a film that rescues the story of Angelina Napolitano, a mentally and physically abused woman who murdered her husband in Sault Ste. Marie during the early 1900's. Initially sentenced to death by hanging, her sentence was eventually commuted due to public outrage. International opinion clearly sided on mercy since Angelina had endured intense physical and mental abuse at the hands of her husband and her reaction was a matter of self-defence.

The rebirth of Angelina's narrative is clearly rekindling the social consciousness of Sault Ste. Marie and with plans to shoot the film directly on the site of where the actual murder happened the energy around the project will only help reconnect the community to a key part of its history. It will also serve to reclaim an important aspect of Italian immigrant history.

In the National Post article, Alessandra asks a key question, "I would just love to know if it [i.e. - Angelina's story] has been passed down to anyone in a clear fashion." This is a powerful question that centers on the importance of narrative and also connects to my own preferences for field work in learning versus book learning. The investigative model behind this project is an exemplar of the learning process with the film becoming the eventual product. In determining whether or not this project was viable, Sergio and Alessandra spent many hours conducting investigative research and intensive field work - a process that should be promoted, integrated and authentically experienced by all students at any age.

The environment for producing a film like "Looking for Angelina" has the qualities of a network learning environment. Field work and investigative research form the core strategy and, in this case, have resulted in the creation of connections across people, places and things - connections that are likely to grow over time. The essence of the project is focused on the ideal of film reflecting life in a socially conscious way. Too often, in my own experience, I have seen students at a wide variety of age levels almost exclusively focused on the final production elements of film production (especially digital imaging) without really having an underlying mission or ideal to inspire their work. This is what separates the true artist from the technophile. While students may acquire the technical capacity to produce film, they do not experience the essence of film production often enough, and as a result their core message is illusive or absent.

A key element is fostering a social consciousness is identity. And identity is expressed through narrative. We don't need theories and concepts of identity - we need authentic stories. I'm often shocked at how many people cannot answer the question, "Who are the ten most influential people (dead or alive) that inform who you are and the things that you do?" Abstract classifications of knowledge may help to illuminate certain aspects and offer greater depth to the narrative, but it is the integrity of the story that holds it all together into something that speaks to us with meaning, purpose and relevance. Jean Vanier's ideas and development of communities of belonging capture the most essential elements of narrative design.

Perhaps "Looking for Angelina" will inspire communities of belonging in Sault Ste. Marie as well as across the extended community of Italian immigrants. Perhaps it will also inspire those outside these cultures to gain a deeper sense of appreciation for how they are in fact connected to them. This kind of inspiration is an important source of energy in learning, as well as a fundamental approach to designing and developing a deeper sense of social consciousness that motivate communities of belonging. And perhaps, responsible and creative film-making such as undertaken by leading-edge movie companies like Platinum Image will help provide much needed relief from the vacuous reels of plastic-fantastic film-making that we are all too familiar with.

---

Update: August 2004

In a recent discussion with Sergio and Alessandra of Platinum Image I learned more about their ideas as well as the film-making process involved in the upcoming release of Looking For Angelina. I introduced the project in a previous entry, and now that the movie has gone to post-production it seems like a timely opportunity to update the progress being made.

After sitting with Sergio and Alessandra one evening and viewing the numerous photos they have of the film in process, one of the things that struck me the most was the sense of community that must have developed on site...

The production of Looking For Angelina has a organic feel to it that I sense has created a new sense of community in Sault Ste. Marie. Many of the supporting cast were volunteers and through the course of the filming some learned that they had a closer family lineage to the story than they realized. The community also rallied around the creation of production facilities, wardrobe and props.

The motto of Platinum Image is "Film Reflecting Life" and their design emphasis is to produce "socially conscious" film of high quality. Of course, in an age bombarded by reality television, or television that pretends that it is in some way real, many of us remain skeptical if not cynical about such claims. But in the production of Looking For Angelina we see something quite different in that the social consciousness of the community in which it was filmed is an essential building block of what will appear directly on screen. People not only discovered a story that lay shrouded within their own local culture, but also became more aware of their own proximity to it. This, in one sense, makes a contribution to their own individual and collective identity.

Looking For Angelina is supported by a website that is in the emergent stages of design, and it is my hope that part of the design consideration for this website is to capture and communicate the film-making process itself, as well as to share some of the personal discoveries made within the local community. It seems to me that the filming has generated a new kind of dialogue within Sault Ste. Marie, and it would be very interesting to try and capture some of that dynamic. This was precisely one of the reasons for leveraging processes like Connected Intelligence to help promote community and economic development. To achieve this online as effectively as possible, the design strategy for the Looking for Angelina website will need to focus on patterns of (potential) communication at least as much as web copy and graphics.

One of the comments that Sergio made to me, and I agree completely, is that education tends to make things too abstract. Graduates from film-making institutions are often well-armed with theoretical principles yet lack enough authentic experience in the art of film-making. And there is a wide gap between understanding theory and being an artist. Perhaps Looking For Angelina might offer a valuable learning resource from this perspective. From a local perspective, Sault Ste. Marie has a great deal of potential value to leverage in terms of community development.

Using the City of Sault Ste. Marie website, I conducted a search on Looking for Angelina and at this early stage found no content. Hopefully some will emerge in the fulness of time and since the film has yet to be released this is quite understandable. I also noticed that the city of Sault Ste. Marie also has a Business Innovation Centre that could play an important role to play that would nicely dovetail with their mandate:

"By developing innovative partnerships with industry, government, and other public organizations, the Sault Ste. Marie Innovation Centre is a "catalyst for change". We promote and assist in the development knowledge based industries in the Algoma District as a means to diversify the economy of the region and build a strong, stable economic base."

If I was developing a business strategy for leveraging the value of Looking For Angelina in Sault Ste. Marie, this organization would be a natural starting point.

The film is expected to be released in the fall of this year, and if all things go well, will be presented at the Cannes Film Festival next year.

Learning: Understanding The Acquired Content

The act of understanding another language is not limited to translation. Words carry a collective meaning that is specific to a cultural context in which they are used. Further, there is a wide range of cultural gestures that are not universal, but instead are unique to a given cultural setting. One of the greatest problems in developing more effective approaches to learning is cultural blindness:

The fact is, however, that once people have learned to learn in a given way it is extremely hard for them to learn in any other way.
- The Silent Language

Hall suggests that we need to understand that our beliefs about life and ourselves in general are not universal:

What is most difficult to accept is the fact that our own cultural patterns are literally unique, and therefore they are not universal. It is this difficulty that human beings have in getting outside their own cultural skins that motivated me to commit my observations and conceptual models to writing.
- The Silent Language

This advice is similar in kind to McLuhan's suggestion that we need to learn to stand outside the effects of a medium in order to understand its influence (see: Probe: Learning Environments - The Medium Is The Message). Both authors focus learning on developing powers of discernment that allow us to become more aware of the environments we find ourselves in.

Education: Assimilation Into A Single Acquired Context

Hall made a number of critical remarks about education as a form of ethno-centrism:

• Learning, then, is one of the basic activities of life, and educators might have a better grasp of their art if they would take a leaf out of the book of early pioneers in descriptive linguistics and learn about their subject by studying the acquired context in which other people learn.

• The fact that so many of our children dislike school or finish their schooling uneducated suggests that we still have much to learn about learning as a process.

• The adult mentor molds the young according to patterns she or he has never questioned.

• Much of the difficulty in our schools today stems from the fact that teachers try to inculcate and teach patterns that are partially or incorrectly analyzed... In fact, much of what the child hears goes against everything he/she has learned outside the classroom.
  - The Silent Language

The importance of understanding the "acquired context" acquired context for learning is fundamental in learning to understand how people in different cultures create and communicate meaning. Western systems of education represent a specific kind of acquired context. In McLuhan's terms the idea of an acquired context is similar to his description of a medium. In spite of the presence of content that may be culturally diverse, it is all communicated through the context of our own culture.

What Does The Silent Language Mean For Learning?

If this book has a message it is that we must learn to understand the "out-of-awareness" aspects of communication. We must never assume that we are fully aware of what we communicate to someone else.
- The Silent Language

Learning, from this perspective, is full of wonder, mystery and diversity. Each culture, then, is a kind of learning ecology that has its own character and personality that distinguishes it from other cultures. Through learning people develop beliefs about time, space, identity, and life in general. One cultural set of beliefs about time, space, identity and life are often different from another.

In chapter three "The Vocabulary of Culture" Hall suggests that people operate on three different levels - formal, informal, and technical. These are key concepts in his vocabulary of culture. He suggests three kinds of learning: 1) Formal Learning; 2) Informal Learning; and 3) Technical Learning.

• Formal Learning is an imposed form of learning by adults on youth. The main idea of formal learning is to instill sets of beliefs in youth that are not questioned or challenged. Hall states that, "Formal patterns are almost always learned when a mistake is made and someone corrects it."

• Informal Learning proceeds from the use of a model to encourage imitation. The reasons for behavior encouraged are often invisible, that is, the rules are not visible until one is broken. "Whole clusters of related activities are learned at a time, in many cases without the knowledge that they are being learned at all or that there are patterns or rules governing them." In a sense, informal learning is a form of conditioning.

• Technical Learning is closely aligned with training. It represents more of a one-way transmission of an expert's knowledge to a student in verbal and/or written form.

The Culture of Learning | The Learning of Culture

It seems obvious to say that people in different cultures learn in different ways yet the significance of this remains understated. A person in one culture will not perceive, apprehend, comprehend, discern, understand, or construct meaning in the same way as a person from another culture. The difficulty in learning about this in any significant ways lies in the difficulty in providing people with immersive experiences in other cultures so that they can experience the "acquired context" first-hand. Attempting to teach students about another culture from a classroom, it seems to me, is not only a difficult but also a potentially misleading thing to do.

It's [MMOGames] not replacing literacy practices; it IS a literacy practice. Terra Nova [via Lisa Galarneau].

She then goes on to add the following insights: "So, the question isn't 'Are kids literate?' or 'Are (MMO)Games displacing print media?' but rather 'How are kids literate?' and 'How do (MMO)Gamers engage in print media?"

If we assume literacy to be nothing more than, "the ability to read and write" [World Book] then we find ourselves pursuing a very limited path. The ability to read and write in order to do what? If the answer to this question is, "We learn to read and write in order to become proficient in reading and writing" then we spin ourselves around in circles. At the same time, we should acknowledge that the word literacy does refer us to "letter" and is something visual.

Is we apply this definition to the "back to the basics" notion in education then we have to ask a "basic" question: "If students on average attend school for five hours per day, 180 days per year for 12 years, is 10,800 hours to teach people how to read and write?" This amounts to 1,350 eight-hour days. If schools cannot accomplish the task of making people "literate" (in the sense of the ability to read and write) in 10,800 hours then we need to ask, "Is the teaching of literacy so difficult that it requires more than 10,800 hours of instructional time [ask parents about the intrusion of homework into family life and we soon realize there is significantly more time than this], or is something seriously amiss?"

There have also been many attempts to extend the idea of literacy to various contexts, for example, oral literacy, aural literacy, visual literacy, tactile literacy, media literacy and so on. It may be that the word literacy is problematic since its roots refer us back to visual-letter literate, or we can choose to expand the meaning by moving it into other realms - by adding adjectives to it and then providing new definitions/perspectives.

It's safe to say that the dynamics of online text is different than paper-based literacy. Therefore the quality and character of literacy in one media environment is different from another, even though they share text-based communication that places demands on our ability to read and write. The online character of literacy is embedded in a medium that is more dynamic and interactive. This doesn't make it better or worse, just different. There's a place for both. This is precisely why exploring MMOGames is a valuable place to explore a literacy practice. This latter approach, for me, is preferable and supports Constance's insight, "it is a literacy practice - the key word being "a" which invites us to explore the diversity of ways in which people can be literate.

But MMOGames, and traditional approaches to literacy, must also address the questions Literacy in order to do what? and Is literacy and end unto itself or should it be aimed at something more comprehensive?

Traditionalists might possess a fear of this, but their fears are unfounded. I saw mention of the "five-paragraph essay" in one of the comments and it brought back memories of my son trying to fit all his thoughts and ideas into the five paragraphs demanded by the school system. Agreed - it's a model and there is something to be learned in terms of structure, but it is not a norm, a standard or a tool for evaluation. A few hours per year on it would be enough. I wonder what real authors might think of this practice?

A more aggressive (and risky) approach to expanding our ideas of literacy places it into other realms - for example, visual literacy. If we define literacy literally then the visual aspect must refer to seeing letters. Of course, the idea is aimed more closely at the interpretation (the "reading" and "writing" of) visual images and pictures. I have tended to move more toward ideas about intelligence (a controversial term I know, but I defer to Howard Gardner's ideas about "multiple intelligences") rather than literacy in trying to understand these other media environments.

"In a world-first, researchers from McGill University’s Department of Psychology have developed and tested computer games that can actually help people enhance their self-acceptance. Read on for brief facts concerning the studies that will be published in Psychological Science and the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology."

I know very little about game theory or the psychology of gaming. At the same time, I have played many games in my life: Go Fish!, Monopoly, Risk, Chess, Checkers, Cribbage, Euchre, Solitare, The Game of Life, Trivial Pursuit, Sorry, Mastermind, Battleship, Blackjack, Scrabble, Lawn Darts, Horseshoes, Tennis, Badminton, Football, Baseball, Basketball, Golf and so on. I've also played other kinds of games like hide the teacher's lesson plan, knock on the door and run - hide - and watch, set the paper bag of the bad stuff on fire at the doorstep - ring the doorbell on Halloween - and watch 'em stomp, play the music just a little too fast for the dancers, improvise unexpected modulations for the vocalist, and others that I won't further embarass myself by mentioning.

I guess a simplistic way of understanding games would be to say that they are a coordinated set of strategies designed to attain a goal that are carried out within the confines of a set of rules. Or a game might be a way of playing - amusement, a pastime, a diversion, and possibly a kind of prank. On the digital scene, it's quite clear the game systems and online games are an extremely propserous market. I sometimes see young people playing football, not outside with other people, but as a solitary activity with a machine. Seems like an odd thing to do, but far less bizzare than the relentless scenes of digital madness that are popular.

If there is a transferrable connection between game design and the development of self-esteem, then I'm all for it. Many of the games today seem immersed in violence and gore while designers simultaneously deny any ill effects on those that use them. It's reasonable to assume that if a game can help improve self-esteem and self-acceptance then another game must also have the potential to instill other qualities like violence and malevolence. It is just as reasonable to assume that games designed to have postive effects may not.

David Cronenberg once said that an artist is a person who puts ideas out into the world and they often come back to him/her in ways they never could have imagined. This is good advice to keep in mind, and has a close resemblance to Marshall McLuhan's warning that, "The Medium is the Message/Massage." Like curriculum, a game (digital or not) can be viewed as a form of technology.

Playing Grow Your Chi, EyeSpy: The Matrix, Wham! Self-Esteem Conditioning, essentially involved me in clicking on images of faces that were postive while not clicking on images of faces that were negative. Try Wham! and at the end you will read:

"Good Work! You just created associations between yourself and acceptance. Our research indicates that this increases self-esteem."

Essentially what happens is every time you click on your name or birthday (this was entered in to game before play began) you received facial expressions that were positive, while other names and dates were negative (or something less than positive) facial expressions. One of the problems I had was that I didn't put my real name or birthday in so I think I built someone else's self esteem - or was it the avatar of self-esteem?

Kidding around aside, the idea of building a game that is designed to promote positive self-esteem is an area we are sorely lacking in. We are so immersed in negative images from game systems, news media and the entertainment industry that we have numbed ourself to the reality they portray. It's not that we don't understand this or haven't studied it enough, we just seem to be unable to collectively change it. Why? Actually, I don't think analyzing the reasons why we haven't changed our obsession with violence matters, we know that we need to change and that's enough.

The real challenge for a game that is designed to promote positive self-esteem, or anything positive for that matter, is transference - how can (if it can) what is "learned" in the game system survive in our everday experiences? It sounds to me like a designed to promote self-esteem certainly can't hurt and is refreshing break from the boring leagues of inane game designers out there, but how far can flashing images on a computer screen really go? Is the web becoming a big Flash? By using only positive reinforcement are we tacitly implying that we should merely avoid the negative things in life?

Since the research has not yet been released, it is too soon to say whether or not the idea of Self-esteem Games can transfer into everyday experiences in a sustainable way. The games available online are, of course, meant to be examples of a more complete version, not the entire product.

Life is not a game or a simulation and is far more complex and unpredictable than rolling a pair of dice or habitually pointing and clicking on a game controller. There is a lot more to self-esteem than psychology and gaming. On the other hand, there are rule-like elements embedded inside the thing we call culture. It seems reasonable to assume that there might be some correlation between the experiences we have while playing games and the things we do in our lives. If this is the case, we might not only have the introduction of games that are beneficial, but we may also be able to put a mountain of responsibility and accountability on the violence mongers that design games as well.

The benefits of game applications remain, for me, illusive. I tend to agree with Lisa Galarneau :

Laurel waxed pessimistic about educational games. "I have never seen a good educational game," she said, "It's crap for 30 years." Public education does not teach young people to meaningfully exercise personal agency, to think critically, to use their voices, to engage in discourse, or to be good citizens. We don't need computer games in the schools, said Laurel, we need "affordances for young people to exercise meaningful personal agency." We need to engage in a kind of discourse and critique that can be make them creative, culture makers, and future citizens.

My personal experience places me in agreement. Back in the early 1990's the school I worked in had every educational computer game going - too many. Our teachers used and tested all of them (computer literacy games, math games, history games, etc., etc.) - although some mildly interesting things occurred, none proved durable and the educational value, in our experience, was at best questionable in spite of the claims made by the companies producing them. The games were retired to The Museum of Expensive but Unnecessary Resources and our teachers quickly returned to better practices. Safe to say games have developed since then have changed, but games in general tend to lack durability and sustainability. They also tend to be closed systems based on pre-determined algorithms and rules - they just don't transfer well into real life. Why not start with real life?

I have also helped students with self-esteem and self-acceptance issues that were beyond what we might think of as "low." It would never have occurred to me, nor does it now, to use a game as a means to provide help.

Further, games do not promote Brenda Laurel's important notion of personal agency. A game, by its very nature, is an impersonal agent - it has no intelligence. It's not too much of a stretch to find parallels between a game design and curriculum design - both impose a pre-determined set of rules and function as impersonal agents on the people using them. A game can be a curriculum in sheep's clothing and a curriculum can be a game in sheep's clothing. Relevant and motivating learning environments can be provided in the complete absence of games.

This is perhaps one of the greatest challenges faced by real teachers (I say "real" for anyone that hasn't actually been on the front lines with a variety of age groups cannot fully appreciate this), and that is how to broker a relevant and meaningful relationship between two opposed forces - a centralized demand from an impersonal agency and the natural human demand for personal agency.

Now I'll contradict myself. Perhaps the answer is to play a game on the impersonal agencies themselves. Although a Network Learning Environment has nothing to do with a game, it has been demonstrated that they can have a powerful effect on reducing and eliminating impersonal approaches to learning. The problem is, once they start challeging exisiting positions of authority, another kind of game can occur.

"We are so beyond needing to train people for subservience. The world is crying out for functional, thinking adults who can solve problems, think critically, take initiative and live their lives with a philosophy of personal responsibility. Telling them that teachers know everything and they know nothing is not the way to accomplish this." [Lisa Galarneau]

In my own experience as a teacher and administrator, it seemed that the basic question being asked about relevancy was something along the lines of this, "How can we [the educators] make our content [the curriculum] more relevant [acceptable] for the students [receivers]?" This question was often tacitly implied in instructional design, a process that is sometimes not too distant from sales and marketing. In other words, one important purpose of a learning activity was to manufacture relevance.

My experiences in the corporate world reveal little difference to the school setting. The source of design for learning in a corporate environment originates in the curriculum of profitability. Out of necessity, training programs and instructional design methodologies originate from this underlying ground. The employee is quite similar to a student in this respect - they can question the relevance of what they are "learning" to a point, then the rest goes to the water cooler. The most insightful and thoughtful line of thinking developed along these lines I have read remains Edward Hall's The Silent Language.]

If something is relevant to me then it is something that I selfishly feel is important in my life. Not selfish as in "I want, I want..." but selfish as in preserving my own identity. Being selfish is not always a negative thing. In Relevancy as Sanctuary Lisa refers to a wonderful article in the Christian Science Monitor called E-serenity, Now! The article states:

"The information age, it seems, is data-contaminated. And it's not just the volume of information that's worrisome; it's the lack of context in which it's delivered.

At least that is the argument of a new and growing group of people some call "information environmentalists." Their aim: to reclaim quiet mental space from the chirping persistence of cellphones, personal digital assistants, instant messaging, niche cable channels, and a virtual landscape littered with news, entertainment, and sales pitches."

Relevance must have some connection to this need for a "quiet mental space." It may be that the care of our own quiet mental space is essential to the development of more relevant ways of adapting to the needs and wants of people we interact with. As with many things in life, it is a question of finding personal equilibrium.

The Health Supplement Battle

A quick overview of the battle can be attained by visiting: a) The Health Sciences Institute (U.S.A.); b) The Alliance For Natural Health (U.K.); c) Holistic Health Topics (Australia); and an interesting new initiative d) myHealth: The New Zealand Natural Health Products Register.

The regulators' strategy is to ban the distribution of non-approved natural health products to the public. A simple method to do this is to reclassify health supplements as "medicine" and place them in the same category as pharmaceuticals. In a classic hand-shaking between government and corporatism, those products that are approved would then be distributed through approved vendors. The outcry from the natural/alternative health sector is strong, and for good reason.

On the side of regulation, it is prudent to place a high degree of scientific rigour on natural health supplements. USANA is a company that does precisely this by guaranteeing the potency of their products on every label and complying with pharmaceutical-grade Good Manufacturing Processes (GMP) - meaning that government health regulators conduct regular inspections of USANA's manufacturing facilities. Currently in the United States, vitamin manufacturers are only required to adhere to the same standards as food manufacturers - a practice which is not effective nor beneficial to the consumer. USANA was founded by a the scientist-pioneer Dr. Myron Wentz (Ph.D. Immunology and Microbiology) who after numerous years studying the implications of disease at the cellular level refocused his life's work on preventative nutrition.

Health supplement companies that do not use the highest possible standard in the scientific design and production of their products should be viewed with uncertainty, and from this perspective I have no issues with government health regulators enforcing a minimum, and high, standard. Many of us are already aware that the wide variety of vitamins and natural supplements available over-the-counter lack this kind of quality.

At the same time, for health regulators to simply impose a ban on health supplements and alternative approaches to medicine as some kind of "solution" is not only grossly autocratic and irresponsible, it is culturally and scientifically ignorant. To assume that pharmaceuticals are "safe" and that they have the benefits they say they have is a misnomer. To take the scientific and creative energy out of a growing multi-cultural approach to health and wellness is degenerative. To assume that people cannot make effective decisions about their own health and the products they choose to use is offensive. To assume that government regulators and corporations are the best and primary source for making decisions about natural supplement and alternative health practices is fundamentally wrong. To assume that the public isn't suspicious of the backroom dealings between government and corporations to control markets is vacuous.

Weblog Activism
Many weblogs (as well as websites and newsletters) are forming a loosely connected network of activism. Joseph Hasslberger, for example, has built a wealth of information and news related items up about health with the important idea of, "Networking For A Better Future - News and perspectives you may not find in the media." His weblog is one that I have in my RSS list of things to read.

This kind of grassroots journalism is important for a variety of reasons. Journalism is an act of gathering, editing and writing news for the media. The key issue is what to write and why. If in a weblog we write in order to report we essentially mirror traditional practices in media using new tools. What is far more important is to write in order to express something - a personal idea, a personal thought, a personal insight, etc., and make that a contribution to the Weblog of weblogs. My concern is that reporting rather than insight will predominate - for example, the extensive copying and pasting of material from other websites with a much smaller proportion of personal input.

There's nothing wrong with quoting when the quote fits into the flow of an idea we are trying to write about, but to weblog an entry that is of the"look what I found - I've copied it here - you can go read it again there" amounts to a duplication of information. If this practice of duplicating content becomes a prominent way of "reporting" then the Big Weblog will be full of redundancies and lacking in personal insight.

Writing a personal insight is of course a risky business - it puts us out there on the edge. In the fullness of time we might find out that what we have said was mis-guided, or we might find that it provided a seed for further growth. And anything in between can happen. What I hope is that The Big Weblog In The Sky will have a clear emphasis on people's life experiences - speaking in a voice that is their own about issues they are passionate about as a starting point then building in information and news, rather than using news feeds and other sources of information as the starting point and sometimes, if ever, getting into personal thoughts, ideas and insights.

Taking my own cue from a range of other insightful people, one of the ideas I have pursued in my own work is that the creation, evolution and preservation of individual and collective narratives forms the underlying ground for learning - and idea that is not at all opposed to, but quite different from, learning being the mastery of knowledge, skills and attitudes (i.e. expertise). The stories of our individual and collective life experiences are the key to shaping our identity (who we think we are, why we think we got this way, how we think we got this way, etc.), and provide cohesion in our quest for knowledge. Without an ecology of identity, we all become anonymous living in the midst of massive power structures (economic, political, social, religious, educational, etc.) that drive our lives. Having knowledge in this environment, and believing that is some kind of path to power is a delusion. Knowledge isn't power. Without narrative, we lose our way in life.

Taking Zenji's cue, I went and had a look at John Papworth's Peace Through Social Empowerment - a title that is difficult to merely pass by. In the section Primary Causes I read:

It is simply this; that our primary problem is not war, or the environment, or population pressures, nor the squandering of the planet's finite resources, nor the alienation from life of many millions of people; THE PRIMARY PROBLEM IS THAT OF SIZE, size developed on such a scale as to disempower people and which makes their moral judgements irrelevant to the passage of events.

What I like about Papworth's line of inquiry is that he seeks the underlying ground of multiple problems by looking at the source, rather than the symptoms of a world ravaged by naive designers. This is an important and difficult direction to pursue, but is one that designers should be paying much more attention to. A great deal of our lives are caught up in reacting to symptoms of living rather than underlying causes. The essential link in Papworth's statement is that size disempowers people.

Oddly enough, a couple of days I was walking around a pond in a grassy area thinking about network marketing (ok - I know that's weird, give me a minute). If each blade of grass was a website or weblog, how would any single blade of grass gain attention? Grow taller? Try to change colour? Try to destroy the others around it? I don't want to start pushing this metaphor since it was just a passing fancy, but I am thankful that grass isn't competitive otherwise things would definitely get weird. Blades of grass aren't storytellers by design. We are.

How might size disempower people? It can cause psychological isolation - the feeling of being completely alone while immersed in a sea of people. It can create symptoms of anonymity - the loss of identity while immersed in a sea of activity. It can breed a sense of learned helplessness - simply giving up in the face of what appears to be insurmountable odds. It can create a sense of imprisonment - the feeling of being trapped in a society whose power structures and systems of authority are too big and amorphous to do anything about. It can breed obsession with Internet communication - the intense output of personal thoughts and ideas that represent a struggle to gain attention in vast oceans of thoughts and ideas. It can also inspire brilliant novels like Ken Harvery's The Town That Forgot How To Breathe

In general, it may be possible that size disempowers people by causing them to lose their own personal narrative (if indeed we ever had the good fortune to have one in the first place). Size confounds our sense of awareness, our sense of time, our sense of place and our sense of priorities in life. I think of the growing population of weblogs. These are an interesting vehicle of communication, but if we simply imagine that half of the population in the world started weblogging it isn't hard to see, RSS or not, that we'll all soon be swimming in a sea of weblogging. The sheer size of the collective website/weblogging communities may become a source of collective disempowerment - the opposite of how they are currently positioned. Even more unusual is the tendency for every site to become some kind of niche expertise as a means to build credibilty and identity, a process that will ultimately only lead to a greater sense of collective fragmentation.

Without a sense of the small and manageable in our networks, we become lost in a sea of bits and bytes. Without a keen sense of the local (all the stuff outside of the computer screen!) in our networks, we all become digital avatars. Without an ability to realign patterns in communication and expertise, we say new things along old lines.

Papworth goes on the say:

If we ignore that and simply focus our energies on particular abuses then, however commendable our objectives and our efforts, we are dealing with the effects of the abuses of power and ignoring their causes. It was Einstein who remarked 'You cannot solve a problem with the mindframe that has created it'. In saying as much he was pointing to the core of our problem; a 19th century mindframe which accepts, without question or challenge, giant centralised states and economic entrepreneurship global in its scope, which together have created a doomsday scenario for the human race...

We are not going to solve the problems of the 21st century with the mind-frame of the 19th. Social empowerment, involving the deliberate creation of an organic, multi-cellular structure and process of our political and economic institutions, is today the only realistic path to enduring peace and to any genuine social progress.

"The deliberate creation of an organic, multi-cellular structure and process..." is an important idea. Yet many of have been conditioned by and immersed in the effects of size. Perhaps what we are saying is that we need to build a new relationship with size, not make it go away (which, of course, we can't). Network learning environments, in my experience with them, have offered some very interesting possibilities along those lines. We do not need to think of global and local as opposite ideas, but perhaps the narratives embedded within them would benefit from Papworth's ideas about social empowerment.

By chance, I came across an article called Toward a Philosophy of m-Learning(2002) which travels across an interesting line of connections across John Dewey, Marshall McLuhan, Seymour Papert, Neil Postman and others.

It's pretty safe to say that if a new technology offers different patterns of communication, then an individual or institution adopting these technologies will experience various degrees of change in their former patterns of communication depending upon their reaction to them. Give every student a cell phone, allow them to use it whenever they want, and new patterns of communication will occur that leverage voice, text and images. Many institutions have already followed this path with laptop technology.

McLuhan, to my thinking, was right when he said, "Today[1960] … most learning occurs outside the classroom. The sheer quantity of information conveyed by press-magazines-film-TV-radio far exceeds the quantity of information conveyed by school instruction and texts. This challenge has destroyed the monopoly of the book as a teaching aid and cracked the very walls of the classroom so suddenly that we're confused, baffled." It's still surprising to see this idea reappearing in different guises today as if it were new, and undoubedtly someone said something similar well before McLuhan. While we may now be talking about a new kind of idea (i.e. - m-Learning), what we are pointing it at is not new.

This confusion that McLuhan refers to is not a negative thing, nor does it mean to imply, I believe, that the traditional institutions that comprise education are somehow endangered, or that the schools will "disappear." Confusion in learning is a healthy and normal part of the process. Nor is it an indication that most learning has to occur outside of the classroom, unless we limit our understanding of a classroom to a physical place within a school.

Ideas about mobility may change our orientation and strategies for using schools, but to say there is no need or remaining relevance for them is misguided. This line of thinking leads us down an "either-or" style of thought in which the traditional is deemed irrelevant and the new is deemed visionary. Simply valuing mobility in learning as an end unto itself misses the point. While it seems obvious that we need to change (eliminate outdated practices, modify exisiting ones, and integrate new ones), it is not as obvious nor as convincing to say as Papert did that "school will disappear."

What mobility should do is invite us to reconsider how we re-orient ourselves with our existing institutions. Perhaps the physical location we call a school becomes a place for knowledge innovation hub(s) or cultural development hub(s), rather than a distribution hub for information. Mobility may also recalibrate our orientation to time and lead to ideas about flexible scheduling, rather than rigid automation. It's as much about transportation as it is communication.

Unfortunately, Neil Postman is often a fashionable target for contradiction. Of course, we don't need to agree with everything a person says, but it would be nice to see this trendy line of thought fade away. For example, "In a recent book Mitchell Stephens, taking issue with Postman, plausibly shows that the moving image in fact ushers in a new age of enlightenment, and answers in the affirmative the question: "Can we entrust video with the education of our young?"

Mobility, in the end, should be focused on the practical life values that can be encouraged through it in an attempt to make notions about new communication patterns in m-Learning and m-"?" less abstract. Toward a Philosophy of m-Learning captures this ideas in the conclusion:

Questions arising in the course of mobile communication seek location-specific and situation-specific answers: the questions create a context, and thus the answers can give rise to knowledge. Now in order to build databases furnishing answers to m-learning questions content providers will have to observe two basic requirements. First, the contents have to be designed not according to pre-existing disciplinary matrices but rather in relation to practical problems. To start from "gravitation" is wrong, to single out "high tide" is right. Second, contents will have to fit the conditions of person-to-person communication. The model to keep in mind is the downloading-something-in-order-to-forward-it-to-someone pattern - as opposed to the I-want-to-know-something-so-let-me-check-the-database pattern.

The idea of starting with personally relevant, practical problems as a basis for learning is far from new. The notion of a school as a place to download a database into the minds of students is well known. But if a "philosophy" of m-Learning has any critical value, perhaps it can provide an exploratory context for integrating meaningful institutional change that makes life values and social issues an important source of design. As with many of its predecessors, m-Learning will face the same bureaucracy and power structures that many past ideas have failed to impact in any significant way.

"Rather than using technology to imitate or supplement conventional classroom-based approaches, exploiting the full potential of next-generation technologies is likely to require fundamental, rather than incremental reforms," Phillip Bond, Commerce undersecretary for technology, said in a speech yesterday at the Enhancing Education Through Technology Symposium in Pasadena, Calif.

"Content, teaching, assessment, student-teacher relationships and even the concept of an education and training institution may all need to be rethought," he continued, adding technology's beneficial effects on learning could change U.S. competitiveness and standard of living."

"Fundamental, rather than incremental reforms"
During his presentation we assume that Mr. Bond went into detail about what precisely this idea of "fundamental, rather than incremental reforms," and provided some examples of how "the concept of and education and training institutions may all need to be rethought," as well as how technology has a beneficial effect on learning. Unfortunately the article doesn't provide these insights, but it is still interesting to explore these statements on their own.

There is an assumption that "education" has been slow to adapt and that nothing innovative has ever taken place inside its domain. This kind of thinking is a mistake. There have been and will continue to be a tremendous number of innovative projects in education that have had the potential to encourage fundamental change. There have been and will continue to be a tremendous number of courageous and creative educators that go against the status quo to find new potential for others. There have been and will continue to be many inspiring students who have reached well beyond the confines of their own education to seek more.

There is also an assumption that the generalization we call "business" has somehow been more "innovative" with respect to the adoption of new technologies, and this in some vague manner makes them more pioneering. Perhaps to some degree, but we have also seen a plague of inane e-Learning systems, floods of email that make the paperless office comical, an inability to develop knowledge about knowledge management, co-opting of the Internet to a large degree, and more.

The notion that "education" has not been involved in innovation is incorrect and misleading. The notion that "business" is a kind of best practice model that education should aspire toward is incorrect and misleading.

Let's return to that word "fundamental" for a moment. Fundamental, rather than incremental reform. The fundamentals of education are curriculum, instructional design, and evaluation. It can be argued that this trio comprises a kind of underlying technology in itself, but we'll leave that aside. Around these fundamentals is an extensive bureaucracy that serves as the agent of administration. New digital technology is not a "fundamental" of education, just as a pen, pencil, crayon or notebook are not fundamentals of education. To speak about changing the fundamentals of education and immediately segueing into vague notions of technological innovation misses the point.

It may be that the kinds of patterns we see in our new technologies, for example networked technologies, provide a metaphor for how curriculum, instruction and evaluation may be influenced and perhaps evolved. But they do not cause fundamental change by virtue of their presence. Innovation in education has not been stifled by a lack of creative teachers, motivated students or the lack of awareness of new technologies - but all this potential for innovation that has been with us for a very long time has been dramtically squandered by lethargic bureaucracies that are far too comfortable and self-serving to be bothered with any meaningful change.

"The concept of an education and training institution may all need to be rethought..."
They have been rethought - many times over, by many different people. I doubt we need to "think" more about it. We need to "do." Education has a long history of creating brilliant insights and opportunities that are marginalized by inept forms of administration, governmental policies, poor leadership, and self-serving bureaucrats. The problem is not a lack of new concepts and ideas, the problem is a systemic lack of will to live out an initiative that fundamentally alters the system.

For example, if we are to "fundamentally" alter the curriculum we need to first know what the exisiting curriculum is built on. In my experience, curriculum is typically a collection of information about: a) knowledge; b) skills; and c) attitudes. This is the source of design. A fundamental change would work at the level of these three assumptions - not above them, not something added to them. In other words, we would be fundamentally altering the structure of curriculum, and therefore the source of design for education.

We might, to take the argument further, challenge the antiquated notion that knowledge is best organized by areas of expertise (or subject disciplines) and seek to replace the usual gaggle of subjects with something new. Or we might question that knowledge should even be a key organizer and replace it with another idea, for example, interaction. We could then proceed to develop a broad approach to interaction in education that oriented us toward a new source of design. The Connected Intelligence Network Learning Projects in Maderia Portugal were based on a challenge to traditional curriculum that included interaction design as a core curriculum component. Schools were viewed as centres for knowledge development rather than knowledge dissemination. In addition, we might even challenge the idea that a "curriculum" is something that can be effectively communicated on paper through static text. Perhaps curriculum is a dynamic interactive force that is in constant flow.

If the concept of education and training require even more rethinking, then this will need to occur outside of the bureaucracy. The current hierarchical structure of education is too over-weight, hierarchical, and centered on education as mass communication to be of any help to itself. This rethinking will also have to be given the will to survive in an administrative morass that will seek to marginalize it and contain it within something called "a project." Calling something a project is an excellent way to isolate it and prevent it from taking hold. It's the bureaucracy that needs to be given project status, a project focused on phasing it out.

Some useful metaphors to explore are oriented toward ideas about networks, connectedness, relationships, interaction design and mobility. The problem is that the bureaucracy responsible for managing education has very little in common this new potential. It may be that the new potential is a serious threat to existing centres of influence, auhtority, power and money. And the threat is quite real - the bureaucracy simply isn't required anymore. It isn't the technology that is the cause of this, but people using the potential of technology to connect, interact, build relationships and develop greater mobility is. This empowers them in a way that traditional curricula cannot. This in turn renders the exisiting forms of administration both ineffective and inefficient.

"Technology's beneficial effects on learning could change U.S. competitiveness and standard of living..."
Statements like these seem to occur frequently and just as frequently stop short of explaining themselves. The notion of "technology's beneficial effects on learning" are frequently left hanging out in the air as if we are all supposed to know what they are. We also know that technology can have negative effects as well. This is an issue that has inspired an overly long-winded debate on good versus bad in technology.

In addition, there is a need to focus on issues in education that are outside the realm of technology, such as the dramatic increase in school violence, the severe marginalization and abuse of those bullied by their peers, the rise in the high school dropout rate, the growing prevalence of youth depression, the belief that twelve years or so of education is a requirement and right of passage to gainful employment, the obsession with standardized forms of evaluation, and so on. Perhaps leveraging new technologies can afford opportunities for finding better ways to communicate these problems from all parties concerned, but this is unlikely to happen by focusing on vague notions technological innovation as a means to improve the standard of living.

This kind of marketing strategy is based on ignorance, selfish opportunism, greed, and want. At its core, it's insulting. If there was a collective wall of marketing shame, this would need to be in the top ten. It is a practice that reveals a brand stupidity, a brand insensitivity, a brand insensibility. Brenda recognizes this clearly, "They never wanted to know me before, and now all of a sudden they want to be my best friend." It amazes me to realize that there are some sad marketers out there that scan the obituaries on a daily basis for sales opportunities. What do they expect their reception to be? It's hard to see how this practice is any different from spam.

In behind all of this is, of course, an industry that pays on performance. For the most part, an investment advisor earns a living based on commission, and in some cases 100% commission. If a base salary is present, then there are usually required sales quotas required to earn a reasonable enough income to live in our grossly over-priced society and/or simply to remain employed. So for the sales person, simply making the sale is closely linked to an act of survival. If they are "always closing" then they are at a minimum always able to pay the bills and retain their employment.

Brenda's story is really a clear and present warning to marketers...

You are an endangered species. The "prospects" you seek are not objects - they are people. If you want to pan for gold then go somewhere out in the backwoods and do it, you can't pan for people. If some authority figure has told you that it is a "numbers game" then tell them, politely but firmly, to get a life. Treating people like a numbers game is for those authority figures that choose to be ignorant and ethically inept executives and partners.

These people you call "prospects" have depth, feeling, intelligence and experiences in life you cannot imagine. And now, all of a sudden, you pretend to "help" them, to build a "relationship" with them, to "care" about them, to "provide" for them, to "protect" their best interests - to desire a "conversation of quality" with them. If any marketer is able to suddenly see an opportunity from an obituary, then they have already become a victim of the own delusions, and their own lies. People are not part of some grand transaction that spells opportunity for you. They are aware of your superficial wares, and most of all, your own lack of real concern for them. And most especially, your inability to use language and words with integrity.

A marketer that sends mail outlining the "benefits" of their "company" to someone on the basis of a tragedy in the family is someone that should be fired. You have not promoted your brand, you have degraded it. You have not created an opportunity, you have revealed a deep sense of ignorance. People, not prospects, know this about you. A prospector is someone that searches for objects not people.

If you are yourself trapped in a situation that demands a "people as numbers" approach to your own personal income, then it is time to find something else to do. Don't worry about being fired, if this kind of approach is going on and you find yourself trapped in it, then you need to fire your company and then share your experience with other people so we can all learn from it, and more importantly, take action.

And network marketers... this isn't the age of "dreams and goals" or "how to make $100,000 in six weeks" or endless blabbering on "time-sensitive opportunities." Stop it. This is called false hope and vicitmization, not marketing. This is trite foolish nonsense. You are embarrassing yourself. It is true that we are in unique, and challenging, times with respect to our careers. We are all familiar with "right-sizing" and the quick cycle of extinction around certain skills and competencies. Many people have found themselves marginalized and are indeed suffering. If you have a personal story to tell about how you overcame serious and difficult situations in life, then you have something of potential value to share. If you have nothing personal to say, you have little to offer. But please, stop it with the dreams and goals, the quick money, the best opportunity ever stuff, the time sensitive offers, and the endless cycle of a lot of writing about very little.

People don't want to be told what their dreams and goals are, and in any case, it is impossible for you to tell them what they are anyway. And if making a $100,000 is six weeks is so easy, then why aren't more people doing it? None of us want to see your fancy cars, your house in the mountains and your jet-setting lifestyles. If you have a business opportunity then state it. If you have a product or service to offer use facts, not flowery language. If you've taken a copywriting course, then forget everything you've learned. This isn't writing anything of value, it's routine and your writing will eventually wind up in the digital junk yard. Moreover, never offer a "time sensitive" offer. It's a childish practice and we all know why you do it. If your product or service cannot endure the test of time then you are indeed already sliding down a slippery slope toward the edge of the cliff. If you can't give people time to think over your offer without annoying them to death with closing tactics, then you may have nothing to offer of lasting value.

It seems that in network marketing everyone is a marketer. The copywriting industry has taken a close note of this judging by the overabundance of training programs on the market now. These programs generally teach how NOT to have a personal voice in writing, but to instead follow a process of using "power" words, tag lines, and "killer"phrases - some would turn you into a guerilla. Welcome the dawn of excessive scrolling down web pages. It is true that anyone can learn to do this, that's because it isn't difficult, but the real question is why anyone would want to learn to do this in the first place. Hopefully new Internet technologies such as weblogs, social networks and RSS will provide firmer ground for a better voice. A voice that isn't tainted with a whole lot of "persuasive" writing about very little, unless of course the medium is co-opted once again. All of this remains to be seen.

And along came niche marketing. Now everything is some kind of niche. Of course, everyone needs to find a niche, in the sense of discovering our true position or purpose in life. But the premise of niche marketing is more about finding an identifiable and suitable place for a product or service. For network marketers, this is viewed as a way to build credibility, trust and a degree of expertise. Yet it seems odd that the biggest niche market is marketing itself - the is a gross excess of marketing marketing. Everyone's home is a commercial center. A niche is also a recess or hollow in a wall. A niche is a way of digging the same hole deeper. We seem to have entered an age of marketing marketing as some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. It is of course true to say that each of us has expertise, whether we recognize it or not, and therefore each of us has an opportunity to connect with other people that share this common bond.

But a niche market is more about how people build relationships and connect with each other on a variety of interests and needs than it is a specific and limited area of knowledge and expertise. Knowledge, and therefore expertise, is already disconnected and classified into oblivion. The real niche market is one that attempts and helps to put our wide variety of experiences back together into something that more closely resembles a unified whole. The benefit of niche marketing is that it recognizes that everyone has a place and something to offer. I believe this is true. The danger of niche marketing is that it leads to increased fragmentation and isolation of experience. If all marketing turns to niche marketing, what will we be left with?

The market needs to take back marketing. The "target market" is not one of consumers, the real targets are the marketers themselves. It needs to wrestle it away from slogans, logos, inept and vacuous advertising, false lifestyle associations, robotic writing tactics, endorsements that are empty, and connections to rich and famous athletes and performers that in the end mean very little.

Brenda's story is not really about marketing - it's about life happening. And life unavoidably happens to all of us. Marketing is not a science, nor is it an art. The end of marketing is not sales or profits.

The legacy of marketing is a collective story about one of the ways in which we choose to relate to each other in life, the ways in which we choose to give and to take, the ways in which we choose to offer help or victimize, the ways in which we authenticate or trivialize the experiences of people, the ways in which empathy and greed battle for attention, and the ways in which we choose to ultimately value life or degrade it.