m-Thinking
The current obsession with mobile is still with the relatively mundane. It is with communication. No doubt, the future of mobile has a lot to do with communication - one of the five Cs that I wrote about in a thought piece for the future of mobile, as printed in Stefan Bertschi's interesting anthology Thumb Culture.
Slowly, we are beginning as a species to understand ourselves. In particular, with the help of various techniques, we are beginning to understand better how we think, although the brain is still very much a mystery and one of the great unconquered frontiers of science.
What we do know is that, by various measures, many of us are poor thinkers much of the time. We might apply faulty logic and reasoning or, more likely, allow ourselves to overly influenced by underlying emotional currents. Goleman was on to something with Emotional Intelligence as a more revealing measure of intelligence, debates about defining intelligence aside.
It is clear that it ought to be possible to augment our thinking processes with the use of computer power. This was the promise of AI. Put crudely, we can think of computers as an extension of our brain's computing power, but one that can be entirely controlled, structured and driven in a direction that we can control. That is, by running an explicit program, unencumbered by faulty logic and emotional influence. At least that's the theory, although we should always remember the old computer adage - garbage in, garbage out. And much of what passes for ‘brain theory’ is garbage.
Clearly, augmented thinking is still very much in its infancy. After all, how many of our current uses of computer could be categorised as aids to thinking. I don't mean the event of thinking. Of course, reading a blog - perhaps this one - will fuel your thinking. What I mean is the process of thinking. The use of technology to assist in how we think about a blog post, a project, an opportunity, a risk, even a piece of art.
Take email, for example. It is still an incredibly crude tool. Having used many of our biggest brains to invent it, all we really have is a faster version of letter writing. Yes, habits have changed and formed around email, but let's not pretend that it's anything that stupendous in terms of augmenting human communication. How many of us struggle to find an appropriate subject for the message? (Why do we need a subject?) How many emails aren’t really communication at all, lacking any cogent point, arguments or calls to action.
Indeed, how many man-years are wasted in corporations by inappropriate messages, inappropriate emails and other inefficiencies of email. We can send letters faster, but we have multiplied the number we receive by an order of magnitude.
Where is the intelligent email program? Where are the education programs to teach us how to use these tools better - to understand their essential characteristics, pros, cons, limitations and so on? Never mind that. We are told by endless numbers of university teachers that many of our school leavers are unable to write. Add that to the email magnifier effect!
Now imagine taking that mass of communications confusion and squeezing it into the mobile? No wonder that mobile email has had such a slow adoption rate. I recall vividly trying to sell my own mobile email solution at a trade fair and being asked by one irate individual “Why do I want it on my phone? I have a hard enough time with it on my desktop.”
Let's hope that the chasm is never crossed, that instead we invent a better means of communication for mobiles before it's too late.
The march of the Internet towards the so-called Semantic Web, Social Web, or whatever the big brains are calling it these days, is clearly a move in the right direction, although to be clear, the semantics we are talking about with Web 3.0 are all about ways of enabling computers to label context and, by implication, derive meaning. We are not talking about a Web connected with the mind, although that is possibly the next step.
If we can use computers to augment our thinking in some favourable direction, then what better opportunity than to use the computers we always carry with us, namely the mobile. It could become a surrogate brain. Most likely, the 'brain' will be in the Cloud somewhere and the mobile will provide the interface, or be the brain's proxy - what we used to called an agent in artificial intelligence lingo.
Putting mobile brains aside for a moment, I'd like to turn our attention to another area of mystery and controversy, which is education. The thing about education is that everyone has an opinion, everyone has a theory. “This” is good for education and “that” is good for education. Fads galore!
Whatever the flavour of the month in education, there is a growing consensus that our current ideas of education are not equipped to deal with various global trends, including the dramatic shift of knowledge working to an artisan activity easily outsourced to low cost brains or scalable IT systems. Many of our educational systems are basically funnels into the world of a shrinking knowledge-based industry. What's the use of a funnel when the thing we're funnelling into is no longer relevant.
This has led various educationalists, both professional and amateur, to posit the idea of Classroom 2.0. It is another 2.0 fudge of ideas, but not surprisingly characterised by common 2.0 attributes: accessible technology, open systems, social-power, relevancy. A kind of Darwinian education system.
It is scary stuff of course. Education, no matter its flavour, has been underpinned since the Industrial age by the idea of measurement and grading. In a world where the education system becomes organic and more real-time in terms of achieving contextually relevant results, the idea of abstract measurement and grading begins to break down. When faced with a problem, what you really want are the tools that enable you to access the higher percentiles of statistical success for that problem. You don't want to be on some bell curve defined in an ivory tower and measured according to political efficacy.
Mobiles are not ideal devices for learning. They’re small, clunky and, if used for a mass-consumption service, like education, require truly universal access, which we don’t really have - so many areas still without any usable 3G coverage.
However, they are potentially disruptive. New devices are emerging (such as e-Readers) and LTE is only “just around the corner.” Once the innovators figure out how to deliver effective personalised learning programs via mobile, educators and educational suppliers (e.g. Publishers) will be challenged by the new order.