Education for Well-being Education as if people and the planet mattered

I wonder how many people who are familiar with mentoring in the traditional sense and understand its value, have yet to consider it in its lighter forms. My experience shows me that many people—especially those who feel overwhelmed by “all the information out there”—have yet to figure out how they can benefit from other people’s minds in a way that is lightweight and unobtrusive.

Let’s consider mentoring as being possible along a spectrum—from heavyweight to lightweight. Heavy is the one most of us are familiar with. Its coordination costs are high. The mentee must know the right person and be able to schedule the appropriate time and place where they can meet. The mentee often has to agree to the terms put forth by the supervising institution, whether it be a workplace, school, or some other organization. Commitment levels are high for both parties. Violations of agreements (formal and informal) can, and do, result in the relationship dissolving. This type of mentoring can be fragile, complex, and hard to come by.

Lightweight mentoring, on the other hand, uses today’s social media, avoiding many of the difficulties associated with traditional mentoring. While it’s not necessarily better than traditional mentoring, it provides opportunities that many people would otherwise not have. It allows you to connect with a variety of minds and is very dynamic, easily adapting to your changing needs. Let’s look at some possible ways to get involved in lightweight mentoring, both as a mentor and mentee.

First and foremost, it’s crucial to find the right person(s). This is a process. It takes some effort. A good place to start is by finding some blogs in your area of interest. Alltop’s index is good for this. Wefollow is good for finding people on Twitter (enter a tag). Twitter profiles are often linked to blogs. If you’ve read a book that was written recently (as in, the author is still alive) you may want to search for their website (often a blog). There’s a good chance they have one. Once you find a blog or two (or ten) that suit your interests, you will notice that their owners frequently link to other sites of interest (blogroll). They also frequently include links to their social media. These links can be learning gold. What’s interesting to note is that today’s platforms have made sharing easy. The best are “designed for generosity”, in the words of new media black belt Clay Shirky. The transaction cost of making something available to others is so low that doing so makes sense. By sharing, people often learn more, feel good, connect, establish their reputation, and in the end, improve their lot while they help someone else’s.

Let’s take a look at a few real-world examples of how today’s new media can help us engage with other people in simple, yet effective ways.

Sites like Delicious, Twitter, Facebook…can give you access to some of the best minds in your area of interest—people that you otherwise might not have any access to at all. As an example, not too long ago I read Jay Cross’s book Informal Learning. Finding it highly engaging, I decided to follow Jay on twitter and added his sites to my RSS reader. I’ve learned a lot from his book, his sites, his tweets, and have even had some lightweight interactions with him (attended an online class he put up for free; received a blog comment, etc.). Another example of an author I follow is Dan Pink who blogs and tweets regularly. Through telepresence, I was able to attend a live (and free!) interview with Mr. Pink which provided opportunities for listeners to ask questions and converse as a group. I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge consultant Steve Hargadon’s contribution to the whole effort. His free, online, interactive interviews have provided deep learning opportunities for thousands of people. Author and blogger Will Richardson is an example of someone who, in an effort to improve education, has made himself generously “followable”. If you were to visit his site you’d see the following links:

Let’s look at some of the items on his list and see how they might be used for lightweight mentoring. I’ll only mention uses that are not obvious to the service. (The best way to learn about these services is to simply start using them. Beware though that much of what goes on in social media is, you guessed it, social. It’s open for others to see—which of course, is the whole point. All the sites in the list above give users a lot of control of how they share their media. Decide what’s right for you.)

Flickr has great groups for sharing and conversing about a variety of subjects—anything people like to take pictures of. LinkedIn, a professional social network, has a huge variety of interest groups. I’m amazed by the quality of information that is “curated” by the people I follow on Twitter. I have some of the smartest people in their fields selecting the best information on the web and passing it on to me, seamlessly, with no bother. On Twitter, another great way to find expertise is to find out who the experts are following. This is easy to do from their Twitter profile. YouTube is not just for videos of water skiing squirrels anymore. There’s a vast repository of instructional material on this site. As a bonus, people who post videos are often willing to answer questions and engage with their viewers. (Here’s a nice example.) Delicious gives you a wonderful peek into an expert’s mind without having to bother them. By sharing their bookmarks (often with the added value of annotations), experts can let you know what they are finding important/useful/relevant.

Be patient with this process. It will take time to find the right experts who are sharing the kind of information that suits you. I can guarantee they are out there—in spades. That’s the beauty of two billion connected minds. Also, don’t forget that the currency of the gift economy is gratitude, goodwill and recognition. Throw it around generously.

Here are my book notes for Anya’s latest book. This book is definitely worth a read. You may also want to view Anya’s talk with Steve Hargadon over at Learning Central.

“Any time you are learning  established information—names, facts, figures, ideas thunk by thinkers before you—that’s scholastic learning. Empirical knowledge, on the other hand, comes from direct experience and experimentation. Americans tend to emphasize the importance of empiricism, new discoveries, and scientific method. The funny thing is that empirical depends on the scholastic. Last year’s discoveries are this year’s history. p. 6-7

“The university’s ‘hidden curriculum,’ he [John Meyer, professor of sociology, Stanford U] says, has always been teaching its own importance. p. 21

“An  African-American man with several Ivy League degrees can get elected president in this country, but would we elect someone who’s never graduated from college? Someone largely self-taught, like Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, or Benjamin Franklin? Impossible.” p. 22

“Our learning institutions for the most part, are acting as if the world has not suddenly, irrevocably, cataclysmically, epistemically changed—and changed precisely in the area of learning.” p. 22 Cathy N. Davidson, Theo Goldberg, in The Future of Learning Institutions in s a Digital Learning Age.

“Opportunities to explore spirituality are many and diverse; it’s just that most people no longer feel the need to visit a large, stone building for hours every week, submit to the authority of a cleric, and listen to some garbled Latin or Hebrew in order to connect to a higher power. I have to wonder if organized higher education could someday go the way of organized religion—not to disappear, by any means, not even to diminish in absolute size, but cede its place at the very height of human thought and center of daily action.” p. 23

“The nation’s top colleges seem to assent to the signaling hypothesis when they agree to rate themselves by how selective they are—that is, how many people they reject, the SAT scores of entering students, and so on. That’s like Weight Watchers advertising that they only take skinny people. If elite schools really subscribed to the value-added, human-capital theory, wouldn’t they instead advertise how good they are at improving  the very low SAT scores of entering students? Wouldn’t they say, “We take absolutely anyone and use our proven teaching methods to turn them into Swarthmore or Pomona material?”" p. 34

“Now that it’s illegal to discriminate in employment by race, ethnicity, gender, religion or sexual orientation, judging people by where and how much they went to school is just about the only acceptable form of prejudice left.” p. 35 (I think it is implied that if you went to a more exclusive school, you are more capable. And we are allowed to discriminate based on capability. We pride ourselves on being meritocratic, even we often aren’t. Example 1: George Bush)

“We need to be open to different ways of measuring the value of everyone’s contributions.” p. 35

“To truly progress in education, and in our society as a whole, we need to redirect our resources and energy from institutions toward individuals.” p. 48

“As Carey [policy director of the think tank Education Sector] has pointed out, 25 percent of US News & World Report rankings come from peer ratings, which is a measure of reputation within a sector. The other 75 percent of the rankings come from either direct or proxy measures of spending per student and exclusivity. That means if a college wants to rise in the rankings, the logical thing to do is raise tuition while accepting fewer applicants. If college A increases tuition, thus spending more on each student, making it harder for poor students to attend and turning more students away, they look more elite and desirable. If college B figures out a way to do more with less and cuts tuition, allowing them to offer slots to more applicants, they lower spending per student and become less selective. College B’s rankings goes down relative to College A.” p. 58

“Currently it’s not possible to on a comparative basis to measure outcomes or learning or student engagement or what is really going on in the classroom.” Bob Moore research director at US News, “defending” the rankings’ validity. p. 58 (Why would you want to measure things like outcomes, learning, or engagement? Really.)

“They found students who classes online learned more and performed better on average than those who stuck to traditional fact-to-face classes. Hybrid approaches worked best of all. The most effective techniques weren’t the use of fancy multimedia like video, pop-up quizzes, or little animated penguins. Instead, online students benefited most in the cases where they were able to move at their own pace, prompted to spend more time on task, reflect on what they’d learned, and collaborate.” p. 92 (Barbara Means et al., Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning, US Dept. of Ed)

“Another possibility to remake the sheepskin effect is for institutions to create competency-based assessments, separate from the other functions of education. Western Governor’s University is a national innovator in assessment-based learning. ‘We said, let’s create a university that actually measures learning,’ the jovial president, Bob Mendenhall, says. ‘We do not have credit hours; we do not have grades. We simply have a series of assessments that measure competencies, and then on that basis award the degree.’” p. 100

“Faculty mentors at WGU are not responsible for grading; that would be a conflict of interest. Instead, multiple-choice tests, math problems, and the like are graded by computer, while essays and in-person evaluations are judged by a separate cadre of graders. This also saves the time of the highest paid faculty. What WGU is doing is again, using the Internet to unbundle the various functions of teaching: the “sage on the stage” conveyor of information, the cheerleader and helpmate, and the evaluator. “We really don’t teach or instruct,” says Dr. Linda Gunn, a student mentor and regional coordinator. “We guide them to learning resources and supplemental information to help them gain their competencies.” p. 101

“Compulsory schools he [Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society] said, with the power of the state behind them, alienate students from their own curiosity and ability by ‘teaching the need to be taught.’ Illich saw firsthand how schools made self-reliant rural people into ‘backward’ illeterates, unable to participate fully in society without depending on state-funded instruction.” p. 112

“‘Deschooling,’ in his world [Illich], means replacing formal schools with a technologically enabled, largely self-directed, free, and open exchange of information. ‘We need research,’ he wrote, ‘on the possible use of technology to create institutions which serve personal, creative, and autonomous interaction and emergence of values which cannot be substantially controlled by technocrats.’” p. 112

“Illich’s strongest point is this: It’s a mistake to identify social welfare fully with the institutions that are meant to provide it. Institutions seek to grow and pursue their own ends, which are not identical with the ends of those they are intended to serve. More prisons don’t mean more justice (see The Economist, July 24-30 for more on more prisons not creating more justice), and more schools doesn’t mean more wisdom.” p. 113

“The university may be too identified with rationality and modernity, progress and justice, to spontaneously wither away. Nor, on most days, would we wish it to. However, maybe a form of genetic engineering is possible. The Internet-enabled “personal learning network” could be the prototype of a lightweight institution that is more open and available to more people, that doesn’t take up more than its shares of resources, especially money, and that interferes as little as possible with individual freedom.” p 113

“John Holt, in his radical 1976 radical critique Instead of Education, speaks approvingly of the Berlitz language school, which judges itself by how well it serves everyone who wants to study, not by how much it discriminates in choosing students. He calls schools like these, “schools for do-ers, which help people explore the world as they choose.” p. 125

Lots of great references in the last part of the book; lots of URLs in bibliography.

The Design School at Stanford is doing some interesting stuff. You can find it at: http://dschool.stanford.edu/k12/index.php

The K-12 Lab started with a question: Why is it that all students start kindergarten with innate creative confidence, but few of them still have it when they graduate from high school? The lab’s work centers on helping schools and teachers around the world re-think their approach to developing creativity.

Their Mission is below. (Reads so much better than most school mission statements, don’t you think?)

K-12 Lab at the d.school: Building creative confidence in kids.

Why this matters?
This is the type of stuff that can reunite families, solve community crises, and empower a generation.
This is about giving kids a methodology when they don’t have one. It’s about unleashing the difference one can make.
This is about getting to know people for who they are, gaining insights around the challenges they are facing, and working together using creative powers to build brand new solutions for those challenges.
It’s about constantly learning from the surrounding world, people, and work.
Though all kids are creative, most kids lack creative confidence to approach the challenges they face.
This is about changing that.

Booknotes for Clay Shirky’s latest book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. This book is certainly worth a read. (My notes in red, text in black are direct quotes.)

One thing that makes the current age remarkable is that we can now treat free time as a general social asset that can harnessed for large, communally created projects, rather than as a set of individual minutes to be whiled away one person at a time. (How do we harness students’ free time in school and out?) p. 10

[several population studies have found] young populations with access to fast, interactive media are shifting their behavior away from media that presupposes pure consumption. p. 11 (Traditional media outlets view their audience as being passive consumers. They have trouble with the “active” part. Reminds me of how traditional educators view students and how active behavior is often frowned upon. (Example of college students who set up online study group being put on probation; the whole issue of what constitutes student cheating.))

[quoting Ito:] Although so much of what kids are doing online may look trivial and frivolous, what they are doing is building the capacity to connect, to communicate, and to ultimately, to mobilize. p. 38

Curiously, an organization that commits to helping society manage a problem also commits itself to the preservation of that same problem, as its institutional existence hinges on society’s continued need for its management. p. 41 (One of the clear reasons schools want to manage students’ learning and are unwilling to give more choice and freedom to students (and parents). See Clayton Christensen’s book.)

Scarcity is easier to deal with than abundance, because when something becomes rare, we simply think it more valuable than it was before, a conceptually easy change. Abundance is different: its advent means we can start treating previously valuable things as if they were cheap enough to waste, which is to say cheap enough to experiment with. Because abundance can remove the trade-offs we’re used to, it can be disorienting to the people who’ve grown up with scarcity. When a resource is scarce, the people who manage it often regard it as valuable in itself, without stopping to consider how much value is tied to its scarcity. p 50-51

The people surprised at our new behaviors assume that behavior is a stable category, but it isn’t. Human motivations change little over the years, but opportunity can change a little or a lot, depending on the social environment. In a world where opportunity changes little, behavior will change little, but when opportunity changes a lot, behavior will as well, so long as the opportunities appeal to real human motivations. p 63 (What opportunities have changed in schools over the last 10 years for students, admin and teachers? Among staff, why do some jump on these opportunities while others don’t? The rift between opportunities inside the school and outside of it continues to grow larger, leading to tension for both students and staff.)

Deci then ran a third session, where he repeated the experiment as he had run it initially: [assemble shapes, with no pay for anyone] In this session, even though each subject received identical instructions, the ones who had been paid in the previous session showed markedly less interest in the shapes during the break than in the session where they had been paid; their average time spent dropped by two minutes, which is to say, it fell twice as far, when the payment was removed, as it had risen when the payment was added in the first place. Even though they had played with the puzzle voluntarily in the first session, the memory of having been paid earlier was enough to depress their interest when they were again given the chance to experiment with the puzzle on their own. p 71 (Pink writes about this also in Drive. Interesting all the accolades schools like the Harlem schools (Geoffrey Canada) get for paying students for getting good grades. Wouldn’t this be counterproductive if we want to foment “love of learning”? Hmm.)

But Deci’s experiment suggested that extrinsic motivations aren’t always the most effective ones and that increasing extrinsic motivations can actually decrease intrinsic ones. (e.g. love of learning, curiosity). p 72

…in real world situations where money was offered as a reward for volunteering, it depressed the number of hours of labor the average volunteer contributed. p. 73 (Reminds me of how we “pay” students with grades/right to graduate for their “service learning” efforts. Seems like this approach would diminish the likelihood and amount of volunteering in the future. Also, if you are forced to do something, how can it be seen as volunteering? Hmm.)

Deci identifies two intrinsic motivations that might be labeled “personal”: the desire to be autonomous (to determine what we do and how we do it) [see post] and the desire to be competent (to be good at what we do). In the Soma experiment, the students who continued to play with the pieces during their break were motivated by desires both for autonomy (the work was under their control) and for competence. (Soma is a game where continued effort brings improvements in skill.) This finding is typical of games. A study of video games concluded that the principal draw for the players was not graphics and gore but the feelings of control and competence the players could attain as they mastered the game. p. 76

(Deci focuses on personal motivation while Benkler and Nissenbaum focus on social motivations. ) …motivations that we can feel only when we are part of a group. They divide social motivations into two broad clusters—one around connectedness or membership, and the other around sharing and generosity. (later on page) Benkler and Nissenbaum conclude that social motivations reinforce the personal ones; our new communications networks encourage membership and sharing, both of which are good in and of themselves, and they also provide support for autonomy and competence. p. 78 (Kind of like me sharing these notes online; I’ll take better notes knowing others may see them and therefore I become more competent understanding it. Makes me think how the idea of sharing is seen as anathema in schools. “They were caught sharing their work.” Also how pitting students against each others (e.g. class rank) reduces the chance of sharing and students wanting to be helpful. Bad design.)

One of the weakest notions in the entire pop culture canon is that of innate generational difference, the idea that today’s thirty-somethings are members of a class of people called Generation X while twentysomethings are part of Generation Y, and that both differ innately from each other ad from the baby boomers. The conceptual appeal of these labels is enormous, but the idea’s explanatory value is almost worthless, a kind of astrology for decades instead of months. p. 121 (Totally agree. It’s about context, opportunity. We are more alike than different.)

…the desire to attribute people’s behavior to innate character rather than to local context runs deep. It runs so deep in fact, that psychologists have a name for it: the fundamental attribution error. [later, next page] To understand why so  many people are spending time and energy exploring new forms of connection, you have to overcome the fundamental attribution error and extend to other people the set of explanations that ou use to describe our own behavior: you respond to new opportunities, and so does everyone else, and these changes feed on one another, amplifying some kinds of behavior and damping others. p. 121-122 (”kids today are so lazy” “they have short attention spans” “they don’t listen”…Context: When a 50 year old today was a kid and they were reading, they didn’t have 20 tabs open on a browser or a ringing cel phone nearby. In school, they didn’t have the opportunity to sneak in a text message. There were fewer distractors that create the kind of behavior that people complain about today.)

We create one another’s opportunities, whether for passivity or for activity, and we have always done so. The difference today is that the internet is an opportunity machine, a way for small groups to create new opportunities, at lower cost and with less hassle than ever before, and to advertise those opportunities to the largest set of potential participants in history. p. 129

[New opportunities are being created by Us by our new tools. The driving forces are:  loosely coordinated groups with a shared culture to perform tasks more effectively than 1) individuals 2) markets 3) governments using managerial direction.] paraphrased, p. 129 (What does that do to schools which currently fall under the purview of individuals, markets and governments?)

Elinor Ostrom … notes that much twentieth-century economics mistakenly assumed that market transactions are an ideal and even default model for human interactions. But some kinds of value can’t be created by markets, only by a set of shared and mutually coordinating assumptions, which is to say by culture. p. 136

“Knowledge is the most combinable thing we have, but taking advantage of it requires special conditions.” (they are…1) size of community, 2) cost of sharing, 3) clarity of what gets shared, and the  4) cultural norms of the recipients. Ideas from Dominique Foray, French economist). p. 141 (Makes me think of Google Translate as an innovation machine since it directly addresses items 1, 2, 3 above.)

It’s tempting to imagine a broad conversation about what we as a society should do with the possibilities and virtues of participation. Such a conversation will never happen. If you do a web search for “we as a society” you will find a litany of failed causes, because society isn’t the kind of unit that can have conversations, come to decisions, and take action. p. 186 (e.g. “We as a society should look at the possibilities that new technologies offer for learning, and adopt them in schools.”)

We are living through the disorientation that comes from including two billion new participants in a media landscape previously operated by a small group of professionals. p186 (or… We are living through the disorientation that comes from including two billion new possible learners in learning environments previously operated by a small group of professionals (schools).)

The communication tools we now have, which merely a decade ago seemed to offer an improvement to the twentieth-century media landscape, are now seen to rapidly eroding it instead. p. 189 (Those rascally kids don’t do their homework anymore because they’re on Facebook all the time! Damn this technology!!)

A society where everyone has some kind of access to the public sphere is a different kind of society than one where citizens approach media as mere consumers. p. 188 (or approach learning as mere consumers.)

As Joshua Porter [social media designer] explains to his clients, “The behavior you’re seeing is the behavior you’ve designed for.” p. 196 Makes me think of Dina Strasser’s post, continued: Users will only take advantage of opportunities they understand and that seem interesting or valuable. Porter is in effect telling his clients: It doesn’t matter how much you want users to behave a certain way. What matters is how they react to the opportunities you give them. If you want different behavior, you have to provide different opportunities. (How would schools be different if they were designed with that last sentence in mind?)

We can’t ask people running traditional systems to evaluate a new technology for its radical benefits; people committed to keeping the current system will tend, as a group, to have trouble seeing value in anything disruptive. p 210 (Reminds me of what Clay Christensen says in Disrupting Class.)

The world’s people, and the connections among us, provide the raw material for cognitive surplus. The technology will continue to improve, and the population will continue to grow, but change in the direction of more participation has already happened. What matters most is our imaginations. The opportunity before us, individually and collectively, is enormous; what we do with it will be determined largely by how well we are able to imagine and reward public creativity, participation, and sharing. p. 212

Here’s something four year olds know: a screen without a  mouse is missing something. Here’s something else they know: media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. p. 212 (And it appears that they also know this: education that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. That has a name: ADHD, high drop-out rates.)

…we’re looking for the mouse. We look everywhere a reader or a viewer or a patient [a student] or a citizen has been locked out of creating and sharing, or has been served up passive or canned experience, and we’re asking. If we carve out a little of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen? I’m betting the answer is yes, or could be yes, if we give one another the opportunity to participate and reward one another for trying. p. 213

I’m hoping that this will be more than just another blog post. If you think it makes sense, please share it with others. If you can get this idea in front of the right eyes, you deserve all the credit. Thanks.
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Would you be willing to walk 30 yards to help save 201,000 gallons of gasoline per day? Would you do this six days a week for one year, helping avoid the need to refine, transport, and burn 222 millions gallons of gas? (About the equivalent of 6.5 Gulf oil spills worth of crude (1 barrel of crude equals about 19.5 gallons of gas), using conservative estimates for the amount spilled.)

If you answered “yes”, you’d be helping protect the planet while at the same time, helping the United States Postal Service meet or exceed its energy reduction goals. You might even lower the price of a stamp and get a little exercise to boot.

The United States Postal Service states that, “Our objective is to reduce our energy consumption 30% by 2015.“1 Why not reduce it by 50% by 2011?

I propose the USPS require mailboxes to be on only one side of the road, where feasible—which is mostly everywhere. I read that the USPS is rolling out a lot of technological solutions like electric vehicles, hybrids, flex fuel vehicles… which is great. It seems however, like they are ignoring an easy no-tech solution.

The diagrams below illustrate it.

Today's inefficient method of mail delivery

A more efficient solution; requires 1/2 the route and 75% fewer stops

Moving mailboxes to one side of the road and clustering them near property lines seems like an easy way to reduce the amount of driving needed to deliver mail while also reducing stop-and-go driving by 75%.

Could this solution really reduce the need to burn 222 million gallons of gas each year, a 50% reduction compared to last year? Possibly. I don’t think the idea is far-fetched. Skeptics however, will point out that in some places, mailboxes are already on one side of the road. Agreed. Skeptics will point out that there are postal carriers that walk (or bike) some or all of their routes. Agreed. However, the figures I’m quoting are based on the 1.25 billion miles driven by USPS employees (using 444 million gallons of gas) as published on the USPS’s website, using figures for 2009.2 (Some context: If you drove at 60 mph continuously, it would take you 2,377 years to drive 1.25 billion miles.)  Skeptics will point out that not all of those miles are for final delivery at mailboxes. They also include many miles driven by trucks to hubs and post offices. Agreed. But the skeptics must keep in mind that by clustering mailboxes, not only is there a huge reduction in driven miles, there is a huge reduction in the number of times each vehicle must start and stop (a 4:1 ratio). Currently, this constant starting and stopping, using few, if any, vehicles with regenerative braking, wastes vast amounts of gasoline. It also adds expensive wear and tear to vehicles. The savings that would accrue from fewer starts and stops would offset some of the skeptics’ valid points above.

Skeptics will point out that the numbers are fuzzy, that the language is inexact and includes a lot of terms like “huge” and “vast”. Again, agreed. So 50% is really just a guess, I have to admit. It doesn’t mean however, that “vast” and “huge” amounts of energy couldn’t be saved using this simple, no-tech solution right out of the box. Even without exact numbers, this idea should be implemented. It could happen quickly, and at very little expense. It has no downside. Skeptics might point out that it could cost some USPS employees their jobs. I disagree. Using the savings that this solution would immediately produce, laid off employees could be retrained, at no cost, to enter green, sustainable industries, producing real value for society while improving their job security at the same time.

Would it be nice to have real numbers on the savings that such a solution would impart? Absolutely. This is why I propose that any math, science, physics, economics, geography, digital cartography, environmental science… teacher that reads this, consider making an authentic, project based learning activity out of it. There’s a lot here, both in terms of content and information literacy. Each teacher/school could publish the results for their particular geographic area, reducing the scope of the project, making it more manageable and accurate. Students from a town, for example, could get detailed information from their post office about routes, miles driven on mailbox deliveries, miles of road with same-sided mailboxes, etc. Results from each school/region could be centralized and aggregated, producing useful data for a variety of audiences. (For more on PBL go here. For more on information literacy go here. For more on questioning strategies, go here.) (email me at wfarren [at] ed4wb.org if you are interested in submitting results. I’ll aggregate them for all to see. Maybe create a mashup on Google Maps?)

Big Question: How much energy could be saved if the USPS adopted such a scheme?
Requires at least the following information:
How many fewer miles would be driven?
How much gas would be saved by having fewer stops and starts?
(Extend) How much energy would be saved in having to buy fewer vehicles and replacement parts?

Subsidiary Questions (Just some)
How much CO2 would this energy savings keep out the atmosphere? How could that amount be expressed in more understandable ways?
What would be some ecological benefits of such energy savings?
What would be some of the economic benefits?
What would be some of the benefits to society (e.g. less respiratory illness)?

Some benefits of such a solution:

1. Reduced greenhouse gases
2. Reduced acid rain
3. Reduced ocean acidification
4. Reduced traffic accidents caused by people passing stopped mail vehicles
5. Reduced traffic congestion (saves even more gas, people’s time, less stress…)
6. Lowered demand for oil reduces chances of oil spills
7. Reduced need to manufacture postal vehicles (good for environment)
8. Save money on postage
9. Save money on not having to mitigate costs involved in the destruction of nature’s services
   
10. Create green jobs
11. Help people exercise

I‘m sure this idea can be improved upon. Please share your suggestions/concerns/doubts. Thanks.

With our fleet traveling more than 1.2 billion miles a year, the Postal Service consistently looks for ways to reduce the environmental footprint that results from visiting every home and business in America six days a week. Sam Pulcrano, vice president, Sustainability, USPS. source

1http://www.biofueldaily.com/reports/US_Postal_Service_To_Receive_Alternative_Fuel_Vehicles_999.html

2http://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/postalfacts.htm

The last post discussed how I might be needing some  help when it comes to avoiding distractors and time-sucks. The video below describes an app that takes an interesting approach to human motivation by using role-playing game theory to help us be more deliberate with our use of time.   Harnessing and applying the variables that motivate many to play online games for hours on end toward other personal and societal goals like learning, exercising and voting, seems exciting.

As new ideas develop that attempt to uncover new ways of inspiring better behavior,  we expect them to follow closer to themes of social motivation and immediate feedback loops, and further from the idea of the coldly rational, will-driven individual. Kyle Studstill at PSFK.com

Is the hyper-linked text we commonly read today diminishing our ability to understand? Are all the distractors available on our screens bringing us down?

Nicholas Carr writes in Wired magazine:

Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.1

Carr points to research that indicates hyperlinks‘ distracting nature weakens comprehension. “Research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links.“ A 2001 study comparing readers of a hyperlinked text to readers of the same text without hyperlinks found the readers of the non-hypertext version to be seven times less likely to report the material as confusing. Another researcher found comprehension rates decreased as more hyperlinks were introduced into a text. Interestingly, it didn’t matter if readers clicked on the links or not. Apparently, just their presence was enough to lower comprehension rates.

The evidence seems convincing. It also seems to make sense—increasing our cognitive load and the associated costs of switching our attention seems counterproductive to good understanding.

“We’re exercising the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading and thinking deeply.“ Nicholas Carr from Wired

But it’s not just hyperlinks that are a problem. My own reading experience shows that staying focused on a text and reading it from start to finish without any interruptions, can be quite challenging. I often find myself opening up new tabs as an idea darts into my mind, or to check my e-mail, or read the news… only to discover several minutes later (sometimes hours) that I had abandoned the original article. Sometimes I’ll be distracted by the music in the background or the chiming of incoming mail.

Luckily, there is some help that can free us from the distractions of hyperlinks and cluttered pages, forcing us to abandon the “shallows” and venture into the deep end of thought. The good people at Arc90 have devised a free utility2 that strips the page of hyperlinks, moving them to the bottom of the page in footnote fashion while also removing all non-textual items from the page. It’s easy to install and works quite well. While it cleans up the page and helps focus my reading, it still doesn’t help me if I choose to open up browser tabs, or check my email. A cursory search of Firefox plugins did not turn up anything that could help me out in that area. If such a plugin did exist, I’d want it to lockdown my computer, disable audio, and prevent me from doing anything but looking at clean text. It would use the number of words in the text to determine how long it should stay in lockdown mode. Since we all read at different rates, users should be able to calibrate the plugin for their reading rate. The plugin would essentially create the same environment you had as a kid when you’d read the back of the cereal box because there was nothing better to do. If you were a slow eater, you’d eventually try to read the ingredients.

As is often the case with technology, it rouses my internal dialog.

I ask: Is this type of technology just a cop-out? Shouldn’t we be learning how to deal with distractors? After all, they are always going to be around.

I respond: If the technology can reduce my distractions and increase my understanding, then it’s worthwhile. Learning to ignore hyperlinks and other media on the page can be counterproductive. They exist in most cases, to provide more understanding of the text. It’s not like the bush on the side of the road that you’ve learned to not notice as you drive your car. That bush isn’t useful to your current mission; the hyperlinks and embedded video probably are. This type of technology would make these distractors useful in the end by executing the delivery of information in a more mind-friendly way, allowing me to see them after I have read the text free from distractions.

I ask: Shouldn’t we learn to control our impulses when we are reading and just stay on the page and avoid checking our email?

I respond: Maybe. Learning impulse control seems to be a good thing. Psychologists have shown in studies3 that kids who can postpone instant gratification and wait in order to receive a reward (marshmallow test3) do well in areas like academics, personal finance, etc. However, the same researchers point out that not looking at4 the distractor is the best strategy for avoiding distraction. It’s hard to read a text and not look at the hyperlinks, so being able to disable them seems like a winning strategy. When it comes to staying on task by not opening up new tabs or checking my email, it gets more complicated. Walter Mischel, designer of the marshmallow study, notes that we can decrease our impulsivity with practice and by using various strategies (e.g. pretending the marshmallow is not a marshmallow). Mischel adds, “And if you don’t practice then you’ll never figure out how to distract yourself. You won’t develop the best delay strategies, and those strategies won’t become second nature.” 5 So, maybe for hyperlinks, I should just disable them, but for impulse control and staying on task, I should try some strategies that help me stay on task and practice them until they become automatic. But a confounding issue is that I really like to open up new tabs when an idea pops into my head. Reading something interesting inspires new thinking. If I don’t act on those new ideas quickly, then they’re often lost.

I ask: Are there other things we can do that don’t require new technology?

I respond: I think as writers, we could look at how we publish, how we lay out a page. What styles lead to the most comprehension and on-task behavior?  Should we put footnotes on the bottom of a text and avoid hyperlinks in the main body? Should we put graphics, videos, etc. at the bottom of the page if we decide to include them? Are we evaluating the value of the non-textual items we publish or are they just there as eye-candy?

A simple fix for many distracting pages may be to just click on the “Print” version which is usually cleaner. Also, you can turn off images on your browser but we’d want an easy way to switch them on and off. The reality is that we like our non-textual information. It adds richness and excitement to online material. The real question I think, is “How to we deliver online ideas in a way that improves understanding and fosters better thinking without stripping it of its richness?” For now, I’m going to stick with Arc90’s solution and practice some self-control when it comes to the other distractors—unless I have a good idea. They’re too valuable to lose.

“Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.” Walter Mischel

Sources:

1 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_nicholas_carr/

2 http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

3 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=1

4, 5 http://www.diigo.com/annotated/d245b9e4dcea5429554762549a122c79

Related: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/

Oh, The Temptation from Steve V on Vimeo.

The Gulf oil spill, is at the heart of the matter, a design flaw. I’m not alluding to BP’s oil extraction technology either. Certainly, it had an important role to play but it’s not the whole story, or even a central part of it. The story is bigger. And like most cases involving corporations and governments, the blame, like the spill, can be spread far and wide. While everyone has BP in the crosshairs, we should recall the adage that when we point a finger, there are three pointing back at us.

How is it that, despite having excellent examples right under our nose, we have designed systems that poison us daily—systems that ignore the fact that we live in a self-contained living apparatus, a “mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam”, to quote Karl Sagan?

Let’s look at some of those excellent examples. They come from nature, a design firm that’s been doing this for billions of years. But first, we must wonder why we’ve ignored these solutions for so long. They’re hiding in plain sight. Try this simple test: Ask someone, “Who makes the world’s best solar panels?” Most likely, they’ll reply that they don’t know or they’ll name some company—this despite the fact that they’ve all seen them: leaves on plants. I suspect that it has something to do with our anthropomorphism, our belief that what we create is superior to nature’s, our belief that we are the most evolved form of life.

Nature’s most important design principle is probably the following: Good design doesn’t compromise the well-being of future generations. Life wants to keep living. Fouling your habitat is very counter (re)productive. We ignore this one with abandon. The Gulf of Mexico is witness.

In keeping with this first principle, nature has figured out a way to deal with trash: it becomes food for another organism. Nature’s trash sustains life and promotes the well-being of future generations. We could learn something here. A century of promiscuous chemistry has produced trash that is toxic to life. Human trash hasn’t learned how to play nice yet. Nature builds just about everything using just four elements: oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and hydrogen. This makes sense since these elements are readily and locally available in air, water and soil and don’t require costly, far-flung extraction. In addition, they are not toxic to life. The spider and the peanut understands this.

Nature’s materials science allows for efficient recyclability, which is another way of being efficient with materials and energy. Nature’s materials don’t end up as dead ends in landfills; they instead, get repurposed into other high value materials. Discarded peanut shells become food for microorganisms, which in turn nourish many other forms of life which manufacture a variety of materials like wood, fur, vegetable oils… Making complex materials like bones, kidneys, shells… using only four elements requires very good design sense—design sense that humans are only starting to consider. Nature has no need for gold, silver or plutonium. Why do we?

Nature's material use is efficient and parsimonious

Another of nature’s design principles is to use only the energy it can capture daily from the sun. Using this approach, nature has become efficient, sustainable and clean. We humans on the other hand, have ignored this important principle, choosing instead to live off stored solar energy in the form of coal, oil and gas. While this is convenient in the short term, it has made us sloppy, wasteful, and toxic.

What is the purpose of universities is not for future generations? Hunter Lovins

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When nature constructs, it is stingy with materials and the energy needed to build. The super-efficient manufacturing that takes place inside a spider outrivals anything humans have ever devised. A spider can produce silk that is 6 times stronger than steel using non-toxic, locally-sourced materials and it does this at room temperature with no pollution of any kind. Visiting a steel mill will provide a powerful contrast into how each species approaches materials science. One supports BP, the other has no need for it.

How will we fuel our lives if we don’t rely on Big Oil? With ideas and information. Yes, literally. An idea, like the shape of a whale’s fin or a leaf’s formula for efficiently using solar energy can obviate the need for oil. Amory Lovins calls these avoided units of energy negawatts, and, as he points out, they’re much cheaper to produce than oil. They’re also benign.

We need to remember that what is scarce on our finite planet is not oil, and it’s not water. It’s oil without water. It’s not air. It’s air without pollutants. The conditions that promote life are scarcer than any material we could ever imagine. But maybe what’s scarcest today is the leadership in congress and in the boardroom which has the conscience and courage to promote good design. It was, after all, good design that allowed Homo sapiens to develop a conscience  in the first place.

The world of life was quiet before and it has been relatively quiet since [the last 600 million years]. The recent evolution of consciousness must be viewed as the most cataclysmic happening since the Cambrian if only for its geologic and ecological effects. Major events in evolution do not require the origin of new designs. The flexible eukaryotes will continue to produce novelty and diversity so long as one of its latest products controls itself well enough to assure the world a future.” Stephen Jay Gould in Ever Since Darwin

Not too long ago, I watched as various self-righteously indignant politicians grilled (not without justification) various BP executives about the situation in the Gulf. With stern, admonishing tones, they called for resignations and ritual disembowelment. Grandstanding was the order of the day. It all seemed very disingenuous.

I wondered what these politicians had done to limit the flow of oil from the earth’s crust? What legislation have they passed that promotes efficiency as opposed to profligate consumption? How have they helped education become more innovative so that it becomes part of the solution instead of part of the problem? What incentives have they put in place to promote long-term well-being as opposed to short-term profit? How has their leadership improved the habitability of the planet? What innovative thinking have they brought to the table? I suspect that if they had been on the stand and had been asked the questions above, they would have stonewalled a little too.

Bird lover Steve Scalise

Creepy? Over-reactive? Just a bunch of crunchies being paranoid? You decide.  (One of the speakers,  Juliet Schor, is an author of several interesting books.) Hope this gets funded. If interested, you can help out by visiting: Documentary Home or  Ground Productions.