Dec

5

Outsourcing My Brain

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, data protection, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, privacy, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments

During this period of enforced convalescence I have had to come to grips with the idea that my brain only works effectively when supported by the memory in all the devices around me. And that this state of dependency is now global. Without our membership of a globally networked society we would become slow and inefficient: with it we become dependent. And it is this dependency which seems to me the first stop on a mental route march which we need to make. I am far from the first to try to examine what Internet of Things (IoT) or, as some will say, Internet of Everything (IoE) will mean for social, industrial or commercial aspects of society. But I do not yet hear much examination of this phenomena in terms of the information industry, let alone the businesses we insist on still calling “publishing” or the “media”.

Let’s start at a point of common agreement. We are in the middle of a new industrial revolution. For evidence, check the websites of IEEE or IET: the latter have just published a splendid “Ones to Watch” report (http://www.theiet.org/policy/media/campaigns/ones-to-watch.cfm?utm_source=redirect&utm_medium=any&utm_campaign=onestowatch#.VHt6PmB0imw.mailto).
They see the vanguard industries in this fundamental change in the nature of commerce and society – think what happened in the UK between 1780 and 1830 – as driven by space exploration, robotics. 3D printing (I would rather they had spoken of additive manufacturing), new energy networks, food manufacturing and cyber-security. I buy all of those, but would add drug manufacture driven by individual DNA analysis.

Underlying this social and industrial revolution is the revolution that makes it all possible: the global connectivity of network – attached computing power, and it’s ability to exploit intelligence and data generated in the network. Only this week Professor Steven Hawking has pointed out the dangers of AI outside of man’s control. My feelings run the other way: it amazes me that while we have spoken of machine intelligence for 30 years we have so little to show for it. Only in the past few years has the ability to harvest data more effectively, and the ability to cross- search it without restructuring it, produced real results in terms of the impact of the data analytics advances (“Big Data”) really struck home. While we will always be seduced by thrills and tricks (Google Glasses?), we can now see machine intelligence built into most common workflows and at a variety of levels.

Here is a list, posted by Vincent Granville at DataScienceCentral, of impact areas for data analysis in the next ten years:

(http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/17-areas-to-benefit-from-big-data-analytics-in-next-10-years)

Just look at how many of these impact the information industry marketplace. As our world of work changes so the very survival of information market players will depend upon how easily we are able to track change and react to it. But what part of this struggle to survive can we lay at the door of IoT/IoE? And can we picture an IoT world which is less trivial than sports wearables or more useful than a car that turns on the house lights at home when you are still a mile away? Well, obviously we can, but the unacceptable passengers riding on the back of IoT must then be taken into account. Yes, it does mean that we shall move from the age of privacy into the age of transparency – and we are halfway there already. And, yes, it does mean that employment is going to be very different. We will lose millions of jobs, and we are surprisingly far down this track as well. The UK public sector will lose a further Million jobs in the next five years, we learnt this week. Some of those will be outsourced but governments do not give up governing lightly – and many of those jobs will become automated systems roles in the outsourcing process . And it may well mean that, at last, we have to properly rethink what Capitalism means. After all, a zero marginal production cost society will ask questions about how the profit mechanism works.

For a good review of many of these questions see Sue Halpern’s review article in New York Review of Books (vol. LXI, Number 18, 3December 2014). Cisco famously predicts that all of this adds up to a 14.4 trillion dollar boost to the global economy between now and 2022. The 10 million sensors that measured our world in 2007 will number 100 trillion by 2030. In Rotterdam docks all containers will be engineered for auto drive by 2018. Uber, a precursor of the automated driving world, was as valuable as Time Warner this very month. For better or worse, this world is with us now. This is not 1780 in the original British experience, but 1820 and the railway boom is just beginning. And for information companies of every type there is a corresponding possibility of mega growth, as long as we read change accurately. Wherein lies a problem that I want to address later.

Nov

28

Fogyism: Old, New and Educational

Filed Under Big Data, Blog, Cengage, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Pearson, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

Forgive the fury of a man typing while lying on his back. This is the first outing of this mind since an operation on my spine to correct a slipped disc. As in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the recovering patient could well be a cockroach, and may be better off as one in a country whose school minister lauds a deeply undistinguished contribution to the debate on improving educational standards from Tim Oates of Cambridge Assessment (http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/Images/181744-why-textbooks-count-tim-oates.pdf). A key argument here is that the absence of “approved” textbooks has diminished UK performance, compared with educational superpowers like Finland and Singapore. Mr Oates makes it clear that his romantic preference is for paper-based resources, and that his attachments are to the world of Nuffield Science and Scottish Maths (SMP), foundation and government funded projects of the 1970s in the UK. British teachers are using too wide a diversity of methods, use their own materials and exchange materials between themselves in ways that make for an undisciplined approach to gaining the outcomes desired by Mr Oakes high stakes testing and the Ministers’ national aspiration for PISA performance.

We have to put up with a lot of this Old and New Fogyism in the UK. I was an educational textbook publisher myself in the 1970s, when the champion of the art of facing backward while walking forward was Sir Rhodes Boyson, then headmaster of Highbury Grove Comprehensive in North London, and later himself a Conservative Party Schools Minister no more effective than his current successors. I wrote to him and visited the school. He explained how the re-introduction of Latin and Greek, as well as demanding that academic staff wear their gowns while teaching, were instrumental in bringing back traditional British public school (private sector) values to public sector schools like this one.After lunch one-on-one in his private dining room I was invited to tour the school with a prefect. Sadly the Latin class had only two pupils, and no one at all showed up for Greek, but I did find myself eventually in the Craft and Design centre. Here, unmentioned by my host, was a powerhouse. Working with the London jewellery markets, a brilliant teacher had created a pupil driven skill development programme which resulted in outwork and, for many, apprenticeships in the jewellery companies, who, alongside grateful parents, had endowed the school handsomely with the resources needed to do the job. The Craft teacher had been there long before his headmaster and did not relish fame: he was committed to education, and to getting his kids what they needed to be successful in life. And as a publisher I was committed to identifying good practice and spreading it around. So we shook on a publishing deal that afternoon and the four book series published as a result was very successful.

So these things are seldom what they seem to be. While mulling on these issues I heard an earlier occupier of the education ministry in the current government, Michael Gove, telling the media what he had done to improve Britain’s teaching stock. Do you realise, he said, that one in eight teachers have a first class degree and over a third have a two: one, and it is getting better every year? And it is this better-qualified workforce who are to be given a standardised, government- approved textbook by Mr Oates? Amazingly, neither Mr Oates nor Mr Gove dwelt on the critical bedevillment factor that needs to be considered before we begin to think about reintroducing paper textbooks. Class size. Pressure on UK state schools is now such that the numbers of students in class is rising, not falling. The inability to cover all bases means that, using traditional methods, it is difficult for the very best qualified teachers to do more than work on the brightest and the most troubled, because these are the noisiest and the most problematical. In the middle of a class of 35 an average pupil can sleep for five years, unchallenged and under-extended. The textbook is the proven route to making this happen.

So what to do? I was delighted to see both the British Equipment Supplies Association and the Publishers Association come out against the Oates paper. They are rightly afraid of any diminution of the traditional right of teachers in the UK to have unfettered freedom of choice in the selection of materials that they use to secure the outcomes that they were employed to achieve. The Oates paper is fragile. It generalises from science and maths to the whole curriculum. Its prejudice against screen-based learning as anything but a support mechanism is palpable. The publishing community is right to condemn it, but urgently needs to go beyond it by abolishing some of its own Fogyism. Let’s make a bonfire of blended learning and all those other halfway houses where we have sought to slowly introduce change at a pace that we think teachers (or ourselves?) can manage. Now is the time for full blooded screen based personalised learning. We have to teach individuals, not classes. The teaching role, as mentor and organized, is vital, but learners must learn at their own speed.we are not educating people for a world of print anymore. We have to raise a generation of collaborative, problem solving screen-based workers capable, as change grows more rapid, of continuous and self-learning. Mr Oates, the Minister, the trade bodies and everyone else should really be asking where the partnerships are between Britain’s great publishers, world-leading software players, educational data analytics specialists, educational institutions and high quality teachers who are going to sort this out. At the moment we see a competition of domestic minnows each trying to live in a version of their own past. We are in danger of letting down a generation of learners.

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