Dec

11

Miley Cyrus v Pope Francis

Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

A good headline attracts attention. And I do have some, lame, excuse, since my headliners were both in the top 10 mentions on Facebook. As a commentator on these matters I am only deficient in two small details: I am not on Facebook and, ahem, I did have to look up Ms Cyrus. But in other respects I come by the subject matter honestly. Both parties here had their 2013 fame boosted by a “new publishing” combo of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Neither was reliant on “old publishing” in the form of TV, radio or even newspapers or books, and indeed old media spent the year covering what these individuals did in new media terms. And while old media compete for the attention scraps (and I am sure Mike Schatzkin is right when he says that once TV becomes a world of self-scheduled downloads it competes more effectively with the time slots currently held by reading) our thoughts should turn naturally to the complete disintermediation of access in the network.

Which mine did when I saw Cambridge Assessment announce a conference on “The School in the Cloud” for next February (http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/insights/schools-in-the-cloud/). In some ways we have already removed “teaching”: what school, teacher or publisher would not subscribe to the idea of the “learner-centric” world today? And quite right too. Yet we have scarcely begun to cope with the real social ramifications of everyone learning at their point of learning readiness. Teachers have not been repositioned as mentors and moderators, the mobile/multi-site nature of education using technology is not yet clear, we still expect everyone to reach the same levels of achievement at the same time, and we blame the teachers when results fail expectations. Arguably, we should put the resources online, create the programming that links resources into learning journeys, watch the outcomes and abandon formal assessment. But the world that moves lightning fast in some places grinds very slow in others. This week I at last saw an advertisement for a course which cheerfully announced its BYOD status (Bring Your Own Device). And while I was delighted the same day to see the announcement that McGraw Hill Education would produce all their content to IMS Interoperability standards, allowing users the ability to use it with true digital flexibility, I still wonder why we did not do this years ago: recalling a discussion at an ELIG meeting in Sestre Levante in the early years of this century when we all agreed on the necessity – but did nothing.

And in all these discussions we keep ignoring the powerful things that happen when someone educates themselves. Yesterday the death of Colin Wilson was announced, whose books “The Outsider” and “Religion and the Rebel” lit up my teenage years and sent me to university as an existentialist. My first visit to Paris was dominated by the need to haunt the Boul’ Mich for a sight of Sartre, Camus or de Beauvoir. Wilson was an entire autodidact, son of a shoe industry worker who left school at 14. There is something wonderful about knowledge gathered the way he gained his, and small wonder he expounded it with such enthusiasm, given that he had quarried it himself. And how sad it is that, now that both of my younger children are at university themselves, I can confess to my entire dissatisfaction with the way they were educated at both public and private schools. What do you recommend in terms of reading around the subject at A level? I asked the head of Classics. Not on my course he replied. All the pupil needs to know is the mark scheme. This is about Results. Reading around the subject? he repeated. Takes far too much time and any additional knowledge gained only confuses them. Well, Mr Gradgrind is now over 150 years old. Dickens’ brilliant creation should be left where he belongs and removed from current teaching/anti-learning practice. Do we want education as workflow (which, paradoxically, is what assessment has given us) – or as Discovery?

So the disintermediation of the teacher may bring some unexpected rewards. Along with the same process in most other professions. The shattering of the legal profession in the last downturn is typical. As we turn the Cloud into everyone’s back office, so we grow in realization that most back offices are all similar And once you get into workflow, you are moving away from reference and research – and reading around the subject. Legal services which began as support activities like PLC, acquired this year by Thomson Reuters, end up as a wholly new way of out-sourcing areas like corporate law. With operations like Axiom Law (http://www.axiomlaw.co.uk/) growing rapidly – and globally from the start – this type of disintermediation may be quicker. And, incidentally, they will need the same skill sets as current publishing/legal services. It is no accident that Axiom have appointed, it is said, a leading Lexis executive to run one of their regional businesses.

Current publishers will react in two ways. One will be to develop the software which enables learners to learn by creating journeys and relearning experiences, and link relevant content, their own and other people’s, to it. And the other will be to ensure that base level primary content is available in the system at all points. In this regard the science publisher’s who worked with CERN on SCOAP3, the largest physics archive ever assembled, which goes live on 1 January 2014, are to be congratulated. And so, incidentally, is Pope Francis, who beat Miley Cyrus by seven places to head up the Facebook league table (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/online/pope-francis-miley-cyrus-and-a-royal-baby-what-facebook-talked-about-in-2013-8994023.html). Now that’s a rare victory for the archaic tongue – pity I never managed to teach myself Latin successfully!

Nov

29

Neon City

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

Perhaps the one thing that Korean cities like Busan and Seoul have in common with Hong Kong is the neon. Looking out of a Hong Kong Club window earlier this week around 8 pm I observed the office building light show, as each of the major buildings showed off their neon displays in a winking cacophony of soundless light. Very impressive, and a good backdrop to the intellectual light show the next day, as the opening speaker at the Business Information Industry Association (BIIA) joint event with the Hong Kong Knowledge Management Society and Hong Kong Polytechnic University took us on an intellectual journey into artificial intelligence that all of us following speakers struggled to emulate. But as an exercise in reconciling the thinking of CIO/CTO – level management with the current developments in data analytics the whole meeting could not have been better organized. As well as a vision of the potential futures in machine and system intelligence, it provided here and now guidance eon the reasons why we need to start and continue down this path, and the benefits we may expect to gain from doing so.

But let me start at the beginning. The first speaker, Ben Goertzel, is both an AI expert, and an innovator and entrepreneur. With his colleagues at Aidyia (www.aidyia.com), at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and through his OpenCog Foundation (http://goertzel.org; http://opencog.org) he works both as a developer of new concepts, and of applications in financial services and trading markets. Aidiya “Aidyia is developing advanced artificial intelligence technology to model and predict financial markets. Aidyia’s predictive model will empower programmed trading systems for fund management.” He gave as good a demonstration as you could wish for if you accept Ray Kurzweil’s proposition that machine intelligence will exceed human intelligence by 2045. Yet much of his talk underlined the idea that you do not need belief: there is enough already in the marketplace to persuade us that we are progressively replacing certain tasks in society with machine intelligence, and that this is a beneficial process.

Here then was a session where the AGI element was centre stage, but you did not have to be a follower of Singularity theory or a robotics fanatic to carry away an enduring belief in the ability of men like Ben Goertzel to change entirely the basis upon which we look at the intelligence which we are currently building into the world of solutions and services. So it was heartening after this to hear Euan Semple drawing upon his valuable experience as head of social media at the BBC to persuade us that we need to grow up – and grow into our inheritance as the interpreters and re-users of the most valuable insights available in the unforced and natural communication within the social media network. In other words, social media are vital if we want to contextualize our analytics and give a reality check to what we are doing with data elsewhere.

Which nicely prepared us for the challenge of cloud computing, as presented by Professor Eric Tsui of HK Polytechnic University. But we were soon past conventional cloud environments Professor Tsui believes with great persuasive power that we shall soon exhaust the cost reduction and compliance benefits of the current cloud collaboration. He calls this the “adolescent cloud”, and excited all of us with a vision of the cloud playing a role in Open Innovation, and in Connectionist learning – a Knowledge Cloud. The Tsui theory that the cloud will become a key element in new business model development and rapid re-iteration of service models is an attractive one, and it blends the cloud as a huge data repository firmly into other strands of developmental and analytical thinking. And these mental fireworks had scarcely died down before Professor Nicolas Lesca of the Universite Claude Bernard at Lyon took the stage. His argument – and I suspect that we had the preliminaries of a presentation of several hours – is that data analytics now adds an extra dimension in a way that few of us had considered before. His arguments were all about the interpretation of weak signals, picking up messages from the data which might previously have never been heard or measured, let alone interpreted. How you amplify these signals, and separate noise from content, is the subject of Professor Lesca’s research, and his thinking had a clear resonance for the debate in the room.

For those whose heads were aching with ideas overload, it was good that the last speaker was the present writer, trying to sum up and pull these themes together. Is there a dichotomy between knowledge management and so-called “Big Data”? Not in this conference. Speakers simply added richness and complexity to the increasing importance of knowledge management subsuming all of these AI, social media, cloud computing and weak signalling themes. As a result marketplaces for information grow more rewarding as well as more complex, and the skills base around knowledge work becomes ever more demanding. I hope the Professors in our programme are as good at producing knowledge managers as they obviously are at knowledge research. And one last thought lingered in my mind. Several times in the day we hovered over search. The expression “needle in a haystack” was used, and we pointed out to each other how inappropriate it was. After all, if we knew we were looking for a needle, and that the place where it was to be found was in a haystack, then the job was done. Bring in the metal detector! Yet the first image I recall in the early days of search was of a huge bale of documentation in an advertisement for BRS Search with people crawling all over it – a veritable document haystack. If Knowledge Management has anything to do with that world then all is lost. If we have not disintegrated and disaggregated the document then we are never going to get to a point of data granularity where this new world has a chance of working. At the moment, though no one said it here in Hong Kong, Knowledge managers may be adherents to the brave new world when out of the office, but too many are prisoners of the wicked world of legacy document based systems when they get home.

Please check the websites of BIIA (www.biia.com) and HKKMS (www.hkkms.hk) for further reports and the slide sets from this really interesting meeting.

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