It seems that it may come, but I won’t know til it gets here.
There’s a strangeness to not knowing, but knowing that it may come.
It’s not me, it’s them. I have lost control, and yet am in control.
They think they know what they’re doing, but I’m sure they’re don’t.
It will come.
And I’ll still be here.
I am at a cross road. Is that one word or two? Singular or plural?
I have written so many waffly (unpublishable) posts recently and you should thank me that I haven’t posted them.
There are big upheavals coming. Okay, they won’t even be noticeable to most people, but for me, they are significant.
I work in a business faculty, something that always makes me confused. I’m not sure how that happened. But the future is upon us, and that future is not what I thought it was. I thought that business of the future would possibly be more engaged with ‘consumers’, ‘client’s’ or whatever we call ourselves. But I am wrong!
Business as she is taught now (and I don’t know why she is she, but she must be) is about know what worked last year. There, I’ve said it. Everything around me seems to be looking backwards. I keep looking forward. Okay, maybe not really forward, more around and about and up and down, I’m not really a visionary, particularly not when it comes to business.
So it is with heavy feet and glad heart, that I declare myself to be not a business person, not an IS person. I did try, I’ve been trying for four and a half years. But, alas, I failed. I failed to become what I didn’t want to be. Hence the glad heart.
But one thing I will miss is teaching a course called Mobile Workforce Technologies. It’s not even about technology, nor about business even though its name says technology and it’s located in a business faculty. This course has given me so much, provided me with such insights into human learning, to cultural differences, to community and many more ideas. I want it to keep going. I want to make a place like that that lives beyond a single semester.
I have another domain that I’m using for that course. I think it would be a great place to develop a shared resource for learning technologies. I may well start that. The domain is shiftingsand.net. Why shiftingsand.net? Have you ever tried to catch shifting sand with a net? No? Neither have I. But the idea of that, of catching the shifting sand of our times, the learning and changes around us is what lead me to that domain.
I want to create a community there. I want the learners of the world to engage in defining what it means to learn now. I’m seriously thinking of setting up a wiki (gotta love a wiki) and a space for a community to develop.
Does anyone want to play?
I’ve been teaching first year Business Informatics for 3 years now and I think I’m starting to get the hang of it. No, that’s not right, I think the students are finally at a place where I’m not that far ahead.
When I started teaching this course, it was pretty ‘scrugged’. It was a traditional IS/IT course with a ‘shotgun’ approach to learning. We basically filled students with the bits and bolts of Information Systems. Each week was a new set of stuff to be remembered. When I took over, it was renamed from Business Information Systems to Business Informatics to coincide with the new book ‘The Book of Informatics’ which just happened to be written by our Professor of Information Systems. That book gave me licence to innovate. I spent my summer holiday reading it and rethinking the course. Since then, there’s been continual updating and tweaking to get it right.
One thing that struck me tonight during the lecture is something that I ask during the first lecture each semester. How many students have a FaceBook? This year, I think nearly a third of the attending students raised their hands (last semester I think there was about 10 out of 200 in the room). I got daring and asked how many had a MySpace. Not as many. Then I threw caution to the wind and asked how many had Twitter. Surprisingly, there were more on Twitter this semester than there were on FaceBook last semester. Last semester I actually had to ask if they’d even heard of Twitter and the response was a dismal no. So, there’s a very different feel to the class which is only partly explained by being in a smaller lecture theatre. Heck, there was even a student who approached me at the end of the class to tell me she was a mod on a wiki somewhere (I can’t remember where now, but that’s post lecture funk, I’m sure I’ll be chatting with her again).
Amusingly, no mobile phones went off, so I didn’t get to dance to any unusual ring tones, but I did dance to the music I put in my video. I did mention that it was probably the lamest video that they would have to watch all semester (it came after the sheep).
It’s always interesting doing this course, because I’m able to push the boundaries. I tell students they are not buckets, and I will not fill them with facts to be regurgitated in the exam – any facts in the course will be outdated by the time they finish their degree so that’s a pretty pointless exercise. This group seemed to get that, although some seemed a bit tentative. But that’s okay, it really is only week 1 and there’s a heckuva lot more to follow.
And it’s crossing a track (the Internet), and there’s a train (people) heading towards the level crossing. It’s going to be a mess, the truck will be wrecked. The train will probably be badly damaged, but the track? It will be fixed. It will stay there. It’s not going away and there is too much value to be had from the track, whether another truck comes along and attempts to cross the track while the train is there is anybody’s guess. There will always be trains on the track. But trucks? There’s heaps of them, some of them manage to cross the track without getting in the way of the trains. But the trucks who insist upon right of way when there’s a train bearing down on them have only themselves to blame for the damage, to train, to tracks. They will eventually pay. They may say the level crossing lights didn’t work, but eventually, we realise that the truck that flies in the face of a train deserves no sympathy. We should not make trains stop for trucks.
Censorship is a truck too. It will make a mess, but eventually, the trucks realise that the train is bigger than anything they have encountered. They need to be wary of trains. Trains are the only things that are bigger than trucks.
I think this analogy needs work.
Senator Conroy (our dear, dear friend) invoked Moore’s Law with regards to the filtering systems currently available. I haven’t actually heard what he said about it[1], although I’m quite able to comment on just the fact that he did mention it and luckily read the transcript.
Moore’s Law, as depicted by the Wikipedia page linked above “describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware” (emphasis added). In layman’s terms, it is often rendered as “computers get twice as good every two years”. It sounds simple enough, but if you read on, the entry continues:
Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years.
So, we have a physical capacity that is increasing, relating to the hardware. So, surely that can apply to the software running on it? After all, the filter will be software that is run on hardware (which we’ve just established is getting better).
Let’s think about that. We had Windows 1 in 1985, Windows 2 in 1987 (so far, it works), Windows 3 in 1990 (slightly behind schedule), Windows 4 (AKA Windows 95) in 1995 (slipping a bit here), Window 5 (AKA Windows 98) in 1998 (almost back on track), Windows 2000 (and its variations) and Windows XP (in 2001) which together should make 6 and 7, but are probably variations on Windows 5[2]. These two were nearly on schedule according to this mythical Software verstion of Moore’s Law. Then we got Vista … in 2006. Whoops, running a bit behind schedule. The next version coming will be Windows 7 (see, I did mention there was something wrong with the versioning system of Windows) is currently in Beta which means it could be ready for 2009 (still behind MSML – Mythical Software Moore’s Law).
To turn the other cheek, so to speak, Macintosh System Software (Version 1) was released in 1984 (January to be precise), System 2 in 1985 (April, we’re doing pretty well here), System 3 came out in January 1986 (ahead of the ball game here), System 4 was released in 1987 (March – still meeting targets), System 5 was 1987 (no month available) and System 6 in 1988 (unverified on Wikipedia from which all the above are drawn). I’m no expert on all of these systems, but I’ve played with a few. The Wikipedia article suggests there were major updates in Systems 1, 4, 5 and 6 which gives us periods of 3 years, some months, then one year. Following System 6, we had system 7[3] released in 1991, but there was no major update until Mac OS 8[4] in 1997, giving us 6 years, rather than the suggested two. OS 9 was released in 1999 (back to the 2 years), then OS X in 2001 (and a version of that every year or two … Mac users are suckers for the shiney).
So, without even going near the run of the mill application software, we see intermittent development (some coinciding with major developments in the technology – probably related to Moore’s Law) with no pattern emerging. There’s no Moore’s Law for software! We cannot predict when improvements will happen, because as soon as something is done, the chips are all updated and it has to be tested again with new parameters and invariably, the code that runs it, no longer does in the way that was anticipated. So, we can’t even predict when things will change, unlike the physical measurements that have been observed with hardware.
So what about wetware? What’s that you say? What is wetware? Well, that’s our brains. I’m fairly sure there has been some significant improvements in the functioning and capabilities of the human brain, and I’m pretty sure that Moore’s Law does not apply. Although, perhaps it simply applies to the propensity to develop new ideas[5]. Perhaps we will find that Moore’s Law of the Human Psyche will allow our politicians (not mentioning any names, Senator Conroy) to develop a new idea every 2 years. Which would be positive, because we’ve already lived through enough of this filtering crap.
Can we have our new idea early, Senator Conroy?
Tags: censorship, nocleanfeed
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