Children of the Cloud
Most of my recent innovation work has been in the area of mobile cultural media and professional networking, so I’ve had my head in the clouds for a while.
I’m particularly enthusiastic about cloud learning, not so much for many of the reasons already put forward, but mostly for the inevitably changed and enhanced relationship that all individuals will have with the web, and even themselves, because of the cloud.
Without diving too deeply into the theory, the human brain is an intensely self-referential system. It operates like a huge app store where most of the apps act as strange loops. Just about the only restriction on our brains is that they have been entirely self-contained so far. The cloud changes this forever. We will soon have all kinds of apps operating exclusively for us, like extra-sensory perceptions, providing new and enhanced forms of self-referential feedback that will dramatically extend our sense of identity. Facebook is an example of some of the first dimensions of this in the social domain. For me then, the excitement of the cloud is therefore about a transformative extension of the social web into a personal web. And from there into previously incredible learner-centered opportunities.
What could such ‘cloud-augmented individuality’ look like? Consider the possibilities of continuously-refined, completely private, and entirely personalized search engines, noise filters, social media analytics, and augmented memory, to name a few. A few days ago Kyle mentioned some of the buzz around the Apple iPhone4’s re-engineered “Siri” tool. Well, once you get around the geekyness of Siri, and many of the areas where it doesn’t work well yet, you start to understand the potential of owning your own personal digital assistant operating for you 24/7 in the cloud, like your own genie. We barely have the slightest clue about what this will feel like for everyone, even a couple of years from now.
And while the concerns of privacy and security have already been referred to many times this week, I’m not especially worried about them relative to equivalent threats in the real world. We will have to fight for them, be vigilant about them, possibly even occupy the Internet in order to preserve them, but I sense that the unprecedented personal potentials and advantages of cloud computing will naturally make everyone inclined to value these rights more than we do now on the web, and perhaps soon even more than we do in the real world. I expect that this personal web transformation will lead to a level of emancipation that humankind hasn’t felt since starting to climb out of serfdom in the middle ages. We won’t give that up easily.
And, as always, I’m only wrong 99.9% of the time.
I’ve just had a chapter with the above title accepted for publication, so if anyone wants to read more and critique heavily, please email me for a confidential copy.
David
Posted in: Week 08: Files in the Cloud
David William Price 2:21 pm on October 27, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi David
Thanks for posting this. I’m thinking there is way too much IT focus in the cloud discussions thus far. I’d have to take issue with the concept that our brains have been self-contained thus far. Have you had the chance to read Don Normans, “The Design of Everyday Things”? It addresses the concept of memory that is internal and external, with external memory incorporating not only memos and job aids but even good design — a well-designed thing incorporates enough knowledge to allow you to operate it automatically to accomplish a task. I think this is further developed in literature about cognitive tools which include things as simple as spreadsheets and concept-mapping.
I think I’ve mentioned before my concern with hyper-personalization – that we get trapped in our niches and stop stumbling into different points of view that challenge our existing paradigms. I would be very interested in a cloud paradigm that integrates a heuristic for enhancing my critical thinking rather than something that cocoons me and my limited experience set.
But maybe I completely misunderstood your point?
David Vogt 2:43 pm on October 27, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
And thanks for these thoughts. Yes, Norman’s sense of design is deeply resonant with self-referential nature of the brain. What I mean by ‘contained’ is that the dynamic tools of identity re-generation are entirely local rather than distributed. And so much of who we are was already ‘hyper-personalized’ before anything digital came along; the whole point of self-reference is to simultaneously challenge and reinforce, based on new information, different aspects of the models we build about ourselves. Enhancing your critical thinking – I bet you could build an app for that!
David William Price 3:05 pm on October 27, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Sounds interesting if I could grasp it better. I like the concept of the challenging but I guess I need more hand holding to understand how this works.
At an Australian university teaching nurses, they built a web-based app that pushed nurses through a critical-thinking algorithm as they were writing literature reviews (it’s called WRAP). Basically a series of prompts to push students through a model of thinking. They want to abstract this into a heuristic. Sounds very cool.
Jim 7:15 pm on October 27, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I agree that as people become more and more digitally mobile, cloud computing will become the primary method for accomplishing tasks. The new mobile culture and explosion of devices reminds me a little of the thin client idea… Most of the data storage and computing horsepower is going to reside server side… but the devices we slip into our pockets or bags are far more powerful than those thin clients ever were. I have also thought that the agent or genie or PDA idea would have been here by now. I remember reading about personal digital agents over ten years ago and then, there was nothing… Siri is rather like that but ‘she’ doesn’t act independently, anticipating your wants or needs based on past interactions (does it? I haven’t used it, only seen it in use).
jarvise 7:09 am on October 28, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Your thoughts on the changed relationships between people with themselves and with the web make sense in terms of distributed cognition. I read an article a few years back about brain plasticity and spacial sense and reasoning. Basically, the argument being made was that increased reliance on GPS navigation units actually changed our brains at a structural level (hippocampus, maybe?). Because we don’t need to know how to get somewhere, it becomes a waste of space. If we are rewiring in response to technology, then anywhere/anytime access becomes imperative. Cloud-based delivery of services becomes essential. Its interesting to think of the environment as extending into the digital realm. The ideas that purport to reveal and clarify our thinking (and even enhance collaboration) such as mind mapping don’t seem to be growing in any big collaborative way. The places seeing enhanced collaboration of minds right now (from what I can see) are places like blogs, youtube, and consumer comments on products. Its hard to envision where we will be in a couple of years.
Emily
kstooshnov 1:54 pm on October 28, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Emily,
I agree with your point about the rewiring of the human brain but wonder about the “wasted space,” do you mean such mental functions as locating places, remembering phone numbers or sustaining our attention span (to sit through a Wagnerian opera, for instance) are being lost, or just relegated to the figurative “back of our mind,” the 90% of the brain we supposedly don’t use? When gathering information for the eBook EMA, I heard a lecture on how reading has changed with the latest technology, similar to how Gutenberg’s press changed reading several centuries ago. Since then, reading and writing have taken on new shape, and it seems more important for students to learn how to navigate through a webpage and post comments than it does for how to use the Dewey-decimal system or cursive handwriting.
While it seems spooky to suggest that we should allow parts of our brain and their related skills to waste away, technology such as cloud computing, or even the PDA-in-place-of-memory, may be part of the human species’ evolution – we are the ones designing this stuff after all. One only hopes that we learned enough lessons from the 20th century, such as the damages to the planet from our dependency on oil, or to our bodies from microwave ovens and processed foods, that we don’t mess things up with our minds too much. But even if we do, someone will probably create some psychoanalyst app to fix it :-l
Kyle
khenry 7:10 am on October 29, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi David,
As a follow up to my comments to Doug and in response to your post, I believe that technology itself is evolving to what is a more ‘natural response’. Students and processes are driving the media used/media design in education, the needs of society are also driving the media in order to get out their message hence now the message is driving the media/technology use/design. We are finding out more about ourselves and trying to tap into or harness even greater power. Our ability to harness/ facilitate the ‘natural response’ as well as to develop/extrapolate potential are going to be central to future successful ventures.
Kerry-Ann