Adobe Education Leaders

My title alludes to Don Shebib’s iconic Canadian movie version of the Iliad—the classic account of the collective journey brought back from beyond the margins of the known—from the creature comfort of the status-quo or the cozy confines of the Hobbits’ shire, in the case of J.R. Tolkein’s novel, The Hobbit.

Teaching, for me, is a story of adventure, of audacity and derring-do. The complimentary aspect of teaching is, of course, learning and the two are mutually interdependent aspects of the same thing—a journey of transformation that, necessarily, brings tectonic shifts in our collective worldview that in turn changes the way we see ourselves and the way in which we engage the world. It is a process of invigoration whereby our lives are given deeper meaning and purpose.

I suppose I chose the awkward, Canadian version of this iconic journey for its allusion to the film whose lack of polish gives it a certain honesty and rawness that lacks the gloss of something that has been overly refined. Refinement and process for me are anathema to the sort of real and visceral learning that typically happens when we wade into uncharted territory—all else is sophistry and formulaic to my mind and this can be the source of some philosophical inconsistencies teaching in a Community College with its traditional emphasis on what the Sophists referred to as “techne.”

I am greatly influenced by the Greek philosophers and, although I derive inspiration from pioneers in holistic education like Rudolph Steiner, I am a Platonist at heart.

I see my role as a catalyst in the ongoing process of the personal transformation of those with whom I am privileged to share time along the path of an incredible adventure that leads us ever forward toward the unknown horizons of a shared dream. Along the way, we listen and help to draw out one another’s hopes, fears and dreams in order to facilitate the process of mapping the route that we have travelled and to reflect on that journey in order to provide a contextual narrative that will help to ground our decisions for setting course for new, uncharted shores. I embrace the wisdom of Poet Robert Frost in his classic “The Road Not Taken.”

I encourage my fellow travelers to be explorers as opposed to tourists—to eschew the proven, vicarious and rote in favour of the novel and risk-laden experiences that enrich the threads of one’s personal narrative and make life and learning interesting and engaging. I encourage trust—trust in oneself, in others and in the possibilities of meeting the unknown. Trust in oneself breeds confidence in one’s abilities to face the unscripted challenges of life. School can too often be nothing more than a “canned experience” that mitigates risk and seeks to contain and restrain by delivering standardized, routinized and predictable outcomes that are at odds with the unpredictable and intractable nature of everyday existence. Trust in others is an essential ingredient of our collective identity. It is the glue that binds us and enables us to do things collectively in a way that transcends the limitations of the individual and allows opportunities for our collective energies to be given sublime, concrete expression. It engenders a form of free and responsible citizenship whose greatest goods come from active participation in the co-creation and co-stewardship of the common good.

A long history in improvisational theatre has taught me the value of collaboration and the importance of both giving and receiving of offers of talent and ideas and how, when we collectively surrender our egos and allow for a space where co-creation can occur, the results can often be sublime. I have learned to accept that failure is an inevitable and important consequence of this sort of experimental and experiential approach to collective creation. I am not interested in what one knows, rather, I am more interested in learning about what we don’t know today—tomorrow and sharing in the process of how we achieved these insights—the narrative of the road. To that end, collaboration is an important dimension of the learning activities in my environment.

Teaching and learning for me constitute an environment that is complex and highly interdependent. It is a whole that transcends its mere constituent parts. It brings many entities into highly complex relationships that, when cultivated, help us to find who we are in these relationships and to experiment with different aspects of ourselves in relation. It is an ecology of deep personal—even spiritual growth and revelation that intertwines relationships forged in a communal search for meaning.

The ecosystem of learning is not limited to clichés of Teacher, Student, Class, School, etc.. I believe that it is an integral part of the broader social, political, psychological and spiritual ecosystem that serves as a space where all dimensions of our collective lives from the rote and banal activities of the everyday meld with our boldest experimentation, where failure and triumph, grieving and celebration meet one another with the sole purpose of allowing us to collectively dream of a brighter tomorrow and to set about investing in this belief through audacious creative endeavours that will bring our dreams to fruition.

The learning ecosystem is an economy of transformation that values the sharing of ideas and earnest effort as its currency. It is an engine of change that facilitates our collective migration from the status quo towards a more sublime ideal. It is a story that has been in the making since the dawning of humanity and one that we continue to write. It is a collective narrative that takes form in informal discussions with faculty and students, formal strategy and planning meetings within the institution, negotiations between management teams and union heads, assignment creation and execution, marking, revision, daily communications with all stakeholders, writing job and grant recommendations, counseling, performing and participating in surveys, posing and answering questions, listening, speaking up, advocating, admonishing, facilitating, meeting, joining, refreshing, participating, excelling, failing, observing, reporting, measuring, analyzing, phoning, emailing, SMSing, Facebooking, Ryppleing, Reaching out, liaising, apologizing, owning, etc..

The reductionist, hierarchal and categorical view of this economy of transformation that sees only teacher, learner, class, school, etc. is an anachronism of the industrial era—a mechanistic view of reality and is out of touch with the hyper-connected 24/7 internet age. The age of instant, ubiquitous and searchable knowledge challenges us to see ourselves in new ways, governed by new relationships in this new techno-cultural milieu. We have been radically interconnected to a degree where paradigms of time, place, authority and knowing take on a radically new dimension that I have heard referred to as a “digital pentacost” in reference to the Christian tradition where people are born into a new time wherein all nations share in the discovery of life changing spiritual vision that cannot be predicted or contained—allowing them to break from status quo ways of being and moving to a new ethic that embraced an open mind to the possibilities of the future. This was a time when traditional paradigms of knowing and communicating were superceeded by new (spiritual) abilities that could transcend barriers of time, space and even language.

We live in this time where embracing the comfort of the known ways of being and doing will certainly result in a continuation of our unsustainable destruction of our ecosystem and our very humanity. There is a pressing need for us to be brave enough and audacious enough to wander down a new path together and the teaching and learning environment can create the sort of climate that is appropriate for seeding such a transformation.

I don’t think that this is something that we can teach in the classic sense of filling the empty cup, rather it is a decision that we must invest in together on all levels by all stakeholders and that we must have courage to move quickly and decisively to walk the walk together and take “the Road not taken!”

To this end I have spent the last 9 years struggling with the challenges that our new ecosystem presents for teaching and learning. During that time I have worked on developing a teaching methodology dubbed RISK-based learning (Rapid Integration of Skills and Knowledge) that uses collective, crowd-sourced approaches to dealing with rapid technological change and its corollary of obsolescence. I have given over 12 presentations to University and College educators from Montreal to San Jose on this topic and was recognized with the McGraw-Hill Award for Innovation in Teaching & Learning in 2007.

Plato, the smartest man I know, is often credited with having said something to the effects that “if I know anything, it’s that I know nothing at all.”
Was he alluding to his own philosophy of ideal form and the fact that he considered himself a perpetual student of life-unformed, unperfected and still in the processs of attaining to perfection-perhaps. Could it be that he was genuinely suffering from some sort of senile dementia that had robbed him of his intrinsic capacity for memorization?
I think that it was a little of both. To understand this we need to re-visit history- both Plato’s history and the phenomenon of history itself.
The historical narrative as we know it in the west today underwent tectonic changes in the period leading up to and beyond the time of Plato.
Traditionally, a people’s history, it’s myths, customs and secrets to survival were encoded and transmitted through a rich mix of media forms that included image, song, dance, story and elaborate eulogies and rituals. This mix of media was used as a mnemonic device to facilitate burning the shared narrative into the collective conscious.
Attending to this legacy of collective wisdom required a collective response and all members of early societies were compelled to bear the burden of the cognitive load of their history by committing some or all of it to memory. This titanic feat of memorization was facilitated through their participation in rituals designed to replicate the DNA of their narrative. This form of the shared burden of memory was highly codified and participatory in nature and constituted a significant drain on the resources of early people’s and may well have been the impetus behind the shift from hunter gatherer societies to sedentary agrarian modes.
The birth of the sign, be it a hand on a cave wall, a hieroglyph or cuneiform impression in clay, “marks” a major shift in media that allowed history, narrative and collective memory to be externalized. According to seminal theorists like Harold Innis, Erik Havelock, Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, the shift to writing revolutionized the manner in which we were able to organize ourselves and the and our systems of thought. With the embrace of writing, ideas could be disembodied and travel through time and space to reshape the power constructs that shaped our social contract and its associated value systems.
The move to embrace the technology of writing, for all it’s promise, was hotly contested by the Greeks of Plato’s time (It has been contended that Homer and the Iliad was a collection of oral stories that were shaped into a collectively celebrated and performed oral chorus that were eventually canonized into an official text under the aegis of a single author) An early Egyptian account of Pharaoh’s rebuff of the god Toth’s gift of writing also speaks to this issue. Pharaoh contended that writing one’s history would invite sloth and forgetfulness in his subjects. Aristotle pushed writing as a means to establishing standards, verifiable facts and officially sanctioned versions of events-a singular perspective over a mosaic-the very things that make empires and institutions possible. Historical narrative and identity went from being a living, shared legacy to a lifeless, static disembodied archive that had to be retrieved and reconstituted, often without the crucial keys of context. The complex data set of living history was no longer participated in by those who had lived it. If one’s experience was deemed to be valid, it would then be recorded, re-framed and redacted by a singular author. This created a world view that had shifted from composite view to a one point perspective.
The advent of the internet and social media has once again invited a composite and participatory narrative where we can upload testimonials to the banal and the sublime dimensions of our existence. What is interesting to note is that while we are immersed in this participatory narrative, the repository of our experience no longer exists embodied within us in the same way as it did in pre-literate societies. In our state of what Walter Ong refers to as “secondary orality” we have dispensed with the burden of memory. The fact that we use the cloud as a mass-repository of our collective data set allows us to forget. With a simple Google search (Scholars portals for the more academically rigorous) we can conjure up that entire data set on a whim. In short, technology—like spellcheck—has rendered memorization culturally obsolete!
I have observed this phenomenon first-hand in the classroom. Often, when I give a lecture or demonstration, it is painfully obvious to me that few students are paying attention to what I am saying or doing. Performance aside, the fact is that they have access to multiple channels of information through the internet, cell phones, neighbours, etc. and despite prefacing my musings with “THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT IGNORE AT YOUR PERIL!” They continue to push and pull information on demand from these sources. Clearly, I am in direct competition with a staggering array of alternative channels of information. It is not that my students are neglecting to pay attention, they are opting to attend to other priorities at that particular time. It is not that they don’t value what I have to offer either. Invariably, after providing my demos a student will ask a question that I had directly addressed in my presentation. On repeating the demonstration the process frustratingly repeats itself until each student in their own time and on their own terms has what they need from me. At times it feels like I am working the drive-thru window at a burger joint!

What has become obvious to me is,  given that I podcast many of my lectures and that so many similar podcasts abound in places like Youtube, a student can gain access to information if an when THEY need it, NOT when I think they need it. It is truly an ON-DEMAND phenomenon that challenges our assumptions about what constitutes effective teaching and learning. So, despite my frustration at their seeming inattentiveness or inability to memorize I have to remind myself of the environments that they inhabit and the rules of engagement that those environments tend to promote or curtail.
Like it or not we have entered an age of a technologically-induced culture of amnesia and instant gratification. To argue whether or not this is culture has validity vis-a-vis our old teaching and learning ecosystems and their associated methods is not a profitable one, rather, we should be exploring how can we reshape the arena and methods of discourse to facilitate deep and meaningful activity for those who have assumed these new technological milieus as the ground conditions of how they access and use information.
I am still working on the answer to that question!

Labour, as its name would suggest, has shouldered its own burden through the ages. Elevating its noblesse or reducing its worth has pitted politicians, social engineers, economists, Marxist theoreticians and capitalists in a titanic ideological struggle that has resulted in labour being commoditised and reduced to the lowest common denominator. Clearly—the dominant western view enjoys a pan global embrace—putting labour, as we once knew and loved it, squarely at the bottom of the Darwinian food chain.

It stands to reason that value or worth inheres in something other than the proverbial “sweat” of our brows. Value now accretes around our ability to build and leverage connectivity and the accumulated  social capital that is measured not in dollars and cents, rather in clicks and likes. Social platforms provide us the ability to form a vast and persistent wake or  train of links to a constituency of people who maintain an ongoing interest in us and provide us with a basis of worth in the emerging economy. The prudent investor seeking to increase his or her “worth”  in this environment, then, would be wise to invest in being highly social and joining the conversation around the water cooler.

There are many, and I would include myself in the many, who stubbornly cling to a sentimental notion of “work” and who view the “Social Thing” as a waste of both time and money (two very familiar friends from the old paradigm of work). This group sees internet use as a form of play at its best and distraction at its worst. We fail to see “traditional” value in it and many of us in law, finance, markets, advertizing, education struggle to wrestle this round peg into the very square hole we created for ourselves over the years.

Walter Ong asserted that the wired generation would enter into what he termed “Secondary Orality” Where being interconnected to the degree that we are forces us to be highly participatory and involved rather than isolated and detached. If you consider traditional organizational schemas pertaining to work, it was mechanistic and hierarchically and linearly structured with each cog doing a very specific job (valued in years of experience and levels of education) performed in relative isolation. It was the age of specialization.

We must then ask, what are the competencies for thriving in this new economy? Learning the Art of Conversation seems to be a crucial one. Connecting and conversing through Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and WIKIs and the like are a good start. Knowledge in this arena seems less proprietary and more of a multi-valent narrative much like going around a campfire circle improvising the lyrics as we move from one camper to the next. For this to work well you need to develop expert listening skills so that you can take what is offered to you, add to it, and pass it on—classic IMPROV theatre techniques that can be gleaned from the works of Sages such as Viola Spolin or Keith Johnstone. A good conversationalist needs to be a generalist so that you can engage with people on their own turf and terms. A good generalist should, naturally, be willing to assume a variety of roles. This ability to switch roles not only confers an adaptive advantage on the individual and the entities that they provide worth to it also helps to build a deep sense of empathy for others in similar situations—especially when you assume new and unfamiliar responsibilities—you understand firsthand what it is like to walk a mile in the novice’s shoes and gain an experience at a grassroots level that older, structured organizational forms cannot  accommodate.

While most organizations recognize the sea changes that are washing over and around us, few have a clear vision of what they need to do in order to engineer a successful transformation that can effectively leverage the emerging paradigms of value. Part of the problem is the inability to wean the organization from traditional rubrics of valuation and organization. Most consider integration as being a scheme aimed at embedding a new technology into an existing structure with the least amount of disruption. The irony is that it is the disruptive aspect of these technologies that should be leveraged NOT mitigated! Often in these circumstances the irritation caused by the “integration” is grudgingly tolerated by decree. The points of contact in the organization are not in alignment with the natural tendencies of the technologies adopted and they often fail or fail to live up to unrealistic expectations.

Few storied organizations are flexible enough in their thinking to consider that a radical restructuring of the org chart is necessary in order to allow these technologies to revolutionize the way they do things. The real innovation, interestingly enough, is in the capacity to consider the sweeping cultural, organizational and economic changes that might be required—the technology simply acts as an accelerant.

I have been working for approximately 8 years on driving cultural change vis-a-vis technology in an applied education context and have encountered the tensions between maintaining the status quo and driving innovation. I can assure you that simply acquiring the latest greatest technology simply does not work without exporing new forms of organization that reflect the inherent tendencies of these technologies and the environments that they help to shape.

I have attached a dossier of illustrated PDFs that detail some aspects of the knowledge and media ecosystem, the competencies and relations between people working in these environments as well as a series of snapshots detailing moves that I have been making away from linear, factory models of organizational efficiency toward models that are more organic, self organizing, agile  and adaptive in order to facilitate RISK-based learning (Rapid Integration of Skills and Knowledge) and effective engagement with emerging technologies and environments.

knowledge_economy_package

Trapped in a Tar Pit

Metaphorically speaking, a dinosaur is any entity lacking the capacity to adapt to environmental changes in a timely fashion. While a dinosaur may well possess the ability to adapt it may be an unfortunate accident of biology or culture that predisposes it to an internal rate of transformative change that is relatively static compared to the rate of change in the environmental factors that, normally, support and optimize conditions for its survival. This inability to match the pace of change places the dinosaur at a competitive disadvantage that eventually pushes it to the margins of relevance and results in its eventual extinction—both literal and metaphorical.

No creature would invite change for its own sake and—humans being like most other creatures—expend enormous amounts of energy attempting to stabilize our situation and achieve a form of stasis that allows us not only to survive but to thrive in relative safety and comfort. We tend towards mitigating the effects of the unknown and the unpredictable and this requires apprehending and utilizing knowledge of the environment in order that we might exploit it to advantage.

Our ability to utilize binding symbolic language and symbolic artefacts and to fashion tools that—according to Marshall McLuhan—extend, enhance and accelerate our effective selves, creates a buffer between us and a natural order that challenges us with the timeless struggle for survival.

The fact that we will soon be uneasily celebrating the turnover of our biological counter to the 7 billion mark is a testimony to how successful we have been at disconnecting from or minimizing the risks that the natural order presents. One could argue that this disconnection could be better characterized as a complete domination and subjugation of the environment that carries with it a dire corollary for our long-term survival and that the technocomplex that we created constitutes its own environment with its own evolutionary pressures.

The Silicone  Pit

Iterative improvement and automation have resulted in the sort of hyperbolic innovations that engineer Gordon Moore predicted in the mid 1960′s. The rate of change is dizzying and poses significant challenges to our capacity for adapting to the changes they usher in. The explosion of new technologies, whose cycles of innovation and obsolescence relegate one to the status of instant expert or instant dinosaur in the blink of an eye, constitutes our greatest environmental challenge.

Having knowledge of one’s object of inquiry has traditionally meant being able to give a name to it—to plot its co-ordinates and assay and record its characteristics. This sort of knowledge has traditionally conferred on the inquirer a degree of power and control over their object of inquiry—it is a form of experiential mapping, if you will. However, this is not so easy with respect to characterizing much less predicting the evolutionary trajectory of our modern technological landscape. Mapping the contours of our ever-changing, ever-expanding information and techno-complex is intractable as mapping sand dunes or clouds—the particulars are so infinitely complex and changing that it defies linear, rational and concrete approaches to knowing. It is a phenomenon that has rapidly emerged into a quantum state where power comes from making sense of the relational dimensions between the elements of this complex rather than knowing the particular qualities or quantities associated with the constituent elements themselves. Understanding, then, assumes a holistic character where inductive logic gives way to deductive and intuitive processes that may benefit more from a metaphor or narrative thread with which to frame or anchor one’s understanding of the infinitely complex. This form of knowing differs from the traditional detached objective methods of scientific knowing. Instead, this form of knowing is experiential, immersive and, simultaneously, transforms both subject and object.

Consider that, in using a technology, you have changed the manner in which you interact with the world around you and this results in the emergence of new patterns of behavior, new modes of interaction, shifts in language, value systems and culture and we are irrevocably changed and the system within which this technology has been used is changed too. This implies that the relationship between subject and object have also shifted. In short we see the world in a different way for the simple reason that our internal value systems have dramatically shifted and the world that we inhabit has also dramatically changed. While we highly value information that is accessible and searchable many with the means to do so would pay millions of dollars for a highly inaccessible “original” painting by, say, Rembrandt, while few of us would be willing to pay for a digital version of it. An objects potential for ubiquity works in tension with its unique instantiation. An object that can readily be reproduced and reducing its value to near zero in a commodity-based economy where value is predicated on scarcity. The web-enhanced age in which we live is one of infinite abundance and, hence, traditional economic value cannot be derived from the objects produced in this ecosystem but, rather, from the relationships that it facilitates. While scarcity and  authenticity are still significant arbiters of value today we see from the runaway success of social resources like Face Book

The Renaissance Through the Looking Glass

The age of now has oft been described as one of digital tribalism where the age of empire, standardization, control and concentration of power and influence have given way to chaotic and barbaric forces that truculently refuse to be defined and controlled by the old paradigms. We are advancing toward the past—almost medieval, semi-literate forms of informal, quasi-embodied social interaction where the emphasis is on the relationship—on being there (digitally) and participating in the conversation. It is Walter Ong’s Post-literate society or age of “secondary orality.” We are leaving the time where meaning was defined in terms of rational scientific constructs and entering a new epoch where our old science creates more questions than it is capable of answering—adding to an already infinite data set. We are entering a new mythopoetic age where it is pointless to look at the massive complexity of our modern technological and information ecosystem and hope to induce meaning and significance through observing it. What is significant is that we are not detached from it (as the old science would have it) we are caught up in its turbulence trying to keep our heads above water, as it were. The more sane approach would be to recognize that this leviathan chimera unleashes enormous pressures on us and to not ask what this means but, rather, to demand “what do we wish this this to mean for us now and in the future” and to hold it to account for this vision. We must not embrace technology simply for its own sake, rather, it should be subsumed in the service of our collective vision for the future and, in that sense, we are called upon to dream and to do so boldly. To envision a world where technology and information serves to nurture humanity requires that we come to understand who we are at our root and to what purpose must our hearts and our minds be put. These questions resonate with aspects of spirituality that seem antithetical to the project of science. However both science and technology have no life or no meaning without being grounded in the context of life—of attending and attaining to being fully human in a world that is rich,  diverse and healthy and to this end all human projects should bend their respective backs to the task of enriching life on this planet and, thus, must be held fully accountable to this demand. Human health is linked to a complex web of inter-relationships that extends out beyond the human sphere to include the entire created order. Our evolving technological landscape has the potential to allow us to discover who we are both individually and collectively in relation to the broader world and to deepen the veracity of relationships that putative modern western science, and the tsunami of uncritical progress it unleashed, has unwittingly compromised.

Why Are We Here and What Are We Doing?

The philosophical perspectives/worldview that I outlined in the preceding paragraphs were not derived from gleaning through the tomes of savvy and erudite pop culture gurus (although I owe a great debt to Harold Innis, Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, and Walter Ong and have enjoyed sharing insights articulated by the likes of Richard Ogle, Don Tapscott and Malcolm Gladwell), rather they came from a direct experience of some fundamental changes that I was experiencing in relation to my subject area and my relationship with my students.

A colleague of mine raised the issue of Cartels in relation to discussions we were having on the state of Educational Publishing in Canada and it caused me to reflect deeper on the issue. I would like to share my thoughts on the subject.

Cartel culture runs deep in corporate Canada. Publishers, Media Consortia, Telcoms and, abominably, Beer Producers being the most culpable. Unfortunately, this has stifled innovation because the bottom line for any Cartel is predicated on maintaining the status quo. Recent announcements on a collaboration between Pearson Publishing and Google may signal a change in the wind, however, I remain cautiously skeptical and I cannot help but feel that it might be nothing more than a savvy co-branding exercise.

Canadian publishers have had an entitlement to the wallets of our students and they have been soundly rebuffed by them over the last 10 years in their flight from the bookstores. From the announcement alluded to earlier, it would seem that publishers would like to enjoy the same level of control over the emerging landscape. Why else would one approach the emperor of the internet (Google)? It is a truism to say that the net ecosystem by its nature is infinitely complex, decentralized and  democratic and it will be curious to see how a Cartel mixed with a virtual monopoly can provide a product or service that resonates with the vox pop of the wired generation.

While educatonal publishers still have an important role to play in the media ecosystem they need to eat  humble pie in my estimation. Something inside me tells me that this meeting between Google and Pearson is like lavalife for publishers. Google is the Yenta who is powerful enough to force an arranged marriage that we scholars and our students didn’t necessarily ask for or want.  Using Google in this manner avoids the messy business of having to engage with the very audience who has rejected your offer of marriage in the first place! The scene reminds me of a titled aristocrat desperately seeking a hasty marriage to a well endowed bride in order to shore up his sagging fortunes.

For the less cynical, perhaps, the threat of extinction has caused them to consider what is at stake and they have listened to a constituency that they have largely ignored in the past. The publishers in Canada need to understand the new ecosystem into which they have been unwittingly mired in—an ecosystem where the “consumer” has a significantly different set of attributes and a demonstrably greater degree of power to shape and even create the very content they consume—it is an exquisite act of self-cannibalism. One might say that we are at the dawn of a renaissance in vanity publishing—my blogging activity, for example. And this is where publishers might actually be able to add value in ensuring that vainglory does not trump quality of content. Other factors in the media ecology are also worthy of consideration and may present opportunities for the hungry publisher. They should avoid the lure of trying to create a leviathan content technopoly (I suspect this is why Google is involved) and work on building value for their audiences. I get the sense that they wish to use these technologies to simply lock down and secure a distribution channel for their content and continue with the status quo. The challenges are much greater and it hinges on technology.

Technology is a thread that is ubiquitous in all disciplines and continues to be an invasive (gaining access into areas traditionally not enabled with technology) and disruptive species that causes social and economic turbulence or “disruption”. There is no “settling” of these turbid waters—no period of calm where we can establish the lay of the land and start utilizing it in some meaningful way. By the time we think we comprehend it, it has morphed into something else. This means that we must come to terms with the fact that there are no “set pieces” in education and that this means a significantly lower ROI on assets generated and a much shorter window in which to capitalize on any generated content and it is at “content” and its authorship/ownership where I think the publishers are, unfortunately, nostalgic.

We no longer live in an age where an artefact or content is the thing valued, rather, value inheres in the ability to connect, stay connected and maintain and explore the dynamics of a relationship (ie. Facebook). Content is a by-product of these relationships but the value to the participants lies not so much in what is produced but in the relationships themselves. At the root of internet content generation on social networks is a fundamental human need to instantiate our being in vis-a-vis the “other”. Nowhere in history is it more true than the internet age. Only pre-literate cultures enjoyed such a degree of radical interconnectedness.

If publishers could grasp the fact that their future lies not in securing and indenturing content rather, as brokers of deep and transformative relationships, they may actually be able to bring significant value to the current ecosystem, otherwise they are doomed to be horse traders in the age of the automobile. As content producers they have failed to deliver in terms of price, usability and timeliness. If every domain of human activity is technologically enabled in some way it stands to reason that the diffusion cycles of these technologies will be fairly aggressive and cause knowledge to obsolesce in 12-28 month cycles. Teaching and Learning and Educational Publishing, like it or not, are inextricably linked to the innovation cycle and demand agility in our adaptation to the new ecological niches they create. This is an incredibly demanding task and I don’t believe that traditional publishing workflows and value chains can support this. We need to explore adaptation strategies that engender collective co-authorship and collaboration even highly fragmented forms of  micro-monetization (App Store comes to mind) that allows everyone to participate in a YouTube style economy. The traditional “customer” has a significant role to play in the generation and shaping of content in this new economy with a larger share in both the benefits and the responsibilities. Facilitating this process, with a view to encouraging and promoting excellence is, to my mind,  the new publishing paradigm.

Facebook has categorically proven the value of relation over content and that the sense of authorship has morphed into a domain of co-creation and collaboration. Our students should actually be participating in building learning domain architecture, experiences and content. Not being considered as the bottom of a vertical food chain!

I have been working for the past 8 years on building a “Knowledge Garden” This project at GBC School of Design (an experimental lab in developing crowd-sourced approaches to educational content creation, curation and distribution) has and will continue to support  experimentation in new paradigms of engagement and I would be very keen to develop a partnership with an interested publisher to share in the co-creation of new learning methods from the ground up. We could certainly benefit from their expertise in content management and distribution and we could show them how this can be transformed into something new and meaningful for the wired generation.

With the advent of mobile, pad devices and the app store phenomenon there has been a trend that has effectively atomized product offerings that range from the sublime to the ridiculous (the latter seem to be doing a brisk business). This move away from “fat boy” apps that do everything under the sun to a widget with a streamlined and focused set of functions results in a daunting universe of choice akin to walking in to a candy store whose shelves are brimming to overflowing.
With so much up for grabs it begs the question: “Where do I begin?”
Adobe’s Periodic Table of Applications is no exception. While the products on the Adobe shelves are substantial they ,too, are by necessity, ever-expanding. Even for a seasoned user, the choice of which products will get the job done, is a difficult question that requires considerable research.

I am attempting to lead a transformation of our design department that will deeply integrate digital workflows—particularly those in the mobile space—and have been stymied by the task of trying to make sense of which workflows and toolsets make the most sense for particular contexts. The fact that many of the product offerings have significant overlaps in function make this task all the more intractable.
I made this known to some of the Adobe team while attending the San Jose educational summit this summer. I had bemoaned the fact that there was a palpable need for a killer infographic that detailed all of the production pathways and tools that one should use for particular tasks.

It suspect that  I came off as being rather naive to some of my technologically erudite colleagues. They informed me that there was no “right” way of doing things and that the nuances of each project required the aplomb of a Pebble Beach caddy in order to select the “right club” for the task at hand. While this may make sense for the seasoned professional, the fact remains that the sort of deep and latent process knowledge that many experts take for granted is inaccessible to the neophyte. I mused: “If only there were some sort of pre-application interface that could, through prompts, could ascertain the “WHAT” of your project and then present you with a number of scenarios for the “HOW” that would include workflows and tools.”

Imagine then, from a User Experience perspective, if all of our various expertise were to be explicitly rendered in a database that linked to a rich graphical front end, say, the very colourful Adobe Table of Elements. Imagine after answering a few prompts that branched down didactic rabbit holes of possibilities, the table of contents “LIT UP” like the letter board on Jeopardy! Imagine the pathways to production glowing in front of you, lighting your way from beginning to end!

I hope that Michael Gough, Adobe’s UX design head, has the opportunity to ruminate on this possibility!

Seeding the Knowledge Garden Beta Lab: Developing a Cross-disciplinary course in Knowledge Design & Curation for George Brown College.
By Jim Kinney, Professor, School of Art & Design, George Brown College.

Preamble
The number of web pages in existence today is estimated at anywhere from 25 billion to 1 Trillion and is moving towards an infinite value. Having the equivalent of all human knowledge a mere Google search away confers knowledge power on the average internet user that eclipses the wildest imaginations of our predecessors yet, in order to fully utilize this incredible resource, requires that we are able to harness this chaotic agglomeration by subjecting it to a process of refinement.
The rigour of computer science and library science has helped to make this infinite datascape easier to navigate, search and visualize. As more of our economic activity migrates to this space, productivity gains as well as new ways of interacting stimulate the emergence of novel economic patterns with new value propositions. These emerging values do not conform to the old paradigms of vertical, hierarchal organisation and functional specialization with their synchronized production of concrete artefacts.
Artefact production is an anachronism of an industrial age that we have been increasingly outsourcing and leaving behind. We have migrated to a new space where value lies not in things but in relationships and this new landscape has opened the door to a creative impulse that has not been experienced since the dawning of the renaissance.
The adept is one who can work outside the traditional constraints of space, time and function and who can assume a multiplicity of roles and adapt on the fly to rapidly changing environments. These participants in the new economy will, by necessity, be effective in team-based approaches and organizations will need to move to a rapid response or Just-In-Time operational model that can accommodate changes in the wind and allow for innovation.
In order to allow for the incubation, acceleration and commercialization of ideas organizations will need processes and infrastructure that allow for a design-centred approach that can quickly prototype, test and refine ideas for market. Part of an effective infrastructure will be a cultural apparatus that promotes multi-disciplinary collaborations that allow for the confluence of design thinking, new methods, materials and technologies to solve problems in a myriad of domains such as healthcare, service sectors, security, finance, etc.
Crucial to the success of this design-centred approach will be building the capacity to capture and curate process knowledge on the fly in order to build a powerful, searchable knowledge repository that can be drawn upon to inform other teams working on other projects. The ability to organize effective teams and capture their experiences, as it happens, and to use this intelligence in debriefs to inform standards of best practice will be an integral tool in the emerging economy. The ability to modularize the functionality of knowledge assets in order to enhance their accessibility and usefulness as well as an ability to re-configure and repurpose these assets for a variety of applications constitute an emerging skillset. See Appendix 1 (Knowledge Worker)
Participants in the emerging economy will require broad base of skills that can be adapted to a multitude of scenarios in order to collaboratively, co-create, curate, distribute and monetize digital assets and experiences. Whether you are a Chef working with a programmer to produce an interactive mobile menu application that will allow for people around the globe to participate in a cooking class from home or whether you are a Palliative Care practitioner who is documenting patient care and interactions on a tablet in consultation with a medical doctor, you will need to know how to work in a team in order to design workflows and applications that help you to optimize your outcomes. Given that these complex systems are rendered more usable through rich visual interfaces, at least a rudimentary knowledge of these processes would be critical to establishing a common framework of practice around how information in the moment is best captured and made usable. This forms the basis for a new class of participant in the emergent economy that we can call the knowledge holder/creator. The knowledge holder must be adept at working with programmers, engineers and designers to render their knowledge into assets and experiential opportunities that are more accessible and usable by a broader spectrum of clients. The knowledge holder will need to learn the skills of capturing and curating their know-how in ways that optimize this accessibility and usability.

The Knowledge Garden Project
This project used a team-based, distributed model of peer-to-peer learning that was designed as an adaptive response to pervasive, persistent and aggressive change in technology.
By reframing traditional classroom roles and empowering students as co-creators/designers of knowledge, over 150 individuals were soon doing the work that was done by only one. The ability to rapidly research, demonstrate, document, podcast, archive and curate a myriad of learning experiences across a broad spectrum delivered the power to generate know-how that was vastly superior in both quality and quantity to what could have been done by a professor alone.
The fact that subsequent teams of students would assume stewardship of this resource meant that an entirely new generation of stakeholders could work on updating and improving the resource by adding searchability, improved assets, better organization, etc. Even if a new release meant that over 30 hours of podcast instruction and hundreds of PDF manual pages were rendered obsolete, the new owners could cope with this. While this would represent an unmitigated disaster for a group of professors this was a relatively simple fact of life that could easily be remedied with another burst of creativity from its stakeholders. Individually, the task was leviathan, collectively—it was relatively easy.
In this model the professor took on the role of mentor providing research direction that best tied to the problems being tackled. Finally, the professor acted as a knowledge harvester—taking the best materials and promoting their use within a content system by the broader student population.
This new methodology combined with some software and hardware infrastructure paved the way for creating a Just In Time or RISK-based approach to learning (Rapid Integration of Skills and Knowledge).

Beta Lab (Knowledge Curation and Design Course)
While the provenance of this idea was borne in the context of teaching software to Graphic Design students it quickly became apparent that the real potential for innovation lay in bringing design practice, RISK methodology and Knowledge capture/curation infrastructure and know-how to non-traditional disciplines in order to widen the net of inclusion and to “push the envelope” as it were in disciplines that, traditionally, had not enjoyed the sort of knowledge/tech transfer that designers have enjoyed since the mid 1980’s. It occurred to me that a multi-disciplinary approach had the potential to float many more boats and provide a context for rich interdisciplinary collaborations that would address some of the key skills and competencies required by the communities that we serve—namely, the ability to collaborate and communicate effectively.
A workforce that has the knowledge skill and infrastructure to capture and reframe the intelligence of their respective fields delivers the capacity to transform those fields by making their know-how accessible, searchable, transferrable, comprehensible and highly mobile. These new modalities have the added capacity to generate revenue and promote great efficiencies while binding participants in the process to powerful new modes of interaction and providing them with direct participation at the epicentre of the new and emerging economy.

The Ground Covered
I have worked since 2003 on refining methods of peer-based collaboration within the context of design. My students have self-organized, self-taught, demonstrated and published a wealth of materials in the three primary areas of Photocomposition, Illustration and Page Layout/ Printing using Adobe’s industry standard toolsets. The learning was contextualized in solving three main problems: The production of highly realistic illustrations using the two-dimensional medium of Adobe Illustrator and the compilation of a manual that detailed the tools, tips and techniques necessary for accomplishing the task. Further explorations of Photoshop were required in order to produce a compelling piece of cover art for the manual and InDesign was used to publish the materials as a PDF book. Rather than learning being a series of seemingly disconnected factoids, each element eventually took its rightful place in a sequence whose sum resulted in expert and compelling works. All of the research presentation and publishing were co-ordinated and executed in a collective fashion while the Illustrations, naturally, provided an outlet for individual expression and grading. It was a blended form of learning that, while it allowed for a summative expression of individual abilities, could not have been made possible without a concerted commitment to a group-based approach to learning.
Initially, Students not only showcased their individual talents (some of whom won international design awards from Adobe) but they each shared the fruits of their collective efforts in the form of a beautifully designed and extremely informative manual covering key functions of three very key Adobe toolsets.
Infrastructure:
In 2009 I participated in a joint research project with Apple Computer and three other Canadian universities that allowed me to explore the potential for the creation and distribution of mobile learning assets for and by students. This opportunity resulted in the generation of a rich, searchable resource that could be configured and used both on an individual and a collective level. In addition to the usual production of illustrations, cover art and how-to manuals, over 200 podcasts were generated many employing closed captioning and several executed in other languages such as Spanish and Mandarin—effectively transforming what would normally be considered as a roadblock to learning into a terrific learning advantage. The racial and linguistic diversity of our large urban mosaic was changed from challenge to opportunity by leveraging this inherent capacity to speak to the world. On conclusion of the research, infrastructure was repatriated and, only recently, has it been re-established with the acquisition of a new podcast and wiki server. Ideally, it would have been helpful to acquire a third authentication and sign-on server but we are working on managing these resources in a very independent manner that allows us to minimize reliance on IT resources and maximize experimentation and innovation by way of this relative autonomy.

The Course
It occurred to me that the course should build incrementally in order to develop best practices, test infrastructure robustness and requirements and that early iterations should be limited to design students with proven capacity to work with these technologies and document their processes in a clear and usable manner. Later iterations should ideally reach out to include other departments within our school in order to allow them to explore untapped niches of opportunity in their own domains. Eventually, in the third phase the course would encourage community members NGOs/agencies and private companies to partner with the program in order to leverage our capacity for providing solutions to these problems. I envision a cross-disciplinary team that would involve second or senior year students from various departments in order to provide a broad base of skill sets, a variety of faculty consultants, an IT liaison, a community partner with a problem to solve and a technology provider who sees in the community partner an opportunity to explore untapped applications for their product. This ecosystem of stakeholders would then collectively define and deliver innovation in the sectors represented by our community partners. The college itself could be designated as its own community partner and derive benefit from the creation of a cutting-edge knowledge ecosystem that buoys up underserviced areas. For instance, the simple inclusion of closed captioning as part of any workflow by student researchers creates a direct benefit of inclusion for a broader swath of the community!

Just In Time
The benefits of access to pre-release (beta-level) engagement with toolsets are significant. Instead of reacting to change, participants would have a role in shaping the changes affecting them by occupying a seat at the table where decisions are being made. This ground-sourced form of participation is a trend that will continue to grow and be incorporated in the development and marketing strategies of most leading companies. Any institution that can incorporate this form of dialogue into its program cannot help but assume a leadership role in shaping future trends and, as a corollary of this approach, its students are given significant lead times that allow them to anticipate and prepare for the changes that will effect their respective industries in ways that are profitable to them and the organizations that they work for.
Already the wheels have been set in motion with Apple Computer and Adobe Systems with respect to high value strategic relationships that involve this sort of cutting edge research and curriculum. Eventually, I envision an evolution of the lab where a multi-disciplinary team of students works with faculty, IT, a community partner using pre-release technologies that are being tested on real world problems—moving from scenarios of theoretical use to actual case use. Students and faculty would not only gain experience in emerging technologies ahead of the curve, they would get to apply it in particular instances relative to a problem identified in the community. They would also capture and curate this know-how and report to the various stakeholders on progress. The beta providers would gain access to a team of researchers who would provide critical bench testing of their wares and access data relevant to contextual use scenarios as well as proof of use for new markets/customers. They also would share in the warehoused knowledge and make this public on the release date. The fact that the beta providers could then offer the know-how material that was produced to their traditional user base as well as to anticipated new markets is a powerful incentive to participate.
The college would have the advantage of having know-how embedded in its participants but also in the form of searchable podcasts that could then be distributed to the broader community on the release date. The students, too, would have established a leadership position vis-à-vis this know-how and would have developed valuable research and collaboration skills in the process.
An opportunity also exists to license and distribute this content to create an income stream through Knowledge channels such as Lynda.com, iTunes, etc.
Strategically, Knowledge Capture and its curation are highly significant in adapting to the skills and knowledge vacuum created by the wave of succession caused by the Boomer generation’s exit from the workforce. Implicit knowledge held by Boomers, is in danger of being lost if it is not expressed, captured and repurposed for a smaller, younger generation taking the reins. Much work needs to be done in helping organizations acquire and utilize the capacity to capture and re-purpose the strategically important knowledge that constitutes their intellectual capital and competitive advantage. It is entirely reasonable to promote this form of Knowledge design and curation as a standard business practice.

What We Need
The project has only tacit approval at this stage. The course outline has been submitted to both the Director, Luigi Ferrara and his Co-ordinator, Judith Gregory for approval. We will need:
Lab space: Room to accommodate 15-20 people with tables in the centre to facilitate face to face interactions. White boards around perimeter to allow dtailing of discussions and prototyping.
Podcast Server/WIKI server (already acquired)
Service contracts to guarantee QS. On system configuration and maintenance
10 new computers (preferably Mac)
High bandwidth Wireless connection to the internet
VPN clients for senior administrators
Pre-release Software/Hardware and reporting software
Cross-disciplinary liaison to assist with outreach and building connections to other departments.
Creation of cross-curricular (Gen Ed) Requirement or accreditation possibly incentivized by two credits.
Ability to extend tenure of particpants to more than one term.
Terms of Engagement Agreements/ NDA’s, etc.
Recruitment process.
Interview process.
Legal advise on streamlining a process for binding a diverse group of stakeholders to the obligations of a Non-disclosure agreement while upholding the rights of individuals or organizations bound by them.
The will and the vision to support the project.
Potential Downside
The success of this enterprise is contingent on a number of factors. First, if the institution and its leaders fails to understand what is at stake and what the benefits are, it will be difficult to promote the risk-taking necessary to facilitate the acquisition of adequate resources and to experiment with new approaches in delivery. Cross-disciplinary approaches are difficult to co-ordinate with willing partners. A climate of risk mitigation will minimize participation in unproven territory and will default to a wait-and-see approach that is anathema to innovation—cultural acceptance of risk taking is necessary. Binding agreements between stakeholders need to be negotiated in order to ensure longer term viability. This will require signatories at the management level to give the project the endorsement it requires and to negotiate relationships that work to serve the interest of all parties involved. Other faculty and managers need to be educated on the significance of the approach and how it is validated through research and is consistent with emerging trends in experiential learning and is ideally suited as an adaptation and innovation methodology.
All stakeholders must perceive advantage in engaging with this approach and must be given a role in determining the contours of the engagement. Exclusion of any one party could result in a disconnection and a failure to “own” and promote the process towards excellence.
Given its marginal, off-grid approach adequate IT support for this project has been ad hoc in nature. Proper resourcing of IT support will be crucial to the success of any joint venture and care has to be taken to ensure clear and open channels of communication between our internal support and those of our technology providers. Failure to ensure that our technology partners and our internal IT partners are aligned in their respective tasks will result in technical impasses that will delay the move forward with project-based research.
NDAs are extremely important to partners providing pre-release opportunities and cultivating a climate of discretion and secrecy will be of the utmost importance. An interviewing process and the signing of binders by participants can help to lend weight to this necessity and the violation of these agreements would, understandably, do irreparable damage to the partner, the beta project and the reputation of the institution. The lab and the participants will be under wraps until the release date at which point we will be at liberty to share our successes and leverage any content/processes.
Non participation would effectively render the ambitions of this project to being moot and, so, proper promotion of its merits to the college community, managers, faculty, students and the broader community will be key to its long term success. Failure to promote the enterprise will result in its marginalization and eventual decline.
Keeping the initial offering limited to a small, select number of students will constitute budgetary pressure on the local level but will be necessary in order to ensure manageable success. The research-based focus may well present opportunities to attract research grants from government agencies, internal funding as well as our partners who will already be supplying in-kind investments of technology for our use but may well provide additional funding. Our community partners may best be able to provide an infusion of financial support given that we are helping them to solve a problem. The lab should be kept to a small group of 10-15 students and the professors involvement would require a release of two teaching blocks to accommodate proper oversight. As the lab culture matures we may be able to move to a staffing model where a student from a previous year is given the paying position of research lead and reducing the amount of direct involvement by the professor.
Debriefing sessions will be crucial to monitoring the health of a project and for instituting best-practices that will guide and inform future project participants. This will provide an opportunity to garner feedback/ratings from the various participants. A reporting structure will be necessary in order to share findings with the management layer and provide transparency and accountability on performance. Where NDAs allow, opportunities should be sought for presenting findings in the public domain through conferences, workshops etc. and victories and accomplishments should be celebrated in vehicles that are accessible to all of the parties (Trade Magazines, Symposia, Conferences, etc.).
This project represents over seven years of methodically acquiring resources, experimenting with methods and promoting its potential. I have every confidence that, with the proper support and dedication to its vision, it will help to place our college in a leadership position not only in innovation in teaching and learning but in providing new capacity to non “design-oriented” domains that will allow them to leverage the power of the knowledge that they hold and to migrate that knowledge into more contemporary domains that provide efficiencies as well as revenue-generating potiential.
I am excited to begin forging bold new partnerships and building something new and powerful that will serve our communities for years to come.

Regards,

Jim Kinney

Appendix 1_K-Worker_Competencies & Relations

The Renaissance Through the Looking Glass

The age of now has oft been described as one of digital tribalism where the age of empire, standardization, control and concentration of power and influence have given way to chaotic and barbaric forces that truculently refuse to be defined and controlled by the old paradigms. We are advancing toward the past—almost medieval, semi-literate forms of informal, quasi-embodied social interaction where the emphasis is on the relationship—on being there (digitally) and participating in the conversation. It is Walter Ong’s Post-literate society or age of “secondary orality.” We are leaving the time where meaning was defined in terms of rational scientific constructs and entering a new epoch where our old science creates more questions than it is capable of answering—adding to an already infinite data set. We are entering a new mythopoetic age where it is pointless to look at the massive complexity of our modern technological and information ecosystem and hope to induce meaning and significance through observing it. What is significant is that we are not detached from it (as the old science would have it) we are caught up in its turbulence trying to keep our heads above water, as it were. The more sane approach would be to recognize that this leviathan chimera unleashes enormous pressures on us and to not ask what this means but, rather, to demand “what do we wish this this to mean for us now and in the future” and to hold it to account for this vision. We must not embrace technology simply for its own sake, rather, it should be subsumed in the service of our collective vision for the future and, in that sense, we are called upon to dream and to do so boldly. To envision a world where technology and information serves to nurture humanity requires that we come to understand who we are at our root and to what purpose must our hearts and our minds be put. These questions resonate with aspects of spirituality that seem antithetical to the project of science. However both science and technology have no life or no meaning without being grounded in the context of life—of attending and attaining to being fully human in a world that is rich,  diverse and healthy and to this end all human projects should bend their respective backs to the task of enriching life on this planet and, thus, must be held fully accountable to this demand. Human health is linked to a complex web of inter-relationships that extends out beyond the human sphere to include the entire created order. Our evolving technological landscape has the potential to allow us to discover who we are both individually and collectively in relation to the broader world and to deepen the veracity of relationships that putative modern western science, and the tsunami of uncritical progress it unleashed, has unwittingly compromised.

The Silicone  Pit

Iterative improvement and automation have resulted in the sort of hyperbolic innovations that engineer Gordon Moore predicted in the mid 1960′s. The rate of change is dizzying and poses significant challenges to our capacity for adapting to the changes they usher in. The explosion of new technologies, whose cycles of innovation and obsolescence relegate one to the status of instant expert or instant dinosaur in the blink of an eye, constitutes our greatest environmental challenge.

Having knowledge of one’s object of inquiry has traditionally meant being able to give a name to it—to plot its co-ordinates and assay and record its characteristics. This sort of knowledge has traditionally conferred on the inquirer a degree of power and control over their object of inquiry—it is a form of experiential mapping, if you will. However, this is not so easy with respect to characterizing much less predicting the evolutionary trajectory of our modern technological landscape. Mapping the contours of our ever-changing, ever-expanding information and techno-complex is intractable as mapping sand dunes or clouds—the particulars are so infinitely complex and changing that it defies linear, rational and concrete approaches to knowing. It is a phenomenon that has rapidly emerged into a quantum state where power comes from making sense of the relational dimensions between the elements of this complex rather than knowing the particular qualities or quantities associated with the constituent elements themselves. Understanding, then, assumes a holistic character where inductive logic gives way to deductive and intuitive processes that may benefit more from a metaphor or narrative thread with which to frame or anchor one’s understanding of the infinitely complex. This form of knowing differs from the traditional detached objective methods of scientific knowing. Instead, this form of knowing is experiential, immersive and, simultaneously, transforms both subject and object.

Consider that, in using a technology, you have changed the manner in which you interact with the world around you and this results in the emergence of new patterns of behavior, new modes of interaction, shifts in language, value systems and culture and we are irrevocably changed and the system within which this technology has been used is changed too. This implies that the relationship between subject and object have also shifted. In short we see the world in a different way for the simple reason that our internal value systems have dramatically shifted and the world that we inhabit has also dramatically changed. While we highly value information that is accessible and searchable many with the means to do so would pay millions of dollars for a highly inaccessible “original” painting by, say, Rembrandt, while few of us would be willing to pay for a digital version of it. An objects potential for ubiquity works in tension with its unique instantiation. An object that can readily be reproduced and reducing its value to near zero in a commodity-based economy where value is predicated on scarcity. The web-enhanced age in which we live is one of infinite abundance and, hence, traditional economic value cannot be derived from the objects produced in this ecosystem but, rather, from the relationships that it facilitates. While scarcity and  authenticity are still significant arbiters of value today we see from the runaway success of social resources like Face Book

Trapped in a Tar Pit

Metaphorically speaking, a dinosaur is any entity lacking the capacity to adapt to environmental changes in a timely fashion. While a dinosaur may well possess the ability to adapt it may be an unfortunate accident of biology or culture that predisposes it to an internal rate of transformative change that is relatively static compared to the rate of change in the environmental factors that, normally, support and optimize conditions for its survival. This inability to match the pace of change places the dinosaur at a competitive disadvantage that eventually pushes it to the margins of relevance and results in its eventual extinction—both literal and metaphorical.

No creature would invite change for its own sake and—humans being like most other creatures—expend enormous amounts of energy attempting to stabilize our situation and achieve a form of stasis that allows us not only to survive but to thrive in relative safety and comfort. We tend towards mitigating the effects of the unknown and the unpredictable and this requires apprehending and utilizing knowledge of the environment in order that we might exploit it to advantage.

Our ability to utilize binding symbolic language and symbolic artefacts and to fashion tools that—according to Marshall McLuhan—extend, enhance and accelerate our effective selves, creates a buffer between us and a natural order that challenges us with the timeless struggle for survival.

The fact that we will soon be uneasily celebrating the turnover of our biological counter to the 7 billion mark is a testimony to how successful we have been at disconnecting from or minimizing the risks that the natural order presents. One could argue that this disconnection could be better characterized as a complete domination and subjugation of the environment that carries with it a dire corollary for our long-term survival and that the technocomplex that we created constitutes its own environment with its own evolutionary pressures.