 So I decided to give this a name. I called it through the MOOC darkly. Why did it call? Why did I call it that? Just because That's the phrase that entered my mind when I asked myself. What should I call this? I Looked up the burden in film And and I looked up the source of the phrase and all of that that kind of gave me a heamed structure everything else around so I Was asked to Say who I am or to outline who I am and of course you got the official introduction from Jackie at the start But here's the the less official version of who I am my I'm a researcher for Canada's National Research Council but really what I do is a mix of Four major things for Oh, come on You suppose you try to just switch it back to the camera and it doesn't just switch back to the camera You have to mess with it a bit then it switches back to the camera Okay, so I'm a mix of four things So and as you saw on this slide there that I couldn't get rid of a mix of the philosopher the journalist the Technologist and the educator My philosophy Background is my formal academic background and what that means is when I come to research in Education and educational technology. I'm coming from a perspective as a philosophical researcher My readings are different probably from what you read educators grew up in bloom and and and Dewey and the gousty and the rest of them I I read you know Hume and air and Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein and You know, I've looked at questions of knowledge and learning from the perspective of ontology Epistemology metaphysics philosophy of mine. So I'm coming at it from a different perspective The journalist in me began somewhere before grade five. I Created a little newspaper on a Mimeo graph machine in our school called the Eagle report When I was at university I was editor of the student newspaper for a couple of terms and today even I'll have my newsletter all well daily the technologist you've seen to some degree in In my writing and thinking about technology topics, but you know, I also program computers The my website which is down stud CA runs on software that I created myself and I've been doing this for many years. I actually worked with Texas Instruments for a little while and Technology has always been a theme In the work that I've done and then of course the educator I Have experience in the classroom. I Have the harsh experience has as a graduate assistant teaching his first class to 88 eager first-year students And that was my introduction to teaching no preparation. No nothing They just threw me in front of that class and said teach them logic And so I did but you know I spent seven years as a tutor with Athomas to university and I've worked in a number of educational institutions through the years and So I have a pretty good practical background and of course recently with people like George Siemens and others I've been teaching online so that's who I am that's kind of where I'm coming from and You know, I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking about you know This this set of things that I've learned this you know, these four domains these four disciplines And maybe a few others beside they don't characterize what I know particularly you know, it's not a whole list of old stack of Of contents in my brain They really do represent what I've come to be over time the kind of person I've become the the This you know the the thing if you will that I've become and so that's What sort of sets off? This talk today, and I'm thinking about it again y'all first thing that sprung into my mind where I thought what should my title be? It was through a moot directly No idea why I honestly don't know everything came from that title which came from nothing So I looked it up And as I looked it up it occurred to me that learning Itself has a lot in common with growing up, you know It's funny when we think of the transition from childhood to adulthood. It has a lot to do with what we learn You know and adults we know how to drive his children. We don't adults. We can handle our alcohols children. We can't but you know, it's You know, and you've all gone through this experience You remember your childhood and you remember becoming an adult and it wasn't Accumulating more and more stuff in your mind. It was becoming a different person literally a different person Yeah, and the same guy I was when I was a kid You know with all those strange dreams and ideas and thoughts and prospects and that but I'm also a very different person than I was as well and It's this difference that is the outcome Or you know the consequence of learning so We think about that I think about that and Now I moved to the first question and the first question was The question of the future of higher education. Oh Dang, I forgot one of my effects. Okay. I'm gonna give you the effect quickly because I planned it There's way too much to remember when I'm trying to do this. Okay. Here's I keep hitting the wrong button right so We shouldn't see here. This is me saying who I am back to that. That's another Steven downs who wasn't me pretty neat effect okay, and then Now this is the through the glass directly childhood is like learning effect and And the idea here again is to show how moving from childhood to adulthood. Is it just? Accumulating a whole bunch of new knowledge It's becoming a different person. It's Creating a new perspective new point of view Etc. Okay, that's a pretty cool effect. All right, let's move To the next point then which is to look at the future of higher education which is the first of the questions at long last that I was asked to to address and and In understanding the future of higher education higher education. I think we need we need to understand Actually, it's a future of education and higher education, but in either case We need to understand what they call the value proposition This is one of those terms from business and economics, and I don't have much time for business and economics But some of the concepts are useful and this is one of them The the idea of a value proposition is what it is. You're actually selling for example People might think that they're selling a certain product, but they're actually selling the Experience that goes with the product People think that you're selling books But what they're actually selling is not the printed word But the storytelling that is contained within the books So what is it that? People are actually selling Again, I hate the word selling here But I'll use it as it's a business economics thing when they're when you're selling Education or higher education or to flip it around a bit. What is it that we're actually doing? When we're doing education Well, I think there's two sides to it and the one side is The the the side that we're familiar with the learning the content the job training aspect of it the idea of There being content that we're trying to get from the teacher or professor's head to the students head I really think that's a very small part of it the other side of it is Socialization network and identity and it's interesting with with all of this discussion of MOOCs and online learning and that But those colleges and universities who are most about that are The ones that have been on MOOCs and online content generally think for example About what you're buying when you buy an education from Yale, right? Yes, you're buying philosophy courses perhaps or architecture courses or whatever But really what you're buying is this whole Community at Yale You're buying you know the Illumini Association. You're buying the networking that you're doing with people you're buying possible membership in the the Yale it's going bones society with the possibility of becoming You know a president or a leader of industry or some such thing. I Remember reading F Scott Fitzgerald this side of paradise and Indie talks about you know going through his prep school Which was his only formal education took a couple of years and then going to university at Princeton And you know I was very jealous you get into Princeton after a couple of years of school But that's the way it was back then But more to the point You know what happens when he goes to Princeton isn't the learning so much as he's setting up his network of connections and social relations and all of that for the rest of his life and so This is that value proposition that I'm talking about this this idea of Developing the socialization developing the networking developing the identity now we think of Education as these two things separate learning content and job training is one thing and Socialization networking identity is another and as long as we keep them separate Like this, then we can have one education system for the masses Which is the learning and content and all of that and another education system for the future stolen bones members but More and more as I think about learning and I think more and more as researchers in general think about learning We come to understand that these two aspects of the value proposition are one in the same that Learning to be say a geographer car repair person police officer Physicist an engineer Isn't just learning the content isn't just learning the principles isn't just getting on the job training But it's actually a process Where you become one of these things you become a geographer You become an engineer engineers really understand this Engineering is a very academically rigorous process But at the end of the engineering degree they go through something called the iron ring ceremony the iron ring is Traditionally fabricated out of the iron of a bridge that collapsed and the idea is that you wear the iron ring to remember your responsibility as an engineer to society But it's also this process of socialization like this process of Identification you are an engineer. You haven't simply learned to be an engineer. You are an engineer Why is this important? I think the future of higher education Lies in understanding this and we're at one of those crossroads where we could say oh Yeah, learning is just about getting the content the knowledge and we'll go off in that direction and Get it terribly terribly wrong Or we could understand that in learning in education We're about creating or I don't even I was gonna say we're about creating people But it's not that kind of education We're we're about helping people Define who they want to be and then become that person and I think that that's a much more hands-on a much more I'm looking for the right word here Authentic isn't the right word, but much much much more humanistic model of learning So that's the frame. That's the backdrop so moving from that now we move into the question that's on everybody's minds today and That's the question of MOOCs Now we know kind of what a MOOC is massive open online course. So it's open. It's online It's massive or supposed to be massive end of it's a course now the thing with with MOOCs is It isn't simply About replacing one kind of a course with another kind of a course And I think we need to understand this although it has been presented that way recently I'm sure you all read From Phil Hill and others about the San Jose State University deciding to get out of Or to put on pause more accurately its agreement with Udacity and and the reason for that as we go through Phil Hill's article we read we read that The students who were teaching the MOOC were not passing the class Or at least not at the same rate as the students who are teaching the more traditional class now I think about this and What seems to be significant here and Phil makes the point You know that's a very hastily done the last minute poorly planned kind of exercise And we should not be surprised that it didn't succeed But it's also one of these exercises where we just took this MOOC pulled it out of the air if you will I said oh take this instead of that and expected it to work and That seems to me to be Unrealistic, you know, let's come back to the whole question of the course model in general and You know think about the problems of the course model in general The idea here with the course model is that you can take this narrowly defined segment of learning and simply Slotted in you know sort of like plug-and-play learning and that's the model. We've developed over the years now in Regular, you know K-12 education and college university education. We know that we can't just do that And we know that what we really need to do is get students a series of courses Which we call a program or a course of studies or some such thing You know leading to some ultimate objective or degree in other words courses don't generally just stand on their own You know unless you're taking something from a human resources at a company, but normally they're part of a larger process they're also spelt within our and We don't have that structure background or infrastructure yet for MOOCs, you know what one of the Common criticisms of a MOOC is that you know our students need to really be prepared, you know They need to be academically ready. They need to have motivation be able to you know Study for themselves in order to be successful in a MOOC and I said, well, yeah, that's true But it's also true of traditional courses that students need to have a whole set of skills They need to sit quietly their hands forward in front of the center, but you know, they need to learn to listen They need to do group work. They need to be able to read at a fairly high level in order to be successful in traditional courses, but we have this whole Infrastructure that helps people be prepared to take traditional courses So by the time they get to you know geography 101 at Yale They've mastered most of what they need to master in order to be successful at that course And they can actually focus not so much on the course But on all the social goings on around them because that's what they're really interested in when they're at Yale They're so good at taking courses by then they can do that at 20% effort the MOOCs take more efforts and they take more effort because People don't know how to study this way yet. They will you know people who've grown up using the internet Will know how to study this way, but right now what we have is What I would call the MOOC out-of-water phenomenon and I tried to find a video of fish flopping on the ground, but I don't have one But the MOOC out-of-water phenomenon, this is fish flapping on the ground You know you just imagine these students who've been plucked out of a traditional system and tossed into a MOOC And it's like somebody who can't read being tossed into a reading course Well, they're not going to be successful because we don't have the background right We don't have the environment right so What is that environment and that leads to the next one of the questions that I was asked to talk about and That question just concerns open ed Generally, I was asked for an open education overview well You know There's there's no single model for open education And and so you can't really give the open ed overview There's Instead different ways of looking at openness different concepts of openness Traditional openness, you know open education is what we saw at the open university for example Where you know it still costs you money and you still have to go there But there are no admission standards. So that's that's the very traditional sort of open education On the other hand would have the concept of what I would call free learning, which is open learning with No costs and in a sense open learning with no limits free learning to me refers not simply to the price but also to the idea that the learning is created by and Managed by the people who are doing the learning and we also have Open access and I think this is a fundamental kind of openness where We're accessing not just the content But the community itself and this goes back to our value proposition, right? If we're just that if we're just offering people access to the content part of education We're really offering them access only to half the education and not even the important half And in fact the half that is over time becoming less and less important Open access to me means access not just to the content to the but also to the community itself And that's why when we developed MOOCs we developed them the way we did With access to the teaching access to the interaction of the participants among each other and with the instructors and the guests in the course There were other forms of open access and I've talked about them I won't linger on them here But I do want to mention them so that we don't forget them and those are open-ass open access in terms of open assessment and Open access in terms of credentials for example badges and these are sorts of ways of getting at open access to the community We think of MOOCs we think of the technology the technical innovations and all of that But I want to focus on the last bit that I've put here in this title Assessing the person not the memorization and again this speaks to this wider aspect of learning This aspect of learning that's more like becoming than it is like absorbing Right now one of the big questions about MOOCs is how do you assess learning and when people ask that sort of question? It's like they're asking how much of the content that was presented in the course actually Remained in the person after the course and to me that's a very young interesting question because that's not the purpose of an Education we think of the purpose of an education as a process of helping a person become something Then our assessment should be something along the lines of Has that person become the sort of person that they wanted to become when they set out in their learning program Well, how do we ask that? Traditionally it was very hard to do it really the only way you could do it was through a process of recognition and What by recognition what I mean is this? Phenomenon it is Tognitively it's essentially the same as recognizing a face or recognizing a tiger in a forest Or recognizing a fish out of water or whatever but recognizing basically is where One person who is familiar with the domain or the discipline looks at the other person in performing Tasks and and other things related to that discipline saying yes This person is a successful second son Sports is a really good example We all go to the baseball diamond or football field and we watch the players play and although we're not experts Just otherwise we'd be playing because they get paid millions of dollars Although we're not experts we can watch their performance on the field and judge For ourselves where there are not they're good players. You know, yes, you you watch I don't know Alexander Rudd Regress play third base and you say yeah that guy can play third base You know that well, you've seen lots of third baseman and just does it better? There's a whole variety of things for the same thing is true of engineers You know you can tell that somebody is a good engineer or a bad engineer well before the bridge collapses And the way you do that is you look at all the all of the things that a person does in the course of their Working as an engineer the optimist they do The reports if they write the conversations they have with other engineers and you can tell Especially experienced engineers can tell if a person is a good engineer Through a multitude of little simple little things that do they use do they use the words correctly? Do they think the right sorts of things are important? Do they view the world in a certain way? Do they have all of these little points of professionalism? You know and it's it's all of these things that you learn at Yale or that you learn at finishing school or prep school Before you get and turn into the club and all of these things are actually the criteria for membership in the club now the tests touch none of that the tests take certain abstractions and They say this is being an engineer. We'll test them on this and if they get this they probably got the rest kind of a crapshoot in the future as More and more people work in a MOOC like environment and by MOOC like I mean my kind of MOOC not Udacity's kind of MOOC a MOOC like environment where you do your work in a public way and you share that work With a community of people and it might be organized around a series of events We call these events courses, but really what they are is shared Academic or professional practice that happens over a defined period of time and there's more and more people do that you can see a greater and greater percentage of their public performance and We can use software and other analytic tools to actually perform the task of Recognizing performance in the same way we can program to recognize the tiger in the woods or the face of a person that security services are looking for so I think The the really interesting technology that's going to be coming up isn't the MOOC itself It isn't personal learning networks. It certainly isn't learning analytics properly so called but it's this kind of Total understanding of what learning is. I think we're still pretty far away away from that just a few thoughts now to finish off and This this was the section where they asked me for my favorite topic of the day and my favorite topic of the day concerns the purpose of education Because more and more we're being asked to justify learning from the perspective of You know employment Jobs and all the rest of it And and more and more we're seeing The economic motivation for learning both on the producer side and And as well as on the consumer side, and this is why we're seeing You know Clarence Fisher reported this course that we're getting 43 million right by it's getting 2.5 million D2L getting 80 million etc. There've been all kinds of Funded projects in education and these are all based around the idea that there's a connection between Learning and the economy and yes Yes Everybody needs a job Or at the very least everybody needs an income they need to eat they need to have the capacity to have a good life But learning is not about jobs and the economy and there's a couple of reasons for this First of all learning is not about jobs in the economy when we're engaged in the process of education We're not engaged in the process of improving the economy We're engaged in the process of helping a person become the kind of person that they want to be and not Everybody in the world wants to be the kind of person who is dedicated to helping the economy You know, it's not something you put on your tombstone You don't say at the end of your life Fred Born 1920 died 2020 he helped the economy It's not really what we look for Secondly and perhaps even more importantly Economic issues aren't going to be solved by education and people who tell you that they are Misrepresenting the state of affairs now Education and particularly the broader model of education the social identity forming kind of aspect of education is Necessary for economic success It's difficult almost impossible to achieve economic success social success and the other kinds of success Without that, but it's not sufficient And this is not sufficient part that I think is really important You know the problems with the economy are not being caused by the fact that people aren't educated enough We have the most educated Population in the history of the world You know, there are more educated people today. They are they are more educated Then any other time in history We're in an economic recession. So clearly the one isn't directly related to the other I think we're looking much more about fundamental issues of fairness that need to be addressed I think we need to be looking at things like income distribution. I think we need to be looking at Who has their hands on the levers of power who has their hands on the control of resources and production You know Carl Sagan did a book called cosmos and the closing chapter of cosmos was who speaks for earth and It did some of the most poignant writing I've ever seen certainly by a scientist Who don't generally write like that or even think like that and I think it's a relevant question You know and when we look at education We want to ask now who speaks for The students who speaks for the people who are being educated and we want it to be the students Who are deciding for themselves who they are and who they're going to become who they are going to be and if we Make education Subservient to the economy if we make education Observient to the people who control the bulk of the wealth What we're doing is we're saying as a society that This small number of people will be able to tell people who they are and what they are And I don't think this is a this is a You know a Sustainable long-term strategy because I think people want more and I think people want their education to become meaningful for themselves Also, I don't think it's a good model for the economy simply because The economy like any network thrives through equity of the distribution of resources through diversity through autonomy of independent agents through interactivity and through Openness and and part of that openness is openness into the club Openness into the social identity forming aspect of education so I'm not sure that you're expecting for a talk from me today, but these are well, this is what's on my mind today and This is what follows from the Through the MOOC's darkly title that sprung into my head like palace Athena fully formed And I hope you found it interesting and over to you I How for the sailor make an actual college degree I had a sailor advertisement start That's Just for the record you should not have videos that auto starts on your webpages Anyhow, I'm having trouble hearing What you're saying on the other side there's a lot of warbling in that so people have extra microphones open that might be causing it I'm not sure We're trying to Actually our first time What I was saying is I'm not sure of your level of familiarity Kind of Creating There's a difference courses We do have some Interactive each other kind of based on their own using and did want over the summer summer school session where for the public facilitators to participate in forums and make sure that we were on-site with the students more. But where do you see an organization like ours that doesn't necessarily run a loop type model? Where do you see that in what organizations can provide some of that equity in learning that you retain? I think I get a sense of the question. It's, again, very difficult to make out the sound. I'm sure the recording will come out better. This is a question that's being faced by most of distance education, especially recently, because most of distance education has historically been composed of course packages and self-paced courses. These were the sorts of things I worked with when I worked with Athabasca University. They sent out these books, booklets, workbooks and videos, and one course even sent out a human brain, a plastic model of a human brain, which is a good thing, now that I think about it. Athabasca at the time really emphasized to its staff the need to contact and connect with the students teaching the course. One of the things that we did is, in the first week that they took the course, they signed up for a certain start day. We would call them and tell them that we were there, help them with any starting problems, and that one act would double our completion rate, because there's this huge difference between taking a course by yourself and taking a course in the context of some social environment, even a nebulous kind of distant social environment. Terry Anderson calls it presence, and he speaks about cognitive presence and social presence, and the idea here is that having presence increases the effectiveness of the course. So for an organization like Sailord, and you're certainly not alone in this, I would be looking at trying to add that element of presence to the learning materials, to the self-paced courses, and you're not going to be offering MOOCs properly so-called, because certainly not MOOCs along the model of Coursera or Udacity for a variety of reasons, and mostly because it's simply not practical to do that, but you do have learning resources that can be situated within the social environment, the social learning environment. At one end, that means something as simple as attaching social networking, communications functionality to your online courses. So even if a person starts a course, they start their self-paced, they start whenever they want, there's a Twitter hashtag, so as soon as they start, they can check the Twitter hashtag and communicate with other people talking in the course. More long-term and more immersively, if you will, the courses become more and more of these immersive exercises into wider communities, and that's the sort of MOOC that George Siemens and I created, where we weren't so concerned about building this course and offering it online as we were about opening up this process to the community to take part in. And I think you'll find over time, as you enable more and more community, and I'm trying to find different words rather than repeat the same word over and over again, but more community, more socialization, more communication, more interaction, as you enable more of that in the courses, you'll find, I think, and I hope that these courses become less and less something that you create and more and more something that the participants create until the courses will begin to morph over time. And from your perspective, you'll need to create room for that to happen. You'll need to create room for the course to become something new, room for new materials to be added, flexibility and space for people to take what you've created, and as I like to say, folds, fiddling, mutilated it, mutilated it, turning it into something of their own. Eventually, the idea here is the stuff that you've created becomes the material that participants in your course, they don't simply learn it, but they use it to communicate with each other and to create projects of their own. Does that make sense? Yes, it definitely does. So, with that, most of my questions, did anyone else have any questions? If you'd like to kind of go over a little bit, I'll try to do some of the other questions as well. Hi, Mr. Downs. This is Jen Xu. My question is, you said earlier that students aren't currently set up for success in the current iteration of online education. Future generations might be, maybe because they've grown up in this completely digitized, somewhat digitized world. What could be done for students today in order to better prepare them for success? Make them do things? That's a great question. There are two aspects to the questions. First of all, what are those conditions for success? And then secondly, how can we foster them? Keeping in mind we can't just teach them because then we're going back to the old model with the conditions of success or some sort of content we stuff into their head. That doesn't work either. So, first of all, what are the conditions of success? I use an analogy, and I think it's a pretty good analogy, where learning a domain like physics or engineering or geography or whatever is like learning a language. It's like becoming literate. And there's an awful lot of touch points in that analogy. If you allow that, if you allow yourself to see yourself as becoming a speaker of physics, of beer, of physics, of beer, of physics, then underlying principles of literacy are the underlying principles of success in this kind of environment. And that makes sense, and that's consistent with the way it was with classes where actual literacy, being able to read books and write papers, were the conditions of success. So what are these underlying conditions of literacy? Well, there's a set of them. One of them, for example, falls under the general heading of syntax or pattern recognition. And this is basically just a set of skills associated with perception and cognition, where when you look at and interact with an environment, you're able to infer regularities for systems from that environment. It's the process by which we recognize tigers in a forest, because tigers are orange and forests are green. It's the process by which we recognize grammar and rules of syntax and language. It's the process where we recognize trends in the history, patterns in the weather, etc. There's a whole range of them. So this is one type of literacy. And where it plays a role in learning in MOOCs is in being able to detect and identify materials, resources, giving communities and people in the world who would be relevant to learning this or that subject. And one of the things that we did in our MOOCs is we had people find resources every day or as frequently as they could and contribute them. And the idea, and George said this well, part of learning a subject is learning to find the right stuff related to the subject. And what we're doing here is we're trying to foster this regularity generation, recognition capacity. Now, you can't just teach the principles of it, right? They try to do that in language learning. You learn all the rules of grammar, underline the nouns, circle the verbs, and that gets old really quickly. The best way to learn it is by doing it. I used to love Sesame Street. I never watched Sesame Street because I was too old. It started too late. And one of the things it did brilliantly was this whole, which of these things does not belong segment? And you might think that was a complete waste of time, but it's teaching this pattern recognition kind of thing by having you practice looking at patterns. And so preparing a person for pattern recognition, especially a young person, having them do this, having them find patterns, having them find regularities, giving them games, quizzes, exercises, whatever, that involve the recognition of patterns, the finding of regularities, the abduction of laws of nature might be a bit much. But you know what I mean? And again, you don't teach them this, you just have them do it. This is the same. There's a set of these literacies, determining meaning, value, and truth, for example. Learning to use concepts and ideas to do things, for example. Understanding place, awareness, context, localization, situation, environment, process of inference, induction, deduction, definition, description, and understanding processes of change, growth, cycle, spiral, and those sorts of things. All of these are underlying elements of cognition that support success in a moot environment. And these are the sorts of things. You have to learn them by practicing them. Right now we don't. Right now we don't even come close to thinking about how much learning by deduction do we instill in our children, for example. How much inductive reasoning do we get them practicing? It's actually very little. So they have to go from being receptors to being actual generators of language, logic, and meaning. And there's a whole range of ways to do that. So I think that's how I would approach this lesson. I hope that wasn't too long. No, that was great. Thank you so much. Does anyone else have any? I might have one. I don't know anything. I'm going to turn the camera here because my room view is not on YouTube directly. Hi, Steven. It's Sean. I've been sort of monitoring the Hangout console here just off the screen. So I read, probably just the other day, 25% of North American Internet traffic or something like that is going through Google servers. Right? And I know that you've been... I'm sorry? It's going through Google servers. Oh, Google servers, yeah. I know you've been a big component of the ownership of data of RSS. You filter your own tools in order to make sure that it works the way you need it to work. And it's sometimes hard to imagine or we easily forget that there was a time before the Internet, there was a time before the web enabled all this networking and connection. So I guess my main question here is what's your hope or what's your vision, especially on your most optimistic days, for how people are going to be connecting 10 years from now? Where are we going? Well, still use the Internet mostly because it's really hard to change the Volkswagen into a truck while you're still driving it. You know, there's no practical alternative. But you know, the Internet itself is constantly morphing and changing and mostly in the direction of increased bandwidth and increased access. It's interesting, the figure recorded 25% of all traffic goes through Google. And I'm thinking like 24% of that is probably cat videos on YouTube. One of the things that really gives me hope for the Internet is that I can't imagine people letting go of that. I can't imagine us giving up on Saturday. I can't imagine us giving up on XKCD and sending selfies and posting what become viral videos and all of that. And you know, from the very beginning of the Internet, even before the beginning of the Internet, this is what made it great. And there's a whole history of stories. Larry Lipman, the I Will Answer Anything person on Usenet, for example, and so on. So there's that human aspect of the Internet that makes it great. We're right now having that human aspect collide with the commercial aspect, and that's where we see the Facebooks and the Twitters and all of that. And I'm sure they would very much like to make it their own private service. And I don't think we should let them. But there is this, you know, host your own Internet movement, you know, keep your own data. And I think that we are going to have more options in the future than we have now. Right now, you know, if we want to have a space online, if we want to have a presence, you know, it used to be we'd have to set up a web page. That was hard and only geeks could do that. And then we'd use Blogger or something like that, and that was somewhat less hard. And a lot of people could do that, but it wasn't very flexible. And so the next generation is the social media services that we have now. And, you know, it feels now like this will never change. But trust me, this will change. There was a time when it felt like Yahoo groups would own all discourse online. And now nobody even knows what they are. Geocities, there was a time when most of all websites were Geocities websites. And people have never heard of Geocities today. So I'm not so concerned that any of these companies can capture all of the Internet. Also, too, as time goes by and as we produce more and more data and more personal data, there becomes an increasing need to be able to manage this for ourselves. Now, we can't really manage this for ourselves yet. So we use photo services, we use social networks and all of that. But eventually, it will be as easy to manage our own data as it is to manage our own books. You know, we could always get books from the library, but most people have books at home because it's easier and it's more convenient. And that will be true of our data as well. And already, we're buying appliances like televisions, especially televisions, the new Samsung televisions are all networked, and other appliances, stereo systems, toasters. All of these appliances are connected to your home network. And over time, your home network is going to, this will happen, it's going to develop a storage capacity. I already have network hard drives in my living room. Once we have that, once we have easy tools, we will more and more move off of these common services and on to these home networks, simply because it will be a lot cheaper. If you have, I have 25,000 photos. 25,000 photos is, I don't know, gigabytes. It's not quite 100 gigabytes, but it's a bit less than 100 gigabytes. Keeping that online would cost me about $25, $30 a year. If I multiply that by 10 times, which is entirely possible, because I'm just now beginning to shoot in raw format, it's much larger. I could be looking at $250 a year just to store my photos. That suddenly becomes impractical. It becomes much more practical to store them at home and offer them on the internet from my home server. So I think we're going to see more of that sort of thing, where some of our data will be at home, some of our data will be online, some video will be at home, some will be online, and our home internet and the online internet will become much more indistinguishable. The more our home internet is part of our life, the less a company like Google or Facebook or Twitter or any of them can monopolize our online presence, because we always have the opportunity to move, to move our data from wherever it is to our home environment. So I'm not too worried about it. You need to become less and less of an expert today in order to do a lot of this stuff. I do it because I can, and it does take quite a bit of technical skill to do that, but people will build tools, people better than me will build tools to make this easily accessible. I'd like to compare internet technology with the internal combustion engine, or engines in general. And 80 years ago, 100 years ago, an engine was a highly technical thing that only experts could really use. People who had cars really needed to be mechanics in order to use them because they would break down so often. The car would crash, not crash into a telephone pole, but just stop working and you'd have to go in. There was the whole culture around it. The increase in the 50s and all of that, they knew their engines, they could go in, they could air out the carburetor and all of that. And that's the sort of thing with the internet today where you have internet greasers. Like me, I'm an internet greaser. There's a term for you. But 450 years and you don't even notice that you're buying an engine anymore. You get an automatic toothbrush. That's an engine attached to a toothbrush. If you don't even think of it, you can go to the drive store and buy a toothbrush or a fan or a car or a motorcycle or all of the other things that we've put engines into, refrigerator, etc. It would be like that. And it would just be this whole array of devices and we just buy them, we just use them, we don't have anything to think about it. And more and more, they put control over our own data into our hands and less and less into the hands of internet greasers and the companies they form. I'm going to have to remember that term, internet greaser. Let me ask all of you, what do you think about what I've said today? Does it make sense to you or does it sound like I'm blowing hot air? And you can say it either, it's okay. Perfect. In fact, I think what you said was very interesting and it's a very interesting way to look at education as a whole, especially if you think of it as a tool for socialization as well as delivering content. So I think some of the areas for interest for us as an organization are going to be how well-reviewing was helping turn to both the social aspect of learning as well as producing high-quality content. I've prior to working here had some experience working in higher education and I know that to briefly kind of touched on just as a consumer of education model, that was very highly controversial especially for professors who were tenured or fighting for ten year and then wonder why these bratty little students would come in with every little question or proactive kind of having students go up there and do it, that they're purchasing learning because they're purchasing access to jobs and also the economics students that kind of discordance which I'm sure a lot of you looked up with here did great people or just graduated and started to look up jobs market that the saying that education isn't about jobs which I would agree with you on it's very hard to hear the job market saying well I did just pay a lot of money and going into that experience this was the way to get a job and now we're coming into an economy where you really may have to kind of kill what you need as far as the freelance. Sorry, that's also a higher education especially if you want to work around their budget, their income based on the research that you're doing here in the U.S. So being able to have access to not only government but community and resourcefulness is also going to be important. I do have a lot of answers to what you said I would ask you for more thoughts on how you can potentially fit into all of this you mentioned the best way to assess the students to be able to assess a person and I'm taking back to my higher education and I could just see a whole bunch of my academic colleagues like I'll pick up announcing you're telling me now I have to hold every single hand kind of holistically be able to give my standard to people this is something that's very important and I would traditional colleges look at that how should kind of the open industry look at that how would you put in some sort of recognition that would make sense and be standardized enough even though education is about jobs to be able to say well I was assessed in a useful way this is my standard of knowledge that makes me a capable person makes me a capable I guess a vehicle for knowledge well let's look at the end point first because we know if we have a sense of where it's going keeping in mind we can't just predict and everything will come out naturally like that but let's imagine and we'll put ourselves into this employer job context so I'm an employer I have a company here in Canada and I have a job opening I post the job opening which might mean as simple as I tweeted it but probably not but even before I post it knowledge of my job opening will filter out through the community at any rate I'm going to get expressions of interest for various people and I might want to do a little head-hunting anyways myself so how am I going to manage this I will have an application it might be something similar to a Facebook app only it's in the future so it won't be Facebook and it won't be called an app but we'll just localize it for now and what this app would do is it would look at the qualifications of people who are already in my company so it looks at my company's profile well all of my employees profiles especially the person in the position I'm trying to fill and if it's a new position it'll look at other people in my company and it may look at other people in other companies and look at those positions and that kind of creates if you will a competency profile again very bad very cumbersome terminology for something that's really actually very detailed, very fine-grained but there's this thing that's a competency profile it'll meditate that and look at people on the internet look at the work that they've done that they've made available now it's not going to be everything because people have privacy considerations they'll only put the work out of the communications out into public that they want to be publicly available so they'll put their best foot forward and we all understand that just like on somebody's Facebook page they don't put everything on their Facebook page or at least they shouldn't sometimes they do we understand that too and that's all okay it's all part of a rich tapestry as my wife says and so this program looks at this and what it does basically is it compares the competency profile with each person out there and it does this matching kind of exercise and it'll never fit 100% never but it'll be sort of partial mapping and these kind of network based connectionist based programs are really good at what they call partial pattern matching and so it'll basically identify a set of people who are most similar to the competency profile that I'm trying to fill it'll rank them and then it'll present those names to me and then out of that list of names some of them may be people who have applied others may be people who want but basically it cuts through the whole competency definition and recruitment process so that when I have a position I want to fill basically I put in a short request on my computer and I get a list of names it's almost like I want to watch a movie on Netflix and so I open up Netflix and it has a set of suggestions for me based on you know what's new what I've seen before what it was with my taste profile and I look at those top things and they're different every day every day is different and I looked at something else today that I didn't look at yesterday so it's sort of like that and then it's like it's not a Netflix of employees but it's almost like that and it gives me the opportunity to call them interact with them because we still want to at least talk with people before we hire them so that's the end point and so the question is how can colleges how can students, how can professors prepare for this well we're not preparing people to pass tests anymore clearly and I think the more effort we spend trying to teach people to pass tests the less we're preparing them for the future and also the less we're preparing ourselves for the future as educators because we're kind of missing the boat it's a good question I don't think there's a single answer I mean I'm doing what I think is necessary to prepare for this imagining the future and then talking about it and then designing software applications that I think will fit this future fabricating fabricating the wrong word telling the story around this future every time I tell it I imagine it a little bit differently a little bit more detail in all of that so there's that aspect of it if I was a professor in a university right now well I'd be just a few years from retirement I wouldn't really worry I'm just kidding I'd be I'd really be focused on well I wouldn't let me think when I was teaching college university level classes I was really really interested not in the content of the course but in making sure that my students were literate and I mean literate in this wider sense able to communicate able to comprehend what they read you know I would teach logic and critical thinking I would skip most of logic and critical thinking if they could read a newspaper editorial identify what was said, what the argument was and what the reasons were I considered that a success and it didn't matter to me whether they could identify and name all of the logical fallacies what mattered to me is they could comprehend this editorial and respond to it intelligently and I think this kind of basic literacy is at the core of every discipline you know I think geography geography has nothing to do with language but there is a literacy of geography it's the same kind of literacy and geographers study the land and they study the people and the culture and the buildings and the artifacts but they do the same kind of thing they read these things they study and what's not important is that they name all the countries and all the capitals and all the languages of the world but they're able to look at a city or a community and be able to say this is whatever it is is what this community is saying to me as a whole this is what this community stands for this is what this community means that's at the core of geography and I'd be more focused on that and as an educator I'm more focused on this core of education education is well it's about reading people and it's about teaching people to read all of these different languages it means that as an educator I need to become as literate as I possibly can if I'm literate I'll survive any of these changes it's not going to be a big deal if the university goes broke and I have to make my own way in the world if I really understand the core of how to help people learn I'll always find employment and I think that's always going to be true and even deeper I think people who have this core and I don't just mean basic literacy basic memory etc but this deeper understanding of how to get at what the message is what the reason is these are people who can if there are no jobs available can create and make jobs for themselves because they have the creative capacity to look at the environment around them find out what the recognize it's a process of recognition recognize what the opportunities are have the tools to address those opportunities and make a living for themselves especially as we move toward an economy where we have less and less equity more and more money in the hands of the very wealthy the traditional economy becomes less and less functional and people have to learn to function outside it and these are the skills that you need I think if I had to answer that answer that question I think getting at the core getting at these basic literacies in each of these disciplines would be where I'd want to focus I don't know if that was a coherent answer but that was the best I could do I really appreciate your time I really appreciate that answer if there aren't any more questions you really appreciate your time it's definitely an honor and I think again we won't take up any more of it but really wanted to if everybody wants to thank you so much and I really appreciate all of you taking so much time out of your afternoon to talk with me, I appreciate that that's a wonderful treat thank you, goodbye bye