Today’s youth have some very interesting things to say. Who’s listening?
Piotr Czerski says:
We, the Web kids; we, who have grown up with the Internet and on the Internet, are a generation who meet the criteria for the term [generation] in a somewhat subversive way. We did not experience an impulse from reality, but rather a metamorphosis of the reality itself. What unites us is not a common, limited cultural context, but the belief that the context is self-defined and an effect of free choice.
Researchers at Sony’s Computer Lab in Paris have been working with a group of robots that have been programmed to develop their own shared language. There has been phenomenal progress in the development of machine learning in the past decade or two. We encounter this everyday as we use technology but don’t always realize what’s going on. For example, our cars adjust to the way we drive to maximize fuel efficiency, Google knows what we are looking for before we finish typing it into the search engine, computer games adjust to the way we play to keep the game exciting for us. In robotics, one tricky problem is finding out how best to make robots that can walk. A group of researchers at the University of Vermont demonstrated that robots that are programmed to learn to walk, rather than being fed all of the necessary instructions beforehand, perform better than the pre-programmed robots.
Another sticky problem in robotics and computing, is developing robots that can talk naturally. Natural language has proven so complex that we can’t program machines to do it because we don’t entirely understand how it works ourselves. One thing that I’ve suggested in casual conversations is that perhaps the best way to get machines to talk would be to have them develop and learn their own language and then teach them to translate to our languages.
As it goes, whenever you come up with an idea, there’s most likely someone working on the same somewhere in the world. And such is the case at Sony’s Computer Lab in Paris. Their robots perform various actions with their bodies in front of a mirror and give new actions a name. They then interact with the other robots, 20 of them in all, to discover that they have named the same actions. The robots adjust their vocabulary until they reach agreement on specific terms. They have proven remarkably adept at doing this and have even developed relatively complex concepts such as “left” and “right”. Also, they develop their language so rapidly that the researchers have had trouble keeping up often needing up to a week to decipher the robots language. Now we just wait and see if the robots can figure out how to translate their language to ours…
Bonus ill-structured problem: Pedagogy – robots – language?
Sometimes it makes no sense to us why certain technologies take hold when they do and even less sense when we learn that “new” technologies turn out to be rediscovered “old” technologies. Consider cement, perhaps one of the best known examples of a technology that was developed, widely used, virtually disappeared, and then re-emerged as a novel technology centuries later. Cement was used extensively throughout the Roman Empire and then seems to have been almost forgotten (i.e. there are almost no written historical references to its use) until mid-European engineers started recording formulas and directions for its use in the 18th century.
As an ardent follower of the development of information technology for nearly two decades, I’ve seen similar emergences/disappearances/re-emergence of several technologies. In the late 1990s and early 2000s some colleagues and I were tracking and developing technologies for collaborative writing. We were positive that these technologies were about to break through. It made perfect sense to us; we had the tools to do it, and we felt that the incentive to adopt the technology was there. It turned out we were wrong. Collaborative writing tools didn’t really start to take off until the end of the 2000s. Around the same time that we were playing around with collaborative writing, Netscape was developing interesting tools that looked set to transform web browsing into a significantly more social experience than it was at the time. Well, we all know what happened to Netscape, and the web didn’t really start getting social to any notable extent until the mid 2000s.
A lot has been written about factors that affect technology adoption – turns out it’s a strange and constantly changing mixture of context, society, economy and serendipity. ‘Nuff said. But, what affects technology abandonment and why does it seem that we sometimes abandon technologies in a way that either immediately or eventually seems to work against our interests? Well, here’s an interesting article that discusses exactly that in a very interesting and relevant context – the Hunger Games books. Apparently, some readers have been questioning why a future society with various technologies that seemingly surpass our current technological capability, don’t have some technologies that we consider basic today; such as the Internet. The authors and specialists that they spoke with make an important point; that one technology is not inherently better than another. When the nature of our problems change, our requirements for tools change and we go off looking for something new and shedding the old.
The following is a somewhat quick & dirty reflection on the symposium on the future of education that I participated in in Iceland last week.
I was on a panel at a symposium on the future of education held at the University of Iceland (UI) last Tuesday (March 20, 2012). The key speaker was my advisor, Dr. Arthur Harkins, and with me on the panel were Dr. Svanborg R. Jónsdóttir, lecturer at UI, and Dr. Jón Torfi Jónasson, Dean of the School of Education, UI.
There has been little discourse on the futures studies, and in particular the future of education, in Iceland. Consequently, the Icelandic language lacks many of the concepts used in futures discourse (for ex. Icelandic philosopher Gunnar Dal suggests in his book published in 2005, Stórar Spurningar (transl. Big Questions) that perhaps there may at some time be a field of study referred to as “futures studies” – I guess he didn’t notice that there has been such a field since the 1950-60s developing increasingly rigorous methodologies). The symposium, along with a growing interest in the future of education in Iceland, provided a great opportunity to expand Icelandic discourse on education to include discussions about futures. Continue reading
Continually increasing evidence that future thinking is being taken, or should be taken, seriously.
Interesting free publication from Creative & Cultural Skills and A New Direction in the UK.
We asked over 40 artists, practitioners and thinkers to address issues around how the education system needs to respond to the needs of the creative and cultural industries. Go to the think pieces section to read contributions, watch videos and join the debate through your own contribution.
Dr. Arthur Harkins and I will be participating in a symposium on the future of education in Iceland on March 20, 2012. The symposium is hosted by the University of Iceland’s School of Education. Dr. Harkins will present on some critical issues for the future of education. I will be joined by Dr. Jón Torfi Jónasson, Dean of the School of Education, and Svanborg R. Jónsdóttir on a panel that will reflect on Dr. Harkins’ presentation. More info:
“Tuesday the 20th of March 15-17 The School of Education in collaboration with the Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy and Development, College of Education and Human Development, University of Minnesota, will host a seminar on issues related to the future of education. This will be in H-101 in the School of Education.
Professor Arthur M. Harkins from the University of Minnesota will review some of the important issues in an opening presentation and answer questions on the issues he discusses.
In a discussion seminar Tryggvi Thayer from the University of Minnesota and Svanborg R. Jónsdóttir and Jón Torfi Jónasson from the School of Education, with other participants, will reflect on the presentation and speculate with professor Harkins on where we go from here.
The seminar is open to all interested in the issues.”
