Attendees at the AOL Web lounge at the Milken Global Conference. (Click on the photo for the bigger, clearer Flickr version.) [Tags: milken businessmen photos]

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John Kruper of Cardean moderates. (I’m live blogging while I’m on the panel.)

Will Richardson, who teaches in the K-12 system, thinks blogs provide a powerful opportunity for students to make connections to other people, ideas…”I cringe when I hear people say blogs are online journals. They’re learning places.” His 6 and 8 yr old children have blogs and engage with other kids their age.

Liz Lawley says she uses blogs to get info out to her classes. She also sets up a class blog where students can talk about the assignments, comment on each other’s activities, post results of research and other projects. They look at one another’s posts and comment on them. “It encourages a kind of thoughtful ongoing dialogue that you simply can’t do when you only have four hours a week in class.” She also invites authors to engage in a dialogue with the class. This teaches them that there are long term consequences to what they say.

George Siemens explains his term “connectivism.” The half-life of knowledge is diminishing, he says: it’s becoming obsolete faster than ever. Courses can’t keep up. Connectivism says that the knowledge resides in the networks we create. Our education system was designed to create certainty. Now the system has to be able to adapt quickly. The network persists longer than traditional relationships with teachers.

Adrian Chan says that different social software apps are organized to support different themes: Dating, career networking, etc. He looks at the social practices in the use of the software, including in the educational environment. What matters is how technology is embedded in the process. In the case of edu, many of the students already have practices set up: They already IM, chat, etc. How do these technologies change conversation? Is there a type we can identify as learning? If you integrate technologies, would you lose some of those learning opportunites.

I talk about lessons from Wikipedia ,but I can’t blog and talk at the same time.

Doug Thomas, who has an article with John Seely Brown in Wired this month, says he’s concerned that we’re training kids for the best jobs in the 20th Century. Instead, we should be helping expand imagination. He knows a student who has to sneak art and music into his studies because they’re not on the test. “Our mission is to try to re-integrate imagination back into the curriculum.” MMORPGs are one way to do that. They’re not just games; they’re synthetic worlds. (He says the average age of WOW players is 28.) Because you can imagine liberating things in the game, you imagine liberating things outside the game. E.g., a mgr at Yahoo approaches every task as if setting out on a quest. Doug shows the famous video of the Star War Galaxies emergent party – 100 players learning choreography, etc. He taught a course with a heavy mmorpg component and learned he had to get himself out of the way. They learned from experience. E.g., it’s hard to lecture about ethics, but if you can put them into a situation where they have to make a choice…

Q: It’s all so basically new. Are people basically good or bad in this environment?
George: Content is useless. The instructor provides guidance, not content, and isn’t the center of the experience.

Liz: Content isn’t irrelevant. If we’re going to turn out people with the credentials employers want, we have to be sure they have the content required. But it’s not a matter of pouring content into people.

Q: Companies access MySpace of potential employees. Should your 6 and 8 year olds be worried?
Liz: This is a huge issue. We can’t tell our kids not to blog. We have to teach them to think about what will happen in 5 or 10 yrs.
George: We have to teach them how to handle the freedom.
Will: This is a literacy we’re not teaching our kids. And enabling kids in MySpace to link to Old Spice is what’s really bad.
Me: And we need a culture of forgiveness. Maybe our kids will figure it out.

Q: You’re creating a generation of Borgs that play games.
(We didn’t really answer this.)

Q: We get it. How do we get there? E.g., not everyone can afford a laptop.
Liz: You have to start with the teachers. The technology has to be part of the day to day environment.

George: The problem is a lack of will, not of resources.

Q: With 50,000 blog posts an hour, the problem is one of discovery. How do we know whom to trust?
Doug: Scale counts. E.g., at Second Life a group looks for copyright infringement. When it gets really big, they can’t police it. Community governance arises.

Me: These are issues we can only solve by working through them. The change is too deep.

Q: In Shanghai, you can go into a Net cafe where people are playing mmorpgs that put them into medieval China. And I blog and get hate mail. What about the dystopian aspects?
Doug: It’s both/and. People probably said about the first cave paintings: “Oh no, the kids will spend all day on line and won’t hunt.” People miss the subtleties of what’s going on.

Liz: In part it’s because you’re writing for Huffington Post.

Q: We still have the old leadership style.
Liz: People react by banning laptops. It puts a burden on the professors when they have to actually hold students’ attention. We’re performers at heart but that’s not what professors will need to be.

Will: The control issue is at every level. There’s a district in Texas that’s banned the word “MySpace” — not the site but the word.George: Same issues for corporate education.

Doug: Scaffolding knowledge is different than experiential knowledge. Some ways are not taught well in an exploratory fashion. [Tags: milken education blogs]

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Paul Gigot of the WSJ moderates a panel on the future of the world economy.

First to speak: Václav Klaus, the Czech president. He was reluctant to accept the invitation to talk about topics as indefinable as the global economy because it is a distraction from the real problems and from actually doing anything. He focuses on Europe. It is an tightly interconnected world, he says. Some in Europe have proposed establishing a fund to compensate the “victims of globalization,” by which they mean Europeans. Instead, they should create a fund for the African victims of European protectionism. The real problems, he says, are in the realm of ideas, e.g., government intervention, paternalistic income redistribution, political correctness, those who think they’re better than us and would regulate us…

David Rubinstein, a co-founder of the Carlyle Group (see this), speaks. He begins by trashing the Carter administration, in which he served. [I’d take Carter-style incompetence over Bush’s any day.] He says the US used to be the economic driver. Now what happens outside the US is more important to our economy than what happens inside. We have to change if we’re going to join a vibrant global economy. We need to encourage investing overseas and let non-US investments here. If we don’t change, we’ll become second class citizens.

Nobelist Gary Becker (blog). Factors that have driven this amazing global economy: 1. Remarkable productivity growth, particularly in the US. Productivity determines whether people are better off. It will continue unless policies intrude. (Gigot nods vigorously.) 2. Developing economies (China, India) where governments have gotten out of the way.

Risks: Not oil prices or inflation rates. Not low savings. The danger is geo-political and government involvement. The risk is that the governments will try to do things they can’t really do, such as provide full employment. Overall, he says, the economies look good.

Gigot: We have a world of liquidity. [Is that like Water World?] It hasn’t been this liquid since inflation was high. Should we be worried?

Becker: Relative prices change, but that doesn’t mean the price level will rise. Inflation is mainly determined by monetary policy, and central banks are providing stability.

Rubinstein: Fuel prices went up faster during the oil shock of the ’70s. We’re better at managing the change now.

Gigot: We have a new Fed chairman. How’s he doing so far?

Rubinstein: Until there’s a crisis, we won’t know if he’s up to the job.

Becker: I agree. But it doesn’t all rest on the individual. The tools are in place…

Klaus: I share the optimism. I wrote my doctoral dissertation 40 yrs ago on “The Problem of Inflation in the Capitalist Countries,” so I know something about inflation. (Laughter).

Rubinstein: Central bankers aren’t as important as they were 50 yrs ago. Markets drive them. (Klaus rocks his head in considered disagreement.)

Gigot: Mr. President, you’re pessimistic about Europe. Eastern Europe has been adopting the flat tax…

Klaus: The longer term statistics show that EU growth rates have been going down decade by decade, from 5% in the 1950s to less than 1% now. As far as the flat tax, I campaigned for it 10 yrs ago but didn’t win. It’s on the ballot in 5 wks. I’m in favor of it, but I don’t think it’s a panacea.

Rubinstein: The 15% capital gains tax hasn’t been given the credit it deserves. And, everyone is an investor now. [Well, except the huge number of people who are in debt.]

Becker: Flat taxes aren’t flat; the poor don’t pay anything. What you really want is a low tax rate; it doesn’t have to be flat.

Gigot: If Congress doesn’t extend the capital gains rate, will the damage be immediate?

Rubinstein: It won’t help.

Becker: Barriers will continue to fall.

Klaus: Tariffs will continue to come down, but non-tariff barriers will continue to be erected.

Gigot: The Carlyle Group invests in China. What’s up there?

Rubinstein: We’ve invested in life insurance there; only 8% of the China have life insurance. We’re buying the Catepillar of China. Each deal took about 3 yrs. I kept going to what were billed as closing dinners. If you think you’re going to make a quick dollar in a year or two, that’s not the place for you. You have to make it clear that you’re going to help China, and not just help yourself. They don’t see Western capital as essential to their economy, although they’re glad to have it. [Tags: milken economics]

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A site promoting Net neutrality has launched: DontMessWithTheNet.com (blog). Amazon, eBay, Google, IAC, Microsoft and Yahoo! all support it. [Tags: net_neutrality]

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[milken] Turning education into a global mill

I’m at a session called “Changing Post-Secondary Education to Meet the Needs of a Global Economy” with Greg Cappelli of Credit Suisse, Edward Guiliano, Pres of the NY Institute of Tech; Ted Sanders, chairman of the Cardean Learning Group; moderated by Ted Mitchell, CEO of New Schools Venture Fund. (As Liz points out, the room is full of people in black suits…including her!)

Overall: The panel said stuff everyone in the room already knows: Americans don’t know nuthin’ about them furren countries. And China is so cool! Sorry, but I don’t know anything about this topic and I still didn’t learn anything.

Greg talks about education in China. China’s GDP is growing rapidly, he says. Over 10% of total world foreign direct investment goes into China and Hong Kong. Plus, he points out that there are a heck of a lot of Chinese folks. (I missed the actual number.) They’re spending a lot on education. The population is enthusiastic because getting a degree vastly increases one’s income.

Ted says that the demand of higher eductiona will exceed capacity in many countries as well as in some states in the USA. People studying outside their country will go from 1.2M now to 7+M in 2025. So, the biggest opportunities in higher ed will take place outside the US.

Edward presents a list of dismal statistics about how stupid Americans are about the rest of the world. China is becoming the largest English-speaking nation in the world, and it’s doing it through policy. We need to be teaching our kids a second language when they’re young. We should be enticing more international students here.

Ted: The educational innovators will not be found at the Harvards and Sanfords. It won’t be at the public universities because they won’t spend tax dollars. We need to think global but serve local populations. We need consortia.

[First The World is Flat reference at 32 minutes in.]

Ted: “There are 10,000 Chinese students studying in British Columbia because they can’t get into the US.” [Maybe they landed there and had the good sense not to leave.]

Q: Where will the next generation of faculty come from?
A: (Ted) They won’t be Americans. We graduated 50,000 engineers last year while China graduated 300,000 engineers.

Q: What’s in place to help people get jobs, etc. People are still using resumes.
A: Nothing in K-12.

[Liz tells me I may have misidentified the speakers. Sorry.] [Tags: milken education]

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BTW, we’ve set up a tiny IRC chat so we can pretend to be taking notes when in fact we’re making fun of people: irc.freenode.net #milken. Um, I mean we’re using it to share ideas and communicate with one another. (There are only three of us at the conference using it.) [Tags: milken irc]

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I’m on a panel at the Milken conference today. Apparently, it’s like the West Coast Davos. All I know is that the conference stipulates that I have to be dressed in business attire. Not even “business casual.” Ok, I’ll put on my sports coat and tie, but they can’t make me wear clean underwear. Oh yeah, stickin’ it to The Man!

The panel is called “Blogs, Wikis, MMORPGs, and YASNS: Shaking Up Traditional Education.” I am in awe of my panel mates.

Because it’s an actual panel, not a sequence of PowerPoint decks, no one knows where the conversation will turn. But here are some of the things I might end up saying:

What are our students learning from the success of Wikipedia? We hope they’re learning that they can’t be passive recipients of knowledge. But they’re also learning that authority doesn’t come only through chains of credentials; that we can get on the same page about what we know; that knowing involves be willing to back away from your beliefs at times; that knowledge is a social product, or at least heavily socially contextualized; that the willingness to admit fallibility is a greater indicator of truth than speaking in a confident tone of voice; that knowledge lives in conversation, not in the heads of experts; that certain people who do not need to be named are just impossible.

Knowing has been primarily a way of seeing the simplicity behind the world’s apparent complexity. But now as a culture we’re busy complexifying everything we can. E.g., blogs take a simple idea and turn it over and over in their hands, poking at it, trying it this way and that, connecting it to that other thing over there.

I don’t know what will happen to the basic structure of education, the course, but topics have exploded. This makes it harder than ever for us to listen to educators tell us what’s important for us to know…but we need to listen.

Textbooks are and always have been boring and self-satisfied. The basic problem is structural: They exist between covers. I don’t know what to do about this, but someone will figure it out.

The endless decentralized distraction that is the Internet certainly raises questions about our ability to hold our culture together (and if that is even a good thing), but we should at the very least rejoice that we are learning what education has always tried to teach us: The world is endlessly interesting. [Tags: education milken wikipedia]

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Brad (who totally does not suck) has posted a demo of a song, the first in what he promises will be a new set. It’s posted at his forum where everyone has ideas about how to make it better. My big idea about how to make it better is for people to listen to it…and to support the webbiest musician on the Web.

Yes, I know I am too old to be a BradSucks fanboy. But I am nonethelss. [Tags: music bradsucks]

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No, not Jakob Nielsen. The Nielsen ratings.

I along with n million other holders of an email address have received an invitation to join the Nielsen Net Ratings “family.” All I have to do is install monitoring software that reports on every site I visit and every transaction I do on any site. But, according to their privacy policy, no one sees this personally identified information except for Nielsen, um, an for unnamed partners, and, oh yeah, the police if Nielsen thinks I’m doing anything illegal or posibly illegal depending on who’s doing the asking. Also, if I’m caught typing with one hand, they tell my mommy.

So, Nielsen’s ratings are going to report with statistically significant accuracy on the browsing behavior of patsies. [Tags: nielsen]

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Dan Klyn has some practical suggestions for retailers thinking about letting users tag merchandise. Why not pre-populate your catalog with tags drawn from the item descriptions? Why not rank tags higher based on the popularity of the page or item? What do you do about a product that’s tagged “crappy” or “over-priced”? (I think Dan’s answer that last one is that you surface tags based in part on how popular they are.) The result is not a pure folksonomy, but purity isn’t always what we — merchants and shoppers — need.

He also points to Etsy.com as an example of a merchant using tags well. [Tags: taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous dan_klyn ia tagging ]

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