www.nickhodge.com

Laurel Pap­worth has some inter­est­ing com­ments on generation-Y (digi-kids) and the dis­con­nec­ted nature of our cur­rent gov­ern­ments. Laurel’s post ref­er­ences this art­icle in the Sydney Morn­ing Her­ald (Laurel: the reason why Fair­fax doesn’t believe in the long tail is that it hasn’t worked out its busi­ness model yet)

Hav­ing spent two days with a selec­tion of pas­sion­ate Vic­torian School Prin­cipals, I am more con­cerned about our Gov­ern­mental policies and the silent digital major­ity than those on the ground in the classroom.

The You­Tube present­a­tion at the begin­ning of her post puts stark num­bers on the story from The World Is Flat.

Thomas Fried­man was in Aus­tralia a few weeks ago, and spent time with both sides of Aus­tralian Fed­eral Polit­ics. I hope he was able to talk and explain that Edu­ca­tion and Band­width are crit­ical to the future of this nation. If being a Nation is that import­ant anymore.

I am going to extend Thomas’ equation:

CQ + PQ + EQ > IQ

EQ is emo­tional quo­tient, emo­tional intel­li­gence or emo­tional matur­ity. You can­not teach EQ from books. Pas­sion­ate Teach­ers provide a role model for our kids for the future.

Let’s hope the gen­er­a­tion after us repairs the mis­takes we’ve made.

From World in their Hands, Sydney Morn­ing Her­ald Icon today:

But Dr Jan Fletcher, of the Child Study Centre at the Uni­ver­sity of West­ern Aus­tralia, is wary of vir­tual lives for chil­dren. “There is a danger that this online inter­ac­tion might be lim­it­ing the amount of social inter­ac­tion the child is actu­ally hav­ing,” she warns. “I want kids to talk to each other about what they’re inter­ested in, not about a world inven­ted by a toy company.

Hmmm, online inter­ac­tion takes many forms — and kids do talk to each other about what they are inter­ested in. Online, off­line, within and without borders.

It seems the world of “toys” and “inform­a­tion” joined together magic­ally means “edu­ca­tion”. What if inform­a­tion is actu­ally, well, fun? Gone are the book­ish days of read­ing an encyc­lo­pe­dia and wel­come to the world of instant information.

The crit­ical skill is inform­a­tion lit­er­acy.

As high­lighted by one of Australia’s lead­ing Social Net­work­ing thinkers in Edu­ca­tion, Mike Sey­fang, tech­no­logy in schools is already in schools. Mobile phones, the MSN Mes­sen­ger com­munit­ies, blogs, Myspace, Wiki­pe­dia: these tech­no­lo­gies are being used by stu­dents today.

One per­vas­ive tech­no­logy that hounds par­ents today is the use of MSN Live Mes­sen­ger. It’s the stand­ard tool for all kids today. Without Mes­sen­ger, kids are out­casts from their social net­works. They use it to gos­sip (like the tele­phone of pre­vi­ous eras) and to col­lab­or­ate on school pro­jects. And prob­ably bully, too. In all instances, col­lab­or­a­tion is king. Today, the abil­ity to col­lab­or­ate in work and life scen­arios is under­developed in K-12 (espe­cially at the pointy end of K-12) as the focus moves to indi­vidual achievement.

Unless you are stuck on a deser­ted island, your life is going to be col­lab­or­at­ive. Work, too. In a con­nec­ted world, this is amp­li­fied and pack­et­ised.

What is needed is policy and technology-frameworks to unlock the power of the net­works that exist. It might be Single-Sign-on (some­times referred to SSO), fire­walls and other pieces of tech­no­logy that cor­por­a­tions already use. Microsoft (my employer) eats its own dog­food: smart­cards, fire­walls, net­work secur­ity and the like.

How­ever, it is my con­ten­tion that the first hurdle isn’t the tech­no­logy: it’s enabling the pas­sion­ate teach­ers to engage in the learn­ing net­works. Remov­ing the block­ages of knee-jerk blanket restric­tions — as they do not work. Remem­ber, the inter­net was designed to deal with fail­ure and route around it. Cen­sor­ship is classed as a fail­ure, and there­fore is routed around.

I’d love to hear teacher stories.

Kevin Richard­son, Head­mas­ter of Immanuel Col­lege, on the Future of Learning.

Jimmy Wales in is Aus­tralia for the education.au organ­isa­tion. I’ll be there in Sydney on the 26th April.

If you are not a par­ent or teacher with chil­dren between the ages of 5–15, you might want to read some­thing else. I know how it gets when people talk about kids.

If you are a teacher or par­ent, wel­come to the new inter­net gen­er­a­tion gap.

An art­icle pub­lished in the New York magazine, Say Everything, details the online lives of Gen­er­a­tion Y. The art­icle takes a moralistic-angle to cre­ate a story; and asserts that the gen­er­a­tion gap is greater now than when Elvis, Cliff Richard and The Beatles rock-and/or-roll per­ver­ted the lives of Generation-X’s par­ents in the 1950s/1960s.

It’s more than mor­als. It is about how the world is at the pivot point of a dra­matic change.

This quo­ta­tion from Clay Shirky sum­mar­ised where we are at:

“Whenever young people are allowed to indulge in some­thing old people are not allowed to, it makes us bit­ter. What did we have? The mall and the park­ing lot of the 7-Eleven? It sucked to grow up when we did! And we’re mad about it now.”

The moral side is important,Look at your internet-connected kids: what are they doing, right now?

As a com­par­ison, I took a photo of Liam over the week­end that illus­trated this major gap:

1. Liam has both MacOS X Tiger and Microsoft Win­dows XP run­ning, and is using both flu­ently. Vista will not be installed until he’s backed-up his PC, and he’s sure his games work.
2. MSN Mes­sen­ger is his con­nec­tion to the out­side world: rarely will one of his friends call on the phone; but I am sure he com­mu­nic­ates more widely than I at the same age. His peers are world-wide, not local.
3. There is a Fire­fox ses­sion run­ning on the Mac with his favour­ite web sites (for­ums, not blogs) going. He says that he’s had a Fire­fox browser win­dow run­ning for 2 weeks, solid. 
4. On the Win­dows box, he is cre­at­ing an Adobe Premiere video clip (adding titling+encoding). Not only con­sum­ing con­tent; he is act­ively adding bits to the world. The video comes from cap­tur­ing an anim­a­tion cre­ated using Garry’s Mod for Half-Life 2.
5. He is listen­ing to ABC’s Triple-J not via radio, but via Internode’s stream.
6. Liam watches less broad­cast TV than Avril and I. Way less. Yet his know­ledge of what is cur­rent and news­worthy is no dif­fer­ent. There  is no man­u­fac­tured scarcity (either in time, or in phys­ical atoms)
7. Wiki­pe­dia answers everything.

Hyper-connected & digitally-creative.

Com­pare this to your world.

Mak­ing a ‘social net­work­ing’ plat­form that assumes you are con­nec­ted and are writ­ing, not just read­ing from the web: that’s next. THe next gen­er­a­tion is cre­at­ing these tools as the Baby boomers and Generation-X keeps look­ing at its col­lect­ive navel.