edna.edu.au

Network Awareness? I think not.

It never ceases to amaze me; how people who are "professional educators" can be such lousy learners. We can blame it on their education of course, where almost any imaginative mind will have their intuitions beaten out of them by a socialization process, which prepares them for yesterday's world, and industries. Here's your degree; it entitles you to deliver the same to the next generation.

I blame it on the lack of a philosophic education, where one can learn to step up Jacob's ladder from the practical world to Plato's temple of ideas, and then retrace their steps at will. In a mechanically minded (industrial) world, this lacking is so dangerous. Everything becomes a production. In the case of education, progress (these days) becomes "the production of open content". In government, it's open government. In network design, it's open standards, and so on.

In a philosophic world it would just mean monitoring the change in industries called media. It's pretty impossible to learn about anything until you see it for the first time. Progress would be about understanding what the various professions have to learn from one another, and how one could complement the other, and what forms of media would develop to reflect the learning.

One of my more progressive barometers here is in NZ, where Leigh is revisiting his intuitions about IT infrastructure, again.. Hopefully this won't be a mere flash as it has been in the past. It might mean a sustained focus on the obvious fact that the web is just the surface layer to a suite of protocols which sit on top of copper or fibre, and it needs to conform to (their) National and Global Communities of Practice. Let's face it, telcos only build for old institutions and individuals, so they won't help (until there's a buck to be made).

Hopefully, it might even mean that the knitting circles can distract the boys from comparing the size of their pipes, and coming up with ways that, when we read a thing on the silent web, we might push a button and speak (to one or a hundred), in "real time" as an network engineer would say.

Tags: knitting circles
Posted at 07:50AM Aug 04, 2009 by simon fenton - jones  |  Comments[0]