Technology

information & communication technology

just checking the box

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Were the two recent crashes of Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft a result of inadequate training, or design and safety flaws resulting from a lack of regulator oversight? I don’t know and I cannot speculate. However, I am interested in how training design decisions are made and what role Learning & Development (L&D) professionals play in the relationship between building aircraft and flying them. Is there something to learn here?

“The captain of a doomed Ethiopian Airlines flight did not practise on a new simulator for the Boeing 737 Max 8 before he died in a crash with 156 others, a pilot colleague said … The 737 Max 8 was introduced into commercial service in 2017, but pilots of older 737s were only required to have computer-based training to switch, according to Boeing, airlines, unions, and regulators.” —CBC 2019-03-21

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constant outrage

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Many of us are getting depressed and pessimistic about  the state of society, whether it be the big one — climate change — or the many smaller problems facing us — populism, extremism, anti-science movements, xenophobia, etc. One of the biggest frustrations is that the various camps just do not talk to each other with any intention of understanding. In addition, social media — the preferred source of news for many people — tend to increase the outrage. The medium is the message, said Marshall McLuhan, and this medium is all about emotion. Often, our self-perception of knowledge acquired through social media is greater than it actually is. Social media have created a worldwide Dunning-Kruger effect.

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unintended consequences

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“Welcome to Magic School. Here is your schedule.”
“Thanks! But…”
“Yes?”
“This is just ‘Ethics’ and ‘Human rights’ and things like that.”
“Correct, that’s the first year curriculum.”
“Do we have to learn all this?”
“Of course! What do you think this is, software engineering?”
—@MicroSFF

—

  • Some unintended consequences of automobiles are pollution, gridlock, and manslaughter.
  • An unintended consequence of using cement as our primary building material is large CO2 emissions.
  • An unintended consequence of Facebook is false narratives.
  • An unintended consequence of consumer social media platforms is a surveillance economy.
  • An unintended consequence of a digitally mediated society is constant outrage.
  • An unintended consequence of online services like Über is “low-paying work that deliver on-demand servant services to rich people“.

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learning as disservice

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It is time to revive an insightful comment by a friend and inspiration, David Jonassen — as his Wikipedia entry says, Dave wrote about “learning with media, not from it”.

“Every amateur epistemologist knows that knowledge cannot be managed. Education has always assumed that knowledge can be transferred and that we can carefully control the process through education. That is a grand illusion.” —David Jonassen

Knowledge is personal. Knowledge is human. Knowledge cannot be managed.

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in the beginning was the word

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A fairly lengthy article in The New Humanist — Are we city dwellers or hunter-gatherers? — questions the accepted wisdom that it was agriculture that domesticated hunter-gatherer societies and as a result imposed hierarchies and created societal inequalities. The authors cite many discoveries of hunter-gatherer societies that managed to organize on a massive scale and create large complicated structures.

“Still more astonishing are the stone temples of Göbekli Tepe, excavated over 20 years ago on the Turkish-Syrian border, and still the subject of vociferous scientific debate. Dating to around 11,000 years ago, the very end of the last Ice Age, they comprise at least 20 megalithic enclosures raised high above the now barren flanks of the Harran Plain. Each was made up of limestone pillars over 5m in height and weighing up to a ton (respectable by Stonehenge standards, and some 6,000 years before it). Almost every pillar at Göbekli Tepe is a remarkable work of art, with relief carvings of menacing animals projecting from the surface, their male genitalia fiercely displayed. Sculpted raptors appear in combination with images of severed human heads. “

These required some form of institutions and command & control to coordinate work. But these works were mostly done on a seasonal basis with large groups of people getting together for a period of time and then going back to egalitarian tribal ways. This trend was also in evidence in North America and the Arctic. People were willing to get together and give up control in order to hunt or create something larger than themselves. There is also evidence that a selected few of these people were revered and their deaths celebrated to show their wealth and influence.

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the democratization of media

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“You’re just hearing about it [microaggression] more, because the people who have been suffering it for a long time have decided that they aren’t going to suffer it anymore. The disempowered recognize that it’s time for them to be heard.

Social media gives them a platform to broadcast that message for the first real time in history. Prior to a decade ago, they’d have to find some way to get their message out through media dominated by the very people who were looking down on them and oppressing them. The democratization of media gave them an equal playing field now.” —Peter Kruger, on Quora

Last year I wrote a series of posts on the retrieval of feminine characteristics necessitated by a network society. This started with the future is networked and feminine, the most viewed post I have ever written here.  It was summed up in retrieving gender balance, a much less controversial title. My intent with these posts was to show how diversity is essential for innovation, and ignoring or sidelining 50% of the population is just plain stupid. Heather McGowan gave some positive feedback which I appreciate, given my own privileged position in society.

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nine shifts — one is critical

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Nine Hours

In 2004 Bill Draves and Julie Coates wrote Nineshift: Work, life and education in the 21st Century. That was the same year I started blogging here. Nineshift is based on the premise that there will be a major shift in how we spend 9 hours of each day.

“There are 24 hours in a day. We have no real discretion with roughly 12 of those hours. We need to eat, sleep, and do a few other necessary chores in order to maintain our existence. That hasn’t changed much through the centuries, so far.

That leaves approximately 12 hours a day where we, as individuals, do have some discretion. That includes work time, play time, and family time.

Of those 12 hours, about 75%, or 9 hours, will be spent totally differently a few years from now than they were spent just a few years ago. Not everything will change, but 75% of life is in the process of changing right now.”

The authors put forth that society will significantly shift what we do with those nine hours and this will be complete by 2020 — one year from now.

  1. People Work at Home — “Work is an activity, not a place.”
  2. Intranets Replace Offices
  3. Networks Replace the Pyramid
  4. Trains Replace Cars
  5. Communities Become More Dense
  6. New Societal Infrastructures Evolve
  7. Cheating Becomes Collaboration
  8. Half of all Learning will be Online
  9. Education becomes Web-based

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democracy and equality

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Will technology empower or frustrate learning and will established powers control individuals or will something new emerge? These were the questions asked during the The Edinburgh Scenarios in 2004. The resulting scenarios were as follows.

Web of Confidence: Technology advances, power shifts to emergent players.
U Choose: Technology frustrates, power shifts to emergent players.
Virtually Vanilla: Technology advances, power retained by established players.
Back to the Future: Technology frustrates, power retained by established players.

A similar question is being asked by the European Union in looking at the future of government. Four scenarios have been put forth.

DIY Democracy: the societal gap increased drastically, governments are not able to provide proper public services and citizens have to look after themselves.
Private Algocracy: the power over data, data analytics and decision making are fully moved to multi-national data companies who is taking over the regulation.
Super Collaborative Government: all the promises of open governance, digital government and public sector innovation come true.
Over-Regulatocracy: the government is engaged for the wellbeing of individuals and economy but processes became so complicated that even public benefits are hard to claim for.

In both cases it is a question whether digital networks will empower people or only those who hold power. These kinds of questions can help us map a way forward. I hope the EU initiative has more impact than the Edinburgh Scenarios did. These exercises may make us feel empowered, but the test will be if those currently in power take action. I think states will continue to try to take control, such as requiring back doors in all crypto-technologies. Large platform companies will continue to harvest data on a global scale and become too-big-to-fail. However, these scenarios might give some impetus to citizens to put pressure on governments and corporations to push for  democracy 2.0. Here is my mash-up of these two initiatives.

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#ForTheWeb

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For the Web is part of the Worldwide Web Foundation — “established in 2009 by web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee to advance the open web as a public good and a basic right … fighting for digital equality — a world where everyone can access the web and use it to improve their lives.”

For the Web is currently asking for stories.

How has the web changed your life? What do you use it for? What are your hopes for its future?

Well I have to say that the web changed my life. My blog has given me almost everything that is positive for my work. It has allowed me to connect with a global network. In 2003 I started freelancing, working from here in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada — population 5,000. Even our timezone [Atlantic Time] is unknown to many people. In 2003 my professional network was comprised of my ex-military connections, a few university ones, and some professionals in our rural region. The Canadian Maritime Provinces —  New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island — have about 1.7 million people, with no large cities. The region has relatively high unemployment, no head offices of large companies, and my town is 1,000 KM away from the next major urban centre — Montréal or Boston. There are few regional opportunities for me to find good paid work.

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first we kill the jobs

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Donald Clark shows how WildFire, a machine-augmented instructional content development system, saved significant time and money to develop a global training program.

“We used an AI tool to deliver a project to a large multinational (TUI) with £16 billion in revenue. The project delivered 138 modules on the locations for its holidays, flights, airport codes and so on. Recognising that they could never have produced content on this scale and timescale, as the estimated costs for external development were just under £500,000, and it had to be delivered in weeks not months, they opted for WildFire. This uses AI to create content in minutes not months, along with supplementary curated content, also selected by AI. —Donald Clark

The future of work will more and more be human creativity augmented by the diligence of machines. New business processes will be developed to take advantage of both people and software. If you are not looking at ways to augment what has traditionally been human work, you and your business will likely be left behind. Businesses have to embrace automation and foster creativity.

“Creativity is a conversation — a tension — between individuals working on individual problems and the professional communities they belong to.” —David Williamson Shaffer

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