Emergent Learning - Harvesting screen addiction to learn stuff

For those of you, who are concerned about your kids' screen addiction, here is some good news:

You can now harvest your kids' screen addiction to good use, i.e., to teach them programming.

No, it is not an "educational toy", that kids will readily toss away, on receiving as a gift.

The problem with "educational toys" is that, learning is embedded, which instantly disinterest kids, but learning needs to be emergent, i.e., emerging out of an experience and in this case, playing a game.

Cargo Bot is a super-cool iPad app., where learning programming is emergent, by playing.

It is like any other game, with levels and reward with incentives. What is different with Cargo Bot, is that, there is zero-effort to "teach" the kids.  Instead, learning happens automatically, by virtue of kids, graduating to different levels and earning 1,2 or 3-stars.

My kids, 10 and 8, played around with this game and got hooked to it. I tried it as well and I played/solved a game/problem in the Impossible category, which the app. recognized as an unknown solution and encouraged me to upload the solution to YouTube.

CargoBot must be made mandatory in the elementary school curriculum as tinkering would be finally introduced in a structured manner in School.

Emergent Learning Games are a great way to harvest kids' screen addiction.

Directed Sense-making and 6things

The Printing Press made us all Read.  Reading is nothing but directed thinking. Reading saves time. Literally thousands of years of thinking.

The Brilliant Mathematician Ramanujan was an autodidact. Without any formal education, he would think and write, what he discovered, in his notebooks. But, a great number of his discoveries, were in fact rediscoveries. Reading would have saved him many years of thinking and he would have started from, what others already discovered.

We surf the web for information, to research Information. However, whatever we made sense, people don't usually start with that. They start afresh every time they try to research information. This need not be the case.

6things enable to do "directed sense-making".  This directed sense-making would help save hours of researching in the internet.

How does 6things accomplish this? Bees collect honey and they tell other bees, the source of the honey and offer them sample of the honey. 

Billions of people are connected to the internet. They search, research, analyze and make sense of information. 

6things connects you to that intelligence.

6things - Search Insights, not webpages

Delicious built a tool, seeking to build a library of bookmarks. Its 5 million user base, doesn't prove very much. However, Wikipedia sought to create a library of books and its insane success informs us that, the model is quite potent.

There are about 181 million blogs, whereas there are over 2 billion users sharing content in Facebook. This informs us, that sharing content trumps creating new content.

Why did Wikipedia succeed, while the Delicious Model didn't.? The short answer is focus. While Wikipedia creates an environment for progressively creating content or parts of content, there is no such innate discipline in Delicious, I can create content, as and when I want and thus, after a while, I as the user, doesn't see the payoff, just like bogs. If there is not enough traffic, you eventually give up blogging.

However, wikipedia is everyone's blog library, where some folks decide what topic is worthy and start writing the initial sketch and others review and refine the content, if the topic interests them.

Delicious would have been successful, if I knew that, somebody else is interested in the topic that I bookmarked and others added more bookmarks to the same topic. There needs to be a common thread to begin with and folksonomy isn't enough for me to keep up my interest.

Pinterest, however is successful, due to its resemblance to Flickr rather than to Delicious. There is still a need to build a wikipedia of bookmarks without the need for an army of volunteers and generate the wikipedia of bookmarks, for each topic, while helping users search more efficiently.

One might ask, why do you need yet another search engine. Search engines help search noun and not verbs. Stay tuned for 6things, as it rebuilds its toolset.

…and then you can search for insights, not merely web pages.

From Gutenberg to Directed Sense Making

"Man has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much...the wheel, New York, wars and so on...while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man...for precisely the same reason.” - Douglas Adams


Exhibiting collective intelligence is not just limited to human beings, but instances can be found across the entire living species.

Ants operating as a colony do remarkable things, when compared to the individual ant, which is not very bright.

Honey Bees share honey with each other, using a complex ceremony called the Waggle Dance.

Yet, humankind has been able to achieve astounding feats, not possible by other Species, using a meta tool, namely language.

Printing Press, which is a celebration of humankind's collective intelligence, made us all Readers. Reading, helps us think in a directed fashion, literally saving us thousand years of thinking.

The Web, made us all Writers. Yet, not all of us can instantly become writers, without Motivation and Training. So, in order to achieve the level of impact, that we achieved with the Printing Press, we need to Connect the Human Intelligence with the Artificial Intelligence in an optimal fashion.

“Connected Intelligence is about creating a spontaneous network of individual intelligence that achieves a common purpose, without the need for a planned orchestration.” - Vasu

Reading can be considered directed thinking.... Imagine, how much advancement, humankind would achieve by directing sense-making.

A manifestation of such a directed sense-making, is the ScribbleBee, which is an e-book system, that adapts itself, based on the reader's interest and comprehension.

The "Master Slave" Spiral Path of Technology

The Royal Library of Alexandria was the largest and the most significant library of the ancient world.

Yet, Kindle enables you to carry all the books from the Royal Library, in your hands. 

Sure, you can locate information very easily much better than the physical. …annotate and share these annotations with your social network using Diigo.

But the biggest time spent in reading a book is… in comprehension.

The process of understanding is about, how well you transform the string of words into a model. 

Sure, the author has a  big part to play…. in chiseling your understanding.

The Author is however bounded by the fact, that he needs to cater to different kinds of readers and yet she has to write exactly one string of words, for all.

This need not be the case. The author can generate different string of words which resonate with different kinds of readers.

…and the e-reader can detect your comprehension and adapt the book, detailing parts that you need explanation and skipping those, that you already understood.

Technology brought the friends virtually to your home, enabled you to record without ever venturing to a Studio and read from your couch, without going to the library.

But this serving-role of technology, is short-lived.

Technology, who was your slave, swiftly assumed the role of the Master, where you became the gadget.

But, the next phase is even more exciting, it is marching towards the invisible…. to quantify your life, including your social life and to create a book that adapts based on your comprehension.

…and then Technology would truly be your slave.

The Age of the Silly Apps

It takes 45 minutes to memorize the key layout in the QWERTY keyboard, but only 20 minutes in the Dvorak keyboard.

There are some celebrity Dvorak users including Steve Wozniak and Nathan Myhrvold. 

Dvorak studied letter frequencies and the physiology of people's hands and carefully designed an optimal solution  to alleviate the problems he identified with the QWERTY layout.

While it is available as an option in the mac, it is dropped in the iPad, due to poor adoption. 

In spite of August Dvorak devoting all his lifetime to spread the keyboard, the cool innovation can be considered a failure due to poor adoption.

Why is adoption hard?

The QWERTY user has to spend time unlearning QWERTY and learning Dvorak instead. …and the average user learns few new things every week, from websites to applications.

On thin slicing, the cost of effort/time to learn Dvorak, does not justify the benefit of typing efficiency. 

Hence, we are in the age of the silly apps. I define silly apps as apps that require near-zero effort in determining its value and spending almost no time, learning to use. The casual user could try one of those every day and forget about it, if it doesn't stick.

If it does require any more effort, it better cure cancer or help lose weight. 

"Freemium First Enterprise Second" Renaissance and the Mozart style of innovation

The BlackBerry (it sounds like the past, isn't it?) brought the Smart Phone to the Enterprise, while the cool iPhone introduced the Bring-Your-Own-Device culture to the enterprise.

The iPhone with its app store, the open source movement and the web 2.0 ushered in the prosumer culture, which blurred the producer/consumer distinction.

The resultant Long Tail of Applications caused people to Bring-Your-Own-Technology (BYOT) to the office.

As applications move from the data center to the Cloud, the power is shifting from the IT department to the user and the power-hungry users, are now boldly ignoring apps from large corporations and are embracing whichever satisfies their unique needs. 

As the freemium-first-enterprise-second trend is becoming pronounced, (note:the rush of acquisitions by Salesforce.com), innovators need to move from the Beethoven style of innovation into the Mozart style of innovation.

Listen to the Late Dijkstra talk passionately about Mozart

Skim, Slice and Dice to slay Information Overload

Q: If a baseball and bat cost $110, and the bat costs $100 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?

If you answered $10, you just realized that your intuition could let you down or you need to go back to Elementary School.

 If you answered $5, you probably quickly guessed an answer and then tested it and iterated until the solution was consistent or you used what you learnt in Elementary School.

 The point is, you could start off thinking with your 'right-brain' and then test it with your 'left-brain'. Or using Daniel Kahneman's terms, combining System 1 with System 2 thinking.

 I suspect that, with the information overload, the optimal strategy in most contexts, would be to provide tools, so that, employees could 'efficiently' skim the page, in order to speed read documents, slice conference calls into segments, so that, they could quickly refer back to what was discussed, without losing the 'impact' and dice the email, so that your employees get off the email world and do work.

Spaces between words

There were no spaces between words, in our early writing on slates, papyrus, even on early handwritten books, says Nicholas Carr. Spaces made reading enjoyable.

The web, with its links, has regressed reading into a cognitively intensive act, the way it was when there were no spaces between words.

We adapt to this challenge, by skimming the page, by quickly thin slicing, what is interesting/important in the page.

Because of the insane amount of information, there is a high chance that, we might be caught by the inattention blindness, quite often, like it is explained in the interesting video.

Skimming the Web and Thin Slicing

Malcolm Gladwell explains thin-slicing as our ability to gauge what is really important from a very narrow period of experience.

He illustrates how, after analyzing a normal conversation between a husband and wife for an hour, John Gottman can predict whether that couple will be married in 15 years with 95% accuracy. If he analyzes them for 2 hours, his accuracy diminishes to 90%.

We skim the page everyday and thin-slice it. In fact, many of us do it with, hundreds of pages everyday.

No we don't want some machine to summarize the page for us. It would have stripped of the soul of the material. But, we want perceived affordances,that will help us thin slice a page.

Affordance, a word coined by perceptual psychologist J.J.Gibson refers to the actionable properties between the world and an actor. "Perceived affordances", according to Donald Norman, refer to the world that is perceived by the user, rather than what is true.

With such tools, we would "cope up" with the information overload efficiently, just like, how our eye copes up with the sensory overload every day.