From: Michael Wiik (mwiik@messagenet.com)
Date: Thu Mar 20 2003 - 11:58:44 MST
Forgive me, I need to quote Anders Sandberg at length from the
Leaderless Resistance thread:
> I have always found these "and then a miracle happens" scenarios
> unlikely, both the technological found here or the "consciousness
> change" version greens often invoke with about the same amount of faith.
> But it seems equally unlikely that the standard scenarios I complained
> about above would be true, other than in a very general way. What these
> scenarios lack is the organic complexity of real history. They are too
> much like one-dimensional stories to be even believable eigenvectors of
> history.
>
> For example, even without magical tech we could get some rather sweeping
> changes if at least part of the population become fluid "smart mobs"
> empowered by wireless communications and google. That in turn could
> introduce complex stresses between the "fluid" and "crystalized" parts
> of society which could express themselves in far more ways than "group A
> oppresses group B" or "group A takes over from group B". And so on.
>
> The fun part of scenario planning is to figure out these second order
> effects. They might not come true, but they help us understand those
> non-intuitive feedbacks and evolutionary phenomena that surprise most
> planners.
I've done some thinking along these lines, one idea being providing web
access (allowing for individual blogs) to some hungry third world
village which would then be 'adopted' by a classroom in the U.S. The
villagers could blog details of their environment, plus things like
mailing soil samples for analysis, etc, and the challenge to the
classroom is how much they can improve villager life via all or mostly
information.
Basically, the individual villagers blog their individual needs and
desires into blogs which are aggregated by the class.
I could see even elementary classrooms participating in this, perhaps
interacting with the villager kids, or data entry. Maybe even better:
they provide direct support to upper classes and graduation (from
elementary school or junior high) also means 'adoption' of a village
which you now are involved with upon high school graduation. (Excuse the
U.S.-centric terminology)
There are significant barriers to here, especially language, and
probably most conversation would be mediated by automated translation
systems. Villagers might be hesitant to discuss personal needs and
desires and that would perhaps take significant time and repeated
friendly (and non-judgmental) interaction to overcome. The kids would
get some benefit of being like consultants, outside the politics and
social structures of the villagers and thereby build trust to offer
objective advice.
Whatever the benefits to the village, the benefits to the class could be
enormous. All education would be geared toward solving real-world goals
in real-time. Perhaps some social science subjects would be shifted to
lower grades, as they might, for example, research history to prepare
summaries for the higher grades who turn these into direct
recommendations. An example might be 'find ways similar tribal conflicts
have been resolved before' etc. One might imagine much larger
classrooms, with teachers in all subjects roaming about to small groups
to offer specific education. Kids might grow up with years of direct
experience in solving real-world problems. It seems empowering.
-Mike
--
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Mar 20 2003 - 12:04:41 MST