Saturday, September 15, 2007
Technology & Outdoor Education: Some Experiential Possibilities
James Neill, Keynote presentation at the Outdoor Recreation Industry (ORIC) Conference, Novotel, Sydney Olympic Park, New South Wales, Australia, August 25, 2007
[Slide 1]
Please feel free to turn your mobiles on, laptops on, any other technology you like on. For some reason we've got this idea that you've got to switch everything off to learn and there's a different way of thinking which is that we can switch everything on and incorporate that in some way.
So ... “Technology and the Outdoors: Some Experiential Possibilities”.
This is a bit of a rave from a pro-technology point of view. Previously I've advocated for a “mountains speak for themselves”, low-technology getting-back-to-nature point of view. This is a bit of a flip-side, but also hopefully a bit of an integration. I think we've got some ideas which aren't helpful around some sort of perceived antithesis, that these things are opposites, technology and the outdoors. I'm going to suggest to you that perhaps we can find ways to synthesise these things.
[Slide 2]
Now just to kick off things, I've got a video to get you into the mood of what I might mean by “possibilities” and new kinds of thinking perhaps that we haven't looked at before. One of the things I'm going to talk about is low technology and high technology. So, when I say “technology”, I mean all technology and we'll talk a bit more about that.
There's a little website out there called postsecret.com, I don't know if any of you have seen it and this is the trailer for this particular website.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6rTkp1dek4
OK, basically this was one guy (Frank) who came up with this idea one day that he would start asking people to send him postcards of secrets and they started flooding into his mailbox and he just started whacking them up on the web and its become this kind of social phenomenon that a number of people really connect with. They go on each week to see the latest postcard's on the web and he's produced a whole lot of books and so on. One of the things this highlights to me is the use of low technology (written, hand-made postcards) with the new kind of technology (web-based social networking) and the kind of synergy that can be achieved there. And I think there's scope for some things like that in outdoor education.
[Slide 3]
This whole presentation will be put up on wilderdom.com and
[Slide 4]
if you go to wilderdom.com/tech there will be a wiki page up there.
[Slide 5]
You can find me at james@wilderdom.com. One of the themes here is of (and I'll get into this more) openness and making information free and available which is one of my little bandwagons.
[Slide 6]
Now a couple of metaphors for thinking about technology. For some people I think technology appears like this freight train rumbling, they know its coming, they know its big, but its a bit too scary and let's just pop our heads in the sand. That's OK, there's all range of responses.
[Slide 7]
Nevertheless, it is coming and I might suggest to you that the way I think about technology, and you might find this metaphor works for you, is like a wave. I read a little bit of advice when I first started in academia that said look around you when you start off in a career and look for the waves of change that are coming through and see if you can't paddle and get on the back of one of those waves because with just a little bit of your energy you will be carried forward into a new realm of possibility. So about 10 years ago when I started in academia I kinda looked around and said look I can see technology coming, let's try and jump on the back of it and paddle a little bit.
[Slides 8, 9, 10]
I'm going to say a few things about what we might call deschooling. We talk a lot about learning and going to school and so on, and yet one of the things that's happening is that perhaps we have more of a challenge in letting go of what we've learnt and unlearning. And I think most of us have heard this stuff that we're currently preparing students for jobs that don't exist, but haven't really embodied the pace of change. We are living more out of the past, than we are towards the future that we are heading into. These students are going to go into, they're going to be around, I mean my little kid was born into the year 2000 and there's a chance he could see the 22nd century in, which is quite an amazing thought that we're preparing kids like that now really for not just the 21st but, if we get there, the 22nd century and they're going to be dealing with problems that we haven't even thought of yet, so we might want to stop and think about that.
Any skill which you give them which turns out to be a redundant skill is actually a disadvantage to them for their future. Any maybe what we need to be doing is starting to undo some of the stuff we've already programmed and looking to open them up so they can engage in things that we haven't even imagined yet.
[Slides 11, 12, 13, 14]
I mentioned the idea of being free and open and sharing and I think one of the low tech and most valuable things is the old aboriginal principle of sharing. We teach it in our courses, we want our kids to do it, but when it comes to information, knowledge, and so on, we still have yet to reach a critical mass of sharing within our industry, that in many ways is undermining our capacity to respond to 21st century and beyond issues. So, I simply want to share, explore, and set up for debate (we probably won't quite get to debate, but we can do that after the presentation).
What I'm trying to search for, I guess, and this is really kind of as an academic I guess my responsibility is report to back to society. I don't report to my bosses, I report to the practitioners and should be judged in terms of the value of the job I'm doing by society. And so, I just want to give you a summary of the last 5 to 10 years of mucking around with technology.
[Slide 15]
Like many of you the thing that fundamentally got me going was being in the outdoors, and we share that in common. I also had a fascination with what makes people work, what makes people tick, and like Ian Boyle's presentation on positive psychology, not just what makes them go wrong, but how can we help them go better. And at some point I thought how on earth am going to put those two things together because I kinda went through uni in the days before there was outdoor ed [at uni] and then I kinda discovered outdoor ed and thought wow, like many of you have, that's it, that that's brought those two things together (outdoors and psychology). I then found myself lumped in at uni and I did feel quite disconnected as this sort of suggests. Teaching at university after teaching in outdoor education feels fairly constraining until you start trying to break down some of the ivory towers and do something else.
What connected a lot of these ideas together for me was the internet and the only reason that website (wilderdom.com) started was out of pure and utter frustration at being at university and wanting to tell the world about outdoor education and what outdoor education was doing and not being able to get information. And I thought well if its going to be that hard, then the very least I can do is basically dump my hard drive up on the web, so that other people can search it and make use of it if they wish. So that was really the birth of wilderdom.com. I'll also show you a bit more about the death of wilderdom.com because I'm moving on, you know, to different applications. But before I tell you about that,
[Slide 16]
that's a graph. The blue line is the reach per person of wilderdom.com, of some weird guy's website which he did between 2am and 4am over a year or two, by comparison, for example, that aqua line is my university, which has 10, 000 students (University of Canberra). I find it very difficult to get across to the university that by not letting me put my stuff on a university website, they are missing out on a whole lot of potential. It's because it wouldn't go any where else that I dumped it up on the web. But that's one person sharing information. Imagine if the 300 academics at my university also put their hard drives up there for society, what kind of sharing might we be able to achieve? Ironically, the technology is all there, that's all just sitting there, it's like, you know, these huge, powered cars but people are turn the key on and have a go.
Down there (on the graph), and it's not really a boast fest, but there's outdoored.com. That brown one down there is aee.org, acacamps.com is the black one and there's all sorts of stuff these organisations and networks could be doing to bring people together, but its really not kind of happening at the moment; it's small groups of people.
[Slide 17]
Just to put this in perspective, wilderdom.com gets 10, 000 visitors a day and they spend an average of 5 minutes there and if you calculate that out, that's like right now 110 people reading that material and looking at that stuff, so its the equivalent of a small school or its an outdoor ed kinda program going on. I don't have any contact with them; occasionally someone sends an email or something. So, that might give you some indication of the educative potential, I guess, of sharing information.
[Slide 18]
Just to come back to this little picture, the things that drive me now with my students at university are that I make things as experiential as possible and push into what's sometimes called blended learning which is a combination of face-to-face learning and a parallel procss going on online. So its face-to-face, but equally they can interact meaningfully and powerfully through online methods. For example, I've got students doing blogs this semester for their uni course.
More to the point, for us, something that's really only just about to take off, is mobile learning. If you think about these laptop computers and so on, they really are 20th century technology, they're old, they're not going to be about in a few years time. Everything's is pretty much coming down to a [single] mobile device. And that's a really exciting thing for us, because all this time we've thought of technology as separate to outdoor education because they are these large, big objects that you can't take with you. That's pretty much over now and we're pretty close to be able to have all of this stuff, the potential of the web and more, with a mobile device and then we can go and do whatever we like.
In fact, we are the people (outdoor educators) perhaps who could teach educators how to use mobile devices and how to use them for learning on the move. And I see this an opportunity we can either get on the back of and participate in, and help the traditional education community learn about the mobile stuff or we can just let it go past us and see what they come up with.
The thing, whether we like it or not, that ties this together is some sort of IT knowledge. But I think we've got a huge cultural issue where, if you go to most organisations the IT people are way over there and we find it very difficult to talk to them, we find very scary even to talk to them, and we've got a whole of users over here who are completely and utterly frustrated, bombarded by spam in their emails, and so on, and its a stress to turn their computer on and what we do need are some sort of ambassadors and diplomats kinda going back and forth, and that's the IT guy who wanders down the corridor and has a chat to you and can actually talk English and its those of us who decide to muck around, and hack around, and play around with things, talk to the IT people, and try to relate it back to real people's lives. So, that's some of the stuff that's kinda been influencing me.
[Slide 19]
The other thing is that for me, fundamentally, is that the philosophical or motivational drive for mucking around with technology is not the technology. It's a means to an end, and the word emacipatory means empowering or enabling people to do stuff. And to me that's one of the exciting potentials.
Later on for example, I'll show you a photograph of the $100 laptop, wind-up laptop, that is about to be shipped in lots of a million to poor countries in Africa and they're all going to be intermeshed and networked and you know, when we suddenly hand over 50 million of these to the African continent what kinds of things might start happening? What kinds of conversations might start happening about what the world about what it means and what's happening to people around the place?
[For an example of the kinds of things which might start happening, see the Hole in the Wall video - http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/india/thestory.html]
[Slide 21]
Embedded in that is this notion of a free and open philosophy and practice which I've come to synthesise recently into four things that help guide my teaching at university and which for some reason is a completely and utterly foreign idea to most of my colleagues and that I find difficult to talk to them about.
I'll just briefly mention what these things are:
One is the use of free software and I'll give you four reasons for why we should be using free software in a moment.
A second thing is open format. When you give me a .doc file you are saying to me you need to go and purchase $300 worth of software in order to read the information I'm offering you. However, there's a whole lot of other options out there now and there's software that you can download and you can store your things, so you'll start to see these things, open document (.odt), open document spreadsheet (.ods), open document presentation (.odt). I can give you that file, you can download free software and use it. Now, you might be going big deal, I've already got Windows, I've already got a Mac. That's fine for you, but when I want to send to those 50 million kids in Africa am I asking them to buy $300 worth of software to read my information? So, what's the point, when I can just download it for free and it's only that (this is the unlearning thing) you go I don't know how to download and install, but you learnt how to use Microsoft, OK, it was bred into you over the last 5 or 10 years, this stuff is easier to use. It's only hard because of your past teaching and the very clever marketing that made you believe that the hardware was connected to the software and its only very, very recently and its still very hard to do is to buy a computer without an operating system that's Microsoft. You don't have to, alright, you just have to put your foot down and say I want an operating and I don't necessarily want Microsoft, download your free software and away we go. Now I might add that although this is a bit evangelical and so on, to me, we don't have to go cold turkey, alright, we just go slowly. All I do every semester is pick one application I'm using and I move on the journey towards free and open software, OK, gradually, slowly.
Next thing, down the bottom here, open licensing. I can give you something that I made with free software where its in open formats, but what license do I put on it? Do I put a little c down the bottom and copyright it back to myself and say you can't use it. Or do I put a reverse c (I haven't got here), it's called copyleft, which says go and use it. Now, there's a whole issue there around the translation of property law because if you go and steal my car I can't drive home. But if you take my presentation and you re-use it, I can still drive home, I can still use my presentation next week, so what have I lost? There's a whole range of licenses, you can pick anything from being as most restrictive as you like through to putting it in the public domain.
Open access. In many ways putting material in the public domain is the simplest and best thing do. Most of us think there's some sort of fantasy of commercial potential in our material, when in fact if you just put it out there, you can have 10, 000 people coming to your website. Just throw your intranet open and make it an internet. Free marketing. People will love it. So, what I'm now talking about is open access, making it freely available. Turn your hard drive or intranet into an internet.
[Slides 22, 23, 24, 25, 26]
I'm going to keep moving, but Richard Stallman has a nice article called “Why Schools Should Use Free Software”. I'm just going to jump to the last point. He talks about easy reasons and simple reasons for using free software, like no $, but fundamentally what he says is that if you look at our schools' mission statements, and statements about our courses, we're about trying to teach people to be good citizens, emphasing cooperation and sharing, and if you use free software, kids can open it up, it's like having a car bonnet that you can open up and tinker with. We give them a tool they can use, they can download, they can show their friends, they can share with their friends, we're not teaching them with something they have to hold on to and if they share they are breaking the law. OK, I think that's probably enough of the open philosophy sermon.
[Slide 27]
We'll go through some technological trends, then look at some applications in outdoor education.
[Slide 28]
Now I've mentioned this tension: I think when we say the words technology and outdoor education in the one sentence or try and pretend we know how to put them together, we feel a little bit uncomfortable about that. It's a philosophical tension. These things are uneasy bedfellows and yet, if you think about it, who goes out there naked with kids and finds food out there? It's almost never been done. We've always taken some sort of technology. In fact we love technology, we love our gear, we love having the latest thing, etc. How much electricity went into that, how much research, how many minerals, etc.? We're taking huge amounts of technology out there, more and more, and yet we're sort of saying we don't do technology, we unplug people, we don't take technology out there. So, this tension is quite an intimate tension and we're kinda prejudice around what kinds of technologies we want to use and privelege.
[Slide 29]
So, we might turn that around and say what is the role of technology in outdoor education? We're not anti-technology, we do like some technology. So, have we thought through pedagogically why we're going to take that bit of technology and not that other bit of technology? Maybe instead of taking all of those karabiners and of all of that abseiling and rockclimbing paraphenalie, we're just going to body belay, but we might also take an iPod or a video camera.
[Slide 30]
What I want to suggest is that technology is not the antithesis of outdoor education. Clearly it's not. Otherwise we would be doing programs naked and we'd be doing the opposite of what we are actually doing, which is taking technology into the outdoors.
[Slide 31]
The antithesis of the outdoors is indoors. Outdoors only got created when we started building doors. I tried to think through, when did outdoor education begin. It wasn't here forever. I mean, you could say everyone was originally doing outdoor education, but they didn't think it was outdoor education because there was no doors to go out of, into the outdoors. So, outdoor education really got born the first time someone put a door up and then decided that the locus of existence was indoors and that learning belonged indoors. We had to distinguish then and say, oh, so you were outside when you were learning, well then, that's outdoor education. But I think we could probably claim that back the other way and say education always was outdoors, that is education, and now you people are doing something called indoor education. We're doing education. They're doing indoor education.
[Slide 32]
OK, so, what is technology? You know that existentialist notion of making a word strange? It means to take a word we have assumptions about and we think we know what it means, but then when we start talking about it and start actually trying to define it, we start going hang on, what is it?
[Slide 33]
This has become a semi-famous photograph. It was taken in 2005 in Congo [which is next door to Rwanda] and this is a female gorilla and she was captured on film with a stick trying to wade across an area of water and not only was she holding that, she was poking and prodding trying to work out where she could get across. And this got written up as a scientific breakthrough: animals use tools. I think some people might have observed this before, however we've got a photograph of it and evidence of other things too such as gorillas laying down sticks to make a bridge to get across the water and so on. Of course animals use technology, birds build nests, beavers build dams, etc. Clearly tool-making is not exclusive to humans, although we've taken it to a new kind of level.
[Slide 34]
We weren't the only primates to use tools. Neanderthals were'nt just animals, the whole point of hominids is that they were primates who started making sophisticated use of primitive tools.
[Slide 35]
In 1991, this is one of the spin-offs of global warming, hikers on the border between Italy and Austria, came across a dead body that they thought was a climber who had been lost in the previous season or two. When it was recovered, the remarkable thing was that it was a mummified corpse who died about 5,000 years ago. It's quite a fascinating story. They've named him Otzi and they've done masses of scientific analysis, e.g., of his stomach to work out how much pollen was in there and what time of the year he died, he had traces of copper in his hair and it proved therefore that the copper and iron age was earlier than what was previously anticipated, and he had a huge number of artifacts on him: bows, arrows, complex bread made with levening, fire starting kit, all sorts of knives, first aid kit with medicinal herbs, he was wearing some quite sophisticated shoes (so sophisticated that a commercial company is replicating the design and is selling Otzi shoes. It's interesting that we've got all this mass of technology now, but look at the shoes that come out, and think of all the technology we've lost from bootmakers and shoemakers. There was clearly cultural ritual of some sort because he had all sorts of tattoos over his body.
Now, when I look at that list and then I look at today's gear list for outdoor education programs I actually don't see much difference. We've updated the technology and that's it (and arguably we haven't if we look at the quality of his shoes and possibly his medical kit). He was found with an arrow-head in his shoulder and there is all sorts of speculation about how he died.
[Slide 36]
Robert Fitzgerald, a colleague at the University of Canberra, has a large mobile learning grant to help agricultural workers in Cambodia to use SMS and mobile learning communications. So, some people are going to completely bypass the whole computer things that we've been mucking around with because they don't need to bother. It's one of the advantages of being a late adopter because the bang you get for your buck as a late adopter is greater and you don't have as much unlearning to do. So, don't be afraid, you're going to bypass all these people who thought they were keeping up with stuff just by engaging in the new technology. Now, whether that's weather information or information from other workers about what they're doing and what's going on, this can bring all sorts of potential to these people's lives.
[Slide 37]
So, I come back to the question, “What is technology?”, having seen a few examples. These are my definitions or suggestions.
[Slide 38]
When you think about it, its any useful cultural artifact,
[Slide 39]
any artificial aid. It's artificial because we weren't born with it. So we're taking out all sorts of artificial aids to facilitate our experience.
[Slide 40]
You might think of it as capability which is not inherited. So, its power and potential that you have as a human being, but you've acquired that through cultural experience and being resourced and taught how to use those resources.
[Slide 41]
Another way of thinking about it is that its the hardware and software that you've got. But something like a pocket-knife is useless to someone who doesn't know how to use it. A computer is an anchor, it's a waste of energy, why would you cart it around if you don't know how to use it. So, it's also the know-how. Technology itself is no use to us, unless we've got the cultural knowledge to know how to use it.
[Slide 42]
So, briefly, crunching human evolution into one slide, we've moved very rapidly over time and we don't realise that. We've got evidence that human beings began using tools at least several hundred thousand years ago. They were wooden tools and stone tools. Humans developed copper and iron based technology certainly by around about 3000 years ago (Otzi was 5000 years ago) and probably this evolved sometime within the last 10, 000 years. Interestingly, the end of the last major ice-age was about 10, 000 years ago. During the ice-age there was a contraction of human populations to warmer areas (just as there is likely to be contraction to cooler areas during the upcoming warming period) and small groups had to undertake expeditions to find fertile land. It was probably through the of technology during this phase which helped some groups to survive the tough environmental conditions. These skilled groups then become ancestors of the great cultural revolution which followed, when environmental conditions turned to be more conducive to the flourishing of homo sapiens. All major known human civilizations have spring up in the last 10, 000 years - or more precisely, since the end of the last ice age, e.g., going back to the Mayans in South America.
Within the last 150 or so years, we've witnessed the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution brough mass efficiency, surplus resources, and comfort, with signficant social implications such as greater leisure time. For the first time, on a mass scale, people were released from the daily grind (if it was a grind – and that's debatable) of the daily task of meeting personal, subsistence survival needs via direct contact with nature. We still haven't worked out what to do with this surplus and unique opportunity and the consequences of that are becoming pretty obvious now (from obesity to environmental pollution). We clearly haven't yet put our new found powers and resources to their most effective and sustainable use. And that's why its really a human technology problem which we have, and not a technology problem per se.
Computers have barely been around in terms of being available to the general population in the last 20 or so years. And the digital, networked revolution has only gained major traction since the approximately the turn of the century (~2000 AD).
[Slide 43, 44, 45, 46, 47]
The notion of singularity is that (because) the speed of computers doubles every two years (Moore's Law), we are approaching a hypothetical point in time where a critical mass of people will be similtaneously interconnected, and that as a result, significant paradigmatic changes are likely to occur.
[Slide 48]
This graph, depicting Moore's Law is on a logarithmic scale, so its exponential (even though it looks linear). It indicates that the pace of change (in the speed of computing) continues to accelerate.
[Slide 49]
We can look at our history of evolution in terms of the waves of change. The first wave was the agricultural revolution; the second wave was the industrial revolution; the third wave was the information revolution, of which Moore's Law is an example. However, in many ways the information age has peaked and is waning. Whilst digital technology will get faster and more embedded in our lives, it is now already an old revolution; the new revolution, which some speculate is now unfolding, is a revolution of the mind, soul and spirit. This can be seen as influenced by the natural flow of evolutionary development (e.g., Maslow's hierarchy of needs), massive global interconnectivity (singularity), and escalating challenges of sustainability, growth, and survival. Others have described the 21st century as likely to be characterised as the century of biotechnology (integrating biological with technology) and artificial intelligence. It is predicted, for example, that in this century, computers really will become more intelligent than human beings, with potentially profound consequences.
[Slide 50]
High tech and low tech. I'm not saying that we should be using technology; I'm saying we should be thinking through what technology we're using. If you think about something like navigation, how do you navigate using low technology? You don't use anything; you use memory. How did people travel long distances where they had no memory? They used cultural memory; cultural memory stored in formats that were portable, accessible, mobile, efficient, and things like the aboriginal songlines, where they sing a song and then navigate using a mental map of where to go is an example. Then we come up with maps and compasses, sextants, and so on. One of the things I'm concerned about is why are we so homogenous in our gear lists? Why don't we run a program perhaps with no maps. Sometimes we take maps off participants. But we do seriously think its a good idea to always use one technology, which is what we are currently, mainly using. So, let's perhaps run some programs without those facilitaties, and then perhaps also let's run some programs with modern technologies, and play around with the full spectrum and educate kids and let them learn and explore how to use a whole range of technologies.
[Slide 51]
As an academic I can come up with all sorts of ideas, but why don't we run programs using technology of 10 years ago, then the next year you go out with technology from 100 years ago, and then the next you go out with technology from a 1000 years ago. And then, I don't understand, why don't our school kids experience at least one week of sustainable living? We send them out into the community and say they've got to live sustainably, but we don't give students are genuine experience of that, let alone the skills and knowledge. I don't get it. Why don't they just go and live on a permaculture farm and at least experience sustainble living? Otherwise it's a joke.
Urban adventure. It's coming, it's here, are we participating in it? Are we really exploring it and its potential?
We've also already talked a bit about mobile learning.
[Slide 52]
Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 – you've probably heard of these terms, but perhaps have not appreciated what they refer to.
Web 1.0 is static, didactic, and passive. This is you going to a website, reading static information, and possibly downloading, end of story. Pretty boring, but it was exciting when it happened.
[Slide 53]
Web 2.0 is this notion that we are going to make things dynamic (so the pages changes, they are not static information), we're going to make it experiential (you can participate and actually become part of the page), and therefore it's (inter)active. When we start using words like these, what does it remind us of? Experiential eduction. So, here we have an experiential tool at our fingertips.
[Slide 54]
Web 1.0 is also called the read web; whereas Web 2.0 is also called the read/write web.
[Slide 55]
Here is the Wikipedia page for outdoor education. All you've got to do folks, if you don't like it, see that button, edit this page, make changes, and then hit the save button. Most of that page is my crap, and I'm sick of reading it. I'd rather read your thoughts, your input. If you type outdoor education into Google.com that page is pretty close to the first one. (Update: As of approximately one week after this talk, the Wikipedia outdoor education page became the number one result on a google search and is likely to remain so for some time.) So that's what the world is seeing currently and reading about outdoor education. That's our advertising page to the world, in effect. And when I talked about the death of wilderdom.com, I was referring to the rise of Web 2.0 and interactive, community-based sites such as Wikipedia, because this is really people's voice and that's to me the real outdoor education we want to develop and communicate to the world. And we can hyperlink it to whatever we like and embed it wherever we like.
[Slide 56]
Al Threlfall has recently set up this “Outdoor Educators of the World” group on FaceBook (Note: 92 members at the time; within two weeks this group has grown to 130 members and looks increasingly active). What's now emerging are little pockets of collaborative networks that are cross-institutional and they represent a series of like-minds who want to get together and work on something.
Here's the $100 laptop. It's got solar panels, you can wind it up, you can only order them in lots I think of at least a million, and can only be ordered by governments of developing countries. They're in the final trial stages before final production and shipping. They're not $100, they're a bit more expensive than that. And this is probably going to be the largest social experiment with technology that we've ever seen.
These laptops don't even need the internet because they all talk to each other. They're designed to cooperate. So, rather than my internet connection not being shared with you over there, which is ridiculous. Eventually, we'll all be connected. These people are all going to share their network, so that all only person needs a big, fat connection to the internet somewhere, and it can be spread and shared in a 'mesh' by these laptops.
[Slides 58, 59]
Another application growing in usage and importance is digital mapping and portable Global Positioning Systems (GPSs). These slides are from a virtual hike briefing are courtesy, Ian Boyle, from Glengarry, Australia. Virtual mapping is nice, fun, muck around with it, go for it.
[Slide 60]
But what I want to move on to is...What we really want be getting into are these things called mashups which is where we combine data from different sources. And that's where you can do something like go to Google Maps and cooperate with our storage of information. I don't know we would all want to run separate virtual mapping systems, why don't we cooperate and just have one, where we all put our stuff on there. Or at least upload some of your information, photographs and so on for various points. Cameras now are pretty much going to come preinstalled with GPSs, so you take your photograph, upload it, and there it is at the right GPS point, and we build cultural history and local area information.
You don't have to use it, but it's there, its one of the new possibilities. For example, I've always been embarrassed as an instructor that I can't know about everything. I don't know the stars, I don't know the plants, but what if I had my hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy with me. And when the kid says what's that plant, or tell us about those stars, we have some chance of working it out together as co-learners, instead of saying mate, I've worked on psychology and that's all I can tell you about being out here.
[Slide 61]
This is a Google Map (actually its a Frappr Map which builds on Google Maps) of outdoor educators and outdoor education organisations around the world, a bit like the FaceBook group. There's 112 members and apparently there's only two of us in Australia, so you go to frappr.com/outdooreducation and pop yourself in there – it's free advertising, folks. Put in a hyperlink to your organisation. Why wouldn't you do it? You wonder why your site comes up down the bottom on a Google search, it's because you don't have anything linked to it. So do it, pop it on Wikipedia, put yourself on the Frappr map, and so on.
[Slides 62, 63]
Let's watch another video to show you the Greenwich Emotion Map. [video]. This was actually an outdoor art project in the UK. What they were doing was mucking around with real-time monitoring of people with mobile devices...I'm going to play on 8x so we can speed it up. So, its an urban walk, with a group of people distributed at various points, carrying mobile phones, and they're texting in reports on their experiences...and you can see these jpegs coming up, people aren't naming their files, but they're also taking photographs with their mobile phone. Part of this project was also to try to map their emotions because different places engender different kinds of emotional responses. So once we hook this stuff up with biofeedback tools, heart-rate monitors, brain-wave monitors, and so on, there are some fascinating possibilities for exploring and better understanding the psychology of the outdoors. Bruce Hayllar's doing some work in this area. Of course there's commercial interest because of the potential to place advertising more strategically. But, I think, we get hold of this kind of technology and experiment with some of the possibilities for sharing and connecting. It might be a bit pie in the sky at the moment but it's an insight into the future.
[Slide 64]
Sites such as Flickr provide a powerful Web2.0 medium for photosharing which illustrates, among other things, the use of tagging.
[Slide 65]
For example, these are my tags used to bookmark sites on del.icio.us. I don't keep bookmarks on my computer, I make them public. So, that tag cloud is a bit like a personality analysis, I guess. But if you want to see all the sites I've tagged for this presentatation, I've used the tag oeit, so you can see those via http://del.icio.us/jtneill/oeit which will show 100 or so bookmarks for this presentation.
If everybody tagged their photographs oric2007 and uploads them to photosharing sites, we could create a combined stream of all the photographs from this conference. So once we start connecting our information to these sites, we are going to start to accelerate some of the networking possibilities. That's what conferences are for, but we come to a conference every now and then, and this stuff is 24/7 if we want to access it.
I'll show you one last thing and then we'll finish up.
[Slide 66]
I saw my son running around earlier with this mood ring, which he bought for $5. These things were a fad in the late 1970s. They are body temperature monitors. This is a very basic form of what we call biofeedback. And not unlike what Ian Boyle was talking about (in his presentation on using Covey's 7 habits of highly effective teenagers in outdoor education programs), this is using technology to give biological feedback and then we can start to mentally control our relaxation. That's a simple version.
[Slide 67]
And that's a more technological version. Daryl from Army Adventure Training is experimenting with use of portable biofeedback devices and having people at the tops of ropes courses analysing their responses and learning to get greater control over what's going on in their body. Alright, so huge potential, I'd suggest, and its a conversation that I hope will be ongoing.
[Slide 68]
I'll just show you one slide of some slightly crazy stuff. Eventually e-paper will become less expensive than than real paper; we're running out of trees, but we will be to create e-paper...This is an electronic tent. It's basically a projection of a virtual world. You can put kids inside here, turn out the lights, and they use a torch (flashlight) as a cursor to interact and move through some kind of virtual space. And they're using the metaphor, if you like, of camping in a virtual world to achieve certain kinds of experiences. So, this is less about us bringing technology into the outdoors and this is a chance for us to insert outdoor education into virtual environments. Go onto Second Life or any of the other virtual worlds and its an outdoor education world which people are building and constructing. And maybe we can get together sometime and have a bit of a fly and a swim.
[Slide 70]
So, there are three things I wanted to leave you with:
Technology is moving towards being mobile, so get used to mobility, think mobility, and we're probably among those best equipped to educate people about learning and being mobile;
Think singularity, which is the idea that this is all coming together so fast that change is going to become more and more rapid. The more you unlearn now and get on board with future innovations, the faster we'll be able to move with it, and
Things are going virtual. So we have a place not just in outdoor education for technology, but we can bring outdoors, believe it or not, into the new kinds of worlds people are living in.
Thanks very much.
Listen to this article.
[Slide 1]
Please feel free to turn your mobiles on, laptops on, any other technology you like on. For some reason we've got this idea that you've got to switch everything off to learn and there's a different way of thinking which is that we can switch everything on and incorporate that in some way.
So ... “Technology and the Outdoors: Some Experiential Possibilities”.
This is a bit of a rave from a pro-technology point of view. Previously I've advocated for a “mountains speak for themselves”, low-technology getting-back-to-nature point of view. This is a bit of a flip-side, but also hopefully a bit of an integration. I think we've got some ideas which aren't helpful around some sort of perceived antithesis, that these things are opposites, technology and the outdoors. I'm going to suggest to you that perhaps we can find ways to synthesise these things.
[Slide 2]
Now just to kick off things, I've got a video to get you into the mood of what I might mean by “possibilities” and new kinds of thinking perhaps that we haven't looked at before. One of the things I'm going to talk about is low technology and high technology. So, when I say “technology”, I mean all technology and we'll talk a bit more about that.
There's a little website out there called postsecret.com, I don't know if any of you have seen it and this is the trailer for this particular website.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6rTkp1dek4
OK, basically this was one guy (Frank) who came up with this idea one day that he would start asking people to send him postcards of secrets and they started flooding into his mailbox and he just started whacking them up on the web and its become this kind of social phenomenon that a number of people really connect with. They go on each week to see the latest postcard's on the web and he's produced a whole lot of books and so on. One of the things this highlights to me is the use of low technology (written, hand-made postcards) with the new kind of technology (web-based social networking) and the kind of synergy that can be achieved there. And I think there's scope for some things like that in outdoor education.
[Slide 3]
This whole presentation will be put up on wilderdom.com and
[Slide 4]
if you go to wilderdom.com/tech there will be a wiki page up there.
[Slide 5]
You can find me at james@wilderdom.com. One of the themes here is of (and I'll get into this more) openness and making information free and available which is one of my little bandwagons.
[Slide 6]
Now a couple of metaphors for thinking about technology. For some people I think technology appears like this freight train rumbling, they know its coming, they know its big, but its a bit too scary and let's just pop our heads in the sand. That's OK, there's all range of responses.
[Slide 7]
Nevertheless, it is coming and I might suggest to you that the way I think about technology, and you might find this metaphor works for you, is like a wave. I read a little bit of advice when I first started in academia that said look around you when you start off in a career and look for the waves of change that are coming through and see if you can't paddle and get on the back of one of those waves because with just a little bit of your energy you will be carried forward into a new realm of possibility. So about 10 years ago when I started in academia I kinda looked around and said look I can see technology coming, let's try and jump on the back of it and paddle a little bit.
[Slides 8, 9, 10]
I'm going to say a few things about what we might call deschooling. We talk a lot about learning and going to school and so on, and yet one of the things that's happening is that perhaps we have more of a challenge in letting go of what we've learnt and unlearning. And I think most of us have heard this stuff that we're currently preparing students for jobs that don't exist, but haven't really embodied the pace of change. We are living more out of the past, than we are towards the future that we are heading into. These students are going to go into, they're going to be around, I mean my little kid was born into the year 2000 and there's a chance he could see the 22nd century in, which is quite an amazing thought that we're preparing kids like that now really for not just the 21st but, if we get there, the 22nd century and they're going to be dealing with problems that we haven't even thought of yet, so we might want to stop and think about that.
Any skill which you give them which turns out to be a redundant skill is actually a disadvantage to them for their future. Any maybe what we need to be doing is starting to undo some of the stuff we've already programmed and looking to open them up so they can engage in things that we haven't even imagined yet.
[Slides 11, 12, 13, 14]
I mentioned the idea of being free and open and sharing and I think one of the low tech and most valuable things is the old aboriginal principle of sharing. We teach it in our courses, we want our kids to do it, but when it comes to information, knowledge, and so on, we still have yet to reach a critical mass of sharing within our industry, that in many ways is undermining our capacity to respond to 21st century and beyond issues. So, I simply want to share, explore, and set up for debate (we probably won't quite get to debate, but we can do that after the presentation).
What I'm trying to search for, I guess, and this is really kind of as an academic I guess my responsibility is report to back to society. I don't report to my bosses, I report to the practitioners and should be judged in terms of the value of the job I'm doing by society. And so, I just want to give you a summary of the last 5 to 10 years of mucking around with technology.
[Slide 15]
Like many of you the thing that fundamentally got me going was being in the outdoors, and we share that in common. I also had a fascination with what makes people work, what makes people tick, and like Ian Boyle's presentation on positive psychology, not just what makes them go wrong, but how can we help them go better. And at some point I thought how on earth am going to put those two things together because I kinda went through uni in the days before there was outdoor ed [at uni] and then I kinda discovered outdoor ed and thought wow, like many of you have, that's it, that that's brought those two things together (outdoors and psychology). I then found myself lumped in at uni and I did feel quite disconnected as this sort of suggests. Teaching at university after teaching in outdoor education feels fairly constraining until you start trying to break down some of the ivory towers and do something else.
What connected a lot of these ideas together for me was the internet and the only reason that website (wilderdom.com) started was out of pure and utter frustration at being at university and wanting to tell the world about outdoor education and what outdoor education was doing and not being able to get information. And I thought well if its going to be that hard, then the very least I can do is basically dump my hard drive up on the web, so that other people can search it and make use of it if they wish. So that was really the birth of wilderdom.com. I'll also show you a bit more about the death of wilderdom.com because I'm moving on, you know, to different applications. But before I tell you about that,
[Slide 16]
that's a graph. The blue line is the reach per person of wilderdom.com, of some weird guy's website which he did between 2am and 4am over a year or two, by comparison, for example, that aqua line is my university, which has 10, 000 students (University of Canberra). I find it very difficult to get across to the university that by not letting me put my stuff on a university website, they are missing out on a whole lot of potential. It's because it wouldn't go any where else that I dumped it up on the web. But that's one person sharing information. Imagine if the 300 academics at my university also put their hard drives up there for society, what kind of sharing might we be able to achieve? Ironically, the technology is all there, that's all just sitting there, it's like, you know, these huge, powered cars but people are turn the key on and have a go.
Down there (on the graph), and it's not really a boast fest, but there's outdoored.com. That brown one down there is aee.org, acacamps.com is the black one and there's all sorts of stuff these organisations and networks could be doing to bring people together, but its really not kind of happening at the moment; it's small groups of people.
[Slide 17]
Just to put this in perspective, wilderdom.com gets 10, 000 visitors a day and they spend an average of 5 minutes there and if you calculate that out, that's like right now 110 people reading that material and looking at that stuff, so its the equivalent of a small school or its an outdoor ed kinda program going on. I don't have any contact with them; occasionally someone sends an email or something. So, that might give you some indication of the educative potential, I guess, of sharing information.
[Slide 18]
Just to come back to this little picture, the things that drive me now with my students at university are that I make things as experiential as possible and push into what's sometimes called blended learning which is a combination of face-to-face learning and a parallel procss going on online. So its face-to-face, but equally they can interact meaningfully and powerfully through online methods. For example, I've got students doing blogs this semester for their uni course.
More to the point, for us, something that's really only just about to take off, is mobile learning. If you think about these laptop computers and so on, they really are 20th century technology, they're old, they're not going to be about in a few years time. Everything's is pretty much coming down to a [single] mobile device. And that's a really exciting thing for us, because all this time we've thought of technology as separate to outdoor education because they are these large, big objects that you can't take with you. That's pretty much over now and we're pretty close to be able to have all of this stuff, the potential of the web and more, with a mobile device and then we can go and do whatever we like.
In fact, we are the people (outdoor educators) perhaps who could teach educators how to use mobile devices and how to use them for learning on the move. And I see this an opportunity we can either get on the back of and participate in, and help the traditional education community learn about the mobile stuff or we can just let it go past us and see what they come up with.
The thing, whether we like it or not, that ties this together is some sort of IT knowledge. But I think we've got a huge cultural issue where, if you go to most organisations the IT people are way over there and we find it very difficult to talk to them, we find very scary even to talk to them, and we've got a whole of users over here who are completely and utterly frustrated, bombarded by spam in their emails, and so on, and its a stress to turn their computer on and what we do need are some sort of ambassadors and diplomats kinda going back and forth, and that's the IT guy who wanders down the corridor and has a chat to you and can actually talk English and its those of us who decide to muck around, and hack around, and play around with things, talk to the IT people, and try to relate it back to real people's lives. So, that's some of the stuff that's kinda been influencing me.
[Slide 19]
The other thing is that for me, fundamentally, is that the philosophical or motivational drive for mucking around with technology is not the technology. It's a means to an end, and the word emacipatory means empowering or enabling people to do stuff. And to me that's one of the exciting potentials.
Later on for example, I'll show you a photograph of the $100 laptop, wind-up laptop, that is about to be shipped in lots of a million to poor countries in Africa and they're all going to be intermeshed and networked and you know, when we suddenly hand over 50 million of these to the African continent what kinds of things might start happening? What kinds of conversations might start happening about what the world about what it means and what's happening to people around the place?
[For an example of the kinds of things which might start happening, see the Hole in the Wall video - http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/india/thestory.html]
[Slide 21]
Embedded in that is this notion of a free and open philosophy and practice which I've come to synthesise recently into four things that help guide my teaching at university and which for some reason is a completely and utterly foreign idea to most of my colleagues and that I find difficult to talk to them about.
I'll just briefly mention what these things are:
One is the use of free software and I'll give you four reasons for why we should be using free software in a moment.
A second thing is open format. When you give me a .doc file you are saying to me you need to go and purchase $300 worth of software in order to read the information I'm offering you. However, there's a whole lot of other options out there now and there's software that you can download and you can store your things, so you'll start to see these things, open document (.odt), open document spreadsheet (.ods), open document presentation (.odt). I can give you that file, you can download free software and use it. Now, you might be going big deal, I've already got Windows, I've already got a Mac. That's fine for you, but when I want to send to those 50 million kids in Africa am I asking them to buy $300 worth of software to read my information? So, what's the point, when I can just download it for free and it's only that (this is the unlearning thing) you go I don't know how to download and install, but you learnt how to use Microsoft, OK, it was bred into you over the last 5 or 10 years, this stuff is easier to use. It's only hard because of your past teaching and the very clever marketing that made you believe that the hardware was connected to the software and its only very, very recently and its still very hard to do is to buy a computer without an operating system that's Microsoft. You don't have to, alright, you just have to put your foot down and say I want an operating and I don't necessarily want Microsoft, download your free software and away we go. Now I might add that although this is a bit evangelical and so on, to me, we don't have to go cold turkey, alright, we just go slowly. All I do every semester is pick one application I'm using and I move on the journey towards free and open software, OK, gradually, slowly.
Next thing, down the bottom here, open licensing. I can give you something that I made with free software where its in open formats, but what license do I put on it? Do I put a little c down the bottom and copyright it back to myself and say you can't use it. Or do I put a reverse c (I haven't got here), it's called copyleft, which says go and use it. Now, there's a whole issue there around the translation of property law because if you go and steal my car I can't drive home. But if you take my presentation and you re-use it, I can still drive home, I can still use my presentation next week, so what have I lost? There's a whole range of licenses, you can pick anything from being as most restrictive as you like through to putting it in the public domain.
Open access. In many ways putting material in the public domain is the simplest and best thing do. Most of us think there's some sort of fantasy of commercial potential in our material, when in fact if you just put it out there, you can have 10, 000 people coming to your website. Just throw your intranet open and make it an internet. Free marketing. People will love it. So, what I'm now talking about is open access, making it freely available. Turn your hard drive or intranet into an internet.
[Slides 22, 23, 24, 25, 26]
I'm going to keep moving, but Richard Stallman has a nice article called “Why Schools Should Use Free Software”. I'm just going to jump to the last point. He talks about easy reasons and simple reasons for using free software, like no $, but fundamentally what he says is that if you look at our schools' mission statements, and statements about our courses, we're about trying to teach people to be good citizens, emphasing cooperation and sharing, and if you use free software, kids can open it up, it's like having a car bonnet that you can open up and tinker with. We give them a tool they can use, they can download, they can show their friends, they can share with their friends, we're not teaching them with something they have to hold on to and if they share they are breaking the law. OK, I think that's probably enough of the open philosophy sermon.
[Slide 27]
We'll go through some technological trends, then look at some applications in outdoor education.
[Slide 28]
Now I've mentioned this tension: I think when we say the words technology and outdoor education in the one sentence or try and pretend we know how to put them together, we feel a little bit uncomfortable about that. It's a philosophical tension. These things are uneasy bedfellows and yet, if you think about it, who goes out there naked with kids and finds food out there? It's almost never been done. We've always taken some sort of technology. In fact we love technology, we love our gear, we love having the latest thing, etc. How much electricity went into that, how much research, how many minerals, etc.? We're taking huge amounts of technology out there, more and more, and yet we're sort of saying we don't do technology, we unplug people, we don't take technology out there. So, this tension is quite an intimate tension and we're kinda prejudice around what kinds of technologies we want to use and privelege.
[Slide 29]
So, we might turn that around and say what is the role of technology in outdoor education? We're not anti-technology, we do like some technology. So, have we thought through pedagogically why we're going to take that bit of technology and not that other bit of technology? Maybe instead of taking all of those karabiners and of all of that abseiling and rockclimbing paraphenalie, we're just going to body belay, but we might also take an iPod or a video camera.
[Slide 30]
What I want to suggest is that technology is not the antithesis of outdoor education. Clearly it's not. Otherwise we would be doing programs naked and we'd be doing the opposite of what we are actually doing, which is taking technology into the outdoors.
[Slide 31]
The antithesis of the outdoors is indoors. Outdoors only got created when we started building doors. I tried to think through, when did outdoor education begin. It wasn't here forever. I mean, you could say everyone was originally doing outdoor education, but they didn't think it was outdoor education because there was no doors to go out of, into the outdoors. So, outdoor education really got born the first time someone put a door up and then decided that the locus of existence was indoors and that learning belonged indoors. We had to distinguish then and say, oh, so you were outside when you were learning, well then, that's outdoor education. But I think we could probably claim that back the other way and say education always was outdoors, that is education, and now you people are doing something called indoor education. We're doing education. They're doing indoor education.
[Slide 32]
OK, so, what is technology? You know that existentialist notion of making a word strange? It means to take a word we have assumptions about and we think we know what it means, but then when we start talking about it and start actually trying to define it, we start going hang on, what is it?
[Slide 33]
This has become a semi-famous photograph. It was taken in 2005 in Congo [which is next door to Rwanda] and this is a female gorilla and she was captured on film with a stick trying to wade across an area of water and not only was she holding that, she was poking and prodding trying to work out where she could get across. And this got written up as a scientific breakthrough: animals use tools. I think some people might have observed this before, however we've got a photograph of it and evidence of other things too such as gorillas laying down sticks to make a bridge to get across the water and so on. Of course animals use technology, birds build nests, beavers build dams, etc. Clearly tool-making is not exclusive to humans, although we've taken it to a new kind of level.
[Slide 34]
We weren't the only primates to use tools. Neanderthals were'nt just animals, the whole point of hominids is that they were primates who started making sophisticated use of primitive tools.
[Slide 35]
In 1991, this is one of the spin-offs of global warming, hikers on the border between Italy and Austria, came across a dead body that they thought was a climber who had been lost in the previous season or two. When it was recovered, the remarkable thing was that it was a mummified corpse who died about 5,000 years ago. It's quite a fascinating story. They've named him Otzi and they've done masses of scientific analysis, e.g., of his stomach to work out how much pollen was in there and what time of the year he died, he had traces of copper in his hair and it proved therefore that the copper and iron age was earlier than what was previously anticipated, and he had a huge number of artifacts on him: bows, arrows, complex bread made with levening, fire starting kit, all sorts of knives, first aid kit with medicinal herbs, he was wearing some quite sophisticated shoes (so sophisticated that a commercial company is replicating the design and is selling Otzi shoes. It's interesting that we've got all this mass of technology now, but look at the shoes that come out, and think of all the technology we've lost from bootmakers and shoemakers. There was clearly cultural ritual of some sort because he had all sorts of tattoos over his body.
Now, when I look at that list and then I look at today's gear list for outdoor education programs I actually don't see much difference. We've updated the technology and that's it (and arguably we haven't if we look at the quality of his shoes and possibly his medical kit). He was found with an arrow-head in his shoulder and there is all sorts of speculation about how he died.
[Slide 36]
Robert Fitzgerald, a colleague at the University of Canberra, has a large mobile learning grant to help agricultural workers in Cambodia to use SMS and mobile learning communications. So, some people are going to completely bypass the whole computer things that we've been mucking around with because they don't need to bother. It's one of the advantages of being a late adopter because the bang you get for your buck as a late adopter is greater and you don't have as much unlearning to do. So, don't be afraid, you're going to bypass all these people who thought they were keeping up with stuff just by engaging in the new technology. Now, whether that's weather information or information from other workers about what they're doing and what's going on, this can bring all sorts of potential to these people's lives.
[Slide 37]
So, I come back to the question, “What is technology?”, having seen a few examples. These are my definitions or suggestions.
[Slide 38]
When you think about it, its any useful cultural artifact,
[Slide 39]
any artificial aid. It's artificial because we weren't born with it. So we're taking out all sorts of artificial aids to facilitate our experience.
[Slide 40]
You might think of it as capability which is not inherited. So, its power and potential that you have as a human being, but you've acquired that through cultural experience and being resourced and taught how to use those resources.
[Slide 41]
Another way of thinking about it is that its the hardware and software that you've got. But something like a pocket-knife is useless to someone who doesn't know how to use it. A computer is an anchor, it's a waste of energy, why would you cart it around if you don't know how to use it. So, it's also the know-how. Technology itself is no use to us, unless we've got the cultural knowledge to know how to use it.
[Slide 42]
So, briefly, crunching human evolution into one slide, we've moved very rapidly over time and we don't realise that. We've got evidence that human beings began using tools at least several hundred thousand years ago. They were wooden tools and stone tools. Humans developed copper and iron based technology certainly by around about 3000 years ago (Otzi was 5000 years ago) and probably this evolved sometime within the last 10, 000 years. Interestingly, the end of the last major ice-age was about 10, 000 years ago. During the ice-age there was a contraction of human populations to warmer areas (just as there is likely to be contraction to cooler areas during the upcoming warming period) and small groups had to undertake expeditions to find fertile land. It was probably through the of technology during this phase which helped some groups to survive the tough environmental conditions. These skilled groups then become ancestors of the great cultural revolution which followed, when environmental conditions turned to be more conducive to the flourishing of homo sapiens. All major known human civilizations have spring up in the last 10, 000 years - or more precisely, since the end of the last ice age, e.g., going back to the Mayans in South America.
Within the last 150 or so years, we've witnessed the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution brough mass efficiency, surplus resources, and comfort, with signficant social implications such as greater leisure time. For the first time, on a mass scale, people were released from the daily grind (if it was a grind – and that's debatable) of the daily task of meeting personal, subsistence survival needs via direct contact with nature. We still haven't worked out what to do with this surplus and unique opportunity and the consequences of that are becoming pretty obvious now (from obesity to environmental pollution). We clearly haven't yet put our new found powers and resources to their most effective and sustainable use. And that's why its really a human technology problem which we have, and not a technology problem per se.
Computers have barely been around in terms of being available to the general population in the last 20 or so years. And the digital, networked revolution has only gained major traction since the approximately the turn of the century (~2000 AD).
[Slide 43, 44, 45, 46, 47]
The notion of singularity is that (because) the speed of computers doubles every two years (Moore's Law), we are approaching a hypothetical point in time where a critical mass of people will be similtaneously interconnected, and that as a result, significant paradigmatic changes are likely to occur.
[Slide 48]
This graph, depicting Moore's Law is on a logarithmic scale, so its exponential (even though it looks linear). It indicates that the pace of change (in the speed of computing) continues to accelerate.
[Slide 49]
We can look at our history of evolution in terms of the waves of change. The first wave was the agricultural revolution; the second wave was the industrial revolution; the third wave was the information revolution, of which Moore's Law is an example. However, in many ways the information age has peaked and is waning. Whilst digital technology will get faster and more embedded in our lives, it is now already an old revolution; the new revolution, which some speculate is now unfolding, is a revolution of the mind, soul and spirit. This can be seen as influenced by the natural flow of evolutionary development (e.g., Maslow's hierarchy of needs), massive global interconnectivity (singularity), and escalating challenges of sustainability, growth, and survival. Others have described the 21st century as likely to be characterised as the century of biotechnology (integrating biological with technology) and artificial intelligence. It is predicted, for example, that in this century, computers really will become more intelligent than human beings, with potentially profound consequences.
[Slide 50]
High tech and low tech. I'm not saying that we should be using technology; I'm saying we should be thinking through what technology we're using. If you think about something like navigation, how do you navigate using low technology? You don't use anything; you use memory. How did people travel long distances where they had no memory? They used cultural memory; cultural memory stored in formats that were portable, accessible, mobile, efficient, and things like the aboriginal songlines, where they sing a song and then navigate using a mental map of where to go is an example. Then we come up with maps and compasses, sextants, and so on. One of the things I'm concerned about is why are we so homogenous in our gear lists? Why don't we run a program perhaps with no maps. Sometimes we take maps off participants. But we do seriously think its a good idea to always use one technology, which is what we are currently, mainly using. So, let's perhaps run some programs without those facilitaties, and then perhaps also let's run some programs with modern technologies, and play around with the full spectrum and educate kids and let them learn and explore how to use a whole range of technologies.
[Slide 51]
As an academic I can come up with all sorts of ideas, but why don't we run programs using technology of 10 years ago, then the next year you go out with technology from 100 years ago, and then the next you go out with technology from a 1000 years ago. And then, I don't understand, why don't our school kids experience at least one week of sustainable living? We send them out into the community and say they've got to live sustainably, but we don't give students are genuine experience of that, let alone the skills and knowledge. I don't get it. Why don't they just go and live on a permaculture farm and at least experience sustainble living? Otherwise it's a joke.
Urban adventure. It's coming, it's here, are we participating in it? Are we really exploring it and its potential?
We've also already talked a bit about mobile learning.
[Slide 52]
Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 – you've probably heard of these terms, but perhaps have not appreciated what they refer to.
Web 1.0 is static, didactic, and passive. This is you going to a website, reading static information, and possibly downloading, end of story. Pretty boring, but it was exciting when it happened.
[Slide 53]
Web 2.0 is this notion that we are going to make things dynamic (so the pages changes, they are not static information), we're going to make it experiential (you can participate and actually become part of the page), and therefore it's (inter)active. When we start using words like these, what does it remind us of? Experiential eduction. So, here we have an experiential tool at our fingertips.
[Slide 54]
Web 1.0 is also called the read web; whereas Web 2.0 is also called the read/write web.
[Slide 55]
Here is the Wikipedia page for outdoor education. All you've got to do folks, if you don't like it, see that button, edit this page, make changes, and then hit the save button. Most of that page is my crap, and I'm sick of reading it. I'd rather read your thoughts, your input. If you type outdoor education into Google.com that page is pretty close to the first one. (Update: As of approximately one week after this talk, the Wikipedia outdoor education page became the number one result on a google search and is likely to remain so for some time.) So that's what the world is seeing currently and reading about outdoor education. That's our advertising page to the world, in effect. And when I talked about the death of wilderdom.com, I was referring to the rise of Web 2.0 and interactive, community-based sites such as Wikipedia, because this is really people's voice and that's to me the real outdoor education we want to develop and communicate to the world. And we can hyperlink it to whatever we like and embed it wherever we like.
[Slide 56]
Al Threlfall has recently set up this “Outdoor Educators of the World” group on FaceBook (Note: 92 members at the time; within two weeks this group has grown to 130 members and looks increasingly active). What's now emerging are little pockets of collaborative networks that are cross-institutional and they represent a series of like-minds who want to get together and work on something.
Here's the $100 laptop. It's got solar panels, you can wind it up, you can only order them in lots I think of at least a million, and can only be ordered by governments of developing countries. They're in the final trial stages before final production and shipping. They're not $100, they're a bit more expensive than that. And this is probably going to be the largest social experiment with technology that we've ever seen.
These laptops don't even need the internet because they all talk to each other. They're designed to cooperate. So, rather than my internet connection not being shared with you over there, which is ridiculous. Eventually, we'll all be connected. These people are all going to share their network, so that all only person needs a big, fat connection to the internet somewhere, and it can be spread and shared in a 'mesh' by these laptops.
[Slides 58, 59]
Another application growing in usage and importance is digital mapping and portable Global Positioning Systems (GPSs). These slides are from a virtual hike briefing are courtesy, Ian Boyle, from Glengarry, Australia. Virtual mapping is nice, fun, muck around with it, go for it.
[Slide 60]
But what I want to move on to is...What we really want be getting into are these things called mashups which is where we combine data from different sources. And that's where you can do something like go to Google Maps and cooperate with our storage of information. I don't know we would all want to run separate virtual mapping systems, why don't we cooperate and just have one, where we all put our stuff on there. Or at least upload some of your information, photographs and so on for various points. Cameras now are pretty much going to come preinstalled with GPSs, so you take your photograph, upload it, and there it is at the right GPS point, and we build cultural history and local area information.
You don't have to use it, but it's there, its one of the new possibilities. For example, I've always been embarrassed as an instructor that I can't know about everything. I don't know the stars, I don't know the plants, but what if I had my hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy with me. And when the kid says what's that plant, or tell us about those stars, we have some chance of working it out together as co-learners, instead of saying mate, I've worked on psychology and that's all I can tell you about being out here.
[Slide 61]
This is a Google Map (actually its a Frappr Map which builds on Google Maps) of outdoor educators and outdoor education organisations around the world, a bit like the FaceBook group. There's 112 members and apparently there's only two of us in Australia, so you go to frappr.com/outdooreducation and pop yourself in there – it's free advertising, folks. Put in a hyperlink to your organisation. Why wouldn't you do it? You wonder why your site comes up down the bottom on a Google search, it's because you don't have anything linked to it. So do it, pop it on Wikipedia, put yourself on the Frappr map, and so on.
[Slides 62, 63]
Let's watch another video to show you the Greenwich Emotion Map. [video]. This was actually an outdoor art project in the UK. What they were doing was mucking around with real-time monitoring of people with mobile devices...I'm going to play on 8x so we can speed it up. So, its an urban walk, with a group of people distributed at various points, carrying mobile phones, and they're texting in reports on their experiences...and you can see these jpegs coming up, people aren't naming their files, but they're also taking photographs with their mobile phone. Part of this project was also to try to map their emotions because different places engender different kinds of emotional responses. So once we hook this stuff up with biofeedback tools, heart-rate monitors, brain-wave monitors, and so on, there are some fascinating possibilities for exploring and better understanding the psychology of the outdoors. Bruce Hayllar's doing some work in this area. Of course there's commercial interest because of the potential to place advertising more strategically. But, I think, we get hold of this kind of technology and experiment with some of the possibilities for sharing and connecting. It might be a bit pie in the sky at the moment but it's an insight into the future.
[Slide 64]
Sites such as Flickr provide a powerful Web2.0 medium for photosharing which illustrates, among other things, the use of tagging.
[Slide 65]
For example, these are my tags used to bookmark sites on del.icio.us. I don't keep bookmarks on my computer, I make them public. So, that tag cloud is a bit like a personality analysis, I guess. But if you want to see all the sites I've tagged for this presentatation, I've used the tag oeit, so you can see those via http://del.icio.us/jtneill/oeit which will show 100 or so bookmarks for this presentation.
If everybody tagged their photographs oric2007 and uploads them to photosharing sites, we could create a combined stream of all the photographs from this conference. So once we start connecting our information to these sites, we are going to start to accelerate some of the networking possibilities. That's what conferences are for, but we come to a conference every now and then, and this stuff is 24/7 if we want to access it.
I'll show you one last thing and then we'll finish up.
[Slide 66]
I saw my son running around earlier with this mood ring, which he bought for $5. These things were a fad in the late 1970s. They are body temperature monitors. This is a very basic form of what we call biofeedback. And not unlike what Ian Boyle was talking about (in his presentation on using Covey's 7 habits of highly effective teenagers in outdoor education programs), this is using technology to give biological feedback and then we can start to mentally control our relaxation. That's a simple version.
[Slide 67]
And that's a more technological version. Daryl from Army Adventure Training is experimenting with use of portable biofeedback devices and having people at the tops of ropes courses analysing their responses and learning to get greater control over what's going on in their body. Alright, so huge potential, I'd suggest, and its a conversation that I hope will be ongoing.
[Slide 68]
I'll just show you one slide of some slightly crazy stuff. Eventually e-paper will become less expensive than than real paper; we're running out of trees, but we will be to create e-paper...This is an electronic tent. It's basically a projection of a virtual world. You can put kids inside here, turn out the lights, and they use a torch (flashlight) as a cursor to interact and move through some kind of virtual space. And they're using the metaphor, if you like, of camping in a virtual world to achieve certain kinds of experiences. So, this is less about us bringing technology into the outdoors and this is a chance for us to insert outdoor education into virtual environments. Go onto Second Life or any of the other virtual worlds and its an outdoor education world which people are building and constructing. And maybe we can get together sometime and have a bit of a fly and a swim.
[Slide 70]
So, there are three things I wanted to leave you with:
Technology is moving towards being mobile, so get used to mobility, think mobility, and we're probably among those best equipped to educate people about learning and being mobile;
Think singularity, which is the idea that this is all coming together so fast that change is going to become more and more rapid. The more you unlearn now and get on board with future innovations, the faster we'll be able to move with it, and
Things are going virtual. So we have a place not just in outdoor education for technology, but we can bring outdoors, believe it or not, into the new kinds of worlds people are living in.
Thanks very much.
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