Ian M Rountree

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How Will Our Children Learn to Internet?

January 6, 2016 by Ian Leave a Comment

Internet Skills, like Keyboarding before them, are not part of our educational culture. Why?

When you boot up a video game for the first time – whether it’s a first person shooter, a single player RPG, or an MMORPG involving multiple players across the internet – there’s almost always a newb island. For the first little while, the game’s distressingly easy, you’re handed all kinds of information in easy to digest chunks, and the broad rules of the game are laid out in the form of demonstrations.

Move here. Get the thing. Press the button. Talk to her. Fight him. Complete the quest.

These places – it’s usually either a literal island, or a small encounter camp off to the side of the rest of the world – teach the newest of the new players, with no previous exposure to the genre or the game, the fundamentals of the world they’re about to inhabit. Experienced players, who have an inherited understanding of many elements of general game design and delivery, will pass through this experience very quickly. The less your exposure to the game, games in general, and the system being used, the longer it’ll take to get through it. But everyone can get through newb island with relative ease. It’s a literal boot camp for the experience; the place where your expectations get reset, you’re informed about the new world, and given your place in it.

Unlike designed experiences such as video games, there’s no “newb island” on the internet. Without it, how will we teach future users what good behavior is?

The User’s Side: Child-proofing the world vs World-proofing the child

We like to think of the early web was very different from what we see now. Small, insular groups controlled their bulletin boards and chat systems with a friendly face and clear no-nonsense rules.

There are a few examples of this. One of the earliest chats I joined in the 90s, Alamak, had a large (at the time) community – numbering a few hundred users concurrently connecting, almost any hour of the day. The admins, and particularly the owner, were very active. They had to be; sales of “Ops” permissions (the ability to make rooms, a stake in the policing of the site, and other perks) for a few dollars a month were how they made their living. They had a clear interest in growing a community, and making sure that community supported them.

Some of these Ops took it on themselves to do a New User Speech, when they identified someone very clearly logging in for the first time. Doing that identification was hard, but the speech was integral to how a number of people saw the chat; over the course of about fifteen minutes, in a locked room, the Op would go over the usual expectations, dump some really simple “Don’t be a jerk” style guidelines on the new user, and answer some questions.

Lots of people have a clear nostalgia for that kind of activity – the small groups, the new user speeches, and so on – but it’s difficult to remember that the environment didn’t stay that way for long. By the time you were a “new user” on two or three different chats, you get tired of learning new rules, and you start assuming that every community is basically the same. It’s hard to learn that “Don’t be a jerk” actually means very different things in different environments.

So things changed. New users stopped accepting help as offered. Problems got more common, and toxicity (a big deal today) began to make its way toward being the norm. System admins had to adjust; instead of educating the users, they had to secure their systems. Unfortunately, in the way of many things, the business side of system security is always more effective than the community side, and we can see where that goes today.

The bigger the net got, and the more people logged in daily, the more obvious it became that there was just no value – no way to scale tasks – in the realm of user education. So we abandoned it. There were simply too many new things, and too many people.

The Internet’s Side: Eternal September

There are way too many newbs. Like – mind-boggling numbers of people, entering the web for the first time, every day. It’s so hard to foster new people partly because there are so many – and partly because they come in with this sort of magical-thinking “I Am Om(net)scient” attitude that’s impossible to break down.

The term “Eternal September” isn’t used very often any more (because it’s over 20 years now that we’ve been within this never-ending month). But it’s an important idea to recognize.

The truth is that your experience with the web begins long before you actually put hands to keyboard, especially for younger people. Anyone under 18 now has never lived in a world without pervasive cellular phone use. Anyone under 10 won’t remember a time when tablets were a novelty, and not a de rigueur part of living in a connected economy. There are no effective barriers to entry, by design, to the world of connected commerce, communications, and digital business.

The outcome here is that, while there’s a lot of ambient knowledge about the internet and how to work it, it’s become largely instinct – unstudied, mysterious, and sourceless. Anyone who’s never gone out of their way to read an EULA, T&C document, or the ToS for their favorite app is an amateur. They’re appreciating something, even to a high level of potential use, without conscious education about the thing they’re appreciating.

They’re newbs. All of us are, still, after close to 25 years. This is especially true of social media, which has only been a big deal less than a decade, despite being the literal core of the internet’s popular foundation.

It’s clear we don’t yet know how to use social media in a positive light.

Resentment is a serious consequence of social networks, and one that they’re all bad at dealing with. On any social network there are far fewer people who are successful (usually in quasi-tiers) and then there’s everybody else looking in through the window at the party. For many this means they get to contact their heroes, but for some it’s a cause for jealousy. She’s so lucky. He’s such a shill. She knows the right people. He’s in their pocket. She sleeps around. He’s corrupt.

The above is from an article decompressing about GamerGate. This isn’t an article about GamerGate, but it’s impossible not to look at big internet phenomena without considering where it’s come from, what could have prevented it, and spending some time thinking about whether it was a good thing or a bad thing.

Of course there will always be instances where good comes from the internet’s basic transparency and free communication. Child predators being found out, joyful revolutions, shared moments of accomplishment. But those aren’t what I want to talk about. What worries me is how, in the future, will people know how to act in social circumstances, both online and offline? How will the differences between the tools at hand for those circumstances begin to cue us in and create opportunities to use reason and accurately develop opinions and emotions?

There’s no “decline of internet education” – it’s never existed properly in the first place.

I wish I had answers to offer, I really do – so if you came here for them, my apologies for disappointing you. Instead of trying to fix this problem (which I hope you’ll at least agree it is), I’d like to ask some questions that I really hope you’ll think about, whether you respond here in the comments or not.

  • Education or Training: How can we begin to build an education framework for the web, for the users to come after us? Should that framework have a face in the school system, or should parents keep that role?
  • Respecting the “Internet Permanent Record”: What kinds of social structures do we need to change, so that we stop punishing people decades later for their initial lack of informed action, such as just generally being young and stupid, or – more recently – a Canadian Liberal candidate being pushed out of her election race because of a poor taste tweet being dug up?
  • Mandates of Limitations: Should parents allow or encourage their kids to set up masks, or disposable avatar accounts, that they’ll use until their age of majority and then permanently abandon, for the sake of both of the above aims?
  • Should Business Step In: Fewer people every year actually learn non-social skills, such as keyboarding, despite average typing speed likely rising simply by way of self-training. Is there a business case for creating apps or systems intended to obsolete themselves by way of educating a user out of the need for them?

You can see where this is going, I hope. We must a lot more considerate not only of the structures we’re building (socially and personally) using the internet itself – and conscious, intentional education is a good way to start. But how does that work?

If you’ve got any questions about this – and I hope you do – I really hope you ask them, and keep asking them, until someone begins to work on answers in a meaningful and visible way.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: community, education, internet

Education and Social Media

May 19, 2011 by Ian 3 Comments

Graduation 2008 - Thirty30 Photography | FlickrThere’s a lot of discussion in professional social media circles – from publishers, to consultants, to agencies – about education. Clients need it, businesses need it, the public needs it – but so do the professionals working in these very complex, highly unorganized fields.

There’s now very little stringent education directly related to social networking as a business communication tool; while there are plenty of dyed in the wool professionals, the building of a knowledge base accessible through higher education seems slow in catching up. This isn’t even a theory versus practice problem – I think it’s an educational system problem.

How can we create education for new kinds of professionals, when education itself is failing?

This article from MENG Blend on May 17th tells a strong story about the state of education in general:

[…] even though the real ROI of college over time is well-documented, college completion rates are falling rapidly.  On average, four year public schools graduate only 37% of their students within four years.  The story at community colleges, which account for 46% of all undergraduates, is even worse:  just 25% of those at 2-year colleges graduate within three years of the time they start.

Damning, isn’t it? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: business, college, commentary, education, on-the-web, qualifications, rant-alert, reaction, social media, sociology, statistics, teaching, the-web, university

Academic Proof vs Social Proof

December 9, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

rank and file - photo by spacepleb
photo by spacepleb

How do you justify getting a degree in the age of social proof?

I’m not going to pretend to know the statistics nationally, but of the graduating class I came from, two people I’m aware of did the “right thing” and went to college to get degrees. One in sociology, one in psychology. Both of them are still working retail because there are no jobs requiring the degrees they have. It’s a little unsettling. But then, I wasn’t one of the two who got the degrees.

Instead, I worked. I intended to work until I found something worth going to school for – I still do, and the options are narrowing as my experience increases and my tastes settle – but now I’m wondering if it’s not possible to simply use the experience I have as a foothold to the career I’ll eventually retire from. It really makes me wonder how useful the post-secondary educational system is.

A part of this comes from my frustration with the education system itself. My father’s a teacher and has been for his entire adult life, nearly forty years I think. I’ve seen a number of the struggles he has with the system itself, the bureaucracy behind the scenes, and it makes me a little worried for the students who have to put up with the end results of this. I’m convinced it’s time for an overhaul, but I admit there’s little I could contribute to the doing of that.

Instead, I think it’s important that businesses begin to more adequately recognize when someone’s had better training in one direction or the other. In some instances, there is no substitute for a degree. Accountants, software designers – there are things you learn from concise, critical study that simply cannot be taught on the job. The degree, the certificate – these things still have merit, but their arena has to change, and employers need to recognize this.

Similarly, work experience provides a number of benefits degrees do not. Soft skills, prioritizing beyond the current assignment, forward thinking – the workplace has need of these abilities far more than the schools do, and for certain jobs – strategy, marketing, sales, perhaps even reaching as far as executive positions, given the right kinds of experience, it may be more effective to consider someone’s real life decisions and knowledge beyond the classroom will inevitably be more valuable.

I think one of the troubles with the acceptance of work experience and real-life CV-building experience might be the question of scale. There is a lot of standardization in schooling, if someone’s passed, they have proven their ability to keep up with accepted norms, and like any machine, business relies on standards and metrics. Life experience provides none of this clean-cut, rationed demarcation, which will likely prove the biggest frustration for recruiters trying to pull in the talented rather than the credentialed.

But at the end of the process, when the dust settles and the new workplace adjusts to new venues for education, the same will apply as does today: there is no clearcut benefit in pushing yourself or anyone else down an educational path they’ll waste, when they could be gaining other valuable learning simply by sitting up and living in a way that’s attentive to their needs and highest good.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: commentary, economics, education, sociology

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