Reassembling the social

I must confess to having neglected the Dear Bruno for far too long. The book has been out a while but I had been too busy patrolling the diameter of my ever shrinking life (thanks Arti) to pay it sufficient attention. I am, for those who don't know of my interest in what is generally called actor-network theory, something of a devotee of Latour's scribblings. The man has a wonderful sense of humour, fun and a delightful capacity to puncture much of the pomposity that passes as social science (I did put on a string of garlic when I typed those last two words). "Be prepared to cast off agency, structure, psyche, time, and space along with along with every other philosophical and anthropological category, no matter how deeply rooted in common sense they may appear to be" pp. 24-25.

The Medici effect

Any book with the subtitle: what elephants and epidemics can teach us about innovation is at least worth a scan. Leaving aside the usual hype that goes with a lot of business publications (yeah, I read stuff from the dark side), this 200 page little jolter is worth a peek for folk who puzzle about the I word (I is fer innovation), although to be fair, Johansson writes more in terms of break throughs than innovation. One of the intriguing observations about break throughs was just how much hard work is involved. Often such things are popularly presented as "Ah ha" moments while sitting in or imbibing fluids. Johansson reports that Mike Oldfield (remember Tubular Bells?) did 2,300 recordings before he got what he wanted, and that Edison did 50,000 experiments to develop the storage fuel cell (p.107). Johansson's thesis is that the break through stuff comes at the intersection of two, often quite disparate fields and gives a good number of well told accounts of this phenomenon. I must confess that this book probably encouraged (or even justifies!) my weird tastes in reading and pursuing ideas that don't even remotely look educational. It also offers yet another telling crit. of what goes on in the name of curriculum in most formal educational systems as being quite daft. Put simply, if we play the Medici game with this book and curriculum, schools (at all levels) come out as places of incrementalism and conformity. As Johansson argues, incrementalism has its place but its not the place you want to be if you want to do anything that either stirs or feeds you passions. If nothing, the book is a great source of "off the wall" PD ideas for jaded educational consultants or tired university lecturers looking for a new riff for their stuff. To help, Johansson offers a kind of framework for the break through phenomenon and includes some interesting counter intuitive ideas. In my humble opinion, it would be such a neat way to think about curriculum, kids and turning schools into sites that did interesting, even useful knowledge production (yeah cheap plug for the KPS stuff.... ). The other thing that struck me was the importance for the intangible stuff around all of this, passion (and I love this gem from Arti's recent scribble: I have always felt that grappling without lust is unethical), energy, persistence, faith in self and ideas and all those other qualities the school system is so good at squashing in kids. There is a lot more to say, the book resonated with a very large number of memes that are important to me and I think might rank up there with the current top 100 of selfish memes busily looking for compliant hosts.

The rise and rise of the quants

It was in James Boyle's keynote at Beyond Broadcast 2006 that I guess the term behavioural economics was first raised for me. Apologies for y'all for which it is old hat. Then Christopher Lyden's Open Source podcast on Economics Reimagined helped the penny to drop, if indeed it has. Lyden's chat with a number of behavioural economists opened my eyes widely. David Leonhart's piece in the NY Times refers to them as intellectual imperialists. It is apt. What is behavioural economics? Quoting Lyden: Economics used to be about markets and predictions: tax rates, interest rates, fiscal policy, monetary policy. In short, about money. But with the advent of behavioral economics, economists began to realize that markets are simply aggregations of human choices, and that to understand these choices — imperfect, often irrational or counterintuitive — is to act as a psychologist. For this insight the economist Amost Tversky and the psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize together in 2002. If economics is not necessarily just about money, then, but about human behavior, it can be applied to any number of other fields. In the Times article, brand-new economist Emily Oster applied her talent to the field of AIDS research to solve a problem that epidemiologists couldn’t. Oster is one of many, a generation of economists looking for new fields to conquer. Put very bluntly, given buckets of data, not collected for a specific research purpose, i.e. an experiment, and given ever growing computer power, the opportunity to fashion interesting questions of social importance and to use existing data to examine them gives you, very crudely, behavioural economics. One of the folk in the Lyden conversation was interested in the question, why poor kids do poorly at schools. Now folk with interests in this area will be aware of the little war that has been raging in Australia about this. Very simply, them who say it is all about school effects and them who say that socioeconomic background is very important. Enter player three from left field with none of the history but access to a lot of data and the economic routines to explore/examine and tease out patterns. To me, this is an interesting shift for those folk who dabble in the broad church we call research in education. Anyone for economics 101?

Breakthrough ideas for education in 2007

The Harvard Business Review has published its 20 breakthrough ideas for 2007. The list makes for some interesting reading, at least for my quirky tastes but it got me wondering what would a similar list for education or perhaps schooling look like? Is there an educational imagination out there? Perhaps the notion of breakthrough and education are antithetical? As Heather-Jane Robertson wrote some time ago: "The only thing you can do quickly in education is damage" Heather-Jane Robertson (1998) No More Teachers. No More Books. The Commercialization of Canada's Schools, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto.