Off Course-On Target

Future Sources of Innovation, Discovery and Design?

Perhaps it is just a case of seeing what I want to, but I seem to be finding more and more evidence to support my long-term prediction that for the next few decades at least, we will find that one of the greatest sources of innovation, new ideas, and inspiration will be the developing regions of the world. This is due to:

• The benefit of starting with a a clean slate and having no pre-existing infrastructures, customs, and behaviors to overcome.
• The driving force of necessity, which, as the saying goes, is "the mother of invention".
• The fact that creativity and innovative thinking lies within all 6.6 billion of us on the planet! 

Whatever the reasons though, I think we all have a great deal to learn and benefit from these often overlooked and unexpected sources.

Amazing Afrigadget (www.afrigadget.com)

The most recent example of one such fabulous source of innovation and invention is called Afrigadget. Thanks to Kelly Rupp, my champion at Autodesk, and Jeff Wilk at TenCue for the link.

I highly recommend you check out some of the fascinating postings on the AfriGadget site.  Some recent ones that I think you might find particularly worthwhile and interesting include:

• An interview with Simon Mwacharo, an entrepreneur whose small business CraftSkills, is based in Nairobi, Kenya. His business focuses on designing and building self-sustaining renewable energy projects in places that do not have access to the electric grid.
• "Powering African Schools with Toys", which is the story of a young inventor, 23-year-old Daniel Sheridan, and his vision of how children playing on a school yard teeter-totter (seesaw) could supply significant amounts of electrical energy for the area.
• A fascinating online overview with lots of great links to mobile phone solutions from another great resource, Jan Chipchase, who works for Nokia. As AfriGadget says, Jan “can best be described as a design and usability ethnographer. He explores the way mobile phones are used worldwide, and reports back to Nokia’s design team. He’s a fascinating person to talk to, and I thought I might highlight some of the stories he’s come up with while exploring in Africa.”
• The Village Phone project (by Grameen Bank) happening in Uganda. Jan has taken an excellent picture and annotated it with the important facts about this project in a rural Uganda.

  

  For more information about Jan, read this recent NY Times article, and of course, you can subscribe to his blog, Future Perfect.

Well, you get the idea, this site is just full of inspiring stories of powerful, yet often very simple, solutions coming out of Africa. I highly recommend the AfriGadget site as a worthwhile place to spend some time during your next web surfing session.

Benefiting without Eliminating?

As I noted at the start of this posting, one of the key reasons why developing regions are such a rich source of ideas and innovation is that they lack the prior use, habits, and infrastructure that are present in the more developed parts of the world. As you check out the postings on AfriGadget , consider one of the ongoing questions I ponder about all this:

How we can find a way to reap the benefits of these new discoveries, inventions, and innovations, have them spread to everyone and everywhere who could benefit, and yet not interfere or negatively change or inhibit these sources? 

The value is partly that people in these regions have not been affected by our thinking, models, assumptions, etc., and so what concerns me is how do we tap into these sources without affecting and changing them?

100 Days and it’s gone?

Perhaps we can't avoid affecting and changing them. Maybe we just want to be sure to maximize the benefits and innovation coming from these sources. This situation might benefit from a tactic I’ve long practiced with new employees, staff, or team members who join an organization that I am part of. I make it a point to meet with these new arrivals, not only to welcome them, but to tell them that for the next 100 days, they have a unique and special value to offer. Because they are new and not indoctrinated, they will see things differently than those who have been with the organization for some time. They will have different assumptions, and they will suggest different solutions to problems. My choice of 100 days is relatively random, but in the several decades I’ve been doing this, it seems to be the amount of time it takes before their newness is lost, and with it this unique and transitory value.

Of course, I am also quick to point out that this is hardly the end of their value (let’s hope!), but rather that this is the moment in time when they have a unique value to offer.  My specific recommendations are to have them ask those '”dumb questions” quite loudly and proudly, since they often serve as the spark of new thinking that leads to a better solution. I recommend that those who are around these new arrivals tap into this special value and ask the newcomers for their opinions, their perspectives, and ideas.

More commonly, new people tend to be quiet, study the situation, and assume that they won’t have as much to offer until they get “up to speed” with the norms of the organization and thinking of others, but that approach misses out on a great opportunity.

Learning from the OLPC example?

A more direct example, that I’m still pondering, is the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project and similar efforts like:

• The Classmate PC, a low-cost laptop by Intel
• Digital Textbook, a South Korean project that intends to distribute tablet notebooks to elementary school students, and put computers in the hands of the masses in many developing regions. 

More specifically, I wonder whether OLPC's decision to offer only the new equipment, but no teacher training, set curriculum, guidelines, and “how to” type of information, was a “bug” or a feature?  In part, this was apparently a budget issue—no funds for such materials and programs—but as you might guess, I actually think that purposefully NOT providing this type of training and guidance will produce much more innovative uses and outcomes than if all the “experts” had provided their guidance, opinions, directions, and methods.

Les extremes se touche?

However, I believe there are ways to bridge these two extremes of providing no assistance and providing too much.  There are LOTS of parallels here to what makes for great teaching and great learning, and I’ll explore some of these themes later. But for now, sparked by the brilliant light shining out of these often overlooked sources of creativity, I want to focus our collective attention on them to see what we can learn from them, and how we might all benefit more.

I am not suggesting that these developing regions are the only sources of inspiration, innovation, and ideas, nor am I suggesting that as they become more successful, they will lose this wellspring of inspiration. Certainly human history shows otherwise.  No, I’m pondering this idea with you because I’m anxious that we pay attention to the characteristics of innovation and invention. I'd like to see us work to find more ways to increase exponentially the volume and diversity of inventions, innovation, and discovery to match this world of exponential change and its accompanying challenges that we are now living in.

I think about these questions ALOT, and so I’d like to develop them a bit further in a future post.  For now, I leave you to enjoy and benefit (I hope) from checking out Afrigadget and stimulating you to both look for more and send along some of your favorite sources of innovation, creativity, and invention, wherever they may be.

And as always I’m VERY interested in your perspectives and views. Does this match examples that you are seeing?  What are some of the best sources for innovation, invention, and ideas that you are aware of?  Think about your last "Aha!" moment, streak of creativity, or invention.  What were the conditions and the environment as this was happening?  See any common elements in these?  Or do you see any common elements that we want to avoid—those that stifle or reduce creativity?  I'm anxious to hear your comments, and I’ll be back shortly with more of my thoughts on increasing the volume and diversity of creativity in the world.

Living and Learning at the Beginning of the Cognitive Age?

The New York Times recently published an article by op-ed columnist David Brooks"The Cognitive Age" that I think is very worthwhile reading. While I have no interest in the political aspect of this piece, I do have a great deal of interest in his main point about the economic connections to skills, and about the future being one of "cognitive talent", as well as Brooks' keen observations about the connections to learning.

I've often observed that for the past few thousand years, we as humans have focused on leveraging and augmenting our physical abilities—initially with basic tools such as the lever, the wheel, pulleys, screws, etc. and then on through machines, internal combustion engines, hydraulics, electricity and robots. All of these enable us to do things we either could physically not do ourselves or give us the ability to do them faster, easier, and at greater scale. While this will likely continue for some time, my sense is that we are at the point of diminishing returns (have been for some time), and that the future (and some aspects of the present) is about putting more and more focus on leveraging and augmenting our cognitive capabilities. The most obvious example is computer technology that enables us to do things with our brains that we either could not do or now can do much faster, easier, and at greater scale. 

Of course, much has been written about the "knowledge worker", but the most common picture painted seems to be based around an office or desk job model. I think the vast majority of jobs will be elsewhere: on site, in the field, mobile, and other environments. What's more, many jobs—the majority I believe—have been categorized as skilled labor, blue collar work, and other such labels.  It's thought that these jobs will either be eliminated or relegated to low skills and low wages.

As mentioned in my previous post "Human History is Additive Not Subtractive",  these prognostications of the experts seems very much at odds with what has actually been happening. Consider everyday needs of most people for services, such as car repairs, plumbing, health care, and manufacturing. In all of these cases, we find perhaps the most amount of change. They are becoming more and more cognitive-based, rather than manual-labor-based.  While you still get your hands dirty doing many of these, it is the brain of those doing these jobs which is doing more and more of the work. Brooks points out this same kind of disparity with globalization:

"But there’s a problem with the way the globalization paradigm has evolved. It doesn’t really explain most of what is happening in the world. Thanks to innovation, manufacturing productivity has doubled over two decades. Employers now require fewer but more highly skilled workers. Technological change affects China just as it does the America. William Overholt of the RAND Corporation has noted that between 1994 and 2004 the Chinese shed 25 million manufacturing jobs, 10 times more than the U.S."

The article goes on to make the key point for me:

"The central process driving this is not globalization. It’s the skills revolution. We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked."

I think it is also worth noting how well this matches up with and augments the astute observations that Daniel Pinks makes about the characteristics of the coming "Right Brain Economy" in his book Whole New Mind.  You can read more about this and how it ties into this same theme in my previous posting "Getting it Right".

In his blog "Connecting the Dots", Steve Borsch had a recent posting called "The Cognitive Age: Why Social Media Matters", which references Brooks' New York Times article and adds some interesting observations. He sees social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace as well as trends I've commented on previously, such as crowdsourcing (originally coined by Jeff Howe in this worthwhile article in 2006 Wired magazine), are tied into the emerging cognitive age Brooks outlines so well.

For me however, Brooks synthesizes this all down to make the most compelling point about the often misguided views of globalization with his note:

"The globalization paradigm leads people to see economic development as a form of foreign policy, as a grand competition between nations and civilizations. These abstractions, called 'the Chinese' or 'the Indians,' are doing this or that.

But the cognitive age paradigm emphasizes psychology, culture and pedagogy—the specific processes that foster learning. It emphasizes that different societies are being stressed in similar ways by increased demands on human capital. (emphasis added)

If you understand that you are living at the beginning of a cognitive age, you’re focusing on the real source of prosperity and understand that your anxiety is not being caused by a foreigner."

This certainly matches up with my experiences of traveling the world and working with so many people of diverse cultures, countries, industries, and jobs. Going back to my opening comments, you can see why I was drawn to Brooks' observations that we are living at the beginning of a cognitive age, and that indeed the future is all about leveraging and augmenting our cognitive abilities. 

As Brooks notes, this all aligns very well with the need for an increased focus on learning. In some future articles, I am going to look at the flip side of the learning coin: teaching as a skill set that we will all want and need be more competent with if we are to survive and thrive in a cognitive age. 

And what do YOU think?  Does this match up with what you are seeing within your own job and practice as well as within your community, your children and your experiences with the world at large? Send in your comments, critiques, counter views or additional examples of these trends.

Is the Sky Really Falling?

I recently read the article "AT&T: Internet to hit full capacity by 2010", which is pretty much summarized by the title and the opening line:

"U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T has claimed that, without investment, the Internet's current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010."

You can read more in the article, although they digress into some net neutrality issues.  However, this latest prediction reminds me of similar predictions throughout history that "the end is near", and I'd like to explore them further here.

The "Limits" of Physics

I can recall back in about the late 80's when experts were making similar predictions and warnings that we had reached the upper limit of how fast data could be transferred through phone lines via modems—9600 baud! These same experts claimed that we'd reached the limits of physics and it was just a "fact" that we needed to accept. 

As we can now see (with the benefit of hindsight, of course) that entirely new materials and techniques, such as optical fibre, compression algorithms and other breakthroughs, were developed to get around some of the limits that existed for wire-based data transfer. Wikipedia has a good history of modems, bandwidth, and the inventions along the way.

It's interesting to note that these types of warnings and stories are usually accompanied by quotes from the experts and other "facts", which prove that they are "true" and inevitable.  It reminds me of this quote from a  great scene in the movie Men in Black:

"Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow."

BTW, you can find this quote and just about any other kind of movie-related trivia from the handy Internet Movie Database.

The "Limits" of Technology

Going much further back, dire warnings in the late 1800's said that we needed to seriously curtail the expanding use of horses, cows, and beasts of burden or else the planet would soon be covered in several feet of manure!  The experts had "done the math" and this was an inevitable and irrefutable prediction. But ooops! We didn't allow for the invention of the internal combustion engine, electrical power, and other energy sources that significantly reduced our reliance on animal-based power. Of course, we also didn't anticipate the whole new series of problems and challenges of global warming that many might argue make the manure problem look like a good one!

I sometimes have the sense that some of the more dire predictions about global warming and other imminent disasters are similarly exaggerated and misdirected. Please do NOT misconstrue my comments here to mean that we have nothing to worry about or to work on. I want to champion quite the opposite reaction!  To be sure, all of us have much to be concerned about. We need to be more diligent and work harder than ever to ensure the sustainability of ourselves and our environment so that we can ensure an ever brighter future for us all. 

The "Limits" of Human Capacity, Foresight, and Imagination

History has shown that we are capable of doing some VERY stupid things and can exhibit great ignorance and lack of foresight.  However, as illustrated by my prior examples, history also shows that we need to take into account our even greater human capacity for invention, discovery, creativity, innovation, and design.

I'm sure that many of you may have similar Chicken Little "the sky is falling" * stories, and I'd be most appreciative if you'd post these to your blogs or send comments here to help all of us learn from these historical examples.

I'm was in Mexico recently and I'm told that the story of Chicken Little (and the saying "the sky is falling") are well known there and translates to El Cielo Se Esta Cayendo. For those not familiar with this reference the previous link will give you the background.

In the end, I have huge faith in our collective powers for invention, creativity,  innovation and designing solutions. What we need to watch out for is the flip side of this where we become smug, arrogant, or cynical based on what we "know for sure" today.  I hope that examples such as this latest prediction about the limits of Internet capacity will only serve to help us balance these forces and inspire and motivate us all to work towards new ways to improve our lives and those of all others. 

Rather than imagine what we'll know for sure tomorrow, imagine if ................ Not only is the sky NOT falling, it is the limit of what is possible.

Human History is additive NOT subtractive!

When something big, new, and innovative comes along, most of the affected domain's “experts” and pundits typically decry the loss of the "good old ways" and lament how they are going to surely be eliminated by the new.  A common response, but they are WRONG!

However, when we look at the historical record, we rarely see the elimination of old practices and experiences. Instead, while the old is most often dramatically changed in terms of its role and its percentage of use, the new game in town usually augments the original purpose and value proposition of the old.

Let’s use radio as an example. When radio first came along, the experts and pundits predicted it would eliminate newspapers. When TV came along, they claimed TV was going to eliminate radio.  After all, who would want a talking box when we could have talking pictures?  But look at where we are in 2008!  In fact, no new media in history has ever eliminated the older media type that preceded it! 

Radio is not only a viable media, but one that is going through a resurgence and increase in effectiveness, reach and use.  The way we use radio, and the role it plays in our lives, HAS changed dramatically of course. For example, when was the last time you remember sitting down with your family to listen to an evening radio show. Yet, in the early days of radio, this happened all the time!

However, radio has not diminished at all in its value and use—it's just changed in how, when, and where we use it.  With the advent of satellite radio, HD radio, Web-based radio, podcasts, etc., we are in fact seeing radio go through its own exponential change and growth.  So the “death” of radio, as with most “old things” was greatly exaggerated, to say the least.

We've witnessed the same trend countless times with other technologies, such as predictions that airplanes were going to eliminate automobiles and trains, how online or eLearning was going to eliminate teachers and classrooms, how eBusiness was going to eliminate stores and shopping...and the list goes on. I'm sure you can name other (and better) examples of this same trend.  I'd like to hear about them.

Living in a World of Exponential Change

Not only has the new not eliminated the old, but it has caused exponential change and growth. This is another example of why I believe we are Living in a World of Exponential Change.  In my previous post "The Future is about Winning NOT Losing!", I used the example of the changes and future of film and video as an example and how recent phenomena, such as YouTube, Flickr and Pangea Day, bear witness to exponential change.

Not only is there exponential growth in the volume of video-based content, but even more importantly is the explosion of growth taking place on the production side—people creating and publishing video content in greater volume and diversity. This increase on the production side is being met by equal or even greater growth on the consumer side with the increased number and diversity of those who are watching, interacting, being inspired ,and moved to taking action by film and videos. Taken together we are truly talking about exponential growth! 

But growth, in and of itself, is not enough. I’m big on ensuring that we maintain a focus on the value proposition and underlying purpose of the things we do (see my postings and podcasts on Perfecting the Irrelevant and Flapping for more details on my views about how we confuse value proposition with activities for example).  How do each of these examples fulfill (or not!) the value propositions of improving the ways we as humans can communicate, express ourselves, see other points of view, and provide outlets for our creativity and innovation?  From where I sit, we now have more and more ways to deliver on these value propositions and we ARE delivering! What do you think?

Sailing Into Uncharted Waters

There are a number of changes coming up for both myself and Off Course - On Target (OCOT), so this posting will be a bit different to provide you with a quick overview of what's coming your way.

Ship Shape

Through to the incredible support of my company, Autodesk Inc., and my boss (thanks Kelly!), I'm going to be off work through January 25th, 2008, and busy using up my large collection of years of accumulated vacation time. I'll be using this time to finish getting my sailboat, the good ship Learnativity, all ship shape and ready for some upcoming extended world cruising.  I'll start posting more details for you on my new adventures at sea in the new year and Elliott Masie and I are going to join forces in a larger context as he too sets out to live, learn, and explore this great planet of ours. We've dubbed our collective effort as the "Grand Learning Expedition" and will have a variety of ways for you to participate and learn along with us in the new year.

With all my time and attention devoted to this and all my online time spent learning more about all things nautical, including finding the best sources and prices for the seeming unending supply of equipment a seaworthy sailboat requires, my one regret is that I won't have any time to devote to Off Course - On Target until I return to work at the end of January. BUT, never fear, there are some very interesting alternatives and additions for you, and we'll continue to ensure that OCOT remains "serendipity central" and lives up to being the place "where unexpected paths lead to great discoveries."

New Perspectives, New IQ Points?

I've always been intrigued by and have often quoted Alan Kay's estimation that:

"A new perspective is worth 80 IQ points"

and this quote came to mind as I was pondering what to do with OCOT while I'm out. Of course, one perfectly fine option is to simply hang up a "Gone Sailing" sign and give you a rest and a chance to spend more time on the many other sites I'm sure you are trying to stay up with.

But I thought of some other options as well.  For example, I've long been interested in having more diversity of content within the blog format, and I think we need to understand more about the boundaries of that format before we switch to another one, such as a wiki or newsletters or shared documents or e-mail threads. I've also been planning doing some interviews, and featuring new perspectives from others to add to my own. Now I have the luxury of expanding upon this. In keeping with our theme of experiential learning being such a great teacher, I've picked out a small group of people I know who come from extremely varied backgrounds, professions, locations, and interests, and of course, perspectives. I've asked them to consider sharing their thoughts and ideas with you here on OCOT in text, audio, or video. I've left it completely open to each individual to decide everything from topics to format to frequency, and have simply asked that they choose topics they have a passion for and ones they think would be of interest to you. I'm excited by the prospect of having OCOT be a forum for the range of ideas and points of view this eclectic group will undoubtedly come up with, and am very confident you'll really enjoy it immensely.

I'm also interested to see how this works for the invited guests.  I've purposely picked a very broad range of individuals, and some have their own blogs, so this is in part an experiment to see if it makes sense for them to use OCOT as an additional outlet or to speak through their own blogs and use OCOT for connections I might make, providing comments, etc. Other invitees don't have a blog, but may be considering starting one, so this is a chance for them to experiment. For others  who don't have the time or desire to commit to a regular flow of content that a blog requires, this opportunity provides an outlet for them whenever they would like to use it. You can come up with many other options I'm sure, and again, this will be a chance to experiment and discover some of these combinations, and learn more about the variety of presentation that works within blogs and what needs to go beyond these boundaries.

We'll keep this wide open and informal, so just how many of them can find the time to contribute and just how often they choose to do so remains to be seen. I see this in keeping with our focus on experimentation and discovery, rather than being very directly tied to my being out for awhile, and my hope is that we find this works out very well and we can continue to play with this additional type of content on OCOT long after I return. My goal is to bring you interesting people and perspectives, along with the extra IQ points you can gain from visiting OCOT! So be watching this space over the next few weeks for some additional new posts by these individuals, and let us know via your comments, how it works for you, your reactions to both this new type of content, as well as the topics themselves.

My thanks in advance to those guests who took me up on this offer, and have fun with the experiment.

OCOT 2.0?  Looking for a Few Brave Beta Testers

Finally for today, I'd like to talk about one last but very exciting bit of new experimental and experiential learning we are going to be starting. We're adding entirely new capabilities to OCOT. As per my previous comments about exploring the boundaries of blogs, I'm also anxious to learn "beyond the blog" and to join forces with you to try out new forms, formats, and features that continue to improve and grow our mutual communication, collaboration, and value. For example, I'd like to learn more about when a wiki type of format is more appropriate for  soliciting more direct and detailed input from the rest of you. I'd like to have us learn more about when the voice of a single author makes sense, and when the collective voice of a group of people creating, editing, and evolving content, conversations, and knowledge make more sense. I'd like to see how well we can blur the boundaries and barriers that formats sometimes put in our way. Is there a more transparent and blended way to have content be "just right" for us and matched to our constantly varying moods, context, and conditions?  As we have more and more options and ways to communicate, we will need to become better at choosing the right tool for the task at hand. 

To do all this, I've been working with a talented developer, Tony Freixas, to create a test site with a whole new look and feel and a mashup of many different features and capabilities that might make sense for the next iteration of OCOT.  At this point, we have the first prototype up and running as a temporary test site, and we're looking for a few brave and curious volunteers to take this prototype for a test run and get their feedback on the experience to help guide future directions and capabilities to bring to all of you out there in OCOT land.

If you have a few hours in the next 2 months and would be willing to try out this new OCOT experience and provide us with your reactions, experiences, and suggestions, please send a short e-mail to Tony and he will send you instructions on how to participate and contribute. My thanks in advance to those volunteers. We'll be back to the rest of you with results in the New Year.

Bon Voyage!

As we all begin to wrap up yet another year that seems to have flown by, and ramp up for the start of 2008, I want to thank each and every one of you for reading, listening, and watching OCOT. I take it as a great honor that you would choose to spend the most valuable currency there is—your time and attention—and I hope you continue to find it to be a good use of both (why else would you come?). I hope that OCOT continues to take you down some very unexpected pathways, which lead to even more unexpected and even greater discoveries. I'm about to head out on some grand new adventures, journeys, and discoveries of my own, and look forward to sharing and learning more with all of you next year. 

Thanks for helping to make 2007 such a truly great year, and here's to making 2008 even better!

w
a
yne
=====

Wayne Hodgins
Strategic Futurist
Autodesk Inc.
+1-707-803-3579

Moving aLOM

If you are a regular visitor here at Off Course - On Target, (OCOT) you know that metadata—characteristics that describe anything and everything—has been a major part of my life and a major focus for many years. If you'd like the full story of my initial recognition of metadata and its value, you can listen to or read my previous posting "Wayne's Wine Epiphany".

What is metadata?

Sometimes metadata is more commonly called "tags", such as the information you provide for things like photos that you upload or blog entries you create and search for. At a simple and personal level, metadata would include your name, phone number, address, family members, your likes and dislikes, skills, knowledge, etc. These are all of the literally millions of characteristics that describe, and to some extent, define you and the world around you.

Among many other benefits and uses, metadata is critical for improved "findabilty" and discovery, as opposed to searching. It is largely via metadata that we are able to find the "right"  people, places, and things (with "right" referring to our individual situations, context, and needs). This also works in reverse by enabling other people, places and things to find us, where appropriate and wanted.

What's been my involvement?

One of my more significant commitments to metadata started back in 1997 with the creation of the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee or LTSC, and within this committee, the formation of the Learning Object Metadata Working Group or LOM. LTSC is a group of volunteers who are devoted to development and implementation of standards for interoperability for use within the worlds of Learning, Education and Training (LET). LOM is a set of standards focused on the metadata required for more effective learning and performance.

I've had the honor of being the Chair of the LOM Working Group for over ten years, and this has afforded me the privilege of working with some of the most dedicated people I know. They have worked tirelessly, and often thanklessly, to produce several fully completed standards for metadata such as the IEEE 1484.12.1 standard for the LOM data model and the IEEE 1484.12.3 standard for the XML binding of LOM to enable the exchange of LOM instances (metadata records).

You may not understand or even be interested in these specifics, which is as it should be for most standards. How much do any of us care or know about such things as TCP/IP, HTTP, or the other standards which make the Internet possible? In a similar way, standards for metadata—of which LOM is but one—are part of what has enabled the improvement  of the creation and interoperability of metadata (though much is still needed).

To our surprise, LOM standards have been implemented broadly, both within the context of learning, education, and training, as well as within an eclectic and extensive list of other domains, including art, history, archives, and human relations. I know of no way to count the amount of such LOM-based metadata nor the number of implementations of LOM, but the numbers are globally dispersed and easily numbered in the millions and beyond.

What's Next?

Now it's time for both LOM and I to move on into our respective next stages and hence the title of this posting. As of January 1, 2008, I will be stepping down as Chair for the IEEE LOM Working Group, and I'm delighted to publicly congratulate Erik Duval for being appointed as the new Chair of LOM. I am about to make some significant changes in my roles and responsibilities, both personally and professionally (more on this in a future posting), and it is time for LOM and metadata overall to evolve to best fit the "Brave New World" we now live in. In spite of his relatively young age, Erik Duval has been one of the longest serving individual experts focused on metadata for learning, education, and training. Based on his work in metadata since the early 1990's, such as the creation of the ARIADNE project which is a large European based consortium focused on knowledge sharing and reuse, Erik was instrumental in the creation of the IEEE LOM WG from its very beginning.  Officially, Erik has served all this time as the Technical Editor of LOM and, along with Tom Wason, they created the initial kernel that grew into the full LOM standard. I could not be happier or more optimistic about the future of LOM and of the advancement of metadata than I am with turning over the leadership to such a capable individual and someone who has become one of my closest professional colleagues.

While those of us who first began to put this focus on metadata knew it was important for the future, I'm not sure that any of us could have imagined the degree to which this would be true or the scale of use and generation of metadata. To meet these new needs and scale will require both the evolution of metadata as we know it, as well as a complete rethinking. Some new leadership and energy will be of great assistance in making this happen. As such, the other main purpose for this posting is to bring your attention to some important and recent developments in the area of metadata; the first is a series of new activities within and related to the current LOM standards, and the second is addressing the longer term future of metadata developments—it's worth keeping your eyes on.

Where is LOM heading?

Here's a short overview of the new activities related to LOM:

• Reaffirmation of the 1484.12.1 LOM standard, which is largely an administrative action required by IEEE for all active standards every five years.  As the name applies this is merely a check that an existing standard is still in active use and will continue to be so. As the millions implementing LOM can attest, this is very much the case.
• Corrigenda for the 1484.12.1 LOM standard, which will provide a list of all the minor (but important) technical corrections and edits to the original LOM standard, which have been discovered by those previously implementing LOM.
• Two New Parts for LOM:  After several years of work led by Mikael Nillson, the Joint DCMI (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative) / IEEE LTSC Taskforce has just initiated work on two new IEEE standards.  The previous link will provide you with access to all details of the work to date, previous meeting notes, and ways to contribute to these efforts.  As briefly and coherently as I can put it, these two standards are for:
  • Developing a Recommended Practice for Expressing IEEE Learning Object Metadata Instances Using the Dublin Core Abstract Model to meet the growing demand for interoperable definitions of Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) metadata terms and IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) data elements, which allow these to be used together in metadata instances.
  • Developing a Standard for Resource Description Framework (RDF) Vocabulary for IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) Data Elements. In simpler terms, this standard will  address the increasing demand for definitions of IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) data element semantics, which allow the expression of IEEE LOM instances in applications using Semantic Web technologies such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF). For some data elements, this expression can be achieved using existing, stable RDF vocabularies. The purpose of this standard is to define the semantics of data elements not covered by such vocabularies. This standard forms an important basis for making IEEE LOM useful in this larger metadata context.
• LOM next:  Over the last year or so, we've discussed how we want to make LOM evolve over the longer term. The time has come to consolidate that discussion, gather requirements, and start thinking about how to meet those. Erik and the LOM Working Group have begun a series of open, regular, synchronous discussions in order to first bring everybody up-to-date on these activities, develop a plan of action, and then to begin the necessary new work.
  • These meetings are open to ALL and will be virtual meetings accessible both online and via phone.
  • If you are interested in participating, please either contact Erik Duval directly via e-mail (Erik.Duval@cs.kuleuven.ac.be ) or subscribe to the LOM mail list on the LOM web site. 
  • While those with metadata expertise would be especially welcome, it is equally valuable to get input from a diverse range of others who want to use and benefit from significant improvements in metadata for LET in the future. Please consider adding your input to this important effort.

Trends in Metadata

Metadata is often unnecessarily limited by the popular "data about data" description, but it is so much more than this.  Metadata is perhaps most often applied to "nouns", and my simple minded recollection of the definition of a noun is a person, place, or thing. To date, most of the focus has been on metadata for content (which has been very beneficial and for which much more work is still needed), but the future will include much more attention on the other "nouns"—people, places and things. This post would go on for much too long were I to do justice to any one of these or countless other areas that would benefit enormously from improvements in their related metadata aspects, so I will only list a few areas and provide you with a glimpse of the future potential within. Watch for future developments in metadata for some of the following:

Metadata about PEOPLE

This kind of metadata, especially pertains to our skills, knowledge, abilities, experience, attitudes and competencies.

In one small example, the IEEE LTSC Working Group 20 recently completed a standard for "Reusable Competency Definitions" or RCD, and this Working Group is now looking at other aspects of competencies that would benefit from standards. 

Metadata about PLACES

For example, we are seeing the recent surge of metadata in the use of maps, and GPS metadata is being added to things like Google Earth", which will enable us to answer questions such as:

• "Where are you now?"
• "Where was this photo taken?" 
• "What does this location look like?" 
• "What happened here in 1782?"

Imagine the possibilities as more locations become "smart" with metadata about them and related to them. Photos and video might show what they look like now and in the past. Metadata will be increasingly available for every building, its contents, furniture, features, hazardous materials, fire extinguisher and escape information to name but a very few metadata elements.

Metadata about THINGS

Metadata about things provides the characteristics of all the physical objects in the world, such as machines, parts, equipment, food, furniture, music...well you get the idea. 

Add to this all the non-physical things, such as objects created in virtual worlds. Now imagine if all these "things" were connected and could start to share this information and "talk" to each other.

You are already familiar with bar codes, which contain the metadata for everyday things, as well as the more recent use of RFID tags to electronically capture and broadcast all of this metadata. This is sometimes referred to as "the Internet of things". See the 2005 executive summary of the Internet of Things for one perspective and more detail on this concept.

For example, imagine if all the ingredients in your kitchen made all their metadata available, such as how full or empty they are, when they are about to expire, which combinations might let you make a dinner along the lines of what you desire, and without a trip to the store.  It's all just metadata!

To learn more:

• Wikipedia provides this brief overview on the related topic of object hyperlinking.
• This short BBC article from 2005 discusses how the United Nations was predicting such a "network of everyday objects".

AUTOMATED metadata generation (AMG)

Once you start to consider the massive amount of metadata that is required and possible for each and every person, place, and thing, you quickly "do the math" and realize the overwhelming problem of "How will all this metadata ever be created?" Our initial tendency has been to assume that metadata is all human generated—literally "typed in" to forms. If this were true, there would not be much of a future for metadata, since there is most likely more metadata than data and certainly more metadata than there are people, places, or things! 

While human generated metadata, especially the more "subjective" metadata elements, will always play an ever more critical role in the future, it will become the minority of the overall volume of metadata. Increasingly, metadata will be generated automatically.

To learn more:

• See this article on AMG which comes from one of the many groups that Professor Erik Duval leads at KU Leuven, a prestigious Belgian university.

USER GENERATED metadata

Did you know that literally all the metadata for all the CD's and music you see displayed on your MP3 players, iPods and computers, artist name, title, album name, etc. is generated by other listeners, such as yourself and NOT by the record companies or publishers? What if we could tap into the metadata that each one of us (eventually all 6.6 billion of us) are probably generating every day, such as the tags and captions we add to photos, the PowerPoint slides we create, and search terms we use, to name but a few?  Such is the power of user generated metadata and there will be much work in the future to increase the generation of, capturing, and putting to effective use the flood of metadata that will result.

ATTENTION metadata

Attention metadata is a common term for all the metadata that captures your likes and dislikes, and which can help you find everything from great music to listen to, people to get together with, TV shows and video to watch, etc. We can think of it as the things we "pay attention to"...hence the name.

Attention metadata is what recommender systems are based on. One such effort to address some of the needs for better capturing and interoperability of this type of metadata is that of the attention.xml group. You can listen to this 2004 podcast with some of the originators of attention.xml and this podcast and blog from Alex Barnett discussing attention related topics.

Why would you need this? Consider shopping sites that track your buying patterns, and your opinions and preferences after such purchases, and use these to help you find additional items that you may want (if you let them). How does the system know if you are buying the item for yourself or as a gift for someone special? Currently they do not, and therefore the recommendations become less relevant and you likely stop using them. However as these issues begin to be addressed, there will be more and more "decision support" to help us deal with the growing problem of an economy of abundance and too much choice for those of us privileged enough to live in such situations.

Metadata UNIQUE and SPECIFIC to LET

While some of the metadata standards, such as LOM, are intended to cover the application to LET, most of the initial work to date has been much more general and largely applied to content. There is an enormous need for much greater focus on metadata that is unique and specific to learning, education, and training. This would include metadata to assist with evaluation and assessment—matching learning styles with teaching styles, and helping each of us as unique individuals to have LET options that are just right for us at just the right time and in just the right way.

And trust me, this is but a minor scratch on the vast surface of but one slice of metadata and its very exciting future! 

So LOM, for now....

I certainly have mixed emotions about reducing my direct involvement in LOM and the development of some of these future metadata related topics. However, I can't imagine leaving LOM in better hands than those of Erik Duval and the many, many other dedicated individuals, old and new, who have such dedication and passion for improving learning, education, training, and performance and indeed the world in general, through better use and generation of metadata.

Whether or not you consider taking an active role in this future development of LOM and metadata standards and specifications, I certainly encourage you to pay more attention to the role of metadata and how it serves as a fundamental principle in the future of your life, both personal and professional, and the future of the world around us.

Wayne

EOL and the power of MC2: Mass Contribution x Mass Customization

Some of my previous postings have focused on the need to dramatically increase the scale of our discovery of the unknown. I'm finding more examples all of the time that show a trend towards more mass participation and mass contribution by connecting everything and everyone together. The project we recently covered called the "Encyclopedia of Life" (EOL) is one such example.

But let's take a step back and try synthesizing this into something that give us direct and broader benefits.

As I noted my previous postings "New Perspectives: Looking Down and Under" and Third Wave, about the Open Ocean Initiative (OOI), EOL is not just another amazingly large scientific study with the resultant report and data. Instead, EOL is yet another great example of the pattern towards mass customization and mass contribution.

EOL will be using a mashup model by assembling lots of technology and data from many different sources into a single experience. This effort is not as flexible as I would like in terms of providing multiple experiences, and is much less "open" from a contribution standpoint than I would ultimately like, but it is still a huge step towards mass contribution compared to the historically typical static and closed research.

For the project, agents will collect all the information about a particular species from the Web and assemble it into a draft species page.Scientists will then review, edit, and authenticate the information. A species expert will sign each page.

This is a proven model, but is also one that will be challenged to meet their objective of exponentially increasing the volume and speed of cataloguing the worlds known species of life and even more so in discovering the unknown 90%.

But let's keep in mind that the context here is scientific data, and thus it lends itself much more to such scrutiny, accuracy, and expertise. Yet I can see that by truly opening this up to mass contribution by the global scientific community and providing a way to converge, connect and vet it all, then it is quite possible (I'd estimate probable) that this will create a tipping point and set off the chain reaction or network effect that can achieve the audacious goal of EOL, and do so in a fraction of the time.

However, the most exciting characteristic to me is the degree to which EOL is shining example of the trend towards mass personalization and the Snowflake Effect.  For example, when you're using EOL you can set up your level of expertise in a given context, you can post questions, photos and your own discoveries. After all, many of the currently known species have been discovered accidentally and by amateurs—a.k.a you and me!  Imagine the impact of adding millions or billions more "amateur explorers" to this process?!

Fail Forward Faster!!

There is, of course, the big question of how to do all this with a strong degree of accuracy and authenticity. Similar to the challenge that something like Wikipedia faces, when anyone can post or edit anything, how do we know if we can trust the information? This is a very important and major issue for all of us to pay attention to and to participate in evolving some effective solutions. While Wikipedia continues to have its share of growing pains, why would we expect anything less of disruptive innovations? Some of Wikipedia's recent decisions are of concern to me regarding some of the restrictions they are placing on postings and editing;however I empathize with the difficult decisions they wrestle with and applaud the fact that they are making decisions, good and bad,and thus learning from their experiences, so the can put ever forward. 

Let's be sure to keep in mind that this is all a grand experiment and a learning process, and we should expect "failures" and relish the learning that they provide. From my perspective there is no question that we are much better off with this trend towards a much more transparent process, mass contribution etc. as exemplified by the likes of Wikipedia, and I welcome the rapid growth of this pattern with such additional efforts as the Open Ocean Initiative and the Encyclopedia of Life. Check them out and see what you think.

w
a
yne
=====

Memories of Philip Dodds: We've Lost a Great Navigator, but Not Our Way

It was a sad weekend for me and many others as we received the news on Saturday morning that Phil Dodds had slipped away peacefully after a long and valiant battle with cancer.

It has taken me awhile to be able to write this, but I join the many others who share in the wide range of emotions and memories invoked by thinking of Phil. 

Referencing one of Phil's many claims to fame when he starred as a young man in the classic movie "Close Encounters of a Third Kind",  (center person in the screenshot from the movie), Elliott Masie wrote this typically thoughtful message:

"What are we saying to each other?"

That was a single line, spoken by the sound engineer at the end of Close Encounters of a Third Kind, as he played chords and a friendly alien spaceship played music back.

The role was played by a young sound engineer who was spotted by Steven Spielberg and given the on-screen role as the interface between these two worlds. That man, Philip Dodds, was still young and inventive, when he passed away this Saturday morning.

Philip Dodds was the Chief Architect of SCORM and the force behind sharable and reusable content. He was deeply involved in the evolution of interactive multimedia and expanding the possibilities for learning via technology.

If you use a Learning Management System, author an interactive learning module, or talk about the future of Web 2.0, take a moment to thank a man who you probably never met. Philip's work was KEY and CRITICAL to the exciting world of learning, knowledge management, and collaboration that we take for granted.

Philip's dreams were to create a global set of standards and specifications that would allow content to be searchable, reusable, and expandable.

Philip, we thank you for all that you have done, and we'll keep asking that question: "What are we saying to each other?"

With respect and sadness,

Elliott Masie

For those of you who knew Phil well and are feeling a bit melancholy, as Tom King put it, you may want to head over to this thread that Tom started on Phil on the AICC blog. Phil may be most publicly remembered as "the father of SCORM" or Shareable Content Object Reference Model but there is so much more that Phil accomplished, and Tom kindly provided links to some of many other ways that Phil left his imprint on this world. As Tom reflected in a recent e-mail, "perhaps reading the comments will be a bit uplifting for you too." Please add your memories of Phil to the thread as well, and here are a few of mine:

My Memories of Phil Dodds:

I remember all those late night and early morning meetings working on what Phil usually referred to as "the devil is in the details" and his quips about "working code trumps all theories". 

While many of these meetings were held in conjunction with a standards meeting of IEEE or AICC or ADL or ISO meetings in yet another city in yet another meeting room, we also had many of these meetings out at Phil and Sue's wonderful and historical Weems family farm house in Annapolis, Maryland.

I dug up this photo as it is so very fitting of Phil and these memories.  Not only does this show Phil (on the left), beaming as always, in front of a flip chart full of notes after one of these many meetings at the farm, but this is the photo that Phil chose to send me a few months ago when we were dealing with the loss of another great contributor, Claude Ostyn who is in the middle of this picture, along with Tyde Richards on the right.

Sue and Phil always encouraged us to stay over for the night, and though part of Phil's ulterior motive was to get more work done, it was also to have more time in the evenings to play music, enjoy a good Scotch, and discuss some of the wonderful history of the original Weems house and family. 

If the name Weems is not familiar to you, in the days before there was Global Positioning Systems or GPS, it was Phil's grandfather and namesake, Captain Philip Van Horn Weems, the "Grand Old Man of Navigation" who modernized celestial navigation with the ingenious "Weems System of Navigation" and who invented such things as the Second Setting Watch.

I fondly recall Phil recounting some of the of the Weems family history and tales of his grandfather as we were taking a break from SCORM work and sitting in the study in the farmhouse which would more accurately be described as a wing of the Smithsonian navigation museum. Phil told of how Charles Lindbergh studied with Weems before attempting his 1928 transatlantic flight, and Admiral Byrd, a classmate of Weems at the Naval Academy, came to Weems for instruction before setting out for the North Pole.

Whether he knew it or not, Phil admirably carried on this family tradition by acting in so many ways as the "grand old navigator" himself for so many of us.  It was like a déjà vu experience for me to read in the following tribute to Captain Philip Weems:

Captain Philip Van Horn Weems, the "Grand Old Man of Navigation," is renowned as a pioneer in the field. He modernized navigation by simplifying techniques; invented and adapted new, time saving methods; and most significantly, shared this knowledge through the tireless teaching of his discoveries and insights. His pupils were naval officers and adventurers. His advancements, which began during his career as a naval officer, now stretch across all types of navigation - from maritime to aeronautic, from underwater to outer space.

Just as with his grandfather before him, Phil too was a pioneer, inventor, engineer, and teacher who worked tirelessly to convert his visions to explicit form and share them with all of us so passionately.  Phil has left us with a plethora of navigational instruments, tables and maps in the form of things like SCORM documents and tools, ADL-R and so much more to help chart our way forward in the often confusing seas of learning, education, and training.

On Saturday, we lost our "grand navigator" but Phil Dodds has left us well equipped to find our own way now.

Thanks for the memories and the navigational aids Phil!

w
a
yne
=====

Technorati tags: Phil Dodds, Captain Philip Van Horn Weems, ADL, SCORM, memory, ADL-R, Weems, navigation

del.icio.us tags: Phil Dodds, Captain Philip Van Horn Weems, ADL, SCORM, memory, ADL-R, Weems, navigation

New Perspectives: The Third Wave?

In my recent posts on New Perspectives: Looking Up! and Looking Down and Under, I reviewed a series of new initiatives and technologies ranging from several significant efforts to explore and document the great unknown of earth's oceans to the new capabilities of Goggle "Sky" and  the hidden flight simulator in Google Earth. I chose these examples, in part, to provide you with some new perspectives and because I agree with Allan Kay that:

"a new point of view is worth 80 IQ points."

I thought each of these provided some new perspectives and are very much worth your attention in and of themselves.

However, my primary purpose and point was that I think these examples offer evidence of powerful new meta patterns and trends—"meta' in the sense that I believe that they are operating at a very profound and pervasive level and are affecting more than we may realize.

What is fascinating to me about the marine projects, for example, is that they are being designed not only to provide a huge increase in the quantity and quality of marine data, but the measurement tools and technology they will use is being made accessible to everyone and available on a continuous basis. This is a major shift in approach that believe is a characteristic of the times we are living in.

In spite of all the hype that surrounds buzz words such as Web 2.0, what I see here is a much larger and more profound pattern towards openness and bi-directional functionality. To me, these examples represent the realization of what Alvin Toffler and his wife, Heidi. so presciently described as a "pro-sumer" society. Back in the 60's and 70's when Toffler first wrote about this idea in their best sellers of the time Future Shock and Third Wave, he predicted that we were moving from the industrial evolution which he characterized as the "second wave" ( the first wave was agrarian hunter/gatherer) towards a third wave where we would not be categorized either as producers OR consumers, but rather we would be both, simultaneously.

We've seen this pattern emerging with the evolution of Internet, and World Wide Web, and as related tools have become more "read/write" (consume/produce) and more mass contribution-oriented. Mass production and read only (consume) are becoming a thing of the past. 

But most of these tools are characterized by or limited to the technology world. Now we see this same pattern emerging in new and very different spheres—the marine and space examples we've just looked at, and the pattern becomes much clearer, much larger, and much more powerful. 

In the case these oceanic projects, they are creating an infrastructure of interconnected tools and technology that will be widely available to all who wish to use them. Not only will almost any of us have access to oceans of data (sorry, couldn't resist)—a huge gain in itself, these projects will also enable public and other scientists alike to take control of the tools themselves. Imagine YouTube filling up with high def video content uploaded in almost real time from these projects. Imagine controlling the cameras to make your own videos!.   

So what?  Well among other shifts, these patterns promise to cause increasing acceleration of the rate of change (part of Living in a World of Exponential Change) with some equally rapid and radical results. As Professor Oscar Schofield, a biological oceanographer at Rutgers University put it:

"the data gathered already had upended some of what he was taught in graduate school, from the way rivers flow into the ocean to the complexity of surface currents." and went on to say:

“When there’s a hurricane, when all the ships are running for cover, I’m flying my gliders into the hurricane,” using his office computer, Professor Schofield said. “Then I’m sitting at home drinking a beer watching the ocean respond to a hurricane.” 

“What’s great about oceanography is we’re still in the phase of just basic exploration. We’ve discovered things off one of the most populated coasts in the United States that we didn’t know yet. O.O.I. (Open Ocean Initiative) will take us one level beyond that, to where any scientist in the world will be able to explore any ocean.”

Now THAT is powerful change and a wave I plan on riding. More likely this meta-trend will affect all of us more along the lines of the way a rising tide raises all boats in the harbor. It is likely that we are all "rising" already, whether we know it or not.

Well, I hope you're feeling much "smarter" now with all these new perspectives and extra IQ points.  As a sailor, I'm obviously fascinated with the ocean, but I'm also trying to use these larger trends to get a bit "smarter" myself by looking at the world from new vantage points, such as Outer and Inner Space. 

Isn't it fascinating that the more we learn the more we understand how much more we don't know? "Curious for life" is a goal I hope you share too and that this little "drink of water" will motivate you to learn much more about the aquatic worlds all around us. Sea you soon!

w
a
yne
=====

Technorati tags: oceans, patterns, trends, future, prosumer, Toffler, change, exponential change

del.icio.us tags: oceans, patterns, trends, future, prosumer, Toffler, change, exponential change

New Perspectives: Looking Down and Under

In "New Perspectives: The Benefits of Looking up!", we looked at the value of new perspectives in general and one perspective in particular—looking up more often to learn from the stars, sky, and space. Using the new Sky feature of Google Earth as an example, we also looked at gaining yet another perspective—by flying—and how we could tie two perspectives together to do things such as looking up at the stars to help us navigate our way on land and sea. Now I'd like to continue with our exploration of the power of perspectives by looking down and under.

The Power of Inversion

One trick I've found extremely useful for helping me solve problems and finding new perspectives is to invert things. For example, I remember how amazed I was as a young boy when I discovered that a telescope becomes a microscope (or vice versa), when you simply look from the other end!  Ever since, I've tried "looking through the other end" or inverting my thinking as much as I can to learn more, gain new insights, and see things more clearly from a new perspective.

Applying this inversion technique to the Google Sky example, what I'm hoping for next from Google or other providers of similar technology is the ability to point that camera in yet another direction—down! How about a "Sea" feature that would let us point our attention and camera the other way, down to what makes up over 71% of the Earth's surface; the oceans. It seems to me that we could learn a lot and gain many new perspectives by looking at what some call "Inner Space", the world's oceans and waterways, with at least the same intensity and resources we devote to Outer Space. Here is a brief and sobering overview of how little we currently know about the watery world around us, and some equally exciting projects that are tackling this deficit and revealing just how much we can gain from looking at it.

Networking the Oceans?

Let's start by checking out the Sept. 4th, 2007 article in the New York Times called "Bringing the Ocean to the World, in High-Def", which covers the new Ocean Observatories Initiative as well as some other very exciting major projects aimed at filling in a lot of our missing knowledge about the oceans that surround us. These endeavors are important because the oceans contain the vast majority of the earth's living space.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative involves two very different approaches:

• Placing a range of sensors in the oceans to provide directly measured data.
  
• Connecting all these sensors through the Internet so that all of the information gathered is accessible to the public and the scientific communities.

The new Ocean Observatories Initiative is:

"a multifaceted effort to study the ocean—in the ocean—through a combination of Internet-linked cables, buoys atop submerged data collection devices, robots and high-definition cameras. The first equipment is expected to be in place by 2009."

From my perspective, we are in DESPERATE need of this proliferation of study and these approaches. I always thought it curious that we know so much more about "outer space", relatively speaking, than we do about the oceans around us or our "Planet Ocean" as it is sometimes referred. Think I'm being too hyperbolic (who me?!!)? Check out some of the following facts—some fun, but many that are are very serious and sobering.

Fascinating Ocean Facts

 

 

• Water is the only known substance that can exist as a gas, liquid or solid within the limited temperatures on Earth. 
• The oceans cover 71% of the Earth's surface and contain 97% of the Earth's water. 
• Less than 1% this is fresh water, and 2-3% is contained in glaciers and ice caps. 
• All life on earth is thought to have originated in the ocean. 
• An estimated 80% of all life on earth is found under the ocean surface. 
• Over 1 million known species of plants and animals live in the world's oceans, and scientists say there may be as many as 9 million species we haven't discovered yet ( = almost 90 % UN discovered!). 
• 96.5% of the total water on earth is in the global oceans. 
• Oceans contain 99% of the living space on the planet. 
• Less than 10% of that space has been explored by humans. 
• The average depth of the ocean is 3,795 m. The average height of the land is 840 m. 
• 90% of all volcanic activity occurs in the oceans. 
• The top ten feet of the ocean holds as much heat as the entire atmosphere. 
• One study of a deep-sea community revealed 898 species from more than 100 families and a dozen phyla in an area about half the size of a tennis court. More than half of these were new to science.

 

At best, it is estimated that we have only mapped about 10% of the ocean floor in any detail. So what?  Remember the US submarine San Francisco that crashed into an underwater mountain near Guam back in January 2005? While the details are still under investigation, the biggest factor is the simple fact that we didn't know the mountain was there!   

Don't know what we don't know!

As stunning as some of these facts are in revealing how little we know about "Inner Space", recent studies are strongly suggesting that our ignorance is MUCH larger!  And this isn't just because the oceans are so obviously vast. We don't seem to do much better with waters that are very close to us land lubbers. For example, consider the recent study (Jan.2006) of the Gulf of Maine done as part of the Census of Marine Life, with the Huntsman Marine Science Center of St. Andrews, New Brunswick, which found in their first count of known marine species in the Gulf of Maine region (3,317 and counting) was more than 50% larger than previous estimates!

But there's hope at hand. Going back to the New York Times article, it also points out many more and equally promising projects for the direct study and measurement "of the ocean - in the ocean." Each project is directly and very accurately measuring different sets of characteristics, such as temperature, currents, life forms, and also detailing their effects on land, current changes, role in climate change, etc. But what struck me the most was that all the individual projects are adopting a common approach of being open, interactive, and connected. As a result, these individual projects are similar to nodes on a network and benefiting from the same network effect where the whole is indeed so much greater than the sum of the parts. One of the studies, for example, involves a series of underwater cables that will crisscross the tectonic plate known as Juan de Fuca in the Pacific Northwest, which as Dr. John R. Delaney put it:

“For the first three or four years, people just laughed when I said we’re going to turn Juan de Fuca Plate into a national laboratory,” Professor Delaney said. “Now they’re not laughing.”

As an added bonus and as a Canadian, I was also tickled to learn that Canada is putting in its own cabled network for more of the Straits of Juan de Fuca off the coast of British Columbia, which is where I last lived in Canada and where the rest of my family lives.

In another post, I'll add some overview comments on the meta-trends and patterns that are emerging in both these recent marine examples as well as the likes of Google Sky, which we covered in New Perspectives: The Benefits of Looking Up.

Until then, as sailors say:

"May you have fair winds and following seas."

w
a
yne
=====

del.icio.us tags: perspectives, ocean, oceans, marine life, water, marine, ocean facts, fun facts, Ocean Observatories Initiative, networking, Juan de Fuca, submarine, inverted thinking, lateral thinking, thought sparks</