Craig Thomler's professional blog - AI and digital government thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective
Craig Thomler
I've worked in the online sector since 1995 in roles including founder, publisher, journalist, webmaster, marketer, channel manager, CIO, COO and visionary. I left the public sector in early 2012 to lead Delib Australia as Managing Director Australia and New Zealand. More...
In one of the more misguided approaches to internet regulation, the UK government banned the majority of UK citizens from editing Wikipedia earlier this week.
This was done, according to the SMH article, Wikipedia added to child pornography blacklist, due to the identification of a photo in one article (of the more than 2.6 million articles in Wikipedia) as being of a sexual nature and the entire site being added to the child pornography blacklist (ironically the same list that Senator Conroy has discussed using in Australia).
The image in question, of a 1976 German album cover, has not been banned elsewhere in the world, was publicly available in a physical form (as the cover of an album) and is digitally available at many other websites including Amazon.
Per the PC World article, in a facesaving effort, which ironically emphasises the difficulties of filtering the internet, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the nonprofit group that blacklisted the Web page, stated that,
The image in the Wikipedia article is hosted outside the U.K., an issue addressed by the IWF in its statement Tuesday. "Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted abroad, will not be added to the list. Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted in the U.K. will be assessed in line with IWF procedures."
The IWF lamented that while its goal is to minimize the availability of indecent images of children on the Internet, its decision to blacklist the Wikipedia article "had the opposite effect."
Being a parent with school-aged children, their education and future prospects are of significant interest and concern to me.
I want to ensure that my children are prepared for the world as it will exist in ten, twenty and thirty or more years.
The government should be at least as concerned. The impacts of effective or ineffective education have long-term ramifications for a nation, which can be experienced as a shortage of skilled workers, falling innovation and company/job creation, slower economic growth, inadequate leadership and even, in extreme cases, the disintegration of a nation's fabric. I am acutely conscious that the majority of WHAT I learnt at school 30 years ago has not provided significant benefit in the areas I have worked in. The majority of my practical knowledge came from outside official learning channels.
Even at university in the late 80s, though the subject matter was more useful, the teaching techniques (large lecture halls and crowded tutorials), were not an effective environment for many people to learn.
The jobs I have worked in since the mid-1990s did not exist ten years before - in most cases the organisations and their business models did not exist either.
So how do we prepare our children to be effective, successful and happy contributors to a future economy?
This is one of those big hairy audacious problems for which I don't see simple solutions - predicting five years into the future is hard, let alone 30 or 40 years.
Two things I experienced at school did prepare me for the future world (of today). A passion for learning and an understanding of how to seek out information and process it.
These two skills are in my view the most important that can be taught to any children. They lead to flexibility and adaptiveness, skills that our current and future economy will need in abundance. They also lead to individuals that are confident, able to effectively assess risks and willing to build new things, not simply propogate the old.
So the question for me becomes - does our current schooling system still foster these two skills amongst our children?
Or does the system we have today focus on subject matter (curriculum) rather than individual learning capacity and outcomes?
I believe that the biggest learning factor in any education are the teachers. The second biggest factor are the other students. Third is accessibility to information and the actual material or curriculum is a distant fourth.
In my view if adequately trained teachers are not available, or if students are not encouraged and supported to work together collaboratively it does not matter how good the curriculum is - the learning outcomes will be poor.
So are we paying enough attention to education in government, even with the 'education revolution'?
I'm not sure yet - however the following video from Professor Michael Wesch, brought to my attention by Stephen Collins of Acidlabs in his post, Connect.Ed - The story of a girl, raises real questions in my mind.
I've just rechecked this figure, using the same approach as Laurel (via Facebook's ad tool), and found that Facebook now lists 4,252,860 Australian members - a growth rate of over 100% for the last twelve months.
Of these, 3,957,900 are over the age of 18, 1,400,900 are over the age of 30 and only 185,780 are over the age of 50.
It seems that women are more active users (2,407,200 females versus only 1,724,340 males) and only 93,100 confess to being university (college) graduates (versus about 200,000 university students) - though education level can be left blank by members and does not provide a full picture.
It is also possible to look at Facebook members by city/town, marital status and sexual preference, but with less accuracy.
What does it mean for a government when 20% of it's population, and almost 4 million voters, have chosen to use a particular medium?
Governments regularly advertise their initiatives and engage constituents in mediums with a fraction of this 'readership'.
Perhaps we need to see greater government involvement in social media as well.
The eGovernment Resource Centre has tipped me off that the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy has set up a consultative Future directions blog for two weeks with the purpose of soliciting public comments that will contribute to the development of a Future directions paper for the digital economy.
It's good to see that some time has gone into thinking about having a Terms of use, Moderation policy, specific Privacy policy (rather than relying on the general policy for the site).
There's also a feedback tool for people who wish to comment on the blog itself rather than on the policy.
What is not good to see is that the approach isn't using an effective blogging platform and the moderation approach has meant that in 11 pages of comments so far, not one commenter has referenced other comments, which means that no cross-dialogue is occurring. There's also been no official responses to blog comments as yet, but it is early days (less than 24 hours since it went live) - hopefully we'll see more conversation than talking past each other.
Given that the aim of the initiative is to collect community views and reactions, fed by a series of posts by the department, a blog is a reasonable, if not the best, choice of tools and the Future Directions blog at least gets the ball rolling.
Working in government, I've encountered the difficulties in using a real blogging tool, also commented on in this APC Magazine article, The 10 sins of Senator Conroy, the blogger, and hope that as the government's acceptance and experience of the internet improves, so shall it's capacity to engage.
I am also hopeful that the Department will look further afield than at direct responses in this blog at the posts on other blogs, forums, wikis, micro-blogging channels, timelines and other Web 2.0 mediums related to the topic (here's an example).
There's already a large number of comments on the blog - dominated by the Filter discussion, which is a topic I have been developing a post on, focused on how internet users have self-organised via Twitter, blogs and forums to oppose the initiative, culminating in a series of rallies in all Australian capital cities this Saturday 13 December.
It will be interesting to see whether, with the current focus on the Filter debate, many people will respond on the specific topic of the Digital economy.
I will also find it interesting to see whether the community perceives there to actually be a 'digital economy'. Personally I think there's one economy but with a range of different communications and distribution channels (but I'll say more on this in one of my comments on the Future Directions blog itself).
Reading the Connected Republic this morning, Paul Johnston has written an interesting post, Us Now: On the Road to Self-Organised Government?, about the new documentary, US Now, which explores the power of self-organising groups and what they might mean for society and the public sector.
The film has just previewed in London, however clips, a blog and other information is available at the Us Now website and the Us Now Youtube channel.
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