Recently I attended a Skillshare class on learning, taught by the community manager of the startup ShowMe (“a crowdsourced Khan Academy”) and an engineer from Quora (a Q&A site).

Kika mentioned that Skillshare cautions against offering free classes, for which people often don’t show up, and that the completion rate for the free Stanford AI course offered last fall was just 6 percent. To this, one of the attendees responded that she’s more likely to follow through with something she’s paid for. I suggested one might achieve a similar outcome by using Stickk–which allows you to designate goals, penalties, and moderators–to complete free courses.

Clearly education is being overturned by the digital revolution. The question is, what does traditional (pre-digital) education offer? And to what extent can that be supplanted? I think it’s a few things:

• A physical space, as much for learning as for recreation.
• Discipline, which comes from accountability to authorities and social pressure from peers, but also from going to a place for an event and concurrently with others.
• Direction, which comes from following a curriculum or syllabus, and being corrected.
• Community, which comes from sitting alongside other students and, especially, from collaboration with them.
• A network, which comes from meeting other people, who are either in your class or institution, or passed through it at another time.
• Feedback, which comes from teachers and peers, but also, increasingly, from software.
• Credentials, which comes from institutions and experts, but also from portfolios, and through portfolios, acceptance in a marketplace.
• Serendipity, which comes from brushing shoulders with people outside your field.
• Magic, which comes from pheromones mixing with alcohol and spring flowers–which brings us back to physical space. One study concluded that: “The best research was consistently produced when scientists were working within ten metres of each other.”

Some of these things can be replicated online by services. Others can be cobbled together with help from social networks, including Meetup, Stickk, and Quora.

Different companies are making different bets about the future of education. Skillshare envisions a world of lifelong learners, in which neighbors teach each other, and in which everyone has a talent to contribute and hidden experts surface democratically. ShowMe seems to be betting on the same forces, albeit with a greater emphasis on auto-didactism and lesser one on local learning. Of the two, I find Skillshare’s proposition both more enticing and problematic. ShowMe already has a partial proof-of-concept in Khan Academy and works as a single-player experience. Skillshare requires population density, coordination, classrooms, and a populace eager to continue learning, and teaching, through adulthood.

Regarding incentives. Are we more likely to do something we’ve paid for (the cost is sunk), or something we will pay (a penalty) for if uncompleted? I’m unaware of any studies. You?

The other Wednesday I walked Central Park north to south. The cherry blossoms were aflame, but the trees remained girlish. As the sun spilled over Central Park West and slanted through the wood, it rendered everything with depth, a depth persisting over distance, at a pitch one rarely sees. Here were layers, not of the sagittal sort revealed in a slice of onion, but one behind the other–visual polyphony–perceptible only in soft focus–polyphonic seeing.

For much of this stroll I was accompanied by my dear friends, Richard and Annette, Londoners on their first trip to New York. Moments before we were drinking coffee on the sidewalk of the Hungarian Pastry Shop, and I was joking that, in the course of this retirement, they ought to make the obligatory trip to Machu Picchu. Characteristically, Richard scoffed at this and questioned what wisdom might be gleaned from such travels. They, or at least he, had only come to New York to visit me. Better to spend the remaining days in his shed, cracking the mysteries of syntax, with time made for children & grandchildren and the occasional escape to France. Who could find fault with this resolve to live free of convention, globe-trotting geezers be damned?

Yet I couldn’t help think that this somewhat sedentary retirement might be in conflict with his desire to keep his mind sharp and overturn linguistic science. Is it possible that travel to strange places maintains and strengthens the brain by immersing it in a flood of experiences (of a magnitude one hasn’t experienced since infancy)? By one measure–memory–this would appear to be the case. Who doesn’t have an easier time accounting for the hours of a day spent moving through space than one spent in one place?

In the back of my mind I sensed the vague pull of a passage I’d recently read:

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

William James first wrote about the curious warping and foreshortening of psychological time in his Principles of Psychology in 1890: “In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn-out,” he wrote. “But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.” Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older. “If to remember is to be human, then remembering more means being more human,” said Ed.

And so it was that I could see the distance for the trees; and that I can see last Wednesday for our stroll.

(Richard: I look forward to that postcard from Machu Picchu.)

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

On the night of Saturday April 21st, in commemoration, while the world is sleeping, I’m holding the first (annual?) Paul Revere Ride.

We’ll kick off at sundown in midtown Manhattan, cycle through the night up the Hudson, through forests and towns and under the stars, and — if the night smiles — breakfast atop the Croton Dam at dawn, decked out in revolutionary garb!

Details to follow. Spread the word. If you’re game, shoot me a message.

Be a hero. Ride.

I’ve finished After Dark, my first Murakami novel. (Williambsurg, I’m ready for you.)

I hadn’t intended to read it, but the opening grabbed me:

Eyes mark the shape of the city.

Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature—or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old…

This evoked one of my favorite compositions, The Low Symphony of Philip Glass. Which is to say, it was like soaring over a twinkling metropolis at night.

With its references to fast food and cell phones, After Dark resides in the present, and unfolds in real-time, in the space of a night. It’s told in the third person and present simple, which lends immediacy (a trick masterfully exploited by Alan Lightman in Einstein’s Dreams). The characters are compelling and there are some good dialogues. But ultimately the story has too many loose ends and Murakami’s suggestion that we’re watching through a lens feels forced and gimmicky.

All in, neither bad, nor memorable.

Are the oceans about to be filled with floating cities? Is the world poised for an explosion of new states, each testing an alternative society and government? Is this the next frontier, and precursor to the final one? Could the reopening of the frontier stimulate an era of political innovation and freedom, providing a safe haven for dissenters and heretics?

And what would the existing nations have to say about this? What of self-defense, from them and from pirates? What of states founded for vice? Assuming sovereignty, what courts would protect the investors in such a project? Which investor might self-fund such a scheme? Who would live there and who would rule?

Ergo some of the questions asked and raised last night at FutureSteading, an event held at Columbia University to raise awareness of The Seasteading Institute. The roster included several of the usual suspects, including the aptly styled biogerontologist Audrey de Grey, sitting behind a placard on “the future of aging”. We were also treated to a chat from a 17-year-old “genius” as well as one from a Thiel Fellow obsessed with Bitcoin and the like. Underwriting much of this was, of course, the man himself.

The keynote was delivered by one Michael Keenan, president of Seasteading. On a stage full of madmen, his hypomania was something to behold. Was he taking the piss? The audience sat stone-faced. Regardless, the project to build a floating (commuter) city off the coast of San Francisco for the H1B-less struck a chord.

As we rushed off at the end of his talk, we turned toward each other and teared up with laughter. We’d seen the future. And it’s a hoot!

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us. 

Marshall McLuhan

This just out: The QWERTY keyboard may have a slight effect on how we perceive words, eliciting negative feelings for the difficult-to-type, and vice-versa. The evidence has been disputed, but the implications remain interesting.

What is the the relationship between us and our environment?
Might we might change and improve our brains by designing our environment to yield cognitive benefits?

Recent research in neuroscience argues for the neuroplasticity of the brain into old age. This has prompted writers including Nicholas Carr to suggest that the technology we create (in this case the internet) is physically altering our minds.

But while the effects of QWERTY and the internet fall under unintended consequences, how about explicitly designing or adapting (everyday) tools to make us smarter?

It seems reasonable that within the next decade even the most mundane objects and devices will be signal emitting and networked, a part of the “Internet of Things“. The milk will tell you it’s half full,  the house will tell you it’ll be toasty by the time you arrive. But who says this HAL must speak your native tongue? He might as well teach you another, bestowing upon you the sort of immersion a child enjoys. The “talking house” would become a “teaching house”. Indeed, I’m reminded of the story of an author (perhaps Naipaul or Rushdie) who grew up speaking a different language on each floor.

After my post on language learning, I got into a bit of an exchange with my friend Richard on differing outcomes among children and adults. Richard has some of the background in cognitive linguistics that I lack, and he tells me that “There is overwhelming evidence that the programming gets harder with age and is eventually impossible.” Still — without having yet read the literature — I’m skeptical about whether different outcomes have to do with the purported ossification of the brain, or whether they’re better explained by the shift from experiential to book learning. For the record, I’m prepared to crawl around on all fours and be fed foreign fruits and phonemes — preferably in a nice location and by pretty examiners — should this advance the science. Meanwhile, I giddily await the day my environment teaches me new languages.

But back to the study. Should I pursue left-handed women?

Blurbs should come with a Whore Score: a measure of an author’s credibility in endorsing another’s work.

Does the blurb author slap his name on any piece in print? Strumpet!

Is the blurb author mentioned in the book in question, or is the author returning a blurb? Tramp!

Is the blurb author putting his name on a work by someone powerful? Harlot!

Enough of these mutual admiration societies already! Truth in advertising!

I got back late and fried up some lamb over garlic while listening to Lorca.

Then I cut Marieta into 33 pieces.

Now she divulges her beauty measure for measure, in a little slideshow, at random, while I break my fingers on her.

I was biking over the Gowanus yesterday evening listening to Gainsbourg & Bardot and thinking about learning & memory in the context of beginnings & endings. Now, my proverbial horse may be dead, but let’s give it one more kick to be sure.

Common knowledge has it that children pick up languages faster than adults. Some have questioned whether this holds when adults benefit from equivalent immersion. Indeed, one might think that an adult–particularly one who has studied language formally–should be able to tap superior pattern recognition skills to learn faster. I don’t know whether this race has been resolved (if you do, links please) and this is not my subject. No, what interests me here is the process by which one achieves fluency in a language and why children may, on average, be faster.

Let’s say language is a circle. At the center are all the high-frequency words: the, be, to, and, of, etc. At the peripheries are the neglected: bollocks, knackered, peripatetic, and so forth. Fluency occurs when one has acquired each, or walked every inch.

What’s the best strategy?

Ideally you’d walk this circle linearly, in a spiral, picking up the stop words before venturing into obscurity. Indeed, this is the path a curriculum will try to lead you through.

In practice it’s hard to be so linear. Learning a language is not like reading a book or watching a movie: to understand the “punchline” you need to practice, practice, practice, and build foundations. So rather than spiral through, every day you open the notebook and retrace the steps you’ve taken. And since the high frequency words are in the front pages of the notebook–and people like to begin at the “beginning” and flatter themselves with all that they know–these words get practiced ad nauseum. It’s a bit like the fisherman, who rows out in the morning and returns home by evening, never quite reaching the edge of the ocean. Half his time is spent retracing. How inefficient!

Meanwhile that kid starts not in the dead center but somewhere near it (perhaps he picks up peripatetic before the). And he does not spiral through the circle but bounces about it randomly, guided only by what he hears about him. He’s an explorer, with a home in every port.

Who covers the territory first?

 …

But then again, maybe this is all bollocks. Maybe it’s all about learning in context and repeating in contexts.