:Connecting the Dots

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” First published in 1993, it’s probably among the top ten most famous New Yorker cartoons.  It reveals a society just becoming aware of this new phenomenon, the Internet – and already struggling with the freedom it was granting users to obscure and misrepresent their identities.  In the fifteen years that have passed since then, the questions have only gotten bigger and more profound.  Who am I really talking to in this chatroom?  Is that really your picture on Facebook and when was it taken?  Is this e-mail really from a Nigerian prince?

We think this is a 21st-century, postmodern problem but reading Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City and Thunderstruck has led me to reconsider.  The villains in both books – real historical figures – assume and discard aliases constantly, a practice that Larson asserts was commonplace in the 1800’s.  In a rapidly-changing society lacking social security cards, bank accounts, and even fingerprinting technology, it was easy to wake up one morning and decide, “I’ve had enough of Michael Curtin and all his problems.  I’m going to hop on a train to the next city west, change my name to Bob Smith, and start all over.”  It was a real problem that offered ne’er-do-wells opportunities at forgery, fraud, and much worse.  In the time since then we’ve erected so many laws and institutions to safeguard and fix identity from the day we’re born to the day we die.

Now here we have this whole new world, the Internet, and it seems like we’re back to square one.  The horrible story of Lori Drew and Megan Meier has to send chills up the spine of even the most zealous internet enthusiast.  Maybe, as Seth Godin argues, the time has come to abandon (or at least control) anonymity on the net.  He rightly points out that privacy and anonymity are two different things and that most of the problems on the internet stem from people hiding their identity and/or pretending to be someone else.  Maybe I’m naive, but I want the people my daughter meets online and the computer programs running the sites that she visits to know that she’s only seven years old.  And if in a few years she happens to wander into a chat room with a 50 year-old sexual predator I want her to know his name and his real age.  Would this pulling away of the masks make a horrible event more or less likely to occur?  Isn’t that why we put streetlights in dark alleyways?

If we want to do business and build real relationships online, we have to know who we’re dealing with.

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Two things happened yesterday that reminded me that for all of our complaining about how schools never change, teachers never change, things only get worse, kids only get worse, the whole world is going down the tubes — some things do get better and we do move forward sometimes:

1.  America elected its first African-American president.

2.  My seven year-old daughter and I were reading an old Calvin & Hobbes book.  In one strip, Calvin tells Hobbes that he’s going to make an ashtray to give to his parents for Christmas.  My daughter stopped reading and asked me, “Dad, what’s an ashtray?”

I’m not sure which of these had a more profound impact on me, but I think that both clearly show that the world in which our children and students are growing up today is radically different from the one in which we were raised.

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I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, a somewhat heady but also very funny and insightful treatise on the importance of randomness in our lives – and our complete blindness to it.  He argues that we now live in “extremistan” – a world where it is likely that improbable events will occur- but we still think we’re living in mediocristan, where the bell curve accurately represents reality and almost anything can be explained and predicted through statistical analysis.  To those who disagree, Taleb would point to 9/11 and the current financial crisis, the most obvious examples of events which no one could possibly have forecast.  Taleb argues that life has just become too complex to render accurate predictions about anything worth predicting.  The best we can do is to be ready for anything: “luck favors the prepared”, as Louis Pasteur famously said.

Of course, to those of us in the technology world, this should be obvious.  Early on in Ed Tech, the advice to schools and districts was to write a five-year technology plan and even now anyone who wants eRate funding must submit a three-year plan.  Those of us who have lived through of few iterations of these plans – however throroughly they were researched, however collaboratively they were written – know that things never turn out quite as planned.  For example, my district’s current plan mentions nothing about a global financial crisis in year two that will severely limit our ability to fund purchases of new technologies.  Likewise, who wrote a technology plan in 1998 that anticipated the Columbine school shootings a year later and the subsequent millions of dollars that schools would pour into emergency notification systems?  Are we as in control as our technology plans suggest?

And it’s not all about bad news, either.  New technologies sprout up quickly and in ways we almost never expect.  Is a tech director just supposed to watch opporunity pass by because that exciting new technology wasn’t in the plan?  Who saw Voicethread coming?  Luck does favor the prepared, so maybe the best we can do with these tech plans is to keep them broad and focused on the things that don’t change: hiring the right people, keeping the channels of communication open, clarifying the vision.  I keep thinking about Google’s policy encouraging employee’s to spend 20% of their time on the clock working on side projects: they know something great is likely to come about if conditions are right to allow it to happen and they don’t try to force it.  Hence Google Chrome.

Are schools, with their yellowing technology plans, yearly budget fights, and stifling beauracracy, ready for randomness? 

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