Starting off our science fiction reading with The Water Knife

Starting off our science fiction reading with The Water Knife

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On Tuesday I floated the idea of reading a near-future science fiction novel.  The goal was twofold: to get ideas about the future, while having fun. Readers here and elsewhere (Twitter, Facebook, email) voted for their favorites and contributed more suggestions.

After brooding over your comments, here’s my selection for first book: The Water Knife (2015) (publisher link; Amazon; Audible) by Paulo Bacigalupi.  It’s about climate change warping the American Southwest, and how society changes as a result.  It’s also a thriller, with a good heaping of technology and politics.

Schedule: let’s dive in and read this through mid-August.  I can issue a post a week, say one for each third of the novel, to keep you all on track.

After that, here’s the list of titles that received two or more votes:

Madeline Ashby, Company Town
Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
Malka Older, Informocracy
Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning
Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
Charlie Stross, Rule 34
Daniel Suarez, Daemon
Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End
Andy Weir, The Martian

Let’s think about which one to read after Water Knife.  I’m leaning towards Company Town.

In the meantime, I’ll reach out to the author on Twitter.  Let’s see if he tweets back.

And happy reading!  Already I’m making sure I have a water bottle to hand…

Edutech

via Bryan Alexander http://ift.tt/25FGf1H

July 20, 2016 at 08:12AM

Which near future science fiction book should we read? A blog book club query.

Which near future science fiction book should we read? A blog book club query.

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What’s a good near-future science fiction book to read, and would you like to read it together?

This question came up during the New Media Consortium’s 2016 conference (my materials).  I recommended that education and technology professionals pay strong attention to science fiction, and folks got excited, wanting recommendations.  So I’ve assembled some (below).

Why near future sf? Because things are changing very quickly, and science fiction historically has been a fruitful way of thinking about the emerging future.   Much of sf takes place elsewhen, either the far future (think space opera) or the past (think steampunk and alternate history), so the near future gives us the best yield.  As one blogger puts it,

near-future SF keeps things local; earth-bound. The reason I find these stories interesting is that they are a way to look at our own society and technology, only a step into the future. The best books are extrapolations of current technologies and situations that seem like maybe they might already be possible.

I’d like to recommend recent sf, too.  20th-century sf can be fascinating, but has dropped off the calendar too far to be of much use – although I welcome suggestions.  The oldest book I cite below is thirteen years old.

Also, sf can be fun.

It’s also time for another blog-based book club.  So far this blog has hosted discussions of Richard DeMillo’s Revolution in Higher Education and Robert Putnam’s Our Kids.  Previously it kicked off a more distributed discussion of Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows.  Let’s do another one!

Here’s my list.  Alphabetical by author.  I avoided Amazon links because some folks don’t like ’em.  I picked cover images when they looked neat.  I’ve read some but not all.  I’ve tried to balance author’s genders.

Madeline Ashby, Company Town.  Ashby’s a professional futurist, and uses this book to imagine what could happen with biology, technology, and society:

New Arcadia is a city-sized oil rig off the coast of the Canadian Maritimes, now owned by one very wealthy, powerful, byzantine family: Lynch Ltd. Hwa is of the few people in her community (which constitutes the whole rig) to forgo bio-engineered enhancements. As such, she’s the last truly organic person left on the rig–making her doubly an outsider, as well as a neglected daughter and bodyguard extraordinaire. Still, her expertise in the arts of self-defense and her record as a fighter mean that her services are yet in high demand. When the youngest Lynch needs training and protection, the family turns to Hwa. But can even she protect against increasingly intense death threats seemingly coming from another timeline?

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake.  The oldest book on our list (2003), and possibly the most famous.  It’s a dystopia, and then things get worse.  Focuses on biology, consumerism, and the digital world.

It’s hard to make VR look good from the outside.

Ernest  Cline, Ready Player One.  Something of a modern classic, this involves an epically elaborate computer game based on 1980s pop culture.  It’s played by people in a near-future dystopia, who use it to escape.

David Eggers, The Circle.  A look into a giant technology company and its impact on human life, from one of America’s most famous novelists.  (Thanks to Larry Johnson for the recommendation)

William Gibson, The Peripheral.  Part of this novel takes place in the near future, where poor folks and military veterans eke out an existence on the fringes of society.  Another part occurs two generations later, after civilization has been shocked and redesigned.  The two worlds come into contact.  (My review)

Malka Older, Informocracy.  All about a world driven by information and polling.  From the official site:

It’s been twenty years and two election cycles since Information, a powerful search engine monopoly, pioneered the switch from warring nation-states to global micro-democracy. The corporate coalition party Heritage has won the last two elections. With another election on the horizon, the Supermajority is in tight contention, and everything’s on the line.

With power comes corruption. For Ken, this is his chance to do right by the idealistic Policy1st party and get a steady job in the big leagues. For Domaine, the election represents another staging ground in his ongoing struggle against the pax democratica. For Mishima, a dangerous Information operative, the whole situation is a puzzle: how do you keep the wheels running on the biggest political experiment of all time, when so many have so much to gain?

Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning (NPR rave review).  It takes place a bit further ahead than the rest of these books, but looks grounded in all kinds of ideas we’re thinking about today.  Lots of world-building with science, technology, and culture.

Nathan Rich, The Odds Against Tomorrow.  About a statistician tasked with predicting near-term futures, with an eye towards disaster.  Then real disaster happens.

Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story.  Takes place in a decaying but technologically advanced America, and features a romance between digitally retro and non-retro characters.

Neal Stephenson, Reamde.  A thriller taking place in a future so near it might as well be the present, the novel involves a massively multiplayer online game, drug smuggling, new computer desks, a Welsh Muslim terrorist, and more.  Almost a caper.

Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End.  This is one of the older books (2006) on my list, but it’s a good ‘un.  The main focus is how education could change in the next generation or two.

…so which ones do you like?  What titles should we add?   If things get out of hand I’ll fire up a SurveyMonkey.

 

Edutech

via Bryan Alexander http://ift.tt/25FGf1H

July 18, 2016 at 04:46AM

Blackboard Learn Ultra: Ready or not?

Blackboard Learn Ultra: Ready or not?

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By Phil Hill

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At this year’s BbWorld16 users conference, Blackboard’s new executive team demonstrated their ability to deliver a much tighter, more coherent message of what they are learning from talking to customers and what the focus of the company will be in the next few years. The “1 Learn, 2 Experiences (Original and Ultra), and 3 Deployments (Self-Hosted, Managed-Hosted, and SaaS)” meme is an example. Words are easy to come by, however, and Blackboard leadership needs to back up their claims, particularly with the Learn LMS and particularly with the long-delayed Learn Ultra.

Michael described the challenges that Blackboard and its new CEO Bill Ballhaus face back in January, with this comment about Learn Ultra [emphasis added]:

Prove that Ultra is real: While there are customers who will not be quick to move off of 9.x (for a variety of reasons), nobody believes that the current platform represents a compelling future for digital learning environments. It is long in the tooth. But schools evaluating LMSs have largely discounted Ultra because they don’t think it’s real and they’re not convinced that it ever will be. Now that the product is a year late, they have increased reason to be skeptical. We have heard that there are schools piloting Ultra, but I am not aware of any public information about how these pilots are going or even which schools are participating. Blackboard needs to ship Ultra and trot out some customers who are willing to speak publicly about their experiences with it. If they fail, they will not get a do-over.

While this inaccurate claim came from the previous executive team, and while I have heard nothing but positive reviews from Blackboard staff about the new CEO, this does not mean that previous claims are irrelevant. And the issue is not what Blackboard told us at e-Literate, it is more what they have told or not told the higher education (and K-12) communities.

Thanks to an interview Michael and I had in April with Bill Ballhaus and Katie Blot, SVP of Corporate Strategy and Industry Relations, I updated our understanding of Learn Ultra’s status:

When we asked when Learn Ultra would be available for schools to actively pilot (real courses, real students, with major integrations to student rosters, etc), it was interesting to hear both Ballhaus and Blot take a very different approach and give what appears to be much more conservative estimates. Learn Ultra should be available for limited-functionality pilots for specific faculty (e.g. for courses not using the LMS heavily) by Fall 2016 and more broadly for institutions in Spring 2017, leading to general availability in Summer or Fall 2017.

This is why I was surprised to see a press release just this week claiming that “Blackboard Learn Ultra Experience Available Now”. At the keynote, Bill Ballhaus said that Learn Ultra was “generally available”, although based on another interview with Ballhaus and Blot later in the week it became apparent that this was inadvertent phrase. The real message is that Learn Ultra is ready for production as described in Katie Blot’s blog post:

Bill told the crowd (40% of whom are attending their first BbWorld) that the highly anticipated Blackboard Learn Ultra experience is now available for production use.

Slide from #BbWorld16 keynote

Did Blackboard just pull a rabbit out of the hat since April and move its general availability of Learn Ultra from Summer 2017 to Summer 2016? Based on interviews and in breakout sessions this week, the simple fact is that Learn Ultra is just now entering the phase for running pilots. While IT language can be fuzzy, a pilot is generally understood to be a test for a subset of the target end users, typically running on the final or production environment, using real-world scenarios, for the purposes of testing the system and determining if the application is ready to go into full production mode. For a higher education LMS, this means at a minimum running multiple courses within an institution with real students taking the courses for at least a full academic term. The very first Learn Ultra pilots in higher education are starting this fall at the University of Phoenix and “a handful” of other institutions.

Last night Katie Blot shared a link to a new blog post from the company – “Where we stand with SaaS and the Ultra experience”.

• And, delivered via continuous updates the Learn Ultra functionality that will meet the needs of many instructors. In fact, at BbWorld 2016 we declared that Learn with the Ultra experience is available now for pilot and production use.

So let’s clarify what we mean when we say that Learn with Ultra experience is available now. Learn with the Ultra experience now has a rich enough feature set to meet the needs of a certain segment of instructors. It’s ready for those who use the fundamental elements of an LMS. Will it be right for everyone? No, but the Original Course View, which can be run side by side with the Ultra Course View in SaaS, will meet the needs of the rest of instructors, those who need the full depth and flexibility the Original experience provides. And over time, we’ll continue to deliver more functionality for the Ultra experience on a frequent and regular basis, just like we have with Collaborate and Bb Student.

This blog post is a good sign of trying to be open and transparent, and the clarification about pilots is important. I still find the language “available for … production use” to be inaccurate. No academic leader in their right mind would skip a controlled pilot testing out this long-awaited LMS re-architecture and go straight into full production mode. And to my knowledge no institution has indicated that they plan to do so.

The message I heard over and over from people who had tried the Learn Ultra “educator preview” matched what SUNY’s Doug Cohen shared in his session where Blackboard asked him to try out Learn Ultra and present his findings unfiltered. There are some nice design features in Ultra, and there have been vast improvements in functionality – both bug fixes and new features – added within the past four months. But as Doug shared, Learn Ultra is not ready to evaluate yet at an institutional level. While he noted in a conversation after the session that this would be an individual campus decision within SUNY and not up to the system office where he works, in Doug’s opinion Learn Ultra will likely be ready for a true test by the beginning of 2017. There are a handful of schools, most notably the University of Phoenix, that are being more aggressive and starting pilots this fall, but I am hearing a consensus that Learn Ultra needs more time before having institutional-run pilots.

The Blackboard team noted in their press release:

Based on user data, the product offers the functionality most instructors need to manage their courses today

The basis of this determination, according to Katie Blot, was driven by analyses such as looking at the courses in a large community college to see which components of Learn 9.1 were used in each course, and then determining if Learn Ultra had those features.[1] There is a real difference, however, between analyzing such course data and asking real people responsible for making campus decisions of whether they would start a Learn Ultra pilot. If the vast majority of customers say that “it’s not ready to evaluate fully”, that does not necessarily mean that they must be waiting for Learn Ultra to have all features present in Learn 9.1 Original View to satisfy all faculty. Most campus administrators I have talked to know that Learn Ultra can be a course-by-course decision after you enable Ultra at the institutional level. The question is whether an institution is ready to enable this course-by-course testing and to support the new capabilities.

One more detail that is relevant to messaging. Once a course is converted to Learn Ultra, it cannot be converted back to Original view of Learn 9.1. You can go back to a snapshot of the course as of the time of conversion, but any course data created or added within Ultra will be lost. In other words Learn Ultra is much more than just an option user interface sitting on top of Learn 9.1, as described in one of the breakout sessions.

Slide presented at #BbWorld16 session

If Blackboard executives want to be open and transparent, which I believe they do, then part of the job is using straightforward, accurate language. Don’t play verbal gymnastics in “ready for production” without letting people know this will be the first time anyone has run live courses with real students. Don’t ignore the company baggage where customers and analysts have been told misleading stories even within the past year.

What Blackboard could have done is used this simple message to their advantage. We told you in April that we would be ready for limited-functionality pilots in fall, and we’re on schedule and making real improvements. The days of Learn Ultra delays are over.

The company has made a lot of progress in the past four months with Ultra, has improved the overall message, and has introduced some useful tools coming out such as Predict and Planner. But the community needs more in terms of open and transparent communication, especially around Learn.

1. I believe they did this analysis from more than one school, but she mentioned this example to point out that they looked across the entire college, at all courses.

The post Blackboard Learn Ultra: Ready or not? appeared first on e-Literate.

Edutech

via e-Literate http://mfeldstein.com

July 15, 2016 at 07:32AM