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'+'''Chapter 5: Education: A 2020 vision'''+' ''Education or formation'' Forming today's digital native A 2020 vision Integration Education Comment on Ch. 5

Use the word 'education' and everybody knows what you mean, or has an opinion about it. Use the word 'formation' and, in general, there will be a 'Now what do you really mean?' pause. 'Are you talking about cell formation, astronomy....'? A relatively small cohort of the general population, those with a deeply classical education might think of Plato, or Aristotle's notion of the formation of the soul. And then there are others.....

For one thing, the comment above reflects something that might be true where the discourse is in English. It is not so true of languages like Italian, or French, where the equivalent term for formation is much more likely to be understood and used in the context of education or as the appropriate word for education.

'Formation' is also a term with a quite specific use and meaning in the context of (mainly, but not only) religious communities, either in the more general sense of, say the seminary preparation of candidates for ministry, or Religious Life communities otherwise known as communities of consecrated life. These communities, especially the larger ones, are most likely to describe the content and processes of formation of their members, be it initial or ongoing, in a lengthy document which may have a Latin title in its official version: ''Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis et Studiorum''. Fortunately this always gets shortened to 'Ratio'! A Ratio will almost certainly be complete and very well thought through, since it takes the entire experience and tradition of the group and looks at how it can hand this on authentically and fully to new members. The Ratio I have in mind as I write this is some 400 pages long and a very good and serviceable document updated nearly ten years ago.

I would like, in this chapter, to talk about the quite specific notion of formation just outlined, then to return to the question of education as it is more generally understood.

''Formation''

In the light of what we have indicated so far about attitudes and habits of a digital culture today, and in the light of what can happen in ten years of rapid development, it might be very important to look at such a Ratio to see if it reflects the kinds of realities today's candidates are living in, even though these will differ considerably around the world. Candidates are as likely to come from a village in Africa as they are from a suburb in one of the world's Western 'megalopolises'. For that reason a Ratio cannot descend to too many particulars, leaving that to local contexts to draw up. If anything, this places even more weight on the general guidelines to give an appropriate grounding for the eventual particulars.

Having said that, I have no doubt that we should begin by looking at some particulars that are shared by many young candidates today and will be more so tomorrow, across national and cultural boundaries, and I have in mind – since Africa has already been mentioned – that we must distinguish between levels of Internet use (where people think of connecting with a fixed computer via telephone access, leaving much of rural Africa 'offline' in that sense) and wireless connection via mobile devices. Here Africa is much less disadvantaged, and the situation will only get better. In 2010, bandwidth access will get cheaper, faster and easier for most of the world. O3b Networks is building "a new telecommunications infrastructure offering low-latency links from 1 Mbps to 10 Gbps for core trunking, instant fiber-path restoration and 3G Cellular backhaul". If that sounds like gobbledygook to the reader, think of it this way: O3b is short for the “Other Three Billion,” the nearly half of the world’s population that has little or no access to the Web. The new satellites will orbit at about 5,000 miles above Earth, much closer than existing geostationary satellites, which sit about 22,000 miles high. As such, the new satellites will suffer much less “latency,” the time lag when data travels between the surface and a satellite. That’s especially important for Internet traffic, where data is constantly traveling to and from users’ devices. They will be positioned immediately above the 'middle' regions of the world (think roughly of the subtropical zones either side of the equator) where they will 'pick up' many of the 3 billion.

It sounds so simple! The theory is that the 3 billion will have access, but as someone living under an oppressive regime told me recently, the possibilities of access mean nothing if Government is not interested in providing it. So maybe what I say about information and formation to follow might be in view of potential digital natives for whom the dream may not come true. That becomes a human rights issue, not a simple technical one. But I believe at this point we should also be quite clear about something else. People tend to confuse Internet and World Wide Web or use the two terms interchangeably. It would be better to regard them separately for what they are. The Internet was a military invention, fundamentally – a way of ensuring that in the case of massive attack on existing communications structures there was a way of continuing communication via a virtual network of computers. That is oversimplifying things of course, but this was the basic notion behind it. The World Wide Web was built on top of that and had nothing to do with the military. Sir Tim Berners Lee was responsible for building the Web. It was something he developed as a side project in 1990 while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland. Addressing the US House of Representatives in 2007, Berners Lee had the following to say:

-> The success of the World Wide Web, itself built on the open Internet, has depended on three critical factors: 1) unlimited links from any part of the Web to any other; 2) open technical standards as the basis for continued growth of innovation applications; and 3) separation of network layers, enabling independent innovation for network transport, routing and information applications. Today these characteristics of the Web are easily overlooked as obvious, self-maintaining, or just unimportant. All who use the Web to publish or access information take it for granted that any Web page on the planet will be accessible to anyone who has an Internet connection, regardless whether it is over a dialup modem or a high speed multi-megabit per second digital access line. The last decade has seen so many new ecommerce startups, some of which have formed the foundations of the new economy, that we now expect that the next blockbuster Web site or the new homepage for your kid's local soccer team will just appear on the Web without any difficulty.(This document on the Web [http://dig.csail.mit.edu/2007/03/01-ushouse-future-of-the-web] [PDF]).

In other words we are talking about a reality that is fundamentally free and open, built on top of the open Internet. And to make the point even clearer, he adds:

-> The lesson from the proliferation of new applications and services on top of the Web infrastructure is that innovation will happen provided it has a platform of open technical standards, a flexible, scalable architecture, and access to these standards on royalty-free ($0 fee patent licenses) terms. At the World Wide Web Consortium, we will only standardize technology if it can be implemented on a royalty-free basis. So, all who contribute to the development of technical standards at the W3C are required to agree to provide royalty-free licenses to any patents they may hold if those patents would block compliance with the standard. Consider as a comparison the very successful Apple iTunes+iPod music distribution environment. This integration of hardware, software, Web service shows an intriguing mix of proprietary technology and open standards. The iTunes environment consists of two parts: sales of music and videos, and distribution of podcasts. The sale of music is managed by a proprietary platform run by Apple with the aim of preventing copyright infringement. However, because Apple uses closed, non-standard technology for its copy protection (known as Digital Rights Management), the growth is seen as limited. In fact, Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently wrote that the market for online music sales is being limited by the lack of open access to DRM technology. By contrast, the podcast component of iTunes is growing quite dramatically, providing a means for many small and large audio and video distributors to share or sell their wares on the Web. Unlike the music and video sales, podcasts are based on open standards, assuring that it's easy to create, edit and distribute the podcast content.

In fact there is an update on Berners Lee's comments: in early January 2009 Steve Jobs announced that Apple has removed DRM from eight million of its 10 million songs, and the remaining two million will follow DRM-free by the end of March.

The World Wide Web is already free and open – and should remain so. I find it hard to understand why we are so often prepared to spend huge amounts of money having things done for us (building very expensive web sites for example) when basically the entire system is open, Berners Lee (and now the W3C Consortium he leads) openly explains all the protocols and processes needed to build a web, and it only requires some people to learn this language. Can we imagine saying to children today – no need to learn to read and write; just pay someone to do that for you while you concentrate on other things? Similarly today 'web literacy' needs to be considered along with reading and writing as a basic skill. A formation programme that leaves it out is missing something very important.

Forming today's digital native(:nl:)