Tag Archives: online

Blog

Bill Gates sez: screw university, study online

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In case any of Mister Gates’ lawyers are reading this, the above headline is a deliberately overstated paraphrasing (it’s how we write on the intertubes, y’know). But the nugget of truth is there: Ol’ Bill spoke at the Technonomy conference last week, and suggested that in another five years or so, more people will be studying online than in universities and colleges [via SlashDot].

I presume he means colleges and universities in the US, though I’d suggest that “first world” nations like the US and the UK will actually have the slowest rate of take-up for online study, as university attendance has the weight and kudos of long tradition to prop it up. But as distrust of the higher and further education systems grows, and more and more new graduates come to realise they’ve put themselves deep into the debt hole for a piece of paper that makes little or no difference to their employment prospects, a shift to what we might call “entrepreneurial learning” is pretty inevitable. Take me as an example: I build websites for a living, but have never had so much as a minute of formal tuition or education in the field; I just googled my way into it, found out what I needed to know as I needed to know it.

But the more important factor here is motivation: as the cost of formal education soars, people will think more carefully about why they’re studying. A degree is much less a means to an end than it used to be, and much as I’ve repeatedly considered doing a degree by distance learning, it’s for the satisfaction of the accomplishment rather than any illusion that my employability would be significantly enhanced. Hence “entrepreneurial learning”: skills and conceptual frameworks acquired with purpose in response to direct needs, rather than abstract knowledge sets accumulated toward a set of targets that may well have no equivalent in the employment marketplace.

The bad side to this, of course, is the lack of clear metrics for employers as to what a potential employee knows. But from anecdotal evidence that’s as least as old as I am, that’s been a problem with the existing system for some time. Perhaps we’ll see a return to competency testing in job interviews? The rise of a sort of zaibatsu-apprenticeship system? A greater percentage of freelance workers in a greater range of industries?

Blog

World of Statecraft

I try to avoid reusing the headlines of articles I link to, but in this case I just had to let The Guardian‘s choice carry through, because it’s just too good to improve upon. The story: there’s an MMORPG in the pipeline that essentially models and recreates the European Parliament.

The game will allow players to gain points and move up levels by proposing legislation, amending laws, writing articles for an online newspaper and other tasks. The developers are in discussions with journalism schools and secondary school teachers to incorporate the game into teaching modules.

The game will allow for fictional pieces of legislation to be crafted and track real bills making their way through the European legislative machine. The game’s developers, the European Service Network, a Brussels communications agency that until now has mostly been responsible for producing EU brochures and websites, saw the popularity of online games such as World of Warcraft and thought they could make a sort of legislative Middle Earth out of the European parliament.

“It’s completely out of the box. It’s an experiment as a means of bringing together the best trends in the internet to stimulate discussion about Europe,” said ESN’s manager of the project, Ahmed ElAmin.

“World of Warcraft was one of the inspirations. It’s the biggest online role-playing game there is. It shows there is a huge audience for 3D online worlds.”

Well, yes, there is a huge audience for online 3D RPGs… but most of them involve goals and rewards of a more visceral kind than ramming through (or blocking) some obscure but important chunk of legislature. And I’m docking you ten points, Mr ElAmin, for your use of “out of the box”. Tsk..

Snark aside, it’s an interesting attempt to open up the mechanics of European democracy to the layman, and I think I’ll be giving it a look at some point (time permitting, natch). But it rather begs the question: once we reach a point where we can simulate a large-scale consensus democracy online, why the hell don’t we abandon the pretense of simulation and let it run that way for real?

Blog

Free preview of Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House

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I’ve never read an Ian McDonald novel I didn’t love*.As such, I commend unto you this Tor.com preview of a chapter from Mister Mcdonald’s newest novel, The Dervish House, courtesy of those nice people at Pyr Books.

Continuing his ongoing project of setting near-future sf in developing/non-WASP nations, The Dervish House is set in a Turkey not too far from now, having been recently absorbed into the European Union… plenty of fertile ground for speculation there. A confluence of geography means cultures and ideas have mixed and clashed in that part of the world for millennia, and the sociopolitical state of the Old World suggests it’ll get another turn in the spotlight soon.

There’s a copy of The Dervish House lurking in my TBR pile, and it’s one the ones that keeps whispering to me about how my currently-in-progress reading and reviewing commitments just aren’t as important as I’ve managed to convince myself they are… filthy bookses. They talks to me, they does. Ahem.

So, any other Ian McDonald fans in the house? Or anyone found him not to their taste at all? Tell us why!

[ * Caveat: I’ve not read them all, though. YMMV, etcetera etcetera. But if you can read Desolation Road and genuinely not find it mad charming, you are dead to me. In the nicest possible way. ]

Blog

Read this story: The Exterminator’s Want-Ad by Bruce Sterling

As I seem to be having a “recommend stuff elsewhere” kind of day here at Futurismic, here’s another suggestion for you. In between its non-fiction material (focussed, as its name might suggest, on building future communities based on sharing and mutual cooperation) Shareable.net is running science fiction stories from some big names to illustrate its chosen topics. The latest offering, “The Exterminator’s Want-Ad”, is from none other than Bruce Sterling – a darkly humorous first-person missive from an incarcerated former Beltway lobbyist and climate change denial huckster, locked up and “realigned” by the networked socialists of a post-climate-collapse near-future.

I could hear some of you make a sharp intake of political breath there, so let me reassure you that although Sterling evidently (and vocally) sides with progressive “bright green” sociopolitics, the socialist society he depicts is no naive utopia; if you’ve read his recent novel The Caryatids, you’ll know he’s more than able to draw every faction of the political future with all its warts and scars and human flaws fully to the front. I’m even tempted to label both works as non-partisan satires… but hey, go read it and make your own mind up.

And while you’re over there, Shareable has lots of other sf-nal content, such as interviews with Kim Stanley Robinson and Paolo Bacigalupi; go take a look around.

[ It also looks like they need to get a better comment spam plugin… ]

Interviews

Juggling Reality: An interview with Keith Brooke

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[ This interview was done for Futurismic by Mike Revell, and sent in literally about three months ago; thanks to the chaotic events of my personal life around that time, it never got added to the publication schedule when it should have been. I present it now with my thanks – and profound apologies – to Mike, and to Keith as well. Thanks for your patience, gents. ]

Thirteen months ago, in a creative writing seminar at the University of Essex, Keith Brooke walked into the room dressed in jeans and a faded shirt, and sat behind his desk at the head of the class. The murmur of idle student chatter fizzled and faded at a brief smile, a ruffling of notes.

He didn’t look the sort of man to have invented a time machine. But now, one year and two novels later, it would certainly explain a lot if he had done.

As well as teaching at the university, Keith runs their website, too; he created, and for many years maintained and edited infinity plus, a vast online home for speculative fiction that has since spawned a number of printed anthologies; and he has written a plethora of short stories and novels. His most recent book, The Accord, was published in March last year and received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, while the eagerly anticipated The Unlikely World of Faraway Frankie is due out was published in April.

I caught up with him last week and talked the internet, storytelling, and managing a myriad of different realities. Continue reading Juggling Reality: An interview with Keith Brooke →