Not only is O’Reilly’s post interesting because it contextualises some of his comments about web 2.0 – particularly his absolute focus on the user’s role in successful web 2.0 applications (applications win if they get better the more people use them), but it highlights different types – or levels of use of cloud computing.  O’Reilly labels them: ‘Utility Computing’, ‘Platform as Service’, and ‘Cloud-based end-user applications’.

All of these have implications for the way in which some educational services can be organised and delivered.  The implications of ‘Utility Computing’ of mass procurement of infrastructure; supporting developers of educational resources, to providing the necessary computational power for high level simulations and games.  The implications of ‘Platform as Service’, potentially with lower barriers to entry than that described as ‘utility computing’ is the possibility for more specific applications being developed from existing APIs for education.  This level of cloud computing allows those closer to the end user to develop more specific application:  what tweaks would you make to Google Docs to use it more effectively in your classroom?  How would a collaborative mindmapping tool be different if it were designed for your students and location?  The possibilities of greater customisation and development for local need becomes more apparent and potentially opens up routes for greater collaboration between developers and educators/students.

The most obvious implications for education though come in O’Reilly’s category ‘Cloud-based end-user applications’.  Any web 2.0 tool you care to think of, that provides the structure or tools for learners to build on their own input, is part of ‘the cloud’.  Learners accessing the tools they need, when they need them to make sense of their own data.  The possibilities of harnessing this potential in education is that we can really support the mobile learner where it is not the technology that is mobile, but the learner and – importantly – their personal data and information.  The possibilities of cloud computing for enhancing education, if not defined are certainly becoming clearer.  The task now is to investigate the preferable nature of these opportunities.

Recently, the doomsayers have been gaining the upper hand.  Curious to find out more about their worldview, I decided to set up an experiment in post-apocalyptic living, to learn what it might be like to live in the dark future they were foretelling. This article gives a brief outline of that experiment.

The utopia experiment, as I called it, started when I put an announcement on my website in January 2006 calling for volunteers to come and help me set up a temporary community in the Scottish Highlands. We would live as if modern civilisation had collapsed, growing our own food, generating our own power, and salvaging what technology we could from the wreckage.  Within a few months, I had received hundreds of applications to join the experimental community. And they weren’t all hippies in their twenties either, as one of my friends had predicted. With ages ranging from 18 to 67, and a roughly equal mix of men and women, they came from a wide range of backgrounds; an ex royal marine turned shoemaker, a computer programmer passionate about vegetables, a retired schoolteacher who had spent time with the Inuit.

It started in Mexico, while I was touring the Yucatan Peninsula.  I had long dreamed of visiting this part of the world, famous for the ruined cities of the Maya civilisation, which flourished in the first millennium, before collapsing rather suddenly around the tenth century.  And when I visited these lost cities, they did not disappoint.

I can still remember vividly the impact that the ruins of Uxmal had on me. As I surveyed the majestic temples and stone colonnades from the top of a steep pyramid, a feeling of melancholy overcame me. I pictured the bustling crowds who must have once thronged the streets and squares, over a thousand years before. In the distance, where once there would have been fields full of maize and beans, all that could be seen now was the green canopy of the jungle, which stretched in all directions, punctuated only here and there by the peeks of distant pyramids, marking the sites of other lost cities.

Nobody who visits these ruined cities can fail to wonder what happened to their original inhabitants, or why they were abandoned. Fortunately, archaeologists have pieced together the answer. The Maya collapse, it turns out, was not triggered by invasion, or any outside force; it was entirely self-caused. It seems the Maya depleted one of their principal resources – trees – and this led to a series of other problems, including soil erosion, decrease of usable farmland, and drought. The growing population that drove this overexploitation was then faced with a diminishing amount of food, which led to increasing migration and, eventually, bloody civil war.

As I sat atop that pyramid in Uxmal, a question began to form in my mind.  If a great civilisation like that of the Mayas can implode, I wondered, might not the same happen to us? There are, of course, some big differences between the civilisation we live in today and that of the Mayas. For one thing, our civilisation is global. This has both advantages and disadvantages. On the positive side, globalisation means that when one part of the world gets into trouble, it can appeal to the rest of the world for help. The Mayas did not have this luxury, because they were in effect isolated from the rest of the world. But on the negative side, globalisation means that when one part of the world gets into trouble, the trouble could quickly be exported and cascade throughout the tightly-integrated international system. If modern civilisation collapses, it will do so everywhere. Everyone now stands or falls together.

If the idea of our great global industrial civilisation crashing seems outlandish, no doubt the idea of their own civilisation collapsing would have seemed equally crazy to the Maya at their heyday. To the crowds who once thronged the now deserted streets of Tikal and Chichen-Itza, the idea that within a few years these streets would be deserted would have been hard to entertain. So perhaps those who refuse to contemplate the possibility of global collapse are simply suffering from a failure of imagination.

That’s when the idea for the utopia experiment came to me.  I would appeal for volunteers to live as if civilisation had recently collapsed.  It would be a kind of collaborative fiction, in which we would gradually flesh out an initial scenario and turn into a plausible narrative of life after the crash.  By acting it out in real life, I hoped our thoughts about such an existence would be more realistic than if we just sat around and made it up.

I returned to England from Mexico full of enthusiasm for my new project. The first task was to find a suitable location. My scenario called for somewhere rural, so the volunteers could grow their own food. Climate would be important too – and if climate change was one of the major contributors to the collapse of the old civilisation, the places favoured by the old climate might be too hot or too dry for new settlements. I began to peruse the scientific models forecasting the climate of different parts of the UK, and one area seemed to stand out as more favourable than most – the Highlands of Scotland. While the south of England would become increasingly dry with global warming, all the models predicted that rainfall would still be plentiful in the Highlands, while the rising temperatures would mean that average snowfalls there would reduce by up to ninety per cent.

Having secured a suitable location, the next step was to recruit volunteers for the experiment.  In January 2006, I put up a new page on my website, with the following announcement:

“Volunteers needed for a visionary experiment – from March 2007

From March 2007, I’ll be inviting volunteers to join me in an experiment in utopia in the Scottish highlands.  We will live together in a novel kind of community based on three main ideas:

1. It will be a LEARNING COMMUNITY – each member must have a distinctive skill or area of knowledge that they can teach to the others.

2. It will be a WORKING COMMUNITY – no money is required from the members, but all must contribute by working.

3. It will be strictly TIME-LIMITED.  This is not an attempt to found an ongoing community.  Members may stay for up to three months, but may also come for as little as two weeks.“

To make it clear that this was not just another commune, I made it clear that the aim of the experiment would be to simulate life after the collapse of modern civilisation:

“The main objective of this experiment,” I wrote, “is to simulate life in the aftermath of a collapse of global civilisation and to prepare for such an eventuality.”  The announcement finished by asking potential volunteers to email me a short (200 word) description of themselves and what they could offer the community.

At first I made no attempt to promote the project or tell anyone the announcement was there. I didn’t know if anyone would see the website, or respond. But, the wonders of the internet being what they are, somehow people found their way to this page, and within a few days I received the first application.   It was from a 51 year old man who called himself Agric. 

When I eventually met him in person, he turned out to be a softly spoken man with shocks of white hair and irrepressible energy (a “hobbit on speed”, as another volunteer once remarked), . He lived in Slough and worked in computers – but he was planning to sell his house and become a nomad. It didn’t take me long to realise that Agric was a committed “doomer” – a believer in the coming apocalypse. For him, the scenario we were playing out at the utopia experiment was not just a collaborative fiction. It was preparation for the real thing. He could always back up his gloomy prognostications with lengthy discourses on the stock exchange, the global economy and, of course, peak oil.

One of the main lessons from my experiment was how easy it was for people to make the same ideological transition that Agric had already made – from imagining what it might be like if civilisation really did collapse, to firmly believing that it would collapse.  The experiment was originally meant to be a kind of collaborative fiction, in which we would gradually flesh out an initial scenario and turn it into a plausible narrative of life after the crash.  The problem, as it turned out, was that our thoughts became too realistic.  With the benefit of hindsight, I should have seen this coming.  A similar thing, after all, happened in the famous Stanford Prison Experiment conducted in 1971 by Phillip Zimbardo, when the undergraduates who he selected to live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building started taking their roles far too seriously.  Zimbardo had to terminate the experiment early, and in the end I also decided to curtail the experiment after a year.

For me, one of the final straws came when some of the volunteers started talking about justice.  Without any police force, surely we would have to enact our own – inevitably rough – kind of justice?  That sort of thing is ok to write about in fiction, but it could get very dangerous if you begin to start acting it out in reality.

Besides the transition from taking the scenario as an interesting fiction and an accurate prediction, I also witnessed another strange mutation; the volunteers began to think of the future collapse as something good.  It’s the opposite to sour grapes – Jon Elster has called it “sweet lemons”. This strain of thought has many names.  Luddism.  Anti-technologism.  Anti-transhumanism.  Primitivism.  Bioconservatism.  But they all amount to the same thing.

Part of the appeal of this current of thought is that it provides an easy explanation for a sense of anomie.  Boredom, frustration, anxiety, depression?  According to the Luddites, we can blame them all on industrial civilisation.  If we were hunter-gatherers, living in small bands consisting mostly of family members, in contact with nature, directly satisfying our own biological needs each day, then we’d be happy, right?  Well, maybe.  But that was the past, and we can’t go back there now.  Or maybe we can – if society collapses…. That’s one reason why Luddism is so dangerous: it encourages people to imagine social collapse as something desirable.

Thinking about the future can be done in a sensible way, but only when one is aware of the many pitfalls that we tend to fall into when trying to do futurology.  The utopia experiment taught me about many of these pitfalls.  Besides the tendency to take fiction as truth, and the sweet-lemons phenomenon, I also witnessed what the security expert Bruce Schneier refers as the tendency to focus on “movie plot threats”.  People worry about dramatic threats of the sort that make good movies – and convince themselves that these are probable just because they are dramatic.  As Schneier says:

“We all do it. Our imaginations run wild with detailed and specific threats. We imagine anthrax spread from crop dusters. Or a contaminated milk supply. Or terrorist scuba divers armed with almanacs. Before long, we’re envisioning an entire movie plot, without Bruce Willis saving the day. And we’re scared”

Psychologically, this all makes sense. Evolution has endowed us with good imaginations.  But these imaginations are often seduced by dramatic images and pay little attention to good probabilistic reasoning.

When I did eventually call an end to the experiment, most of the volunteers returned happily to their former lives, but some of them wanted to carry on.  Indeed, they were shocked that I did not want to carry on with them.  When I explained that the experiment had always been just that – an experiment, a kind of collaborative fiction – they didn’t believe me, even though I had clearly stated that at the outset.  A few of them are, I believe, still thinking about trying to buy some land of their own in a remote part of Scotland so they can live there permanently and prepare for the coming apocalypse for real.   And they are convinced that someday, I’ll see the light, and come and join them.”

Element 1. Different ways of organising social groups that (potentially) move away from hierarchical organisation to more collective approaches in making the most of the cultural capital of the group. Particularly, I’m thinking here about the way in which organisations share knowledge, expertise and ideas – not just schools and ‘learning organisations’, but workplaces within the knowledge economy. The three necessary categories for harnessing collective wisdom, according to Surowiecki, are: aggregation, diversity and independence – mechanisms must be in place to bring together the views and opinions of the group; the group needs to be diverse in experience and knowledge, and their views must be able to be shared independently (not altered through peer pressure etc). This relates to BCH’s Challenge 3, which is looking at trends in the production and definition of knowledge. It also relates to BCH’s Challenge 4, which is aiming to understand trends in work and employment.

Element 2. Democracy and citizenship become important topics for discussion in relation to understanding how groups can interact differently in making decisions. Those who advocate developing current democratic practices (based upon majority-rule) to more participatory forms of governance suggest that current democratic practices are more closely tied to oligarchical practices (claiming, for example participation stops when leaving the voting booth). Challenge 5 is looking that the trends in the relationships between state, private and third sector provision of public services – and in relation to this is it interesting to think about the demands from communities and citizens if they become or demand greater participation. Challenge 2 is looking at Identities, Citizenship and Communities and may provide interesting reading in this area.

Element 3. Participation. Within the BCH programme we have various different ways of encouraging engagement with a wide variety of people and organisations. The general model we’re using sees Communication approaches (such as the website, blog, newsletter etc) as a means of sharing information and progress; activities and events (such as workshops, presentations, comments on the blog, Million Futures and BCH Power League) as normative approaches to participation; and finally deliberative engagement with BCH through a Citizens Council, Citizens Panel, expert interviews and facilitated forums. (I’ll return to the Citizens Council and Panel in a later post). Making sense of many different voices and channels of communications is important to this programme both to ensure that it is built upon the values and aspirations of education’s stakeholders (that’s all of you!) and also so that it is informed by the diversity of ideas and expertise that Surowiecki talks about. In an earlier blog post I put a link to a Grupthink question to gather your views – interestingly in his presentation, Surowiecki mentioned this tool. (If you’re interested in participating in any way, get in touch and we can find a suitable approach!)

A fourth element relates to Technological trends. A paper from the Scientific and Technology Subgroup reported on some of the key trends emerging in computing, bioscience and maths that will develop over the next 15 – 50 years. It highlights Birnbaum’s ‘Once-per-decade-disruptions’ with a possible example being ‘large scale socio-technical Systems of Systems’ (page 12 of the paper). The paper is certainly worth grabbing a cuppa and a biscuit and having a read: the possibilities offered by the affordances of systems of systems is worth considering in relation to group dynamics and ways of working together, as is the stark warning about the rate of technological progress in relation to that of our reliance upon and understanding of complex systems.

Although of course, mass participation will not always lead to expected or perhaps desired results. Just ask Mr Splashypants.  (*Update – for more internet memes try this timeline*)