2015 06-11--continuous change--black-swans_sab (2)
•Download as PPT, PDF•
0 likes•393 views
This presentation, prepared by Paul Signorelli and Samantha Becker for delivery at the New Media Consortium 2015 Summer Conference (in Washington, D.C.), focuses on developing skills needed to deal with unexpected change--particularly for those working in educational technology. The slides were designed by Samantha; Paul wrote the script that is accessible by clicking the "Notes" icon directly below and to the right of this description.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
More from Paul Signorelli
More from Paul Signorelli (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
2015 06-11--continuous change--black-swans_sab (2)
- 2. PAUL SIGNORELLI PAUL@PAULSIGNORELLI.COM @PAULSIGNORELLI SAMANTHA BECKER SAMANTHA@NMC.ORG @SAMBECKERTWEETS SWAN’T TO GET IN TOUCH? #NMC15BSWAN
- 4. “What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it.”
- 6. AN INVITATION TO THE BALL… BLACKSWANBALL.ORG
- 8. BRINGING THE BALL… TO YOUR HOME COURT.
- 9. BLACK SWAN FRAME OF MIND UNTETHERING
- 12. RECONNAISSANCE
- 13. NEXT STEPS
- 14. SUMMARY
- 15. FROM THE NMC Black Swan Ball site: blackswanball.org All available NMC Horizon Reports: horizon.nmc.org NMC Horizon Project Higher Ed wiki: horizon.wiki.nmc.org FROM THE BUILDING CREATIVE BRIDGES BLOG Articles about the Black Swan Ball: buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com/?s=black+swan+ball Articles about Horizon reports: RESOURCES
- 16. QUESTIONS?
- 17. FOR MORE INFORMATION… Paul Signorelli & Associates 1032 Irving St., #514 San Francisco, CA 94122 415.681.5224 paul@paulsignorelli.com paulsignorelli.com Twitter: @paulsignorelli buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com Samantha Adams Becker 1250 Capitol of Texas Hwy South, Building 3, Suite 400 Austin, TX 78746 504.267.3165 samantha@nmc.org www.nmc.org
Editor's Notes
- Let us, in the spirit of exploring change, innovation, and the dealing with the unexpected, do something unexpected: Take no more than two minutes to reset this room in any way that makes it more conducive as a space to support our learning while we’re together today… [after the room has been reset:] That was a relatively small change. The concept of the Black Swan is much larger and much more significant: I It’s something so apparently unpredictable that we don’t even see it coming until we are beak to beak with it. We’re talking here about things at the level of 9/11. Or, to imagine a Black Swan that hasn’t yet become visible, the discovery of a village here in the United States where everyone has five arms and drinks nothing but sunshine—something that, when it appears, changes our assumptions and our actions at significant levels. We’re really talking about something so apparently beyond the realm of possibilities that we don’t see it and don’t know what to do with it when it actually does show up. The New Media Consortium explorations of Black Swans began when Larry Johnson and others acknowledged that we’re good at documenting what we can see, and recognized the need to ask ourselves a critically important question: “What might we be missing?” Here’s a summary, from Wikipedia, about how “Black Swan” came to be a symbol for what we failed to accurately anticipate/predict: “The phrase "black swan" derives from a Latin expression; its oldest known occurrence is the poet Juvenal's characterization of something being "rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno" ("a rare bird in the lands and very much like a black swan"; 6.165).[4] When the phrase was coined, the black swan was presumed not to exist. The importance of the metaphor lies in its analogy to the fragility of any system of thought. A set of conclusions is potentially undone once any of its fundamental postulates is disproved. In this case, the observation of a single black swan would be the undoing of the logic of any system of thought, as well as any reasoning that followed from that underlying logic. Juvenal's phrase was a common expression in 16th century London as a statement of impossibility. The London expression derives from the Old World presumption that all swans must be white because all historical records of swans reported that they had white feathers.[5] In that context, a black swan was impossible or at least nonexistent. After Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered black swans in Western Australia in 1697,[6] the term metamorphosed to connote that a perceived impossibility might later be disproven. Taleb notes that in the 19th century John Stuart Mill used the black swan logical fallacy as a new term to identify falsification.[7] Let’s turn to the book that inspired the New Media Consortium’s Black Swan Ball earlier this year and that is going to serve as the foundation for what we do together today.
- We predict, therefore we fail… The gist of Taleb’s wonderfully dense and inspiring book is that we incorrectly believe we are good at forecasting. The entire book not only shows us how wrong we are, but also suggests that we need to recognize how unprepared this incorrect belief makes us when those Black Swans show up. Selected notes from the beginning of the book: pp. xvii-xviii “I push one step beyond this philosophical-logical question into an empirical reality, and one that has obsessed me since childhood. What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. “First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, (p. xviii) human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.” p. xix “The central idea of this book concerns our blindness with respect to randomness, particularly the large deviations: Why do we, scientists or nonscientists, hotshots or regular Joes, tend to see the pennies instead of the dollars? Why do we keep focusing on the minutiae, not the possible significant large events, in spite of the obvious evidence of their huge influence? And if you follow my argument, why does reading the newspaper actually decrease your knowledge of the world?” p. xx “What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. This is all the more worrisome when we engage in deadly conflicts: wars are fundamentally unpredictable (and we do not know it). Owing to this misunderstanding of the causal chains between policy and actions, we can easily trigger Black Swans thanks to aggressive ignorance—like a child playing with a chemistry kit.” p. xxi “We do not spontaneously learn that we don’t learn that we don’t learn. The problem lies in the structure of our minds; we don’t learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don’t seem to be good at getting. We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion.” p. xxiv “Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses on the ‘normal,’ particularly with ‘bell curve’ methods of inference that tell you close to nothing. Why? Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its nickname in this book is GIF, Great intellectual Fraud.” p. xxvii “The philosopher Edna Ullmann-Margalit detected an inconsistency in this book and asked me to justify the use of the precise metaphor of a Black Swan to describe the unknown, the abstract, and imprecise uncertain—white ravens, pink elephants, or evaporating denizens of a remote planet orbiting Tau Ceti. Indeed, she caught me red handed. There is a contradiction; this book is a story, and I prefer to use stories and vignettes to illustrate our gullibility about stories and our preference for the dangerous compression of narratives. “You need a story to displace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read. If I have to go after what I call the narrative disciplines, my best tool is a narrative. “Ideas come and go, stories stay.”
- Here’s the heart of our dilemma, from page 10 of the book…
- When we place this in the context of the New Media Consortium Horizon Project, we see what is already in place: the reports are not designed to document White Swans or Black Swans; they lead us toward the Gray Swans that may not yet be in our ponds or lakes, but are visible, at various levels, somewhere along the horizon of our visual field. Our reports document what is happening so we can prepare us for what is coming… …but this doesn’t necessarily prepare us for what we do not know is coming… [More about the Horizon Project at: http://www.nmc.org/nmc-horizon/]
- The New Media Consortium’s Black Swan Ball brought around 50 of us together just outside of Austin, TX in January 2015 to explore the theme of Black Swans and how best to deal with them when they appear. But while the conversations were rich and inspiring, they still focused more on what we’re calling (in our session today) “Gray Swans”—things we can already see even if they haven’t completely landed in our learning pond yet: drones in learning, the quantified self, and machine learning, for example.
- We took a variety of approaches in our efforts to stimulate Black-Swan thinking: Before the summit began, New Media Consortium staff set up online collaborative spaces that Black Swan Ball participants could use to create responses to the Swans we were discussing. During the summit, discussions were initiated through brief, formal presentations that helped us visualize what might come out of a particular Swan’s arrival. We also created opportunities to extend the conversations beyond the room through things as simple as tweeting and through more ambitious approaches including online sites where projects could continue to be developed not only with Black Swan Ball participants, but with the participation of others who weren’t present for the initial discussion. There was a sense of playfulness integrated into all that we did—including assigning the names of superheroes to the various discussion groups.
- We’re proposing to build upon all of that today by asking you to: Think about what a Black Swan might look like to you, within your own settings Identify skills, frames of mind, and resources that will help all of us effectively cope with Black Swans when they arrive Identify what we can do individually and as a group to keep this Black Swan conversation going long after the formal hour-long session concludes To do this, we’re going to offer a couple of suggestions, then spend the remainder of our time encouraging you to engage in the best Dancing With Swans moments you can imagine and create.
- Let’s swim with our Black Swan for a few minutes to set ourselves up for some productive, unpredictable, Black Swan conversations… We might start by acknowledging that we’re frequently tethered to our experiences and assumptions in ways that prevent us from being able to see a Black Swan. So, the starting point here is to deliberately try to untether ourselves a bit from those experiences and assumptions that are most likely to hinder us in our efforts to cope with Black Swans.
- We might also recognize the power of improvisation. A basic tenet of improv is to say “yes” rather than “no” to whatever comes our way. Saying “yes” in improvisation is what leads to some of the most rewarding moments in the process; saying “no” automatically shuts down the improv moment/frame of mind.
- Let’s seed the discussion a bit by offering a few examples of some potential Black Swans: What if very copy of PowerPoint disappeared completely tomorrow and we were told we could not recreate anything even vaguely resembling PowerPoint? How would that alter the way we facilitate teaching-training-learning? What if we were told that, effective tomorrow, we would no longer measure learning with grades or badges? How would we set our learning goals, how would we begin to redesign what we do with our learners, and what, if anything, would replace grades and badges and other existing ways of measuring learning? What if we were told that our current onsite and online learning spaces would no longer be available to us after midnight tonight? Given a completely blank slate, where would be take our teaching-training-learning efforts? The point here is not necessarily to discuss these examples, but to sit with the colleagues next to you and try to imagine the unimaginable in your own settings. [leave time here for brief group discussions and debrief]
- Staying within the groups you have already formed: Identify skills, frames of mind, and resources that will help all of us effectively cope with Black Swans when they arrive [leave time here for brief group discussions and debrief]
- Staying within the groups you have already formed: Identify what we can and will do individually and as a group to keep this Black Swan conversation going long after the formal hour-long session concludes [leave time here for brief group discussions and debrief]
- [participants each have opportunity to mention one thing they learned, will do, or will not do as a result of having joined this session today]
- Several resources to explore…