The Quantified Self and What it Means for Learning

The Quantified Selfand Learning

Hans de Zwarte-Learning Event 2012

“What if the walls in yourhome could display all yourself-tracking data?” Laurie Frick

Apologies in advance:this is a story about a future

which doesn't exist yet

Apologies in advance:it will be to abstract for about

90% of the audience

Who am I?

Innovation Managerfor

Global Learning Technologiesat

Shell International

Digitale civil rights “activist”and free software fanatic

volunteering for

Bits of Freedomand

the Internet Society

Reader, fascinated by the idea of social engineering and by

The Big Lebowski

Innovation

Scenarios

Quantified Self

Learning

Risks

Wat does an innovationmanager do?

“Early experimentation will lead to invaluable experience and fewer mistakes in the future”

Medicine Patient→

Patient Medicine→

How do you help peoplethink strategically?

One way is: scenario thinking

Innovation

Scenarios

Quantified Self

Learning

Risks

Learning Scenarios Workshop

Online Educa, Dec. 2011

No predictions but better long term decisions

e.g. IT infrastructure or organisational models

Two axis with uncertainties

How work is organised:

planned, hierarchical↔

organic, project based

What work is based on:

relationships↔

data

Old BoyNetwork

relationships

data

planned,hierarchical

organic,project based

In-Crowd

QuantifiedSelfBig Data

Quantified self?

Innovation

Scenarios

Quantified Self

Learning

Risks

We start in 1945...

“A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

Vannevar Bush in “As You May Think”

“Clothing-based computing with personal imaging will blur the boundaries between seeing and viewing and between remembering and recording.”

Steve Mann

"A SenseCam is a black box about the size of a cigarette pack which contains an infrared system [..] and when it finds a person it takes a picture. It also takes a photograph when the light changes or at intervals up to a minute, depending on how it is set."

Gordon Bell

“One day I’m sure everyone will routinely collect all sorts of data about themselves. But because I’ve been interested in data for a very long time, I started doing this long ago.”

Stephen Wolfram

OutgoingMail

Appointmentsin Calendar

“It only takes a few minutes a dayof recording to create a pretty detailed data set of the year.”

Nicholas Felton

Sure Hans, but...

Scientistsand Artists

There is a “movement”

Consumer productsare available now

The Fitbit

“I'd like to think that Timeline succeeds at representing your history in a way that mirrors personal memory. The most recent section are your freshest memories and are all apparent. As you travel back in time the years become abbreviated and only the highlights are initially visible.”

Nicholas Felton

You are also being “measured” without you noticing

The costs of self-tracking will be so low that not measuring yourself contineously will be

considered “irresponsible”

First wave:use it to better your physique

Second wave:use it to improve cognitive skills

Now we have arrivedat learning

(a sigh of relief, finally!)

Innovation

Scenarios

Quantified Self

Learning

Risks

What do you need to learn?

1. You have to do somethingSomething you haven't done before

(“stretch assignment”, curiosity)

2. You have to reflectWhat just happened?

Adjust and tune

(3.) Certification/competencesis often added as a secondary process

What does quantifying yourself mean for: doing, reflection and

certification/competences?

A couple of my ideas...

1. Doing

Yes, I am not afraid to put forward the idea of a

personalised computer-based tutor

s

“Imagine that this tutor program can get to know you over a long period of time. Like a good teacher, it knows what you already understand and what you are ready to learn. It also knows what types of explanations are most meaningful to you.”

Danny Hillis over “Aristotle”

Will you be more daring?Insight in your own lack of change and

habits as a catalyst for change

Invitation for a more experimental mindset?

2. Reflection

Measuring creates a tight feedback loop

Think of what Amazon knows about you through the Kindle

Which pages did you spendthe most time on?

Which passages did you highlight? How does that differ

from the rest of the world, your colleagues and your

friends?

Hans around 2008-2009

Imagine a “temporal wordcloud” which you can use to see which themes you have

been paying attention to

Insight into your use of timeWhat percentage of my time have I been doing email,

sitting in meetings, talking at the water cooler or networking on LinkedIn?

Also for social skills

You can “query” yourself

“People argue about the need to forget things, but if you look at business discipline—advising that you write everything down, your goals and objectives, and return to them to see how you did, examining what went wrong—I think the same thing could happen with our personal lives. Being able to say, ‘Now I realize my tone of voice was threatening’—I think there’s a real positive aspect in having the real record of what things looked and sounded like, and sequences of events, because we often end up believing things that are not based on facts anymore.”

Jim Gemmel

3. Certification/competences

The end of competency management

The end of portfolios

Instead:

“views”/visualisations of a person

“searching” through a person

Automatic certifications?

“One can easily imagine submitting their usernames for Google Web History, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Blogs, Google Reader, YouTube, etc. IN PLACE OF taking a four hour high stakes exam like the ACT or GRE. Why make a high stakes decision based on a few hundred data points generated in one morning (when you could be sick, distracted, etc.) when you could get 1,000,000 data points generated over three years?”

David Wiley

Innovation

Scenarios

Quantified Self

Learning

Risks

Of course there are risks too

Can we still re-invent ourselves if we never forget anything?

“[..] Forgetting is not an annoying flaw but a life-saving advantage. As we forget, we regain the freedom to generalize, conceptualize, and most importantly to act.”

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger in “Delete”

z

A world constructed from the familiar is a world in which there’s nothing to learn ... (since there is) invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas.

Eli Pariser

The “filter bubble” will only get stronger (self-accelerating)

Sleepwalking into a surveillance state?

A last provocation:“the proactionary principle”

“People’s freedom to innovate technologically is highly valuable, even critical, to humanity. This implies a range of responsibilities for those considering whether and how to develop, deploy, or restrict new technologies. [..] Give a high priority to people’s freedom to learn, innovate, and advance.”

Max More

Quantifying = Learning

Questions?

Mail: h@nsdezwart.nlTwitter: @hansdezwart

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Steve Mann:http://www.whosdatedwho.com/tpx_5992219/steve-mann/photoVannevar Bush:http://archeocomputing.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/vannevar-bush.jpgGordon Bell:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gordon_Bell.jpgStephen Wolfram:http://www.wolframalpha.com/images/press/photos/sw/sw-sf1055-5x4.jpegWolfram measured images:http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/#more-2535Nicholas Felton: http://blog.noahkalina.com/post/18557358009/nicholas-felton-20120115-5-minutes-on-the-vergeBell timeline: http://opengl.jp/blogger/2005/11/mylifebits.htmlLaurie Frick (opening slide):http://www.lauriefrick.com/sleep-patterns/Online Educa workshop:http://online-educa.com/media-picture-galleryDanny Hillis:http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/06/10000-year-clock/all/1Victor Mayer-Schönberger:http://www.fotopedia.com/items/flickr-538333155Jim Gemmel:http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10353343-264.htmlBig Brother Awards: https://www.bigbrotherawards.nl/Max More:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Max_More,_Stanford_2006_(square_crop).jpgDavid Wiley:http://davidwiley.org/

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