da Scriffles

How many centuries did the human race work to fly by flapping before we realised that you don't have to flap to fly?

If you watch a bird fly then you notice that it also glides long distances without flapping.

One day someone asked himself: "Why? How does a bird do this?"

Curiosity led to an explanation and he found out ... we joined the birds and promptly forgot "why".

International educator, Larry Johnson, launched the first Horizon Report on Australian education in Brisbane in May.

He gave a highly entertaining and enlightened talk on what needs to change to integrate the education system into the 21st century. Johnson works with governments and educators all over the world.

His company, the New Media Consortium, is a non-profit group that explores the use of new media and technology.

He has a unique, global perspective and his experience of tech started with building radios with his dad to taking video calls from his two-year-old granddaughter today.

So what does he think effective education is? 

You need to make their jaws drop in awe. Effective education makes kids jaws drop. In India, he knows a teacher who runs a mobile science van. Kids do hands-on activities, such as making a plastic bottle shoot a paperball.

The teacher shows them how "pressure" inside the bottle shoots the ball of paper at them and explains that the same pressure gets planes off the ground. 

Johnson has adopted this teacher's mission to build curiosity in children. To this mission Johnson adds the need to teach mutual respect, and the ability to collaborate. But curiosity is at the top of the list of non-negotiables.

The lesson for people doing the "strategic thinking" to design an effective education system for the 21st Century here is this:

It's not about building a better 20th century, or a better 19th, or 18th - it's about the 21st century.

"What are we focused on?" he asks. "Our strategic thinking is based on a world that no longer exists," he said.

To paraphrase him, "Are we looking to the cold, dark past or into the light of dawn of a new future?"

Sometimes, he said, in order to see the rainbow you just need to change your perspective. Just look out the window, he said.

"The net is like air for children today." His two-year-old grandaughter calls him via video phone and learned her way around an iPad in the twinkle of an eye.

"Facetime Grandpa!"

"We need to build a world as it needs to be for them, that's a very different thing to the world we wish it was for us."

And there's more to this looking at things differently business. What is the network?

Is it the 1.3 billion mobile phones sold every year? Is it the html browsers?

Like do you really think that "The Network" is the National Broadband Network, or the five cables under the oceans that connect Australia to the world? (Singapore has 22 by the way)

"The network is us." He didn't realise this point until his 27-year-old son, who teaches high school in Korea, told him. The network is not cables and computers and phones - it's us, people, we are the network.

There were 6 billion active mobile phones in the world in 2011 - 76 percent have html browser - 96percent have basic browsers - but that's not the network that came into play to make an Arab Spring. The government actually turned that network off in Egypt and the "actual" network kept going - you can't switch it off.

Sometimes you just need to be looking out the window to see the rainbow.

Johnson showed a map of the world taken from space and all the lights show where electricity burns. Then he flashed up the same map showing all the geographical mobile phone connections - guess which one burns brighter?

The reach of the mobile network is BIGGER than the electric grid.

The "network" was radio when he was kid. He made radios with his dad - that was high-tech in the 1950s - FDR fireside chats. His father explained how radio waves bounce around the world so they can listen to the Casius Clay fight in Paris in the wee hours of the morning.

Then television came along. They watched the top-rating show on a Wednesday night The Beverly Hill Billies.

Marshall McLuhan warned - "The network is changing us."

And in 1963, the most trusted man on television, Walter Cronkite, rocked the country with the announcement that the president had been shot in Dallas.

"The entire country stopped for three days in a profound collective mourning," he said.

"We didn't really know what it was that we were experiencing."

So he decided to study computer science to explore the network.

Some practical points that need some thought to factor into "stategic thinking":

• Today people expect to be able to work, learn and socialize where ever-whenever
• Only five cables connect Australia to the rest of the world - Singapore has 22 communication cables 
• the internet is no longer about the Gigabytes anymore it's about mobile
• it's about The Cloud stupid
• openness is the new value - it's not a trend.
• 80 percent of our lives is not spent in school - so how important do you think "informal" education is?

Has your mouth dropped? Because mine did as I listened to the man.

And then he ended it with Benny E King's Stand By Me and he stood silent on stage. He put himself through uni playing jazz and he's a photographer who gets up early to photograph dawn.

Seems to me that he's building a picture of the dawn of the 21st Century here. Will you stand by him?

Ralph Waldo Emerson was wrong when he wrote: "Essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf". Because the Industrial Revolution has touched everything.

The 18th Century is coming to a close - a little late - in the 21st century when what we need is another industrial revolution, thanks to peak oil and peak debt and climate change. Revolution of universal design with universal application ... if you want to invest, invest in community, invest in people.

This is the message from today's philosophers who gathered at Berkeley's Ecoliteracy Centre for the Systems Thinking seminar by Fritjof Capra in June.

 

In one action-packed week in San Francisco, I managed to more than fulfil all three goals for my trip:

• to catch up with family
• to hear Fritjof Capra speak
• to walk in nature.

 

On the riverboat trip across Lake Tahoe to Emerald Bay, we listened to words of Mark Twain delivered by an actor who impersonated Twain.

"To obtain the air the angels breathe, you must go to Tahoe." _ Mark Twain

My cousin informed me that "They ran a bumper sticker campaign to "Keep Tahoe Blue". Turns out climate change has warmed the waters of one of the world's largest alpine lakes. 

The dramatic landscape and cool, cool basin of blue water was carved by melting glaciers. But less snow falls in winter, more rain falls, the seasons have changed. To me, it seems that angels still breathe the air there but imagine what it must have been like when Emerson and Twain were around? 

My father's cousin took me to see Muir Woods - a massive, old-growth, redwood forest basically in the heart of the San Francisco Bay Area. It is as incredible as the Daintree Rainforests of North Queensland. Except instead of ascending into the mountains, you descend along a winding road into the depths of a fairytale forest.

Here's a quick video of Muir Wood:

What's all this got to do with Systems Thinking? Well, ecology is a system and we are part of this system. Definitely no better than a redwood.

I'm guessing that the wood may exist due to the cloud forests - the infamous bay mists - just as the Daintree's Uplands are sustained by the cloud forests that blow in from The Great Barrier Reef. If these mists disappear due to seasonal changes (read global warming) these ancient ecosystems will fail due to climate change.

Scientists say Evolution started in places like these. The oldest coastal redwoods in Muir Woods are up to 1200 years old - so they were giants even 200 years ago when Ralph Waldo and Twain marvelled at nature.

Ralph, a philosopher poet who loved nature, could not ever imagine that man could exhaust nature - even though he worried about the consequences of the great Industrial Revolution's inexhaustible drive to make more stuff quicker. This is quite a feat.

 I travelled to San Francisco to hear another philosopher, the physicist-author Fritjof Capra, talk about Systems Thinking at the Ecoliteracy Centre. 

He's writing a new book on Systems Thinking. I've wanted to hear him speak ever since I read his book The Tao of Physics in about 2008 - I came to it late. It was first published in 1975. I managed to ask him to elaborate on how he came to write it.

The physicist took took time out from his academic and scientific research to write this book about how physics is proving Eastern philosophy. People hung on his every word.

Climate skeptics can deny all knowledge and ban climate science from being taught in schools but the truth is that when you teach ecology you are teaching systems thinking and systems connect us to everything in the cosmos - all the way through evolution to the first bubble the popped.

Fritjof Capra, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Ecoliteracy Centre, Aristotle share one trait - they teach that we must learn from nature rather than try to defeat nature.

I bought many books at the Ecoliteracy Centre, like Cradle to Cradle, Remaking the Way We Make Things, ©2002, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. 

Many books, such as this one and the one Capra is writing, advocate a new Industrial Revolution. We need to learn to make things better so that there is not so much waste - as in nature.

"If the first Industrial Revolution had a motto, we like to joke, it would be 'If brute force doesn't work, you're not using enough of it'." _ Cradle to Cradle.

If "make it fit" was good enough for industrial solutions in the 18th century then what's wrong with industry of today? Make it fit again, redesign it, make it fit in ways that follow nature's design. Build new industries, build new markets, isn't that what business and industry do? 

See Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation. Berkeley's Ecoliteracy Centre is funded through philanthropy and is designed to the tip-top sustainability ratings in the USA.