Big History

I am currently (not at this second, but at this time) listening to a wonderful lecture series from The Teaching Company called Big History. The lecturer is Professor David Christian from San Diego State University. I mention this for three reasons.

First, the lecture series from the Teaching Company are wonderfully interesting lectures on a diverse range of topics and I highly recommend them. I have listened to dozens of these lectures comprising hundreds of hours of informative enjoyment. I listen while in the car or while out walking or hiking. For the enjoyment value alone these lectures are worthwhile. But, that is not all.

Second, exposure to a diverse range of ideas is very important as you never know where important insights may come from. I can say with a fairly high degree of certainly that I have not listened to a single set of lectures that has not provided me with insights well beyond the topics of the lectures. These insights usually apply to things I am currently working on or thinking about and provide me with new ways of looking at problems.

And third, this ties in with what I was saying in my last post. So it is on point to this thread. However, that will take a little explaining. Christian's thesis is that you can unify all of history from the Big Bang to modern times, despite the vast differences in the scale of time and space by looking at history as a process of the creation of great complexity. Further, if we see this complexity as occurring in steps, we can see it line up with our current academic disciplines. Cosmology (Big Bang), Astronomy (Stars and Solar Systems), Geology (Planets), Chemistry (Particles), Biology (Life Forms), Sociology (Societies), and so on. This is a very clever idea and I have not done it justice here, but have sketched out enough to make my point.

Social interaction is the engine by which societies form and evolve. As such, it is on a par with, say Chemical Reactions or Biological Reactions. We have a reasonably good grasp these days on chemical reactions, less on biological reactions, and less yet on social interaction. Tinkering with chemical reactions when you don't understand them puts you at risk for blowing yourself up. Tinkering with biological reactions when you don't understand them puts you at risk for poisoning yourself. Tinkering with social interaction must put you at risk for something. But we don't even understand enough to know what we might be risking. Yet we have these powerful accelerants called social interaction technologies. And we have no idea what the consequences of these technologies might be. So, context may be a little more important than we realize.

Technology versus Context

Most classes in Information Technology focus on the technology rather than on the context of the technology. For example, if one were to take a class in a programming language, say C# just to use a current example, one would, hopefully, learn how to program in that language. This is a good thing and I don't wish to diminish it. However, I do wish to point out what is lost.

There is a history of programming languages. Over the past fifty years programming languages have changed dramatically. If you were to take someone who learned a programming language at one point and show them programming ten years later, they would probably not recognize it. In fact, today, most programming is the assembling of reusable components in an integrated development environment. That is very, very different from what I learned. In fact, it was an uphill climb for me to get used to this new paradigm.

C# is an example of an imperative programming language. There are also functional and logic languages that were more popular when artificial intelligence was ascendant.

Over the years the monarchy of programming languages has changed considerably. Languages like Cobol, PL1, C++, and Ada were the languages du jour while many current students have never even heard of them. Java is currently the language du jour and it won't be long before it joins the rest of the pack in obscurity.

The problem here is that if you teach a person to program, they learn how to program in that one language. If you teach a person the context, they can learn new languages as they evolve. This is not generally a problem as most students only program in the early part of their careers. By the time their skills have become out of date they have moved on to other things like design, or management or working with clients.

One of Murphy's Laws of Technology states that if builders built buildings the way that programmers write programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization. We have seen how shortsightedness in the financial industry can create problems. I wonder if we are not being similarly shortsighted in our technological infrastructure. Having programmers write programs that they know they will not have to maintain cannot be a good thing.

But, there is an even larger point here. Programming languages are just one instance of education in Information Technology. Overwhelmingly classes in Information Technology focus on the technology rather than the context. As I think about it, I also wonder if other disciplines don't do the same. Well, I am getting a little far afield here and should probably think about this a little more.

Summer is Underway

I took a break from this blog for a few weeks as I negotiated the break between semesters. The break between spring and summer is usually the most difficult. There are always a lot of last minute things to do as people panic in the realization that the academic year is almost over. And before you can catch your breath the summer session is underway. The other intersession breaks are usually around a month. In the spring, you only get a couple weeks. It sounds like a lot of time but between residual items from the spring and new work for the summer, it can get hectic. I had grading, meetings, two dissertation defenses, and preparations for my summer class. All of this is now under control so I can return to writing again.

I am offering an exciting class this summer. It is a class in business applications of virtual worlds. It is not a totally new class. It has been on the books for years under the title Web Based Systems Development. I first introduced this class in the early 1990's under the title of Corporate Web Applications. At the time few people believed that the web had much potential use for corporate applications. Now the web is as mainstream as you can get and few people see the potential of virtual worlds for business applications. I see virtual worlds as the 3D web and have updated the course accordingly.

The course is exciting because I have decided to, unapologetically, teach the course the way it would look if virtual worlds were mainstream. In this way I get to begin developing a future course while teaching an existing course. The drawback, of course, it that it takes a leap of faith on the part of the students. You don't see adds in the newspaper saying "virtual world developer needed" whereas you do see adds for php programmers. But, if we taught to the ads in the paper, we would not last long. To teach a proper academic course, you need the perspective that can only be gained by getting on the bandwagon long before anyone realizes there will be a bandwagon and studying it in terms of all the other band wagons you have seen.

This is a professional hazard for academics in practitioner fields like Information Systems. If you stay within your comfort zone, you become out of date and irrelevant. If you wish to stay relevant and vital, you have to take huge risks many of which will not pay off. Further, most of those risks come from our inability to predict the future. I have gotten quit good at is as far as it affects my areas of concern. But, no matter how good you get, the future is still, well, unpredictable.

There is a story, in Greek mythology, about a woman who both pleased and angered a god. In return she was given a blessing and a curse. The blessing was the gift of prophecy. She could see the future. The curse was that nobody would ever believe her. I know the feeling.