Kangaku

Probably the best part of my intellectual life in Oxford are my kangaku lunches with three others who love thinking about the future of education. Okay we have a strong bias towards the application of technology but its all sincere and based on our love of learning. Of late its been about so-called MMOs or software that promotes mass participation e.g. Flickr, World of Warcraft and Second Life.

We are four in Kangaku and we are equally divided between two positions (probably based on our backgrounds: hard and soft sciences). When we look at technology we can focus on (a) its effects on society (b) the quality it gives to our ability to represent or explain. I am in the latter, I tend to tune out when we hypothesize about how a blog entry gets into a national newspaper; wow I think, so what. So knowledge is moving with new dynamics, maybe faster, maybe through new social networks. There is no paradigm shift, just more of the similar.

For me its about re-representation as they taught me at Sussex, and specifically it is our ability to explain with more than natural language. What I dream of is a language of graphical simulation, a language that is easy to learn and tuned for the understanding of complex systems. In fact I will be bolder, it is a language that moves the zeitgeist towards a 'common sense' that understands everything is a complex system - there are no simple solutions, no black and white heuristics just a world that we can only strive to understand and represent but will of course never get there.

The more we learn the less we know we understand. The rate limiting step in our education system is our ability to represent and so explain. Society is dying to tear itself away from the paper and pen, we are at a juncture, a time when we will enter the simulation and begin the complete representation of knowledge, the rationalisation of words into properties, algorithms and graphics. After a librarian stage we'll then pass through into a period of great experimentation as a feeling meaningless consumes us - once we've re-represented everything we'll have a game that won't take very long to play. This is the time when we'll re-surface from the halting machine and open our eyes again to take a large new batch of empirical information.