Following on from Dr Mike Ryan’s provocation found here. We publish the transcript of the debate that looked into the rewards and challenges that a change to a non-linear, bite-sized, lifelong learning environment will bring.

Transcript

Mike Ryan

My job for many companies is to look at the future and how the world has changed and if you look at Manchester in the 1900s compared to now, it is a very different place compared to now on virtually any level. One of the problems I think for the city of the future, is the one I think that hasn’t changed dramatically in all that time – The way that we teach and the way that we learn. And this is something that is long overdue in catching up with the way in which the world works. I’ve done a lot of research into the way the young people are changing and technology is causing them to become very good multi-taskers, but also very good at understanding short very quick pieces of information. So they are, short-form people, short-form learners and that is characterised mainly by the way people surf the web. The people who are generally planning education are from a generation before, who are long-form, into the deep reading of books and the detail that’s there. And I foresee in the future, a clash between the two types of learning materials and learning types, which will cause problems in the education system that, are probably manifesting themselves already. I think in the world of the future, you wont have to know anything anymore, because all the facts that are available, in the world are on the internet. You need to know which are true, and which aren’t, but it is the process of understanding and interpretation that we need to teach, rather than the facts themselves. I don’t think people need to be examined on facts anymore. They need to be examined on the process, on the understanding and the learning and how they implement those things. More controversially, do we want a linear education system, when we are living in a digital world?

There is a concept at the moment that you study when you’re young and then you go and do work for the rest of your life. That was based around a Victorian model which said that you joined a bank at the age of 17 and at 65 you left and got a gold watch and you enjoyed you’re retirement. We are now looking at a world where people have 14-15 maybe 20 jobs in their career, and for those different jobs you need different skills. That really leads me to believe we need a lifelong learning model rather than a linear one at the beginning of life. This is something, which I’m very passionate about, is that we start to look at how we learn through the whole of our lives in a bite-sized way, which suits us. We’ve also seen things like Facebook and the way in which people use YouTube and other devices to try and provide a feedback mechanism because people want to communicate with what they know. I think again education is going to be doing an awful lot more with those sorts of worlds, because the social network side of our online world is ripe to be used for learning in a whole different way and this is something that schools are going to have to start to get used to. Very much a personal view, the Building Schools for the Future programme that is going on in our world at the moment in the UK is very interesting, but building new schools with interactive whiteboards isn’t changing the fundamental model and that really is where money is being wasted. A lot of money is going into building things but not a lot of money is being spent on how we are going to change what happens in those buildings.

So my provocation for you is that learning is changing and I suppose the key connection with Mark Gasson’s work is that some point in the future, maybe we will live in a world where the internet is augmented into our world ion a different way and I’ve been looking at the development of nanotechnology in contact lenses where you actually get a wireless connection in your contact lenses and information from the internet is being pulled in real-time in front of your periphery while you’re walking around. This is something that I believe will become commonplace, so you’ll never not know someone’s name. You’ll never not know where it’s going to be. And in that complex world of information and information assimilation, The skills to refine that information and to filter it, to the point where that information is useful, I think is going to be the biggest in demand in companies, organisations and by individuals.

Discussion

Conway Mothobi

You mention that education has changed, is that tight? I wouldn’t agree with you more, but I think it is more to do with actual society. If you look at education right across the world you’ve actually got what are called ‘summer holidays’, where everybody leaves school, leaves college, etc. Isn’t that predicated on the age-old system of actually farming, whereby people were told, “you can’t be in school, you’ve got to go and do the harvesting”. So if we move away from actually doing it, wont you agree that what you have to do is to scrap the whole thing of an academic calendar, and also the provision of whiteboards etc. That’s a waste of time, to be honest with you, and provide much more interactive stuff, using such things as the social networks for education, and actually the whole notion of examination is important because personally I wouldn’t like someone slicing me up in theatre and saying, “Ooh, I wasn’t quite sure which was the heart and which was the lungs when I was doing my biology.” I mean that’s not on is it. We have to sort of balance this. I know it’s quite trendy to say, “exams are bad etc.” But I think it depends how that person might actually affect you.

Mike Ryan

It’s assessment I think and the other thing you’ve just mentioned now is the fact that game playing should have far greater influence on how we learn, because if you look at the way some of the more interesting ways that people enjoy and understand things. Actually by doing game playing and that way of learning is incredibly popular with that age range that is coming through at the moment. It’s not being tackled very well by the educational system.

Question

What I find interesting is how limited risk assessment is in this type of research. Because imagine if everything fails, technology is bound to fail, if you don’t teach people basics what will happen? For instance I remember the New Year when they saying systems would fail, in hospitals doctors found out that they didn’t know how to work the most basic things without technology. From where I’m from they had to go and find doctors who knew how to perform the most basic lifesaving things without the use of technology. I’m thinking, you can’t just prepare people for the next thing to come. There must be some kind of history behind it. People have to be prepared for when technology fails because that’s one of the risks, the nature of this technology failing, for some reason. If you have a society where people walk around with information being fed to them and all of a sudden someone pulls the plug, what’s going to happen? It’s going to be the Dark Ages all over again. So I think we should be careful, I think being futuristic doesn’t have to be flying up in space and let’s forget everything and let’s forget facts and that two and two is four. I just think that would be really, really risky.

Question

I have two points one is that we are only saying that people moving from job to job require different kinds of skills. I think you have the wrong notion of skills. Skills where defined differently in the 17th Century than they are now. I think that would be very difficult for a bar tender to become a doctor, so I think something persists there in terms of knowledge. If I mover from job to job within the service economy, then there are certain kinds of skills I require time and again. So I think there is a problem there.

Another thing that really interests me, I can’t really tackle it myself, is the question of identity. Now if I think of myself, my self-identity – the self, is based on the knowledge I have. Now if I understood your technology idea, it means I go through the world and I’m feed by information that comes from the internet, rather than from myself. Now I don’t know whether this kind of vision that you have just proposed, which I think is a very, very dark vision. I wonder whether or not I’m completely losing my self-identity? What happens – it is a psychological question, a philosophical question, that would be my point – So what happens to the self in this kind of world?

Question

It’s to do with the way teaching, no if people have the access to information there isn’t necessarily the same focus on learning facts, because you can get facts beamed to you all the time. So what do we shift the focus to? Is it learning how to learn? Is it learning how to apply facts? Is it philosophy? It’s a bit more practical a bit more near to the future. I the near future how will we change the way we teach people?

Mike Ryan

First of all I’m not saying that we need to abandon the basic principles of jobs and the information that they need. What I am saying is that the way that we learn it shouldn’t be done from a textbook. That could be done in many more crazy ways than just paper and figures in a book. In terms of where that information is and how to interpret that information, I don’t see many people in our world having any problem with that. As far as the cultural identity problem, I don’t think a world knowledge economy is going to count for very much longer, I think we are in the latter stages of that as a concept. The knowledge economy is based around knowledge and information, which is now contained in a database. I think we are going to move towards a care economy, which is going to be more spent around humanness.
Effectively if we have the ability to tap into information that we need to know, as and when we need it rather than a whole chunk of it at one point in our lives. We will be freer and have more time when we are learning to rediscover our humanness, to rediscover the importance of humanity against this information world. So I think a balance of those two things will actually make things better rather than worse.

Moving forward to your point… I think it is a very exciting time for the future and the examples that we had of someone working and becoming a doctor, “Why not” is my answer. The barriers for going into careers now are lowering. Not so long ago you had to do 7-9-11 years apprenticeship to become a craftsman, making wood furniture and things like that. Those sorts of timeframes are changing as our world is changing and I think, why do we not have more people making a crossover into different careers? Why do we not have the opportunity to try different things? Maybe with the bite-sized way that learning can be broken up into manageable chunks. Why can’t I be on the bus going home studying for my medical exams, at some point if I’m working in a bar during the day? Why not give me that opportunity using technology in an augmented kind of way.

Response

There are some skills that you just need to spend years and years learning them. That will always be the case so… That’s my point.

Response

Some of the things added to the en reassured us as to what your thinking is. There is a temptation in a debate to say something quite dramatic and to go to extremes. This idea of relying on technology concerned me. I am doing some work on behalf of Creative Partnerships. We go into schools, to work with schools, to get teachers to take a more adventurous approach to what they are doing in the classroom and what is my concern is how do we get more and more teachers to engage with that, because there can be temptation sometime for the practitioners that we take into schools do nothing more than entertain the children, we want actually to change practice. Also, topically, we have just had a change in government and there are concerns about cuts, so where do we generate the debate and keep the focus critically on continuing that kind of approach in education, maybe integrating it a bit better into some of the things that have been done by government and educationalists.

Response

I think the context of where we at now in the country, there seems to be areal paranoia that we are not producing solid things and products. I think that subject is at quite difficult time for the government to say a lifelong learning approach is going to be one that produces anything useful for the country, which is sinking.

Mike Ryan

But by the same token you’ve got 40% of 18-24 year olds out of work at the moment and most of those aren’t even at ‘level 2’ in terms of learning. The only way that we can get them into jobs is by training, and that training is going to have to be bite-sized… I think it would be best if we adopt that kind of training now in order to preserve a generation that is out of employment.

Response

The way it is going on with technology as well and I’m an advocate. The irony is that education or education institutions themselves are perpetuating the need for education in this old fashioned way. I have worked in education for eleven years teaching FE (Further Education) and HE (Higher Education). Ironically I spend much of my time teaching people things that I have taught myself, yet you are in that very structured environment and again that is another thing that needs to be looked at and broken apart maybe.

Question

What do young people think about your provocation, about this whole concept of bite-sized learning? Interestingly enough the two youngest people in the room have left. Which says a lot.

Mike Ryan

I have been involved in the URT diploma, which is one of the schemes the Government stated as couple of years ago, which is looking at the way that we engage people in a different way of learning. It was very ambitious and I think it’s not failed but it certainly hasn’t done as well as it could of done, purely because it’s been delivered in that traditional educational model by practitioners in schools. I have been in Rochdale talking to some learners there, who are doing an IT diploma. Giving them ideas about what we could do that could be slightly different. So I found out that they’ve all got Facebook access and that they use YouTube and we were trying to teach them how to code and do different things. I said, “I’ll tell you what, our company will give you an iPod touch” so the person in three months time has got more people downloading a Facebook app that they made, that does something than anybody else. There’s a challenge there to go off in Facebook and try and get as many friends as possible to use the app that’s there. I thought that was a perfectly innocent thing to do, as Facebook is used by many people and is all there. From the teacher’s point of view, they are banned from using it on college premises. I said how many people use and everybody put up their hand and there is this disconnect. The school thinks that it is above all and thinks that none of this stuff happens and outside of that world it is going on everywhere else. In many ways you have got to get them to grow up and do something different. I’ll contrast that with something I saw in South Manchester which was part of an IT diploma, teaching the group how to fly planes, and that was to teach them responsibility. If they are flying as plane and they crash it, they are dead and that is quite an interesting different approach to being taught. But that’s how great differences are in education. It is an interesting experiment and it is interesting as it is creating a level of maturity that wasn’t there before.

Question

Are you aware of the consequences of human nature with all these aspects of the internet. There is nothing better than meeting somebody you have never met before after a year or two and remembering their name. There is nothing more challenging than standing in front of somebody trying to remember a name, then you remember it and everybody lights up and that is something that will be lost with the eye-retina information. People will just stop being interested in each other, not being remembered, people will just loose interest in each other on a one-to-one basis. Which will be a shame.

Mike Ryan

But we have information overload and we are required to remember an awful lot of things, and maybe some of that we shouldn’t be remembering. Or at least it’s just too much to remember

Response

Technology today could allow everyone in society to wear a name badge, but nobody likes wearing name badges, you have to understand why it is.

Response

The point I would just like to add is we also have to think education is also about institutions and power. The Prime Minister came from a very privileged background, from an education establishment that is teaching people but is also conforming them to the status quo. Changing the way we teach people is great but we have to consider there are these institutions already around that have another remit.

Response

That is absolutely nothing to do with education. That is just that guy was in that building for that period of time and met those people. It is nothing to do with what he was taught when he was there. That was thirty years ago and look how far we have come in thirty years, what is going to happen in the next thirty years? Him going to Eton has nothing to do with education.

Response

Education is fine, you can just learn. It’s also how we behave socially, it is about how we engage with people socially, it’s not just about information it’s more skilled than that. If it was the case then we would not have people who have power coming from certain institutions.

Response

Exactly, it’s not to do with the information they were given while they were there. That’s exactly what Mike was saying, it is not to do with the information that they learn. It’s to do with broadening out education, to new ways of education people. Nothing to do with the education that he learnt by himself whilst sat in that building. It was the people he met. He didn’t learn anything that nobody else can learn.

Response

It also about the degree in which you are open to influence, from others that might be part of your culture. There is a culture within school like Eton, it’s whether that person can listen, for example to the rest of the country in terms of what we want and the people who are in power govern the country so there can be these small cultures that spring up which might be a norm to someone like him. You are taking in information in different ways, through your senses. Not just data, it’s all stuff that influences us. So I would have those same concerns about two politicians have such great power and they are both went to private school.

Question

I was interested in Mike’s comments about the term Knowledge Society. That is very interesting particularly in the world of the internet. What is it that we educate people in. Information overload is talked about quite a lot, but I also think that we haven’t got a clear idea about what information, knowledge etc. You teach people. It is only cultural education do you teach people about … do you teach people about the immigrant experience, whatever else… And the thing that concerns me sometimes, with the internet is that a lot of information is not on there. I’m not a teacher but some of my friends are English teachers and I do worry that some of the books that they teach in schools are the same books they taught me in school thirty years ago. Modern classics like Lord of the Flies, 1984. I do worry that there is a collective memory loss about the knowledge that we should probably be teaching people. There is quite a laziness about some of the things we are teaching because there is a sense that there is a lot of information out there and we just need to identify a few key facts and that’s it.

Mike Ryan

Well we look at how information is broadcast these days and if you think about the main social media 25 years ago was a 2.5 hour feature film now you have a two minute video on YouTube that has ten times as many viewers than something that appears on actual TV. So we are seeing the compression of information in all aspects of life. I don’t think education is immune from that. I’m not saying that will necessarily create problems, but it is something that education has to progress. Because the audience that are going into school and are then starting to learn are requiring that short titbits of information, rather than the depth that we had maybe 30-40 years ago. That played off in the future is something that we have to address. I haven’t got the answer to it, but what I’m saying is that if you go into a primary school now and start to look at how the young people are interacting and working, there multi-tasking by what they can do at the same time, but they are also very hungry for lots of little things, bite-sized access to information rather than at depth. I agree that we loose something if we don’t have depth, but I don’t think we are taught deep pockets of learning is going to work with that age group.

Question

I think, when I think about technology and young people are talking about internet access to all kinds of information. A school is kind of curation, identification of what information is useful. Like curation and also talking about in the same ways talking about the chips that help us. That she can be looking forward to a technological future and not expecting that everyone will have this information, have the access to information, access to devices. It’s giving people the skills to cope when things go wrong.

Mike Ryan

The digital report that was published by Fast Futures that the government commissioned in January of this year, which was looked at future jobs to 2020. One of the biggest aspects when looking at the types of jobs there will be is online curation. Such as cyber bullying mentors, people who actually help you if you are being bullied online. People who are there to authenticate, because one of the things we have on the internet is trusted/untrusted sources. You probably trust what’s on a BBC website but you may not trust what you get from a torrent. That is giving people life skills to be able to spot. What is very interesting is that if you look at all the things like the invasion of various chatrooms by people who are there for dubious purposes suggests that children who have grown up with the internet, natively start to navigate this world of truth/untruth. In a way that perhaps we’ve had to learn retrospectively, they’re learning as they are growing in and means it’s less of an issue to them as it is to us.

Question

I think technology has failed to enhance education. I work in education for ten years I work in a University and I have a feeling that the university is trying to adapt to the last few academic years to falling standards. I would like to take the Eton argument as I think If you want to make some sort of survey about social backgrounds in this room, I would suggest that most of us come from a relatively middle class background. We are very vocal, some of us could probably associate ourselves as a certain powerful elite in society. I think that this sort of skills really don’t come from the engagement of technology. I think this does create power relationships in our society, which are not considered in your argument.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Possibly related to this:

1. Provocation: Learning is Going to Change
2. Comixed: Enhanced – The Remix
3. Comixed: Enhanced. May 2010, Contact Theatre, Manchester

Mike Ryan – Learning is Going to Change from Manchester Beacon on Vimeo.

How will learning change in the Future. Mike suggests that were are learning in a 20th Century Way and we will learn in bit-sized chunks using technologies such as phones or social networks. We will learn how we want and when we want through our lives

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Possibly related to this:

1. Learning is going to change – The Conversation
2. Comixed: Enhanced. May 2010, Contact Theatre, Manchester
3. Comixed: Enhanced – The Remix

This is a live blog of the COMIXED: A NETWORKED CONVERSATION event at the Zion Arts Centre, Manchester.

Comixed is a “Networked Conversation” on a number of pressing issues affecting all of us:

Climate Change / The Digital Economy / Ageing / Food Security / Synthetic Biology.

Please read the ‘provocations’ we posted earlier on Climate Change, The Digital Economy, Ageing, Food Security and Synthetic Biology to find out what people thought about these issues before the event.

Please contribute by commenting below, especially if you were there and spot any inaccuracies or inconsistencies!

We want you to get involved.  You can follow us on Twitter and/or contribute using the #cmxd hashtag.  We are @ComixedMcr on Twitter, perhaps follow us?

________

And Erinma Ochu, Director of Manchester Beacon kicks off by introducing the event.  Welcome to Research Councils UK.  Most of the audience is students and academics. Post event audience stats: 43% of attendees were people from community groups, 40% academics/university people and 17% people from the business community.

Warren Bramley from four23 introduces first speaker, Martyn Amos who is discussing Synthetic Biology.

Martyn shares that he is working on an ESPRC-funded project at MMU researching synthetic biology.

Have moved away from ‘in vitro’ work to look at how living cells can be engineered to persuade them to do human-defined tasks.

Nano-Info-Bio describes the convergence of 3 incredibly important sciences: Nano technology, Informatics and Computer Sciences and Biology.

We will move from ‘Intel inside’ devices to hybrid devices that have human-engineered cells.  Applications:

• – anti-malarial drugs engineered from bacteria
• - bio-sensing: bacteria developed by scientists in Edinburgh to detect arsenic in drinking water.

Not rocket science, this is all happening now.  The constraint is ’scientists facing perception of working with dangerous organisms’.

We’re taking bits of different organisms and joining them together to form an entirely new organism.  This has ethical and cultural implications.

Martyn Amos now plays a quote from Chris Eccleston in Russel T Davies ‘The Second Coming‘, as sampled by Orbital on their Blue album:

You are becoming gods.  There is a new master of creation, it’s you.  Unravelled DNA, created bacteria strong enough to kill every living thing. You think you are ready for that kind of power? You are not!

Hands up for anyone who thinks you’ve got it right.  Yes, there’s always one.  I can see it.  If you want the position of God then accept the responsibility.

Questions from the floor:

Q: What are the ethical questions?

Prince Charles’ stance on GM suggesting that GM crops would develop into scientific problems.   These accusations have plagued the GM food industry.

There are other private players in Synthetic Biology, however.   Craig Venter, one of the big ones is trying to do with Synthetic Biology what Bill Gates did with computer technology.  He is investing lots and is patenting all that he produces.

The other camp is the open source movement, the ‘open source wetware’ movement which follows the open source ‘Linux vs Microsoft’ paradigm by bringing others together. ‘We are the Ubuntu of Synthetic Biology’

Q: Is there a lot of ignorance about this?

Synthetic Biology is where top down meets bottom up, we are taking bits of biology apart and take them apart in the attempt to understand how it works and how to make it work in new ways.

‘What I cannot create I cannot understand’ Richard Feynman

Q: Bio remediation

Using bacteria to digest toxic metals.  Bacteria that flouresces in certain light.

Q: What is being done to prevent bio-terrorism?

Like with Ubuntu, if any one has the technology what would happen?  It would be much easier to get a tub of anthrax than use a genetically modified organism.   If I were a terrorist, I would not use this approach, as there are better ways of getting negative payloads.  Genetically modified organisms are relatively weedy.

Q: But wasn’t this the argument applied to ‘nuclear weapons’.

The key is openess.  If everyone is aware of a technology, it becomes less likely as a threat.  The 1982 virus that killed many in Siberia was recently recreated because in doing so we could understand it better.

People will be bio-hacking in their kitchens, this is already happening.  The open wetware movement feels that if this happens, at least we will be able to get ahead because everyone will be using it.

Q: Don’t downplay the effect of open source on synthetic biology

There is already a blurring in applications: you can have silver ions within socks for keeping them from smelling however already these silver ions are now polluting the water supply.

They (synthetic biology) can be an easy way of finding a solution that creates more problems.  In comparison, sustainable solutions are a lot harder and require a lot of political will, but more sustainable.

Who controls all this open source wetware?

A: The key word is ‘open’ not source.   We put the information back out there unlike Venter.

We are not doing nano technology, we are doing synthetic biology.  So applications like growing the materials for curing malaria can be done using vats of bacteria.  The alternative is to plant Wormwood plantations to cover an area the size of Vermont in the US.

Professor Jon Whittle is now talking about Digital Economy:

Digital Economy is a broad term defined by the Research Councils to reflect ‘modern information technology being used to make people’s lives better’.

An example of one of the things funded under the Digital Economy programme:

Project being led out of Kingston University based on a book called Nudge written by an economist at the University of Chicago.  The premise is that you can nudge people in society towards good or bad things based on how you present things.

One issues being tackled is Climate Change.   A lot of people care about climate change but few have changed their behaviour to reflect this.

This project is trying to take a technological solution to this problem by trying to collect data about what your neighbour does in the community and then feeds that back to you.

By using technology the idea is to nudge people into taking action.  This is a funded project, it is reality.

Professor Jon Whittle then uses a simple exercise to help us visualise the future of digital technology:

Pick out a person in the room.  Imagine that in 30 years you can look at them and see what they are thinking.  You know their interest, whether they know anything about synthetic biology.

Prof. Jon says that a few months ago he used to be incredibly skeptical about Twitter but now thinks it is the future.

Our opinions will be written about that person.   In future I may receive a text about that person in the room stating that he/she shares your interest in ‘Michael Buble‘.

Ask yourself if this is a good or bad thing.

You can use this to shape society for the better.  Issues like Crime.  The police know where crime happens, they can produce crime maps but what they do not know is whether we feel safe in our neighbourhoods.

This would actually be useful information because if they knew that there was a place where people do not feel safe in their neighbourhood but are actually safe, the Police could then run ‘reassurance programmes’ in those areas.

This technology would impact politics as people would be able to vote MPs in based on what they need them to do immediately rather than what they hope they can trust them to do over 4 years.

Q: Someone disagrees on the use of Twitter.  What about mis-information?

The genius of human beings is that we have choice.

We can choose how we present ourselves on these social networks.   If social networks allows us to see into the minds of others, teenage girls would not be seduced by paedophiles presenting themselves as teenagers on social networks.

A: This technology is going to be built whether we like it or not.  Prof. Whittle argues that this is the crux of his provocation.  These things are going to happen anyway what we should do is try to understand them.

Q: The use of technology directed as a force for good is a great idea but not so sure how society can make it work.  Society has good and evil and Twitter and other social networks allow us to project aspects of ourselves to society.

We then aggregate all that information and bring it into society as we know it.

A: Prof Whittle argues that we are trying to understand how this technology affects society.

Second Life is a virtual replication of human life.  Where are we leading on to when we cut out the 70% of interaction that is down to body language?

How do we ensure that we don’t people understand these implications.  Moving away from the view of the internet as a ‘black box’ and ‘you’re just looking at websites’.  We need to educate people about the internet.

We need to move away from terms like ‘good/bad/control’ as they are objective terms.  As a musician I’m interested in peer to peer filesharing technology. It’s less about good or bad.

Too often we have used technology not because we need it but because we can.

A: Prof Jon Whittle responds with a number of examples:

A parent that takes his 14 year old to a concert is not so concerned about keeping them too close to them because they have a mobile phone.

The NHS have just approved the use of the Nintendo Wii for exercise and health benefits.   Previously no-one ever considered video games as a way of staying fit and healthy.

Professor Callum Thomas is now talking about air travel and climate change:

Aviation is only responsible for a small proportion of human emissions that contribute to climate change.  The problem is that the use of aviation is growing,  year on year whilst other forms of transport are reducing.

The new Airbus has fuel efficiency as a passenger moped however that plane will consume the same fuel as 250 cars.  The technology is getting better but not fast enough.

As a society we are enjoying the benefits of a global society, much of it down to aviation.  The challenge is do we indulge aviation or do we conserve it?

Do we through money into research and development that would deliver the hydrogen-powered planes that can get rid of the problem altogether.

In 2060 are you going to travel to visit family in the Caribbean or will you holiday in Wigan.

Q: Warren asks, what would his answer be?

Prof Thomas would like us to throw money into the research to fix the problem.

Environmental scientist in the audience thinks that air travel technology is flawed fundamentally.  Economically, it pulls money out of our economy.   Culturally, it undermines the idea of ‘multi-culturalism’ as many look at culture at being ‘culture elsewhere’.

Solutions: ramp up taxation?  Pump government money into alternatives.  The more privileged are already the ones on EasyJet flights and so taxation will not make a difference in reducing air travel for the rich.

A: Which has a greater environmental impact? Dropping H bombs on different parts of the world versus flying people half way across the world to meet other cultures?

We cannot argue that we have ‘different cultures’ amongst us as if your loved ones live half way across the world you have to ’spend air miles’.

Q: How do you compare amount of fuel spent on air travel versus road transport?

Transport is responsible for a third of emissions however whilst 90% of people use their car daily, most people use their car once a year.

Q: Under-developed countries need flying doctors, h0w do you categorise essential vs non-essential air travel?

A: It’s not easy to do.  Being less UK-centric: what about our colleagues in Europe who rely on travel from Northern Europe to build their economies.  What also about African economies that are reliant on food export from their countries as a source of revenue generation?

We should widen these lifestyle questions to include the cost of cooling the servers that power Twitter and Facebook!

Kate Bailey now talking about Food Security:

Fo0d Security is about people having access to safe and affordable food.  Since World War II, we have enjoyed access to food in abundance however this issue affects the developing world.  In 2008 we had a food shortage, this hadn’t happened for over 20 years.

Global population to rise from 6 to 9 billion by 2050.  Food supply needs to rise to meet that growth.  There is also the problem of access to land and resources for growing food.

In the UK, in coming years, we will have to be aware of the growing problem of food security.

How do we use technology to mitigate this?

We need to double production global but we need to reduce inputs: we need to increase volume of food but rely environmental impact.

Are we overly reliant on science?  Do we have to change our diet? What then would we be allowed to eat?  Do we start making decisions about whether we eat meat the production of which contributes 14-18% of emissions.

There are also tensions between the use of technolgy.

How do we as consumers have to change our behaviour?

Q: How do we start looking at controlling the population?

There are inherent ethical problems associated with that.  There is also a moral argument as we in the West enjoy the lifestyle that creates significant emissions, are we morally allowed to prevent the developing world from achieving the lifestyles we enjoy?

Q; What about social justice? Do we need to think about the impact of our behaviour on others?

How do you use a social and ethical environmnent to construct your discussion with society?

Q: In the West we forget that we enjoy the luxury of not having to ‘find’ our food.  Local food systems need to be looked at but it actually comes down to the individual.

In this issue, it comes down to the consumption level of the individual.   To go from lighting a fire to making a meal takes 5 hours, compare this to cooking a meal in the microwave in 9 minutes.

It’s about informing people about this.   We need to teach back wards and inform the public about the labour that is involved in food production.  We have cookery books instead.

Comment: In the West we don’t have to fight over food yet so it is wiser to solve the problem before we need to.  If we slow population growth we can solve the problem.

Comment: It’s actually not down to the individual, it’s up to the Government to restrict what people can or cannot do?

Prof Jon Whittle comments to state that it would be unfair to stop him being able to eat a mange in December if he wanted to.

A: Apparently, the agricultural systems we have in place are unsustainable and so that in the future mangoes may not be available in December.

Comment: Technology will not necessarily bring more happiness.  Someone who is maintaining a very fulfilled sustainable lifestyle states that we are overlooking the personal fulfilment that can come by low carbon living.

Very lively discussion about the ethical issues around air freighting mangoes.  Cannot keep up!

A: Be aware that developing countries that grow mangoes do so for an economic benefit so completely stopping this would not be helpful.

In addition, with technology making the globe smaller and more connected, we will increasingly rely on trade and so the issue is working out systems that support the cross cutting of issues that food security discussions generate.

Professor Remco Polman now talks on Ageing:

Prof Polman is now discussing his research on the impact of ageing has on social movement.  How do we increase the amount of time people can stay active for.

A 100 year old woman recently broke the world record for shot putting in her age category. What are the factors that allowed this woman to maintain a healthy life?

By 2056 30% of the UK population will be over 50 years old.

If people can maintain independence for longer, can we suggest that people work for longer?  Do we want people working at difficult jobs until their 70s?

How do we help people maintain their independence and remain healthy, particularly from a social activity.

In Holland, cycling is common place, in the UK it can be quite dangerous.  We should encourage people to cycle more as Manchester for example is very flat.

Another area that can be improved to accommodate an ageing population is in the equipment produced for use in gyms.

Most gym equipment designed for much younger people.

How do we assess how we change behaviour to accommodate easier access to local supermarkets for example.  Older people consume less food but will consume it for longer.

Q: Do we need to think of people as ‘older’ people? Do we not have a problem with these fixed ideas about when people make these transitions?  ‘Retirement age’ is a good example.

It was brought in to allow people to enjoy a short period of ‘end of life’ enjoyment.  Perhaps we shouldn’t have a retirement page.

A: Prof Polman says he also espouses a ‘life span approach’ to things

Comment: The tendency to define people based on their age is not wise.   One of Manchester City Council’s approach to aging is to create  an environment where we promote health and healthy aging and healthy living by getting things right for for young families and others.

A: Most cities don’t have an aging strategy.

Comment: The only other city in England that has a defined aging strategy is Camden.

A gentleman who has grown his food since ‘dig for Britain’ has a food budget for £6.  Perhaps one solution is to encourage growing of food rather than having to spend the time in the gym.

The important thing is to get working but retirement is very much about not having to work.

The demechanisation of agriculture is the issue.  Remember we only got into cities because of the need to use human labour into other work outside growing food.

A: There is still a need for volume-based agriculture that is more environmentally sustainable.  Science has to start providing the answers towards this.

Comment: We cannot convert older adults into being socially mobile enough to ‘grow all that they need’.  Enabling environments will enable everyone to get involved.  We cannot make everyone ’superhuman’ so that they can do what they need to do. Society is diverse and so we need complex solutions to address this.

We have to address the different ways that people age rather than recommending that people age a certain way.

And that was it!

Please comment on any or all of the above.

Erinma closes the event by asking what are the things we can take away from the debate.

Are there going to be possibilities for research that come out of the unique opportunities provided by the unique city of Manchester that many of us live in!

Keep an eye on the blog over the next few days.

We had two illustrators attend the event and they will be creating some comics from today’s event, sharing the themes discussed in a more visual format.

We will be publishing the comics on this blog as they are produced.

No related posts.

Prof. Jon Whittle, Chair of Software Engineering, Lancaster University offers this provocation on the Digital Economy:

Twitter, Bebo, Facebook, mash-ups, web 3.0, delicious…. where does it all end? Are all these new technologies really improving our lives? Or are they just a drain on our time and resources, keeping us away from the things that really matter….?

The time is ripe for developments in technology to change society for the better.  There are unprecedented opportunities to solve some of society’s most complex challenges through the appropriate use of technology. But we must be careful to focus on substance not fads.

Unless we understand the impact of technologies on society, we may never fully realise their potential.

Wise words indeed.  How can we start understanding the impact of technologies like Facebook on society?  Where does one start?

Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

Image Credit: ICTKM

Possibly related to this:

1. Unprecedented Opportunities in a Digital Economy – The Conversation