Bring me your Huddled Murdochs!

As usual when thinking about how things might go in Australia, I started to think about the US. This time, thinking about digital coming of age, I began to think about one of America’s more prominent immigrants, Rupert Murdoch.

Mr Murdoch has evidently been thinking about immigration himself recently. Paying tribute to his own status as “part of the most recent wave of immigrants attracted by the bright beacon of American liberty”, he has entered the political fray in the US on the side of the immigrant. Like other business leaders - but unlike rank and file Republicans and vigilante “minutemen” - he has lined up to support moves by President Bush to introduce “guest worker” legislation and reform immigration laws.

Along the way Mr Murdoch made some remarks that even the Australian government ought to heed. In a speech reported in the Wall St Journal’s online Opinion Journal late last year, he said:

We'll never fix the problem of illegal immigration simply by throwing up walls and trying to make all of us police them. We've tried that for a decade or so now, and it's been a flop. What we need to do first is to make it easier for those who seek honest work to do so without having to disobey our laws.

More recently Mr Murdoch has turned his attention to another kind of immigration. It seems that he himself has recently “come of age” - digitally. Here he is speaking earlier this month to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, admitting that he was wrong to ignore the “digital revolution”. He confessed, “as an industry, many of us have been remarkably, unaccountably complacent. Certainly, I didn’t do as much as I should have after all the excitement of the late 1990s”:

I come to this discussion not as an expert with all the answers, but as someone searching for answers to an emerging medium that is not my native language. Like many of you in this room, I’m a digital immigrant. I wasn’t weaned on the web, nor coddled on a computer. Instead, I grew up in a highly centralised world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know.

Murdoch contrasted his own upbringing in the tightly controlled world of centralised editorship with that of his two young daughters (as opposed to his four adult children): "My two young daughters, on the other hand, will be digital natives. They’ll never know a world without ubiquitous broadband internet access."

It did take Rupert Murdoch quite a long time to realise he was a “digital immigrant” as opposed to a “digital native”. The terms were coined back in 2001 by Marc Prensky in On the Horizon, (pdf file 58KB). But now that he’s got the message, Mr Murdoch is up for the challenge:

The peculiar challenge then, is for us digital immigrants - many of whom are in positions to determine how news is assembled and disseminated - to apply a digital mindset to a new set of challenges. We need to realise that the next generation of people accessing news and information, whether from newspapers or any other source, have a different set of expectations about the kind of news they will get, including when and how they will get it, where they will get it from, and who they will get it from.

Mr Murdoch warns, “we must free our minds of our prejudices and predispositions, and start thinking like our newest consumers”. He describes what these “digital natives” want:

… they want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle … One commentator, Jeff Jarvis, puts it this way: give the people control of media, they will use it. Don’t give people control of media, and you will lose them.

And here’s what Jeff Jarvis himself has to say about that, on his blog Buzz Machine: “I was impressed to see Murdoch giving this warning to the nation's august editors - and also impressed to see him embracing new ways to do things, including citizens media”.

So how do we get to those digital natives? In his Opinion Journal piece, Mr Murdoch points to the importance of education, but only to claim that it is failing to meet the challenge, a fact that is only disguised by the performance of immigrants:

The evidence of the contributions these immigrants make to our society is all around us - especially in the critical area of education. Adam Smith (another Scotsman) knew that without a decent system of education, a modern capitalist society was committing suicide. Well, our modern public school systems simply are not producing the talent the American economy needs to compete in the future. And it often seems that it is our immigrants who are holding the whole thing up. … The point is that by almost any measure of educational excellence you choose, if you're in America you're going to find immigrants or their children at the top.

Like the US, Australia is a settler society, founded on successive waves of immigration. But is Australia up to the digital challenge?

The Ministerial Advisory Committee for Educational Renewal (MACER) advises Queensland’s Minister of Education Anna Bligh. In 2003 I chaired a MACER committee that was tasked to report on the professional development of teachers. The problem proved to be the same as the one identified by Murdoch eighteen months later: teachers are “digital immigrants” confronting a new generation of “digital natives”. We reported on the demographic research that the Y Generation are said to have a strong work ethic, are entrepreneurial, seek change and variety, are independent and enjoy change. They enjoy the coaching and mentoring approach to learning and are willing to take risks. They have very strong values and principles.

Apparently, the next cohort will be the Millennials (born since 1995) who, together with Generation Y, are digital natives rather than digital immigrants. They don’t think of computers as technology at all, work in teams, stay connected, are creators as well as consumers, don’t tolerate delays or incompetence among peers, and they like to learn. (Creative Workforce for a Smart State)

Is our formal education system ready for the challenge of people who are, at one and the same time, and in one and the same activities, both citizens and consumers, the hope for both freedom and the economy, the bearers of new wants and demands that digital distributed technologies can and do serve better than analogue centralised ones did? Here’s what the MACER report thought about that:

As a workforce, teachers are still organised along industrial lines, where standardised professional development has been tied to the needs of a command bureaucracy with industrial agreements and strong hierarchies. Teachers are treated as if they belong to the industrial working class of the mid 20th century. A culture of low trust and high control produces low autonomy, risk-averse, time-serving behaviour. The requirement for predictability at the system level produces top-down strategies that may not apply well to any individual situation. The system itself is driven by targets and indicators which may result in it continuing to perform well in ways that need to change. … If teachers are to participate in and serve the burgeoning needs of the future - where creativity, innovation, risk, autonomy and self-management are the “secret life” that drives economic and social development - then they need a make-over.

What progress towards these goals has Education Queensland actually made? A lot, if you follow tick-the-box (pdf file 42.8KB) logic.

But there’s still a long way to go. The problem is summed up for me in the high-control, low-risk strategy of Education Queensland’s website for school students, about which I do know something because two of my daughters go to Queensland state high schools. They can access and use Google for Web references, but when they try using Google’s “images” button it is blocked, no matter what images are sought. My daughter, for example, was looking for pictures of “cats.” This is what she saw:

You cannot access the following Web address: http://images.google.com.au/images?q=cats&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search The site you requested is blocked under Education Queensland's Managed Internet Service Filtering Policy. If you would like to view the category under which the site is blocked, please use the N2H2 URL Checker located at http://database.n2h2.com/cgi-perl/catrpt.pl. You can: Use your browser's Back button or enter a different Web address to continue. Contact your school's MIS Administrator if you want to request this site be unblocked. STOP! Education Queensland blocks Google Images: accessed October 14 2003

That was the situation in October 2003, when I was compiling the MACER Report. I made a fuss about it at MACER, and was eventually informed that the block had been lifted. But now I’m told it has been re-imposed, and at the time of writing is still there.

The idea that an entire Education system can protect itself, or its students, by denying them access to any images is frankly dumbfounding. It’s also about 500 years out of date. Didn’t we stop smashing images for fear of the effect they may have had on the populace back in the Reformation? Not just dumb, but stupid - if the idea is to dissuade horrible teenaged boys from looking at things that they shouldn’t, it won’t work. The only message sent is that the education system is literally frozen rigid with fear at the prospect of students finding things out for themselves.

Instead of blocking Google images, how about learning some home truths from those who are coming after?

… learning will become a distributed system, dedicated to creativity, innovation, customised needs and networked across many sites from the family kitchen to the business breakfast as well as the classroom and workplace. Educational practices in the various systems need to open up, to become more permeable and responsive to changing economic and social factors.

The shift from teaching as transmission of knowledge to learning as production of knowledge means that an important responsibility for the system will be helping people learn to learn, and to become motivated to learn. In this scenario, teachers become learning entrepreneurs, managers or producers, and teaching gives way to the design of learning programs. (education.qld.gov.au/publication/production/reports/)

In short, teachers must become more like Rupert Murdoch, just as, with the humility of the immigrant, he has shown himself willing to learn from the natives. There is nothing else for it, as Mr Murdoch once wisely but provocatively said on another matter, but to “change the culture”. The digital natives have already come of age. It’s time the big systems - whether they’re media industries or education authorities - grew up too.