The Quantified Self and What it Means for Learning

The Quantified Self
and Learning
Hans de Zwart
e-Learning Event 2012

“What if the walls in your
home could display all your
self-tracking data?”
Laurie Frick

Apologies in advance:
this is a story about a future
which doesn't exist yet

Apologies in advance:
it will be to abstract for about
90% of the audience

Innovation Manager
for
Global Learning Technologies
at
Shell International

Digitale civil rights “activist”
and free software fanatic
volunteering for
Bits of Freedom
and
the Internet Society

Reader, fascinated by the idea
of social engineering and by
The Big Lebowski

Innovation
Scenarios
Quantified Self
Learning
Risks

Wat does an innovation
manager do?

“Early experimentation will lead
to invaluable experience and
fewer mistakes in the future”

How do you help people
think strategically?

Learning Scenarios Workshop

Online Educa, Dec. 2011

No predictions but better
long term decisions
e.g. IT infrastructure or organisational models

How work is organised:

planned, hierarchical
↔
organic, project based

What work is based on:

relationships
↔
data

relationships

Old Boy
In-Crowd
Network

planned, organic,
hierarchical project based

Quantified
Big Data
Self
data

“A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books,
records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that
it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an
enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

Vannevar Bush in “As You May Think”

“Clothing-based
computing with
personal imaging will
blur the boundaries
between seeing and
viewing and between
remembering and
recording.”

Steve Mann

"A SenseCam is a black box
about the size of a
cigarette pack which
contains an infrared
system [..] and when it
finds a person it takes a
picture. It also takes a
photograph when the light
changes or at intervals up
to a minute, depending on
how it is set."

Gordon Bell

“One day I’m sure everyone will
routinely collect all sorts of data
about themselves. But because
I’ve been interested in data for a
very long time, I started doing
this long ago.”

Stephen Wolfram

Outgoing
Mail

Appointments
in Calendar

“It only takes a few minutes a day
of recording to create a pretty
detailed data set of the year.”

Nicholas Felton

Consumer products
are available now

“I'd like to think that Timeline
succeeds at representing your
history in a way that mirrors
personal memory. The most
recent section are your freshest
memories and are all apparent.
As you travel back in time the
years become abbreviated and
only the highlights are initially
visible.”

Nicholas Felton

You are also being “measured”
without you noticing

The costs of self-tracking will
be so low that not measuring
yourself contineously will be
considered “irresponsible”

First wave:
use it to better your physique

Second wave:
use it to improve cognitive skills

Now we have arrived
at learning
(a sigh of relief, finally!)

1. You have to do something
Something you haven't done before
(“stretch assignment”, curiosity)

2. You have to reflect
What just happened?
Adjust and tune

(3.) Certification/competences
is often added as a secondary process

What does quantifying yourself
mean for: doing, reflection and
certification/competences?

Yes, I am not afraid to put
forward the idea of a
personalised computer-
based tutor

“Imagine that this tutor
program can get to know
you over a long period of
time. Like a good
teacher, it knows what
s
you already understand
and what you are ready
to learn. It also knows
what types of
explanations are most
meaningful to you.”

Danny Hillis over “Aristotle”

Will you be more daring?
Insight in your own lack of change and
habits as a catalyst for change

Invitation for a more
experimental mindset?

Measuring creates a tight
feedback loop

Think of what Amazon knows
about you through the Kindle

Which pages did you spend
the most time on?

Which passages did you
highlight? How does that differ
from the rest of the world,
your colleagues and your
friends?

Imagine a “temporal
wordcloud” which you can use
to see which themes you have
been paying attention to

Insight into your use of time
What percentage of my time have I been doing email,
sitting in meetings, talking at the water cooler or
networking on LinkedIn?

“People argue about the need to forget
things, but if you look at business
discipline—advising that you write
everything down, your goals and
objectives, and return to them to see
how you did, examining what went
wrong—I think the same thing could
happen with our personal lives. Being
able to say, ‘Now I realize my tone of
voice was threatening’—I think there’s a
real positive aspect in having the real
record of what things looked and
sounded like, and sequences of events,
because we often end up believing things
that are not based on facts anymore.”

Jim Gemmel

The end of competency
management

Instead:

“views”/visualisations
of a person

“searching” through a person

“One can easily imagine submitting
their usernames for Google Web
History, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious,
Blogs, Google Reader, YouTube, etc.
IN PLACE OF taking a four hour high
stakes exam like the ACT or GRE. Why
make a high stakes decision based on
a few hundred data points generated
in one morning (when you could be
sick, distracted, etc.) when you could
get 1,000,000 data points generated
over three years?”

David Wiley

Can we still re-invent ourselves
if we never forget anything?

“[..] Forgetting is not an
annoying flaw but a life-saving
advantage. As we forget, we
regain the freedom to
generalize, conceptualize, and
most importantly to act.”

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger in “Delete”

z

A world constructed from the familiar is a world in
which there’s nothing to learn ... (since there is)
invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with
our own ideas.

Eli Pariser

The “filter bubble” will only get
stronger (self-accelerating)

Sleepwalking into a
surveillance state?

A last provocation:
“the proactionary principle”

“People’s freedom to innovate technologically is
highly valuable, even critical, to humanity. This
implies a range of responsibilities for those
considering whether and how to develop, deploy, or
restrict new technologies. [..] Give a high priority to
people’s freedom to learn, innovate, and advance.”

Max More

Questions?

Mail: h@nsdezwart.nl
Twitter: @hansdezwart

Image Credits and Licence This presentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Netherlands License,
Except the images, they have their own license, see the sources below:
Steve Mann:
http://www.whosdatedwho.com/tpx_5992219/steve-mann/photo
Vannevar Bush:
http://archeocomputing.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/vannevar-bush.jpg
Gordon Bell:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gordon_Bell.jpg
Stephen Wolfram:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/images/press/photos/sw/sw-sf1055-5x4.jpeg
Wolfram measured images:
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/#more-2535
Nicholas Felton:
http://blog.noahkalina.com/post/18557358009/nicholas-felton-20120115-5-minutes-on-the-verge
Bell timeline:
http://opengl.jp/blogger/2005/11/mylifebits.html
Laurie Frick (opening slide):
http://www.lauriefrick.com/sleep-patterns/
Online Educa workshop:
http://online-educa.com/media-picture-gallery
Danny Hillis:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/06/10000-year-clock/all/1
Victor Mayer-Schönberger:
http://www.fotopedia.com/items/flickr-538333155
Jim Gemmel:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10353343-264.html
Big Brother Awards:
https://www.bigbrotherawards.nl/
Max More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Max_More,_Stanford_2006_(square_crop).jpg
David Wiley:
http://davidwiley.org/

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