20 -- [the "knowledge age"]
22 -- [learning is now a "transhuman process," involving machines that learn or adapt as well as human learners]
22 -- With knowledge doubling every year or so, "expertise" now has a shelf life measured in days; everyone must be both learner and teacher; and the sheer challenge of learning can be managed only through a globe-girdling network that links all minds and all knowledge.
23 -- The hyper in hyperlearning refers not merely to the extraordinary speed and scope of new information technology, but to an unprecedented degree of connectedness of knowledge, experience, media, and brains -- both human and nonhuman. The learning in HL refers most literally to the transformation of knowledge and behavior through experience -- what learning means in this context goes as far beyond mere education or training as the space shuttle goes beyond the dugout canoe.
24 -- Our economy is being crippled by too much spending on too much schooling.
26 -- [An example of hyperlearning systems: the GM CAMS expert system for automobile maintenance; system includes a "manual" mode as well as top-down directed "automatic"]
27 -- Hyperlearning is a categorical step -- the proverbial "quantum leap" beyond "artificial intelligence," beyond broadband telecommunications, beyond information processing, beyond biotechnology. Rather, hyperlearning represents the fusion of these technological threads. HL is weaving them into the fabric of a new industrial base for a new kind of world economy.
28 -- [George Gilder's notion of "telecosm" -- totality of information available instantly to everyone]
28 -- The third thread is a kit of "hypermedia" tools that you will need to navigate through a knowledge-dense universe. Hypermedia is to multimedia roughly what an index is to a book. Only there's an unlimited number of simultaneous indexes and they are built into the text or other material -- you don't have to go to the "back of the book" to get a reference. The vital role of hypermedia in hyperlearning is to provide the technical bridge between information and understanding.
29 -- The humanlike level of performance will require only that computer power continue to advance at the same rate over the next few decades as it has over the past century.
37 -- A prototype camera-on-a-chip, with a lens the size of the capital letter at the beginning of this sentence, already has been developed at the University of Edinburgh.... Beyond near-term applications -- such as unobtrusive security cameras for houses, automatic teller machines, and eventually automobiles -- this microvideo technology promises Dick Tracy-style videophones in a wristwatch.
37 -- Those with the greatest ability to pay will still get greater access to the most valuable knowledge. But the cost of access will be so greatly reduced that vastly more knowledge will be available to everyone.
38 -- The key to the impact of these new multimedia systems is that they will be interactive -- the user does not merely observe or absorb information, but gets unprecedented power to create and act upon it.
44 -- [Mentions Schank's notion of "storytellers" as agents to assist hypermedia navigation.]
46 -- Leading researchers in the field of neurobiology expect a revolution in pharmacology by the turn of the century that will produce drugs that do for the brain what steroids do for muscles.
48 -- Hypermedia so far has been concerned with easing information retrieval. The "hyper" literally refers to many-dimensional connections, but the key idea is the connectedness: the ability to link hordes of data bits into patterns or structures the human mind can grasp. Hyperlearning needs to push this technology a quantum jump further than just grasping information: to make the higher level connections needed to extract knowledge, insight, understanding, and skill from a maze of information and experiences.
The "skill" factor is crucial. The mission of hyperlearning is not only vision but action. HL's purpose is enhance the human user's ability to direct the potent technology of the smart environment, lest the human be reduced to technology's object. The job of hypermedia alone is to inform; its job as part of the fabric of hyperlearning is to empower.
49 -- Einstein developed the special theory of relativity by "riding" a light beam in his mind's eye -- those with less vivid imaginations could share Einstein's "thought experiments" through VR imagery.
63 -- [Perelman agrees that "technology-centered" is a stupid term, since all learning depends on technologies]
66 -- [Anxiety over automation in the 50's -- Vonnegut's Player Piano]
69-70 -- [The "knowledge sector" of the late-postmodern economy: information as a renewable resource. Perpetual motion.]
70 -- ...information has special characteristics that distinguish it from all other economic entities. Most notable may be that information can be taken without being lost. By the same token, information may be licensed or leased to a large number of people at the same time without being divided or diminished. This makes intellectual property, or more simply "software," extremely profitable to own -- and therefore very attractive to steal. So information's special nature also makes property law far more critical to information-based businesses, even as it makes enforcement of that law more complicated.
73 -- The mindcraft economy will replace degrees and diplomas with precise instruments that certify attainment of competency.
77 -- [Charles Handy's portrait of the future work force: 3 groups, the "core" of permanent employees; the "contractors" who are brought in as needed; the "part-timers" who are jobbed in and out in marginal capacities.]
77 -- A substantial mass of part-timers who may work nominally either as contractors or employees, including: women (and some men) wanting to devote much but not all their time to child-rearing; nominal "retirees" who neither want nor can afford (or be afforded by society) to stop working entirely; and youth or people of any age who need part-time income while they devote the rest of their time to "recapitalizing" themselves either through reeducation and retraining or entrepreneurship.
78 -- Nearly all the people in Handy's shamrock gain income not by selling their labor but by renting their human capital.
80 -- As economist Anthony Carnevale has reported extensively, American employers tend to underinvest in educating and training their employees. A major reason is that, in a nation whose constitution prohibits indentured servitude and slavery, employers face the genuine risk of getting less or no return on investments in worker development if the employee leaves. The economic loss is compounded if the employee goes to work for a competitor.
81 -- [From selling labor to selling capital: everyone will want a share of long-term profits. Working for "points," as they do in Hollywood.]
87 -- In the recession of 1990-92 (ongoing at this writing), America got a cold shower of comeuppance for at least three costly delusions: (1) You can borrow prosperity without paying for it. (2) You can always make money in real estate. (3) You can never spend too much on education.
88 -- [Business Week:] From 1989 to 1990, the real incomes of college-educated men fell by 4 percent, and white-collar pay in general was down 2 percent. While neo-New Dealers were prattling about the rich getting richer, families in the top 5 percent of income saw their incomes decline over two-and-a-half times faster than middle-income families and nearly five times faster than families in the bottom fifth.
88 -- [American dream goes sour: diplomas and advanced degrees are no protection against downsizing.]
89 -- ["MADMUPs:" Middle-Aged Downwardly Mobile Underemployed (or Unemployed) Professionals.]
90 -- [Diplomas as junk bonds.]
91 -- The "more school" prescription has an ever more hollow -- and maddening -- ring to the middle-class family just starting to assemble a retirement nest egg after paying the equivalent of another house mortgage to send their kids to a hoity-toity college, only to see their brilliant twenty-five or thirty-year-old unemployed offspring "boomerang" back to the family nest after five or ten years in graduate school. That kind of academic prolongation of adolescent dependency is becoming epidemic in America. One out of every nine U.S. twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-old adults were living in their parents' home in 1990. A 1988 survey revealed that nearly 40 percent of U.S. men between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-one had held their current job for less than one year.
91 -- [Difference in lifetime earnings between college and HS graduates is almost negligible; possibly negative.]
94 -- [Sun Microsystems hires top supercomputer experts from the former USSR for $50 per month.]
97 -- [Economics of higher ed: with savings interest below 6 percent and college costs growing by 8 percent per year and more, it's impossible to save enough.]
99 -- Education must be shifted to the ramp of "total quality," "continuous improvement," and "just-in-time" delivery aimed at steadily decreasing the cost of learning, even as we seek to make learning more relevant and useful.
101 -- [Billions spent on educating children; pennies spent on educating adults]
102 -- [Praise for Ken Burns' Civil War, and promise of an "interactive" version on the way.]
103-104 -- [Hanushek study showing no correlation between increasing educational expenditures and educational outcomes.]
106 -- The simple truth is that education in America costs too much.
107 -- Academica [Perelman's name for the hypothetical nation of educators and schools] would now be the largest, and possibly the last, socialist economy on earth. By the way, the "socialist" label applies quite literally: American academia is about 90 percent owned, operated, and/or financed by government; and most of the remainder is government-regulated.
107-108 -- ["Boom and Bust" cycle in school reforms.]
110 -- Business in general has the most immediate and tangible need as a consumer of the human and intellectual capital that HL generates and education increasingly undermines. Business also is explicitly sensitive to the tax and other cost burdens imposed by a swollen, greedy academic bureaucracy, and conversely to the savings offered by a productive, HL-based learning enterprise. And business has organizational and financial resources that could vastly amplify the political clout of the millions of families and workers who are the most vulnerable consumers, and most aggrieved victims of a self-serving educational establishment.
A different but no less compelling business interest is in producing the HL systems that are needed to infuse learning into the entire twenty-first-century economy, and in the process replace education altogether.... replacing academic classrooms with hyperlearning technology offers a potential commercial market opportunity worth a few hundred billion dollars a year in the U.S. alone -- and several times more in the rest of the global economy. This is the greatest business opportunity since Rockefeller found oil. Yet it is being thwarted by a thicket of legal and regulatory barriers, and vested interests, that can only be cleared by forceful, cunning attack by unapologetically ambitious, entrepreneurial business leaders. Enlightened self-interest, after all, is supposed to be the fuel of free-enterprise capitalism.
111 -- [Examples of anything but enlightened self-interest: wholesale avoidance of local taxes on the part of large corporations: GM in Tarrytown NY, and in Spring Hill TN.] Local businesses in Wichita, Kansas, made $1.1 million in donations [to public schools]; then took back $1.6 million in school-tax concessions.
112 -- The result of these blatant contradictions is that the political credibility of business leaders in education reform is sinking like a rock.
112 -- The dilemma here stems from a basic failure of business strategy. The CEO and other top executives of any business wear several hats -- administrator, leader, preacher, fiduciary, advocate, role model, worker, adviser, builder, inventor, citizen, sometimes owner, and so forth. But all these roles are parts of just one job, to grow a particular business in an ethically and socially responsible way. Effective business strategy requires aligning the actions taken under all the manager's hats to pursue a coherent direction.
113 -- Investment capital needed to reinvent learning delivery systems and to retrain staff must come from economies in the existing system budgets.
113-14 -- [Electoral balance sheet: 1 citizen of "Academica" for every 20 irate taxpayers.]
114 -- ...lots more bang for lots fewer bucks.
115-16 -- [Analogy: Catholic Church's suppression of individual Bible reading, after invention of Gutenberg press, compared to National Education Association's declaration that all classrooms require a teacher.]
118 -- ...the information technology that overthrew the Soviet empire is having a similarly terminal effect on other not-quite-so-huge but sprawling and turgid bureaucratic institutions, including all state-owned industries as well as corporate behemoths like IBM or General Motors.
119 -- Reformers who aim to free schooling from bureaucracy are trying to free an aircraft from the air. An aircraft for airless transport is, in fact, a spacecraft -- not a "reformed" aircraft but a whole different thing.
121 -- [Argues that students are currently "servants" of teachers, but these roles must reverse, leaving students the "customers" of teaching as a service industry.]
121-22 -- Consumer empowerment is a necessary condition for the growth of hyperlearning technology markets. Even if consumers become far more widely aware than they are now of the prolific power of modern technology to serve their needs, vendors will find little increase in effective demand for their products as long as the learning consumer remains politically and economically disabled.
126 -- ["Cognitive science" shows that learning happens in context, not in abstract acquisition of "facts."]
132 -- [Case of student who can record bowling scores with great facility, but can't do classroom math problems based on the same principles.]
135 -- To be effective in [new] settings, workers need not only the skills developed by a particular simulation "game," but what we might call "metagame skills" -- reflecting the higher order skills needed to master new games from scratch. That new games ability is crucial to working in environments that require anticipating a virtually infinite number of crisis scenarios and that present continually upgraded operating technology.
[Prescription here: play lots of different video games...]
142 -- Pedantic, linear teaching rarely conveys the true drama and mystery of the human quest for knowledge. School plods where human imagination naturally leaps.
145-46 -- [Nintendo's "campus" and its 500 "game masters."]
151 -- [James Burke vs. E.D. Hirsch.]
152 -- So the proper "map" of the universe of all knowledge would be something like the surface of a sphere (actually a hypersphere), one that is also expanding, like a balloon. Every "fact" is a point that is connected to every other point.
156 -- [Contrary to the "hacker" stereotype, users of computer software are actually quite cooperative and social.]
160 -- [Points to an "academic underclass" who will never be properly credentialed by the education elites.]
162 -- [African-American girl in Perelman's physics class who won't accept her sterling performance. Why does she refuse to accept success? Social factors.]
166 -- Socialization is a function of societies, not of classrooms.
169-74 -- [Discussion of 1989 Bush education summit; wrong goals, wrong time frame.]
175-76 -- [Laments restriction of science and technology jobs to white males, since these groups are declining demographically. Prominent part of the solution: remove barriers to immigration from Hong Kong.]
182 -- [Perelman's credo: MBFC, or More Better Faster Cheaper]
184 -- [School Choice is not the answer, unless schools are commercialized.]