Community in Cyberspace: Real or Imagined?

By Carl Hunt

What do the reactions to the recent WikiLeaks (also here), Facebook, and your town have in common?  Well, since you saw the title to this week’s blog already, you guessed it: community.  The line of inquiry we take up today, however, is how “real” are these communities and what do they mean to us in terms of individual and collective human behaviors?

Since we talked a bit about Facebook previously, we'll focus on real "imagined" communities.

We all experience effects of behavior and one of the very first insights we consider is the effects of behavior in cyberspace-based communities.  Regardless of nation-state ties or physical locations, the virtual communities of cyberspace can create real effects that cause challenges to the traditional structure of government or business.  The communities that formed to do “virtual combat” against those that initially cut off access to the WikiLeaks site caused real damage that can be measured in lost income or customer confidence.  While the level of damage caused is still being debated, it was indeed quantifiable.

Equally as interesting, there is no evidence that any of the groups (communities, if you will) had ever met or coordinated their attacks on each other before the recent US government-related WikiLeaks were released.  These communities may have previously existed but their objectives and capabilities remained largely unnoticed until a rationale manifested itself and these groups self-identified around a common cause.  They “imagined” a status that empowered them to act as members of a community.

So, what is an imagined community as opposed to a real community?  Is there a difference as far as cyberspace communities are concerned?

Americans, Chinese, French, and even Somali citizens understand their ties to a nation-state entity.  In some populations, the concept of nationalism creates great personal patriotism and fervor, and in some a personal identification with national spirit is less relevant.  But in all cases, according to Cornell emeritus professor, Benedict Anderson, some quality of fraternity emerges and a people develop a sufficient sense of national identity that they come to be willing to die for their identity and the national entity.

Since we have not yet fought any full-blown Cyber World War, it’s unclear yet how such a strong sense of “nationalism” will play out in cyberspace.  Anderson’s ideas about imagined communities still resonate strongly in both real and virtual life, however.  We’ll have to see how the notion of willingness “to die for their identity” as a part of a community, whether physical or virtual, will play out, but there are insights we can start to accrue, as the recent wikileaks episodes clear.

NY Times technology reporter and author Nick Bilton has begun to address the idea of imagined community as it applies to cyberspace in I Live in the Future and Here’s How it Works (Crown, 2010).  Bilton writes “…we are constantly weaving in and out of small and large, obvious and imagined communities.”  Cyberspace, or the digital realm, as Bilton further clarifies it, is an “always on, real-time, creating, consuming society,” and the media has been bringing this trend to human community for many years, perhaps centuries, as noted by both Anderson and Bilton.

Writes Bilton about Anderson’s perspectives on community and the media: “In the same way that Anderson recognized that the printing press and its ability to communicate in a person’s language could break up power structures and create meaningful and powerful nations, so too may our online communities reshape and remake both our own personal imagined nations and our traditional ways of communicating.”

The creation of new globally-connected, yet often self-detached imagined communities such as the participants in the wikispaces conflict demonstrate is important to watch.  Community may be real or virtual but it is in the mind of the beholder what role and actions the inhabitants may take, and in fact, cyberspace may amplify those roles and accelerate behaviors around the globe.  While we may never see the Cyber World War, we will likely see constant transformation of conflict as enabled by cyberspace and imagined communities.

Study and modeling of these communities is a critical objective of SENDS as we have noted here and here, for example.  Creation of common terms and concepts so that we can better understand the wicked nature of the problems we discover along the way is also a mandate.  Before we can understand communities and new forms of conflict in cyberspace, we have come to grips with the nature of cyberspace, and we need your help.  Please send us your thoughts to words@sendsonline.org and let’s move forward with this real and important community!

Information Operations and Cyberspace: It's “Time” to Chat

By Craig Harm

Last week, Carl Hunt and I had the opportunity to talk about the SENDS effort at the Defining IO/Cyber Spectrum Operations Conference hosted at SPAWAR, Charleston, SC.  The conference was conducted by the Association of Old Crows.  The conference theme was “Defining IO & Cyber Capabilities in 21^st Century warfare”.  Keynote speakers were headlined by Vice Admiral “Mike” McConnell, U.S. Navy (retired) who was previously the Director of the National Security Agency and the Director of National Intelligence.  This was an important conference!

Discussions the first day centered on the strategic issues of DoD and national cyber operations and defense efforts.  While we heard how each of the military services is reorganizing to make cyber operations a more main-stream activity, we also heard about the complexity of their network management and defense challenges.  Senior-level operators expressed their concerns about being unable to see into their own networks.  The speakers included an Army general officer, a reservist on active duty, who has also worked in senior leadership positions in the commercial sector.

Many of the senior-level presenters on the first day talked about their efforts to secure their own networks.  As would be expected from those with such responsibilities, they all seemed to focus on the key areas of management, oversight, accountability, command and control and roles and missions.   These points were highlighted by recurring mention of organizational studies, effectiveness inspections, committee formations and “way-ahead” talks.

The second day was focused more on the “tactical” level and network operations.  A key point about network dependencies was brought up during these discussions.  The upshot of all of the presentations was that despite the talk of Net Centric Operations and Warfare, the DoD is really Net Dependent, and it is this Net Dependency that presents the most opportunities for vulnerability; this creates a driving force behind the requirement for secure networks.   With over 1.4 million DoD users on the network (including an increasing mobile presence), the challenge for network operators is building the culture to ensure users are protecting data and the network.

Yes, despite the leap in technologies and accessibility, it is still a culture issue – a people issue.

Although the details and the content of most of the discussions about Information Operations (IO) were classified, there were some key points of interest we can discuss here.  The first and foremost to me is the incongruence of the definition of Information Operations and what it is composed of.   Even today, there is still debate about what IO is and how it’s done.  The conventional DoD definition of IO includes both electronic warfare (EW) and computer network operations (CNO).   While some of these discussions look and feel “new”, such as computer network operations, the main themes are not, as I point out below.

The third and last day was conducted as a panel forum on new technologies.  The panel members were asked to address “What are some new technologies on the horizon, and how are these technologies transitioned to the warfighter?  What are Cyber and Net-Centric Warfare, and how will these capabilities help the warfighter?”

There were discussions and presentations on adaptive antenna technologies, text and video content extraction, as well as Information Management systems: the technologies of cyber-enabled operations, if you will.  It was in these sessions that Carl presented the SENDS Project.  His was the only presentation of the entire conference to specifically address the need to understand the human part of cyberspace, the linkage between “new” and “old” thinking about Information Operations (see below).

Many of the presentations during the conference alluded to the human element, but none called it out specifically.   In addition to giving a basic overview of the SENDS philosophy and the concept of the Science of Cyberspace, Carl talked of how the biggest source of both gratification and aggravation in the growth of cyberspace is in innovation….persistent, emergent innovation, a human process, by the way.

There is a paradox of sorts, where the ultimate uses of technologies and policies in many cases deviate to a use that was not the original intent.  This, Carl pointed out, is the manifestation of emergence from human, technological and cultural exchanges.  Cyberspace is a breeding ground for adaptation and innovation.  People interacting with other people, often through cyberspace technologies, show us daily how adaptive and yet unpredictable we truly are: this also helps explain why social science, while making progress, still has a long way to go!

After hearing three days of talk about the importance of Information Operations, the tremendous focus and effort within the DoD towards these operations, and the monumental challenges DoD has to overcome to implement them I began to wonder why this seems so new to people.  Information, communication, connectivity and secure lines of communication have historically always been important, vital parts of our lives as humans.

Several in the conference pointed out that during the revolutionary war, it was George Washington’s tremendous human network for gathering information that enabled him to outmaneuver the British and keep the Colonial Army intact.  While moving to intercept Robert E. Lee's army of Northern Virginia, Union soldiers from George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac discovered a misplaced copy of Lee's detailed battle plans wrapped around three cigars; even though McClellan failed to exploit the discovery to victory, he was still able to achieve a tactical draw at Antietam (interestingly, some of the first “cyberspace” technologies such as the telegraph, linked people during that time).  World War II saw the dependence on wireless transmission, another manifestation of cyberspace.  The Allied exploitation of Japanese codes and the German Enigma machine gave a significant advantage to the Allied war efforts.

So why is there the sudden emphasis on Information Operations?  Why is this different now, in the 21^st Century, than it has been in the past?  Why are these operations drawing so much attention from our national leaders in the last few years?

I believe what is really making this different is rooted in the effects modern cyberspace connectivity brings to operations.  Near-ubiquitous human connectivity and the massive quantities of data, interacting through the technology of cyberspace, have a transformational temporal impact.  It is really about time, and the massive human-human, human-machine and machine-machine interactions that modern, fast-paced flows of information enable.   SENDS is attempting to gain an understanding of these same themes through the study of exchange, emergence and self-organization.

These elements that cyberspace brings to Information Operations makes things different now, more than at any other period in history.  And it is these elements, including the effects of time, through which we must gain a more fundamental understanding before any study, reorganization or new policy will ever have any significant impact.

Cyberspace Community: Yours, Mine or Ours?

by Carl Hunt

Perhaps the biggest source of both gratification and aggravation in the growth of cyberspace is innovation…continuous, emergent innovation: it constantly surprises us!  What we ultimately observe in human, technological and cultural interactions often does not resemble the original purposes we had in mind when we built and deployed cyberspace realizations of our great ideas.  The communities within cyberspace just seem to take over and something new emerges.

Whose communities are these that change our intents and purposes?  Why don’t we have better control over our ideas and creations?  Just who owns cyberspace in the first place and do “they” control these communities?  Why do these emergences keep happening?

We have spoken about emergence in past blogs (here and here, for example), but we haven’t yet discussed it in terms of community, an all-important concept for cyberspace dwellers to accept and adopt.  People, interacting with other people and our technologies, show us routinely how adaptive and often unpredictable we truly are, particularly when we start forming the connected collectives we call community.

Whether these collectives and communities are in the virtual worlds of cyberspace or in the real world (whatever the differences are anymore), who owns them and who governs them?  Do we as humans own cyberspace or does it ultimately own us within the communities we build and occupy?  Could we at least suggest models of how these things work together?

One thing we have seen is that cyberspace is a breeding ground for adaptation and innovation, accelerating the processes of ecological coevolution as we have discussed in the past.  And since we can in fact begin to build models of these interactions, we can see that the outcomes of these adaptations and exchanges are truly emergences.  We can also see that these emergences apply to communities, as well.

SENDS is about leveraging these outcomes of emergence in the context of biological, sociological and technological events.  Emergent behaviors, products or processes are outcomes that are greater than the sums of their parts: the very nature and richness of the interactions that bind together to produce novelty and innovation ensure the amplification of the essential qualities of cyberspace.  Oh yes, emergence is something more than a simple sum of parts.

Cyberspace communities accommodate and reflect emergence in ways that we as humans have simply not been able to visualize before.  Technological innovations are mashed up to produce products not originally conceived, enabling new opportunities and processes for their uses and new communities to embrace and propagate them, and the cycle begins again.  New communities then form and so it goes, on and on…this is emergence in action!

Emergence is empowered by the connectivity of cyberspace in ways no other environment or domain of existence has ever done before, and we can indeed begin to model it, as we suggested (here and here).  But, communities and the dynamism they represent start to really add complexity to the models.  That’s why it’s so hard to say whose community is whose and who really occupies or controls it.

It’s worth trying to struggle with the concept of community within cyberspace, and we are going to do it in these blogs.  We’re going to leverage the insights we gain from the calls for assistance from contributor Bob Schapiro, for example, and find ways to express cyberspace as community, embracing emergence as a concept that reveals rather than obscures. 

We may not answer all the questions raised in this blog today but we’ll answer some of them.  And in keeping with good science, we’ll raise even better and more focused questions that help us explain and predict just what is happening in cyberspace and in community.  We may even reach some level of community sensibility!

Editor's Note: We want to thank Atlantic Magazine correspondent James Fallows for mentioning SENDS and the SENDS blog in a recent piece (noted in the right margin of this blog).  Jim's work in helping people understand the effects of cyberspace and the applications of modern technology have been terrific over the years.  Thanks, Jim!

Graphical Languages in the Cyberspace Ecospace

by Sandy Klausner

editor’s note: Sandy Klausner is the founder and CEO of CoreTalk Corporation, the designer of the Cubicon programming language, described at http://www.coretalk.net/.  The opinions and concepts proposed by Sandy reflect his thinking about new types of programming languages, and web-based architectures including Cubicon.  SENDS does not endorse any specific product, but seeks to ensure members and guests of the Private-Public partnership of the SENDS Consortium are aware of novel thinking proposed by those associated with the Consortium and its efforts.

As reflected throughout the SENDS Blog (here and  here, for example), the SENDS Project seeks to understand the nature of cyberspace as a complex adaptive system (CAS) as well as reflectively thinking about cyberspace itself as a meta-system.  Not only is cyberspace characterized as such a CAS, but increasingly the computer architectures and programming languages that support cyberspace-based communications must also support these levels of functionality.

This functionality, discussed previously, includes the processes of exchange, self-organization and emergence.  Let’s look at each of these through the lens of computer network architecture.

Exchange – The exchange of concepts and information requires a semantic basis to enable software agents to infer relationships and manage content and services without human intervention.  This machine processing requires unprecedented levels of automation to support massive exchanges between billions of people and information transactions around the world.  New graphical languages must enable domain experts to create, share and execute software agents that process knowledge, transact services and enable social networking to evolve to new levels of collective intelligence.

Self-organization – People, systems and information need the ability to self-organize through cyberspace.  Such capability mandates a new computer science, infused with the inspirations of complexity science, where software artifacts are inherently recombinant to energize self-organization.  This first principle science will enable unprecedented levels of interactions and interoperability that can be visualized as dynamic system models.

Emergence – As noted in Carl Hunt’s earlier blog, this self-organization process is the transmission that moves exchange into emergence.  Emergence of novel behaviors, fresh opportunities and new organizational structures must be simulated in new graphical languages that support cyberspace evolution, providing insights into complex cyberspace realms.  These visual simulations will be easily shared across domains, providing novel ways to understand complex systems and provide continuous dynamic feedback to all participants in knowledge evolution.

Knowledge Processing

Borrowing from the SENDS blog on “Ecospace”, Figure 1, below, helps to visualize the major interactions that take place to create both the opportunity and the requirements for coevolution within cyberspace and its interacting elements.  Service exchanges and knowledge processing are at the heart of this interaction.  The figure also depicts several categories of emergence that are both ingredients and products of the coevolving world of massive interconnectivity that cyberspace enables.

There are two basic forms of systems that coevolve with each other through exchanges and processing that compose cyberspace: human systems and machine systems (together they accommodate the production of something useful).  Emergent characteristics from human and machine behaviors, technologies, cultures and governances all synergize to produce what we recognize as cyberspace.

The services that we introduce to make the network valuable as well as the threats to those services are also part of the coevolving landscapes.  Just as in predator-prey models of ecosystems, the threat is an integral consideration of a holistic perspective of cyberspace.  Finally, both natural and artificial adaptations take place that ensure cyberspace is a constantly changing, coevolving environment that truly requires the augmentation of more modern architectures and graphical programming languages.

Figure 1 - The Programming Language-Architecture View of the Cyberspace Ecology (courtesy CoreTalk Corp.)

New Software Paradigm will Manage Systems Complexity

The gap between generational advances in hardware (Moore’s Law), users’ application demands, and software’s ability to productively utilize both continues to expand … with no end in sight.  This gap can only be closed by greatly automating the software life cycle that can effectively overcome complexity bottlenecks.

A new software paradigm must address seven fundamental cyberspace complexity challenges that can be characterized in the following ways:

Semantic Web – As RDF & OWL remain underutilized, a graphical language must provide the required formalization of ‘context’ and ‘community’ architecture to fully support a global semantic substrate across cyberspace

Service-oriented Architecture – As SOA remains too ad hoc, new approaches must provide the requisite technology for machine-to-machine (M2M) interactions to truly scale across billions of devices

Smart Grid – As hard real-time environments are difficult to encode, a graphical language and a contextualized infrastructure must provide the following capabilities for a National “Smart Grid” to be realized sooner:

- ability to create and evolve interoperable standards

- mediation of services between disparate devices in a community

- execution environment that deterministically processes events in real time

“Manycore” processing – As threading is failing to scale, a fused software/hardware architecture must provide an effective parallel programming mechanism that can harness the power of emerging “manycore” processors

Software re-use – As current programming language ecosystems lack componentry architecture, a recombinant technology must enable a fertile exchange of high value intellectual property assets

Malware – As current immunization technologies are increasingly less effective, next generation programming must prevent malware infiltration through a robust ‘whitelist’ security model for all software components and apps

IP (intellectual property) tracking & licensing – As the Open Source model lacks a viable business model, a graphical language must ultimately support the ‘Open Design’ software model that provides direct compensation/recognition for authors based on virtual supply chains

Conclusions

As a proponent of what the SENDS Project calls “Open-Source Science,” these discussions about new, exchange-based programming languages and architectures are an important augmentation not only to a science-based approach to understanding cyberspace, but to spur greater innovation in the development of these capabilities.

I think the Cubicon programming language that CoreTalk has designed is consistent with the principles SENDS initially proposes for architecture and language development.  As is the case with all open-source evolution, however, the market and its users will decide.  In the meantime, the public-private partnership SENDS seeks to leverage is a viable path forward to doing good science in cyberspace and generating more secure environments for national and global prosperity.



SENDS and Sensibility

by Carl Hunt

Jane Austen’s novel, Sense and Sensibility, tells a story of rich, dynamic dealings among an interesting cross-representation of the people of late 18^th Century English life. The successes and failures of the characters of the story, moderated by the emotions and realties of the time, are a microcosm of life even today.  The characters lived their lives through complex interactions basically devoid of technology yet ultimately made wise and “sensible” decisions about their lives that produced a relatively “happy ending.”

One almost wonders how they accomplished this without Facebook and Twitter.

Seeking an understanding of the sensibilities of how people interact, make decisions and take actions in the interconnected environment of cyberspace is a major objective of SENDS.  Emotion plays a significant role in how people relate in any social environment.  That’s a key distinction between human and machine interaction.

Machines don’t yet communicate well without a detailed “understanding” of the instructions they are passed through code, yet people often do.  Cyberspace in the current age is about people most of all, and how they communicate with each other.

In spite of misunderstandings, people still accomplish objectives and create relationships that frequently succeed.  Disasters do happen and even battles are fought over what began as emotional reaction, but so far humanity hasn’t ended because of misinterpreted or deceptive communications.  Humans seem to do okay.

Since emotion and sensibility so often drive human behavior, the question arises about how to model motivations and behaviors so that they can better inform simulations about network operations and defense.  To start coming to grips with this challenge, we introduced a SENDS approach previously in these blogs: SENDSim, the SENDS cyberspace modeling and simulation environment.

How we define and frame an environment such as cyberspace has a great deal to do with how we model it.  Bob Schapiro suggested several important considerations and challenges earlier this week.  If we define cyberspace solely as a battlefield environment, for example, our vocabulary reflects that bias, and the characteristics of the simulation agents we model might also inappropriately reflect such biases.

Department of Homeland Deputy Secretary Jane Holl Lute raised the challenge of properly defining cyberspace in a recent speech at Black Hat in July of this year.  In her speech, Deputy Secretary Lute asked “Cyberspace: is it a war zone? Is it a marketplace, a neighborhood, a school, a highway, a do loop of our past activities, a playground, a sandbox…” and made several important points about its diversity.

It’s easy to see how emotions have driven the debate up to this point, as well as how sensibilities must be driven by human common sense and logic to help us get this right.  Deputy Secretary Lute is asking a very important and very sensible question.

To seek answers to those questions in SENDS, we are placing a significant level of confidence in modeling and simulation to help us better understand how people interact with each other and the technologies of cyberspace.  Approaches like SENDSim, along with the insights of users of cyberspace, as Bob pointed out, may the only way we’ll ever be able to define and begin to comprehend something so vast and complex.

SENDSim offers an economical opportunity to build a laboratory that helps us experiment with human insights and test interactions.  It offers us a way to address the dilemma Deputy Secretary Lute raises while ensuring we capture the nuances of human and technological interaction.  Examining the behaviors of each is critical to understanding cyberspace in a way that reflects both “Sense and Sensibility.”

Jane Austen’s characters apparently did well enough in their life without cyberspace, but most of us now rely on it for almost all forms of communications.  As Bob implored, please help us get these definitions right.  Help us do better science and experimentation, in the appropriately defined environment, by engaging in the “open-source science” of cyberspace.

To quote Bob from last time, please “send us your thoughts at words@sendsonline.org.”

What We Talk About When We Talk About Cyberspace

by Bob Schapiro

Words conjure images – we think in images and symbols.  Any good taxonomy of cyberspace must begin with that reality, or else it will likely join the junk pile of history.  At best, its terms would enter the ranks of words that people know but never use.  (Elementary school is nearly a universal experience, but when was the last time you said “tardy” or “lavatory” out loud?  For that matter, “taxonomy” always makes me think of April 15^th…or a stuffed beaver.)

As SENDS develops the foundations of a Science of Cyberspace, we invite your contributions to a new, hopefully universally accepted vocabulary that builds on what works today.  We’ll give you the email address at the bottom of this column, along with our hidden agenda.  (Please excuse me, but I used to produce television newscasts; I have to tease what’s coming up, it’s in my DNA.)

On television, I confront the need to visualize the concept of cyberspace.  I mean, how many images of fingers on a keyboard can you stand?  Fortunately there are many stock animations available on the topic.  You’ve seen them.  Usually you are zooming into some abstract space, sometimes with zeroes and ones flashing past you.  The concept is clear:  In order to deal with cyberspace, you have to move through space.

This is not the best definition, but certainly understandable.  “Space” is right there in the term.  For that reason, some people use the term “cyber realm” or “cyber domain.”  I’ve heard more than one theorist ask if cyberspace existed before we had computers to see it.  Hmmm…in outer space, Saturn had moons before we had telescopes to see them.  Amoebas existed before we had microscopes.  Did my email exist when I was still using a typewriter?  Somehow I don’t think that this is what the theorists meant…

Email is perhaps a better place to begin.  Cyberspace is a big, heavy-duty concept.  Email has obvious analogies to other experiences; these may offer insight and solutions.  For example, is spam just junk mail on steroids?  If so, solutions that mitigate junk mail might reduce the problem.  But what exactly is spam?

An inclusive definition might be “unwanted and unsolicited messages.”  This would include unwanted tweets and Facebook messages...and exclude emails from a magazine to which we actually subscribe.  After all, by subscribing, aren’t we just asking for it?

There are certainly similarities between spam and traditional junk mail.  Both often masquerade as official business, on the theory that if they can just get me to open it, I won’t mind discovering that they tried to mislead me.  (Well, if I open it, they succeeded in misleading me, but I don’t like to admit that.)

Of course, none of the junk mail that the postal carrier brings to my door ever causes my toaster to burn the bagels…or ransacks the address book in my desk drawer.  Obviously there are categories of spam, but there is no similarly accepted four-letter word for “email messages that contain malware” – well, none that we can print in a family blog.  We need a word.  Words are symbols and we think using symbols.  Cognition improves when we have precise, well-understood definitions.

I promised you a hidden agenda.  We actually have two.  The first is that a wide cross-section of folks should come up with these terms or else the lawyers will.  Yes, the scientists will try, but if the words don’t feel right to a lot of people, the lawyers will prevail.  Probably federal lawyers.  Probably committees of federal lawyers.  Do the users of cyberspace really deserve that?

The second is that we’re going to try to make the Internet a more hospitable place with a voluntary “SENDS Seal of Approval”...an early effort to ensure our “Science of Cyberspace” is truly open-source science as we've said in other blogs.  Pardon the hubris, but someone needs to say it: cyberspace belongs to all of us and we all need a say.  If we succeed, you and I will not have to create “accounts” every time we buy something and we won’t confront an unfathomable array of cookies after an hour on the web.

Yes, we are that optimistic.  But we know it will only work if we have a precise and popular terminology, with words that we all can easily understand and remember.  Just send us your suggestions at words@sendsonline.org.

Don’t be shy.  Remember that the term “cyberspace” itself was only coined in 1982.  The science-fiction author William Gibson created it as an “evocative and essentially meaningless” buzzword, as any student of Wikipedia knows.  In fact, Wikipedia needs cyberspace to even have an audience.

There’s an emerging, rich history out there and cyberspace—despite its humble origins—is a concept that is coming to define much of our lives.  You can help define cyberspace.  Send us your thoughts at words@sendsonline.org.

Classrooms in Cyberspace

By Nelson Stewart

[Editor’s Note: Nelson Stewart is a music, English, geography, and history teacher in Hamilton, Ontario.  He is also a contributing subject matter expert on “Cyberspace Age” public education and the musical industry, as he describes in the SENDS White Paper on the Science of Cyberspace.  Below, Nelson discusses his thoughts on how cyberspace is transforming education in the grade school classroom. – Carl Hunt].

As a teacher I have seen in just the past few years an explosion in the use of cyberspace.  There are important ways in which this been a valuable asset in the classroom.  For example, as a teacher of multiple subjects I literally have computer access to a world of knowledge, right from my desk.  When a student asks a question about any subject I can instantly seek out the answer, and if appropriate put it up on a screen and share it with the whole class.  Not only that, but I can often provide a photo, video clip or a sound-bite to accompany the information I pass on to the students. 

My students recently completed a cross-curriculum assignment involving the presentation of songs of a socio-political nature.  Each student was required to research the history of the song, the composer and the way the song relates to similar music and the world at large.  They also had to provide an analysis of the song from both a lyrical and musical perspective and then discuss it with the class.  Not only was research done using the Internet but each song was played for the class using YouTube. 

This power is augmented by the use of Smartboards in the classroom, which are touch-sensitive and are linked directly to the Internet through the teacher’s computer.  This means that even a primary or junior student has the ability to instantly connect with the world through their fingertips.  As we move toward a time when each student has their own Internet capable device, connected to the vastness of cyberspace, the possibilities seem endless.  Indeed, my school board just issued $185,000 worth of iPhones to school board staff so that they may have a reliable and consistent means of communication. 

Once we get to the point where every student has an iPad or similar tablet device, for example, then two things are likely.  The first is that these devices may lose their novelty, and therefore will just become tools, much like text books and whiteboards now.  As students and teachers get used to these new devices in the classroom, students with headphones plugged in listening to music -- as a lot of us do when we're working -- won't seem strange (the next generation of teachers, who were raised in an iPod/laptop world, will be even more accepting of this).

Secondly, if every student has a standard electronic medium then it will be easier for the teacher to plan around that.  Lessons, audio-visual aids, etc., can all be downloaded into each device and used in a uniform manner that is supervised by the teacher.  Report cards, homework, letters to the parents, and permission forms can all go home with the students on their tablet.  As technology advances, those devices will no doubt provide increasingly stimulating ways to improve pedagogy as well (for example: holographic images, direct cerebral connections that “transport” students to new lands, etc.).  While isolated experiments of this nature are being conducted around the world, we have a long way to go to fully exploit these new ways of thinking about the classroom in cyberspace!

Today, such devices only provide access to children’s games, music, and bare-bones Internet access, but one can easily imagine how much simpler it will be for students, particularly ones with learning disabilities, to access cyberspace by “plugging” in directly just by thinking about it or interfacing cerebrally, a la The Matrix.  Education must not be limited to so-called standard ways of perception, and new forms of cyberspace connectivity are beginning to offer ways to overcome the lack of eyesight, hearing or other senses.

Of course cyberspace and its accompanying technologies come with their own sets of problems related to use in the classroom.  Students with hand-held, Internet-capable devices are sometimes more interested in emailing their friends or playing on-line games than what is going on in the classroom.  To my mind this directly relates to the general decline in attention-span and on-task time in the classroom that is viewed by many teachers to be a result of technology overload, particularly in relation to cyberspace communication and gaming at home.  As always, achieving balance is important…but that’s not a problem unique to cyberspace.  I think a science of cyberspace can certainly inform how we achieve that balance.

In the end, it will be up to teachers of this and new generations of students to challenge themselves and their educational systems to harness these new technologies and connectivity in ways that produce interesting and relevant forms of education.  Cyberspace is expanding, as are the technologies that leverage it: as teachers we must ensure our students can take advantage of this new world, not deny its role in education.  The classrooms of the “Cyberspace Age” offer far more winners than losers if we get this right.