Games for change

So you know the next two weeks will be thin on the ground for me – I’ll be flat out like the proverbial lizard preparing for my KM study meeting in Taiwan, flying to Taiwan blah blah.

I don’t want you to hit the Unsubscribe button though because I’ll be back with those long, raving and ranting posts I know you love so much. But to clear up my backlog of interesting stuff to share with you – here’s a great site I found that uses games to bring attention to the most pressing issues of our day, such as poverty, human rights, global conflict and climate change.

So a lot of arty geeky types, along with academics, journalists and individuals from the nonprofit and government sectors have collaborated on the site Games for Change. I’ve been dabbling with some of them because I need to design curriculum in the next few months.

There are various game channels – I really wish I had access to this sort of interactive, educative stuff when I was a teacher back in the mists of time. I particularly like the games on global conflict and human rights. They deal with real-world issues.

Check out this game – 3rd World Farmer – designed for ages 11+ years, the game lets players manage a small virtual farm in a developing country and experience the hardships and dilemmas faced by the poor.

Ars Regendi is a political game where a player can found their own State and lead it according to his or her political ideals. And Escape from Woomera is probably a very timely game for Aussies to play given the current situation with Sri Lankan refugees. The game gets players to try and escape from an immigration detention centre.

And my favourite? It’s a game called Civilization IV: Quality of Life and involves players in using their moral values to reward a society.

Given Gen Y and Millenials penchant for virtual worlds, these digital games are a fabulous way of raising social, legal and moral issues and facilitating social change. The site also has a toolkit of the game-making process and prompts you to think about the sorts of questions you need to ask if you’re thinking of designing a digital game. Cool!

Future of learning

For the next couple of weeks,  I will be “on the road”. I’m off to Taiwan to participate in an Asia Pacific Knowledge Management study meeting.  I’ll be speaking on Intellectual Capital – more when I come back.  See – I actually still do stuff in KM 🙂

This is good news for you dear reader as it means I won’t have any time for long, ranting posts.

But next week, I’ll be offering a lucky reader a 3 month free subscription to Choice magazine! Stay tuned for competition details.

Meanwhile, I have a backlog of interesting stuff to share with you. Look what I’ve found!  I’m excited by this even if you’re not. I spend a fair bit of time teaching uni students. This semester, I’ve taken a break from face-to-face teaching but in 2010 I’ll be getting back into it. For over 6 years, I’ve been teaching in a virtual environment via an online facilitation system. This of course means that I spend a fair bit of thinking time on education – how to engage students; how to design interactive stuff; how to encourage students to engage in intellectual discourse and so on.

So I was doing some research about educational trends and I found this cool site on the future of learning. I often wonder if F2F teaching will become a quaint relic of the past and whether students and lecturers will be engaging in a virtual environment like Second Life. I wonder how gamers will influence learning; or how Gen Y will bring a whole new perspective to education.

The 2020 forecast has some great insights and examines the forces that will impact on education over the next few years.  Here’s a quick summary:

• we are shifting towards a “culture of creation” and this means individuals can grasp the opportunity to create new selves, organisations, systems, societies, economies and knowledge;
• “educitizens” define their rights as learners. Participatory media will lead to a re-articulation of identity and community in a global society;
• resilience (which is a concept I spend a lot of time thinking about in relation to KM) – schools and educators will need to equip students with skills that facilitate resilience eg networking power; using social media to engage with the wider community; applying collective intelligence;
• new tools for visualising data will require new skills in discerning meaningful patterns – I actually think this will be a huge area for educators as software applications that help people to visually think and problem solve become smarter;
• local values will reawaken. Economies of group connectivity—combined with fears of globalism and concern over dominance of big business—will create a revival of localism. New civic processes will emerge and educators and learners will need to engage with this;
• youth media and Gen Y will dominate – smart networkers will push the organisational edge for employers and community leaders. Gen Y’s experience with interactive games and virtual worlds will result in community learning that stresses cooperative strategies, experimentation and parallel development.

There’s sooooooooo much on this site and explored in the trend map but I’m short on time as I have to prepare stuff on intellectual capital. So I’m going to leave it to you to check out the interactive map – pretty cool the way you can navigate the map and drill deeper. At the very least, it will trigger thoughts about the way educators and learners will need to change course over the next few years and how a “learning ecosystem” will be the future of learning.

Make sure you check out the section on Altered Bodies and A New Civic Discourse. For KM people, there’s also some great resources on scenario planning.

Are you guilty Google?

After 5 years, I gave up teaching at a university in Sydney largely because I was tiring of the spoon feeding students seem to expect these days. Very few students were willing to do research beyond a quick dip into Wikipedia, with the odd citation of a book or journal article thrown in. Curiosity appeared to be lacking. The general attitude seemed to be “I’m paying a heck of a lot for my education, just give me the degree/diploma”. I often had assignments handed in with slabs of text taken from Wikipedia and students more often than not failed to examine the original source material. So I threw in the towel.

Seems I’m not an isolated case as there have been some recent articles that have caught my attention and I’d like you to explore. Google and the End of Wisdom by Bob Batchelor is an interesting piece.  Here’s some snippets:

• “I think one would be hard pressed to find a mainstream American under the age of 30 who did not feel that all their questions could be answered by Google. Today’s students, from first graders to those in graduate school, have been taught to find specific, correct answers. Google does this quickly and efficiently. For them, Google is a godsend.”
• “In general, students are willing to forfeit advanced thinking (critical thinking, in-depth research, and healthy skepticism) for the speed and quickness of Google search results. They are so programmed by standardized testing in K-12 education that finding “facts” online is deemed sufficient to meet college-level expectations. Since standardized tests rely heavily on multiple choice examinations, the search for the single, correct answer is paramount.”
• “Wisdom develops over time as a person stacks up experiences and finds measures to constantly reengage with the changing nature of the world at large. Relying on answers from a search engine, even if it produces thousands of results faster than the blink of an eye, cannot compare to the simple, beautiful act of sitting quietly for 15 minutes, disconnected from the computer—and thinking.”

From personal experience with Uni students over the last 5 years, I’m not going to disagree with the article. My blogging colleague Marc over at Creative Spark (you have to read his blog) had an interesting exchange with Bob regarding his article, so I won’t rehash the issues discussed.

It is of course so that we can tailor and change our information flow, through RSS feeds, Twitter exchanges and so on. So there’s an argument to say that we can be more enriched and curious in the digital world because we are exposed to so many different ideas and perspectives.

I get this but somehow – and I need to reflect more on this – it seems that today’s Uni students are just hovering at a very superficial level. They are not diving in and reflecting, ruminating, debating, challenging, exploring.

And then there was this article entitled Pixelated Brains and the New Media with a series of links to great articles, including Bob’s. The articles examine whether, with all the stuff out there in the digital universe, we are merely nibbling, grazing, getting sound bytes. Sort of like rushing through the Macca’s drive-in. We flit onto this piece of information like a butterfly and then flit somewhere else with it. But surely this aids cross-pollination of ideas.

Anyway, read the “pixelated brains” series of articles to find out whether humanity is doomed to being dumbed down or whether we are an evolving species.

At least I no longer have to mark essays that boast slabs of Wikipedia text and little evidence of critical thinking (not to mention grammatical and spelling errors). For my rants on the loss of critical thinking, go here and here if you’re interested.

Consider that a divorce

The Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, back when he was but a humble Hollywood actor said to his wife (played by Sharon Stone in Total Recall) “consider that a divorce” and shot her, boom, kaput, dead. Now that he’s the Governor of California, he has affairs of state to consider. And he’s been reflecting recently on textbooks. You know, the sort of things kids use and learn from at school. Arnie is saying “consider that a divorce” to school textbooks and has announced his plan to terminate them.

Now, I have ranted before about the sorry state of education as I see it (and I have some expertise in this area being a Uni Adj Professor and having been a teacher). You can catch up on my rants here and here. But I didn’t realise that Arnie was such an authority on education – did I miss something? – has he been a teacher? For he says this:

“Kids, as you all know, today are very familiar with listening to their music digitally and online and to watch TV online, to watch movies online, to be on Twitter and participate in that and on Facebook. So basically kids are feeling so comfortable today, as a matter of fact, as comfortable with their cell phones and their keyboards as I did when I was your age, when I was a kid, with my pencils and crayons. So this is why I think it is so important that we move on from the textbooks. The textbooks are outdated as far as I’m concerned”.

Anyway, Arnie’s Digital Textbook Initiative, is clearly fueled by his need to slash California’s costs as the State is facing a budget gap of US $24.3 billion. The average textbook costs California around US $100 and in 2008 the State spent $350m on textbooks and can no longer afford it. Schwarzenegger believes initial savings from the plan will be between $300-400 million. In 2010, California high school students studying maths and science will be provided with access to online texts instead of the traditional printed textbook. California is the first US State to introduce such an initiative. But let’s not get carried away by Arnie’s rhetoric that kids have embraced new online technologies and so going digital is now the best way to learn in classrooms. 

I hope he’s thought this through. I’m happy to offer The Governator some free advice:

• make sure you don’t simply convert textbooks to a digital format and leave it at that. Think about how to make the digital learning environment interactive, collaborative, fun. And you might have to train a few teachers whilst you’re at it. I would doubt that every teacher in California tweets or has a Facebook page, so you’ll need to think about how they’ll teach using digital media.
• consider California’s digital divide – around 75% of Californians report having computers and internet access at home, school or work – but just over half (55%) have internet access at home. Those from a Hispanic background report considerably less internet access (48%). Have you read the open letter to you from The Children’s Partnership? – which urges you to consider the School2Home initiative aimed at addressing the Digital Divide by getting computers and high-speed Internet access into the hands and homes of middle school students in underperforming schools throughout the state. An estimated 400,000 students and their parents in 539 underperforming middle schools would benefit from School2Home.
• are you going to provide every kid with a laptop? To get kids to do their homework (at home), you’ll need to provide the technology – how much is that going to cost?
• make sure you read reports on comprehension rates of digital versus traditional book.  Go here Arnie for the New York Times article The Future of Reading Online, RU really reading? Or check out Nicholas Carr’s article in The Atlantic “Is Google Making us Stupid?“. Before you terminate textbooks, reflect on the words of a cognitive neuroscientist – “Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you’re into the 30-second digital mode”.
• check out the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus experiment. 27 seventh-graders were asked to look at the site and judge whether the information provided was trustworthy (this would involve critical thinking skills). Nearly  90% of them missed the joke and said the site was a reliable, trustworthy source and that the tree octopus (a fictional creature) exists.

It’s intriguing. I am probably reading more than I have ever read. Text messages, Twitter streams, hundreds of blogs, newspapers online and I design interactive modules for Uni students. But occasionally I wonder if I am merely skimming fragmented bits of information; if I am being given the time to pause, reflect, marinate, digest, interpret, consider and make the connections. Am I just hovering over the surface and not diving deep? I haven’t given up reading books that I can hold in my hands. I don’t think I ever could. I like to dog ear a page or write and draw in the margins. I like the linear, sequenced progression the printed page gives me.

Richard Foreman in an essay entitled “The Pancake People, Or, The Gods are Pounding my Head” made this powerful statement:

“I come from a tradition of Western culture in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality – a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West…..But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available”. A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense culture inheritance – as we all become “pancake people” – spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button”.

Think about it Arnie. Do you want future generations of Californians to be “pancake people”?

Obama’s snowballs

You’ve probably seen this very funny Obama meme, which seems to involve cats, McCain, Sarah Palin, babies and my favourite to be picked on – former Prez Bush. Apparently, Obama was having a bit of fun with one of his staffers and snowballs were being thrown. Somehow, an orange kitty cat became the butt of the joke. Here’s the cat and Bush versions.

You can see other versions here. Now, these snowballs are not like Rumsfeld’s snowflakes and I can’t give Obama any advice on his throwing arm or his aim. But seems Indiana University is prepared to give Obama some words of wisdom. Imagine you had the proverbial 2-minute elevator ride with the Prez – what advice would you have for him? If you’re a bit stuck, you can consult the University’s latest issue of Perspectives on Policy, which sees 30 academics dishing out thoughts on health care, education, the environment and so on. Here are some of their ideas:

• Boost consumer spending by using federal funds to reduce state sales taxes.
• Use the power of technology to improve citizens’ health, not just the health care system.
• Take advantage of the global interest in learning English to help young Americans engage with the world.
• Reach out to China and India, the world’s most populous countries, to tackle climate change.
• Create an Arts Corps of people to share the experience of having one’s life changed by art.
• Send Mahlia and Sasha to ballet class. “It will send such a powerful message to children all over the world.” (Chair of the Department of Ballet).
• “…we need to value science for what it can teach us about uncertainty, as well as for its ability to reduce uncertainty” (conservation biologist) because it can provide strategies for “weathering surprises, reducing damage and hastening recovery.”

I would advise: no matter how tough it gets, erase the word “secrecy” from the US Government dictionary – make sure all your policies are transparent, not just your talk. And think very carefully about throwing money into the potential black hole of bailouts – because the economy as we know it is stuffed. We need to think about what the post-global financial economy and society will look like. Let’s not go back to the greedy bankers, pillaging of the environment and obscene consumerism. There is a gentler way. We must find it.

So…what advice would you give Obama right now?

Maps of the future

The Institute for the Future (IFTF) has produced some maps that look at signals of change, trends or disruptions in the future. The first map, 2008 Map of the Decade, looks at patterns and activity that help to make sense of our possible future within a ten-year forecast. You can download the map from the IFTF site.

There are five key foresights around:

• diasporas: emerging new economies
• civil society: the evolution of civic infrastructure
• food: the flashpoint
• ecosystems: management in the context of life
• amplified individuals: the extended human reality

The diasporas cluster is interesting. With increasing global migration, diasporas will no longer be defined by geography. New disasporas will be defined by shared identities brought about by social networks, activities and events. And the future flashpoint (which I’ve said many times on this blog) will be the global food supply. As the climate changes and as our planet groans under the weight of a world population predicted to be 9.2 billion in 2050, global food supply will be disrupted and this will be accompanied by water woes. At the same, I certainly think that we’ll see the rise of localisation – a return to growing food in local communities and a call to return to the planet large areas of wilderness that were previously destroyed by humankind.

Also from Institute for the Future is a Map of Future Forces Affecting Sustainability that provides foresight for navigating “the complex business sustainability landscape from 2007 – 2017, with a focus on environmental health and safety strategies”. The Institute describes this map as a “sensemaking and provocation tool” to help businesses shape their strategies in a future world driven by sustainability concerns.

You can download and enlarge the map here.

As this map points out, we are moving from a world of problems to a world of dilemmas in which sensemaking capabilities will be important along with an ability to deal with uncertainty (yeah, well the GFHF is certainly helping us get this skill!). The map helps to identify dilemmas within the driving forces of People, Regions, Built Environments, Nature, Markets, Business and Energy and I think if you look at it carefully, you’ll see it can help businesses and individuals to elevate the conversation around sustainability.

Finally, from KnowledgeWorks Foundation and The Institute for the Future is the Map of Future Forces Affecting Education, which you can download.  The trends this map highlights confirm what I’ve been saying – a revival of localism but also of interest is Gen Y’s smart networking capabilities:

“Their experiences with shared presence through instant messaging and video chat, gaming as a structure for thinking and interacting, and multiple digital and physical worlds will create new modes of work, socializing, and community learning that stress cooperative strategies, experimentation, and parallel development.” 

You can view all the trends for this map here.

UK dumbing down?

Seems the UK is at it again. Not content with tossing out words like moss and heather from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, the UK is now busy tossing out history and geography from its primary school curriculum. Yes, well…I can see the logic. Why have kids learn about the rich history of previous civilisations and human settlements? That’s such ancient history! And why learn that Austria is not the same as Australia or that Canada is not actually a state of the United States?

A major Government interim report (The Rose Review) recommends that priority be given to literacy and numeracy skills as well as nurturing pupils’ personal skills (such as thinking and listening skills) and focusing on health, sex and relationships, well-being and personal development (including happiness and self-esteem). I have no issue with this. These are good skills to concentrate on especially teaching kids how to search the internet appropriately or whip up a podcast or two before they hit High School. The report also recommends moving from the current 14 individual subjects taught to six broad themes or areas of learning, which are said to strip away the clutter. So History and Geography is clutter??

Seems to me this is more about pruning the curriculum and having children learn less. As far as I understand it, History, Geography and religious education will be merged into the theme “human, social and environmental understanding”. Having been a teacher, I can tell you that teaching a broad, ill-defined theme around a pastiche of ideas is a whole heap harder than teaching a particular discipline (albeit more palatable for kids!). So if the pruning of the primary curriculum was also aimed at reducing the teaching burden, I don’t think it will achieve that. And having a degree in History, I’d ask why it’s no longer appropriate to equip students with a disclipinary framework through which to make sense of the past, understand the present and explore the future. Moving to six broad themes runs the risk of diluting specialist knowledge and producing a generation of kids pretty good at podcasting or whipping up a spreadsheet but having no in-depth knowledge of humanity’s historical narratives.

Thinking how I might approach this as a teacher, I can see that you could start off a theme with say an historical event, then move to locating that event within a geographical location, then move towards a broader topic within one of the six themes (say, how the historical event changed a country and its culture; or how the environment and tribes were impacted by the Conquistadors conquering the Aztec Empire; and you could bring in music and the arts of the particular country or human settlement). But I’d be worried that I was simply providing kids with a broad brush stroke across a wide thematic area at the expense of depth and intellectual rigour. And I’d also be worried that kids end up with a melange of ideas about a particular theme without any real anchoring of that idea within a discipline. Teaching “History” says something; it’s an anchor or a disciplinary framework through which a child can intellectually explore. Teaching the theme “human, social and environmental understanding” says what? What’s the structure?

And it seems to me from reading the interim report that the emphasis has shifted to practical skills and sees schools moving into territory that surely families and the wider community has occupied (teaching kids about sex and relationships, finances, health and well-being and so on). Of course, with our consumerist driven culture, it could be argued that families and community have stuffed things up by allowing kids to eat junk food and sitting mindlessly in front of the television. So schools (and the Government) now have to wade into the fray and take charge of life education of children.

But how on earth is this all assessed? How do you assess happiness and health? Will schools need “happiness ” or “emotional intelligence” targets? How do you teach “happiness” as it’s relative – what makes me happy may not make you so. I’d also ask whether the content from the current subject-based curriculum will be simply moved across to a theme-based curriculum or whether it will be reduced. And if it’s reduced, what exactly will be tossed out?

Perhaps, Sir Jim Rose (author of the report), needs to look at some stats. One in five UK teenagers believe that the Sun orbits the Earth and national tests showed that 50,000 so-called bright 11-year olds failed to reach an acceptable standard in English. Worse: Psychology professor Michael Shayer, of King’s College, London, found that the high-level thinking skills of today’s 14-year-olds are now on a par with those of 12-year-olds in 1976.

And while he’s at it – take a look at Melbourne University, which is now revamping its teaching programme. Part of its curriculum was based on broad topic areas such as “Politics of the Body” and “African Drum and Dance” (damn….missed that class!). Complaints have been received by lecturers and students alike that broad themes were not integrated enough, were not challenging enough or were too shallow.  Having learnt some lessons, the Uni is doing a rethink.

Australian students to study Wikipedia

Having once been a High School teacher (back in the mists of Creation), I am pleased to see the NSW Board of Studies offering Wikipedia as a prescribed text for Higher School Certificate students. We’ve all carried on about Wikipedia in various ways: sloppy or inaccurate entries; Wiki fascists attempting to dominate a collaborative space; students thinking that accessing a Wikipedia entry constitutes thorough research and so on.

The English syllabus in 2009-2012 will now include the option of studying Wikipedia in an elective called the Global Village. This really brings home that I studied in the Dark Ages – my prescribed texts were The Grapes of Wrath, The Triffids and stuff by Hemingway if I recall. There was no Global Village elective ‘cos there wasn’t any Global Village.

So High School students will get to look at how social communities interact and communicate. At the same time, I trust they will also learn to critique Wikipedia and understand it triggers further investigation and that they need to explore alternate viewpoints.

I decided to check out what the NSW Board of Studies offers these days. Great to see they’ve just launched NSW Students Online for Year 12 students, described as a one-stop online study shop to give students a personalised experience.

I also decided to check out the current HSC syllabus. Great stuff kids get to learn these days. And I decided to take a few multiple choice questions – previous Higher School Certificate questions that students use to test themselves out in preparation for the real thing. Thankfully, I flew through the Legal Studies questions. Don’t ask how I fared with General Mathematics or Senior Science (I am perplexed by the title: is this science for senior citizens?!). Go ahead, try out the multiple choice questions and see if you’re smarter than the average 17 year old.

What students don’t know

Senator Joseph McCarthy investigated people who protested the war in Vietnam, better known as the Second World War. Fortunately, that war was over before Christopher Columbus sailed to America;otherwise, we might have never experienced the Renaissance.

You see anything wrong with this? Hopefully, you know that McCarthy was after Communists in the 1950s; that WWII took place between 1939-1945; that Columbus supposedly discovered America in 1492 when he sailed off into the ocean-blue; and that the Rebirth took place in Europe from the 14th Century through to the 17th Century roughly. If you didn’t know that the Vietnam War wasn’t WWII, then hit those History text books now!

Unfortunately, a survey of 1200 American teenagers aged 17 years found that only a few thought the above opening paragraph was a bit odd. 20% couldn’t name the enemy in WWII; more than 25% thought that Columbus hit the US after 1750; and 50% didn’t know a thing about McCarthy or what the Renaissance was. The real clanger from the survey IMHO was that nearly 25% didn’t know who Adolf Hitler was and thought he was a munitions manufacturer.

Perhaps you’re not saddened or alarmed by this. Perhaps you think that the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing, is an old goat when she said in her acceptance speech: “We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers”.

I haven’t been a teacher for over 15 years now, so I’m open to being slammed for the following suggestion. But I wonder if schools and teachers are so now heavily focused on test-based accountability that excellence in education has been shafted. So History and Literature are nice to haves, for example, but not really important in a world filled with computers. So you have kids being churned out of schools and they’re computer and internet literate, mobile phone and sms savvy, sure. But these are basic skills and I’m not sure they really fully equip one to participate successfully in a civil society that requires you to know (surely) the history and culture that formed one’s national community and the broader global community.

The same survey said that in 2006, 15- to 24-year- olds reported reading an average of seven minutes a day on weekdays and 10 minutes a day on weekends, preferring instead to get their information from the internet.

Now prior to reading this survey from Common Core, I might have dashed off a post bemoaning young people being glued to vacuous video game sites or wandering around in Second Life or twittering away with their friends. All at the expense of reading a classic or studying some history. But I’ve reflected on this a bit more and I’m prepared to say that (gasp!) with social networking sites, blogs and so on, we are producing a generation who are darn good story tellers and marketers. They are baring their souls and wearing their hearts on their sleeves when they blog about their inner most thoughts and desires.

In my day (whoa: getting old when I say this), I would lock myself in my bedroom and scribble in my diary. Those ones that had a lock and key. This is the older form of blogging I guess. Yet, I would have been mortified if anyone had read how I thought Michael F was a spunk. I guess Anne Frank’s diary is just the same as a blog. But whereas my diary writing was a private space, separate from my social activities with friends, today’s storytelling youth merge the social with the private. Does this produce a richer context? Does it produce more interesting people? Does it matter that they can’t recite “In 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue”?

I’m still not sure but read the report. Let me know what you think.

Are Americans just plain dumb?

Let me start off this post by saying this is not about bashing Americans. I’m sure we all have an opinion about the current state of the US and the War on Terror. But this post is asking something I’ve pondered before when I took a look at the New York State Regents Exam in History, with its multiple-choice questions accompanied by plenty of clues. Are Americans less well-educated than the rest of the world? And warning: there’s a bit of a rant ahead, so skip it if you’re not interested in thinking about whether contemporary society is guilty of shallow intellectualism.

I’ll back up a bit: my first introduction to the US and Americans was in the late 1990s, when I was asked by a US technology company to do a conference and workshop tour, talking about their technology and KM. I have to say I really loved the US, particularly Boston and Chicago. Would even consider living there if it wasn’t for the circus that is their immigration system.

What really stunned me though was this – over dinner with some executives in Philadelphia someone commented that Australians always seem to be so well-travelled (well, that’s because we live at the arse-end of the world as Paul Keating had a habit of reminding us and so we need to get off our proverbial butts to see anything). But it was the next comment that stopped me in my tracks: “so do you really have kangaroos hopping down the streets of Sydney and what’s it like to have a Queen as your President?“.

I took a few moments to see whether this question was a joke at my expense. And did he mean THE Queen or a queen? I had visions of seeing our Prime Minister (note to Americans: we don’t have a President) participating in the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras!

Over the next month, I travelled through Texas, Virginia, New York, Florida and LA and I started to notice a pattern. The news on TV talked only of America and US events. Hardly a word was uttered about international news. But then of course 9/11 hit the US and forced Americans to lift their collective heads up and notice that there is a world beyond the borders of the Land of the Free.

So it was interesting to read about a new book by Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason, which bemoans the current state of American “culture”. Jacoby is 62 years old but I don’t think she can be accused of being a fossil blaming young people for an apparent demise in intellectualism.

I’m sure you’ve all seen this cringe-worthy video on YouTube of Kellie Pickler (of American Idol 15 minutes of fame). Competing against a 5th grader, she was asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?“. Her reply? “I thought Europe was a country“.

Is this an isolated case or are we living in such an age of commercialism and obsession with self and reality TV that there is a backlash against the acquiring of basic knowledge? A varied intellectual life is the very basis of a functioning democracy. But 6 out of 10 young Americans didn’t know where Iraq was on the map when National Geographic conducted a poll in 2006 and recently an American I met confused Australia with Austria (okay, I can see the similarity, we Australians love to yodel too!).

Have Americans given up on the Enlightenment values of rationality, pursuit of the scientific method and encouragement of diversity of thought and argument? Are Americans now a society being kept amused and stupefied by infotainment; determined to weed out “the different”; and demonstrating an antipathy towards science from the fundamentalist religious right?

Jacoby’s book brings to mind Richard Hofstadter’s tour de force, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, published in 1963. I read it during my university days and if I remember correctly, Hofstadter highlighted three pillars of anti-intellectualism — evangelical religion, practical-minded business and the populist political style. Despite the rise of the notion of expertise enshrined in knowledge management and despite the expertise of technology geeky types, I think the three pillars are still firmly rooted in America.

Anti-intellectualism can be seen everywhere: the decline of educational standards; the corporatisation of universities; suspicion of science and medicine, leading to the rise of alternative medicine and so on. We have “expert intellectuals” (consultants), not “critical intellectuals”, schooled in the art of argument, debate and the ability to reason. We have specialists rather than expert generalists.

The postmodernist mood following WWII reacted to, if not rejected, the assumed certainty of scientific efforts to explain reality. So no one explanation is valid for all groups, cultures or races. Reality is constructed individually through our own interpretation of concrete experiences. The abstract is rejected in favour of the concrete.

This is why today’s mantra of “well, I’m entitled to my own opinion” is so sacrosanct. This is why reality TV shows reign supreme – they’re about real world experiences of grappling with weight issues; surviving isolation on some Pacific island; racing around the world looking for clues to the next destination or what task to perform.

This is why you have an American President who is better known for his comic gaffes and lack of curiosity about the world than for serious intellectualism. It is why we tend to speak or advertise in slogans and it is why our society is one of glibness and self-absorption. It is why popular science tries to pass itself off as serious science and it is why we are critical of each other rather than providing a critique. It is why business is obsessed with the bottom line, efficiency and productivity because serious intellectual pursuit requires inquiry and reflection (aka time wasters). And so we have closed minds.

Okay I realise I’m on a rant here. I’m not saying that Americans are the dumbest people on the planet. I could sling all of the above at Australia. And I think the internet, our obsession with iPods, YouTube, MySpace and so on has ushered in an age of solipsism.

What do you think?