I read The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll at the beginning of the summer 1993. I had never read a book so quickly; four days’ worth of morning and evening commutes on the city bus (less than five hours) to and from my summer job at the Communications Research Centre.

My job included an email account. I exercised it on the Friday of my first week. I had just finished Cliff’s book that morning and I sent him an email to say that I enjoyed it. Cliff wrote back about four hours later. He came across as a genuine person which turned me in to a follower of his work.

Since then, I’ve read Silicon Snake Oil and High Tech Heretic (also by Cliff). Both books present extremely compelling arguments against computers in school classrooms. If memory serves me, High Tech Heretic tells one story of a Texas school which replaced a teaching position with a dedicated ISDN line. That kind of logic makes you wonder.

His ideas make great sense to me and I was disappointed when he very politely turned down an invitation to be interviewed for my Electric Sky podcast.

It turns out that around the same time that I extended the invitation, he was a speaker at the TED conference. The video of his presentation was just released two days ago and it reminded me why I wanted to have Cliff on my program. At one point he settled down from his manic manner and very calmly, very directly said:

“If you really want to know about the future, don’t ask a technologist,
a scientist, a physicist. No. Don’t ask someone who’s writing code.
If you want to know what society’s going to be like in twenty years,
ask a kindergarten teacher. They know.
In fact, don’t just ask any kindergarten teacher; ask an experienced one.”

There are a lot of people in the social media community that are futurists. Many of us are called upon to speculate on the world-yet-to-be. It’s time to invite other disciplines to the community. If you don’t involve the right mix of people in the conversation, the conversation will never advance. If we don’t listen to fresh voices — the right voices — and we don’t shake up our current ways of thinking, we will set ourselves up to make the same mistakes we’ve always made.

Thanks, Cliff, for the fresh idea for an episode of Electric Sky.

Photo: TED.com