This week I had the privilege of talking about SENDS at the summer, 2011 meeting of the Coalition for Advancing Cybersecurity Education (CACE), in Dayton, OH. I’ve had a long-term relationship with the USAF’s Center for Cyberspace Research (CCR) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, and I’m not surprised that CACE would hold their meeting here. The CCR is also part of the CACE effort, and a cosponsor of SENDS.

CACE is an “open” association in that it seeks the membership of “all individuals or organizations who are interested in cybersecurity education.” According to their charter, CACE “focuses on educational aspects of current, emerging and at times novel cybersecurity paradigms, frameworks and standards….” While SENDS is obviously about more than cybersecurity, the intersection of education between the efforts, particularly “novel…paradigms,” is of great interest to the SENDS Project.

Several important themes from the CACE meeting interwove very well with the execution of the SENDS Academic Curricula task work, as well as the SENDS Center for the Science of Cyberspace. As much as the CACE folks seemed interested in SENDS, I was even more energized by them…what a great audience! Education in and about cyberspace is big deal, particularly in terms of cybersecurity.

There are systemic benefits to gain by harnessing relevant, appropriate educational approaches to cybersecurity education specifically, and cyberspace science education generally. Notice I didn’t say “modern” approaches to education. In fact, it’s tough to even define what modern really means in the hyper-connected age that is cyberspace…technological change happens so quickly that calling anything modern seems to lose some impact. This was also a thread of the CACE meeting.

So, I am “secretly” proposing we use the “code names” of “relevant” and/or “appropriate” to describe more meaningful forms of education than the common, traditional approaches we tend to use now. We’ll have more to say about that when we release the results of the SENDS Academic Curricula task in the next month or so. (In the interest of full disclosure, it’s really not such a big secret—I overheard one of the senior members of the CACE group use those terms and I agree with them fully!)

Adaptive, connection-oriented education (relevant and appropriate) approaches give us systemic benefits that enable a fundamental framework for our understanding of who we are in cyberspace, what we do there, and the consequences of our behaviors in cyberspace. This framework will help explain and predict, the hallmarks of doing science.

The CACE meeting attendees recognized that we must focus on the value of relevant educational approaches to aid the digital natives that are now starting to exert their influences on the uses and growth of cyberspace. Those of us who pioneered the development of the Internet, the Web and their convergence with human users into what we now call cyberspace, must help our younger users better understand their environment and where it is taking us all.

We built cyberspace without really understanding what could happen when everything begins connecting to everything, as Ann Cudworth proposes in the SENDS Center for the Science of Cyberspace video. We still don’t really know what might happen, although we do now at least have some experience with it. In any event, our younger generations must live with and learn to maximize what we’ve built…we need to help them by making education more meaningful, and that was the message from the CACE meeting, as well.

Another interesting point raised in this week’s meeting was the apparent continued need for “standardized” educational curricula even in the face of the rapidly shifting environment that cyberspace presents to us. Standardization offers both stability and common baselines upon which to build…it also offers certain economies of scale. But, anything “standardized” also has baggage when the world around us changes so rapidly that standards begin to get in the way of innovation and dampens evolution. Clearly, there’s some level of friction at work here.

Somehow, we need to find and exploit the niches that emerge through the frictions presented by those who want standards and those who prefer the “roll your own” forms of education (again, more comments on that when we publish the Academic Curricula report). How might we find and harness those niches without falling into the traps of standardizing away from innovation and creativity? The CACE group has some ideas about that.

One important thing that CACE and its members do is to seek the infusion of industry and government perspectives into the debate, those who will make the best use of educated cyberspace dwellers. After all, industry and government are the main “consumers” of the “products” of education: our children and families.

I don’t intend to commoditize our progeny as some sort of product that comes off the assembly line of schools, but yet that is being discussed more and more in books like A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change (Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, CreateSpace, 2011). Education is the most important investment we make in our future and we have to leverage cyberspace and connectivity to try to get education right: that’s where our new generations will be dwelling more and more.

The SENDS Academic Curricula task was a sleeper hit for the SENDS Pilot Project in my view. While we can’t yet post the final report for a couple more weeks, we can say that the indications are, even in 2011, most people feel like cyberspace education (both learning about and using) is largely self-learned. A New Culture of Learning seems to confirm that, as does the results of the SENDS survey. Is that something we can also leverage on behalf of CACE and in shaping the future of education?

To that end, perhaps we’ll find it’s more important to grow “native” cyberspace residents first, and then refine their education through more adaptive focuses on science, technology, engineering and math. Before youngsters take on the challenges of learning to code programs, for example, maybe they should learn what it means to be a responsible resident of cyberspace first…to learn how to learn. It’s just possible that understanding the arts, social sciences and history are still highly relevant to produce cyberspace denizens that learn to become accountable to each other as part of the emergence of good cyberspace behaviors, even when the “rules” of interacting are still evolving.

Programmers may benefit from learning the philosophies that underpin the emergence of effective programming methods in the rigorous ways we must now require to create secure code. Maybe this is how we manage the friction between standardized approaches and adaptive approaches…how we develop an appreciation for responsibility to our nation’s prosperity and security…how we leverage cyberspace connectivity to develop ownership of challenges and build collaborative solutions to those challenges. These are also questions that CACE appears to be tackling – bravo!

As a final note in this continuing story of education in and about cyberspace, the environments in which we teach and learn will also be relevant and must be appropriate. That is why we spend so much time thinking about and writing about the SENDS Center for the Science of Cyberspace. Such a center, even though largely virtual, will help shape learning and teaching in the connected age. CACE is interested in that, also.

by Carl Hunt, sendsonline.org, June 17, 2011