According to a recent Pew Internet & American Life survey 28% of internet users, 7% on any typical day have have tagged or categorized online content:
Tagging is the process of creating labels for online content. The mechanics are simple on most tag-centered websites. After creating an account on a site like flickr.com you can upload your own pictures to the web site and label them as you see fit – for instance, labeling a picture with a setting sun in it as "sunset." You can also search the site using keywords and, when you find photos posted by others that you like enough to want to retrieve later, you can apply your own tags or labels to them. That might mean that you call someone else's picture "sunset" even though he originally labeled it "clouds." Then, from any internet-connected computer you can go back to flickr.com and find all the material you have tagged -- both yours and the material from others that you've labeled your own way.Not only can tags be personally useful to people who want easier ways to retrieve information and content that appealed to them, but they also have a social dimension. Your tags on flickr are added to the millions of other labels on the site; that allows flickr to organize information better for other searchers who use those keywords -- making this a classic example of bottom-up building of categories instead of top-down imposition of categories.
The Online Education Database lists 77 ways to learn things faster, better, and deeper, including:
From the Tampa Tribune, 50 Things We Know Now That We Didn't Know Last Year, including:
...3. Blue light fends off drowsiness in the middle of the night, which could be useful to people who work at night.
...
15. Americans spent almost $32 billion on toys during 2005. About a third of that was spent on video games.
...
21. Two previously unknown forms of ice - dubbed by researchers as ice XIII and XIV - were discovered frozen at temperatures of around minus 160 degrees Celsius, or minus 256 Fahrenheit.
...
24. At least once a week, 28 percent of high school students fall asleep in school, 22 percent fall sleep while doing homework and 14 percent get to school late or miss school because they overslept.
...
39. The common pigeon can memorize 1,200 pictures.
...
49. One of the most effective ways for athletes to recover after exercise is to drink a glass of chocolate milk.
Research indicates that thinking fast makes you feel better:
Research in an entirely different field, music, has found that the tempo of background music played during a test can affect performance in tests of spatial ability. The faster the music, the better the mood of the participants, and the better they performed.
Emily Pronin and Daniel Wegner took a look at this and other evidence and began to wonder if the speed of thought itself could be what caused mood to improve. But how do you increase the speed of thought?
They devised a simple and elegant method: They simply asked volunteers to read words aloud as they scrolled onto a computer screen, one letter at a time. In the slow-thought condition, the words scrolled at a rate of about 6 letters per second. In the fast thought condition, the words scrolled at 20 letters per second. This compares to about 12 letters per second when people read aloud in a natural voice. After the test, the fast readers indicated that they felt they were thinking at a faster rate compared to the slow readers, and they indeed said they were generally in a better mood.
MIT has established a Center for Collective Intelligence, which is attempting to explore group intelligence (such as discussed in The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowecki):
The focus on collective intelligence appears to have been inspired by a number of indications that the internet is transforming the ability of people to work together, and enabling new forms of collaboration. CCI's literature specifically cites Google, Wikipedia, and Innocentive as examples of new forms of collective accomplishment, and they have appointed Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and the CEO of Innocentive to their board. Their Handbook of Collective Intelligence, which attempts to both define the field and provide a moving snapshot of its current state of knowledge is, in fact, a Wiki.
...via ars technica
Sometimes taxonomy is a tool and sometimes it's a cage:
The task of the taxonomist or information architect is not to provide absolute consistency and standardization, maximum tidiness, and complete information efficiency. Optimizing efficiency in a complex system, as Jacobs noted in regard to cities, destroys the resilience of that system and its capacity to adapt to new circumstances. So the task of the taxonomist or information architect is not to optimize efficiency, but to optimize effectiveness, and that always means sub-optimal efficiency. Consistency and standardization must be sufficient for effectiveness and the meeting or your goals and no more than sufficient.To remain resilient and adaptive, a knowledge environment must always also be hospitable to alternate mechanisms of knowledge organization, access and use – which to a degree will compete for attention with the formally privileged mechanisms such as taxonomies.
Folksonomies are a case in point. It is not especially healthy just to try to bend folksonomies to the needs of taxonomies as vocabulary harvesting devices as several organizations have done, and leave it at that. If the conditions are right to support healthy folksonomies, then the organization will get far greater value by actively exploiting their potential for providing rich serendipity as well. [I’ll talk about folksonomies and rich serendipity in another post]. They can by all means be used to harvest vocabularies, but this is just icing on the cake, not the substance of the cake.
Also:
To see an example of this plethora of competition between knowledge organization devices we need go no farther than online bookseller Amazon. Look at any Amazon page for a given book, and you will find a taxonomy (represented by formal subject categories), user-contributed tags, links to other books bought by other people who bought this book, booklists compiled by users on related topics, suggestions for other books based on a complex algorithm combining your past behaviours and those of others, and so on. All of these mechanisms for purposefully finding – or serendipitously discovering – books, co-exist, and compete. You can bet that Amazon watches the intensity of use of each of these mechanisms, and as any single instrument gets used more or less intensively, Amazon will adjust its investment in supporting it accordingly. As Amazon has grown, so has the number of ways of locating and suggesting books. Taxonomies form only part of this complex web, and rightly so.
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, has refused to censor Wikipedia for China
Wales said censorship was ' antithetical to the philosophy of Wikipedia. We occupy a position in the culture that I wish Google would take up, which is that we stand for the freedom for information, and for us to compromise I think would send very much the wrong signal: that there's no one left on the planet who's willing to say "You know what? We're not going to give up."'
Andrew Carvin's notes from Jimmy Wales' talk at Wikimania:
We're announcing that the One Laptop Per Child Project is including Wikipedia as the first element in their content repository. (ac: though they've been talking about this for at least a year.)
Wikiversity: A center for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. It will create and host a range of free content materials, multilingual materials, for all ages in all languages. It'll host scholarly projects and communities to support these materials, and foster research baed in part on existing resources in Wikiversity and other wikimedia projects. Launching in three languages, in a six-month beta, within a month.
Wikimedia Foundation will also now have an advisory board to help improve partnerships, public relations, financing, etc. Additionally, Wikia and SocialText is launching Wikiwyg. It will make it easier for more people to get involved in wiki editing.
The technological barrier to entry keeps out really smart people who are uncomfortable with the Wikipedia interface. "Wikiwyg, in some shape or form, will be the future of the Internet," because it will allow non-techies to become Wikipedians easily.
...via Smart Mobs
A Boston Globe article on why Google makes everyone else nervous:
Research firms are only now beginning to take the measure of the company's influence. A recent study by Outsell showed that 80 percent of advertisers now use the Internet, with the adoption rate projected to hit 90 percent by 2008. While search engine advertising is expected to increase 26 percent this year, with Google raking in the largest share, spending is projected to grow 2 percent for newspaper and magazine ads and 2.4 percent for radio and television ads.
Research firms are only now beginning to take the measure of the company's influence. A recent study by Outsell showed that 80 percent of advertisers now use the Internet, with the adoption rate projected to hit 90 percent by 2008. While search engine advertising is expected to increase 26 percent this year, with Google raking in the largest share, spending is projected to grow 2 percent for newspaper and magazine ads and 2.4 percent for radio and television ads.
Similarly, the Google effect has reduced Internet service companies -- who'd once hoped to be gateways to the Internet that profited from Internet services -- to ``pipe companies" that build networks and charge businesses and consumers for access.
And, Google's e-mail, calendar, and word-processing products are pioneering an ad-supported Internet delivery model that threatens the desktop licensing model of Microsoft and other proprietary software companies, and could appeal to their ``enterprise" market of businesses and other organizations. Aiding Google's efforts to deliver robust software on the Internet, and faster search results, is a worldwide network of between 300,000 and 1 million servers, according to analysts' estimates; Google itself declines to specify its number of servers.
In addition to some of the issues mentioned in this article one of the big, big issues that companies like Google should be worried about if they seriously want these applications to take off is privacy rights and protecting individuals from unwarranted search and scanning. Trusting the company that's storing your life online is something that we all ought to take very seriously (and really it can't just be based on trust. We need an infrastructure that updates traditional protections in light of electronic storage and guarantees them as we are guaranteed protections in our homes and other properties).
A project at WikiMedia with the mission:
Wikiversity is a centre for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. Its primary priorities and goals are to:
Among the things I found interesting here is a list of how people can participate in this project:
Some Ideas for Effective Initial Participation
There are definitely some ideas here that I can see for eXtension.
From Wired News, research into using brain-wave signatures for security access:
Their idea of utilizing brain-wave signatures as "pass-thoughts" is based on the premise that brain waves are unique to each individual. Even when thinking of the same thing, the brain's measurable electrical impulses vary slightly from person to person. Some researchers believe the difference might just be enough to create a system that allows you to log in with your thoughts.
A pass-thought could be anything from a snatch of song, the memory of your last birthday or even the image of your favorite painting. A more achievable alternative might present you with predetermined pictures, music or video clips, to which you would think "yes" or "no" while the machine monitors your brain activity.
Inside Knowledge has an article about Euan Semple, knowledge manager at the BBC and his efforts to introduce collaborative tools. It's not a new article, but it's new to me and provides an interesting discussion of ways that people adopt and use new tools. I particularly like his description of people's response to the tools: "Some are very enthusiastic, others are interested, while a third group, which is getting smaller, looks horrified and bored,” he says.
He also talks about the need for enthusiastic early users as well as a critical mass:
The bulletin board is largely self-policing, self-organising and self-managed. To achieve this, Semple says you need a large and diverse group of people. “There’s always an early-adopter hump to get over until enough people are using it. Different interests must be represented for the environment to work as an ecology.” By not pushing the tool too heavily at the start, employees heard about it, used it, found solutions to problems and told others of their experiences. Talk.gateway is now the second most visited site on the intranet, with 8,000 people connecting to it each month, out of approximately 25,000 staff. Discussions range from procurement issues to debates on the BBC’s decision to broadcast Jerry Springer the Opera.
...
Web logs (blogs) were the third tool to appear. While many companies still debate their value within an organisational setting, the BBC now has 150 employees blogging. “A big leg-up was when Richard Sambrook, director of World Service and global news, started a blog, which is fan-bloody-tastic,” says Semple. “It’s really authentic. In his own voice he writes about the real issues at work, the challenges his department faces, and external factors and influences. It’s really brave.” Sambrook currently tops the BBC leagues, with 8,000 visitors in just over a month.
...via elearningpost
The Stingy Scholar has a Google maps mashup of universities offering podcasts, webcasts and Open CourseWare. It's not complete (ISU Extension's podcasts aren't on there, for example), but there's a lot of links and it does have a way to add more links to the map.
Kevin Gamble is talking about the James Surowiecki book, The Wisdom of Crowds, which discusses how large independent crowds are nearly always smarter than one or two people. Very much related to that discussion is this call Smart Swarms to help solve tough security issues:
The idea is to get lots of people focused on a security issue, or even a programming problem, and then have them chisel away at the code and examine how those pieces interact and work with all the total software. Instead of looking at programming as just lines of code, these swarms of people examine how each piece interrelates and works within a network.
"The key to robust security is network thinking," said W. David Stephenson, principal at Stephenson Strategies, a company that works closely with the Department of Homeland Security to develop defenses against terrorist attacks on computer networks. He is also an expert in the emerging science of social networks. This means he spends a lot of time looking at the behavior patterns in ant hills and beehives and applying them to networks and network design.
...via Digg
According to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project 45% of internet users say that the internet helped them make important decisions. They also indicated a marked increase over a report asking similar questions in 2002:
From Wikipedia, a list of all Google's services and tools, including:
...and plenty more
Rather than telling people where the information they want belongs in a set list of categories and subcategories, tagging lets users say--this is where I think this goes. Tagging has been used extensively in places like Flickr and del.icio.us and is a large part of what makes these services so useful to people. Now corporations are looking at what tagging can do for them:
Given their information density, Rosenfeld thinks intranets will be a prime testing ground for tagging at the corporate level. One company that has seen encouraging results using tags is IBM. "Tagging makes it easier for you to go back and find something," says Maria Arbusto, IBM's director for user experience who is responsible for how IBM presents its internal information, websites and applications to employees.
Arbusto says IBM is "still in the early days" of using the terms employees provide to improve discoverability. She says it has worked well in a pilot involving ThinkPlace, the intranet application IBM uses as an internal suggestion box for ideas the company should consider commercializing or developing and deploying to employees. In the system, employees can comment on the ideas and rate whether they should be pursued.
ThinkPlace originally classified ideas using terms from IBM's official taxonomies for content such as industry and products. But "we observed the users and saw that the terms they used didn't always match" the formal taxonomy, she says. So IBM created a way for users to enter keywords, or tags, that would be appended to the suggested terms from the formal taxonomy and thereby improve their ability to find relevant ideas. The results have been promising, says Arbusto. "You can see what your colleagues are interested in," she says. "From a collaboration and knowledge-sharing perspective, that's what's neat about folksonomies."
...via elearningpost
A recent survey says that half of all written communication is by e-mail and a whopping 29% is via text messaging:
The results among those aged 15 to 24 who took part showed only 5% of their communications were by pen and paper, a lot lower than the older people.
Yet despite the growing use of the internet and other new media, most people still spend more time watching television and listening to the radio.
...via Smart Mobs
Or, more strictly speaking, a single point in time snapshot of Wikipedia that you can download to your iPod
A page that will show the links between any two entries on Wikipedia. For example, 'rottweiler' and 'Buddha' have three degrees of separation:
Rottweiler
1935
December 29
Buddha
You can also view the return trip.
Martin Belam has a fascinating article on keeping the BBC's 2 million web pages identifiable and usable. The BBC's offerings include television, radio, regional offerings, independent productions and lots of other content produced in lots of other categories. The keys to helping people move through the pages and to making the disparate pages identifiable as BBC pages are: navigation, search, and classification.
There's lots that's interesting in this article, but I want to highlight this bit on classification:
We have a real problem, in that we want to make everything simple and easy for people to understand, but at the same time we have been charged by the government to show the breadth and depth of our content, which as I said is over 2 million pages.
So we end up with things like the BBC Directory, with 14 top-level categories as follows:
Even to the untrained eye there are some serious flaws in the top level classification schema illustrated here.
To highlight a couple of them, the World Service is a radio station, so why is it classified as a top-level category in its own right, rather than a sub-category under Radio where all of the other radio stations sit? CBBC and CBeebies are two television channels aimed at children. So why are they not either under one Children's category, or sitting under the Television category with the BBC's other channels?
The answers are to do with the branding and the politics of the BBC as an organisation. The World Service is funded separately from the Licence Fee funded content on the BBC web site, so needs to be made distinct from the UK focussed public service offering. CBBC and CBeebies are aimed at very different audience age groups, and from a marketing point of view it has been important for the BBC to distinguish them as separate entities.
So you can see already that the whole of the current classification schema has been compromised by the priorities of the business taking preference over the priorities of the information professional.
There is another problem with this as well. We have a one page directory for the whole site, and of course, everybody within the business wants their content to appear in it. We end up with a page with 245 links on it. To shrink it down to the size that will fit on a PowerPoint slide or be an illustration in an article makes it completely unreadable. The page ends up as very little use to anyone, with too many links and too much scrolling.
....
Fortunately we do at the BBC have some people who understand the need for usable classification, so alongside the politically driven Directory, we also offer a comprehensive A-Z index of the website. This also has a spin-off benefit for us, because it means it is very easy for search engine spiders to reach and index all of our content.
Near the end of the article, Belam also discusses the new BBC initiative, backstage.bbc.co.uk, which allows users to take BBC content and re-mix it. New ideas direct from users are already coming from this initiative which may provide even more 'glue' for associating the BBC's disparate parts and making it easy for users to get what they want when and how they want it.
An article from David Weinberger:
Jimmy has been all over the news telling people that Wikipedia is not yet as reliable as the Britannica, that students shouldn't cite it, that you should take every article with a grain of salt. (One Wikipedian suggested to me that such a disclaimer ought to be on every page; I agree.) The media are acting as if this is a humbling confession when in fact it's been what Jimmy and Wikipedians have been saying from the first day of this remarkable, and remarkably successful experiment in building an inclusive encyclopedia together.
The media literally can't hear that humility, which reflects accurately the fluid and uneven quality of Wikipedia. The media — amplifying our general cultural assumptions — have come to expect knowledge to be coupled with arrogance1 : If you claim to know X, then you've also been claiming that you're right and those who disagree are wrong. A leather-bound, published encyclopedia trades on this aura of utter rightness (as does a freebie e-newsletter, albeit it to a lesser degree).The media have a cognitive problem with a publisher of knowledge that modestly does not claim perfect reliability, does not back up that claim through a chain of credentialed individuals, and that does not believe the best way to assure the quality of knowledge is by disciplining individuals for their failures. Arrogance, individual heroism, accountability and discipline ... those have been the hallmarks of the institutions that propagate knowledge.2
With Wikipedia, the balance of knowing shifts from the individual to the social process. The solution to a failure of knowledge (as the Seigenthaler entry clearly was) is to fix the social process, while acknowledging that it will never work perfectly. There are still individuals involved, of course, but Wikipedia reputations are made and advanced by being consistent and persistent contributors to the social process. Yes, persistent violators of the social trust can be banished from Wikipedia, but the threat of banishment is not what keeps good contributors contributing well.
IBM is developing an application that to analyze how online discussions and blogs are affecting a company's image:
IBM originally developed OmniFind to index and search information that resides within corporate networks. But it found that some customers were keen on learning what outsiders were saying on the Web about a given corporation, said Marc Andrews, IBM's director of strategy and business development for unstructured information.
"Organisations are struggling to understand what people are saying about them in public," said Andrews. "That ends up having an impact on opinion and buying decisions."
...via Smart Mobs
at Wikipedia:
The World Futures Studies Federation is the organizing force behind The Great Wiki Raid. WFSF “raiders” will endeavor to add as much information as they can, in multiple languages, regarding the topic “futures studies” over the course of one day. Choosing Wikipedia as their “target” acknowledges the dramatic way in which digital technology is transforming knowledge creation and distribution.
...via JoHo the Blog
The new interface for the web may be maps:
Benfield thinks online maps will increasingly become the interface for the Web. "In building its map application, Google made use of a new way of programming Web applications," said Benfield. "It is known as AJAX. Also, Google created an API, allowing users to implement maps within their own applications. Almost overnight, this has made MapQuest almost irrelevant."
...via Smart Mobs
An article in the Guardian on plans for the future of Wikipedia and Wikimania:
Among the projects under discussion are an online atlas charted by members of the public; a repository of classical music to be performed by student orchestras; a file format to rival the mighty MP3; an online curriculum stretching from kindergarten to university; and an archive of images of paintings by the old masters. In short, Wikipedia is to spread its wings over many more forms of culture.
...via Smart Mobs
This discussion says that it's not the meetings, it's what we do with them:
If the meeting is focused on making a strategic decision, we spend as much as ten hours of design time for every hour of meeting time. We want people to think together, not just listen to reports or information that could have been distributed in other ways. Getting people together is expensive, too expensive not to engage their best thinking around important issues. We focus most of our thinking meetings at the strategy level with just enough content presentation to make sure people have a firm grasp on the elements of the issue. This means giving people information prior to the meeting and providing content that has been boiled down to the bare essentials. It means developing visual representations and prototypes of the information so that people can interact with it on different levels. It also means understanding that most strategies fail and deliberately looking for alternatives.
...via Patrick Mayfield
Tagsurf is a new type of online message board which organized by tags instead of topics. Discussions are threaded like traditional message boards.
...via Smart Mobs
SearchEngineWatch reports on how Americans search:
What are people searching for? Most people (88%)said they were researching specific topics—specifically, information about hobbies. And women (61%) were more likely to search for health and medical information than men (35%). Surprisingly few people researching specific topics are looking for job or career information (28%).
Other common things people use search for include:
...via Smart Mobs
Via Nature (via Smart Mobs), news of a study that says if you haven't seen a news article within 36 hours of its publication, you're probably not going to see it:
Dezs and his colleagues collected such data for a single day on the Origo portal, during which time it released 3,908 news stories. On a typical day, Origo logs a total of 6,500,000 hits. The researchers looked at the relationship between the number of hits per item and the date the item was released, as well as the patterns of visits to the site by individual users.
Unsurprisingly, each item receives the most visits on the day it is posted, and the number of hits falls off rapidly after that. There is a daily rhythm because nearly all readers of the Hungarian site are in Hungary, so hit patterns are not affected by having readers in different time zones. After just three days, most people who are ever going to read the item have already done so. Even with an archive, online reporters cannot pretend they are writing for posterity.
You can find the original research paper here
From The Register:
Scientists from all major Dutch universities officially launched a website on Tuesday where all their research material can be accessed for free. Interested parties can get hold of a total of 47,000 digital documents from 16 institutions the Digital Academic Repositories. No other nation in the world offers such easy access to its complete academic research output in digital form, the researchers claim. Obviously, commercial publishers are not amused.
...via Smart Mobs
From Wireless Watch Japan via Smart Mobs, consumers are using cellphones to scan the QR code on grocery store produce which then links them to a mobile website with information on origin, soil composition, organic fertilizer content, etc.
QR codes are reducing the fear factor for foodstuffs in Japan as agricultural associations embrace the new wireless technology tagging fresh produce for quick access to mobile information web sites. A new English language report [.PDF] released this month by NTT DoCoMo on QR code use in agriculture reveals the growing popularity of this medium.
Here.
Sometimes we don't even have to comment...
Great whitepaper from Touchstone on solving wicked problems--those problems which are difficult to define, large, complex, changing and which do not respond to a traditional linear problem-solving approach (in the beginning of the paper, they mention that most of us don't actually solve problems with a linear model, but we think we do, which, it turns out, is significant):
Solving a wicked problem is a fundamentally social process.
Most wicked problems involve lots of stakeholders. In a corporate project, stakeholders could include:
What makes wicked-problem solving so challenging is that none of these stakeholders can be safely ignored. Many are involved in defining the problem, and many also add constraints to the solution. Other teams working on related projects have a particularly large stake, because one team's solution is the next team's problem.
No project leader is brilliant or experienced enough to go off and solve a wicked problem alone. It is not even possible to assemble a team of brilliant people to go off and solve the problem, because the moment they go off, they leave behind stakeholders whose input is essential.
....
Faced with the frustration of wicked-problem solving, some people get fixated on some aspect of the problem or solution. They recognize that that aspect is vital to the project's success, and that it will get mishandled or forgotten unless they make sure that it is not. These people will make the same point, meeting after meeting. Henry, in the example above, will hold onto his idea for using the pemory widget-for weeks, if necessary-until it is time to incorporate it. Without a system to document or capture the full range of thinking and creativity that occurs in wicked-problem solving, people have to remember to keep in existence any idea that comes up out of sequence. Since repetition is one key to memory, project meetings are a ritual of repetition so that nobody forgets an important idea.
Without a system to document or capture the full range of thinking and creativity that occurs in wicked-problem solving, people have to remember to keep in existence any idea that comes up out of sequence. Faced with wicked problems, few people today are able to have meetings be effective. We often hear that there are "too many meetings" and that they don't go well. People identify with a point of view and defend it. Topics are continually rehashed, with little progress and virtually no learning taking place. Side issues seem to consume valuable meeting time.
Most complex problems these days are also wicked problems and learning how to recognize them and solve them is critical to organizations.
...via elearningpost
Kansas State researchers say that distracting visuals on TV screens make viewers less likely to retain content:
In the past few years, television stations have begun to reformat their screen presentations to include scrolling screens, sports scores, stock prices and current weather news. These visual elements are all designed to give viewers what they want when they want it.
However, Kansas State University professors Lori Bergen and Tom Grimes say that it's not working.
"Our conclusion has been that if you want people to understand the news better, then get that stuff off the screen," Grimes said. "Clean it up and get it off because it is simply making it more difficult for people to understand what the anchor is saying."
Grimes and Bergen are both associate professors of journalism and mass communications. They have collaborated with Deborah Potter, head of the Washington, D.C., research firm Newslab, in a study on distracting visual information. The study focused on viewers' ability to digest content in the presence of distracting information on the screen.
"We discovered that when you have all of this stuff on the screen, people tend to remember about 10 percent fewer facts than when you don't have it on the screen," Grimes said. "Everything you see on the screen -- the crawls, the anchor person, sports scores, weather forecast -- are conflicting bits of information that don't hang together semantically. They make it more difficult to attend to what is the central message."
...via BoingBoing
...or at least some video games:
A team of researchers led by Ricardo Rosas (...) studied the effects of integrating handheld video games into the first- and second-grade curriculum for 30 minutes a day. Their study was unique because they designed a teaching game with features similar to commercial video games. In a typical video game, the player must perform several tasks in order to reach a goal. As the game progresses, the tasks get more and more challenging. Players are highly motivated to learn the new tasks because it helps them reach the game’s ultimate goal.
Rosas et al. realized that in order for students to be motivated to play the games, the “goal” of the game can’t be something like “learn to read one-syllable words.” Instead, they designed games with goals like “saving the fairies imprisoned in the temples of the city.” From the child’s perspective, it just happened that in order to save the fairies, one of things you had to learn was how to read one-syllable words, such as “sol” for “sun.”
...from Cognitive Daily
Cutting Through has a good post on scenario planning:
The idea is to create a range of plausible, internally consistent futures, covering the range of circumstances that the project might have to operate within. The futures can then be used to evaluate how well potential strategies would operate - they are not forecasts as such, but “rich pictures” of possible futures.
A plausible scenario means that there is a coherent set of events leading from the present to the future, rather than the “with one mighty bound Jack was free” leaps of imagination.
An internally consistent scenario doesn’t contain any mutually exclusive assumptions - for example, increased volume of services together with reduced funding might be inconsistent.
The New Scientist reports on the news that 'Info-mania' lowers your IQ:
Eighty volunteers were asked to carry out problem solving tasks, firstly in a quiet environment and then while being bombarded with new emails and phone calls. Although they were told not to respond to any messages, researchers found that their attention was significantly disturbed.
Alarmingly, the average IQ was reduced by 10 points - double the amount seen in studies involving cannabis users. But not everyone was affected by to the same extent - men were twice as distracted as women.
...via elearningpost
Patrick Mayfield offers some suggestions:
Find our their 'WIIFM' ('What's in it for me?'). What benefits could there be in your programme for that stakeholder. What are the 'wins' for them. This is a deeper, and more personal level of stakeholder analysis that is particularly warranted for the difficult individual.
You need to be clear about what your fall-back position will be if you can't get agreement - your BATNA ('Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement'). In a programme environment this could mean some radical re-scoping of the programme to exclude the need for co-operation from his stakeholder or even in the most extreme cases recommending that the programme is stopped altogether.
...via Cutting Through
Martin Burns has a great post on project requirements:
Step 1: Context Is Everything
Why did I mention Goals above? Because if you don't understand these, you won't get to the Objectives (and therefore Requirements) that the Sponsor actually needs. Take the Moon Landing project. The Goal was "Convince the World of the Superiority of American Technology." Just landing on the Moon wasn't enough - the Project also had to convince the World that it had happened (leaving aside Conspiracy Theorists for now). So a key requirement of the project was to ensure global publicity, including live television broadcast.
So step 1 is really Understand the Goals. How do you do that? With luck, it'll be documented for you (and if it's not, the old PM rule of If it's not documented, it's a rumour holds true), but unless you enjoy working on assumptions, you talk to the Sponsor and other key stakeholders (ie people who have an interest in the outcome of the project). Useful questions to ask include:
- Why are we doing this?
- If we're successful, what would be the outcome for you?
- What would happen if we didn't do this project?
Note that these are all Open questions designed to get the other person talking...
...via Cutting Through
Louis Rosenfeld on the limitations of folksonomies for businesses:
...As sites like Flickr and del.icio.us successfully utilize informal tags developed by communities of users, it's easy to say that the social networkers have figured out what the librarians haven't: a way to make metadata work in widely distributed and heretofore disconnected content collections.Easy, but wrong: folksonomies are clearly compelling, supporting a serendipitous form of browsing that can be quite useful. But they don't support searching and other types of browsing nearly as well as tags from controlled vocabularies applied by professionals. Folksonomies aren't likely to organically arrive at preferred terms for concepts, or even evolve synonymous clusters. They're highly unlikely to develop beyond flat lists and accrue the broader and narrower term relationships that we see in thesauri.
...via elearningpost
Cutting Through has more lists of ten things:
Ten Cool things you can do with web feeds, including:
And, a pointer to ten things your website should be doing:
Cutting Through provides ten ways to use blogs to manageprojects:
Communicating with project stakeholders
Keeping your stakeholders up-to-date with the progress of the project is vital - but if they’re busy people with other things to worry about, how do you keep them informed between major milestone reports with bombarding them with email?
One way is to post regular intra-milestone updates to a blog. It can be updated weekly, daily or even hourly without drowning your stakeholders with emails - and if they use RSS webfeeds to keep updated, they only need to scan the webfeed summaries to know if it’s something they’ll need to respond to.
Also, four ways to use wikis for project management.
A list of publications on thesaurus construction and use.
...via elearningpost
Via BoingBoing, a pointer to info on Google's Project Ocean, which involves a collaboration between Google and Harvard University:
Harvard University is embarking on a collaboration with Google that could harness Google's search technology to provide to both the Harvard community and the larger public a revolutionary new information location tool to find materials available in libraries. In the coming months, Google will collaborate with Harvard's libraries on a pilot project to digitize a substantial number of the 15 million volumes held in the University's extensive library system. Google will provide online access to the full text of those works that are in the public domain. In related agreements, Google will launch similar projects with Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library. As of 9 am on December 14, an FAQ detailing the Harvard pilot program with Google will be available at http://hul.harvard.edu.
Phil Windley has some comments on academic paywalls, or the practice whereby academic papers are hidden within subscription-only journals and aren't getting read by people who do their searching on the web:
The net has changed how information is exchanged and the power of linking cannot be ignored. Ideas that flow freely are more competitive than those that are restricted in some way. Ironically, academics has always prided itself on the free flow of information, but the net has turned that on its head to the point that now academic researchers are the ones who find themselves in the most restricted space of any innovators in the IT space.
Google has a new service, Google Scholar, which tracks down citations.
Faceted navigation is a way to browse information along multiple dimensions.
Here's a KM world article on what it is and what it's likely to be used for:
So how do facets work their powers? First, we need to state what I’ll call Busch’s golden law of facets, named for Joseph Busch of Taxonomy Strategies, a past president of the American Society for Information Science:
Four facets of 10 nodes each have the same discriminatory power as one taxonomy of 10,000 nodes.
That’s stunning. That means that with facets, I can describe a collection with 40 nodes (aka subject categories) that would take a taxonomy 10,000 nodes to describe. That’s for an idealized case, of course, but the gist of it holds true in the real world. The bottom line is that with facets, we can make do with orders of magnitude fewer categories than we needed in a taxonomy.
That’s because taxonomies are a type of pre-coordinate indexing, meaning that its builder anticipates the compound subjects people can browse along later, like “18th Century French History.” In contrast, faceted navigation is based on post-coordinate indexing, meaning that end-users string together their own compound subjects at search time. They do this by combining simple elements from multiple facets, in this example, (Time: 18th Century) + (Country: France) + (Topical Subject: History).
...via elearningpost
David Weinberger further ponders on the Third Age of Order:
First Order: You arrange physical objects: You shelve books, you file papers, you put away your silverware.
Second Order: You arrange separate, smaller objects that contain metadata about the first order objects: You create a card catalog. You make entries in a ledger. You index a book. You now have a second organizational scheme (e.g., the books are shelved by subject but the cards are arranged alphabetically), and it's physically easier to navigate
Third Order: You create electronic metadata so you can organize it in ways that simply weren't feasible before.
And, within the Third Age, on the nature of data and metadata:
So, in the Third Age of Order, all data is metadata. Contents are labels. Data is all surface and no insides. It's all handles and no suitcase. It's a folder whose content is just another label. It's all sticker and no bumper.
Why does this matter? It changes the primary job of information architects. It makes stores of information more useful to users. It enables research that otherwise would be difficult, thus making our culture smarter overall. But, most interestingly (at least to me), this does the ol' Einsteinian reverse flip to Aristotle. Aristotle assumed that of the 10 categories by which one could understand a thing, one must be primary: Where that thing fits into the tree of knowledge. So, you could say that Alcibiades is made of flesh or lived in Greece, but if you really want to understand him, you have to say that he is an animal of a particular kind. But, now that everything is metadata, no particular way of understanding something is any more inherently valuable than any other; it all depends on what you're trying to do. The old framework of knowledge — and authority — are getting a pretty good shake.
We've been talking lately here about tacit knowledge (about which, more later) and small talk and the limitations of online meetings and collaborations for casual conversation (which is sometimes where the most real progress gets made. Related to that, David Weinberger speaks 'In defense of small talk':
Likewise, in small talk, we express ourselves in the details of what we talk about, the words we use, the ones we don't, how far we lean forward, how tentatively or aggressively we probe for shared ground. Because all of this is implicitly presented, it tends to give a more accurate picture of who we are and what we care about than big, explicit conversations.
An article on Information Hunters, which discusses how information foraging on the Internet resembles the activities of hunter-gatherers.
John Udell has an interesting, though short, article on del.icio.us and Flickr and their approach to classification:
Conventional wisdom holds that people will never assign metadata tags to content. It just isn't on the path of least resistance, the story goes, and those few who do step off the path succeed only in creating unwieldy taxonomies. (Do you file the revised XML Schema specification under xml/specifications or specifications/xml? We can never agree, and many good minds are sacrificed in the vain attempt.) Yet somehow, users of Flickr and del.icio.us do routinely tag content, and those tags open new dimensions of navigation and search. It's worth pondering how and why this works.Abandoning taxonomy is the first ingredient of success. These systems just use bags of keywords that draw from --and extend --a flat namespace. In other words, you tag an item with a list of existing and/or new keywords. Of course, that idea's been around for decades, so what's special about Flickr and del.icio.us? Sometimes a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind. The degree to which these systems bind the assignment of tags to their use -- in a tight feedback loop -- is that kind of difference.
Microsoft and open source--it must be a sign of changing times when those words are used together...
Via Clay Shirky and Many to Many--MSFT releases FlexWiki as Open Source project:
We wrote about Microsoft’s FlexWiki project last December. Now eWeek is reporting that Microsoft is releasing FlexWiki code under an Open Source license. (Code is available on Source Forge, though it indicates that is is extensions to FlexWiki — I am not sure when or where the full codebase will be released..)
There's been a bunch of discussion around the blogosphere lately on Wikipedia, including discussion of articles in the Boston Globe and the Syracuse Post-Standard challenging Wikipedia's accuracy and it's long term ability to be accurate. David Weinberger recently talked about Wikipedia, or any encyclopedia's, inability to handle complex truths.
Ethan Zuckerman provides some discussion of another issue that Wikipedia suffers from:
Now one million articles strong, Wikipedia is arguably the largest encyclopedia in the world. Its philosophy of radical openness - anyone can add or subtract anything at any time, though changes can be rolled back - hasn't led to chaos, but a fascinating system that corrects many acts of vandalism within five minutes. It's a fantastic gateway project for non-technical people interested in contributing to a large, meaningful Open project.
Amazing though it is, Wikipedia is not flawless. It's got a problem common to almost all peer production projects: people work on what they want to work on. (This "problem" is probably the secret sauce that makes peer production projects work... which is what makes it such a difficult problem to tackle.) Most of the people who work on Wikipedia are white, male technocrats from the US and Europe. They're especially knowledgeable about certain subjects - technology, science fiction, libertarianism, life in the US/Europe - and tend to write about these subjects. As a result, the resource tends to be extremely deep on technical topics and shallow in other areas. Nigeria's brilliant author, Chinua Achebe gets a 1582 byte "stub" of an article, while the GSM mobile phone standard gets 16,500 bytes of main entry, with dozens of related articles.
In the tradition of Wikipedia, a user--Xed has proposed CROSSBOW--Committee Regarding Overcoming Serious Systemic Bias On Wikipedia, which is designed to help reduce bias and make the encyclopedia even broader than it currently is.
There's a lot to learn from Wikipedia, particularly with regard to the knowledge of the whole versus individual experts. It's something I hope we'll be discussing in Extension as e-Extension, and everything we do, moves forward.
Louis Rosenfeld has what looks like a great set of information architecture heuristics for search systems)
Searching, he says, consists for most people of the following:
It's probably pretty much a given that organizational culture affects knowledge sharing. In an article at Australian Flexible Learning Community, Maish Nichani talks about the ways that culture can affect sharing knowledge in an organization.
The Shifted LibrarianThe Shifted Librarian points to Ohio's Know it Now:
KnowItNow is a live online information service provided free of charge for the citizens of Ohio by the State Library of Ohio and your local public library. Professional librarians are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to answer your reference questions and assist you in finding information. Once logged on with your Ohio zip code, you and a librarian engage in a "chat" session. The librarian “pushes” high quality, authoritative online resources to your screen. You can watch and participate as librarians skillfully navigate the Internet to find precise answers to your questions. At the conclusion of each KnowItNow session, you will receive a complete transcript of your session via email including links to all the online resources shared during that session.
The State Library of Ohio also offers HomeworkNow and ReadThisNow
...via The Shifted Librarian
There's been an interesting discussion, summarized in a Ross Mayfield post on Many2Many about Wikipedia and authoritative knowledge.
Ross proposes some research:
I’ve been quitely[sic] forming a group of journalism schools, media centers and experts to engage in the Wemedia Project, which begins with a formal Wikipedia Article fact checking excercise and publishing findings. The USC Annenberg Center has already announced their support and next month we will begin the collaborative research process within a Socialtext Workspace. Without getting into defining truth, you can separate issue of fact, value or policy. The approach is to apply a formal fact checking process to a sample of articles to gain a baseline measure of factual accuracy and explore issues of reputation.
Good discussion follows the article too.
Duncan Watts at Slate talks about Decentralized Intelligence:
In 1997, the Toyota group suffered what seemed like a catastrophic failure in its production system when a key factory--thesole source of a particular kind of valve essential to the braking systems of all Toyota vehicles--burned to the ground overnight. Because of their much-vaunted just-in-time inventory system, the company maintained only three days of stock, while a new factory would take six months to build. In the meantime Toyota's production of over 15,000 cars a day would grind to an absolute halt....The big question was: How? How does one rapidly regenerate large quantities of a complex component, in several different varieties, without any specialized tools, gauges, and manufacturing lines (almost all of which were lost), with barely any relevant experience (the company that made them was highly specialized), with very little direction from the original company (which was quickly overwhelmed), and without compromising any of their other production tasks?...
Nevertheless, they succeeded, but not in the way one might have expected. Rather than relying on the guidance and coordination of an inspired leader (control mode), the response was a bewildering display of truly decentralized problem solving: More than 200 companies reorganized themselves and each other to develop at least six entirely different production processes, each using different tools, different engineering approaches, and different organizational arrangements. Virtually every aspect of the recovery effort had to be designed and executed on the fly, with engineers and managers sharing their successes and failures alike across departmental boundaries, and even between firms that in normal times would be direct competitors.
Within three days, production of the critical valves was in full swing, and within a week, production levels had regained their pre-disaster levels. The kind of coordination this activity required had not been consciously designed, nor could it have been developed in the drastically short time frame required.
Among Watts' points--when a disaster strikes it can seem natural to opt for a 'command and control' mentality where all parties wait on orders from on-high. Most disasters, though, are beyond the scope of a single person to solve and, in the one-person-in-charge-of-everything mode, requires tremendous communication channels to get the word out to all the people sitting and waiting for orders from above. Most organizations, though, have intelligent skilled people all over the place. Of equal importance, these intelligent people have built informal networks that can create expert teams on the fly.
Knowledge and information are not the same and it's much easier to manage information than knowledge. For one thing, information is the same for everyone whereas knowledge can differ markedly depending on whose brain it's being processed through.
Amy Gahran at Contentious takes a stab at explaining knowledge vs information:
What's the difference between knowledge and information?
- Information generally includes facts, observations, sensations, and messages. Information is content which informs our minds. It's fuel.
- Knowledge, in contrast, is the human experience of information – it's what our minds DO with all that content. It's the fire in the forge.
...via elearningpost
Good article at HBS Working Knowledge about why innovations sit on shelves instead of getting implemented and used.
The problem that Ludwig faced—leading an organization that didn't have the ability to conduct candid conversations about internal problems—is common. Worse, it's also the reason why many technically excellent innovations get stuck inside an organization and never make it to market.According to our studies, the most effective way for a leader to realign his company is to facilitate open and honest conversation about any barriers the organization is facing. For the most part, this requires management to look closely at the roles of various parts of the business and alter the way employees interact. Increasing the pace of business innovation almost always requires reallocating decision rights and, more critically, power. Speeding time to market means delegating authority to heavyweight product development teams. But senior functional leaders, used to making key decisions, are likely to resist.
Bill Ives promises to tell us the History of Knowledge Management in Six Parts:
This serialized work attempts to puts the current state of knowledge management in context, providing a brief historical overview of knowledge management and communication media, and offering a framework for examining issues based on cognitive psychology. Key questions and challenges are offered at the end of most sections. It begins tomorrow with %u201CHistory of KM Part 2: The Early Days.%u201D In this case we are talking about 4000 BC, not the mid 1980s.
...via elearningpost
Infoworld offers a brief article on a couple of companies who have released products that I'd call knowledge management for the individual.
Near-Time, is offering Flow--a "peer-to-peer CM (content management) and KM software that allows users to access, manage, and repurpose content using a range of standards."
Learning Management Solutions has a product called KnowledgeWorkshop--which "allows users to create personally relevant associations and connections between information drawn from a variety of sources, including Web pages, e-mail, documents, PowerPoint slides, databases, and spreadsheets."
Knowledge goes to waste if no one can find it. Although a large part of an organizations knowledge is contained in its people (and usually not capturable in any straightforward way), a significant amount of valuable informaiton is contained in publications, reports, updates, and other documents.
In Getting the Most from Content Management, Sam Goldman talks about the importance of developing a taxonomy for any content management system so that it's possible to find the information that exists when it's needed:
In creating its taxonomy, a company might begin with a survey into what information exists and what is needed and of interest to people inside and outside the organization. It is also helpful to assess how vendors, partners and employees view the organization and how, in that context, they might seek information. Such a process must involve key stakeholders and knowledge professionals working in collaboration with IT.Information exists in every part of an organization but often remains hidden to those outside a particular division. This is because there isn't a consistent contextual relationship between that information and the way it's captured. The description used by finance might be (and probably is -- remember Murphy's Law?) different from the term used in marketing. Establishing a common vocabulary and rules for applying terminology and labeling, for example, can make all the difference here.
No Doubt Research presents Zen and the Art of Knowledge Management:
...grappling with tacit knowledge is a lot like coming to grips with a Zen koan. When we work on 'making tacit knowledge explicit' we find our usual techniques let us down, leave things out, or seem to miss the point. As with the Zen koan, what is really needed to come to terms with tacit knowledge is to suspend our usual expectations and to search for a new viewpoint.
They identify eight things organizations can do to promote the flow of tacit knowledge:
About a change in culture, the paper goes on to say:
...because genuine sharing is always voluntary, the challenge is to create a culture where people are eager to share their knowledge. Yet make no mistake, even rudimentary knowledge management efforts require a requisite shift in culture. To take one obvious example, the creation of a 'knowledge map' will be of no use in an organisation that is resistant to knowledge sharing. Knowing that Helen in marketing is an expert in dealing with e-commerce in Asia will be no use to anyone if she is not motivated to share her experiences with others. Knowledge management is therefore also about change management. This is a complex topic all of its own, and Trevor Williamson's workshop tomorrow will address some of the key elements in dealing with this kind of change.
Ed Felten tells us (well, me, anyway) about a game created at Carnegie Mellon University called The ESP Game:
A group at Carnegie Mellon University has created The ESP Game, in which a pair of strangers, shown a photographic image, are each asked to guess the single word that the other will use to characterize the image....The brilliant part is that the game “tricks” its players into doing an important and incredibly time-consuming job. By playing the game, you’re helping to build a giant index that associates each image on the internet with a set of words that describe it.
David Sifry has put together a Technorati hack that shows the top Amazon products people are talking about.
...via BoingBoing
Chances are if you do much online searching, you've visited a Wikipedia entry once or twice. Dan Gillmor has a good article on the wikipedia is and how it's done.
Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), an encyclopedia created and operated by volunteers, is one of the most fascinating developments of the Digital Age. In just over three years of existence, it has become a valuable resource and an example of how the grass roots in today's interconnected world can do extraordinary things.
How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web
For some reason I thought I might want to know this someday.
Johnathon Briggs talks about starting knowledge fires:
Over the weekend I listened to IBM’s Dave Snowdon discussing the need for organisations to try lots of options and focus on emerging successes rather than to try to define what would be successful and then only try out that option. A metaphor for this would be starting lots of fires. Some will be quickly extinguished by their environment, some will burn a bit but go out and some will become the centre of attention encouraging people to add wood or dance and sing around the flames.
...via Seb's Open Research
The Pew Research Center reports on Consumption of Information goods and services in the United States:
Computers and the Internet are encroaching on the TV and the landline telephone as important information and communication tools for a growing number of tech-loving Americans, especially those in their twenties.
Among other things, they indicate that there are eight different groups of technology users, including Young Tech Elites, Older Wired Baby Boomers, Young Marrieds, and Wired Senior Men. People are becoming increasingly unwired and substituting connection for more traditional media, like television, newspapers, and magazines.
The New York Times has an article on whether robots will ever become conscious:
To Dr. Moravec, if it acts conscious, it is. To ask more is pointless.Dr. Chalmers regards consciousness as an ineffable trait, and it may be useless to try to pin it down. "We've got to admit something here is irreducible," he said. "Some primitive precursor consciousness could go all the way down" to the smallest, most primitive organisms, even bacteria, he said.
Dr. Chalmers too sees nothing fundamentally different between a creature of flesh and blood and one of metal, plastics and electronic circuits. "I'm quite open to the idea that machines might eventually become conscious," he said, adding that it would be "equally weird."
Fast Company reports on how MapQuest gets you from here to there:
MapQuest uses state-of-the-art satellite images and computer algorithms, but it also relies on actual observations in the field. So it is that an army of modern-day explorers is continually remapping the nation. As Clark steers a Ford Taurus through Avalon Way's newest streets, she recites what she sees, starting with street names and building numbers at the beginning and end of a block. "Hemison-- H-e-m-i-s-o-n --Court. There's a gate . . . number four is on the right."
...via elearningpost
The making of a brick is a combination of animation, text and very short video clips to convey interesting information.
...via elearningpost
Games are becoming ever more popular as tools for learning, both in teaching and the workplaces. Despite major differences of opinion among different disciplines, both researchers and developers agree on one thing: The strength of games is that you learn things in the context in which you use them.
Elizabeth Lawley reports from the Internet Librarian conference (I hope I have that right) on 30 Search Tips in 40 Minutes by Mary Ellen Bates
Dan Bricklin talks briefly, but interestingly about the impact of Digital Rights Management, while managing to also mention VisiCalc and Longhorn.
Jay Rosen writes about What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism?. Among the ten reasons he lists:
He follows up with What's Conservative About the Weblog Form of Journalism?
David Weinberger at JOHO says in Metadata and Desire:
This is no longer the Age of Information. It's the Age of Metadata
Metadata can't be perfect. There is no 'right' way to categorize everything and even if there were, you'd never convince everyone to use it. A lot of information is organiz--it comes from where it comes from and it is what it is, trying to categorize it may kill it before it ever gets circulated or, at least, make it no easier to find and more difficult to identify.
...metadata, an abstraction of an abstraction, is directly and intimately tied to human projects and human desire. And what's desire? Nothing but the way we're pulled into the world, over and over, against our will and in ways that constantly surprise us. So, the increasing need for metadata pulls us out of the world as our desire continuously pulls us into the world.Welcome to the rhythm of the modern world
David Weinberger has an article at KM World on tacit emergence:
The most important tacit knowledge isn't simply explicit knowledge that hasn't yet been uttered. Humans aren't databases just waiting for the right queries to be run. The tacit knowledge that lets a senior technician diagnose problems faster and more accurately than others, or the tacit knowledge that lets a CFO see in 10 seconds why a proposed merger is unlikely to work, is emergent knowledge. It comes from a rich, confusing context of memories, heuristics and associations that the technician or the CFO may not be able to explain. In many cases, she or he will form a judgment incredibly quickly and only afterward will try to analyze why.So, the attempt to make explicit the tacit knowledge in an organization may in fact be an attempt to short-circuit the chaotic process of emergence. But that's exactly what emergence doesn't allow. In such cases, a KM system can nourish the intelligence from which wisdom emerges but neither replace it nor make it explicit.
I promised a couple of weeks ago to take a look at disruptive and sustaining technologies with a specific example, so here it is:
For-profit companies are driven and sustained by, obviously, profits, but let's look at an example of how disruptive and sustaining technologies might work in an organization like Extension. For anyone coming in from the outside, 'Extension' is defined (loosely) here as a state University or Cooperative Extension Service associated with a land-grant university and charged with, among other things, communicating and teaching about subjects researched at the university that have a practical impact on people's lives.
Note: I’m still working these ideas out and this isn’t meant to be the one great answer; it’s a way for me to think through what it means and how to understand the adoption of disruptive technologies and the impact they can have. Things will adjust, I’m sure, as I explore further. Comments, as always, would be welcome.
Traditionally, Extension communicates new knowledge through publications, meetings, and demonstrations. If we look for a moment at communication through publications, we can see that this particular mode of communication can take a number of forms--print, web, video, radio, electronic mailing lists, and others. Many of these are technologies that have been adopted by Extension in order to improve the reach and accessibility of Extension publications for our clients. Each of these media production methods have addressed particular needs for Extension’s clients. Each of these methods have established development procedures which involve content specialists, program directors, and communication specialists who work together to provide clear, readable, informative, and accessible materials. The final products are highly polished, well edited, attractively laid out, professional products.
Weblogs, on the other hand, are a direct-to-consumer product. They bypass program directors and communication specialists (except in the sense that a program director or communication specialist might also have a weblog). They are cheap and fast and simple. While the main template can be attractive and readable, they aren’t necessarily as elegant as professional publications, they aren’t always as well-written, and they aren’t edited. They may contain errors that have to be corrected later.
Let’s look at how weblogs and traditional (though often innovative) Extension communication methods compare when considered in the context of disruptive technologies.
1. Disruptive technologies may initially underperform established methods--but they have other features that provide some value.
Weblogs often use standard design templates. They list information in a simple chronological format with some ability to archive information by category and date. There is little complexity in the layout of individual entries, although images and tables can be used in limited straightforward ways. Entries are usually not edited by anyone other than the author and are often short, lacking background and reference material (though most weblog entries include links to additional material on the topic).
However, weblogs are easy to start, require little technical expertise, and are easy to maintain. Good weblogs are frequently updated with current information and breaking news, giving people a reason to return frequently. Information can be posted immediately without a lengthy editorial and review process. The layout makes it very simple to find the most recent information, which some readers value very highly (possibly more highly than excellent production values or high readability). Information is unmediated. It is posted in the specialist’s own voice and it focuses on 'things of interest to this particular specialist' which may include topics such as Extension’s new strategic plan, but may include many other things as well, even things that are not directly Extension-related or content-related. These factors--voice and knowledge filtering--are important in building trust, something some people, in particular those unfamiliar with Extension and those accustomed to searching for timely information on the Internet, value very highly.
2. Technologies progress faster than the market, giving customers more than they need or are willing to pay for.
Some people value fast over excellent. Some don’t want to print publications off the web, they just want to find the information, read it, and move on. Many have no interest in a well-produced learning module, no matter how excellent, that can’t tell them the latest status of an issue today. These clients aren’t teaching a class, they aren’t helping their own clients, they want to know what they want when they want it. And they want to build relationships. They want to collect their own network of experts; their go-to people for the information they need to make the important and everyday decisions in their lives.
For these customers, the time required to produce excellent learning materials or professional print or web publications is a higher cost than they want to pay. While the production is excellent, takes advantage of new technologies and provides a professional product with useful accessible information, it’s more information than they need, too far removed from when they want it.
3. Disruptive technologies are first adopted in emerging or insignificant markets and by marginal customers.
Extension listens to its best customers (as we should) and those customers tell us that they want more publications, more web pages, more learning modules, more video, and more market reports, all of which they do want and all of which help them in some way to learn more and do their jobs better.
Meanwhile, there are also a large number of people who only come to Extension occasionally, who don’t come to Extension because they don’t think we have what they need, or who don’t know anything about Extension and what we can provide. While some of them may indeed want our current publications, videos, and web pages--if we could just make the connection with them--some of them want (or could benefit the most from) something else entirely. If we don’t provide it, there are two other possibilities--someone else will provide it or no one else will and they’ll go away without the information they need and want. In the present days with a global Internet, a third possibility also exists--another state Extension service will provide it and gradually squeeze us out of the picture for that group of customers (and eventually all our customers as the disruptive technology proceeds to become more ‘mainstream’).
Sometimes disruptive technologies completely eliminate the old technologies eventually becoming better, faster, and more responsive. Weblogs will probably never replace traditional Extension communication production. For formal education and other activities, it is likely that there will always be a demand for high-quality, professionally produced materials. Weblogs speak to a different need--the need for timely information, on-the-spot analysis, and relationship and trust-building. While these are all things that traditional approaches may be able to do, they can’t do it as well, as cheaply or as quickly as weblogs can. In addition, weblogs can give a voice to individual specialists and their particular expertise in a way that traditional communication materials often have not. Even newspaper columns, which some specialists produce are not as immediate as weblog publication.
Weblogs are disruptive because they will come whether we ‘allow’ them or not. They are ‘low-end’ compared to our current rich communication offerings, but they provide some things to some people that other tools can’t provide and their capabilities are growing rapidly. How we develop them and some of the new technologies that accompany them, like syndication and aggregation, can determine who we serve, how we’re perceived, and who Extension is in the coming years.
The Creative Commons has a list of applications they'd like to see built to make their ideas for an alternative copyright practical and doable on the web, including:
According to Dan Gillmor, the Open Source Applications Foundation which is developing the application Chandler has received 2.75 million dollars in grants to continue their work on the project.