Preoccupations

What we're teaching this year

I thought I'd post here some links to stuff we've developed and are using with our first year students (13 year-olds). The material is in the public domain, on JotSpot.

So, here's the syllabus. (It's open to revision this year, as we teach it, and, of course, before we teach it again next year.)

Autumn Term

ICT at school, home ... mobile
Internet & web: key figures and events
Reading the social web: browsers, RSS and search
Communicating & collaborating, on- and off-line I: Office(s)

Spring Term

Communicating & collaborating, on- and off-line II: webmail, IM, chat, VoIP; blogs & wikis; video- and photo-sharing; social bookmarking and tagging; maps

Summer Term

Responsibility and Identity: Wikipedia (critical reading, responsible writing); social software (privacy, safety, digital identity)
The Law: copyright (links, permissions, problems); music (file-sharing, DRM); defamation and abuse (rights and responsibilities)
Games
Virtual Worlds   

Then there's a wealth of linked-to background material that served earlier this year as stuff for the department to immerse itself in as it readied itself. (We're very fortunate in the quality and commitment of the team which teaches this course.) I update this material from time to time so it can remain useful. 

Finally, the lessons to date: 

1  Introduction 

2  Home & mobile technologies 

3  The Internet 

4  Internet Pioneers 

5  The Web 

6  The Web 

7  Browsers 

8  Personalisation and home pages 

9  RSS & Aggregators 

10  Search 

11  RSS & Search: improving the signal to noise ratio 

12 Office: I

We've had fun delivering these within the constraints of time (one 40-minute lesson a week!) and the engagement of the pupils has been inspiring. 

In doing what we've been doing, my concern has been to leave behind what John Naughton called (in the Observer) the Old Person's ICT Curriculum. I also found inspiration along the way in Dave Snowden's blog post, Huginn and Muginn. Not everything there meshes with what we're doing (we're not delivering touch-typing and, yes, we should be) and we are teaching something of a body of knowledge (eg, about web history —€” Eliot: 'A people without history Is not redeemed from time' — but that's not what he was referring to: see 'don't teach ICT as if it was a "body of knowledge"'). Such things apart, I'm entirely at one with the spirit of remarks like these:

… make computers and broadband a universal right, like water … most computing skills and all social computing capability is learnt by doing and by regular practice rather than classroom lessons.

… what really matters is that children experience and contribute to the evolution of technology, and to see that evolution as a symbiotic relationship with human kind. That requires us … [to be] thoughtful and mindful. We don't need to sacrifice an eye to gain wisdom … but we do need to sacrifice an over explicit non-experiential approach to ICT teaching.

I also like his fifth point:

Let things emerge, don't plan … It's not so much about repeating a success as repeating the conditions which led to that success. In any complex system you can never replicate outcome, but you can replicate starting conditions. … you want multiple diverse initiatives to emerge, and you want to measure their impact on the social and educational fabric … not a series of pre-determined targeted outcomes.

There's been a surprising amount of room for things to emerge: pupils experiment in their own time, bring a lot to the table, anyway, and are excited by discovering more about the powers given them by contemporary computing.

I'd add to all this a word about the re-appraisal of Prensky's influential digital natives meme — a re-appraisal that has been going on for some time now. Here's Henry Jenkins (writing earlier this month):

Talk of "digital natives" helps us to recognize and respect the new kinds of learning and cultural expression which have emerged from a generation that has come of age alongside the personal and networked computer. Yet, talk of "digital natives" may also mask the different degrees [of] access to and comfort with emerging technologies experienced by different youth. Talk of digital natives may make it harder for us to pay attention to the digital divide in terms of who has access to different technical platforms and the participation gap in terms of who has access to certain skills and competencies or for that matter, certain cultural experiences and social identities. Talking about youth as digital natives implies that there is a world which these young people all share and a body of knowledge they have all mastered, rather than seeing the online world as unfamiliar and uncertain for all of us.

Teaching this course this year, we have had it confirmed that being born in 1994 doesn't mean that online life, for all that it may be familiar, is well understood: where it's come from, what it can do and what your options are —€” these are all things that unite adults and teens as we seek to develop and mature in this new and changing world.

Technorati tags: ICT, St Paul's, youth, teens, teaching, digital natives, digital divide

Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World

— the title of a very long report by Harris Interactive on behalf of the OCLC, available for download (pdf) here. (You can also download sections of the report from here.) In its conclusion it poses the question, 'what are the services and incentives that online libraries could offer users to entice them to come back or to visit more often or even devote some of their own time to help create a social library site?'.

This OCLC membership report explores this web of social participation and cooperation on the Internet and how it may impact the library’s role, including:

• The use of social networking, social media, commercial and library services on the Web
• How and what users and librarians share on the Web and their attitudes toward related privacy issues
• Opinions on privacy online
• Libraries’ current and future roles in social networking

Any report this long is going to take time to read and digest, but a look at some of the conclusions should whet the appetite:

The drive to participate, to build, to seek out communities is certainly nothing new. “Connect with friends,” “be part of group,” “have fun” and “express myself” are the top motives for using social networks according to our research. We could as easily be describing the motives behind the rise of the telephone, civic associations or, more recently, the cell phone, or the motivations that drew e-mail from the office into the home. The motives that are driving the rise of social networking are not unique. And yet, this particular Internet innovation, the social networking craze, feels different. It doesn’t seem to be playing out like the digital revolutions that preceded it. Social networking is doing something more than advancing communications between individuals, driving commerce or speeding connectivity. It is redefining roles, muddying the waters between audience and creator, rules and relationships, trust and security, private and public. And the roles are changing, not just for a few but for everyone, and every service, on the Web. Whether one views this new social landscape as a great opportunity for improved information creation and exchange or as a messy playground to be tidied up to restore order, depends on one’s point of view. …

We see a social Web developing in an environment where users and librarians have dissimilar, perhaps conflicting, views on sharing and privacy. There is an imbalance. Librarians view their role as protectors of privacy; it is their professional obligation. They believe their users expect this of them. Users want privacy protection, but not for all services. They want the ability to control the protection, but not at the expense of participation. …

… librarians have pioneered many of the digital services we now see in broad use on the Web: intranets to share resources, electronic information databases and “ask-an-expert” services. And although it took some librarians a while to embrace the use of search engines as hubs for information access, librarians are now Googling more frequently than their users and teaching users how to maximize the potential of this powerful tool. But, unfortunately, librarians are not pioneering the social Web.

And from the final section of the conclusion, 'Open the Doors':

Our perceptions become our realities, and often, also our limitations. This was clearly the case for the authors of this report when we began our research on social networks a year ago. There is no doubt that our initial perceptions of social networks influenced our approach to this study. Handicapped by only limited personal experiences with sites, we began our study as we had every study before it—by looking at social networks as a service or set of services to be studied, learned and implemented. We conceived of a social library as a library of traditional services enhanced by a set of social tools—wikis, blogs, mashups and podcasts. Integrated services, of course, user-friendly for sure and offering superior self-service. We were wrong. Our view, after living with the data, struggling with the findings, listening to experts and creating our own social spaces, is quite different. Becoming engaged in the social Web is not about learning new services or mastering new technologies. To create a checklist of social tools for librarians to learn or to generate a “top ten” list of services to implement on the current library Web site would be shortsighted. Such lists exist. Resist the urge to use them.

The social Web is not being built by augmenting traditional Web sites with new tools. And a social library will not be created by implementing a list of social software features on our current sites. The social Web is being created by opening the doors to the production of the Web, dismantling the current structures and inviting users in to create their content and establish new rules. Open the library doors, invite mass participation by users and relax the rules of privacy. It will be messy. The rules of the new social Web are messy. The rules of the new social library will be equally messy. But mass participation and a little chaos often create the most exciting venues for collaboration, creativity, community building—and transformation.

Technorati tags: OCLC, libraries, social networking, privacy, trust

Life, the web — all a tangle

The interview Tim Berners-Lee gave last year (IBM developerWorks) was widely reported. I blogged it, Web 2.0: 'what the Web was supposed to be all along', in August 2006, shortly after it was posted. What most struck me about it was expressed, pithily and succinctly, by Sir Tim in a remark about the web made on an earlier occasion — the MIT Technology Review Emerging Technologies conference in 2005, as reported by Andy Carvin in Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web:

The original thing I wanted to do was to make it a collaborative medium, a place where we (could) all meet and read and write.

At the MIT conference, Sir Tim talked about Marc Andreessen and the emergence of a commercial web browser. In the IBM developerWorks interview he said of his web browser,

… the original World Wide Web browser of course was also an editor. … I really wanted it to be a collaborative authoring tool. And for some reason it didn't really take off that way.  And we could discuss for ages why it didn't. … I've always felt frustrated that most people don't...didn't have write access.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I came across a 1997 Time magazine piece about Tim Berners-Lee by Robert Wright, The Man Who Invented The Web:

Berners-Lee considers the Web an example of how early, random forces are amplified through time. "It was an accident of fate that all the first [commercially successful] programs were browsers and not editors," he says. To see how different things might have been, you have to watch him gleefully wield his original browser--a browser and editor--at his desk. He's working on one document and--flash--in a few user-friendly keystrokes, it is linked to another document. One document can be on his computer "desktop"--for his eyes only--another can be accessible to his colleagues or his family, and another can be public. A seamless neural connection between his brain and the social brain. … he is grateful that Andreessen co-authored a user-friendly browser and thus brought the Web to the public, even if in non-ideal form. Yet it can't have been easy watching Andreessen become the darling of the media after writing a third-generation browser that lacked basic editing capabilities.

Now the web is 'finally starting' to follow 'the technological lines he envisioned (… as software evolves)':

Berners-Lee, standing at a blackboard, draws a graph, as he's prone to do. It arrays social groups by size. Families, workplace groups, schools, towns, companies, the nation, the planet. The Web could in theory make things work smoothly at all of these levels, as well as between them. That, indeed, was the original idea--an organic expanse of collaboration. … "At the end of the day, it's up to us: how we actually react, and how we teach our children, and the values we instill." He points back to the graph. "I believe we and our children should be active at all points along this."

So, a fundamental deviation from Tim Berners-Lee's vision for the web occurred in the form taken by popular, commercially viable web browsers. In Dave Winer's view, this early deviation was heavily reinforced by Microsoft:

Since the re-rollout of Office in 1996, it's been really clear why Microsoft was so hell-bent at first owning and then suffocating the web browser, along with the web. … Because for them, writing was not something that would be done in a web browser, if they improved their browser as a writing tool, that would be the end of Word, and with it, a big reason for using Office. … If instead, Microsoft had embraced the web, and with it the shift in their product line and economics, in 1995, we'd have a much richer writing environment today. Blogging would have happened sooner, in a bigger way. It's hard to imagine how much the sins of Microsoft cost all of us.

What a tangled thing technology is (Berners-Lee — 'The Web is a tangle, your life is a tangle – get used to it'). I hope very much that Ted Nelson has brought Geeks Bearing Gifts nearer to publication. Meanwhile, with the Time 1997 piece a little bit more of the road map of the web's evolution became clearer to me. The read-only nature of the successful web browsers that came after Sir Tim's explains a great deal about how many an adult of a certain age perceives the web. I think of John Naughton's sketch of how today's 22 year-old conceives of the web, and of Andrew McAfee's comment,

Evidence is mounting that younger people don’t think of the Internet as a collection of content that other people produce for them to consume. Instead, they think about it as a dynamic, emergent, and peer-produced repository to which they’re eager to contribute.

And I think back to Bradley Horowitz's talk at the London March 2007 FOWA meeting, which I wrote about here — and Twittered at the time: 'from a hierarchy of creator(s)/synthesisers/consumers (1:10:100) towards a web world of participation (100)'.

If the history of the web browser had itself been different, would we have suffered the misalignment of perceptions about the essentially social, creative nature of the web ('I believe we and our children should be active at all points along this') that often exists now between today's different generations of users?

Well, and in any case, 'The Web is no longer the future of computing, computing is now about the Web' (Dare Obasanjo).

***

Footnote. Two other things from the Time piece (I pass them on as given there): ' … contrary to the mythology surrounding Netscape, it was he [Berners-Lee], not Andreessen, who wrote the first "graphical user interface" Web browser. (Nor was Andreessen's browser the first to feature pictures; but it was the first to put pictures and text in the same window, a key innovation.)'

Wikipedia's timeline of web browsers is available here.

Technorati tags: Tim Berners-Lee, browsers, web browsers, history of the web

Web Work

I got this from Anne Zelenka, who "got it" 'from Web Worker Daily’s upcoming book “Connect! Web Worker Daily’s Guide to a New Way of Working” ' — [update] which I now realise, thanks to Stowe (who has an interesting commentary on Anne's post), is her upcoming book. I'll certainly be buying that when it comes out in January '08.

Technorati tags: Anne Zelenka, connectedness, information

FOWA

I didn't go to this latest get-together (I did make the March 07 meet: see here), but we sprung five final year students from school for the day ... and I think they had a ball.

Alex's FOWA photoset is here — and Michael's, here, was picked up on (quite independently) by Marc Eisenstadt, here.

Chatting with Marc by email, he commented on what great role models FOWA gives up-and-coming teenagers. Tom Coates said the same thing to me about Kevin Rose (when we met last month at a dinner held for Howard Rheingold). I think that's all spot on.

Alex has a preliminary write-up here, Michael has posted twice — Future of Web Apps, The Future of Web Apps, and Diggnation: A Round-up, and (update!, 7/10) Adam has just posted an excellent piece on his blog, Future Of Web Apps & Diggnation.

Technorati tags: FOWA, Future of WebApps, conferences, Kevin Rose

Thomas Vander Wal at St Paul's

A great pleasure yesterday to have Thomas speak at St Paul's — on 'Going Social'. A talk written for us, but anticipating Thomas' FoWA talk tomorrow, it was a great overview of social software and social networking and, no surprise, of social tagging. It meshed with much of what we're now trying to do at St Paul's, from our programme for our first year students (13 year-olds) with its introduction to online, collaborative working, to the work throughout the school on social software (now fully available to students).

               

Those attending the talk may want to explore further some of its more technical aspects — eg, folksonomy triads. Thomas has a number of key talks and blog postings online: Folksonomy (Online Information, 2005), Folksonomy Definition and Wikipedia (November, 2005), Understanding Folksonomy: Tagging that Works presentation posted (September, 2006), Understanding Folksonomy (d.construct, 2006).

Given the current impact of Facebook, it's important to gain a perspective, see its origins and limitations (specifically, but also in the context of the general state of social networking sites — let us extract our data; give us portability; let us refind stuff)

      

and remember (or discover) that quite un-Facebook-like sites are ... social. I'm grateful to Thomas for setting out all of this and more. Like him, and like Demos, I place a lot of value in social bookmarking sites (such as del.icio.us) for educational use.

Technorati tags: Thomas Vander Wal, folksonomy, social networking, social networks, social bookmarking, Facebook, del.icio.us, tagging

Microlearning 2007 … and conversation

Time at last for a couple of conference retrospects. First up, this year's Microlearning organised, as ever, by Martin. It was heralded by a puff from Judy on SmartMobs and it was a great success, Martin — congrats! And many thanks.

A mellow tone developed from the start: the three days saw a lot of warm, friendly conversation and really interesting talks. For me, it was a pleasure to have the chance to chat with Martin at much greater length than last year and to meet (their write-ups of the conference follow in brackets after each name): Hemma Kocher (here), Teemu Leinonen (here), Ajit Jaokar (here), Mark Kramer (here; Mark's photos of the conference are here), Stephanie Rieger, Arnaud Leene (here) and Martina Roth.

Teemu's slides for his talk, 'Knowledge Building in New Media Environments', are on Slideshare, as are mine for my talk, 'Where Next?' — here. Hemma's talk, 'How to Deal With Microcontent at the Workplace 2.0', is available as a podcast (from Mark) here and as slides here.

Martin wrote to me that this year's conference had been something like what he had always imagined university life would/should have been like: 'digital media does create a whole new dimension of "scientific community" - I hated the days of "real hard work in the faculty meatspace"' (Twitter). This is something I keep hearing people say — about the web, about great conferences … To borrow from Martin again, it was an experience of 'collective friendship'.

Conversation is absolutely central here. In his talk, Teemu quoted Mikhail Bakhtin, 'Any true understanding is dialogic in nature', and Tim Spalding's comment on my post of last month, Conversation, led me to Barbara Fister's Gorman Forgets to Wind the Clock and so to Michael Oakeshott's 1959 essay, 'The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind'. Disappointingly, this essay doesn't seem to be available online, but Barbara Fister quoted two wonderful passages:

We are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation that goes on both in public and within each of ourselves . . .

Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance.

And I found more, quoted on Mike Love's blog, in his post Oakeshott’s Conversation of Mankind:

In conversation, ‘facts’ appear only to be resolved once more into the possibilities from which they were made; ‘certainties’ are shown to be combustible, not by being brought in contact with other ‘certainties’ or with doubts, but by being kindled by the presence of ideas of another order; approximations are revealed between notions normally remote from one another. Thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another, responding to each other’s movements and provoking one another to fresh exertions. Nobody asks where they have come from or on what authority they are present; nobody cares what will become of them when they have played their part. … voices which speak in conversation do not compose a hierarchy. Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, not is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering. Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another.

This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse, appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper relationships of human utterances.

There's a lot to think about in that! (Need to get hold of the whole essay.) I love how Konrad Glogowski plucks out part of it in Unending Conversation and writes, 'teaching, the way I see it, is what Michael Oakeshott refers to as "unrehearsed intellectual adventure"'.

And doesn't what Oakeshott wrote remind you of something else? Play. 'Thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another, responding to each other’s movements and provoking one another to fresh exertions.'

*****

We surely need some full studies of conversation — it occurs in so many ways. It's realised when companies find that users generate up to 70% more tagging terms than the company taxonomists had dreamed of (because that's how users talk about what's important to them) — Thomas: a triumph of the vernacular over the-officially-provided. (The del.icio.us lesson holds good — and see also the later post — but conversation ensues.) It's conversation that organisations of all types are in part trying to enable when they aspire to go beyond the artery-clogging practice of e-mail. And it's conversation that drives me to del.icio.us-tag items found via friends and people I know through the web with 'via: ...': I want to keep those links alive in my outboard memory as well as in my own head. (There's something very Ted Nelson about this — show all the links. A humanist's web. I would dearly love to see del.icio.us develop more of its native social identity.)

At Reboot this year, one of the most interesting slides I saw was Jyri's of the the hum/wave//beat/particle world of communication. I posted this slide on my Tumblr site, here, and you can access Jyri's talk here, Microblogging: Tiny social objects. On the future of participatory media. Right now, I find I'm using hum/wave software tools a lot (that's what they're there for, that's why they're hum/wave), Twittering and Jaikuing away (even Pownce-ing a bit) — part of that online, conversational world that David Weinberger calls 'continuous partial friendship' and that Martin refers to as 'creating the kind of little loose social events we'd like to have in a real-space environment, but now in the digital dimension':

 … part of the greater tendency to *duplicate* the dimension of small events that together make "daily life" into the digital dimension. like, say, meeting people at the university campus, exchanging witty, sarcastic, melancholic comments in the floors, between courses ... or at an office floor in some media company ... it is an "urban lifestyle layer" for non-spaces.

The best things I've read on Twitter (the above apart): Ian Curry's take, Twitter: The Missing Messenger, and his use of 'phatic function' (Bakhtin/Jakobson); Matt(Jones)'s comment there, referring to Matt(Webb)'s brilliant Glancing piece; Khoi Vinh's Writing and Sizing Twitter (which I heard him talk about at FoWA); Leisa's Ambient Intimacy ('Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible') and Reboot talk (which I got to hear).

Of course, you can say Twitter's 'not for conversation… it’s for stream of consciousness thoughts or status reports', but I don't think that's the whole truth. Ambient things get taken up into conversation, become themselves part of the conversation. (Yes, there's the tension between Twitter's ambient nature and its capacity for threaded conversation … But there's also this other, distinct phenomenon — I've lost count of how many times, meeting someone in the flesh, we refer to things we know about through Twittering.)

I also want to situate 'conversation' in a Long Now perspective. The young are inspiring and, as we grow older, it's obviously in them that our hopes for the future come naturally, and increasingly, to rest. I can well imagine being one day where the great Richard Feynman found himself towards the end of his life — in this conversation with Danny Hillis:

"I'm sad because you're going to die."

"Yeah," he sighed, "that bugs me sometimes too. But not so much as you think." And after a few more steps, "When you get as old as I am, you start to realize that you've told most of the good stuff you know to other people anyway."

But before that (!), we need to get the young to our conferences — and you can imagine my delight that people were saying this to me at Microlearning and Reboot and Interesting2007. You know, you don't find this attitude everywhere you go. Thanks, again, Martin.

Technorati tags: conversation, Microlearning, Microlearning 2007

Conversation

David Weinberger:

I do tend to believe that the Web touches us so deeply because it more clearly expresses what we’ve known all along. That was the point of Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

Tim Spalding:

Learning and knowledge, at least important learning and knowledge, are a conversation. … The education of scholar is an ascent through this conversation. We start with encyclopedias and straightforward books of facts—books that talk at us; certain books. We move to monographs, which seem at first like books of facts, but which we soon learn are really "arguments." We learn to write papers that are arguments too—"Don't just say what you know, have a thesis!"

At some point we discover academic journals, and our eyes are opened to just how complex and contentious and uncertain this certain thing is. And, if we go on long enough, we graduate to conferences, and we learn that knowledge is an actual conversation, usually with alcohol.

Conversations work because, at their best, they know more and produce more than their members. They work because the knowledge is in the conversation. It happens in the very interplay of ideas—asserting, contesting, extending, simplifying and complexifying the dizzying whirl of fact and opinion, creative and synthetic, smart and dumb, right and wrong, from this angle and that. Literature works like this too, but can be even more meaningless without "conversational" context—genre, allusion and imitation and so forth.

So, quiet or not, the library is a buzzing cocktail party—better and better the more people are there and the more they interact. It is already "hive" this session promises. It is, in point of fact, very much like the web.

And on libraries and their catalogues:

… the greatest thing the library has to offer—has ever had to offer—is not the relative fixity and contested reliability some now stridently set against the web, but the bubbling river of conversation it embraces.

… in finding books, we ascend through a conversation. The library catalog is too often an encyclopedia, talking at you. It's useful in the first staged of discovery. But as we ascend through a topic we gravitate to more conversational forms of discovery—reviews, articles, footnotes, bibliographies and the recommendations of others. And, I think, we leave the catalog behind. For some things, like finding new fiction, almost everyone skips the catalog right off, and reads reviews and talks to friends.

I find all that to be very good. (As is Spalding's footnoted point about David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous: "Digitization has kicked things up a notch—made us more aware of the arbitrariness of categorization, the necessity of thinking for yourself and the value of conversations—but these are old lessons.")

Technorati tags: coversation, knowledge, libraries

Interesting2007: pattern recognition

I need to write up something about Reboot 9, but meantime here's a different something … about Interesting2007, Russell Davies' visionary "conference" (his Interesting2007 posts are here). In fact, for reasons Grant and Lee suggest (below), the two conferences hang very well together.

The programme/speakers are here - or get the running order at Roo Reynolds' blog. There are masses of pictures on Flickr and a Flickr Interesting2007 group. (The attributions of the photos below are visible if you hover your mouse over each.) Rod's sketches are here.

 

I had this spooky feeling as I sat in the Conway Hall that my parents would have been there at some point in their lives — and indeed they had. I hope that was in the pre-WWII years when I know they hotly debated socialism and visions for a better century. That's how I imagine it, anyway.

 

 

 

Everybody's favourite hit of the Interesting2007 day seems to be Rhodri Marsden playing along to Wichita Lineman on a saw. Roo Reynolds has this great video of it:

The Independent's technology correspondent, Rhodri also plays keyboard with Scritti Politti. See Wikipedia for more.

Just so much to enjoy! I particularly liked …

Jack on comics (the picture shows Jack discussing one of my all time favourite images, a spread from Desolation Jones by Ellis/Williams — see Jack's and Matt's blog for more details). Hypertime! I must get reading (Alan Moore, Garth Ennis, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis) and find that Hockney film, 'A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China'.

Anne Ward on how everything's interesting. (Throughout Interesting2007, I kept thinking of Andrew Keen and how this day, and Anne in particular, was a perfect riposte.) See I like and Nothing To See Here.

Tom Lewis-Reynier's surreal history of knots. (I want a copy of that maypole shot with every child's face hidden.) Chris on cooking in the El Bulli way. (May have transformed the way I think of cooking!) Tom on tubes as not at all a bad metaphor for the internet. Fiona on the planning and preparation of the Science Museum's Science of Spying exhibition (the slide to the right here is from her talk). Matt on The Vernacular of The Spectacular (great overview of formative influences, lynchpin ideas, striking words and images … and play). 

Special mention to Dave Funkypancake's weird and wonderful collection of photos with killing commentary. This is Roo Reynolds' favourite slide from Dave's presentation, and also mine:

It was a pleasure to meet Grant McCracken at last and his post-Interesting2007 caught my eye:

My second guess was we were looking at the reinvention of the conference.  Many cultural artifacts that have been dislodged by our new world.  Our world has been decentered, flattened, destabilized, distributed, and made participative, anarchical, elite indifferent, cloudily networked, self organizing, and concatenating.  So it's natural that we're having to rethink entertainment, information, elites, experts and especially speakers.  Who now wants to sit in a room and hear someone hold forth?  Certainly, there are a couple of people who we would like to hear speak in this way.  But how often do they turn up to the conferences we go too?  Mostly what we get is two things: 1) badly concealed self advertisement, and 2) a view of the world that means to be comprehensive but proves to be alarmingly (and unwittingly) partial. 

Conferences used to create value by giving us the benefits of a sorting exercise.  The organizers would choose experts and the experts would choose topics and treatments.  We the audience would undergo edification mixed with a couple of moments of epiphany (with the opportunity to build networks over drinks).  The trouble is we are now fantastically good at sorting for ourselves.  What we want from a conference is not a surrogate intelligence of a big name speaker.  What we want is a tide that delivers new and interesting things that present themselves in fresh and unexpectedly formed ways.  …

Put us on the Kauffman continuum, the one that arrays the world between fixity at one end and chaos at the other, and it turns out that we most of us have paddled our way away from fixity towards chaos, and now tread water here in rougher, whiter waters with no discernible effort or difficulty.  Experts be damned.  We can read the world quite nicely on our own, thank you very much.  It doesn't have to be very fully formed for us to "get it." …

… those of us who actually make and manage meanings in the world know the truth of our present condition, and this is that if you have the right powers of metaphor capture and pattern recognition the world is still a relatively intelligible place.  The thing to remember is that the coherences are multiple, the interpretive frames many and conflicting, and the world changeable and fluid.  And when all of this is true, then not only is the sky not falling, but Red Lions Square and Conway Hall when filled with speakers by Russell, is a very interesting place to be.

Compare Lee's post about what Reboot 9 means to him:

I think we suffer from having a well-established conference organising industry for whom conferences are conceived in spreadsheets, not in the heart, whereas Reboot, LIFT and even the O'Reilly events in the USA are led by people who care passionately about the subject of the event. I think Reboot and similar European conferences also benefit from being non-commercial in the conventional sense. Events like Interesting 2007, which I will sadly miss, and Hack Day at Alexandra Palace, and indeed even the semi-shambolic NotCon events of a few years ago are all a better model to build on, and I hope business conference organisers will take a few leaves from their book.

Last "word" to Matt:

Technorati tags: Interesting2007, conferences, conference

Facebook's secret?

Jeff Jarvis in today's Guardian:

What is Facebook's secret sauce? I think it starts with identity. On the otherwise anonymous and pseudonymous internet, this is a place where real identity matters: I use my name and I associate with people whom I actually know. Soon after I started, I got invitations from strangers and asked my blog readers about the etiquette of responding. I was told that, in school, one accepts all invitations, because you are all in the same institution and it's rather like an arms race; school is, after all, a popularity contest. But we newcomer adults already seem to be developing a rule (borrowed from the similar business site LinkedIn) that we should befriend only those we know; it is an endorsement. So we are the masters of of our identities and our communities, which establishes trust. I think internet users have been yearning for such control.

Meanwhile, I think Stowe's spot on when he writes:

Why does Facebook only allow me one blog to be imported?

And:

What I really want is a Twitterific-type desktop app that takes my Facebook stream, and pops new stuff via Growlr. Or, alternatively, a richer notification system: I can't get notified when new material is posted to a group that I administer, for example.

Well, I'm (still?) on a Windows machine and can't comment on Twitterific or Growlr, but a richer notification system — YES! I hit a point yesterday when I found myself asking — 'Now what?'. I wanted more … feedback.

Technorati tags: Facebook, Stowe Boyd, Jeff Jarvis, identity

Douglas Adams: an awful lot of 'us'

Reading Kevin Marks' post Keening for Culture sent me back to that old favourite, Douglas Adams' 1999 piece, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet. I often use the first part of this in talks to both students and adults, but I've spent far too little time on the second half, the bit that Kevin quoted from. Here are some excerpts: 

… ‘interactivity’ is one of those neologisms that Mr Humphrys likes to dangle between a pair of verbal tweezers, but the reason we suddenly need such a word is that during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

I expect that history will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. … 

Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’. … 

Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I’m sure we will look back on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were doing with them for ‘productivity.’

In between reading Kevin's posting and writing this, I gave a talk to Heads of Departments (Faculties) at  Marlborough College (where I once taught) in the course of which I talked about this, 

and also about those dates-from-the-point-of-view-of-someone-now-aged-22 which John Naughton came up with recently (I blogged about them here). 

Before heading off to Marlborough, I showed the two slides to some of my 14 year-old students. About the first (the IBM PC), the best comment I got was, 'What was the point of inventing that?'! I suggested you had to start somewhere, and the same student then added, 'They must have found it so frustrating'. How telling is that! With John Naughton's dates, another student commented, 'You're saying how recent all this is. To me, it all feels so old'. 

Back to Douglas Adams: 

… the biggest problem is that we are still the first generation of users, and for all that we may have invented the net, we still don’t really get it. … Most of us are stumbling along in a kind of pidgin version of it, squinting myopically at things the size of fridges on our desks, not quite understanding where email goes, and cursing at the beeps of mobile phones. Our children, however, are doing something completely different. Risto Linturi, research fellow of the Helsinki Telephone Corporation, quoted in Wired magazine, describes the extraordinary behaviour [of] kids in the streets of Helsinki, all carrying cellphones with messaging capabilities. They are not exchanging important business information, they’re just chattering, staying in touch. "We are herd animals," he says. "These kids are connected to their herd – they always know where it’s moving." Pervasive wireless communication, he believes will "bring us back to behaviour patterns that were natural to us and destroy behaviour patterns that were brought about by the limitations of technology."

We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.

Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.

***** 

Sometimes I'm asked by colleagues why students should blog, and what Douglas Adams wrote back in 1999 would sit right in the middle of my answer. But you can approach the question from another angle altogether, by thinking about why teachers should blog. Martin Weller and Tony Hirst gave an OU presentation on 18 May about just this, available here. The presentation draws upon blog postings by Martin that I'd been reading last month. For example, Some more reasons to blog ('reasons why educators should blog'):

• It exposes the process …
• It provides a useful tool for engaging with other technologies …  
• It's a good means of getting down, or building up, all those thoughts that never quite get in to journal papers.

These things cut both ways: a good ICT course would recognise the first two bullet-points as important reasons why students should be blogging and the third, with some adaptation, would be true for students, too, of course. (And teachers, of course, should blog for the same core reasons students should — the ones Douglas Adams lays out.)

Martin's earlier posting, Encouraging educators to blog, proffered other reasons, of which I would say that 'the economics of reputation' is also absolutely central to why our students should blog:

… increasingly one’s reputation online is seen as a valuable commodity. This is partly because a good reputation is difficult to establish and also because in an environment where content is free and widely available then quality becomes a differentiating factor.

(Again, the other reasons he cites there also have something to say to students, allowing for the fact that his focus was on why educators should blog: engagement with your subject area; increased reflection; personal status and payback; organisational status; link to teaching; eating our own dog food.) In addition to these two postings, Martin's now written up his and Tony Hirst's workshop.

I have a great deal of respect for what's happening at the OU, so it's nice to be able to wind up with this from John Naughton, blogging today — Student blogging:

Tony Hirst pointed me to a lovely blog by a T189 student. It's a stunning example of the usefulness of blogging in education. It provides the student with a tool for publication and self-expression, and it provides very useful information for teachers (e.g. in this case about the difficulties T189 students are experiencing with our Flash-based tutorials). I wish more of our students would blog.

 

Technorati tags: blogging, blogs, education, OU, Douglas Adams, Martin Weller, Tony Hirst, John Naughton

TiddlyWiki

I've been playing around with a variety of wiki software with an eye on what I might recommend for colleagues at school. It was good to meet Jeremy Ruston at Reboot. Jeremy is the founder and CTO of Osmosoft, 'the publisher of TiddlyWiki, a popular and well-regarded free tool that is relied on by hundreds of thousands of people around the world to record, organise and share all kinds of information'.

Doc Searls' post yesterday, Food for rethought, is a good and quick reminder of some of the things that make TiddlyWiki interesting, but I particularly liked these comments of Jeremy's — made whilst demo-ing TiddlyWiki to Doc:

We don't have many weapons to use against really ineffectual people ...  It's reasonable to talk about software as being alive ...  It's symbiotic ... It needs a host geek in which to live ... The value in software is as much in its potential as in its functionality ...

I heard the news of BT buying Osmosoft from Jeremy when we were in Copenhagen. He blogged about it at the end of May:

I’m delighted to announce that the mighty BT has acquired my tiny little company Osmosoft Limited. I’m joining BT as Head of Open Source Innovation, and I’ll be building a crack open source web development team called BT Osmosoft. … BT is becoming a remarkable thing: a truly internet-scale consumer company that doesn’t rely on owning “secret sauce” software for it’s business. At the most senior levels, there’s an appetite to embrace open source that wouldn’t disgrace a web 2.0 startup. I’ll be working with a great many talented and interesting people, and I’m looking forward to it immensely. … I hope BT’s endorsement of TiddlyWiki will open up new applications that we haven’t thought of yet. To meet the challenges that they bring, I’ll continue to strive to keep the core of TiddlyWiki true to its origins as a lean, efficient non-linear personal web notebook.

I see TiddlyWiki has just had its release 2.2. I'm off to look more closely at TiddlyWiki.

Technorati tags: TiddlyWiki, Jeremy Ruston, BT, Open Source

David Miliband: 'a new age of social activism'

In two recent speeches, UK politicians are beginning to show they understand the web. First, George Osborne. And now, David Miliband:

When we think of education, we tend to think of formal teaching in classrooms by teachers.  This remains important.  But the range of resources to support learning is far wider than that - from workplaces and museums to individuals with skills to contribute, and passions to share. They lie beyond the school gates and they are 24/7. And the key to genuine educational transformation is inspiring children and adults to learn more for themselves – what Yeats called ‘lighting a fire’ as opposed to ‘filling a pail’.  So the challenge is to connect people with skills and time to give, from university students, part-time employees and people in retirement, to others with similar passions and interests.  ‘Every citizen a teacher’ may be a bit of a stretch, but it is not impossible to imagine an educational world wh