Tania Sheko's List: Conferences

• I hope this can open up an honest discussion about the ways in which social media is not serving our needs as it currently stands.

• ’m going to start this keynote by stealing a story from Steven Johnson, a historian of technology.

   

  Johnson uses the invention of GPS as a case study in how innovation happens. It’s his favorite story
• The way the story goes is this.
• So one thing we can do is celebrate the environment that actually led to this invention at Johns Hopkins, as Johnson so rightly does.
• But what I’m obsessed with (and really, what Johnson is really obsessed with too, in a sense) is how people who wanted to position nuclear submarines were not familiar with Clarke’s proposal.
• And my sense is that this sort of thing happens almost every day — someone somewhere has the information or insight you need but you don’t have access to it.
• How does this happen? Why does communication break?

• One answer to that is right in front of us. This is a letter, addressed to one person who might find it interesting. Clarke couldn’t have addressed it to the folks at APL because he didn’t know they would be interested.

   

  And this is why this concept of “openness” has become the most important concept in the digital world.
• You don’t know who can benefit from your information, the modern solution to that is to not even try to guess. Unless there is a compelling reason you should always publish it as openly as possible.
• We need to look more deeply into this because this is THE problem of our century.
• I fervently believe that amazing solutions to so many of our major problems — renewable energy, education, disease — exist out there somewhere, but they are in pieces.
• Clarke says something interesting in 2003 about the GPS idea he had had a half century before. He says it was obvious. Anybody in their right mind could have seen it. He didn’t think it was that special an insight.
• Carol Goman calls this phenomenon “Unconscious Competence”. You don’t know the value of what you know.
• It’s not just that Clarke didn’t send his letter to the right people. It’s that Clarke didn’t think there was that much of interest to tell.
• knowledge capture
• The biggest problems of the information age is how we make the most of the massive amount of information we collectively have.
• And to make use of it, to really make use of it, a few things have to happen.

• • record it somewhere

     
   
  •  

    route it to the right people

     
   
  •  

    extend , organize, localize it

     
   
  •  

    pass it back into the streamfor the next iteration
• There’s a broad feeling that social media has solved this problem.
• there’s a lot left to improve.
• So let’s start with the writing down piece of this, the record, part of what knowledge management people would call externalization
• Jim Groom
• EDUPUNK Connectivism
• So what the what the web has done, and blog-like technologies in particular, is move these individual exchanges really quickly to externalization. Ninety percent of what Jim and I have talked about over the years is online, in public, where it’s findable, searchable. Others can benefit from it. Openness combined with these blog-like products — Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, whatever, makes externalization the default.
• But there’s a couple things that makes this approach less than ideal for broad dissemination of ideas.
• The first problem is that social media tends to get only a certain kind of idea down.
• it wasn’t just that he didn’t publish it broadly. it was also that he didn’t know it was worth publishing.
• But here’s the problem — I’m embedded within a pretty advanced group of people in educational technology. Ideas that we think are common might be revolutionary for others. But we’ll never produce posts or tweets about them because everyone in our clan already knows them.
• And the stuff that we do produce assumes you share our background, so it’s not always readable outside our clan
• And it works the other way too. We’re dumb about a lot of stuff that other folks could teach us a thing or two about. But the chance of that “unconscious competence” reaching us is pretty close to zero.
• I actually think routing goes pretty well on these platforms. I’m amazed at what finds it’s way to me via twitter and blogging.
• When a blog post from another twitter subculture finds me it’s been routed through all these other nodes.
• Someone posts in their stream a link and says something like “This relates to higher ed too”. That’s a helpful prompt.
• And maybe that’s enough annotation for me to grok how this obscure economics post relates to my work. Maybe.
• But for a nontrivial set of things if information is going to useful to the circles it moves to it is going to need to be recontextualized and reframed.
• Ideally, when we learn more about an idea we posted several months ago we’d go back and update that post.
• If I think of a new thing it’s connected to, I’m going to want to write in that new connection.
• Extension is where things like wiki have excelled, where communities have worked to extend and connect ideas rather than just retweeting them.
• “Kinneavy triangle”.
• But I’m interested in this as a sort of lifecycle of information
• An idea starts out with what it means to you, the “I” in this situation. Then it pings around a social network and is discussed (the “you” phase). And then in the final phase it sort of transcends that conversation, and becomes more expository, more timeless, less personal, more accessible to conversational outsiders.
• Delicious or Diigo excel at that “I” part
• you don’t want it to be dialogic
• Start out by just caring about yourself, and you’ll actually capture more
• Twitter and blogging, on the other hand, excel at the dialogic and persuasive functions. Ideas ping around and reach unexpected people. Sometimes you even learn something.
• For the expository phase, it’s wiki that excels. By cracking open ideas and co-editing them, we turn these time-bound, person-bound comments into something more expansive and timeless. We get something bigger than the single point of view, smarter than any single person.
• So one thing I’m interested is how we create a system that allows information to flow in this way. One way might be to link up Evernote, Twitter, RSS Feeds and Wiki in a certain way.
• Another way is to start at the end technology — in this case wiki — and look at what it would take to make it work better in the other stages, the I and the You, the personal and the dialogic.
• ederated wiki
• So that’s what I’m going to do today. I’m going to demonstrate a newer technology called
• which allows the sort of communal wiki experience, but also supports those earlier stages of the knowledge life cycle.
• So here’s the problem with using wiki for those first two stages. Wiki, as it currently stands, is a consensus *engine*. And while that’s great in the later stages of an idea, it can be deadly in those first stages.
• Kate Middleton Wedding Dress Wikipedi
• fiasco?
• You can see the world in a grain of sand according to William Blake. And wedding dresses are not my thing, but for some people they’re that grain of sand.
• So some enterprising person went to Wikipedia and started a page on Kate Middleton’s dress. And she and some others started to build it out.
• About sixteen minutes later, someone – and in this case it probably matters that is was a dude – came and marked the page for deletion as trivial,
• So all hell breaks loose. You get the pie fight of all pie fights
• These are all just about whether the page has a right to exist
• Dress defenders say – are you honestly saying that Wikipedia is defined by what’s NOT in it? Wouldn’t that, taken to its logical conclusion, mean that you couldn’t add anything?
• Finally founder Jimmy Wales shows up on the talk page and to his credit says:
• I believe that our systemic bias caused by being a predominantly male geek community is worth some reflection in this context.
• Jimbo Wales (
• You can imagine this as a movie moment. A Jimmy Stewart, Frank Capra moment where everyone on Wikipedia looks sheepishly at one another and comes to their senses, right?
• This is Wikipedia, so a bit after this someome replies — to Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia — basically, stop being a bleeding heart social justice warrior. You’re driving away all us male geek editors with your “activism”. Ugh.
• If you find a community online big enough to be socially interesting it comes with this baggage.
• You go online to share it and you’re teleported past the personal and dialogic and suddenly find yourself having to defend the inclusion of this fact or this edit FOR ALL TIME.

• is this really how you want to start your day?

   
• And it gets worse, because if you lose that battle (notability, accuracy, citations, linked ideas — whatever the battle is) your contribution disappears.
• It’s easy to say that it’s all in the revision history, but in practice what Google can’t see does not exist, and Google can’t see that revision history.
• Wiki is a relentless consensus engine. That’s useful.
• But here’s the thing. You want the consensus engine, eventually. But you don’t want it at first.
• You want the consensus engine, eventually. But you don’t want it at first.
• This is a problem. It’s pretty easy to build a system that starts with consensus and then fragments into personal opinion and individual statements
• It’s harder to build something that starts fragmented and personal, but then organically becomes a shared communal space.
• “spontaneous order”.
• I saw a video of Ward Cunningham, the initial inventor of both wiki
• And what he says in this presentation is we end up being pushed to consensus in these systems because we’ve got the technology upside down
• In a traditional wiki, you have multiple people sharing a single server, and the server is the ultimate arbiter of what’s on the wiki.
• In a federated wiki, everyone has their own server which stores the records associated with them. But the meaning is made in your browser. Your browser pulls wiki records from all over the internet, and makes them look like they exist on a single server.
• If you have a background in network theory, I think you’ll see immediately at how this inversion creates a sort of evolutionary ecosystem where we reach consensus not through arguing who gets to control a page on a specific server, but by seeing which versions of a page spread to where.
• almost no one gets the massiveness of the architectural shift at first
• Ultimately, the theory is that this thing here is the “spontaneous order” engine that can move from the fragmented to the unified.
• t’s to convince you this is an hypothesis worth testing.
• So I want to sketch out what life looks like if Arthur Clarke had federated wiki in say 1950, which we’ll guess at as a time when this GPS idea came about.
• In our scenario, Clarke keeps a journal, and one day he thinks:
• how do ideas spread?
• how Clarke’s idea spreads through copies in a decentralized way that requires no central service
• And then, finally, *really* neat things happen. Clarke has recorded his ideas and linked them.
• Again, the network here does not just route the pages; the pages are expanded and extended by the nodes they touch.
• We’ve moved from the personal, to the dialogic, to the expository. We’re working on resources and ideas together rather than thumbs-up or thumbs-downing. Kind of lovely, right?
• Here we walked through class examples and personal examples, mostly demonstrating how students move through a similar progression, from the I to the You to the It
• As advocates we’re so often put in a situation where we have to defend the very idea that social media *is* an information sharing solution that we don’t often get to think about what a better solution for collaboration would look like.
• Because there are problems with the way social media works now.
• We’re stuck in an attention economy feedback loop that doesn’t allow us silent spaces to reflect on issues without news pegs, and in which many of our areas of collaboration have become toxic, or worse, a toxic bureaucracy.
• We’re stuck in an attention economy feedback loop where we react to the reactions of reactions (while fearing further reactions), and then we wonder why we’re stuck with groupthink and ideological gridlock.
• We’re bigger than this and we can envision new systems that acknowledge that bigness.

• these problems exist, and they are serious.

   

  Minority voices are squelched, flame wars abound.
• We spend hours at a time as rats hitting the Skinner-esque levers of Twitter and Tumblr, hoping for new treats — and this might be OK if we actually then built off these things, but we don’t.
• We can build systems that return to the  the vision of the forefathers of the web. The augmentation of human intellect. The facilitation of collaboration. The intertwingling of all things

98 more annotations...