Month: September 2006

Granted, I trained as an economist and financial journalist. Granted, I have a weird sense of humour. I still did not expect to laugh out loud while reading the Economist.

This week’s issue has a wonderful sideways look at what airline in-flight announcements might sound like, if they were truthful. I wish I could share the whole article with you (it’s only half a page) but I guess that it would not constitute Fair Use. Here’s the strangled-at-birth link, for those who are interested. [People at the Economist: want to get more print subscriptions? want to get more oh-so-profitable digital subscriptions? Then let subscribers like me link freely to the content. And see what happens.]

The in-flight announcement proceeds to tear apart a plethora of “marketed” half-truths, quarter-truths and downright lies. It takes no prisoners, scathing over issues ranging from front-versus-rear-facing seats, likelihood of survival in the event of an emergency landing on water, the value of lifejackets and rafts, the reason for banning mobile phones, issues related to CAT and DVT and air quality. I shall restrict myself to one quote on a Fair Use basis: “We are aware that this video is tedious, but it is not meant to be fun. It is meant to limit our liability in the event of lawsuits”.

Don’t take the article itself too seriously. But do take the principle seriously. It’s not about airlines or even air safety.

It’s about being truthful and spin-free.

Something similar can be created for pretty much every market sector there is, be it pharmaceuticals or automobile or even banking and finance. Even government. Even the security services. Even charities.

There are emperors walking around clothes-free right now. Zillions of them. Everyone knows they have no clothes.

Yet the pretence continues.

Why? I’m confused. I don’t like the answers I come up with.

I loved going to school.

Really loved it.

And it’s only as I’ve grown older that I’ve really come to appreciate the value of being encouraged to be curious, to question, to challenge and to try things out to see what happens.

In a strange kind of way, growing up in a hybrid Hindu family (father quite progressive, mother from very traditional roots) gave me something that proved to be a real treasure in later years. Learning to pick your fights. The curiosity was tempered by a clear understanding of authority and a consequent patience; this was, if anything, accentuated by my going to a Jesuit school. [And yes, I only learnt about the patience over time, I was anything but patient as a youth].

Remember, this was in Calcutta in the 1960s and 1970s. And that meant something else entered the fray. Passion. If I was allowed only one word to describe Calcutta as it was then, it would be passion. [Amartya Sen, in his delightful book The Argumentative Indian, describes, far better than I could, the essence of that culture and environment that I speak of. Go read the book, don’t let me spoil it.]

[An aside: Some time ago I was looking at the Wikipedia entry for Calcutta. And one of the sentences within it caught my eye. Calcutta is in the state of West Bengal, described in that entry as “the world’s longest-running democratically-elected Communist government“. Democratically elected Communists. An interesting concept. I can’t help but feel that, at least in part, the posters of my youth describe it well, proclaiming the existence of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Pro Lin Piao faction. Take that kind of fragmentation to an extreme and you have Hugh Macleod’s Global Microbrand. Deliciously different.]
Curiosity tempered by patience yet refuelled by passion. That is what my family and my teachers and my city gave to me as my inheritance, and I remain eternally grateful. And it’s probably a key reason for my continuing interest in education.
Now I’ve been out of academia for nearly thirty years, I live in a different culture, have different spiritual beliefs and work in an entirely different profession. And the longer I spend at work, the harder it is for me to understand the real distinctions between work and learning, between leadership and teaching. I know they exist, but at some level of abstraction I don’t know why.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

The kernel for the post is really a comment by Mark Berthelemy, suggesting that I delve into George Siemens. [Surprised? I read all comments and, even though it takes time, I get around to reading all the books and links and references that many of you provide. Part of the reason I blog, to learn from you. And I’m grateful.]

I had come across elearnspace before, but somewhere along the line I lost track, probably a bookmark transfer problem that went unnoticed. Given Mark’s prod, I went back and started reading George Siemens again, and went from there to looking at Learning Spaces, edited by Diana Oblinger. [Bill Barnett, if you’re reading this, do you know her?]

I’m still reading through the stuff, will be a while before I can make useful comments. But one thing struck me in my flypast.

In Chapter 7, Linking the Information Commons to Learning, Joan Lippincott makes the following observation:

• Group Spaces: Another major difference between an information commons and traditional libraries is the way they accommodate groups. Traditional libraries have focused on providing quiet space for individual study. Occasionally, a few group study rooms are available, but they are considered a peripheral feature of the library. In an information commons, much of the space is configured for use by small groups of students, reflecting students’ desire for collaborative learning and combining social interaction with work.

Reflecting students’ desire for collaborative learning and combining social interaction with work. That really made me think again about Generation M and work and learning.

So we have these students with a desire for collaborative learning and a wish to combine social interaction with work. And some places of learning have cottoned on to this, and are building learning spaces. And maybe after reading Learning Spaces, there will be more such institutions.

Then the students leave academia and come to “work”. Where they are greeted by cubicles and meeting rooms. If they’re lucky, they get to stay in an “open plan” environment, with row upon row of rabbit warren desk, individually numbered and named, cubicles in all but name. Once you plan it then it isn’t open.

If we want people to collaborate and work together, then we need spaces where they can. If people have meeting rooms then guess what, they will have meetings. And we all know how useful they are.

If we provide them with working-together-spaces then they are slightly more likely to work together, don’t you think. Slightly more likely not to send an e-mail to the person in the next virtual cubicle. Slightly more likely to dry up some of the sources that Scott Adams uses for Dilbert inspiration. [I know, I know, that would be a real shame. Still…]

I think there’s more to be investigated on all this, on how people use (and sometimes misuse, to great effect) what they’re given. But that’s for another post on another day.

I’ve now finished reading the whole essay and all the comments. Fascinating. Lanier says some very interesting things, as do his critics.

• I could regurgitate all the things said and summarise them for you, but that’s not my style.
• I could write a long impassioned response to the essay, pretending to be learned enough to join the luminaries that have already done so. But somehow that doesn’t grab me either.
• I could try rewriting Cluetrain within a single post, but that’s hard for a person whose precis at school was three times the length of the passage to be summarised :-( So I won’t do that.

What I can and will do is try and articulate why I find social software of value, both as an individual as well as when participating in a group, be it family and friends, firm, or even society…..And thereby seek to refute Lanier’s two main points: the apparent loss of valuable individualism and the risk of generating aggregated pap and then making decisions using the pap.

• As an overlay on the internet and the web, social software is first and foremost about connecting people. It allows you to connect to people you don’t know; with collaborative filtering, it allows you to connect to people with similar interests, but not necessarily similar views.
• This is very powerful, since you are able to converse with people who care about similar things; mutual admiration societies, while a risk, tend not to form, because the similarity is about the interests rather than the views held about those interests.
• Networks form as a result, networks bound by relationships between people.  The conversations between connected individuals become micromarkets, a patchwork of distributed, often overlapping, groups. People participate in these markets because there is a strong sense of community, yet with individual freedoms retained, even enhanced.
• This communal bonhomie allows a number of very powerful things to happen; people give freely of their time and of their skill, with nothing to gain but respect and recognition from their micromarket, the peers whose approval they see as valuable; people help each other, work with each other; people teach each other, learn from each other.
• All this is about individuals working together. Not the technology. What the technology does is reduce the barriers to entry, reduce disenfranchisement;  reduce the search costs and connection costs; allow the conversations to persist and be searchable and findable; provide a rich context; have low maintenance costs; where relevant, allow people to work in small groups bringing their communal, often amateur, expertise to bear on lots of small problems. Massively parallel meets EF Schumacher.
• As the people experiment with the technology, new processes emerge; many of these processes are necessarily lightweight and non-intrusive, in order to preserve the individual freedoms as well as the communal value.
• The distributed nature of all this also makes other things happen; it allows a community to respond faster to things as a result of three characteristics; small agile groups; networked non-hierarchical relationships; low barriers to entry.
• The people, the processes and the technology, taken together, are slowly forming a new culture. A culture where traditional governance models are inappropriate, where co-creation is common, where communal ownership is the norm.
• This is not just about Wikipedia or even just about the Blogosphere. Social software is about people and relationships and conversations and markets. Enfranchising people to do things they have never been able to do, some of which their forebears could do (but on much smaller scales).
• Social software is explicitly about the individual and about preserving the individual, but in the context of the groups that individual belongs to. The technology allows us to scale all this, and as a result we need to build better tools. Tools better at publishing, at searching and finding, at connecting, at aggregating, at filtering and even at visualising. Today’s tools are a good start, no more than that.
• The experimentation phase we are in has already paid great dividends, Wikipedia is a good example of that. And there will be a number of serendipitous communal finds as we continue to experiment. Finds that relate to rediscovery of communal arts and crafts, art and music, that relate to new ways of learning and teaching, that relate to new forms of creativity, new ways of being rewarded for individual and collective creativity. Finds that relate to better understanding of ourselves and our ability to look after ourselves, repair ourselves, enrich ourselves.
• We need to continue experimenting. And for that we need open minds, soft hands and a willingness to work together without seeking to polarise opinion through sensationalism.

Mea culpa.

Usually I read The Edge. As with First Monday, it is one more place on the web that I go to in order to find things that challenge me, that teach me, that stop me from seeping slowly into inertia.

But for some reason, probably sheer forgetfulness, I subscribed to First Monday from the get-go, but not to The Edge.

So it took Steven Levy and Newsweek, via an article headlined Mao’s Revenge,(for some reason the online version is headlined Poking a Stick Into the Hive Mind to alert me to Jaron Lanier‘s essay last May, on Digital Maoism. I find it hard to figure out why I didn’t see anything about it anywhere else, given the importance of the debate and the nature of the participants in that debate. So mea culpa again.
Two asides. One, I couldn’t resist linking Lanier’s name to his wikipedia entry; there is an imp in every one of us :-). And two, what I am doing is itself a departure from the Information is Power mindset of old. I am meant to keep these sources to myself and then appear wise and learned while regurgitating stuff from my secret sources. That’s what the old model was about. Hidden sources. Privileged access. Exclusions. A sham wisdom. In the blogosphere we opensource not just our ideas but also all our sources. Because we don’t need to rely on such trickeries as hidden sources.

I need time to read through all that has been discussed, by enough luminaries to fill an Ivy League faculty and more. There’s a lot of useful stuff in there, stuff I believe some of you will enjoy digging through. So dig away.

If I haven’t finished reading it, why am I breaking from my norm and just linking to the stuff? Because it’s now in the mainstream, as a result of the Newsweek coverage, and we need to act. Collectively :-) Before the mainstream accept his view as the norm. Because they will. I can see reprints being ordered now and becoming part of every enterprise pantheon on social software. Unless we respond.
I like a lot of what Lanier usually says. But this time he brings his guns to bear on all the traditional criticisms of social knowledge and citizen media: lowest common denominator; dumbing down; propaganda; hive mentalities and drone thinking; the whole shooting match. And, sadly, he agrees with the critics. Thankfully, he too has critics, and the Edge does a good job in putting their points of view across.

Please do read it if you’re at all interested in the subject. I promise to comment in detail sometime soon, for whatever it’s worth.

Let me end by saying that any medium of expression has the capacity to be subverted into a propaganda machine. The internet is not a medium of expression, it is a place. A marketplace. Of conversations. And so it has a capacity for dissent that is unrivalled.

That’s why crowds can be wise. It is in the capacity for dissent, and the free exercising of that capacity, that collective wisdom is formed.

I am intrigued by the regular convergence of comments on aspects of social software on to a single, critical topic: The role of the expert.
Whether I look at the “quality” comments, the lowest-common denominator ones, the “dumbing down” ones or for that matter the questions on the ontology of encyclopaedias, somewhere in my head they are all the same.
It’s all about the barriers we raise about being “qualified” to be an “expert”.

Imagine a world where venture capitalists refused to fund a start-up unless the founders all had university degrees. Know any large companies founded by college dropouts? :-)

Imagine a world where you couldn’t be a musician unless you’d done your time at the right academy or ecole. Know any talented musicians who had no formal training? :-)
History is littered with examples of prodigious talent without formal qualifications. Qualifications yes. But not formal ones. The world is richer as a result.

Too often “expertise” is associated with (a) formal qualifications (b) years of experience (c) the weight of being “published” and (d) various tests for competence and ability covering intelligence and emotion and cognitive ability and what-have-you.

These are all good indicators of expertise. Some are very good indicators of expertise. But they should not be considered necessary, or, for that matter, sufficient, conditions for being considered an expert.

Know any experts who turned down the Beatles? Know any experts who said that Fred Astaire couldn’t sing or dance? Know any experts who forecast a world market for maybe five computers? Know any that did not believe that a home computer was a good idea? Or that the internet was a passing fad?  :-)

There is no magic formula for talent or for expertise. But passion and motivation and perseverance and  access/enfranchisement go a long way. Every one of us is, or can be, a student for life, and a teacher for life. We all have a responsibility to ensure that the passion and motivation are allowed to be fruitful, and for that we need to ensure open access.

Ontologies can create unnecessary anchors and frames. Subjective elements creep in whenever we try and define expertise, particularly in the study of society. Too often definitions turn out to be dinosaur defences. There is a consilience taking place, a battle between the disciplines. Let’s not behave like the monarchs and priests and doctors and lawyers, and for that matter, IT professionals, of old, did.

As I said earlier, academic qualifications and experience and publishing history and test scores are all good indicators. In many cases they are very good indicators.

But they are not the only indicators. And should not be used to raise the wrong barriers.

Many years ago I used to watch Hill Street Blues regularly (I know, I’m sad that way….). So as we enter a phase where we’re all going to participate in, learn from, implement, iterate and adopt and iterate again the right governance standards for social software, I’d like to quote Sergeant Phil Esterhaus, played by the late Michael Conrad:

Hey, let’s be careful out there.