Furl http://www.furl.net/ http://backend.userland.com/rss http://www.furl.net/member/choconancy.rss Furl archive. Thu, 22 May 2008 19:56:20 GMT http://www.furl.net/item/11742131/forward http://www.furl.net/item/11742131 Tue, 12 Sep 2006 04:37:27 GMT wikis Cooperation KNOW IT ALL Can Wikipedia conquer expertise? by STACY SCHIFF Issue of 2006-07-31 Posted 2006-07-24 On March 1st, Wikipedia, the online interactive encyclopedia, hit the million-articles mark, with an entry on Jordanhill, a railway station in suburban Glasgow. Its author, Ewan MacDonald, posted a single sentence about the station at 11 P.M., local time; over the next twenty-four hours, the entry was edited more than four hundred times, by dozens of people. (Jordanhill happens to be the “1029th busiest station in the United Kingdom”; it “no longer has a staffed ticket counter.”) The Encyclopædia Britannica, which for more than two centuries has been considered the gold standard for reference works, has only a hundred and twenty thousand entries in its most comprehensive edition. Apparently, no traditional encyclopedia has ever suspected that someone might wonder about Sudoku or about prostitution in China. Or, for that matter, about Capgras delusion (the unnerving sensation that an impostor is sitting in for a close relative), the Boston molasses disaster, the Rhinoceros Party of Canada, Bill Gates’s house, the forty-five-minute Anglo-Zanzibar War, or Islam in Iceland. Wikipedia includes fine entries on Kafka and the War of the Spanish Succession, and also a complete guide to the ships of the U.S. Navy, a definition of Philadelphia cheesesteak, a masterly page on Scrabble, a list of historical cats (celebrity cats, a cat millionaire, the first feline to circumnavigate Australia), a survey of invented expletives in fiction (“bippie,” “cakesniffer,” “furgle”), instructions for curing hiccups, and an article that describes, with schematic diagrams, how to build a stove from a discarded soda can. The how-to entries represent territory that the encyclopedia has not claimed since the eighteenth century. You could cure a toothache or make snowshoes using the original Britannica, of 1768-71. (You could also imbibe a lot of prejudice and superstition. The entry on Woman was just six words: “The female of man. See HOMO.”) If you look up “coffee preparation” on Wikipedia, you will find your way, via the entry on Espresso, to a piece on types of espresso machines, which you will want to consult before buying. There is also a page on the site dedicated to “Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia” (Stalin’s birth date, the true inventor of the safety razor). Because there are no physical limits on its size, Wikipedia can aspire to be all-inclusive. It is also perfectly configured to be current: there are detailed entries for each of the twelve finalists on this season’s “American Idol,” and the article on the “2006 Israel-Lebanon Conflict” has been edited more than four thousand times since it was created, on July 12th, six hours after Hezbollah militants ignited the hostilities by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers. Wikipedia, which was launched in 2001, is now the seventeenth-most-popular site on the Internet, generating more traffic daily than MSNBC.com and the online versions of the Times and the Wall Street Journal combined. The number of visitors has been doubling every four months; the site receives as many as fourteen thousand hits per second. Wikipedia functions as a filter for vast amounts of information online, and it could be said that Google owes the site for tidying up the neighborhood. But the search engine is amply repaying its debt: because Wikipedia pages contain so many links to other entries on the site, and are so frequently updated, they enjoy an enviably high page rank. The site has achieved this prominence largely without paid staff or revenue. It has five employees in addition to Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s thirty-nine-year-old founder, and it carries no advertising. In 2003, Wikipedia became a nonprofit organization; it meets most of its budget, of seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, with donations, the bulk of them contributions of twenty dollars or less. Wales says that he is on a mission to “distribute a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet in their own language,” and to an astonishing degree he is succeeding. Anyone with Internet access can create a Wikipedia entry or edit an existing one. The site currently exists in more than two hundred languages and has hundreds of thousands of contributors around the world. Wales is at the forefront of a revolution in knowledge gathering: he has marshalled an army of volunteers who believe that, working collaboratively, they can produce an encyclopedia that is as good as any written by experts, and with an unprecedented range. Wikipedia is an online community devoted not to last night’s party or to next season’s iPod but to a higher good. It is also no more immune to human nature than any other utopian project. Pettiness, idiocy, and vulgarity are regular features of the site. Nothing about high-minded collaboration guarantees accuracy, and open editing invites abuse. Senators and congressmen have been caught tampering with their entries; the entire House of Representatives has been banned from Wikipedia several times. (It is not subtle to change Senator Robert Byrd’s age from eighty-eight to a hundred and eighty. It is subtler to sanitize one’s voting record in order to distance oneself from an unpopular President, or to delete broken campaign promises.) Curiously, though, mob rule has not led to chaos. Wikipedia, which began as an experiment in unfettered democracy, has sprouted policies and procedures. At the same time, the site embodies our newly casual relationship to truth. When confronted with evidence of errors or bias, Wikipedians invoke a favorite excuse: look how often the mainstream media, and the traditional encyclopedia, are wrong! As defenses go, this is the epistemological equivalent of “But Johnny jumped off the bridge first.” Wikipedia, though, is only five years old. One day, it may grow up. The encyclopedic impulse dates back more than two thousand years and has rarely balked at national borders. Among the first general reference works was Emperor’s Mirror, commissioned in 220 A.D. by a Chinese emperor, for use by civil servants. The quest to catalogue all human knowledge accelerated in the eighteenth century. In the seventeen-seventies, the Germans, champions of thoroughness, began assembling a two-hundred-and-forty-two-volume masterwork. A few decades earlier, Johann Heinrich Zedler, a Leipzig bookseller, had alarmed local competitors when he solicited articles for his Universal-Lexicon. His rivals, fearing that the work would put them out of business by rendering all other books obsolete, tried unsuccessfully to sabotage the project. It took a devious Frenchman, Pierre Bayle, to conceive of an encyclopedia composed solely of errors. After the idea failed to generate much enthusiasm among potential readers, he instead compiled a “Dictionnaire Historique et Critique,” which consisted almost entirely of footnotes, many highlighting flaws of earlier scholarship. Bayle taught readers to doubt, a lesson in subversion that Diderot and d’Alembert, the authors of the Encyclopédie (1751-80), learned well. Their thirty-five-volume work preached rationalism at the expense of church and state. The more stolid Britannica was born of cross-channel rivalry and an Anglo-Saxon passion for utility. Wales’s first encyclopedia was the World Book, which his parents acquired after dinner one evening in 1969, from a door-to-door salesman. Wales—who resembles a young Billy Crystal with the neuroses neatly tucked in—recalls the enchantment of pasting in update stickers that cross-referenced older entries to the annual supplements. Wales’s mother and grandmother ran a private school in Huntsville, Alabama, which he attended from the age of three. He graduated from Auburn University with a degree in finance and began a Ph.D. in the subject, enrolling first at the University of Alabama and later at Indiana University. In 1994, he decided to take a job trading options in Chicago rather than write his dissertation. Four years later, he moved to San Diego, where he used his savings to found an Internet portal. Its audience was mostly men; pornography—videos and blogs—accounted for about a tenth of its revenues. Meanwhile, Wales was cogitating. In his view, misinformation, propaganda, and ignorance are responsible for many of the world’s ills. “I’m very much an Enlightenment kind of guy,” Wales told me. The promise of the Internet is free knowledge for everyone, he recalls thinking. How do we make that happen? As an undergraduate, he had read Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 free-market manifesto, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” which argues that a person’s knowledge is by definition partial, and that truth is established only when people pool their wisdom. Wales thought of the essay again in the nineteen-nineties, when he began reading about the open-source movement, a group of programmers who believed that software should be free and distributed in such a way that anyone could modify the code. He was particularly impressed by “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” an essay, later expanded into a book, by Eric Raymond, one of the movement’s founders. “It opened my eyes to the possibility of mass collaboration,” Wales said. The first step was a misstep. In 2000, Wales hired Larry Sanger, a graduate student in philosophy he had met on a Listserv, to help him create an online general-interest encyclopedia called Nupedia. The idea was to solicit articles from scholars, subject the articles to a seven-step review process, and post them free online. Wales himself tried to compose the entry on Robert Merton and options-pricing theory; after he had written a few sentences, he remembered why he had dropped out of graduate school. “They were going to take my essay and send it to two finance professors in the field,” he recalled. “I had been out of academia for several years. It was intimidating; it felt like homework.” After a year, Nupedia had only twenty-one articles, on such topics as atonality and Herodotus. In January, 2001, Sanger had dinner with a friend, who told him about the wiki, a simple software tool that allows for collaborative writing and editing. Sanger thought that a wiki might attract new contributors to Nupedia. (Wales says that using a wiki was his idea.) Wales agreed to try it, more or less as a lark. Under the wiki model that Sanger and Wales adopted, each entry included a history page, which preserves a record of all editing changes. They added a talk page, to allow for discussion of the editorial process—an idea Bayle would have appreciated. Sanger coined the term Wikipedia, and the site went live on January 15, 2001. Two days later, he sent an e-mail to the Nupedia mailing list—about two thousand people. “Wikipedia is up!” he wrote. “Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes.” Wales braced himself for “complete rubbish.” He figured that if he and Sanger were lucky the wiki would generate a few rough drafts for Nupedia. Within a month, Wikipedia had six hundred articles. After a year, there were twenty thousand. Wales is fond of citing a 1962 proclamation by Charles Van Doren, who later became an editor at Britannica. Van Doren believed that the traditional encyclopedia was defunct. It had grown by accretion rather than by design; it had sacrificed artful synthesis to plodding convention; it looked backward. “Because the world is radically new, the ideal encyclopedia should be radical, too,” Van Doren wrote. “It should stop being safe—in politics, in philosophy, in science.” In its seminal Western incarnation, the encyclopedia had been a dangerous book. The Encyclopédie muscled aside religious institutions and orthodoxies to install human reason at the center of the universe—and, for that muscling, briefly earned the book’s publisher a place in the Bastille. As the historian Robert Darnton pointed out, the entry in the Encyclopédie on cannibalism ends with the cross-reference “See Eucharist.” What Wales seems to have in mind, however, is less Van Doren’s call to arms than that of an earlier rabble-rouser. In the nineteen-thirties, H. G. Wells lamented that, while the world was becoming smaller and moving at increasing speed, the way information was distributed remained old-fashioned and ineffective. He prescribed a “world brain,” a collaborative, decentralized repository of knowledge that would be subject to continual revision. More radically—with “alma-matricidal impiety,” as he put it—Wells indicted academia; the university was itself medieval. “We want a Henry Ford today to modernize the distribution of knowledge, make good knowledge cheap and easy in this still very ignorant, ill-educated, ill-served English-speaking world of ours,” he wrote. Had the Internet existed in his lifetime, Wells might have beaten Wales to the punch. Wales’s most radical contribution may be not to have made information free but—in his own alma-matricidal way—to have invented a system that does not favor the Ph.D. over the well-read fifteen-year-old. “To me, the key thing is getting it right,” Wales has said of Wikipedia’s contributors. “I don’t care if they’re a high-school kid or a Harvard professor.” At the beginning, there were no formal rules, though Sanger eventually posted a set of guidelines on the site. The first was “Ignore all the rules.” Two of the others have become central tenets: articles must reflect a neutral point of view (N.P.O.V., in Wikipedia lingo), and their content must be both verifiable and previously published. Among other things, the prohibition against original research heads off a great deal of material about people’s pets. Insofar as Wikipedia has a physical existence, it is in St. Petersburg, Florida, in an executive suite that serves as the headquarters of the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of Wikipedia and its lesser-known sister projects, among them Wikisource (a library of free texts), Wikinews (a current-events site) and Wikiquote (bye-bye Bartlett’s). Wales, who is married and has a five-year-old daughter, says that St. Petersburg’s attractive housing prices lured him from California. When I visited the offices in March, the walls were bare, the furniture battered. With the addition of a dead plant, the suite could pass for a graduate-student lounge. The real work at Wikipedia takes place not in Florida but on thousands of computer screens across the world. Perhaps Wikipedia’s greatest achievement—one that Wales did not fully anticipate—was the creation of a community. Wikipedians are officially anonymous, contributing to unsigned entries under screen names. They are also predominantly male—about eighty per cent, Wales says—and compulsively social, conversing with each other not only on the talk pages attached to each entry but on Wikipedia-dedicated I.R.C. channels and on user pages, which regular contributors often create and which serve as a sort of personalized office cooler. On the page of a twenty-year-old Wikipedian named Arocoun, who lists “philosophizing” among his favorite activities, messages from other users range from the reflective (“I’d argue against your claim that humans should aim to be independent/self-reliant in all aspects of their lives . . . I don’t think true independence is a realistic ideal given all the inherent intertwinings of any society”) to the geekily flirtatious (“I’m a neurotic painter from Ohio, and I guess if you consider your views radical, then I’m a radical, too. So . . . we should be friends”). Wikipedians have evolved a distinctive vocabulary, of which “revert,” meaning “reinstate”—as in “I reverted the edit, but the user has simply rereverted it”—may be the most commonly used word. Other terms include WikiGnome (a user who keeps a low profile, fixing typos, poor grammar, and broken links) and its antithesis, WikiTroll (a user who persistently violates the site’s guidelines or otherwise engages in disruptive behavior). There are Aspergian Wikipedians (seventy-two), bipolar Wikipedians, vegetarian Wikipedians, antivegetarian Wikipedians, existential Wikipedians, pro-Luxembourg Wikipedians, and Wikipedians who don’t like to be categorized. According to a page on the site, an avid interest in Wikipedia has been known to afflict “computer programmers, academics, graduate students, game-show contestants, news junkies, the unemployed, the soon-to-be unemployed and, in general, people with multiple interests and good memories.” You may travel in more exalted circles, but this covers pretty much everyone I know. Wikipedia may be the world’s most ambitious vanity press. There are two hundred thousand registered users on the English-language site, of whom about thirty-three hundred—fewer than two per cent—are responsible for seventy per cent of the work. The site allows you to compare contributors by the number of edits they have made, by the number of articles that have been judged by community vote to be outstanding (these “featured” articles often appear on the site’s home page), and by hourly activity, in graph form. A seventeen-year-old P. G. Wodehouse fan who specializes in British peerages leads the featured-article pack, with fifty-eight entries. A twenty-four-year-old University of Toronto graduate is the site’s premier contributor. Since composing his first piece, on the Panama Canal, in 2001, he has written or edited more than seventy-two thousand articles. “Wikipediholism” and “editcountitis” are well defined on the site; both link to an article on obsessive-compulsive disorder. (There is a Britannica entry for O.C.D., but no version of it has included Felix Unger’s name in the third sentence, a comprehensive survey of “OCD in literature and film,” or a list of celebrity O.C.D. sufferers, which unites, surely for the first time in history, Florence Nightingale with Joey Ramone.) One regular on the site is a user known as Essjay, who holds a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law and has written or contributed to sixteen thousand entries. A tenured professor of religion at a private university, Essjay made his first edit in February, 2005. Initially, he contributed to articles in his field—on the penitential rite, transubstantiation, the papal tiara. Soon he was spending fourteen hours a day on the site, though he was careful to keep his online life a secret from his colleagues and friends. (To his knowledge, he has never met another Wikipedian, and he will not be attending Wikimania, the second international gathering of the encyclopedia’s contributors, which will take place in early August in Boston.) Gradually, Essjay found himself devoting less time to editing and more to correcting errors and removing obscenities from the site. In May, he twice removed a sentence from the entry on Justin Timberlake asserting that the pop star had lost his home in 2002 for failing to pay federal taxes—a statement that Essjay knew to be false. The incident ended there. Others involve ideological disagreements and escalate into intense edit wars. A number of the disputes on the English-language Wikipedia relate to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to religious issues. Almost as acrimonious are the battles waged over the entries on Macedonia, Danzig, the Armenian genocide, and Henry Ford. Ethnic feuds die hard: Was Copernicus Polish, German, or Prussian? (A nonbinding poll was conducted earlier this year to determine whether the question merited mention in the article’s lead.) Some debates may never be resolved: Was the 1812 Battle of Borodino a victory for the Russians or for the French? What is the date of Ann Coulter’s birth? Is apple pie all-American? (The answer, at least for now, is no: “Apple trees didn’t even grow in America until the Europeans brought them over,” one user railed. He was seconded by another, who added, “Apple pie is very popular in the Netherlands too. Americans did not invent or introduce it to the Netherlands. You already plagiarized Santa Claus from our Saint Nicholas. Stop it!”) Who could have guessed that “cheese” would figure among the site’s most contested entries? (The controversy entailed whether in Asia there is a cultural prohibition against eating it.) For the past nine months, Baltimore’s climate has been a subject of bitter debate. What is the average temperature in January? At first, Wales handled the fistfights himself, but he was reluctant to ban anyone from the site. As the number of users increased, so did the editing wars and the incidence of vandalism. In October, 2001, Wales appointed a small cadre of administrators, called admins, to police the site for abuse. Admins can delete articles or protect them from further changes, block users from editing, and revert text more efficiently than can ordinary users. (There are now nearly a thousand admins on the site.) In 2004, Wales formalized the 3R rule—initially it had been merely a guideline—according to which any user who reverts the same text more than three times in a twenty-four-hour period is blocked from editing for a day. The policy grew out of a series of particularly vitriolic battles, including one over the U.S. economy—it was experiencing either high growth and low unemployment or low growth and high unemployment. Wales also appointed an arbitration committee to rule on disputes. Before a case reaches the arbitration committee, it often passes through a mediation committee. Essjay is serving a second term as chair of the mediation committee. He is also an admin, a bureaucrat, and a checkuser, which means that he is one of fourteen Wikipedians authorized to trace I.P. addresses in cases of suspected abuse. He often takes his laptop to class, so that he can be available to Wikipedians while giving a quiz, and he keeps an eye on twenty I.R.C. chat channels, where users often trade gossip about abuses they have witnessed. Five robots troll the site for obvious vandalism, searching for obscenities and evidence of mass deletions, reverting text as they go. More egregious violations require human intervention. Essjay recently caught a user who, under one screen name, was replacing sentences with nonsense and deleting whole entries and, under another, correcting the abuses—all in order to boost his edit count. He was banned permanently from the site. Some users who have been caught tampering threaten revenge against the admins who apprehend them. Essjay says that he routinely receives death threats. “There are people who take Wikipedia way too seriously,” he told me. (Wikipedians have acknowledged Essjay’s labors by awarding him numerous barnstars—five-pointed stars, which the community has adopted as a symbol of praise—including several Random Acts of Kindness Barnstars and the Tireless Contributor Barnstar.) Wikipedia has become a regulatory thicket, complete with an elaborate hierarchy of users and policies about policies. Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas, two researchers at I.B.M. who have studied the site using computerized visual models called “history flows,” found that the talk pages and “meta pages”—those dealing with coördination and administration—have experienced the greatest growth. Whereas articles once made up about eighty-five per cent of the site’s content, as of last October they represented seventy per cent. As Wattenberg put it, “People are talking about governance, not working on content.” Wales is ambivalent about the rules and procedures but believes that they are necessary. “Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it’s a bunch of random people interacting,” he told me. For all its protocol, Wikipedia’s bureaucracy doesn’t necessarily favor truth. In March, 2005, William Connolley, a climate modeller at the British Antarctic Survey, in Cambridge, was briefly a victim of an edit war over the entry on global warming, to which he had contributed. After a particularly nasty confrontation with a skeptic, who had repeatedly watered down language pertaining to the greenhouse effect, the case went into arbitration. “User William M. Connolley strongly pushes his POV with systematic removal of any POV which does not match his own,” his accuser charged in a written deposition. “His views on climate science are singular and narrow.” A decision from the arbitration committee was three months in coming, after which Connolley was placed on a humiliating one-revert-a-day parole. The punishment was later revoked, and Connolley is now an admin, with two thousand pages on his watchlist—a feature that enables users to compile a list of entries and to be notified when changes are made to them. He says that Wikipedia’s entry on global warming may be the best page on the subject anywhere on the Web. Nevertheless, Wales admits that in this case the system failed. It can still seem as though the user who spends the most time on the site—or who yells the loudest—wins. Connolley believes that Wikipedia “gives no privilege to those who know what they’re talking about,” a view that is echoed by many academics and former contributors, including Larry Sanger, who argues that too many Wikipedians are fundamentally suspicious of experts and unjustly confident of their own opinions. He left Wikipedia in March, 2002, after Wales ran out of money to support the site during the dot-com bust. Sanger concluded that he had become a symbol of authority in an anti-authoritarian community. “Wikipedia has gone from a nearly perfect anarchy to an anarchy with gang rule,” he told me. (Sanger is now the director of collaborative projects at the online foundation Digital Universe, where he is helping to develop a Web-based encyclopedia, a hybrid between a wiki and a traditional reference work. He promises that it will have “the lowest error rate in history.”) Even Eric Raymond, the open-source pioneer whose work inspired Wales, argues that “ ‘disaster’ is not too strong a word” for Wikipedia. In his view, the site is “infested with moonbats.” (Think hobgoblins of little minds, varsity division.) He has found his corrections to entries on science fiction dismantled by users who evidently felt that he was trespassing on their terrain. “The more you look at what some of the Wikipedia contributors have done, the better Britannica looks,” Raymond said. He believes that the open-source model is simply inapplicable to an encyclopedia. For software, there is an objective standard: either it works or it doesn’t. There is no such test for truth. Nor has increasing surveillance of the site by admins deterred vandals, a majority of whom seem to be inserting obscenities and absurdities into Wikipedia when they should be doing their homework. Many are committing their pranks in the classroom: the abuse tends to ebb on a Friday afternoon and resume early on a Monday. Entire schools and universities have found their I.P. addresses blocked as a result. The entry on George W. Bush has been vandalized so frequently—sometimes more than twice a minute—that it is often closed to editing for days. At any given time, a couple of hundred entries are semi-protected, which means that a user must register his I.P. address and wait several days before making changes. This group recently included not only the entries on God, Galileo, and Al Gore but also those on poodles, oranges, and Frédéric Chopin. Even Wales has been caught airbrushing his Wikipedia entry—eighteen times in the past year. He is particularly sensitive about references to the porn traffic on his Web portal. “Adult content” or “glamour photography” are the terms that he prefers, though, as one user pointed out on the site, they are perhaps not the most precise way to describe lesbian strip-poker threesomes. (In January, Wales agreed to a compromise: “erotic photography.”) He is repentant about his meddling. “People shouldn’t do it, including me,” he said. “It’s in poor taste.” Wales recently established an “oversight” function, by which some admins (Essjay among them) can purge text from the system, so that even the history page bears no record of its ever having been there. Wales says that this measure is rarely used, and only in order to remove slanderous or private information, such as a telephone number. “It’s a perfectly reasonable power in any other situation, but completely antithetical to this project,” said Jason Scott, a longtime contributor to Wikipedia who has published several essays critical of the site. Is Wikipedia accurate? Last year, Nature published a survey comparing forty-two entries on scientific topics on Wikipedia with their counterparts in Encyclopædia Britannica. According to the survey, Wikipedia had four errors for every three of Britannica’s, a result that, oddly, was hailed as a triumph for the upstart. Such exercises in nitpicking are relatively meaningless, as no reference work is infallible. Britannica issued a public statement refuting the survey’s findings, and took out a half-page advertisement in the Times, which said, in part, “Britannica has never claimed to be error-free. We have a reputation not for unattainable perfection but for strong scholarship, sound judgment, and disciplined editorial review.” Later, Jorge Cauz, Britannica’s president, told me in an e-mail that if Wikipedia continued without some kind of editorial oversight it would “decline into a hulking mediocre mass of uneven, unreliable, and, many times, unreadable articles.” Wales has said that he would consider Britannica a competitor, “except that I think they will be crushed out of existence within five years.” Larry Sanger proposes a fine distinction between knowledge that is useful and knowledge that is reliable, and there is no question that Wikipedia beats every other source when it comes to breadth, efficiency, and accessibility. Yet the site’s virtues are also liabilities. Cauz scoffed at the notion of “good enough knowledge.” “I hate that,” he said, pointing out that there is no way to know which facts in an entry to trust. Or, as Robert McHenry, a veteran editor at Britannica, put it, “We can get the wrong answer to a question quicker than our fathers and mothers could find a pencil.” Part of the problem is provenance. The bulk of Wikipedia’s content originates not in the stacks but on the Web, which offers up everything from breaking news, spin, and gossip to proof that the moon landings never took place. Glaring errors jostle quiet omissions. Wales, in his public speeches, cites the Google test: “If it isn’t on Google, it doesn’t exist.” This position poses another difficulty: on Wikipedia, the present takes precedent over the past. The (generally good) entry on St. Augustine is shorter than the one on Britney Spears. The article on Nietzsche has been modified incessantly, yielding five archived talk pages. But the debate is largely over Nietzsche’s politics; taken as a whole, the entry is inferior to the essay in the current Britannica, a model of its form. (From Wikipedia: “Nietzsche also owned a copy of Philipp Mainländer’s ‘Die Philosophie der Erlösung,’ a work which, like Schopenhauer’s philosophy, expressed pessimism.”) Wikipedia remains a lumpy work in progress. The entries can read as though they had been written by a seventh grader: clarity and concision are lacking; the facts may be sturdy, but the connective tissue is either anemic or absent; and citation is hit or miss. Wattenberg and Viégas, of I.B.M., note that the vast majority of Wikipedia edits consist of deletions and additions rather than of attempts to reorder paragraphs or to shape an entry as a whole, and they believe that Wikipedia’s twenty-five-line editing window deserves some of the blame. It is difficult to craft an article in its entirety when reading it piecemeal, and, given Wikipedians’ obsession with racking up edits, simple fixes often take priority over more complex edits. Wattenberg and Viégas have also identified a “first-mover advantage”: the initial contributor to an article often sets the tone, and that person is rarely a Macaulay or a Johnson. The over-all effect is jittery, the textual equivalent of a film shot with a handheld camera. What can be said for an encyclopedia that is sometimes right, sometimes wrong, and sometimes illiterate? When I showed the Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam his entry, he was surprised to find it as good as the one in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He was flabbergasted when he learned how Wikipedia worked. “Obviously, this was the work of experts,” he said. In the nineteen-sixties, William F. Buckley, Jr., said that he would sooner “live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” On Wikipedia, he might finally have his wish. How was his page? Essentially on target, he said. All the same, Buckley added, he would prefer that those anonymous two thousand souls govern, and leave the encyclopedia writing to the experts. Over breakfast in early May, I asked Cauz for an analogy with which to compare Britannica and Wikipedia. “Wikipedia is to Britannica as ‘American Idol’ is to the Juilliard School,” he e-mailed me the next day. A few days later, Wales also chose a musical metaphor. “Wikipedia is to Britannica as rock and roll is to easy listening,” he suggested. “It may not be as smooth, but it scares the parents and is a lot smarter in the end.” He is right to emphasize the fright factor over accuracy. As was the Encyclopédie, Wikipedia is a combination of manifesto and reference work. Peer review, the mainstream media, and government agencies have landed us in a ditch. Not only are we impatient with the authorities but we are in a mood to talk back. Wikipedia offers endless opportunities for self-expression. It is the love child of reading groups and chat rooms, a second home for anyone who has written an Amazon review. This is not the first time that encyclopedia-makers have snatched control from an élite, or cast a harsh light on certitude. Jimmy Wales may or may not be the new Henry Ford, yet he has sent us tooling down the interstate, with but a squint back at the railroad. We’re on the open road now, without conductors and timetables. We’re free to chart our own course, also free to get gloriously, recklessly lost. Your truth or mine? 3 http://www.furl.net/item/10808498/forward http://www.furl.net/item/10808498 Thu, 03 Aug 2006 03:09:02 GMT Blogs and Bloggers Women in Technology Blogher Get Deeply Geeky “We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.” ~Lloyd Alexander Brought to you by: Laura Scott Miriam Verburg Nancy White Melanie Swan Preface: I don’t do complicated. I don’t do extensive. It makes me nervous and I break out in hives in that little crook where my arm bends and just…no. That said, I’ve been told – ok, warned – that this will be a complicated session. I’m itchy already. (Deep breaths) But! It’s about Gender. I feel very strongly about gender and gender identity and I’ve researched it learned about it and I think all will be well. And when I groveled to be let into Blogher because it was life or death the first thing I did was to exclaim my genuine excitement for women doing things for other women. Flippin’ fantastic. I wish I could say more but, it’s too much, and I am weak. Or, maybe I just have no idea. Session: Once again I’m graced by the presence of Miriam Verburg who is also once again, doing the Make the Audience do work thing and asking how many of the women in the room use open sourcing. Also, how many women in the room are ‘geeks’. The conversation is speckled with points of how to get women involved within tech communities. The hardest part for me right now is once again I am at a loss. I am not a geek (as we all so sadly saw yesterday) nor am I tech savvy in any sense of the word. So again, for me, it’s all about the absorption and then trying to put it here in a way for all to understand. It is once again apparent that there is a lack of female representation in the tech community. The women that are apart of that community are ridiculously smart and do know what they are talking about. It’s developing a sense of community and bringing these much sought after women so that they see that they are not alone. As cliché as it sounds, it’s the absolute truth. One of the panelists just gave a possible reason for why there are so few women in the tech world, which is because of those doing the hiring. Instead women are met with various stereotypes that hinder their progress in the tech field. The remedy? Besides getting angry and bitchy is to stick to your guns and start your own company. (can I just say that even though all of the sessions are panelist driven they all end up being audience driven, which is perhaps one of the most important and best things to see at this conference) So, what are the solutions? If you are a woman in a position and you feel that there is a glass ceiling. Get out. In my personal opinion that seems easier than it actually may be. But also to network, network, network. As it isn't just a tech question, but it's a general women in the workforce question. Some say that there is no actual glass ceiling but instead being in a situation where women need to ask for money while still keeping their feminine personality. It shouldn't be seen as uncharacteristic of a woman to ask for money nor should they be worried about doing so. (Ok, the conversation has just turned to something Utopia which is a tech thing and something about 'meta verse' (sp?) and...I am scared. I repeat: I AM NOT A GEEK. Not that that's a bad thing, but I'm just sayin') Nancy has identified two teenagers who are members of a Summer math and science academy. They are into science and technology and are adorable. But who cares that they are adorable, they're smart (a hell of a lot smarter than I at least) and guess what! In high school they still experience gender discrimination from their male classmates who question whether or not they get help with their homework because they are in the advanced science and math classes. Oh, they're also really fucking articulate. Suddenly I feel inadequate. Durrrr. Thankfully though there are males of the same age and in their summer program who support them. Ok, a 16 year old boy just said that women deserve respect in the lab and the other says that he encourages the girls in his biology class to do better. My ice cold heart just melted a bit, because that? Is very adorable. Moving on... There will be a list! A list of women in the tech field! Lists are good! Now more mention of this open source thing, which I don't get. So if say you read this and you start thinking "OMG WTF were they thinking letting this girl write"? Just know that I am apologizing to you from miles away...I also suggest the podcasts. That way you can hear what has been said instead of just reading what happened. Anyway despite the list of women, there are also goals, which are also very good. Goals that include getting women involved in a singular open source project and finding men to support women. Action: Organize, support tech learning, coordinate 'estro-swarms', notification. And for myself? Learn to use the internet. Joy. And now? We eat. 3 http://www.furl.net/item/10797931/forward http://www.furl.net/item/10797931 Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:29:40 GMT Technology Levels of the Game: The Hierarchy of Web 2.0 Applications Permalink By tim on July 17, 2006 Reading Jim Fallows' new Technology Review article about his experiment in using only Web 2.0 applications for two weeks, I think: "What an odd thing to do! It's a bit like evaluating the utility of an automobile by foregoing your bedroom and sleeping in the back seat of your car for two weeks." Fallows is insightful, and he makes some good points (more on that later), but he also reveals just how hard it is for people to wrap their heads around Web 2.0. He says "Web 2.0's most important step forward seems to be the widespread adoption of Ajax." Alas, that is a common misconception. Just because something uses Ajax and is presented on the web doesn't make it a Web 2.0 application. (Fallows does cite my What is Web 2.0? article in evaluating the first app he mentions, Dodgeball, but he doesn't apply much rigor to the other apps that he talks about. For example, he takes writely as one of his test cases, and then judges the merits of Web 2.0 by how using an online application like writely stacks up to a local application like Word. Writely is interesting, but it's hardly a canonical Web 2.0 application.) The confusion leads me to think about a hierarchy of "Web 2.0-ness": Level 3: The application could ONLY exist on the net, and draws its essential power from the network and the connections it makes possible between people or applications. These are applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. EBay, craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype, (and yes, Dodgeball) meet this test. They are fundamentally driven by shared online activity. The web itself has this character, which Google and other search engines have then leveraged. (You can search on the desktop, but without link activity, many of the techniques that make web search work so well are not available to you.) Web crawling is one of the fundamental Web 2.0 activities, and search applications like Adsense for Content also clearly have Web 2.0 at their heart. I had a conversation with Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, the other day, and he summed up his philosophy and strategy as "Don't fight the internet." In the hierarchy of web 2.0 applications, the highest level is to embrace the network, to understand what creates network effects, and then to harness them in everything you do. Level 2: The application could exist offline, but it is uniquely advantaged by being online. Flickr is a great example. You can have a local photo management application (like iPhoto) but the application gains remarkable power by leveraging an online community. In fact, the shared photo database, the online community, and the artifacts it creates (like the tag database) is central to what distinguishes Flickr from its offline counterparts. And its fuller embrace of the internet (for example, that the default state of uploaded photos is "public") is what distinguishes it from its online predecessors. Level 1: The application can and does exist successfully offline, but it gains additional features by being online. Writely is a great example. If you want to do collaborative editing, its online component is terrific, but if you want to write alone, as Fallows did, it gives you little benefit (other than availability from computers other than your own.) Level 0: The application has primarily taken hold online, but it would work just as well offline if you had all the data in a local cache. MapQuest, Yahoo! Local, and Google Maps are all in this category (but mashups like housingmaps.com are at Level 3.) To the extent that online mapping applications harness user contributions, they jump to Level 2. You'll notice that I didn't mention either Amazon in the hierarchy above. That's because I can't decide whether they belong on level 2 or 3. One can imagine an Amazon-style product catalog offline (for example, in a store), but Amazon is so persistent in harnessing online participation that they have almost managed to transcend the limits of their category. They've also built services, from Associates to S3, that make them completely a network citizen. So call them level 3, and a testament to the power of strategic effort to change the game. iTunes is another great example of an application that spans levels. Its initial market and positioning was as a desktop application with additional online features (Level 1), but as the iTunes music store becomes more and more central to its value and competitive position, iTunes moves to Level 2. To the extent that it eventually incorporates features like those in last.fm, it would eventually become an application that is so woven into the fabric of the net that it would be crippled if taken offline (i.e. Level 3). (Even now, put in a new CD when offline, and you'll find yourself moaning because the track names are missing.) Overall, I believe that there is a strong pressure for all these applications to move up the hierarchy the longer people use them and the more the network features become central to their operation. Meanwhile, there is of course another whole class (the world always resists neat categorization!): that is a desktop application such as an email or IM client that nonetheless finds all its utility on the net. For that matter, consider the humble telephone. As to the strong points of Fallows' piece, I loved his opening conceit: "Sooner or later, we all face the Dodgeball truth. This comes at the moment when you realize that one of life's possibilities -- a product, an adventure, an offer, an idea -- is really meant for people younger than you." This insight echoes one of my favorite lines from Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, "History is a wave that moves through time slightly faster than we do." (Chew on that one for a while! Lovely, succinct, and insightful. If it doesn't make sense to you, wait a few years.) I also liked this bit: "The new Web is analog, not digital. By which I mean it is not the result of a single, big, discrete innovation. Rather, it represents a continuum of new ideas, from the slightly evolutionary to the dramatically different." A lot of people struggle with the fact that Web 2.0 is not so easily defined. Fallows accepts that idea gracefully. He also noted an intriguing consequence of the long tail, namely that apps that don't want to be all things to all people can do less. "But those aspiring to use Ajax to displace desktop applications and services often employ an intriguingly "short tail" approach.... The result of this short-tailism might be a curious new "long-tail" division between online and desktop applications: the free online apps will be for ordinary users under routine circumstances, while for-pay desktop apps may become even more bloated and specialized for high-end users. And to return to the original Dodgeball principle, there will be applications suited to users in each stage of life." I also found this to be a very insightful comment: "The new Web is digital, not analog. (See point number one; discuss.) By this I mean that the collective intelligence Web 2.0 supposedly marshals is most impressive when it sends big, distinct, yes-or-no signals, and worst when it attempts to offer more nuanced judgments." He contrasts the thumbs-up/thumbs-down judgements of eBay (this seller is OK) with what he considers Pandora's failed attempt at more nuanced feedback in selecting music he might like. But he shows his own lack of nuance here. Pandora is not a Web 2.0 application! It uses algorithmic means to identify music you might like, and would work just as well offline. If he wants a Web 2.0 approach to the same problem, he should have tried last.fm. What I found most insightful in Fallows' piece was the idea that Web 2.0 is ultimately based on trust. That's a nice grace note when we think about architectures of participation. They do ultimately rely on trust. He concludes that such trust is fragile, and (to quote the Tech Review PR person who sent me the link to this story), "if broken, will leave the entire generation of new web-ers susceptible to that feeling of being too “old” for a new trend." Despite spam, phishing, flame wars, and reversion storms on Wikipedia, I disagree. Trust is always broken. But I return again and again to the wisdom of Wallace Stevens, who sees the realist, illusions shattered, nonethless returning to optimism, with "the yes of the realist spoken because he must say yes, because beneath every no lay a yes that had never been broken." The human spirit is a wonderful thing, and the fact that we can build applications that let us cooperate in new ways gives outlet to that spirit. Tags: philosophy web 20 Comments Calling Amazon a level 3 seems right to me; you can compare and contrast them with other online book sellers (bn, booksamillion, powells) who are progressivly less web 2.0 and slide farther on down the scale. Not only does Amazon capture user comments, but they also allow authors to do blogs right on thier book pages... that level of interaction seems pretty Web 2.0, and not something I've seen from other book sellers. Posted by: Robert Treat at July 17, 2006 08:37 AM I see a somewhat parallel set of levels in the history of publishing: The Level 0 age was pre-Gutenberg, where all information was produced by, published by (through hand-copying), and consumed by an intellectual elite. The Level 1 age was post-Gutenberg, where the information was still produced by an intelligensia, but it was published by geeks (printers), and over time became widely consumed by an ever-broadening populace. Because of this broader distribution of ideas, the society as a whole benefitted. The Level 2 age was the Web 1.0 world, where suddenly geeks could create and publish their own content and, if they chose to do so, publish the content of other members of the general populace. The content could be chit-chat/commentary about the content produced by the intellectuals. Publishing became something available to "common people". The Level 3 age is the Web 2.0 world, where you don't even have to be a geek to publish. Everyone with society's basic skill set can publish and indeed is invited to publish by MySpace, Flickr, Wikipedia... Amazon encourages both readers and authors to publish commentary about books sold on the site... In both cases, the levels are informed by ever greater breadth of consumption and publication of materials, with everyone doing both in the Level 3 world. The problem in this world, of course, is that indeed everything IS published and what's published into the digital domain is imperishable. Which means that idle chit-chat that once was dissipated into the summer breeze is now carved into digital stone, as it were, becoming part of the permanent public record that exists for all participants in the Level 3 world. Posted by: Kevin Farnham at July 17, 2006 10:03 AM This is really well put together, thanks. Posted by: Justin at July 17, 2006 12:40 PM Kevin -- I agree that there are some parallels regarding ease of publishing. But I think that they are overstated. It wasn't substantially easier for me to get started publishing on the web than it was to get started publishing in print. In some ways it was harder. And ask any PTA that mimeographed its newsletter in the fifties if it was really any harder to get the news out then than it is now. If anything, the basic equipment to "publish," while more widespread, is considerably more expensive. Even in the early days of the printing press, printing presses became as common (relative to population) as ISPs are today. There were local presses in every major town, both newspapers and commercial printers. To me, the real publishing hierarchy is more like this: Level 0: Information is strictly controlled. You have to get the imprimatur of the Catholic Church to get your views heard. Even the ability to read is strictly controlled, to make sure that people don't get above their station. Level 1: Literacy becomes widespread, along with the tools of publishing. Level 2: We develop means for easy copying (xeroxing, leading to electronic cut and paste) so that re-use of published material becomes easier. Level 3: Published material is actually designed for collaboration, re-use and remixing. Collective works become the norm rather than the exception. Posted by: Tim O'Reilly at July 17, 2006 12:45 PM On the subject of Ajax I've been seeing a lot of ajax usage toolkits etc. that are really bad in web terms, given that all data is held in the javascript Posted by: bryan at July 17, 2006 01:01 PM Xzilla -- I use Amazon in my talks all the time for this reason. They are one of the most interesting Web 2.0 companies. They have taken an application that isn't naturally a network effects application and turned it into one by dint of persistent effort, in Jeff Bezos' words (to me, in a different context), weaving a rope of advantage out of many small threads. It's really admirable, and should be an inspiration to companies that don't see a clear path for a single Gordian knot-style immediate solution to how to transform their company or application. Posted by: Tim O'Reilly at July 17, 2006 01:33 PM Great article and insightful comments. I'd agree with the levels in the parent article. I especially liked the publishing analogy as the comparison to the printing press accurately captures the importance of the internet on modern society. My actual comment is sort of off topic but I would like to discuss how the sheer number of WEB 2.0 sites out there, with more coming everyday, may actually be "watering down" the collaborative aspects at the very heart of WEB 2.0. Don't get me wrong. I think WEB 2.0 is great and I expect great things from it. However, with the abundance of similar WEB 2.0 sites out there, how thriving a community can any one site hope to develop? Will not a larger community help drive the quantity of collaboration and, quite possibly, the quality? Sure there are examples of sites that have robust communities (Flickr, MySpace, etc.) but there are many more "cottage" sites out there that are starved for attention. If you look at the internet from a 10,000 foot level there is a lot of collaboration happening today thanks to WEB 2.0 that wasn't happening just a few years back. However, if you zoom in to the 100 foot level you will see that for the most part this "collaboration" is diluted through many different sites. I think you would be hard pressed to find many sites that could be defined as true communities as opposed to cliques. I am reminded of that old joke that goes something like, "If you put a million monkeys in a room, give them a million typewriters to bang on, eventually together they will produce a great novel." This won't happen if you spread those million monkeys out over 100,000 rooms or sites. Not calling anyone a monkey by any means. The comments posted to this article are evidence that there are many sharp minds out there doing there thing. I am simply saying that people ought to give some thought to how better aggregate all this collaborative effort that is happening. The larger the collaborative community the more everyone in said community will benefit. I don't think simply saying that the cream will rise to the top solves the above. Sometimes cream does rise but with the abundance of WEB 2.0 sites out there I believe it is very easy for the cream to curdle. Anyway. My two cents. Again, good post. Cheers! Posted by: Tom Hynes at July 17, 2006 08:57 PM I'm in two minds how useful some of this categorisation may be. Last.fm is more Web 2.0 than Pandora, because it utilises network effects rather than a team of editors to decide on the best recommendations to make to you? All very well, but in terms of the user experience they are really very similar. The effectiveness of their recommendation systems are very much a matter of how broad your tastes are. Pandora ought to come up with a narrower range, because of the way it works, but that may be a good or bad thing to a particular user. If you're looking for music recommendations, you really don't care what's happening in the back room. Also, you say tier 0 applications like Pandora could exist offline. That would only be true if their team had stopped work and finished categorising all the available music. And that is a long way from being the case, I believe. The same would be true of Google Maps if they had stopped updating their maps and imagery, but that isn't true either, is it? Indeed the ever-evolving nature of these applications make them very different from the desktop experience, and continually more powerful, much like your tier 3 applications. So two points there, really: (a) if user experience can find no real distinction between similar level 0 and level 3 applications, is this distinction useful? (b) level 0 applications are gaining distinct benefits from being online. I'd prefer to think of a descriptive spectrum rather than a hierarchy. The extent to which network effects matter is one axis. Posted by: Ian Delaney at July 18, 2006 03:07 AM Ian - A spectrum rather a hierarchy, yes. Reality always eludes hard categorization. However, I think either you or I misunderstand Pandora. I believe that they categorize music algorithmically, which is why I said I didn't think of it as a Web 2.0 app, whereas last.fm, which uses collective intelligence, definitely is. And I at least find very different results from the two systems. To be sure, as you suggest, given that the music world is always updated, thinking of even pandora as a non-internet app is really only a thought experiment, since it is the internet that makes it possible to gather all the music. (If it weren't as easy to rip mp3s, and if we hadn't had p2p to kickstart the online music market, online music would still be in about the same state as online books are today.) But I think my point stands, that pandora wasn't the most nuanced choice from the point of view of evaluating Web 2.0. Posted by: Tim O'Reilly at July 18, 2006 08:14 PM So where does something like SETI@home fit into this then ? It isn't a web app, but it couldn't exist without the web. Is this in any sense a Web 2.0 app ? It fosters a community, and it is all about participation. Is it some kind of antecedent to Web 2.0 ? Or something completely differennt ? Does a Web 2.0 app need to be a business, or aspire to be a business, to qualify ? In the above discussion, there seems to be a shift from discussion applications to discussing businesses. Are they one and the same thing in Web 2.0 ? Posted by: David Mantripp at July 19, 2006 04:19 AM David -- I should have made this clear -- in many ways "Web" 2.0 is an unfortunate name. There are many "Web 2.0" applications, in my opinion, that have nothing to do with the web per se, or the http protocol. Seti@home is one of them. (I still remember the surprise of the P2P crowd, who thought the conference was all about file sharing, when we brought up David Anderson of seti@home for a keynote.) I used to call this whole phenomenon "the internet operating system," but then Dale Dougherty came up with the catchy name "Web 2.0" for a new conference. The name stuck, but the phenomenon I was always interested in was far broader than the web. So, yes, distributed computation, P2P apps, whether for file sharing or for other types of application (like Skype) are part of Web 2.0, often at level 3, even though they have nothing to do with the Web. If you apply the tests that I listed above, you see that they all fit. Nowhere do I say that apps need to use a particular technology. There are also cell network apps that apply web 2.0 principles, and as we get into RFID space, the same principles will apply there. What we're really talking about is understanding the dynamics of the network economy. Posted by: Tim O'Reilly at July 19, 2006 08:33 AM hello sir plz gibve me more informations Posted by: rijesh at July 19, 2006 12:11 PM Level 0: The application has primarily taken hold online, but it would work just as well offline if you had all the data in a local cache. MapQuest, Yahoo! Local, and Google Maps are all in this category (but mashups like housingmaps.com are at Level 3.) To the extent that online mapping applications harness user contributions, they jump to Level 2. I submit that the map examples would actually be much enhanced by having an offline cache. Maps sites are their most useful to me when traveling, unfortunately this is also when I'm most likely to have poor or no connectivity. Posted by: Adam Messinger at July 19, 2006 01:25 PM 3 http://www.furl.net/item/6103233/forward http://www.furl.net/item/6103233 Thu, 15 Dec 2005 04:11:41 GMT activism, global collective action Abstract In groups people can accomplish what they cannot do alone. Now new visual and social technologies are making it possible for people to make decisions and solve complex problems collectively. These technologies are enabling groups not only to create community but also to wield power and create rules to govern their own affairs. Electronic democracy theorists have either focused on the individual and the state, disregarding the collaborative nature of public life, or they remain wedded to outdated and unrealistic conceptions of deliberation. This article makes two central claims. First, technology will enable more effective forms of collective action. This is particularly so of the emerging tools for "collective visualization" which will profoundly reshape the ability of people to make decisions, own and dispose of assets, organize, protest, deliberate, dissent and resolve disputes together. From this argument derives a second, normative claim. We should explore ways to structure the law to defer political and legal decision–making downward to decentralized group–based decision–making. This argument about groups expands upon previous theories of law that recognize a center of power independent of central government: namely, the corporation. If we take seriously the potential impact of technology on collective action, we ought to think about what it means to give groups body as well as soul — to "incorporate" them. This paper rejects the anti–group arguments of Sunstein, Posner and Netanel and argues for the potential to realize legitimate self–governance at a "lower" and more democratic level. The law has a central role to play in empowering active citizens to take part in this new form of democracy. 3 http://www.furl.net/item/6102914/forward http://www.furl.net/item/6102914 Thu, 15 Dec 2005 03:26:27 GMT Communities of Practice/Tech Report Elearning Blogs&LearningCommunities Onfac Week 1 What have I learned about my learning styles this week? There are a few things that I felt I already knew about myself, and then there were lots of new details about my particular learning styles that I hadn't realized before. After going through several surveys and multiple intelligence tests and analyses, I found some interesting discrepencies or conflictions between some of the results. This is actually an important point about how we learn as humans - that there is no accurate way to pinpoint any individual's learning style as it is a dynamic process that can change over time and greatly depends on each individual's surroundings or environment. Here are my results and response to each of the tests/surveys that I took: The Kaleidoscope Inventory AUDITORY (4/12) TACTUAL (3/12) KINESTHETIC (12/12) VISUAL (10/12) Perceptual & Organizational Styles SEQUENTIAL (8/12) GLOBAL (7/12) ABSTRACT (4/12) CONCRETE (10/12) CONCRETE-SEQUENTIAL (18/24) The highest numbers that you received for Abstract/Concrete and Global/Sequential have been combined. There are four possible combinations. An equal score may result in more than one preference. Personality Styles SENSING-JUDGING (9/12) INTUITIVE-THINKING (7/12) INTUITIVE-FEELING (5/12) SENSING-PERCEIVING (10/12) My Response: I have found that I am not the greatest communicator by speaking, so I believe it is accurate that of all the sensory styles, auditory is low. I already knew that I work best under organization, so I think these results can be assumed accurate as far as me being stronger in organization skills/learning. I also scored lower in Tactual learning styles - I wasn't aware of this specific learning style, which seems to be about emotions playing the role in learning. I already considered myself an emotional being, but I may not be when it comes to learning. It's interesting that I am not very strong in this type of learning style. My highest score was in Kinesthetic Learning which relates to the outdoors, physical movement, and challenges. I think this is true, especially since I have always enjoyed playing sports and being active. My next strongest skill was Visual Learning which involves keen observation skills and critical thinking. I believe this to be also be accurate for my learning styles. When it comes to the Perceptual and Organizational Styles, I am strongest in Concrete-Sequential, which has the traits of struggling with creativity, but learning in a sequential, logical order. I also scored higher in Global Learning skills which is described as likes to see the big picture as I did in Sensing/Perceiving, which enjoy action and excitement, along with competitiveness and challenges. My lowest skill was Abstract Learning. Abstract learners prefer concepts and symbols to help them learn rather than the literal and obvious tactics. Overall, I believe these results to be accurate when it comes to describing my learning styles. As for the Personality styles, they to seem to fit the styles or methods I most easily follow, and also the ones that I am not very strong in utilizing for learning. My stronger area was Sensing, Perceiving and Judging where my lesser skills for learning were Intuitive Thinking and Feeling. V.A.R.K. VISUAL: 2 AURAL: 2 READ/WRITE: 6 KINESTHETIC: 6 "Multimodal - 50-70% of the population falls into this style of learning. Multimodals choose to match their mode to those around them. Where opposite of Multimodal types would be those people who try to not match (or annoy) those around them. An example would be asking for a written response when you know the other person prefers their usual approach of oral communication." My Response: I learned from this test that I fall into the Read/Write & Kinesthetic category as strong skills and that I am less skilled with Visual & Aural learning. The test mentions another detail where people who choose fewer than 17 options are more decisive than others that choose over 17 in the Multimodal group. I chose 16 options, but I think this shows me that I may not be a highly decisive person, but at least somewhat decisive. The most interesting thing I noticed about this test was that it contradicts The Kaleidoscope Inventory test. The V.A.R.K. portrays me as not being a visual learner where The Kaleidoscope Inventory test shows me as a strong visual learner. Multiple Intelligences Checklist Interpersonal Intelligence (7/12) Intrapersonal Intelligence (6/12) Logical - Mathematical Intelligence (12/12) Linguistic Intelligence (8/12) Bodily - Kinaesthetic Intelligence (10/12) Spatial Intelligence (10/12) Musical Intelligence (3/12) Naturalist Intelligence (6/12) My Response: After reviewing the results from the Multiple Intelligences Checklist, I quickly saw the similarities with The Kaleidoscope Inventory. Also in this test, my stronger skills were with Logical/Mathematic, Bodily/Kinesthetic, and Spatial Intelligences. My weaker skills were in Intrapersonal, Musical, and Naturalist Intelligences. I think that these results in combination with The Kaleidoscope Inventory results, can enable you to see a more clear picture of your personal learning styles. I have learned that the more you learn about your personal learning styles, the more you will be able to learn more effeciently and effectively and therefore, teach others to learn better too. I also learned that there are many different types of learning that can be used to "rate" your strength levels in one or the other learning styles, and even equal strength or weakness between some styles. These tests cannot be totally accurate since each individual's learning styles are dynamic can change over time or in different environments, but it can however, be used as tool to help increase the knowledge of your own learning styles, so that you may improve your learning methods. posted by Jenny @ 4:33 PM 3 http://www.furl.net/item/6012518/forward http://www.furl.net/item/6012518 Fri, 09 Dec 2005 22:36:55 GMT Communities of Practice/Tech Report Blogs&LearningCommunities Educational Social Overlay Networks Scott Leslie nicely raises a discussion of the relationship between educational social software tools and the current generation of Learning Management Systems (LMS). The challenge is to recognize which components of the learner’s life should be situated in their individual web space and those that should be running in the space of the formal educational institution. Privacy and document control issues provide some guidance, but there are many applications that could run in either, but likely it is wasteful and confusing to have them run on both. Unfortunately, the technology itself is not well established for linking Blog, Portfiolios and personal space to education systems ( thought there are many interesting projects in progress). Developments using syndication, agent harvesting and other semantic web applications will enhance this connectivity in the near future. At present we need to define the appropriate application space and design the functionality and interface between the individual web space and the rather structured enterprise of formal education. This postings addresses these issues and considers social software as a tool to implement this interface as an overlay network.. Educational social software can be used effectively to create a type of overlay network to enhance the more formal institutional network consisting of student support , library, tuition, registration and other institutionalized services. An overlay network is a term from computer science that describes a virtual and often semantically based indexing system that rides on top of physical network. The overlay network serves to facilitate routing, search and retrieval of information in the physical network (Doval D. & O’Mahony, 2003). Ash Maurya (2005) expands the concept and discusses social overlay networks that operate at more abstract levels and focus on enhancing social relationship and collaboration in both online and offline contexts. These social overlay networks use web based technology to not merely connect people to information (as in a search for a music file) but more specifically to connect people to people. By their nature educational social overlay networks are fluid, emergent and self organizing. A further refinement is to define educational overlay networks, as systems that serve to connect and support social interaction among students enrolled in formal education programs. The VS supports interaction and social collaboration on a number of levels. In this first instance as systems to support social and web space connections to current students. Educational overlay networks can be built upon groups of students through cohort type enrollment and learning activity systems, but their more natural context is emergence on a choice basis through individual recognition of affinity, common interest or joint purpose. This is especially attractive to those institutions that offer programming while retaining maximum student freedoms (Paulsen, 1995; Paulsen, 1993) including the capacity to self pace one’s learning and to take advantage of continuous enrollment opportunities. Context Spaces, Tags and Feeds. Maurya, 2005 argues that the most effective use of these social overlay networks is “for implicit discovery through context spaces, tags and feeds.” Context: The context space refers to opportunities that arise sponatenously as well as those planned to invite cooperation and sharing of knowledge growth opportunities. In formal education these contexts are created by the course designers or teachers and are nurtured by teacher, tutors and learners. They are also created by system architects in their design of social spaces, opportunities and support for planned and spontaneous conversation and opportunities for sharing and self disclosure. Increasing attention is being paid to the construction of these spaces in both physical and web based, to maximize learning on campuses and off. (see for example http://www.tefma.com/infoservices/papers/2005_FutureLearningEnvironments_Workshop_Mar05). Here as in many areas of convergence, we see increased interest in creating and capturing in patterns (Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein,1977) architectural features of both physical space and online space to capture the famous QWAN (Quality Without A Name). Tags The tags Maurya mentions include the formal metatagging schemes of the IEEE LOM, Dublin Core and IMS LD, but more importantly extend to folksonomie tags created by learners as they identify and categorize their learning artifacts and contributions to the emerging social learning community. Examples of social tagging systems like Flickr, Furl and Deli.ci.us illustrate that for some activities (for example sharing of photos or useful links etc.) individuals are willing to take the time to upload and categorize their contributions. Flickr currently has over 60 million photos on line of which 80% have been tagged as being available to anyone. Erick Schonfeld’s notes this emergence of a photo based overlay as one example of a larger trend towards multifaceted overlays spinning connections between thousands of individual users who find value in social connection. Schonfeld argues that “To use Flickr is to belong to the culture of participation sweeping the Web — where you write your own blog, produce your own podcast, and post your personal photos for all to see.” Feeds The feeds Maurya notes refer to are the RSS and other forms of syndication emerging from both formal (feeds from publishers, academic journals etc) and informal publication (blogs, student portals). Key to the application of feeds in formal education is the notion that the contribution is owned (and retained) not by the institution in a posting in an LMS, but by the student themselves. Certain subsets of these contributions are linked and archived in social overlay networks (say for an introductory philosophy class) to make retrieval easier by other participants in this class, but they are still fundamentally artifacts of the individual students. Such extreme distribution creates massive headaches for those charged with creating and maintaining closed spaces in educational computer rooms. Within the net world of the institution access and rights of participants are routinely reduced, and traded away for security, privacy and authenticity benefits. Outsiders are restricted from entry beyond public spaces, thus creating safe and secluded spaces for communities. Finally, the institution web space provides a sense of security and high quality backup and support services. Developments on trackback systems and structured blogging are providing glimpses of how such distributed content can be contributed and effectively merged in yet other educational overlay networks. A Graduating Class example I just wasted 45 minutes in nostalgia land looking at the names of the 68 persons who have registered on www.classmates.com from my high school graduation class. I was actually tempted to write a “ghost from the past” email or two, but didn’t. I had an opportunity to fill out a profile of myself, noting what a success I have become and how my 2.45 kids are wonderful- but didn’t. Here is another example in which it is unclear whose space my information should live in. My profile information is mine and I’ve entered it in quite enough social systems already. I wouldn’t mind providing a link from my space to Classmates space, but I don’t have time, inclination nor trust in these guys to bother filling out their profile questions- nor paying $4.00 a month for ‘Gold Access’. But it illustrates the point. My history belongs to me. I don’t mind sharing parts of it with my old school buddies. But I won’t maintain a presence on this commercial site, nor even the school space owned by my old high school. Social Software tools and Learning management Systems Open source social software tools such as Elgg and Barnraiser are designed to enhance learning through provision of blogging, groups support and ways to grow one’s social capital in very distributed contexts. Thus, they become candidates for the tools to create educational social overlay networks. These systems have some tools in common with ubiquitous LMS systems, however their capacity to provide persistence beyond the course, to give ownership of content to the learner, to support tagging, context spaces and feeds make them more likely candidates as useful educational social overlay networks. It is best not to see these tools as replacements for, but as important enhancements to LMS systems. In the following diagram I illustrate the functions of four software systems used in this graduate level distance education course offered through Athabasca University’s Centre for Distance Education. Software used in MDE663 Networked sofwatre used in MDE663 see http://me2u.athabascau.ca/_files/icon.php?id=27 As can be seen the Moodle LMS plays an important role, but so does realtime voice communication (Elluminate), social connectivity and blogging (Me2U instance of ELGG.net) and the social knowledge polling and bookmarking capacity of FURL. They each play a role in building educational social overlays that are creating the next generation of formal education webspace. Reference List Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., & Silverstein, M. (1977). A pattern language: towns, buildings, construction. York: Oxford University Press. Doval D., & O’Mahony, D. (2003). Overlay networks: A scaleable alternative for P2P. IEEE Internet Computing, 7(4), 79-82. Retireved Nov. 2005 from http://www.dynamicobjects.com/papers/w4spot.pdf Maurya, A. (2005). Social Overlay Networks. WiredJournal Blog, Retrieved Nov. 2005 from http://www.wiredjournal.com/archives/2005/09/social_overlay.html Paulsen, M. (1993). The hexagon of cooperative freedom: A distance education theory attuned to computer conferencing. DEOS, 3(2) Retrieved May 28, 2004 from http://www.nettskolen.com/forskning/21/hexagon.html Paulsen, M. (1995). Moderating Educational Computer Conferences. In Z. Berge & M. Collins (Eds.), Computer Mediated Communication and the Online Classroom. (pp. 81-90). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc. 2 Comments » 1. EdTechPost: December 2nd, 2005 @ 12:26 am Great post on “Educational Social Overlay Networks” http://terrya.edublogs.org/2005/11/28/hello-world/ The only post so far in this new edublogs.org blog (oh the marvels of Technorati, like it or not here come your readers, Terry A. ;-) . Not so much a response to my posting on the false dichotomy that… 2. tribe.net: terrya.edublogs.org: December 2nd, 2005 @ 4:51 pm Educational Social Overlay Networks Great read on social networks: http://terrya.edublogs.org/2005/11/28/hello-w… 3 http://www.furl.net/item/5989717/forward http://www.furl.net/item/5989717 Thu, 08 Dec 2005 05:21:29 GMT Blogs and Bloggers Elearning Blogs&LearningCommunities For me the holy grail of edublog software would include the following features: 1. MULTIPLE BLOGS Set up multiple blogs and users. Some blogs will be user-centric while others will be subject based (shared). Some users will be able to publish to more than one blog. 2. SOCAL NETWORKING / AGGREGATION Each user will be able to add 'buddies' or rss feeds to their user account, so that they can monitor or track other blogs in the system. So for example a teacher could track all of their students blogs or a student could track subject blogs etc. 3. MEDIA Multimedia content can be published e.g. pictures, attachments, podcasts etc. 4. TAGS Each post can be tagged and posts can be viewed by tag. 5. CHOICE Posts can be deemed public or private or only viewable by certain groups. 3 http://www.furl.net/item/5989626/forward http://www.furl.net/item/5989626 Thu, 08 Dec 2005 05:05:01 GMT backchannel 3 http://www.furl.net/item/5984942/forward http://www.furl.net/item/5984942 Wed, 07 Dec 2005 20:33:52 GMT Storytelling In 1996, patients and families experiencing a common pediatric problem were interviewed, photographed and a chart review completed. A digital storytelling template was developed: 1. patient's story, evaluation and clinical course, 2. problem-based approach to the evaluation, and 3. discussion of disease process. The media was digitized and placed onto the Internet. The digital stories and a 10-question online survey were pilot tested. Online survey responses were collected from 1999–2003. Overall use of the digital stories was measured by computer server logs and by the number of hyperlinks to the CBPS. Results Eight stories were created using this system. Over 4.5 years, 814,148 digital story pages were read by 362,351 users. Hyperlink citations from other websites to the CBPS were 108. Online survey respondents (N = 393) described the overall quality as excellent or very good (88.4%). The stores were clearly written (92%) at an appropriate level (91.4%). Respondents felt they could begin to evaluate a similar case presentation (95.4%), and would remember the case in the future (91%). Conclusions A new type of CBPS, the digital storytelling system, has been developed and evaluated which and appears to be successful in overcoming some of the limitations of earlier CBPS by featuring patient's stories in their own words, by focusing on problems rather than diseases, and by having stories that are quick for students to work through. 3 http://www.furl.net/item/5962363/forward http://www.furl.net/item/5962363 Tue, 06 Dec 2005 04:18:11 GMT Elearning E-learning 2.0 By Stephen Downes, National Research Council of Canada E-learning as we know it has been around for ten years or so. During that time, it has emerged from being a radical idea—the effectiveness of which was yet to be proven—to something that is widely regarded as mainstream. It's the core to numerous business plans and a service offered by most colleges and universities. And now, e-learning is evolving with the World Wide Web as a whole and it's changing to a degree significant enough to warrant a new name: E-learning 2.0. 3