Ruminate

Liz Lawley discusses a great project where she had her students collaboratively create their own final exam. A wiki seems like a natural place for this kind of activity… I’m going to try this method out this semester.

This microsculpture is pretty amazing… here’s a greatly enlarged sample:

So I understand Scoble being astounded that fewer people were interested in linking to his video documenting IBM’s breakthrough creating and sustaining 45 nanometer transistors. 45 nanometer technology is a huge step and continued evidence that Moore’s Law just will not die.

It’s hard to wrap one’s head around sizes this small. A nanometer is 1 billionth of a meter. One way to think about it: if you divided a human hair (widthwise) into 75,000 strands or so, one of those strands would be a nanometer. Or another way: a nanometer is to a meter as the diameter of a AAA battery is to the diameter of the earth.

And these chips, hundreds of which could fit on a red blood cell (30,000 on the head of a pin), can switch at a rate of 300 billion cycles per second! We live in amazing times.

The first step is admitting that I have a problem. My name is Chris and I am an infornography addict.

Here’s the key paragraph from Henry Jenkins’ post:

I respect what Shirky is doing here in questioning the numbers. I just want to push us to ask deeper questions about the criteria we use to measure the value of Second Life.

Will Jenkins get roasted by those who roasted me for promoting the exact same idea? I’m overstating things, of course, because very little roasting took place (and the little that did was generally misguided and beside the point, such as Dr. Ed’s unfortunate and presumably temporary insanity), but criticism are often met with flames when this subject comes up.

Jenkins is right that quantification of numbers is just one– and potentially a very minor– way of looking at Second Life. I’m sure Clay would agree that examination of the numbers might prove to be one of the least important ways to determine Second Life’s import. But at least it is a material, describable, verifiable way. If Second Life is something that goes beyond mere numbers akin to the Enlightenment (Jenkins said it, not me) and if the Second Life hype is going to be differentiated from similar hype cycles in the past that established little in the way of change, it is going to depend on Second Life users and believers sharing and defining explicit values and practices.

This doesn’t mean academic publishing of papers and quantitative research, though that will surely happen. It means practitioners sharing experiences with one another, not just on mailing lists supporting one another, but in the wider media. Look at other forms of social software and how they have exploded over the past few years! When communities of educators that use Second Life as a tool start forming a rich, open community– one that goes beyond Second Life as the focus of the curriculum and into the practice of education with Second Life as one tool/environment– then the values and practices will naturally be made explicit.

Do the Right Thing is a Digg-style news site focusing on corporate news… but instead of ranking popularity, stories are ranked (by readers) according to their positive or negative social impact.

The site is newly out of beta, but a couple of features I’d like to see soon: RSS feeds, a tuning of the rating mechanism to take into account the number of people who have voted. The current most negative story, for example, is what looks like a prank posting rated very negatively by one person… that shouldn’t be ranked higher than a story with dozens of people voting negatively…

Arguably not fiction, but wrt my previous post, here is a site with some social network visualizations of the New Testament.

Incidentally, are using the Many Eyes visualization site from IBM that allows users to create visualizations with their own data sets… that’s a site I’ll be coming back to in the future!

Below is a map of places found in Tolstoy’s War and Peace as visualized in Google Book Search:

I find the possibilities in this kind of mixing of new information sources– particularly fictional works– endlessly fascinating. I am reminded of a plot line in Vernor Vinge’s work: selling off “first look” rights at analyzing data as huge information resources (primarily the contents of whole libraries) are brought online and there is a goldrush of detection of new insights, errors, etc. that will only be possible at that time.

Similarly, I think social network analysis of the people/characters in books (and across series of books) could be tremendously revealing. For instance: a tag cloud of terms in two different biographies would differ depending on the author’s perspective and focus, a network visualization and analysis of the people the book mentions/covers/cites would likely be quite different. Or how about a social network analysis of the characters in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County?

I could swear I saw something about this not too long ago, but I can’t find a trace of it anywhere now.

Listening to Bryan Alexander’s discussion of social software, information fluency and historicity (along with eating a really spicy curry before going to bed) resulted in having a strange dream where Jon Udell (who I’ve only met once for about 15 seconds) and I were riding Segways around a technology museum discussing Second Life. The dream Udell sympathized with my desire for something more tangible in terms of benefits but directed me to keep in mind the totality of the social acts leading that, collectively, created presence and experience.

Which prompted me to think that there is one immediate, clear benefit to Second Life use: Read the rest of this entry »