Ruminate

[tags]linklog[/tags]

[tags]linklog[/tags]

Hearing shouts and murmurs from beta testers has caused me to look seriously at what information there is about Scrybe. Yes, it looks quite interesting and yes, I really want access to try it out.

So many tools (in particular, Zotero keeps improving, but it lacks good calendar and task capabilities) get a few things right, but I can’t use all of them. Scrybe looks like it might have an inordinate number of quality characteristics…

Peter Merholz has posted an article with generous scans from the manual for the first 128K Macintosh (yes, kids, I said 128K). How quickly we forget all of the conventions and metaphor that have become second nature: scrolling, the desktop, using the mouse in various ways.

This is a blog. That fact means nothing. It is not a peer-reviewed journal, a final archive of my writing, a sponsored publication, or the product of gatekeeping and editing. That does mean something… it means that while the ideas and thoughts are often vital and the product of a long gestational period, the writing itself is not. It is essentially as it came from the keyboard: spontaneous, unproofed, unrevised, and corrected afterward only when necessary to address mistakes that grossly effect the intent. Where such changes have been made they are explicitly noted.

It would be distinctly unwise– not to mention uncharitable– to play connect-the-dots with my physical life and work and my “life of the mind,” as scanty as either might be. My attitude at work, my reaction to ideas, your grade (good or bad), the length and tone of my discussion at the coffee pot, the intensity and duration of my lovemaking, the time it took for me to return your letter or email, and the quality and quantity of my response to you in any medium are probably not tied to anything you read here… at least not in a way that you will be able to confidently assume without sharing years of psychotherapy and the bills that come with it. And even then, keep in mind the next (and last) paragraph.

Opinions and characterizations of fact here are my own and represent no one else. They do not represent the University of Alaska, my family, my friends, my children, my ex-wives, the baristas at the coffee shops where many of the longer entries were written, the irritated owners of said coffee shops who want tables to turn over, the repressed or “the man,” alien life forms, any movement (political or intestinal), the women I want and can’t have, the women I’ve had and shouldn’t have wanted, or a coherent and consistent philosophy or aesthetic. In fact, it’s quite possible that by the time you read the words here they won’t even represent me. If I contradict myself, very well then, I contradict myself. I am not Whitman, but like him I am large and my girth contain multitudes. Catching me in a contradiction is probably not the result of your steely grasp of logic and it’s almost assuredly not a product of hypocrisy. I’m a human being and my blog reflects that humanity.

Sounding the death knell for social software applications (and classes of application) is a sport for some prognosticators and bread and butter for the naysayers. Most of the time they are equally wrong. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? But this major upcoming change to the Wikipedia editing system has me tempted to join in.

Technorati reveals no links to the page on Flagged Revisions, but given that Wikipedia’s success (not to mention any number of purported failings) is generally attributed to its open editing system, implementing multiple layers of bureaucratic approvals sounds like a very big deal indeed.

After multiple readings I am beginning to think that the documentation of this change is being purposefully obfuscated. The very terminology of “surveyors” who have the right to “flag” a particular revision as “sighted” (meaning: administrators who have the right to promote a page as being correct) is a bit mystifying. But the bottom line appears to be this: there will be a new class of administrators with a rather broad power to vet pages. The mechanism of this power comes in the display: the sighted (approved) version of the page will be the one that users who have not logged in will see by default. The fact that later revisions are available is touted as a major reason why this isn’t a bad change, but being available and being obvious and utilized are very different things. A closed system is a closed system regardless of whether the system is actually locked or only apparently so.

Users who are logged in (an exceedingly small minority of users to whom this change is not really directed) will see the actual, current version of the page. This makes sense: such users are typically those who are editing Wikipedia, they will understand these changes which will be opaque to more than 99% of the Wikipedia users. Far worse and more restricting is the fact that all users will, when they edit the page, will see the current version! This will not just be disconcerting when there are newer, unapproved revisions… it will reduce and dissuade contributions from the general user population which is a significant part of the group of Wikipedia editors. Registered users contribute the greatest number of edits, but I suspect that the majority of original and significant content– as opposed to stylistic, structural and essentially clerical changes– come from the huge unregistered population. It is, after all, what wikis and Wikipedia are all about! And let’s not forget that future registered users come from this vast core of anonymous editors. You know those users, they are the ones who go on to be dedicated, enthusiastic Wikipedians.

Is corporatization an inevitable attribute of long-term, sustained success and growth? More importantly, are all the familiar power structures that have been partially subverted (and re-created in different forms) bound to come back with enough time and popularity? I understand the motivation behind this change, but it seems like a poor– and potentially tragic– implementation. Is this an example of the kind of mediocrity by consensus that some of the negative voices claim? And will this new, officially licensed group do what all special groups of this type tend to do and, consciously or not, assume the role of power-seeker and empire builder?

I sit at the coffee shop table writing in one of my myriad paper notebooks, at a table well away from the power outlets (I’ve learned that if I sit too near an outlet it isn’t too long before my space is being eyed hungrily by someone wielding a laptop, all of whom have learned– as I have on those rare occasions that I fire my own up– to always plug in when possible same way it is wise to always fill your water containers when trekking through the desert, into the Appalachias, or around and around the shopping mall).

At one of the window tables with power and a view (the owner has literally screwed the cord powering the open/closed sign to one of the outlets using the kind of one-way screws usually seen only in bathroom stalls and prison visiting areas) a girl has nested with her canary yellow notebook computer, a stack of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs at her side. A friend joins her and she talks about the mixes she is making for friends and family she has recently left to come to school here in the wild north. I have my crazy earbuds in with my ridiculously capacious digital music player’s sound turned off, the highest-tech way of enabling old-fashioned eavesdropping I am capable of.
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Doug over at Borderland is delving into some very interesting issues and ideas that cluster around the concept of emergence. If there’s any theme/meme that is more central to so many ostensibly disparate conversations than that of “emergence” I’ve yet to see it.

When it comes to education, it is clear that many volumes discussing emergence have been written, and many more will be. It’s no surprise since matters of authority and freedom are central to the concept of teaching and learning, to the point that those two pairs are often implicitly and somewhat paradoxically linked: learning represents freedom while teaching represents authority.

I was amused by the first (what I characterize as) conservative response to Doug’s post, which hypothetically posited the “hippie facilitator” vs the “educator with a mission.” It’s no surprise that talking about “give and take” is represented by this person in the question “Did you get your way with your sixth grade teacher?”

My own response was relatively trivial– as midday comments when I am at work tend to be– but necessarily so. I don’t believe there is a single answer to the dilemma, only a series of answers that have to be worked out in practice and in tune with the given teaching situation. It’s strange, though perhaps it shouldn’t be, that the greatest freedom is attained through understanding of restraint, just as the greatest art is that which breaks the rules. But that isn’t the only thing art does, just as freedom is not exercised merely through observation of boundaries. In this sense, conservative commentator #1 is not just on the Right path, but– perhaps incidentally– on the right one as well.

I will be following these discussions attentively. Emergence as a concept is something I am most familiar with in techno-cultural terms… I am particularly fascinated by how it reflects (and reflects on) technologically mediated communities and knowledge-bearing networks, which of course is all tied to my continued feeble attempts to keep adding bits to my own theories of everything.

I should point out that Stephen Downes’ response morphed into an entry in his unfailingly interesting Half an Hour blog. I will note that while I admire his poetic closing, looking at the sky rather than the ground can be a sign of confidence and freedom, but it is also the domain of the sleepwalker and the one who follows easy, well-known paths. That’s the problem with the necessarily symbiotic relationship between the concepts of freedom and authority, space and boundaries, self and other– they work together like one of those visual illusions that continuously flips from one picture to another in the inverse. It’s the very heart of the postmodern condition and the post-postmodern derivative and the endless string of baubles that issue therefrom.

[tags]linklog[/tags]

Google Earth has always been interesting, but now that it includes sky views, constellation and planet info, and Hubble telescope imagery it is tapping directly into one of my primal obsessions: the stars.

As Flaubert put it– and I’m sure the Google developers had this in mind:

“Language is like a crack’d kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.”

(via Christen)