Summary: The number of ways to transmit a motivating vision knows is limited primarily by one's communicative imagination and ingenuity. We know the effective vision by it's effects. It frames and impels specific learning. An effective vision is not limited by the knowledge-making venue; a good vision can work in instructivist, deuterlearning and independent or collaborative research environments.

All of this I said in a recent entry. In this entry I would like to share a specific vision-making classroom activity, one that has turned the heads of 20 year old sophisticates and superintendents with 20 years of experience.

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Here are the clients of the simulation activity:

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Part of the visioning is the creation of an imaginable reality, as you can see in this case, a group of people working together. A teacher and 6 students. The idea of the picture is to create an imagining, a vessel for memories and analogies to real people rather than "words" and "phrases". These imagined people will draw commitments, concerns, compassion and hope in a way that "individualizing" "personalizing" "maximizing potential", alone, cannot.

Impact on thought comes through a) the acceptance of the assumptions about how things work and the b) consequent psychological transitions which occur when the simulation, with an accepted set of premises, impacts the simulation students as it does. (Class members will generally agree that the 6 member class more-or-less represents the range of skill/character variation within a typical class.)

The following sets up the exercise (which I've typically done in a 1-1.5 hr period) The Ms Fineteach Simulation Experience

(these materials are supplements for the accommodative instruction class discussion)

The purpose of this simulation is to examine curricular and instructional ideas as they interact with each other and as they influence real life situations.

The following are the guiding concepts of this particular simulation:

   Rule 1: Kids learn things in sequence. Placing them above or below their readiness level will result in no learning.

   Rule 2: Lessons have content aims. If the content aim is within three objectives, up or down, from a studentÕs readiness level, s/he will learn at her/his learning rate (LR). Otherwise s/he will not learn at all. Example: If Howard Hughes is ready for, i.e., has mastered prerequisite skills/ concepts/etc for, objective 27, he will learn at his learning rate. If he learns at a rate of 6 objectives per week (LR=6), he will do that (even if the teacher isn't exposing material that quickly). If he learns at a rate of 2 objectives per week (LR=2), he will learn that many objectives this week, even if the teacher has presented more material than that.

   Rule 3: Students will give teachers a two week honeymoon... with only minor-too all intents and purposes, negligible --misbehavior ... for two weeks at the beginning of the school year. This means that what would, under other circumstances, set off misbehavior will not do so during the honeymoon. Good impact of instruction will, however, take place.

   Rule 4: For Òoff-taskÓ read 50% of it as quietly off-task (e.g., staring out the window... reading a comic book hidden in the text book, etc.) and read the other 50% as a ÒtroublesomeÓ [disruptive] kind of off-task.

   Rule 5: If misbehavior of the ÒtroublesomeÓ variety is between 25% and 50% the teacher is decidedly grumpy; i.e., s/he is less positive, takes more convincing to participate in building planning and development activities [which, in the long-term, makes or breaks a school; change is constant...if teachers don't participate in the structuring of how change impacts their school... then laws are imposed on them... they resent... and feel out of control and unimportant and their cooperation level goes down even further, and so on].

Rule 6: Ms Fineteach aims her reading program so that it covers 3 objectives per week. She starts the present semester and this unit on objective 30. Her method is large-group-oriented: There is an explanation of the activity followed by the activity. There are roughly 6 different and worthwhile multisensory activities which are set up for each objective. She plans for the group to complete the [18] activities having to do with three reading objectives each week. By the end of our 8 week simulation she will have exposed each student to 24 objectives [and 144 activities].

 Rule 7: If the average of all students' troublesome behavior averages greater than 50% teacher begins to be decidedly bitter... i.e., waaaay beyond grumpy. Problems are projected onto others. Uncooperative and hostile toward a problem solving orientation. His/her lessons arenÕt as effective. Coverage is reduced from three to 2 objectives per week -which will alter teacher impact on the students who are at the appropriate learning level.

Rule 8a: Impact of nonlearning. With the exception of the honeymoon, when a student does not learn anything during a given week, her/his OT rate (see below) will double in the following week.

Rule 8b: Impact of learning. Any week in which at least one objective is learned will result in a studentÕs cutting her/his OT rate in half during the following week.

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A full set up of the experience with worksheet and value/concept probes is provided on an in-class worksheet( which is accessible via this link).

Summary: After I blogged critically on tags recently, I found and read a wowser summary treatise from Clay Shirky. Then I happen upon Ming the Mechanic (Flemming Funch) singing the praises of Clays article. I offer my own excerpts and emboldening below. The article is well worth the reading.

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In short, Clay has hope and reason for it. He believes that the mechanisms are developing so that we will, in a not-so-distant future, be able to use the web as a giant reference system, even while each of us has singular purposes and a distinctly individual philosophy of life.

Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags: "Great Minds Don't Think Alike #

Tags are simply labels for URLs, selected to help the user in later retrieval of those URLs. Tags have the additional effect of grouping related URLs together. There is no fixed set of categories or officially approved choices. You can use words, acronyms, numbers, whatever makes sense to you, without regard for anyone else's needs, interests, or requirements.

The addition of a few simple labels hardly seems so momentous, but the surprise here, as so often with the Web, is the surprise of simplicity. Tags are important mainly for what they leave out. By forgoing formal classification, tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost.

[…]

With those changes afoot, here are some of the things that I think are coming, as advantages of tagging systems:

Market Logic - As we get used to the lack of physical constraints, as we internalize the fact that there is no shelf and there is no disk, we're moving towards market logic, where you deal with individual motivation, but group value.

As Schachter says of del.icio.us, 'Each individual categorization scheme is worth less than a professional categorization scheme. But there are many, many more of them.' If you find a way to make it valuable to individuals to tag their stuff, you'll generate a lot more data about any given object than if you pay a professional to tag it once and only once. And if you can find any way to create value from combining myriad amateur classifications over time, they will come to be more valuable than professional categorization schemes, particularly with regards to robustness and cost of creation.

The other essential value of market logic is that individual differences don't have to be homogenized. Look for the word 'queer' in almost any top-level categorization. You will not find it, even though, as an organizing principle for a large group of people, that word matters enormously. Users don't get to participate those kind of discussions around traditional categorization schemes, but with tagging, anyone is free to use the words he or she thinks are appropriate, without having to agree with anyone else about how something 'should' be tagged. Market logic allows many distinct points of view to co-exist, because it allows individuals to preserve their point of view, even in the face of general disagreement.

User and Time are Core Attributes - This is absolutely essential. The attitude of the Yahoo ontologist and her staff was -- 'We are Yahoo We do not have biases. This is just how the world is. The world is organized into a dozen categories.' You don't know who those people were, where they came from, what their background was, what their political biases might be.

Here, because you can derive 'this is who this link is was tagged by' and 'this is when it was tagged, you can start to do inclusion and exclusion around people and time, not just tags. You can start to do grouping. You can start to do decay. 'Roll up tags from just this group of users, I'd like to see what they are talking about' or 'Give me all tags with this signature, but anything that's more than a week old or a year old.'

This is group tagging -- not the entire population, and not just me. It's like Unix permissions -- right now we've got tags for user and world, and this is the base on which we will be inventing group tags. We're going to start to be able to subset our categorization schemes. Instead of having massive categorizations and then specialty categorization, we're going to have a spectrum between them, based on the size and make-up of various tagging groups.

Signal Loss from Expression - The signal loss in traditional categorization schemes comes from compressing things into a restricted number of categories. With tagging, when there is signal loss, it comes from people not having any commonality in talking about things. The loss is from the multiplicity of points of view, rather than from compression around a single point of view. But in a world where enough points of view are likely to provide some commonality, the aggregate signal loss falls with scale in tagging systems, while it grows with scale in systems with single points of view.

The solution to this sort of signal loss is growth. Well-managed, well-groomed organizational schemes get worse with scale, both because the costs of supporting such schemes at large volumes are prohibitive, and, as I noted earlier, scaling over time is also a serious problem. Tagging, by contrast, gets better with scale. With a multiplicity of points of view the question isn't 'Is everyone tagging any given link 'correctly'', but rather 'Is anyone tagging it the way I do?' As long as at least one other person tags something they way you would, you'll find it -- using a thesaurus to force everyone's tags into tighter synchrony would actually worsen the noise you'll get with your signal. If there is no shelf, then even imagining that there is one right way to organize things is an error.

The Filtering is Done Post Hoc - There's an analogy here with every journalist who has ever looked at the Web and said 'Well, it needs an editor.' The Web has an editor, it's everybody. In a world where publishing is expensive, the act of publishing is also a statement of quality -- the filter comes before the publication. In a world where publishing is cheap, putting something out there says nothing about its quality. It's what happens after it gets published that matters. If people don't point to it, other people won't read it. But the idea that the filtering is after the publishing is incredibly foreign to journalists.

Similarly, the idea that the categorization is done after things are tagged is incredibly foreign to cataloguers. Much of the expense of existing catalogue systems is in trying to prevent one-off categories. With tagging, what you say is 'As long as a lot of people are tagging any given link, the rare tags can be used or ignored, as the user likes. We won't even have to expend the cost to prevent people from using them. We'll just help other users ignore them if they want to.'

Again, scale comes to the rescue of the system in a way that would simply break traditional cataloging schemes. The existence of an odd or unusual tag is a problem if it's the only way a given link has been tagged, or if there is no way for a user to avoid that tag. Once a link has been tagged more than once, though, users can view or ignore the odd tags as it suits them, and the decision about which tags to use comes after the links have been tagged, not before.

Merged from URLs, Not Categories - You don't merge tagging schemes at the category level and then see what the contents are. As with the 'merging ISBNs' idea, you merge individual contents, because we now have URLs as unique handles. You merge from the URLs, and then try and derive something about the categorization from there. This allows for partial, incomplete, or probabilistic merges that are better fits to uncertain environments -- such as the real world -- than rigid classification schemes.

Merges are Probabilistic, not Binary - Merges create partial overlap between tags, rather than defining tags as synonyms. Instead of saying that any given tag 'is' or 'is not' the same as another tag, del.icio.us is able to recommend related tags by saying 'A lot of people who tagged this 'Mac' also tagged it 'OSX'.' We move from a binary choice between saying two tags are the same or different to the Venn diagram option of 'kind of is/somewhat is/sort of is/overlaps to this degree'. That is a really profound change.

[…]

[After looking at user tagging patterns we can say], of particular URLs, that the users tagging this URL either did or did not center around a certain core tags, with this degree of certainty, and, thanks to the time stamps, we can even start to understand how the distribution of a URLs tags changes over time. It was 5 years between the spread of the link and Google's figuring out how to use whole collections of links to create additional value. We're early in the use of tags, so we don't yet have large, long-lived data sets to look at, but they are being built up quickly, and we're just figuring out how to extract novel value from whole collections of tags.

Organization Goes Organic #

We are moving away from binary categorization -- books either are or are not entertainment -- and into this probabilistic world, where N% of users think books are entertainment. It may well be that within Yahoo, there was a big debate about whether or not books are entertainment. But they either had no way of reflecting that debate or they decided not to expose it to the users. What instead happened was it became an all-or-nothing categorization, 'This is entertainment, this is not entertainment.' We're moving away from that sort of absolute declaration, and towards being able to roll up this kind of value by observing how people handle it in practice.

It comes down ultimately to a question of philosophy. Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world? If you believe the world makes sense, then anyone who tries to make sense of the world differently than you is presenting you with a situation that needs to be reconciled formally, because if you get it wrong, you're getting it wrong about the real world.

If, on the other hand, you believe that we make sense of the world, if we are, from a bunch of different points of view, applying some kind of sense to the world, then you don't privilege one top level of sense-making over the other. What you do instead is you try to find ways that the individual sense-making can roll up to something which is of value in aggregate, but you do it without an ontological goal. You do it without a goal of explicitly getting to or even closely matching some theoretically perfect view of the world.

Critically, the semantics here are in the users, not in the system. This is not a way to get computers to understand things. When del.icio.us is recommending tags to me, the system is not saying, 'I know that OSX is an operating system. Therefore, I can use predicate logic to come up with recommendations -- users run software, software runs on operating systems, OSX is a type of operating system -- and then say 'Here Mr. User, you may like these links.''

What it's doing instead is a lot simpler: 'A lot of users tagging things foobar are also tagging them frobnitz. I'll tell the user foobar and frobnitz are related.' It's up to the user to decide whether or not that recommendation is useful -- del.icio.us has no idea what the tags mean. The tag overlap is in the system, but the tag semantics are in the users. This is not a way to inject linguistic meaning into the machine.

It's all dependent on human context. This is what we're starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don't recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we're dealing with a significant break -- by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we're going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.