Sunday, April 29, 2007

Team Knowledge Development with Experts (1) Summary: This extension of my group knowledge building model isn't so much one of structure as of membership. It occurred to me that with the support of an "expertise exchange" either a classroom or professional knowledge-making group could extend it's efforts and effectiveness. [This entry was originally drafted on March 22 ... but somehow was left in the draft stack. Here it is --- a bit later than I planned.] My point is that most groups will run into a "wall" at some point or another. That is, they will soon find that, even between them, they don't have the answers to some of their important and central questions. Nor, they find, do they have resources that quickly provide those answers. Sometimes just waiting out the impasse may help. Perhaps a new problem solving technique will get them there. There are undoubtedly problem solving algorithms that could be adapted to the online group. But, even then, the collective knowledge base and problem solving expertise may not be enough. Does the group disband or does it look for an expert … someone who will volunteer or who will, for pay, get them through the wall? To make this situation more imaginable let's first start with a within-class learning group. It could be online or it could be face to face. The group is working within one subject and with problems that are within the reach of the expertise of the teacher. Teacher sets up a problem series and the groups independently tackle the problems [using within class materials and those they can find in the school and class library as well as what they can find online. Often, early in their skill development, occasionally when the group has become more sophisticated at solving posed problems, the group will hit a wall. For the wall we have the teacher. The teacher, who has picked the problems that he/she can solve or has solved, steps in to offer the timely and useful hint … just, barely, enough to get the group over its problem-solving hurdle. The group solves that problem and learns content and problem solving skills in the process. As the class progresses more and more complex problems are solvable by the group, partly because of advances in content expertise and partly because of its growth in problem-solving sophistication. Take a look at my original model, below. Now imagine that this class is online. The learning environment is, for the most part, Moodle, say, or Blackboard. In the Illustration we may be midway in the group problem solving experience; that is, the group decided at an earlier time, last week, as an example, to partition the original, BIG, problem into S1, S2, S3 ... and S5 … smaller problems. The teacher stands either as the coordinator (RC) or is paired with the coordinator -- when it's becoming obvious that whoever has rotated into coordinator position is "stuck", and it is obvious that the other members (R1-R5) aren't able to help. This too seems to be a "doable" approach to within-class problem-solving-based instruction. In "real" life, the group may not have access to the teacher who happens to have problem solving skills appropriate to their problem. From the perspective of a spontaneously organized problem-solving group ... the classroom is "rigged". After all, in real life the problems haven't yet been solved. The group has organized in the hopes of surmounting a problem that they aren't sure can be solved. Yet, determination, frustration and solidarity, perhaps, have them joining together to try anyway. . Now another, big jump … to non-structured learning situations in which the group has not been organized around a class and acquiring competence in some school-ish way but is, instead a) self-organized and b) motivated by an issue, each member having some reason to be invested in addressing, talking about, learning about, and/or resolving that issue. Picture the situation in which a group of people have locally self-organized around this issue. Each person is computer-comfortable and in communication with the others. Between them they have either partitioned the problem into subproblems -- or have each tried to tackle the problem separately. Each has kept her/his own weblog of work to date. And, using GoogleGroups, they have discussed and attempted resolution without, as far as they can see, any workable synthesis that "solves their problem". Their assigned leader has reviewed their steps to date and all agree that they DO still have the problem/issue but DON'T have a workable solution. Their individual weblogs (W1-W5) as well as their joint group weblog -- GW in the picture above -- reflects their lack of satisfactory closure. They're stuck!! In the class the teacher would come at the sign of a waving hand in the air or in response to an email asking for help. In real life, the part that isn't in a classroom, who or what fills the role of the teacher? Perhaps a content expert. Better yet, a content expert who can help the group "discover" the answer [Discovered answers can often sink in deeper and hold on longer]. Given the reality of "need and expert" the group needs some means to get the volunteer or paid services of an expert who will provide enough expertise to get them over this hump... and to be available for the next one. 7:25:29 PM    Comments []

	Sunday, February 26, 2006

Connected Learning: More Completely via Siemen's In Depth Multimedia Presentation Summary: A multimedia and in depth learning ecology lesson is available. Slides and Audio. Whether you are after content learning or metalearning, George Siemens offers understanding and advice on how you creates a learning ecology -- and supports the subsequent evolution of quality . His ideas will apply online or off. PS. You can navigate in nonlinear fashion --attending to voice, or slides or graphics, as you like. His graphic above (slide 19 in his audio and video sequence), captures important segments of the depth complexity of a learning ecology. PPS. Nota bene. This delivery demonstrates what can be done with powerpoint. Further, because he has used "Articulate" - a Windows-friendly powerpoint-augmenting software -- you get more features and don't have to worry about downloading, compressing or decompressing. :o] [George's Material came to me via Will Richardson's Weblogg-Ed ] 5:57:43 PM    Comments []

	Friday, June 10, 2005

Qualitative Research Software Summary: In searching for open source qualitative research software I found TAMS (Text Analysis Markup System) and TAMS AnalyzerTAMS Analyzer 3.0 for the Mac. TAMS Analyzer uses Graphviz in order to map qualitative findings. Graphviz converts text (text edit, nisus, bbedit, etc.) into graphs. The flexibility and utility of Graphviz resulted in a Big Mac design award. Mathew Weinstein of Kent U is author. His summary remarks appear immediately below. TAMS stands for Text Analysis Markup System. It is a convention for identifying themes in texts (web pages, interviews, field notes). It was designed for use in ethnographic and discourse research. TAMS Analyzer is a program that works with TAMS to let you assign ethnographic codes to passages of a text just by selecting the relevant text and double clicking the name of the code on a list. It then allows you to extract, analyze, and save coded information. TAMS Analyzer is released under GPL. The Macintosh version of the program also includes full support for transcription (back space, insert time code, jump to time code, etc.) when working with data on sound files. I would really like to know if anyone is finding any of this software useful. Thanks: mweinste@kent.edu. I'll add you to the mailing list! ------ Key TAMS Analyzer 3.0 Features: Multi-user support using MySQL as a server Select near with export Improved document management for portability Window zooming Code creation and code set creation done straight on workbench Code set grouping of results Code set creation through marking records Many interface improvements Key TAMS Analyzer 2.5 Features: Multimedia support XML file formats Hot code sets Ability to set comments for both ranges of text and individual tags Recoding possible even if files are not open Updated the regex engine; improved regex search algorithm Flexible results export Key TAMS Analyzer 2.0 Features: Project based design International character support (partial) Through tweedling preferences, projects can be set up to be moved to new machines Searches are now possible even if files are not open Updated the regex engine Escape characters now usable in non regex searches Metatags introduced to empty (or not empty) universal code values at EOF Metatags introduced to control how repeat values are calculated for coded sections that cross {!end} boundaries Key TAMS Analyzer 1.0 Features: Supports multiple coders. Can search information for complex combinations of codes and coders Codes can be nested or overlapped Supports saving and restoring multiple ethnographic projects Practically unlimited numbers of hierarchical codes Easy double click coding Codes can be offset from the text through color Turn frequently used codes or sections of text into one click buttons Search for coded text across documents Export results of searches to database formats Coding frequency and coding co-occurance reports Interactive re-coding from results windows Flexible output: attach additional information to particular passages and to passages within a section of the document Documentation and Screenshots are available here If I were the gasping type I would do so when seeing the analysis features that are available and comparing them (textual and graphical) to those available using Filemaker and Word back then. Did I mention free? Complex knowledgemaking is free for anyone with access to a library Mac and a 1 gig memory stick. I was the data and online guy for a project conducted 17 years ago. All members of the team had Word software and could send data via a modem. Comparing the steps of work then (I spent my sabbatical at it -- all work done on an 87 Mac, and early Mac versions of Filemaker and Word) from to the group work done 17 years ago for our Qual study of the Education program of a small Philadelphia University. [Technorati research knowledge-making software sourceforge] 2:19:04 PM    Comments []

Enabling Knowledge-Making in Personal, Instructional and On-The-Job Contexts Summary: I would like to see some explicit discussion amongst research-oriented and instruction-oriented "personal web publishing" theorists and practitioners. The topic: knowledge development strategies for individuals and groups. To jump the gun a bit: In order to accelerate an individual's learning provide, and train to use, two pieces of software, in addition to general web access software: a weblog and a content management system like Omnioutliner Pro. (Assuming s/he is already proficient with general productivity and web access software). Once individual already has above skills, fold in use of wiki software in a group learning format. (The group learning format can be in a "face-to-face plus online", aka "hybrid", setting (e.g., coworkers at same site who also work and communicate on line) or it can be done purely online. In either case, this step also requires skill development in the social arena--accepting and generating praise, accepting and generating constructive criticisms, listening and feedback skill, generally. Also involved: extemporaneous extrapolation and explaining "on the fly" (The extrapolater will not have had chance to practice saying this "new-to-her" idea.) It occurs to me, as it has to numerous others (see others in links section... follow their link trails for a good starter set of thinkers), that the same relationship between inputs, processes and outputs can be variously labelled weblogging, journal writing, learning, research, 'my job', etc. depending on the context. Whatever the context, the inputs, processes and outputs remain the same and effective knowledge development and organization strategies remain the same. I believe that collaborative research & development (as supported by weblog & wiki -see below) is prepared for by training . The training would be not only in subject matter but in "learning to learn"** via the acceleration enabled by personal web publishing. For your inspection, a summary of two writings: first work done by Seb Fiedler and Priya Sharma on training to learn via the use of personal webpublishing tools and the second a summary of my entry concerning the conduct of team research also using personal webpublishing tools. ----------- What are personal webpublishing tools? Examples are group and individual weblogs and wiki's. Software details vary slightly between the two projects; the primary difference between the two is that one focuses on the generic process with secondary attention to subject matter (the topics are chosen individually but are within a discipline). In the research process suggested below the topics are distinct subpieces of a general research topic. A general problem has been partitioned into researchable parts and handed to researchers who are knowledgeable in the general area and in the use of the personal webpublishing approach to learning/research acceleration. See what you think. Seb Fiedler's Personal WebPublishing as a Reflective Conversational Tool for Self-Organized Learning (for BlogTalk1 11/03). At the time of publication he and Priya Sharma were together running a special topics class which were aimed at enhancing self-managed learning projects at Pennsylvania State University. Because there was the opportunity/requirement for face-to-face interactions with teacher and among students--the authors have been classified this as a hybrid learning environment. Project Notes (please see illustration in final section of paper (link above is a .pdf of that paper)). Project Roles Learning Environment Designer: Sets up of the technological architecture. (Used Userland's Frontier/Manila package: "The backbone of our conversational learning environment is a cluster of independent sites that are visually and functionally interlinked. A course log functions as the publishing space for the Learning Coach and the Learning Environment Manager. … Project owners can comment on items that are published there and open up independent discussion topics if they feel the need. … The project logs offer a similar set up like the course log. Project owners can create and publish log items, story pages, pictures and files (e.g., .pdfs). Initially they can only edit two additional interface elements [ useful links and an about page in which scope, intention etc. of project is presented] Learning Environment Manager: Monitors the ongoing use of the Webpublishing spaces, comments on technical features and procedures, assists participants when there are questions or problems, alters the system interface when the need arises, works out bugs and technical problems when and if they occur. Learning Coach: the following are the actions commonly taken by the learning coach: negotiates needs and purposes, helps to define a manageable scope for project, facilitates conversational exchanges among the participants, introduces and suggests resources, comments on the task-focused activities and negotiates criteria for evaluation, coaches and counsels as needed, creates opportunities for face-to-face meetings, augments, highlights, models and fees back good practice scaffolds (breaks final skill set into steps as needed) by providing mini- interventions and assignments to trigger inner and outer conversations. Learning Project Owners: "spend most of their time working on their particular learning projects, documenting their meaning making process through the externalization of thoughts, observations and questions, chunks of newly constructed meanings, reflections, and so forth. In addition they provide feedback and commentary to each other through face-to-face encounters and their personal Webpublishing spaces." ------ My Group Knowledge-Making Paper (full reference here) (illustration and process description): Most research group endeavors have a life cycle--preceding from formation and ending with either a mature knowledge product or a partial version of the planned-for knowledge product, (or, in the extreme worst case, nothing that was intended nor even any unintended side product that has value). The within-group processes I describe below are aimed somewhere in the middle of the life of the research group. At the base of the diagram you will see 5 R-S pairs. Those represent 5 researcher pairings with a research(knowledge-making) "situation". Each has researcher's assignment has two aspects: first is to "getting a good answer" to a research question and second is to make it accessible, via explanation, to other members of the research team. Each researcher's notes, problems, results and explanations are detailed in her/his respective wiki. As part of participating in the research team each researcher comments upon, offer suggestions for, evaluate, etc. , the work of two other team members--via the evaluated member's wiki. Those processes are signified signified by the dashed arrows from each researcher to two other team members' wiki documents (those documents are W1, W2, W3, etc.). Such cross-communication can help to assure that the researcher will be developing her/his findings and explanations in ways that are compatible with the larger knowledge question which all are addressing with their particular research projects. There is one other (the sixth) team member: the Reporter/Coordinator(RC). S/he will also be reading/evaluating the wiki's from the perspective of the larger knowledge-making situation of which the separate researcher situations are each distinct parts. S/he will also be reading from the perspective of an explication of the total product to a public. In the early project stages the research coodinator/reporter documents impresssions of progress in the in-house summary document which is the group wiki (GW). For non-group members summary snippets are issued via the group weblog (GWL); its purpose is to document progress and/or to justify solicitations of material support from a suprasystem or from a granting agency. Informational support might come via weblog comments from collaborating groups in a larger enterprise (e.g., a containing suprasystem) or from the broader public made up of knowledge consumers and competing research enterprises. Any responses from those outside sources will be fed back into the group wiki as a means of challenging/updating within-group work. A last observation: the dashed line surrounding the group is meant to indicate that the boundary is voluntary. All members voluntarily limit their communications to fit within the bounds of the research mission. This self-limitation will occur for some portion of their time as dictated by their interests and the commitment made to the group. In the best of research groups this self-limitation is in fact empowerment. (See my entry about knowledge-making in bounded groups) [Note 1: I have expanded the number of tools used to two: wiki and weblog. When a publication is to show it's edit history and to allow text intrusions ranging from paragraph level editing by multiple editors to page-level comments, I've chosen a wiki. When the document itself is to remain intact but is be accessible to attached commentary and for linking, I've chosen a weblog. It is possible to follow the design using weblogs alone (replace all wikis with weblogs).The wiki, however, affords a far more nuanced set of possibilities.] [Note 2: Larger knowledge-making enterprises could be approached by using the illustrated group design as a module and by adding necessary organizationalinfrastructure and process] [Note 3: If we replace the researcher and group wiki's with in house circulation of a weekly progress update--- on paper, and if we replace the group weblog with newsletter publications and/or journal articles -- again, on paper , then we still have a "plan". How much better off are we , at this level of analysis, because we HAVE inserted Wiki and Weblog?] RELATED LINKS Seb Fiedler's Papers at his site. Denham Gray's entry (3/05) on the social character of Personal Learning. See , also, his link (via Ton) to a free course on action research and evaluation. Ton Zylstra's Series of Entries(12/03) on Actionable Sense Seb Paquet's Article (10/03) Exploring Relation of Weblogging to Research Seb Paquet's wondering (9/03) about how long it takes for students to get comfortable with weblogging Dave Pollard's (7/03) Detailed Analysis of Blog Flow Sequence Related Entries from Spike Hall: Entry (12/03) showing a research process as it might follow weblog-based networking -- responding to ideas of Ton Zylstra One of my entries on Learning to Learn Learning to Learn ---high proven payoff Notes extending Dave Pollard's weblogging flow ideas into research Definition of Klogs (10/02) (knowledge logs): thoughts and processes involved The Bounded Group Knowledge-Making Hypothesis, (12/02)including a restatement of two earlier hypotheses. This thinking led to my proposal of the group research model pictured above. Details of the hypothesis are below. First, the basic klog hypothesis: a comparison of otherwise equivalent initial learning 'problems' will show that klogging of knowledge acquisition [with no other supports, not even the news reader] will result in faster and more comprehensive knowledge acquisiton than a nonreflective participation in a quest for the same knowledge. Second, the augmented klog hypothesis: comparison of otherwise equivalent initial learning 'problems' will show that the klog augmented by news aggregators, automatic google searches (such as googleIt applied to title) and commentary from readers of klog entries (as in 'further reading' [see above]) will demonstrate significantly enhanced speed and comprehensiveness of development when compared to results of the pure klog approach. Lilia Efimova's Thoughts about Weblogs and Wiki's (6/04) *Comparability is necessary across sets; the sets need to be of equivalent psychological stature. By way of illustration, "20 single syllable french nouns versus an earlier, altogether different, set of 20 single syllable French nouns". 20 addition problems versus 20 ice skating manuvers wont do. :o] **When we get into the realm of 'Learning to Learn' (aka deuterolearning, metalearning) our discussion is particularly called for because, or so it seems to me, discussion of various levels of learning as if they were one will undermine our collective ability to construct effective systems (If we assume that all food is the same won't we be able to think out how to mix, prepare, cook and present in efficient and esthetic ways? Using the broadest designations Bateson (Towards an Ecology of Mind) listed at least three levels of learning: learning, learning to learn (i.e., demonstrating altered knowledge of learning such that greater speed and efficiency is clearly demonstrated in situation 2 as opposed the otherwise comparable* situation 1 , and "learning to 'learn to learn': acquiring the more or less independent ability to generate learning strategies. [Technorati learning, learning-to-learn, research, knowledge-making] 9:43:23 AM    Comments []

	Thursday, June 2, 2005

Google and the Gutenberg Project: Read All That Has Been Written (Anywhere, Any time, Any language); Pretty Soon? Summary: In our efforts to use the writings of others to bootstrap our own learning we often do full-text searches. While we're used to doing this with materials that have been specifically written for the web, we're not yet used to the possibility of having access to all of the world's writings. Maybe it's time to get used to the idea!! In this entry I'm referring to the knowledge quest that starts with the phrase search, i.e., the entry of a phrase , e.g, "individualized, web-based, instruction", "weapons of mass destruction", or "yogic support of family peace", etc., and the resulting web-derived return of print-based (as opposed to web-based) passages containing the search phrase. Several web services are on the threshold of doing exactly this. Type a word or phrase and, a few seconds later, a list of books that contain your phrase will be presented to you. This via the Google Print service. (Address: http://print.google.com/). This service gives tangible evidence of the coming of a time when we will have access the digitized contents of all of the world's books, past and present (out of print, in print). The reality of full access will take a while. After several searches I've had its possibilities amply demonstrated!* Excerpts from the 12/14/04 Google Announcement and Description of the service (the emboldening is mine): "We believe passionately that such universal access to the world's printed treasures is mission-critical for today's great public university," said Mary Sue Coleman, President of the University of Michigan. For publishers and authors, this expansion of the Google Print program will increase the visibility of in and out of print books, and generate book sales via "Buy this Book" links and advertising. For users, Google's library program will make it possible to search across library collections including out of print books and titles that weren't previously available anywhere but on a library shelf. Users searching with Google will see links in their search results page when there are books relevant to their query. Clicking on a title delivers a Google Print page where users can browse the full text of public domain works and brief excerpts and/or bibliographic data of copyrighted material. Library content will be displayed in keeping with copyright law. For more information and examples, please visit http://print.google.com/googleprint/library.html. Such a huge project: all books under copyright and all books in the public domain. Google estimates that it will take years to put together the total digitized library. Now we have the technical ability to access the digitized contents of all of the world's books (paper or electronic), as long as there is one scanable copy to be put in the digital domain. Google is working with libraries to scan in rare texts. Project Gutenberg is also a resource to turn to for books that are out of print (no longer being printed by publishers): Any book that is/was out of print may be accessible as an ebook through project . While Project Gutenberg specializes in US and English books it also has a big roster of books written in other languages. The total collection includes more than 15000 ebook titles. 3:32:56 PM    Comments []

	Saturday, May 7, 2005

"Open Learning" and "Large Learning Objects" (Courses): Support at Utah State University, Rice and MIT Summary: Formal, instructionally oriented knowledge offerings continue to expand. Now, if certification via passage through a "program" ,i.e., pay-for-learning sequence, is not of concern, you may work your way to learning "world class" knowledge without having to pay "world class" prices. From your home computer. This is, among other things, a move in the direction of distributive justice, countering the tendency for the rich (in knowledge) to get richer and the poor (having little knowledge and little real access to it) to get poorer. All we need now is for everyone to have online access and the ability to use it. (A computer in every hut?) Utah State University has entered the Open Learning Support movement. Welcome to Utah State University's Open Learning Support: a free and open resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world. OLS supports USU's mission by engaging the public, cultivating diversity of thought and culture, and supporting learning. Open Learning Support: Is a space where individuals can connect to share, discuss, ask, answer, debate, collaborate, teach, and learn. Is not a degree-granting or certificate-granting program. Does not provide formal access to university faculty or content authors. OLS currently provides discussion services for over 2200 modules in the Connexions collection at Rice University (this server). OLS also provides discussion services for MIT's discussion services for MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative. OLS is free to use and free to integrate with open access collections of educational materials. If you have a Connexions-like collection of educational materials and you would like to integrate with OLS, let us know. Open Learning Support is generously supported by a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. [via edu_rss] Here, for example, is the list of Departments through which courses are available at MIT. I have provided a sprinkling of the course links so that you can check content and organization and referencing for yourselves. Aeronautics and Astronautics Anthropology Architecture Biological Engineering Division Biology Brain and Cognitive Sciences Chemical Engineering Chemistry Civil and Environmental Engineering Comparative Media Studies Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences Economics Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Example courses: Artificial Intelligence Software Engineering for Web Applications (Fall 2003) Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier (Spring 2002) Natural Language and the Computer Representation of Knowledge (Spring 2003) Engineering Systems Division Foreign Languages and Literatures Health Sciences and Technology History Linguistics and Philosophy Literature Materials Science and Engineering Mathematics Mechanical Engineering Media Arts and Sciences Music and Theater Arts Nuclear Engineering Ocean Engineering Physics Political Science Science, Technology, and Society Sloan School of Management Patents, Copyrights, and the Law of Intellectual Property (Spring, 2003) Practical Leadership (Spring, 2003) Cross Cultural Leadership (Fall, 2004) Organizations as Enacted Systems: Learning, Knowing and Change (Fall 2002) Special Programs Urban Studies and Planning Women's Studies Writing and Humanistic Studies The Open Learning Support movement is providing learning opportunities for independent learners around the world. All that's missing is live access to the professor. Also provided is discussion space so that learners with a facilitator can process and examine materials. A good facilitator with some serious background in a particular content could help sincere and moderately independent learners to gain access to "world class" (in terms of utility, currency, complexity, take your pick) content. *The term "learning object" is used frequently and to good purpose by Stephen Downes. His point: that once a good student-operated "lesson" has been constructed it can be reused multiple times without the requirement of multiple deliveries by the original instructor, or any instructor. Knowledge objects would be stored online and be accessible for use in multiple ways in multiple courses. I am calling course materials, such as those linked to above from MIT, large learning objects. (My editorial stretch to the phrase "Large Learning Objects" has not necessarily been sanctioned by Mr. Downes.) 10:41:52 AM    Comments []

	Thursday, May 5, 2005

Tags and the Growth of Knowledge/Understanding Summary: I need to study and think/write more about tags. There is an alternative to my personal project management style: piles, each more or less in sequence of treatment-- most recent on top. The alternative is sorting entries by category; it gives easy, efficient access to information, via an established conceptual map. The map can be personal. or professional or cultural. In the case of information storage, the category map would give access to to entries which relate to certain areas of knowledge and the experience to which it relates. As I understand it, tagging is categorizing on the fly by individual tag users (see the definitions at Technorati and at del.icio.us (under bookmarklets.. about half-way down the page) . As soon as more than one person is involved in tag use the degree of agreement on tag meaning becomes a possible problem. The joint understanding must be there if miss-sorting and consequent loss of information is to be avoided. This issue becomes critical in proportion to the number of users of the tag system. If the group is small--a club, a family, a neighborhood--- the tags can circulate informally or while expertise is being passed on; if you're learning to harvest wheat, conduct a burial, prepare a meal, about to marry or adopt a child. When you are in common (generally experienced by at least one person in a neighborhood or family) situations with more or less common goals, the vocabulary can be shared and easily passed from the experienced to the inexperienced, the expert to the inexpert, in the course of actually doing or in processing that common situation. In short, transmission is clean/efficient when tag and the situational experience it refers to are pretty clear. There are, however, many situations in which much works against clarity. What if, for example,a group is made up of members who , each unknown to the others, is working on material that is related. Relatedness is important because of the possibility of cross-fertilization between similar lines of thought? The discovery of overlap will lead to investigation, reading and, ultimately, to an improved development in one's own knowledge-making efforts. It is this scenario that is at the core of my belief that knowledge-making efforts, as a whole and for individuals, will be markedly improved by comprehensive access to related lines and types of thought. Improved access of this sort will lead to faster development of useful knowledge -for individuals and the sum of individual working with the knowledge venue. Knowledge development that is both faster and "deeper" constitutes the payoff for the effort that goes into developing and using a universal category system for submissions, including weblog posts*, into web, or any other, common knowledge "space" . I don't think that tags, as they are presently constructed and used, aren't the final answer. Why? First, their relationship to deep bodies of knowledge has not been established. This limits search possibilities for the universal audience which includes people with varying depth of skill re the published material. One way or another the ontological tree --ie the body of ideas upon which this one is built and which are built upon this one should be linked to this one -- needs to be easily accessible via the item coding. Second, and equally important, the terms that are used should not only relate to the ontological tree, but should be common and/or commensursate, i.e., translatable one into the other. Inaccessible terms, for example, the terms used only by a group of three avant-garde artificial intelligence researchers, clearly do not suit the needs of the maximal development of universal understanding. Is the use of tags a movement in the right direction? Yes! By way of illustration: If attaching tags at the moment of weblog entry completion helps me get better access to my own body of work, then tags have already helped. If, not only I but all other members of a group of webloggers who are writing about weblogs in education, write my entries using group terms (and tag my entries using those terms ) then I've probably increased my own and my fellow group members access to my reasoning. I've also gained access to the entries of others who are working on related material. This done, we all, as individuals and as a whole, will learn more and faster in our tagged area of knowledge. Interestingly, here are Technorati's most popular of more than 837000 tags presently(5/5/05) in use. The word "tag" is not among the most used ];o] !! *Looking ahead I think that the following need doing: all intellectual material placed on-line, not just weblogs, not just current efforts. Category system has to be developed . Whatever form it takes, it should be automatic -- tags/labels generated according to some accepted system for classifying knowledge. Systems of access for various purposes should then be built. Once the ontology --the knowledge vocabulary and hierarchy is developed, navigation systems for various knowledge consuming and/or Knowledge-making could then be constructed. Maps for the various user groups would differ; the full ontology would be the "same" for all but used differently by the different consuming and developing groups. **Not that there are not reasons for having private (as in restricted usage) vocabulary or languages. However, for so long as, and to the extent that, a language or vocabulary is private is the degree to which they undermine the goal of advancement of universal understanding. Sometimes this is seen to be OK. For example, in the cases of a) developing proprietary knowledge e.g., new software for commercial use) or b) of espionage and spying, the disadvantage to universal understanding is seen to be a benefit to the knowledge-makers. 1:39:27 PM    Comments []

	Saturday, April 2, 2005

Tags in the Quest for New Knowledge: further commentary! Summary:It is no trivial matter to be able to send a question into "web space" and have an answer come back.However, It's one thing to send out "New York Yankees" or "weblogging"; the search task is pretty simple. It's another search entirely that brings back sites, commentary, photos etc. that are "precisely" at the edge of your knowledge space. No single word, probably no single phrase, will bring back such a result. The likelihood of search success diminishes as the searcher's knowledge space increases in size and complexity. Or, putting it in another way, my bet is that, holding "results=successful--the search result desired was found" constant, the more complex and layered the knowledge space, the more difficult the construction of and deployment of search tools/robots/spiders and etc. And, as for tags? Tags connect us. But they are imprecise. However, imprecise though they may be, when I am faced with the options that are now available, I'll take tags, over one word or multiword search phrases, as the fundamental search term. Tags, when used as categorical signs, will afford me a stronger chance of connecting with someone who is working on material that overlaps my knowledge space (pks or personal knowledge space), enough, I think, to inform/inspire any learning reach beyond its present boundaries . When thinking about this it will probably be useful to think of a specific knowledge concern. For example, let's say that I am interested in knowledge-making, knowledge-making in the situation: "ecological protection in isolated, communities faced with strong real estate development forces (e.g., wealthy retirees from the big city who are more interested in a shoreline view of whale migrations than in the ecosystem damage done by acquiring a private access to such a view)". How would I explore ? How would I choose between possibilities? 1) reading the entries of my favorite bloggers hoping for an appropriate stimulus or 2)perhaps googling a word or, in really sophisticated fashion, a set of words combined with a set of blogger names. I am faced with the sure knowledge that this must be a multilayered complex search process. Reading favorite bloggers and writing reactive entries seems to be comparable to the "One Hundred Monkeys Typing" method of creating Shakespeare's plays (i.e., pretty incredibly unlikely). If I use tags, however imprecise, I am forcing myself to abstract my own categorical view of path and implications of my own body of ideas. If there is/are people out there in somewhat the same space... and categorically representing where they are in the same fashion, if that is so, I will find them and their material. And, my knowledge space will have food for growth and elaboration. Here's what Dave Wineberger had to say(I love the ambivalence here; exactly my kind of see-sawing! I have taken some liberties with layout and occasional emboldening): Companies like Boeing spend years developing controlled vocabularies to drive ambiguity out of their technical documentation. For example, tech writers might be told to use the word "turn" but not "twist" when describing any circular motion involving a tool. And, at Corbis, the home of millions of digital images, the in-house cataloguers might be told to use the word "shore" and not "beach" when describing coastal photos. But no one is in a position to write a controlled vocabulary for the Internet, And if they were, you can be sure that many of us would be twisting the night away on the beach, just to break the rules. This is the promise and the risk of folksonomies. Folksonomies arise when people are tagging objects (Web pages, photos, etc.) in public. If you want something to be found by others, you'll choose the most popular tag. That adds yet more momentum to that tag. And before you know it, most people tag posts about PC Forum as "pcforum05," not "pcf", "pcf05" or "Esther's thang." Folksonomies are bottom-up controlled vocabularies. For not very good reasons, the word "controlled" raises a red flag for me. Here's my mental back-and-forth on the issue: Back: A folksonomy is not centrally controlled, which is good because a vocabulary dictator would not only frequently get it wrong, but would silently enforce her interpretation. Word choice is too important to be left to the tyrants. In fact, the first thing tyrants do is try to control our word choices. Forth: But a folksonomy is nonetheless controlled by a majority. Do folksonomies replace the central vocabulary dictator with an emergent dictator? The word choices are likely to be more in tune with majority thinking, but the conformism of the hippies was as bad as the conformism of the suits. Back: This is simply how language works. Words and meanings arise from a type of "conformism," but so what? Meaning itself is a type of conformism, you aging hippie douchebag! Forth: But, language changes through implicit evocations of meaning. There is no word dictator who declares "Thou shalt now replace the word 'idea' with 'meme.'" Nope, we hear the word, get a sense from context or from a bumbling, hand-waving definition from someone at a party, and we appropriate it. After a while, a dictionary notices and attempts to freeze and formalize the definition. Yet, tags are explicit. They take something as rich in meaning as a family photo and reduce it to a single word. That's a diminishment. Back: Big freaking deal. Categorization diminishes. Everyone knows that. It's why we categorize: It reduces complexity to something manageable at least for the moment. But often categorization diminishes so that things in their richness can be found: Menus in restaurants categorize food so you can taste it in all its glory. And if people feel that the popular tags are not categorizing objects the way they want, they can build local folksonomies, using the tags accepted by their social group. Forth: Not in the commercial world. Steve Papa at Endeca at the PCForum open discussion a few days ago pointed to eBay as an example: There are economic reasons to describe your items for sale using the most popular language. E.g., call it a "notebook," not a "laptop." Likewise, where there are economic or other reasons for people to use the popular tags, some folksonomies will dominate. This will undoubtedly drive some ambiguity out of our everyday language. For example, someone pointed out to me recently that CNN started out calling the tsunami a "tidal wave," but switched when everyone else was calling it a "tsunami." That sort of thing will happen faster and more regularly as folksonomies grow in more and more fields. Back: Big deal. Tsunami = tidal wave. And because CNN switched, now we can find its stories when we search for "tsunami." Forth: No two words are every exactly the same. And clarity leads to division. Imagine that a site like NYTimes.com allows us to tag their posts in a del.icio.us sort of way. (We can do that already at del.icio.us, of course, but doing it on the Times site would be different.) There will be tag wars over whether to tag articles as "tax relief" or "wealthy welfare." Communities will form around semantics, making George Lakoff happy, but further driving us apart. Back: So the only thing that lets us live together is the ambiguity of our language? If we ever really understood each other, we'd kill each other? Forth: Well, ambiguity sure helps. What would we do without those gray zones? Me: Folksonomies will influence how we use words outside of the tagging environment. It will sometimes replace the subtle, organic ways in which language evolves with the crudity endemic to explicitness. Groups will form around words, and words will form around groups, as always. We and our language will survive. [ViaJoho the Blog: Controlled and suggested vocabularies: Are tags making us dumb?] Adam Bosworth has similar concerns.. expressed in his own way reflects on social software at in his weblog.: …As long as we don’t let the ontologists take over and tell us why tags are all wrong, need to be classified into domains, and need to be systematized, this is going to work well albeit, sloppily. What it does is open up ways to find things related to anything interesting you’ve found and navigate not a web of links but a link of tags. At the same time Wikipedia has shown that a model in which content is contributed not just by a few employees, but by self-forming self-managing communities on the web can be amazingly detailed, complete, and robust. so now people are looking at ways in which the same emergent self-forming self-administering models of tagging and Wiki’s and moderation can be used for events (EVDB) and for music and for video and for medical information. It’s all very exciting. It is a true renaissance. I haven’t seen this much true innovation for quite a while. What I particularly like about all this is how human these innovations are. They are sloppy. To me Tags are sloppy practical de-facto ontologies. Wiki’s are sloppy about changes and version editing. It is accepted that we’re trying new things and that sometimes messes will occur. In short, it is unabashedly creative and imprecise. I’ve always believed in the twin values of rationalism and humanism, but humanism has often felt as though it got short shrift in our community. In this world, it’s all about people and belonging and working with others…. Adam goes on to note that social software gets spammed (nod to Clay), “We got, unfortunately, any application talking to anyone (we call this spam).” He raises privacy concerns and the cost of interruptions to conclude: It is going to be fascinating and exciting to watch how these tensions play out, namely the rising trend of people working together and collaborating and communicating over the web in increasingly real time ways contending with the human needs for privacy and reflection and with the unfortunate nature of some humans to vandalize rather than to construct. As things play out, I’d suggest we will see forms of communication more asynchronous than email, the social network employed as a filter, richer forms of presence, easier group forming and reputation used only at large scales. Many-to-Many 3/25/05 9:55 AM [Technorati tags: taxonomy folksonomy tags knowledge-making "personal knowledge space"] [edited and revised, 4/3/2005] 10:22:18 PM    Comments []

	Sunday, March 27, 2005

Tags Turning Web Chaos into Categories Summary: Matt Hicks of Eweek explains the effect of tagging blog entries. Wikipedia, Technorati, Flickr and Delicious are all involved. In short. tagged entries, even if [contributed and accessed by] by multiple, incommensurate mental universes (individuals) give the option to search for online entries by category, even subcategory [as accessed via intersections of tag categories]. For purposeful knowledge-building this can be a great advantage. Here's the Eweek article[emboldening is mine, SPH]: SAN DIEGO—In the quest to organize the Web's information, an emerging approach is putting the power to categorize everything from links to digital photos into the hands of users. In the halls and session rooms at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference here, a series of talks this week explored the growing use of tags to let users associate keyword metadata to Web information. Among the early implementers of tags are Ludicorp's Flickr photo-sharing site, the del.icio.us social bookmarking service and the Wikipedia collaborative online encyclopedia. During one conference session, leaders from the three upstart services explored the impact of their decisions to turn categorization over to individuals rather than enforcing established categories. Tags are creating more than straightforward classifications of Web documents or links, said Joshua Schachter, the creator of del.icio.us. One of the most popular tags created on the bookmarking service is "to_read," a tag attached to links of pages users want to remember to read. "There is a behavior around tags that has nothing to do with categorization," Schachter said. On del.icio.us, users create one-word tags for Web pages as they bookmark them in the service. Users can sort and view their bookmarks by various tags, while also viewing the Web links associated with the most popular tags among all users. Even the new term "Folksonomy" has emerged to describe the potential for user-defined tags to organically develop structure out of what might appear to be chaotic collections of information. One of the uncertainties about tags is how they can fit together among various services and what meaning can be gleaned from the tags of a large mass of users. Efforts to collect tags broadly have begun. Earlier this year, Weblog search engine Technorati Inc. started supporting tags. The site now tracks tags from photos in Flickr, bookmarks stored in del.icio.us and LookSmart Ltd.'s Furl service, and blogs published with tags. Tags aren't without their drawbacks. Stewart Butterfield, Ludicorp's president and founder, noted how in Flickr an individual's tag of a photo might be a mismatch for another user. For example, a user who travels to Tokyo might tag all photos from the trip as "Tokyo," including those taken inside a hotel room, Butterfield said. But other users might expect to see only photos of the Tokyo cityscape, and not a hotel's interior, when viewing photos tagged as Tokyo. "I don't think in the context of Flickr that there are bad tags," Butterfield said. "The point is not for you to find all of and only pictures of elephants but to give people a few extra tools to organize their own stuff." Similarly, del.icio.us focuses more on individuals, avoiding approaches where the service might suggest or steer users to use any specific tags, Schachter said. "I don't want people to be dominated by group think," Schachter said. "It's your instinct that is the most reliable and reproducible thing." Yet for Wikipedia, tags complement its group approach for organizing the popular online encyclopedia. Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, said the project relies on a core group of between 600 and 1,000 people to manage the encyclopedia and that the group collectively corrects misclassifications. "If you start tagging things in the wrong way in the encyclopedia, you'll hear about it right away," Wales said. Wikipedia last summer launched its categorization system for the encyclopedia, and Wales said that opening classification to individual project contributors fit with Wikipedia's collaborative approach. "As to why we decided to let the masses categorize things, it never occurred to us to ask that question," he said. [Via Eweek, Matt Hicks and the Article:" Tags Turning Web Chaos into Categories: "] 1:55:23 PM    Comments []

	Friday, February 4, 2005

The Biggest Reason for School Reform: The Loss of Our Children Summary: John Taylor Gatto highlights and explains the singular unproductivity of American Schools.He observes that the once strikingly powerful American character, chronicled by de Toqueville -and noted particularly in our children, has all but disappeared.[Such character has been replaced by sensuous and relatively mindless creatures with relatively little character, originality or self-sufficiency. They seem more and more like the Eloi, right out of HG Wells Time Machine. It's for you to guess who the Morlocks --those that prey upon the Eloi-- might be. This result has been achieved in less than 100 years. Perhaps, if we can find the collective intelligence and will, we can consciously undo the damage in 50??!! In his own words [extracted from his essay AGAINST SCHOOL How public education cripples our kids, and why ]: "Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold: To make good people. To make good citizens. To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else. Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern. The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven , was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens in order to render the populace "manageable." [the emboldening is mine, SPH] It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State , and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education , in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary." Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole. Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier: The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things. The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force. The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one. The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best. The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain. The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor. That , unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. In another essay, The Six Lesson School Teacher*, Gatto left out the ideological provenence and just gave us the effect: the true school curriculum, the one that we teach best of all. In it there are six understandings for each student to master (All the rest is just smoke and mirrors): Lesson 1: Stay in the Class Where You Belong Lesson 2: Turn On and Off Like a Light Switch Lesson 3: Surrender Your Will to a Predestined Chain of Command Lesson 4: Only I [the school/the teacher, SPH] Will Determine What Curriculum You Will Study Lesson 5: Your Self Respect Should Depend on An Observer's Measure of Your Worth Lesson 6: You are Being Watched *This article was originally published in the Fall '91 issue of Whole Earth Review 12:28:24 PM    Comments []

	Monday, January 17, 2005

Omnioutliner save to dynamic html Summary: Omnioutliner has just gone to 3.0; look and feel are terrific. There are many new features and a nicely improved look and feel. My greatest excitement is over the ability to export home developed many featured outlines--in the form of dynamic html. After tipping my hat to Notebook (another outline-oriented CMS manager) I'll say a few words about the wonders Omnoutliner's dynamic outline as a knowledge communication tool. Want a homegrown CMS? NoteBook is definitely worth a look. (I just checked out the site and noted MacWorld and MacAddict ratings). It appears to be working the personal knowledge organization turf, too. However I'll be staying with my longtime favorite Omnioutline. OO is great by itself and as augmented by working with OmniGraffle, drawing/graphing/charting, etc. software. I plan to stay with it for quite a while, not so much because I'm conservative about change (I'm the usual fickle software consumer) but more as a result of it's expanded feature set, particularly the saving of outlines as dynamic html. Outline Formatting in Dynamic Html Any outline can be published and subsequently accessed as an html file. Thus it is readable by any browser. To me, the really exciting outline is the dynamic one (dynamic means that it can interact with the reader, even in html format). The appearance and content of a html version of a published outline can be altered, revealing more or less information, as suits the needs of the user, and as dictated the information and layers of the outline. Take, for example, a course syllabus, the in-depth reference to the content and role related responsibilities of a university course. At first the user of the dynamic outline would see the major headings and nothing else. One of those headings might be "Course Paper" and one its subheadings (revealed by clicking on the original, top level heading) might be “Specifications for Final Paper”. The user clicks, in turn, on that heading and sees those subheadings. For this hypothetical student we'll say that most of the "Specifications for the Final Paper" make sense (or are not presently of concern) but “Citation Format” catches the users eye. S/he therefore clicks on that heading and it expands to reveal citation requirements in full detail. The user gets the information s/he wants with a few mouse clicks. The full dynamic outline (with more details than any user wants at any given time) is an information source that can be as varied in its faces and uses as the interests of its readers and their varying sense of interest and need. Each user will be able to read the outline in unique manner, one dictated by many factors. The gift of the dynamic outline (as opposed to the one that is fully and permanently expanded) is that it only reveals the areas in which the user indicates (via clicks of mouse) active interest. Thus this altered presentation of the same material is less likely to distract, or overwhelm. It reacts supportively rather than sitting there in full [read as intimidating] “majesty”. It almost goes without saying that the information imbedded in this marvel of user-responsiveness has to be detailed enough to be responsive to the needs of any user, at any point in their interaction with the outline’s focus. Also, assuming that the information provided is sufficient to these needs, it needs to be accessible for the average user; in other words, the headings and subheadings, etc., need to be good sign posts for users of widely varying sophistication, not just the developer. *This one based on Marc Barrot’s activerenderer (see http://www.activerenderer.com/outlines/AR/activeRenderer.html for both a dynamic outline example and an explanation of the dynamic outlining process). Marc is a familiar friend to any who use RadioUserland's outlining features. 10:36:47 AM    Comments []

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