June 2007 Archives
We biked down to the Apple store in the University Village here in Seattle today and picked up an iPhone. I know there were lines waiting for them to go on sale yesterday, and I heard from someone who was down in the Village a couple of hours after us that there were lines then too, but I just walked into the store and purchased mine with no fuss.
When I got it home I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was already charged and ready to go. When I connected it to my G4 iMac, the iMac fired up iPhoto, which showed the iPhone as a device, but the activation process wants iTunes to see the phone - which it didn't.
I then moved it to the Intel Mac Mini that has all my music on it, and that machine's iTunes saw it right away and from that point on the process worked very well, walking me through registering for a plan and getting the phone activated.
Once the phone was activated it found my Apple Airport Extreme WiFi hotspot with no problem. Browsing the web with Safari worked fine right out of the box, as did Google maps and playing YouTube videos from the most popular list. The screen on the iPhone is bright and sharp, far better than any mobile phone device I've had previously. The menu structure is clear and intuitive, also a far cry better than my previous mobile experiences.
Setting up the phone for email Google Mail was very easy, and configuring the UW IMAP and SMTP servers was straightforward, though getting used to the touchscreen keyboard will take some time - so far I keep hitting P when I'm trying for O. The IMAP client is far superior to the experience I've had with IMAP on my Nokia E62 - the defaults are sensible, and the response (at least on WiFi) is snappy.
One confusing point I've found so far is in transferring music onto the phone from iTunes on my Mac. I was not able to just drag tunes from the iTunes library onto the phone's Music directory like I can with my iPods. Instead I had to set up a playlist of songs I wanted on the phone and then set the phone to sync with that playlist in iTunes.
I also encountered what seems to be a problem with YouTube search - I was at dinner tonight talking with my friend Ed about Jorma Kaukonen and Hot Tuna (those under fifty might not remember these icons of San Francisco psychedelic folk-rock) - Ed noted that there were some good videos on YouTube featuring Jorma, so I whipped out the iPhone and did a search. The phone was unable to connect to Ed's home Linksys hotspot, so I assumed it was searching on the cellular network, but at any rate it did not fine any results, and the phone kept wanting to search the term Norma instead of Jorma. Searching on my laptop at home right now shows about 123 results for the term "jorma kaukonen". I don't know what's up with that, but I'll prod at it some more over the next few days.
So far my impression of the iPhone is that it is indeed a revolutionary step forward in really useful handheld Internet devices, and I think it should have a great influence on the marketplace going forward.
I'll report more on my use of the iPhone as it happens.
One of the best kept summer secrets in the Seattle area over the last few years has been the free summer concerts in St. Edwards State Park in Kenmore, sponsored by the City of Kenmore, KBCS radio, and Bastyr College. This year's lineup looks like a good one again - these are Thursday evenings from 6:30 - 8 pm.
July 5 - Laura Love
July 12 - The Zydeco Locals
July 19 - Santa Cruz River Band
July 26 - Clinton Fearon & Boogie Brown Band
August 2 -Erin McKeown
August 9 - Johnny Conga & Sabor Tropical
August 16 - Dya Singh
August 23 - Uncle Earl
Harvard prof Andrew McAfee has an interesting post analyzing a recent Gilbane Group poll of 1000 Facebook users of ages 18-34 on which collaboration tools they believe they'll use on their jobs in two years.
Andrew writes: The largest difference, and a statistically significant one, is that the younger crowd has less faith that email will continue to dominate. As a group, the 18-24 year olds plan to make more use of text messaging (a channel technology) and social networking sites (primarily a platform technology, although Facebook does allow communication over private channels). Interestingly, they seem less enthusiastic about instant messaging than does the older set.
Given that we in higher-ed deal with those age groups as primary parts of our constituencies, and that these are the folks who are rapidly becoming our faculty and staff as well as students, we need to be thinking about what happens as these trends accelerate.
Technorati Tags: collaboration, social-software
One of the emerging themes at the UW (and in higher ed in general) is increased interaction across the boundaries of the institution. You can see that in action in the thrust to virtual organizations in research initiatives (see NSF's program in Engineering Virtual Organizations for example), in the establishment of the Global Health department, in the growing cross-institutional software development projects like Kuali and Sakai and in many other spaces.
I'm increasingly hearing (and experiencing) needs to work collaboratively with folks from other places. Unfortunately, most of our systems require a local identity (in our case a UW NetID) for access control. This is where the concept of federated identity systems like Shibboleth should help - and by golly, it does!
Here in C&C we use a Confluence wiki, which recently was Shibboleth-enabled (notes on how to do that are here), enabling users of our wiki to permit access to people with credentials from any of the members of the InCommon federation. One of the InCommon members is ProtectNetwork, an independent identity provider.
So yesterday, when a question came in about collaborating with people who are not UW folks (nor affiliated with any of the other InCommon higher ed institutions) I thought "they should be able to get ProtectNetwork IDs and then we could grant them wiki access in Confluence".
So I went out and got myself an ID and tested it out - and it worked! Here's a screenshot of the Confluence permissions-setting screen with my ProtectNetwork ID circled. How cool is that?
Technorati Tags: collaboration, confluence, digital-identity, federated-identity, federation, shibboleth
Now that the WWDC has come and gone and Apple didn't introduce the long-rumored light notebook, I was looking at Macbooks today, thinking about ordering a new laptop. Figuring that the laptop will probably be my main machine for the next while, I was looking at the Macbook Pros. I was thinking it would be good to trick one out with the full 4 GB memory config, but I was totally blown away by what Apple charges for the upgrade from 2 GB to 4 GB. $750 for 2 GB of memory? Are you kidding, I thought?
But it's not just Apple - Lenovo is charging $845 for the same upgrade on its Thinkpad T60 series. There must be something I don't know about DDR2 memory that causes the prices to be so high.
David Attis, Senior Director of Policy Studies, Council on Competitiveness, is giving the final talk.
Concerns about U.S. competitiveness now appear almost daily in the national news - every country is facing this in the global environment, and feel they're behind. There as sense that we've taken our eye off the ball. Industrial leaders link competitiveness and prosperity to leadership in science and technology. And politicians on both sides of the aisle have followed their lead. There's a broad political consensus that has emerged through the legislative process - the agenda is increased basic research funding in science and engineering, increased funding for graduate education, increased k-12 science education, high-skilled immigration, and r&d tax credits.
These proposals implicitly assume that higher education is the linchpin of U.S. competitiveness. The assumption is that if more funding gets pushed into the system, more innovation comes out. What do we mean by innovation? Doesn't have a precise economic definition, though politicians love the term. Secretary of Commerce now has a commission on measuring innovation. We have some idea of how to increase the number of PhDs and publications, but that's not necessarily innovation. And how does that translate into jobs?
In 80s US was responsible for 46% of RD investment, now it's 37%. In 1986 US produced 52% of new doctorates in science and engineering in 2003 it was 22% - what does that mean for our future? China's the top high tech exporter now, and five of the top 10 countries are developing economies. China is a leader in production, but not in innovation - it's a lot of foreign companies producing in China. China's investment in R&D spending grew 19.3 percent 1995-2004.
David cites the shrinking influence of Great Britain in the world between the 19th and 20th centuries as perhaps a good model of what happens to the U.S. in the near future.
The rise of global research networks - the location of corporate research labs. China and India are cited as the best places to put new R&D facilities.
Dispite significant increases in basic research funding, output (publications, patents) have grown slowly.
Regional knowledge spillovers - putting people into one place and foster relationships and networks fosters innovation. Innovation as a contact sport - happens through personal connections, not licensing and patents. The amount you spend on R&D determines how many people go into science and engineering - getting these people trained and out into working environments is how innovation spreads. Tacit knowledge - what cannot be captured in publications and patents - is the most valuable.
What does that mean for education? There's been a lot of talk about the shortage of scientists and engineers. There's a real gap between what CEOs see and what students see. Students see higher wages for MBAs, JDs and MDs; long routes to specialized degrees; more S&E's working outside the profession; rising unemployment rates for S&Es; middle-aged S&E's struggling to find work; rapidly growing S&E workforce in developing countries.
What are employers really looking for - survey by conference board:
1. critical thinking/problem solving
2. information technology application
3. teamwork/collaboration
4. creativity/innovation
5. diversity
5. leadership
7. oral communications
...
13. math
16. science
Most PhD programs don't typically teach these soft skills. Technical skills are not enough. Cites Georgia Tech's computer science program as an example of an integrated program that puts things together for a CS major - "Threads and Roles"
"Send me engineers who are adaptable - who can think across disciplines."
"Industry needs employees who not only understand the technical nature of their projects, but the business and legal aspects as well..." IBM exec
"We need engineers who think like artists and artists who think like engineers"
The Spellings Commission report - misses a lot of these points.
Information technology: a double-edged sword?
Driver for growth: productivity growth; lower prices; more efficient markets; higher quality goods and services; innovation and new products and services.
Disruptive force: IT-enabled dislocations; offshoring; skill-biased technical change.
Churn is essential to dynamism and growth, but it's disruptive to workers. Average household income has actually declined from 2001-2006.
Will off-shoring hollow out our economy? We don't have good data - it's hard to measure. Companies don't say "we're taking our jobs here and moving them to India".
How many jobs have been lost - estimate is about 1 million - a drop in a bucket. There's no net loss of jobs in the US economy.
What types of jobs are likely to be offshored? If you can do it remotely, it can be offshored. Call-centers, programming, reading radiology, some high-end R&D.
How many jobs could potentially be offshored? Consensus is about 20 million. It's really guesswork - can't predict the effects of technology.
How many jobs will actually be offshored? 4-5% of some regions of US, 2% of others.
Will there be any offsetting increase in jobs due to expanded exports? Could be that there's no net loss.
The returns to education rose significantly in the late 90s, but stalled after 2000 - is this a long-term change or not?
Higher order skills continue to increase in importance across all occupations. The "New Geography of Work" - routine work will be done offshore or by machines, creative work will be done here by people. New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce report (2007). Recommend re-inventing high schools, putting everyone in two year schools and then some move on to higher ed.
Technorati Tags: business, ecar, ecar-2007-summer, competitiveness
We spent last evening at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is located in an I.M. Pei building up above Boulder. We got to hear a terrific talk on the science behind proving and predicting global warming by Susan Solomon. Solomon was one of the first scientists to propose chlorofluorocarbons as the cause of the antarctic ozone hole, and is now the co-chair of Working Group 1 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
After Susan's talk we had a wine-tasting conducted by master sommelier Bobby Stuckey, owner of Frasca restaurant in Boulder. Bobby talked and demonstrated the impact of global warming on wine by having us taste two Italian whites and two Italian reds, one each from a "classic" year and from a warmer than normal vintage. The point is that the heat makes a real difference in the quality of wine, and many of the recent years have been increasingly warm.
For the record, the wines we sampled were:
Keber Pinot Gris DOC Collio 2004 (a classic vintage) vs. the Gini DOC Soave Classico Superiore 2005 (warm vintage); and Le Macioche Rosso di Montalcino 2004 (a fabulous classic vintage that I drank a little too much of) vs. La Spinetta Sezzana 2003.
During the meal we were entertained by Deco Django, which as you might imagine, is a gypsy jazz group from Boulder. They were nice enough to invite me to sit in on bass for a couple of numbers, which was great fun (thanks, fellas!).
Technorati Tags: ecar, ecar-2007-summer
The second morning of ECAR starts off with a panel discussing the educational use of Second Life. The panel is titled:
This Ain't Your Daddy's Classroom For Sure: Serious(ly Fun) Living and Learning in the Virtual World of Second Life. Participants include:
* Eric Hackathorn, IT Specialist, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
* Phillip D. Long, Assoc. Dir, Office of Educational Innovation and Technology, MIT
* Sarah Robbins, Instructor of English, Ball State University
* Angela Thomas, Professor, University of Sydney
* Session moderator: Laurence F. Johnson, Chief Executive Officer, The New Media Consortium (NMC)
Larry kicks it off with a movie that the NMC folks put together about their campus in Second Life, and notes (in passing) that the NMC is making real money contracting with institutions to build spaces in the environment.
The panelists were asked to address these questions:
What brought you to SL?
What are the key insights you have gained to date? Issues you have had to solve?
What questions about SL in particular or virtual worlds in general remain unanswered for you?
Phil Long (the MIT one) starts off by talking about their path to second life - they were looking for ways to express the cultural differences among residence halls at MIT. That led the m to start developing some 3d gaming environment, but in reality they were looking for a social environment, not a game.
Phil notes that the terms of service of SL are a big issue for many institutions, which took them six or seven months to agree on, particularly in regards to indemnification and the resolution of legal issues. Service levels are also an issue - the grid is down every Wednesday for several hours, and once it's upgraded you have to install a new version of the client. It's an extremely engaging place - it's hard to multitask while doing sl. They're interested in exploring other virtual worlds, and the issue of portability across them. They're still trying to figure out the syntax for interacting and what are the affordances for different disciplines. MIT is interested in partially virtual worlds - the notion that you're pervasively existing in both virtual and real space at the same time.
Sarah is PhD candidate at Ball State and director of Emerging Technologies at Mediasoft. She teaches freshman composition in SL. She wanted to put the course under a microscope - within 72 hours of sending an email invite out she had 300 students wanting to sign up - for an 18 person class. She's been teaching for a year now and measuring levels of engagement and community formation. On the whole it far exceeds the levels of engagement in f2f classes. She has lots more questions than answers - it's a student-centered space - students can construct their own learning environments. When students are in charge of their own learning, can we trust them to know what's best? We have to offer some guidance, and we're still learning how to do that in SL. A second question is how to use the environment to encourage the development of lifelong learning environments.
There's a list of universities in second life on the secondlife.com web site.
Angela Thomas was featured in Australian Vogue. She's written a book called Youth Online. She's been researching virtual worlds since '95. She teaches a new media course in SL. She's discovered that the students are extremely committed and excited about second life, more than blogging or forums. The online role playing communities are a unique part of virtual worlds - she encouraged her students to get involved. She also has them do linguistic and semiotic analysis of avatars to understand what lays behind the body construct. The 3D space is compelling because her students are very busy English teachers - they don't have a background in new media or computing, and the 3D space is familiar for them. The aspect of play in SL is also important. Has the potential to flatten hierarchy and let students be more self-directed. Questions - how to find the balance between the delivery of content and student self-direction. She needs, for example, to teach a framework for linguistic analysis. It's not a neutral space - it has some ideologies and discourse the underlies the practices in the environment, and she has questions for how to get students to look at that in a critical way.
Eric is the chief architect for NOAA's virtual island in SL. It's turned into something like Disneyland meets science education. You can fly a virtual P3 Orion through a hurricane, ride a weather balloon, visit a tsunami, etc. IT Security at the US Capitol wouldn't let them demo their second life site there - wrote it off as a video game. 36% of their visitors hadn't heard of NOAA before. Questions - what's about 508 compliance (disabled access). What about content management in the environment? What about borders between organizations? Security is a big thing - right now all chat in SL is in clear text. Gauging return on investment - you have to define what value is - it's not necessarily traffic. SL gives you tools for monitoring the engagement - you can see where people spend time, see who's been idle, who's interacted with what objects, when conversation is happening. There are privacy concerns...
Phil - what is the value proposition for MIT? The opportunity that's enticing is the way of modeling social action in virtual environments, playing out social structures and models through those simulations, e.g. what makes for an effective emergency room in a hospital? Imagine doing that simulation with real live participants. Analogous to cad/cam modeling for social interaction.
Larry - lots of interesting possibilities for expressing data in the environment.
Sarah notes that she saw evidence in her SL courses of real community formation that didn't happen in her other classes - developed their own linguistic conventions, objects in space, etc, and some of those extended outside the space.
Technorati Tags: ecar, ecar-2007-summer, secondlife, second-life
There's a presentation about the JISC/SURF partnership between Great Britain and Australia on e-framework and knowledge exchange.
good video explaining service orientation in a higher-ed context.
e-framework is an alliance of national funders - shared vision and ambitions for service enabled infrastructures.
e-framework as a way to represent the SOA components.
- a shared workspace, helping partners compare and collaborate.
I didn't capture all of the details, but I find the level of international collaboration among non-US higher ed institutions to be remarkable and enviable.
Technorati Tags: academia, ecar, ecar-2007-summer
Michael is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State who made the very popular video about Web 2.0.
Any time you try to predict the future you magnify your assumptions - he realized that in the past three years all of his assumptions about education and information have been shattered. There may not be an "it" to teach any more. When we talk about "it" we're often talking about information.
YouTube gets 65,000 new videos a day - 91% are new original content.
71 million more blogs than in 2003.
Have we prepared our students for this world?
On paper, we thought of information as a thing...with a material form, you could point to it, and it had its own logical place in a specific hierarchy of categories. Managing information requires managing the hierarchies.
Search engines showed us we might not need hierarchies. Hyperlinks showed us that information can be in more than one place at the same time. Blogging taught us that anybody can be a creator of information, Wikipedia showed us that by working together our information can be better than the content of professionals.
Who is the author of this information? Who owns it?
Tagging taught us that we could organize this information explosion ourselves...without "folders".
RSS taught us that information can find us.
when we teach, information is no longer the point.
what was google buying when they bought YouTube? not the Tube, but the You.
Have we prepared our students for this world? Putting Time in perspective
Puts the last 12,000 years (since the last ice age) into one hour perspective. First farmers at 5 minutes - allows people to settle down first towns at 25 minutes ago, first alphabet at 15 minutes ago, industrial revolution is a minute ago. The last five seconds are the twenty years our students have lived on this planet - personal computers, the internet, mobile phones, wal-mart, the end of the family farm, mtv, exurbia.
Looking at spaceship earth - 1.3 billion live on less than $1 per day Over 1 billion people now connected by the Internet - almost as many remain illiterate. Are our students ready for the next fifteen seconds?
He asked his students what they need from their education. They're working on a video of this, which he showed a rough edit of - very powerful and moving to see students with their own words.
Students are learning in spite of us. Technology is not the savior, but a tool we can use (but can use us).
teaching still has not changed, but learning has. That's where the disconnect is.
"We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future" - Marshall McLuhan
Every medium has both enabling and disabling properties. He's trying to break this down in terms of various teaching techniques - e.g. what is a chalkboard teaching? What to students learn when they're looking at a chalkboard? What's missing? videos, images, animations, network. Chalkboard forces the writer to move around, makes you think on the move (as opposed to scripted presentations), encourages you to slow down and improvise, and interact. Chalkboard limits effective class size to those who can see the board.
What's different about PowerPoint? easy for the teacher, mindless (for the teacher), it's fast (too fast?), linear, helps the presenter remember their notes, often does great harm to the presentation. Encourages students to memorize key points, let the professor choose which points are key, encourages the students to regurgitate key points on exams. Good for teaching, but not for learning.
What does this world look like? People can make great videos in basements. Collaborated with a musician in the Ivory Coast, who put his recordings on the Web. He uploaded his original video. Had 253 views in the first day or so. Amazing when compared that he wrote an article a year ago which is just coming out, which might be seen by a couple of hundred people.
By the next morning it had a couple of thousand views, as a result of being Dugg up, rose onto the front page of the Digg tech industry news. As people blogged it it rose in Technorati's rankings.
The selection process is in a sense a peer review and criticism process on a much larger scale than academia ever dreamt of. Seven translation of his video appeared within three weeks.
This mediascape is only as good as our students are - are they going to be responsible participants in this world, or will we see more of Britney Spears' haircut?
Some references - Ian Jukes, Carl Fish, Unesco study on ethical implications of digital technologies.
Lots of the future predictions assume twoard ubiquitous networks and computing leading to ubiquitous information at unlimited speed about everything everywhere from anywhere on all kinds of devices. Why do people need to know things when they can ask Google anything at any time?
RFIDs in food products as an example of bringing the web into the physical world. VeriChip - RFIDs for people. The machine will learn more and more about you. We teach it with every search, tag, and note. Machines will increasingly be able to aggregate data without human intervention - e.g. photos from gps enabled cameras converted to geotagged images on flickr.
Imagine what could be if anybody anywhere could upload information about anything at any time that could be accessed by anybody?
Two scenarios for the future... what will today's fifth grader look like in the year 2020?
First scenario - schools have held on to idea that information is what it's all about and are trying to teach information. Student is not really sophisticated in use of information. A dystopian future - apathetic passive consumers.
Second scenario - we engage with this media, and teach students to be participants. Real information could compete with marketers and advertisers to get to people on their devices. Technology could be used to encourage real social interaction. Because student has been fighting for her rights, the system has evolved to serve her.
Technorati Tags: academia, ecar, ecar-2007-summer
Benkler is moving from Yale Law to Harvard Law
- Networked information economy and society
- The university and the rise of social production
- three design challenges: permeability; control vs. creativity; social applications
A story - attempts to improve vote counting by bringing in machinery, first tried in Georgia. Mainstream media didn't report any problems, but one activist got hold of source code and harnessed a new model of social production. She put the code on her site, which was replicated on a site in New Zealand - we've got hold of a source of data and here it is - read for yourself. Put together resources on the web, and asked for finding to be reported. Avi Rubin at Johns Hopkins found issues, put them on his web site, and others responded. Then Diebold felt that they had to respond. The conversation led to State of Maryland asking for a review of the technology.
The next time around Diebold filed a DMCA complaint against ISP that the activist used, and against Swarthmore which had a replica. End of story? No - because its been replicated all over the web. The network resists the supression of information. The students go to district court and the court grants them the case and Diebold has to pay.
Radical decentralization
- research & analysis
- archiving, storage, retrieval
- accreditation through self-selected peer reivew, critiqaue
- radically decentralized
- done by individuals, for individuals
- alone and in ad hoc networks of diverse longevity
- dynamic problem solving and adaptation
- not impervious, but resistant
What makes this possible?
- in 1835 it cost the equivalent of around $10k to launch a mass circulation newspaper. Changes in the environment made it 2.5 million 15 years later. For the latter you need a business model. Bifurcation around passive audiences and professional commercial producers. f
- The alternative image is SETI@home becomes a huge supercomputer.
Networked information economy -
- radically decentralized capitalization
- computation, storage, communications capacity
- all in the hands of individuals
- the most important inputs, into the core economic activities, of the most advanced economies, are widely distributed in the population.
- Behaviors once on the periphery: social motivations, cooperation, etc. are core
Commons-based production - production without exclusion from inputs or outputs. Authority to act where capacity to act resides - at the edges.
Peer production & sharing - a lot of what we value on the web is done by individuals, without price signals or managerial commans. Sharing material resources - distributed computing, wireless mesh networks, distributed storage.
Four transactional frameworks
Market vs. Non-market; centralized vs. decentralized
new competitors and new opportunities - including platforms for self-expression and collaboration. Surfers - stuff will flow out of connected human beings - inputs into production. Example of IBM's linux-based services earning far more revenue than licensing its patents.
Social production -
A real fact not a fad - the ctiical long term shift caused by the internet
- in some context more efficient than markets or firms
- sustainable and growing fast
- but a threat to incumbent businesses
at level of infrastructure and content we're seeing a battle - law has largely allowed enclosure. What's pushing back is largely market adoption as well as the development of social practices of sharing and cooperation embedded in political engagement. We continue to see tightening of IP, but only through judges, who are largely looking at the past.
The University as Subsystem
A society's knowledge production system includes multipe subsystems - mass media markets, government, gossip/superstition, religion
The university has characteristics: relatively high autonomy, distinctiveness, remove, and self-reference
- high intensity communication
- narrative of commitment to a set of values of inquiry conversation critique and peer review
- perhaps not perfect, but still exerts a direct force on the knowledge production system as a whole.
Spatial and institutional remove - the campus plays a role in structure conversation and exchange as distinctly removed. A distinct kind of conversation in which there are certain ways to behave. Should we continue to retain this coherence? How do we do it when spatial remove is impossible. He doesn't tell his student not to do email while he's talking - he assumes they do it.
Opportunities and challenges of networked environment
- greater efficacy of nonmarket action - the cost of being effective has declined. as organizations universities can do more; touch more people. By individuals within the university,, with relatively more time than average.
Use fund raising capabilities, talent, and organizational form to provide knowledge tools and platforms for society at large. ibiblio, MIT open courseware, etc as examples. Universities also a center for connectivity.
University / individuals - number of participants in open software who are students or faculty in universities is very large.
Pper production and education - learning objects; textbooks (primitive at present); learning by doing in the world - students can engage - can we bridge the outside with the inside; collaborative authorship; identity formation (MySpace?); immersive learning environments. Some research (Charlie Nesson) finds some find it easier to speak up in second life; peer production and research - large scale collaboration across organizational boundaries (e.g. HapMap); open scientific publication - self-archiving; filtering and search; institutional repositories; distributed computing - folding@home, fightAIDs@home, etc.
Permeability - A system with sufficient coherence and "inness" to be a system; and a sufficiently permeable boundary to be part of the network as a whole. Sufficient openness to enable participation: cross-institutional research and education, access to data, resources, platforms across institutions; non-institutional efforts - volunteering as practice-based education
Creativity and control - creativity in the networked environment comes from locating capacity and authority to act at the edges - this is in the process of being a generalized understanding in high tech industries. That's where the observation and solution of issues can be undestood. The more you try to control (separate authority to act from capacity to act) the more you lose the ability to learn in the system.
Parallel claims in favor of end-to-end design principal, with loose, late-binding design. Freedom, looseness, creativity leads to uncertainty and risk. When you send creativity to the edges you increase the number of possible actions, and increase complexity.
Resist urges and pressures to control - experimentation with data, video, music. The urge to control is overwhelming.
The two major security threats - the nincompoops and the bad actors. Important to constrain the nincompoops at the edges, not to constrain the masses in the process. Misbehavior should not be solved by technology, but by disciplinary systems. Misbehavior is a n educational opportunity; people exist in multiple overlapping systems; no single system need solve all problems; technical systems lack transparency of the disciplinary choice andover-regulate users
Designing for cooperation - significant literature in organizational sociology, experimental economics, field studies in political science, etc. Designed to challenge selfish rational actor model; can provide a basis for synthesizing design levers for cooperation. Working on designing for cooperation. What people want to do depends on their relationships - communication is central in how people work. Metastudy of game theory - shows that if you allow people to communicate in any way before, cooperation rises by 50%. Humanization is important. Trust construction - not the output of a system, but as an input - I trust this person to act in ways that are cooperative with me. Norm creation, transparency, monitoring, fairness is important in terms of outcomes and processes, as an input to make system work.
Anonymity is not good for cooperation.
If you impose discipline you crowd out trust.
Wrap up -= the networked information economy creates new opportunities for the university; the university can find new ways to be more effective internally as an educational and research institute.
There was some good discussion during the follow-on panel. I couldn't blog it because I was a panel participant, but I've got some notes that I'll post later, along with the comments I made.
Technorati Tags: ecar, ecar-2007-summer, political-economy, benkler
Richard Katz kicks off the symposium. He asks whether we in higher-ed are incrementally improving the state of the world just in time to fall off the edge of the cliff?
The Educause executive team perceived that there is a vision gap in higher-ed IT - something is changing - how do these changes need to be internalized by those of us responsible for higher-ed IT, so higher-ed extends its footprint and reach?
Rising competition - for talend (elite students and faculty), for resources (federal budget deficit, rising welfare costs, etc), fast growing for-profit sector, privatization of research. China now has a positive balance of surplus with Maylasia in higher-ed already.
Declining Affordability of education.
Changing students and parents - changing mores about information ownership, access and privacy; both "net gen" and those needing remediation. An increasing gap in how students present themselves and the culture of higher education. Students and parents increasingly view higher-ed as a consumer good. Students come to us and face a medieval academy with antiquated methods and practices. How do we interact with them and adapt our culture, systems, and techniques?
New accent on sustainability - greening of services; stewardship and resuse of hardware, software, tools, instruments, and data.
Changing political economy
Technology challenges - incredible complexity - how do we create resilient systems? The impact of Web 2.0 is important - lots of interesting and important stuff going on there. Talking to young people about information technology is like asking fish about water.
Changing tower, expanding cloud - A real transformation underway in higher education? physical or virtual; high cost physical plant or low cost; academic calendar or 7x24x365; academic oligopoly vs. algorithmic populism; fee for service business model vs. variety of models; bundled offering vs. extreme unbundling
history of institutionalization - in early Europe students banded together and pooled their resources to bring faculty to teach. Itinerant scholars roving the countryside, trying to prove their worth. How long will it be before we see this kind of activity in Second Life and Wikipedia? At some time we may lose our oligopoly on accreditation. It's not so good to be a monk anymore - or Britannica!
Questions to consider:
- Is a real transformation underway?
- IF so, can we trace some of the principal vectors of change?
- How might our institutions be affectex?
- What do our institutions need to consider to benefit from new opportunities, or to mitigate new risks?
- What must we in IT do to facilitate the needed changes?
I'll be off to Boulder on Monday for the ECAR Summer Symposium.
Richard Katz has put together a terrific program on the theme of "The Tower and the Cloud":
Plato’s Academy was a marketplace of ideas with little or no intervening infrastructure or institutional bureaucracy. Even writing had no place in the Academy, as it was thought to get in the way of the direct exchange of ideas among academicians. Beginning in the 12th century in Europe, higher education was discharged in universities—gated groves where students and professors lived and studied in a close, apprentice-master relationship. Over time, universities grew to become “multiversities” in the 20th century: learning centers that hosted not only learning and research, but the full range of services such as housing, food service, entertainment, grounds maintenance, waste management, and so on. This is a history of institutionalization.
The Internet is challenging the power and authority of all institutions. The blogosphere, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, and other developments are eroding the institutions’ authority and markets. Blogging and podcasting are disrupting traditional news media. Wikipedia is challenging encyclopedias. The Google Library and others are redefining the institutional library. Synthetic worlds such as Second Life create the potential to redefine learning space. Virtual markets such as InnoCentive aggregate research talent and reward scientific innovation through financial incentives, and they may reshape the landscape of research. The network is empowering individuals by linking them to one another, to information, and to a wide variety of resources. At the same time, the network has the potential to disempower institutions and to destabilize financial and labor markets. Open content and new Web revenue streams are simultaneously empowering the individual and facilitating the corporatization of services formally financed as public services, such as the library.
This Symposium will look at the question of how higher education institutions (The Tower) may interoperate with the emerging network-based business and social paradigm (The Cloud).
I'm particularly excited to be on a panel that will discuss a talk by Yochai Benkler titled Education, Collaboration, and the Networked Information Commons. I've been reading Benkler's influential book The Wealth of Networks, and I'm really looking forward to the opportunity to hear him apply his work on peer production of knowledge to the academic enterprise, and to get to chat with him about it in person.
Technorati Tags: ECAR-2007-Summer, economics, meetings
There's a good article by Michael Sampson in the new issue of Messaging News (pdf file) (you knew such a magazine had to exist, didn't you?) titled Calendaring - Why Isn't It Just Like Email?
I particularly like the way Michael quotes Scott Mace to frame the issues:
“In 1997 I wrote an article for InfoWorld on the poor state of calendaring
interoperability,” recalls Scott Mace, currently a freelance author and blogger at Calendar Swamp.
“When I reviewed the situation again in 2005, I was horrified to discover we hadn’t come very far.
We still face the same problems today we did then.”
I'm mentioned in an inconsequential quote, but that's not why you should read the article. You should read it for the way it lays out the current set of issues and products and the work going on in the calendaring space.
Technorati Tags: calendaring
A few months ago Tom Lewis turned me on to the great concerts available for streaming at Wolfgang's Vault, many of which come from the Bill Graham's vault of treasures. Lots of great stuff from the sixties, seventies, and onwards. Now they've also made some of those concert audios available for purchase, in unprotected mp3 files. Today I bought a fabulous 1974 Ry Cooder session with Jim Dickinson on bass and Jim Keltner on drums. Worth checking out!
Technorati Tags: music
I've been going back and forth between using Bloglines and Google Reader for reading my endlessly growing list of feeds. I had just decided that overall I preferred Bloglines, when Terry pointed out yesterday that Google has added offline access to Reader, using its new Google Gears technology, a browser extension that allows web applications to offer offline functionality.
That solves one problem, which is how to catch up on my feeds while I'm in places (like airplanes) where I have some time and no connectivity. This may, of course, be a transient phase along the road to truly pervasive network access.
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Technorati Tags: google, web-development
