Tag Archives: networking

What is the place of networking and collaboration in online learning?

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Textual productivity →

The the­sis of Steven Johnson’s lec­ture, The Glass Box And The Com­mon­place Book is that a sin­gle piece of infor­ma­tion that is designed to flow through an entire ecosys­tem of news will cre­ate more value than a piece of infor­ma­tion sealed up in a glass box. He calls this the “tex­tual pro­duc­tiv­ity” of the ecosys­tem, and it may be the sin­gle most impor­tant fact about the Web’s growth in the last fif­teen years:

Think about it this way: let’s say it’s 1995, and you are cul­ti­vat­ing a page of “hot links” to inter­est­ing dis­cov­er­ies on the Web. You find an arti­cle about a Colum­bia jour­nal­ism lec­ture and you link to it on your page. The infor­ma­tion value you have cre­ated is use­ful exclu­sively to two groups: peo­ple inter­ested in jour­nal­ism who hap­pen to visit your page, and the peo­ple main­tain­ing the Colum­bia page, who ben­e­fit from the increased traf­fic. Fast for­ward to 2010, and you check-in at Foursquare for this lec­ture tonight, and tweet a link to a descrip­tion of the talk. What hap­pens to that infor­ma­tion? For starters, it goes out to friends of yours, and into your twit­ter feed, and into Google’s index. The geo-data embed­ded in the link alerts local busi­nesses who can offer your pro­mo­tions through foursquare; the link to the talk helps Google build its index of the web, which then attracts adver­tis­ers inter­ested in your loca­tion or the topic of jour­nal­ism itself. Because that tiny lit­tle snip­pet of infor­ma­tion is free to make new con­nec­tions, by check­ing in here you are help­ing your friends fig­ure out what to do tonight; you’re help­ing the Jour­nal­ism school in pro­mot­ing this venue; you’re help­ing the bar across Broad­way attract more cus­tomers, you’re help­ing Google orga­nize the web; you’re help­ing peo­ple search­ing google for infor­ma­tion about jour­nal­ism; you’re help­ing jour­nal­ism schools adver­tis­ing on Google to attract new stu­dents. Not bad for 140 characters.

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The internet is not an echo chamber →

Democ­racy works best when citizen’s are well-informed. The inter­net can either expose us to diverse views that chal­lenge our pre-existing ones, or it can offer end­less affir­ma­tion that the views we hold are the accu­rate ones. In 2001, Cass Sun­stein warned that spe­cial­iza­tion and frag­men­ta­tion char­ac­ter­is­tic of the inter­net favoured the lat­ter and threat­ened democracy:

If the pub­lic is balka­nized, and if dif­fer­ent groups design their own pre­ferred com­mu­ni­ca­tions pack­ages, the con­se­quence will be fur­ther balka­niza­tion, as group mem­bers move one another toward more extreme points in line with their ini­tial ten­den­cies. At the same time, dif­fer­ent delib­er­at­ing groups, each con­sist­ing of like-minded peo­ple, will be dri­ven increas­ingly far apart, sim­ply because most of their dis­cus­sions are with one another.

Yet, nearly ten years later, David Brooks points to new research sug­gest­ing that news con­sump­tion online is far from per­fectly seg­re­gated. Using method­olo­gies sim­i­lar to those used to iden­tify racial seg­re­ga­tion, researchers Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro tracked how peo­ple of dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal views move around the Web. Their main find­ing is that inter­net users do not stay within their com­mu­ni­ties; rather they spend their time on a few giant sites that serve polit­i­cally inte­grated audi­ences, like Yahoo News. Fur­ther­more, they found that the inter­net is actu­ally more ide­o­log­i­cally inte­grated than old-fashioned face-to-face inter­ac­tions in our work­place and neigh­bour­hoods. If democ­racy is being threat­ened — and it is — it seems that the inter­net is prob­a­bly not the culprit.

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Vaccines, The Lancet retraction and open scientific debate →

Last week, the promi­nent British med­ical jour­nal The Lancet for­mally retracted a deeply flawed 1998 study that linked child­hood measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vac­cine to autism. Despite a wealth of research that con­cludes there is no link, a decade of anti-vaccine sen­ti­ment is prov­ing more dif­fi­cult to retract. In an inter­view for On The Media, The Lancet’s edi­tor Dr. Richard Hor­ton weighs in on the state of open sci­en­tific debate:

We used to think that we could pub­lish spec­u­la­tive research which advanced inter­est­ing new ideas which may be wrong, but which were impor­tant to pro­voke debate and dis­cus­sion. We don’t think that now. We don’t seem able to have a ratio­nal con­ver­sa­tion in the pub­lic space about dif­fi­cult con­tro­ver­sial issues with­out peo­ple draw­ing a con­clu­sion which could be very averse.…The 19th-century days where you could sit in the salon at the Royal Soci­ety and have a pri­vate con­ver­sa­tion amongst your fel­lows just doesn’t exist any­more. So I think yeah, too much infor­ma­tion in this par­tic­u­lar case is a bad thing, which seems to go against every kind of demo­c­ra­tic prin­ci­ple that we believe in. But in the case of sci­ence, it seems to be true.

But it is not. I can’t help but won­der if we had had this con­ver­sa­tion, in pub­lic, ten years ago when the study was still “spec­u­la­tive research” we may well have averted the flawed deci­sion to pub­lish it in the first place. We need more infor­ma­tion, not less, and more inclu­sive con­ver­sa­tions, not nar­rowly con­fined to the med­ical com­mu­nity. The pub­lic may well have to engage the med­ical com­mu­nity in the pub­lic space “dif­fi­cult con­ver­sa­tions with­out draw­ing a con­clu­sion that could be very averse…”

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Telling a history of the world with objects →

This past week I’ve been tak­ing A His­tory of the World in 100 Objects for a spin in my mp3 player. It is an extra­or­di­nary, inspir­ing, and slightly crazy British Muse­umm/BBC co-production based on the belief that objects can open up news ways of under­stand­ing two mil­lion years of human his­tory. It revolves around a series of 15 minute radio spots that take one arte­fact, tell its story about the peo­ple who made it, and tell new sto­ries rein­ter­preted by sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions. I’m at episode four, and the nar­ra­tives are grip­ping. The plot emerg­ing is not the his­tory of any one nation or peo­ple, but rather of the inter­con­nec­tions and com­mon ground they all share. Amartya Sen explains this in the first episode:

I think what is really very impor­tant to rec­og­nize is that, when we look at the his­tory of the world, we’re not look­ing at the his­tory of dif­fer­ent civ­i­liza­tions trun­cated and sep­a­rated from each other. They’ve a huge amount of con­tact with each other, there is a kind of inter-connectedness. So I’ve always felt, not to think of the his­tory of the world as a his­tory of civ­i­liza­tions, but as a his­tory of world civ­i­liza­tions evolv­ing in often sim­i­lar, often diverse ways, always inter­act­ing with each other. And this is a very dif­fer­ent view from the clash of civ­i­liza­tions to which we were exposed some years ago, as a way to under­stand enmity in the world. Enmity has not been the gen­eral con­di­tion of the rela­tion­ship between peo­ple across the world in history.

The pro­gramme is fully socially medi­ated, both online and offline with regional museum pro­grams; it will be inter­est­ing to see if the sto­ries sus­tain the momen­tum gen­er­ated in these first episodes.

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Democratic, but dangerous too: how the web changed our world →

What will our planet look like when we are all truly and well-connected? In her speech on inter­net free­dom at the New­seum in Wash­ing­ton last Thurs­day, Hilary Clin­ton declared that inter­net users must be “assured cer­tain basic freedoms” – freedom of expres­sion and of wor­ship, free­dom from want and from fear and, most intrigu­ingly, “free­dom to con­nect”. In sharp con­trast, we have the author­i­tar­ian approaches of coun­tries like China, Iran and Egypt, an over­whelm­ing com­mer­cial web that exploits the vast trails of per­sonal infor­ma­tion we leave behind, and the nar­row­ing prospects of infor­ma­tion we may wish to see when these inter­ests serve up what they think we want to see. Aleks Kro­to­ski looks at the social and psy­cho­log­i­cal impli­ca­tions of con­nect­ing and con­cludes that our rela­tion­ship with the web is a syn­ergy. “… as it draws us into its net­works and its hyper­links, we will shape them in our global image.” It is the most rev­o­lu­tion­ary evo­lu­tion that we have ever par­tic­i­pated in:

…who we are on the web is sim­ply a reflec­tion of who we already are offline. We project hier­ar­chi­cal sys­tems into the vir­tual world. We extend our inter­ests and make them hap­pen using the tools the web pro­vides. We seek out things that make us feel good about our­selves. The web is a mir­ror, and we have to face it in con­fi­dence, warts and all.

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On Teasing and Playful Provocation →

Sur­vival of the fittest is often mis­in­ter­preted to mean sur­vival of the most cut­throat. But fit­ness means so much more than that. In this inter­view, Dacher Kelt­ner points out that kind­ness, play, gen­eros­ity, rev­er­ence and self-sacrifice are also vital to the tasks of evo­lu­tion. And so is teas­ing, which sur­prised me because we tend to be against teas­ing of any sort in our schools and work­places. Kelt­ner calls teas­ing the art of play­ful provo­ca­tion and sug­gests that we use our play­ful voices and bod­ies to pro­voke oth­ers to avoid inap­pro­pri­ate behaviours:

Teas­ing (in the right way, which is what most peo­ple do) … is a way to play and express affec­tion. It is a way of nego­ti­at­ing con­flicts at work and in the fam­ily. Teas­ing exchanges teach chil­dren how to use their voices in innu­mer­able ways — such an impor­tant medium of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In teas­ing, chil­dren learn bound­aries between harm and play. And chil­dren learn empa­thy in teas­ing, and how to appre­ci­ate oth­ers’ feel­ings (for exam­ple, in going too far). And in teas­ing we have fun. All of this ben­e­fit is accom­plished in this remark­able modal­ity of play.

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In the Ants’ Footsteps →

For those who rarely give ants a sec­ond thought, Tim Flan­nery offers imme­di­ate rel­e­vance for any­one inter­ested in the trends now shap­ing our own soci­eties. In his book review of Super­or­gan­ism, he points to the strik­ing par­al­lels between the progress of human evo­lu­tion and the progress of ants some ten mil­lion years earlier:

Begin­ning as sim­ple hunter-gatherers, some ants have learned to herd and milk bugs, just as we milk cat­tle and sheep. There are ants that take slaves, ants that lay their eggs in the nests of for­eign ants … leav­ing the upbring­ing of their young to oth­ers, and there are even ants that have dis­cov­ered agri­cul­ture .… One can hardly help but admire the intel­li­gence of the ant colony, yet theirs is an intel­li­gence of a very par­tic­u­lar kind. Noth­ing in the brain of a worker ant rep­re­sents a blue­print of the social order,Holl­dobler and Wil­son tell us, and there is no over­seer or brain caste that car­ries such a mas­ter plan in its head. Instead, the ants have dis­cov­ered how to cre­ate strength from weak­ness, by pool­ing their indi­vid­u­ally lim­ited capac­i­ties into a col­lec­tive decision-making sys­tem that bears an uncanny resem­blance to our own demo­c­ra­tic processes.

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The Cost of Fearing Strangers →

So which would scare you more: an Amer­i­can Mus­lim fam­ily you knew noth­ing about or the guy from your church who had just gone through a divorce? You would prob­a­bly get this wrong; most of us are ter­ri­ble at risk assess­ment. Stephen J. Dub­ner on why the things we fear the most are sim­ply irra­tional:

Why do we fear the unknown more than the known? That’s a larger ques­tion than I can answer here (not that I’m capa­ble any­way), but it prob­a­bly has to do with the heuris­tics — the short­cut guesses — our brains use to solve prob­lems, and the fact that these heuris­tics rely on the infor­ma­tion already stored in our mem­o­ries.
And what gets stored away? Anom­alies — the big, rare, “black swan” events that are so dra­matic, so unpre­dictable, and per­haps world-changing, that they imprint them­selves on our mem­o­ries and con us into think­ing of them as typ­i­cal, or at least likely, whereas in fact they are extra­or­di­nar­ily rare.

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Google’s Gatekeepers →

A sober­ing piece by law pro­fes­sor Jef­frey Rosen about the crit­i­cal and reluc­tant role that Google’s cor­po­rate gate­keep­ers play in decid­ing what we can and can­not see as it nav­i­gates the ter­ri­tory between pro­vid­ing neu­tral plat­form for free speech and a com­pany in the media and adver­tis­ing business:

“Right now, we’re trust­ing Google because it’s good, but of course, we run the risk that the day will come when Google goes bad,” [law pro­fes­sor Tim] Wu told me. In his view, that day might come when Google allowed its auto­mated Web crawlers, or search bots, to be used for law-enforcement and national-security pur­poses. “Under pres­sure to fight ter­ror­ism or to pacify repres­sive gov­ern­ments, Google could track every­thing we’ve searched for, every­thing we’re writ­ing on gmail, every­thing we’re writ­ing on Google docs, to fig­ure out who we are and what we do,” he said. “It would make the Inter­net a much scarier place for free expres­sion.” The ques­tion of free speech online isn’t just about what a com­pany like Google lets us read or see; it’s also about what it does with what we write, search and view.

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Social Networks and Happiness →

It seems to be the case, online as well as offline, that when you smile, the world smiles with you:

We found that social net­works have clus­ters of happy and unhappy peo­ple within them that reach out to three degrees of sep­a­ra­tion. A person’s hap­pi­ness is related to the hap­pi­ness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends — that is, to peo­ple well beyond their social hori­zon. We found that happy peo­ple tend to be located in the cen­ter of their social net­works and to be located in large clus­ters of other happy peo­ple. And we found that each addi­tional happy friend increases a person’s prob­a­bil­ity of being happy by about 9%.

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