guydm's blog

We are the Machine...

guydm — Mon, 5 Feb 2007 10:19:01 -0700

This video is an excellent representation of Web 2.0 (and all that that implies). True, it may be helpful if one already has a fairly good idea of the message that is being conveyed. No matter though, the premise, imaging, pace, and content all work together to create a thing of beauty and power.

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

Created by Michael Wesch, an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. The style is unique and exactly relevant. The message is powerful and important. My favorite vocabulary builder from this piece, "digital ethnography." Nice spin. This term is shared by the faculty/student working group at KSU where Professor Wesch works "organizing massive teams of K-State students into global citizens working for a better tomorrow."

Gannett, Crowdsourcing = Information Centers

guydm — Sat, 4 Nov 2006 10:39:07 -0700

These comments are cross-posted in dotguy

Gannett, one of the world's largest news organizations, is restructuring their newsrooms across the country to incorporate 'new media' approaches that maximize on the positive sum gains achieved through collective intelligence. This new strategy is built around the notion of crowdsourcing. Gannett terms this new organizational approach as "Information Centers" and the new structure includes a series of redefined departments: Public Service, Digital, Data, Community Conversation, Local, Custom Content, and Multimedia. The transformation reflects a reversal in the top-down, one-to-many approach of traditional media, shifting to a many-to-many model in both the gathering and distribution of new and information. The announcement was made earlier this week in a memo from Gannett CEO, Craig Dubow:

What is it? The Information Center is a way to gather and disseminate news and information across all platforms, 24/7. The Information Center will let us gather the very local news and information that customers want, then distribute it when, where and how our customers seek it. It is the essence of our Vision and Mission and a key element of our Strategic Plan. The Information Center, frankly, is the newsroom of the future. It will fulfill today's needs for a more flexible, broader-based approach to the information gathering process. And it will be platform agnostic: News and information will be delivered to the right media - be it newspapers, online, mobile, video or ones not yet invented - at the right time. Our customers will decide which they prefer.

More information and detail is available at Wired News and at a copy of the original memo is posted on Crowdsourcing.com

Knowledge: 'Creation' or 'Discovery'

guydm — Mon, 2 Oct 2006 12:44:48 -0700

These comments are cross-posted in dotguy

Is knowledge 'created' or is knowledge 'discovered'?

Until most recently I considered this merely a point of semantics. I used to stand firmly in the 'knowledge is created' camp. And I think mostly I still do.

With respect to the role that information technology has in the process of creation, we first articulated that during the days of preaching the gospel of the Net, in teaching that the Connection to Information, enhanced by Communication, led to the creation of Knowledge. Today, that process might be further refined by the addition of 'Collaboration' somewhere in the chain, perhaps between Communication and Knowledge. Again, for my money and reality, this seems to be a fairly solid approach, however, recently I came upon a reference to Jorge Luis Borges' "Library of Babel" that certainly lends some credence to the 'knowledge is discovered' camp, if only from a philosophical standpoint. And as we draw the continuum and historical timeline of the evolution of the Learning Platform at ASU, I think perhaps this is a notion that we may want to further consider and include.

The role that technology plays in the creation and discovery of knowledge is evolving. Communication technology has historically been merely a vehicle of transmission, enabling messages and knowledge to be transferred from one source to another, where individual and isolated reflection and contemplation eventually led to the creation of new knowledge through inductive and deductive reasoning. Presently, the value of technologically enhanced communication is emerging as a powerful medium of collaboration and discovery, enabling synergistic relationships of knowledge creation to form and evolve rapidly and without bounds of time or distance. Dynamic collaboration, enhanced and enabled by new communication technologies, that reach across multiple disciplines, nations, and cultures, foster the exchange of ideas, principals, theories, and knowledge rapidly and on an ever increasing scale. New knowledge is being created faster and in greater volumes today, than in any previous time in history. The pace and volume continue to increase exponentially.

Today, technology plays a critical role in enabling us to create new knowledge. Additionally, technology is also becoming increasingly necessary as a means of merely navigating through the vast quantities of knowledge that we collectively create. As we extract each individual volume from the "Library of Babel" and place it in our own collection of knowledge, the difference between that which is known and the unknown becomes ever smaller. At some point, the quantity of what is known becomes so great as to represent a whole new frontier of unknown for the generations that follow. New tools and new technologies will need to evolve to both store and sort knowledge for current generations, but also to preserve it and present it for the future. The relationship between creation and discovery, and the role that technology has in the processes of each is an ever evolving entity, and each have bearing on the notions of teaching, learning, and research today and tomorrow.

Past: Technology/Media used in the Transmission/Transfer of Knowledge (Print, Theater, Film, Radio, Television, Internet 1.0)
Emerging Present:</strong> Technology as a Facilitating/Enabling Medium in the Collaborative Knowledge Creation process (Digial Asset "Knowledge" remixes, Web 2.x, Ubiquitious Connectivity)
Possible Future:</strong> Technology as a Guide through the vast Library of Babel (Genetic Algorithms, Google Wetware, etc.)