Induction Week

A strange mixture of feelings.

It's odd to be studying at postgraduate level again when all I've done in recent decades is have babies & potter about at level 1 & 2 doing hobby courses & now suddenly I have to be all grown up & serious. Heck, I wasn't much more than a kid myself last time I did anything like this!

Apprehension & a sense of inadequacy creeping in when I read my fellow students' intros & the throwaway line in the induction materials that suggests most people will be coming to this course after other MA modules, ready-equipped with a sound knowledge of learning theory.

Doubts as to whether I'll have time to do justice to such a rich course when my working life has just become impossibly busy.

Tried to kill two birds with one stone by putting some of the day's frustrations into a response to my first tutorial activity, replying to a fellow student's reflections on the effects of connectivity on learning organisations:

Having spent much of today troubleshooting the messes that can arise when various sections of a supposedly connected organisation fail to communicate effectively with each other, I share your ambivalence. It seems to me that connectivity alone isn't enough; there needs to be co-ordination, too. Distributed knowledge can mean we each hold our own little portion of knowledge & the big picture is lost.

I'm not really as cynical as this message makes me sound, just more keenly aware of possible dysfunctionality today than usual.

I've started, so I'll finish!

We have lift-off!

& so the journey begins :-)

In defence of Wikipedia

Now that the excitement over Wikipedia's removal of an inaccurate story has died down, some timely turn-of-year reflections...

The BBC's columnist Bill Thompson already attacked the hysteria evident on both sides of the debate & drew attention to the coincidentally published Nature report that found Wikipedia's scientific accuracy to be on a par with that of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The latest edition of David Weinberger's JOHO newsletter offers a witty critique of the misinformation circulated about the episode by conventional media, who see their monolpoly on knowledge threatened by this snotty little upstart. He relishes the irony of newspapers misreporting the measures taken by Wikipedia to improve the trustworthiness of their material, but also makes the more serious point that conventional media have been wrong-footed by a shift in the nature of knowledge itself:

The media literally can't hear that humility, which reflects accurately the fluid and uneven quality of Wikipedia. The media amplifying our general cultural assumptions have come to expect knowledge to be coupled with arrogance
(...) The media have a cognitive problem with a publisher of knowledge that modestly does not claim perfect reliability, does not back up that claim through a chain of credentialed individuals, and that does not believe the best way to assure the quality of knowledge is by disciplining individuals for their failures
(...)With Wikipedia, the balance of knowing shifts from the individual to the social process.

He makes illuminating points about the way "identity" works in such ventures, too.

Structured blogging (again)

David Weinberger's provisional reactions to structured blogging are pretty non-committal ("interesting and could be important") but I think he captures one issue precisely, when he says:

the success of structured blogging depends on how easy it is for bloggers and how appealing the benefits are

I followed up a few links, to see whether my own negative reactions were shared by other commentators. Here's a sample of quotes I came up with.

Charlie Wood's Moonwatcher
Structured blogging in the enterprise

While having different forms for different kinds of content may sound complex to a TypePad or Blogger user, it's been the way users have interacted with enterprise content management systems like Stellent and Vignette for a decade.

Highly informative, as it told me more about how structured blogging is supposed to work - not an overall tagging system, but a set of forms you need only use if you're making a particular type of post & choose to have it, as it were, indexable. That certainly makes the idea sound less threatening, even if the hackles do rise again immediately on realising its "enterprise" origins & suspecting a major use may be for targetted advertising...

Frank Gilbane's Gilbane Report Blog
Structured Blogging - Enterprise Only?

winning the hearts of bloggers will not be easy. It will be far easier to do in the context of enterprise applications, but the difficulty should not be underestimated. I am a fan of structured blogging and authoring in general, but the concerns being raised are real.

Recognition that the main obstacle may be emotional rather than intellectual/rational... & again the acknowledgement that this may be an innovation that serves the needs of business first.

Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed
Structured Blogging Will Flop

Darn it all, techno utopians are so cute. Nevertheless, structured blogging, the over-ballyhooed idea that people will post to their blogs using different forms depending on what they're posting is going to be a flop.
Its the usual three reasons I trot out repeatedly to technologists with utopian visions who want to change the world on the back of altered user behavior:

1. People are lazy


2. People are lazy


3. People are lazy

There is simply not enough benefit to the average blogger to compensate for the added irritation of having to pull up a separate form for each type of content you post.

A differently slanted synicism, but one it's hard to refute.

Stowe Boyd's Corante
Structured Blogging versus Messy, Messy, Messy

My bet is that Structured Blogging will fail, not because people wouldn't like some of the consequences -- such as an easy way to compare blog posts about concrete things like record reviews, and so on -- but because of the inherent, and wonderful messiness of the world of blogging.
Because blog posts don't have to conform to any structural standards, they can be used to do anything: nothing is out of bounds, because we haven't created the boundaries. The messiness of the world we are living in is one of the reasons that it is such a rich and rewarding experience.

That's the criticism I was groping clumsily towards in my previous post.

I haven't completely changed my mind, but I'm starting to see that educational blogging (OK, all blogging is educational - I should probably say 'blogging as a deliberate educational tool') could benefit from the structuring initiatives. After all, there's a point when organic messiness has to give way to structured writing for assessment purposes (OK, we might deplore that, but l don't feel inclined to take on the entire western academic system this afternoon). So, if I can insist that my students conform to certain structuring conventions when they offer work for assessment, maybe the sky won't fall in if similar structuring conventions are offered (not imposed) in blogging.

Oh, & I'm not unaware of the irony involved in using w.bloggar to format this post, insert hyperlinks & so on!