Friday, June 01, 2007
(Apologies for the font weirdness and other stuff; it's the result of lots of cutting and pasting, as well as Blogger's wonky WYSIWYG editor).
This is the home stretch, the wrap-up, followed by David Weinberger's keynote (the one I'm most excited about).
While waiting for everyone to get seated (we're twelve minutes behind), I'll talk about the late-afternoon snacks, which included granola bars, fruit, and more coffee. The last is the important one.
One weird annoyance: the feedback forms are paper-only. To quote my much-more-prudish-than-me daughter, What the Hamster? For those of us with awful handwriting (and a likely precursor to arthritis that makes writing ten paragraphs of responses painful), web surveys are a blessing. And at a tech conference, why not have it online, where it can easily be analyzed and shared?
Anyway, Karim Lakhani is handing the wrapup:
Wikipedia on VA Tech shootings serving as a clearinghouse for info: Knowledge Beyond Authority.
University: Producers of Knowledge, Consumer of Knowledge, Repository of Knowledge, Transmitters of Knowledge. But Internet blurs producers, consumers, storage, transmission.
University has monopoly over certifying knowledge workers, structure of authority over the knowledge.
De facto, Knowledge Beyond Authority is a challenge to the university (my editorial addition: Only to those universities that put all their eggs in the knowledge certification basket -- the universities that will thrive are the ones that share knowledge and work to make the world better as a whole).
(ETA: Someone in the audience notes that it should be "Knowledge Expands Authority," and that universities need to recognize that or fall behind. David Weinberger just agreed that PhDs don't prove anything. Shades of Heinlein's Number of the Beast.)
Lakhani is now looking for issues from the "how to deal with the RIAA" workshop. Apparently there was a lot of contention there. What a shock. :-) Most seem to stand against the university as police. Some counter-claims note that universities do hold responsibilities when it comes to teaching ethics
One audience member: "Primary goal of guilds is to exclude." Notes that at the extreme (medical degrees) those without degrees who profess knowledge can go to jail. The Academy, as a whole, is practicing a form of protectionism here.
Lakhani seems to be on the same page, simply noting that it'll take small steps for Harvard (whereas MIT takes big steps -- difference in culture).
Lakhani was at MIT during Opencourseware launch. Backstory: Harvard and others were offering course info online to make money, and MIT was late to the game. MIT saw a potential "hack" to the system in simply giving it away for free, thus undercutting Harvard and others. There are more than 150 schools now developing opencourseware, but only 12 or so in the US. One barrier (noted by a UMASS-Boston guy) is that cash-strapped universities need to sell their online courses, and can't afford the investment involved in opencourseware (the educational equivelent of "you've got to have money to make money.").
Someone notes that OpenCourseware is just another form of publishing (sharing knowledge with the world). But that requires universities to accept it as such.
Workshop summaries: Hunger for change is the major theme:
Policy-level change:
Broader University Mission
Access to Knowledge
Copyright to Copyleft
Clarity on Policy
Who is Responsible?
Public/Private/Non-Profit
Technological Changes
Open up infrastructure
Standardization of data
Build and use tech to achieve goals
KBA?
Leaky Technologies
(all of the tech changes stuff above has simply been posted on the projector, without any comment or explanation).
(Lots of this stuff plays into the semantic web).
"Libraries are infrastructure for R&D and knowledge."
Economic Changes
Business Models for Universities
Business Models for Companies
Emergence of hybrid Forms
Who pays?
Is there a free lunch.
"Who Pays" is the big one, of course (Wikipedia keeps seeking donations, etc). See, though, the idea that OpenCourseware has only enhanced MIT's reputation and success.
One note -- Wikipedia gets the donations from their readers. And other projects are also driven by demand -- folks are willing to give small amounts of money and large amounts of time to projects they support.
Social Changes
How to distribute knowledge and authority?
Expertise vs broad participation
Top-down vs bottom-up social systems
Cash between digital natives, immigrants, and luddites.
Personally, I want to see this last one represented in a Starcraft-like setting. The Protoss could be the digital natives, the Terrans the digital immigrants, and the Zerg are clearly the luddites.
Time for the final event: the closing keynote!
David's speaking now, and is engaging as always.
Key points:
Idea of knowledge is out of whack with how knowledge actually works (again, PhD is an example, as the best and brightest often lack degrees). Authorities never did have authority, from a knowledge point of view.
Other assumptions:
"Belief is a mental state"
There is no plural for "knowledge." And the state of it is binary (if something is true, all else much be false)
Gatekeepers of knowledge (publishers, universities) deserve to be gatekeepers.
Real world (a book is an object, it cannot exist in two places, etc) has artificially set our limitations on knowledge. We need to recognize that knowledge doesn't have these limitations (online storage, etc).
"Knowledge is conversational"
(Example: Listservs, wikipedia*, etc -- users earn authoritative currency by demonstrating authority, regardless of credentials) Knowledge is in the shared conversation, not the individuals who share it.
Knowledge is important as potential -- more important to get a post out there, which will then let others correct it, modify it, dispute it, etc. Getting it out there and getting it linked are what matter. An inaccurate post that gets corrected and dissected and read and linked has properly increased the overall base knowledge.
"Authority becomes metadata"
Still need to reduce size of metadata -- if you make the card catalog as big as the book, its not accomplishing much. Same concept applies online.
Looking forward: Important to be unrealistic every one in a while. We're at a crossroads on the web (politically), but the University is the bastion of openness, and the web is capable of serving as the tool of openness that Universities employ. Universities need to be the driving force here, and we need to be optimists about the state of things.
Time to head out. Great closing speech, and damned useful conference!
*He explicitly said that he's sick of using Wikipedia as an example, but it's still the obvious one.
is2k7
This is the home stretch, the wrap-up, followed by David Weinberger's keynote (the one I'm most excited about).
While waiting for everyone to get seated (we're twelve minutes behind), I'll talk about the late-afternoon snacks, which included granola bars, fruit, and more coffee. The last is the important one.
One weird annoyance: the feedback forms are paper-only. To quote my much-more-prudish-than-me daughter, What the Hamster? For those of us with awful handwriting (and a likely precursor to arthritis that makes writing ten paragraphs of responses painful), web surveys are a blessing. And at a tech conference, why not have it online, where it can easily be analyzed and shared?
Anyway, Karim Lakhani is handing the wrapup:
Wikipedia on VA Tech shootings serving as a clearinghouse for info: Knowledge Beyond Authority.
University: Producers of Knowledge, Consumer of Knowledge, Repository of Knowledge, Transmitters of Knowledge. But Internet blurs producers, consumers, storage, transmission.
University has monopoly over certifying knowledge workers, structure of authority over the knowledge.
De facto, Knowledge Beyond Authority is a challenge to the university (my editorial addition: Only to those universities that put all their eggs in the knowledge certification basket -- the universities that will thrive are the ones that share knowledge and work to make the world better as a whole).
(ETA: Someone in the audience notes that it should be "Knowledge Expands Authority," and that universities need to recognize that or fall behind. David Weinberger just agreed that PhDs don't prove anything. Shades of Heinlein's Number of the Beast.)
Lakhani is now looking for issues from the "how to deal with the RIAA" workshop. Apparently there was a lot of contention there. What a shock. :-) Most seem to stand against the university as police. Some counter-claims note that universities do hold responsibilities when it comes to teaching ethics
One audience member: "Primary goal of guilds is to exclude." Notes that at the extreme (medical degrees) those without degrees who profess knowledge can go to jail. The Academy, as a whole, is practicing a form of protectionism here.
Lakhani seems to be on the same page, simply noting that it'll take small steps for Harvard (whereas MIT takes big steps -- difference in culture).
Lakhani was at MIT during Opencourseware launch. Backstory: Harvard and others were offering course info online to make money, and MIT was late to the game. MIT saw a potential "hack" to the system in simply giving it away for free, thus undercutting Harvard and others. There are more than 150 schools now developing opencourseware, but only 12 or so in the US. One barrier (noted by a UMASS-Boston guy) is that cash-strapped universities need to sell their online courses, and can't afford the investment involved in opencourseware (the educational equivelent of "you've got to have money to make money.").
Someone notes that OpenCourseware is just another form of publishing (sharing knowledge with the world). But that requires universities to accept it as such.
Workshop summaries: Hunger for change is the major theme:
Policy-level change:
Broader University Mission
Access to Knowledge
Copyright to Copyleft
Clarity on Policy
Who is Responsible?
Public/Private/Non-Profit
Technological Changes
Open up infrastructure
Standardization of data
Build and use tech to achieve goals
KBA?
Leaky Technologies
(all of the tech changes stuff above has simply been posted on the projector, without any comment or explanation).
(Lots of this stuff plays into the semantic web).
"Libraries are infrastructure for R&D and knowledge."
Economic Changes
Business Models for Universities
Business Models for Companies
Emergence of hybrid Forms
Who pays?
Is there a free lunch.
"Who Pays" is the big one, of course (Wikipedia keeps seeking donations, etc). See, though, the idea that OpenCourseware has only enhanced MIT's reputation and success.
One note -- Wikipedia gets the donations from their readers. And other projects are also driven by demand -- folks are willing to give small amounts of money and large amounts of time to projects they support.
Social Changes
How to distribute knowledge and authority?
Expertise vs broad participation
Top-down vs bottom-up social systems
Cash between digital natives, immigrants, and luddites.
Personally, I want to see this last one represented in a Starcraft-like setting. The Protoss could be the digital natives, the Terrans the digital immigrants, and the Zerg are clearly the luddites.
Time for the final event: the closing keynote!
David's speaking now, and is engaging as always.
Key points:
Idea of knowledge is out of whack with how knowledge actually works (again, PhD is an example, as the best and brightest often lack degrees). Authorities never did have authority, from a knowledge point of view.
Other assumptions:
"Belief is a mental state"
There is no plural for "knowledge." And the state of it is binary (if something is true, all else much be false)
Gatekeepers of knowledge (publishers, universities) deserve to be gatekeepers.
Real world (a book is an object, it cannot exist in two places, etc) has artificially set our limitations on knowledge. We need to recognize that knowledge doesn't have these limitations (online storage, etc).
"Knowledge is conversational"
(Example: Listservs, wikipedia*, etc -- users earn authoritative currency by demonstrating authority, regardless of credentials) Knowledge is in the shared conversation, not the individuals who share it.
Knowledge is important as potential -- more important to get a post out there, which will then let others correct it, modify it, dispute it, etc. Getting it out there and getting it linked are what matter. An inaccurate post that gets corrected and dissected and read and linked has properly increased the overall base knowledge.
"Authority becomes metadata"
Still need to reduce size of metadata -- if you make the card catalog as big as the book, its not accomplishing much. Same concept applies online.
Looking forward: Important to be unrealistic every one in a while. We're at a crossroads on the web (politically), but the University is the bastion of openness, and the web is capable of serving as the tool of openness that Universities employ. Universities need to be the driving force here, and we need to be optimists about the state of things.
Time to head out. Great closing speech, and damned useful conference!
*He explicitly said that he's sick of using Wikipedia as an example, but it's still the obvious one.
is2k7Labels: IS2k7
# posted by Adam Smith @ 12:56 PM 
