StigmergicWeb

I’ve been watching students in two of my classes engaged in a fascinating process over the past few days, and I can best describe the process as antwork. They have been working on a project on Agricultural Practices in Saskatchewan in small groups of 2 or 3. Individually, they have been developing interview questions, interviewing, and in some cases taking pictures. All the content they created was put online by Movable Type, not specifically for its blogging capability but for its flexibility in content management. The site made by my class is one of four sites created as a school project in putting resources online - other projects included an Online Recipe Book as part of a project exploring how food is presented in magazines, a set of diaries and discussions about Romeo and Juliet, and an exploration of Land Claims of Indigenous Peoples around the world.

I refer to it as antwork because it has the characteristic of how ant colonies arise out of the actions of individual ants. Individual ants carry out their actions as individuals, and each individual ant does a miniscule amount of work. But when there are several thousand or tens of thousands (like in my basement), the aggregate effect can be staggering. Like ants, each of the students did just a little bit of work gathering or entering information. Many students (and other teachers involved with the project) were surprised how quickly the sites came together once they started entering information.

In parallel to this project, I have been reading with great interest the Small Pieces Loosely Joined project initiated by Brian Lamb, D’Arcy Norman and Alan Levine. (BTW, Alan is the creator of the uber cool feed2js scripts/site - a fantastic stigmergic tool). The project/presentation is intended to demonstrate how small tools that are easily and readily available to a wide variety of users can provide useful and unique communication and collaboration tools. For the sake of discussion, participants in the project are asked to blog/wiki/chat/other their advocacy for a centralist, decentralist or convergence (previously called the fencesitter) position.

My students’ work is, I believe, a prime example of convergence in action. The work was decentralized because they were each working as autonomous agents (well - semi-autonomous really since I did make this a requirement for the class). They developed interview questions, found people to interview, took picures and did all the knowledge-gathering work. I set very few restrictions on the interview (and was rewarded with a couple of interviews that I wouldn’t have thought of including, but turned out to be dynamite). As much as possible, however, I gave them the responsibility to go out into the world and gather the resource we needed (interviews with farmers, in our case).

At the same time, the communication was centralized. They were all using a content management system that was accessable through any web browser. The pages they made were all standards compliant XHTML/CSS. The reports were all linked from a single main page. The centralization was not a control center, but a capability for communications between my students and … well, anyone in the world really!

To me, this is the sweet spot of educational technology - decentralize the tools and centralize the communication. Interestingly, the internet, particularly the web, have done both. Free applications and operating systems are being widely distributed online. Many of the applications are small, specialized tools (as opposed to the one-product-does-it-all-its-a-floor-wax-and-a-desert-topping variety of application produced by large software companies). At the same time, the internet offers many possibilities for centralizing communication. Entire Free Software projects are being developed by core groups of developers whose only line of communication is e-mail. Mailing lists, wikis, blogs and instant messaging are also effective online communication tools that help people with common interests create a conversation despite vast distances between them.

That’s what antwork is all about! Give everyone the tools to build and create. Use a standard communication protocol so anyone can talk to anyone. Let each agent sniff around the landscape and start pushing some ideas around, and eventually ideas will bump into each other and start to converge into a complex framework.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 15th, 2004 at 11:23 and is filed under education, communication, computer technology, stigmergy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.