StigmergicWeb

Today was the day that I drank the Twitter kool-aid. I have moved from Stage 2 to Stage 6 (at least) in Doc Levine’s description of the epidemiology of Twitterosis.

I spent (most of) my day attending the TLt 2007 conference in Saskatoon, which is about a 90 minute drive from home. During the drive, I listened to the audio recording of Brian, D’Arcy and Alan’s Open, Connected, Social presentation. They are all on my Twitter friends list, a detail that becomes important later in my story.

I’ve blogged conferences in the past, but today I wanted to try Twittering the conference instead. I did this for Ian Juke’s keynote, but Alec managed to coerce me into co-presenting with him in his podcasting session (OK - he asked me and I said yes, but knowing my passion to talk about podcasting makes asking akin to coercion). He also asked Heather and I into co-presenting with him on Free, Open and Collaborative Processes and Tools for the Creation of Digital Content Related to Course Development.

Note - the following interactions are archived on my Twitter favourites page; you may refer to it for the full, non-paraphrased conversation.

Dean walked into the room, so Alec invited him to join us as well. I twittered the session that I was involved in presenting whenever Alec was talking. Dean was sitting beside me, twittering about watching me twitter. As I was describing Alec’s presentation, Brian added his support for our presentation. Dean twittered the address for Alec’s open thinking wiki. Brian added a link to the wiki as Alec was presenting. At about the same time, D’Arcy twittered about a greasemonkey script that turned a MediaWiki page into an S5 presentation. I passed the URL for the script along to Alec via Skype while he was presenting. (I was also adding commentary and suggestions to Alec via Skype providing a live backchannel for the presentation).

A few hours later, Alan wrote about Twitter in his blog. He cited our addition of the mediawiki-s5 script to a presentation as it was happening:

you might chalk this up to the rabid swarming of techno geeks, but for little effort, not stuffing people with email, twitter can generate action. All it takes is a nudge, some contacts …

Dean wrote in his blog about our earlier Twitter synergy, including a link to Alan’s post describing it. Just a short while ago, D’Arcy tweaked the wikipedia-s5 script and loaded it up on his server. He then announced it on Twitter, but not (yet?) on his blog. I have now installed the newly revised script, and I’m going to check with Alec about re-writing his wiki in a MediaWiki so it can be viewed/presented as an S5 presentation.

Thus my twitter mediated day comes to an end. I am still somewhat gobsmacked by the way that Brian and D’Arcy (and Alan, in retrospect) were able to become co-presenters as mediated by Twitter. A posse-amigos co-presentation, if you want to look at it that way. Cool - very, very cool!

I’m reading a paper right now entitled Comparing Weblogs to Threaded Discussion in Online Educational Contexts by Donna Cameron and Terry Anderson, published in the November edition of the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning (thanks to Stephen for the pointer to this). When I write that I’m reading it right now, I mean that pretty much literally as I flip between the windows for this entry and the paper. I’d usually wait until I’m done reading the paper then write about it, but this is too compelling to resist putting thoughts on paper - er, web in real time.

Donna and Terry discuss the use of blogs as tools to create and sustain a community of inquiry. The community of inquiry model was developed by Terry Anderson, Randy Garrison and Walter Archer. It describes three elements of educational transaction - cognitive presence, social presence and teaching presence - and their use in designing online education. Their original research is available online at the Communities of Inquiry (CoI) website, and is well worth the read. At the time of the original research, they were looking mainly at threaded discussion, but these elements also work extremely well if one looks at blogs as the communication tool. This line of thought actually occurred to me two years ago when I was at a presentation by Walter Archer entitled Fostering Critical Thinking in an Online Environment at the Instructional Design conference in Saskatoon, in which he discussed the community of inquiry model. Dirk Morrison had also used the CoI model earlier in the day. One of my first thoughts when looking at the CoI model was that blogs could be used to create cognitive, social and teaching presence, not in any sort of centralized location, but in a much more diffuse and distributed fashion. Here are my notes from the presentation - Fostering Critical Thinking in an Online Environment. (I also blogged some notes about Alec Couros’ presentation on education blogging, and Alec has his educational blogging presentation slides online) My first podcast also describes the conference - StigmergicWeb podcast #1. (link is to blog entry)

OK - back to the paper. Donna and Terry (I keep wanting to retreat back into academic speak by saying “The authors …” or “Cameron and Anderson …”, but that wouldn’t be very blog-ish of me, would it? Informality is an inherent part of the medium. But I digress …) then show how blogs have positive and negative aspects with regard to all three types of presence. One particular thought I like is about teaching presence:

This means that the design of LMS based courses tend to exclude use of emerging Internet tools such as collaborative bookmarking, FOAF, podcasting, synchronous web conferencing and other social software and external database systems. Thus, the design and organization component of teaching presence is generally more restricted when LMS based conferencing systems are used as opposed to blogging tools.

Hmmm - maybe the choice of an open-source LMS versus a proprietary one is not as important as the consideration of why we need an LMS, and what other tools we might need to bring into the design of online learning. But again, I digress …

I enjoyed the paper and did a lot of nodding as I was reading it, more from my own ideas being affirmed rather than from any new perspectives. I think that these ideas have been around for a while; I’ve written and presented (at AMTEC - audio also posted - and a LORNET research symposium) about the utility of blogs as tools in online learning, along with many others far more intelligent and well-spoken than I am. If you are reading this, then you might have the same sense of familiarity. I think that having what we know fit within an established framework of online education should help in trying to get our ideas out to the larger educational structures we work in. Why not print a couple of copies of the paper, leave them strategically placed in your staff/faculty room and then see what happens? Of course, if you want to blog about the experience, that would be even better!

YouTube - Day of the Longtail :: I just saw this after Stephen mentioned it in OLDaily today. The message reminds me vaguely of the tagline for V for Vendetta - “People shouldn’t feel threatened by the media, the media should feel threatened by people.”

Two thoughts struck me as I was watching this. First, what happens when we start to see an educational long-tail effect? Can students used to infinite choice and variety, and expecting that they are able to communicate, interact and critique freely going to be satisfied by a course of studies that they have no voice in creating? Obviously I think not, but are schools ready for this kind of student? What happens when not just markets but curricula are conversations? (Wow - that’s an entire paragraph with only one declarative sentence in it.)

The second thought is that this is exactly the sort of thing that I mean when I call this blog (and all the blogs I connect to, and that they connect to, and … well, you get the point) a stigmergic web. We are in the midst of a sort of global networked consciousness, analagous to the way ants communicate by leaving scent trails for each other. The ants may never meet each other face to face, but they transfer information exactly like neurons transfer information to each other.

Neurons and bloggers actually have a lot in common, now that I think about it. Both are receiving information from other individuals in their network. Both can establish new connections - we do this whenever we read a new blog or find some other information source that we will return to. When neurons do this in our brains, we call it learning (at least for the changes that we are conscious of). What do we call it when a network of minds, capable of rewiring itself, extended throughout the world is established?

I used to read a lot of sci-fi as a kid and teen ager. One of the themes that was written about over and over and over was the possibility of humanity creating a computer, or later a network of computers, that became conscious. The mistake that the science fiction writers made was they assumed that the computers were the neurons in the global intellect. It seems clear that in fact the computers and the internet are the synapses - the spaces between neurons where signals are transferred from one neuron to the next. Each neuron “decides” (not really, but its a close enough approximation for now) whether it will process and pass along the signal or ignore it. The old sci-fi writers might be relieved to know that the neurons, reassuringly, are us. The web is one great big stigmergic communicaton system!

Stigmergic? Relax - you’re soaking in it! Or should that be “Relax - you’re soaking it in!”

We’ve all become fairly accustomed to this read-write web thingy where we are all consumers and producers of information. I use the pronoun we assuming that if you are reading this, you are probably also involved in creating some sort of online content (blogging, wiki-ing, podcasting, contributing to discussion groups) or you soon will be. But I’ve noticed lately that another element is being emphasized, that of blending different RSS or Atom feeds together to create a sort of meta-feed. I don’t think that its new because I’m sure that I remember reading Brian and Alan writing about Rip-Mix-Feed, a pithy little meme summarizing how information can be repurposed using some fairly simple small technologies. In a sense, we all do this every day. I talk to students and colleagues, I pick up ideas from them (as they might also do from me), our ideas all get remixed somewhere in the connections my frontal cortex, and I pass the remixed ideas on to others as I speak with them or, most notably, as I write. I have found that blog writing is a medium especially well suited to this forwarding of my mental feeds.

I’ve noticed this sort of RSS-blending technology seems to be catching on lately amongst us edu-geeks. Stephen, of course, has been doing this for a long time with EduRSS, and as usual its just taken a few years for the rest of us to catch up. SuprGlu is a web service that also does this mix blending, with very polished looking results. As cool as SuprGlu is, I was slightly dissatisfied because I wanted to put something like this together on a page on my domain. Shortly thereafter, Stephen released MyGlu, which is a subset of EduRSS that replicates the functionality of SuprGlu, but with all the yummy freshness of open source code included. Additionally:

MyGlu not only aggregates feeds, it also filters them according to your specifications. So, for example, you could aggregate your posts, photos and bookmarks with the term ‘Amsterdam’ in them.

Impressive! Shortly thereafter, D’Arcy began musing:

I’ve been giving some thought to the “school aggregator” that grew out of the discussions around Northern Voice. What kinds of things will it have to be able to do? Types of interfaces? Explicit and implicit data and metadata? How to manage caching of items, and manage displaying the potentially hundreds of thousands of bits of content that will be pulled into the system over the course of a year? And how to present cohorts/classes/years within this? How to allow students to add multiple data sources, and tag it for use in whatever class context(s)? How to let students and teachers mine the aggregated data to get what they need/want? Lots of stuff to chew on here.

His post on EduGlu is worth reading not only for D’Arcy’s musings, but for the brilliant conversation that is evolving in the comments. Its like my bloglines account talking amongst itself!

So where does that lead us? It turns out that the crew on the good ship elgg have built this capability right into elgg, as D’Arcy just blogged (Elgguglu?!? Yikes, I hope that name doesn’t catch on!). Scott Leslie was simultaneously, synchronistically also pondering if elgg is the mythical EduGlu, his post prompted by reading Dave Tosh’s notes on feedbooks and populating an elgg blog with external content. (By the way, if this works, this blog post will show up not only on my personal blog, but also on my elgg blog).

The emerging theme in all of this is that we seem to learn (and in this context I’m not sure if we means edtech geeks or people in general) through the strange combinations and permutations of ideas that we have picked up from others, which we then pass along to the people around us. I think this is what George Siemens means when he describes connectivism:

Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.

I know that this is how I, as an edtech geek-blogger-podcaster, learn. When I get the chance to watch students engaged in powerful learning, I believe this is how they are learning as well. When I am blogging, I am also hooked into the same process - I read many potent ideas that others are posting on weblogs, I blend the ideas in with some of the secret herbs and spices dwelling in my pre-frontal cortex, and I write down this strange concoction of ideas in public so that you can read this and the whole process reiterates over and over and over …

Now we are pulling together tools to make it easy for us to do the same thing automagically. The thought of that is so profoundly revolutionary, I can’t begin to fathom what this might lead to. Truly, the read-write web is rapidly becoming old-fashioned, and the read-blend-write web is waiting in the wings ready to take its place.

There are many over-whelming ideas left to explore here, but its getting late. If I don’t stop now, I might end up turning this into a Jerry Maguire-esque breakdown/epiphany.

Wow - if you want any proof that we are little ants laying down thought tracks that are part of an emergent whole, this is it. Robert Paterson’s post Going Home - Our Reformation has a lot of people talking about it (like Stephen and Rick and … a whole bunch of others). I hadn’t read it at the time, but I was thinking some of the same things out loud in yesterday’s stigmergicweb podcast. Apparently there is a very big and powerful idea we are all tuning into. Paterson’s post is the most coherent and eloquent expression I’ve seen of it so far. Here’s what he says is happening:

Just as people at the end of the Middle Ages rediscovered the wisdom of the Classic world, so we are re-discovering the experience of tribal life. I don’t mean by this that we will have to take up hunting and live in caves. For we have made a Great Return before and we know how it will play out. Renaissance men did not put on togas. What they did was to remember the wisdom of the classic world that had been forgotten in a millennium dark age and applied this wisdom to the world of their time. So, we too will begin to experience a new way of living and of being and apply this experience to our own time and to our own challenges.

That crystallizes so many ideas that I’ve been turning around in my head for some time now. Now, if everyone would just stop talking about this until I have the time to get my thesis done ;^)

Update - Note to self: When mentioning a really cool post that people should read, it helps to link to the post. D’uh!

Thanks to Stephen (to whom I extend heartfelt felicitations on his newly minted bilingualness)for the link to this:

Yes, it’s only been ten years.

And despite our memories of the crash of 2000, here are ten reasons why I believe that there’s about to be a significant flourishing of Net companies and business successes, not to mention extremely cool things for the rest of us:*

Read more

Oh there is a buzz in the educational technology blogosphere that is music to my ears. D’Arcy is talking about it and so is James. The topic of discussion is smallness. Like D’Arcy, James and many others, I think small may be the next big thing in learning (at least in online learning).

D’Arcy raises some really good questions about how to create a learning system out of some small pieces loosely joined:

What are the small pieces? How can they be tied together? What is the larger ecology that forms as the pieces learn about each other? Where are the gaps and opportunities?

Why small? Because its not big. Its not a monolith. Its not the corporation. Its not all-consuming and impersonal. As James says:

I reckon that through weblogs and aggregation we can un-manage OLEs, we can, dare I say, incorporate subversion into our learning technologies and we can stop the rot of terrible student evaluations, frustrated and alienated teachers and encroaching managerialism into teaching and learning …

Preach on, brother! Devolve the managerial decisions to the users, and let the decisions be made at the edge instead of the (administrative) center. When the scale of the system is large enough, some intelligence and self-organization starts to emerge. How large of a loosely affiliated community is needed for this to happen, I wonder?

I remember a story from a workshop I went to many years ago in my university days. The presenter (name long since forgotten) was talking about campus ecology, specifically how many decisions were better made by watching student behaviour than trying to manage it. The example given was sidewalks. Anyone who has ever spent time on a university campus knows that the campus planners always put sidewalks in the wrong place, as evidenced by the numerous paths etched in the ground by generations of students. The presenter asserted that the best thing to do would be to wait 4 or 5 years after a campus is built before laying down sidewalks, then put the sidewalks where the students walk. It seemed like such an obvious idea to me at the time, and it seems even more obvious that education needs to move more towards the same kind of model.

John Dvorak recently wrote on The Myth of Disruptive Technology. Here’s my favourite line:

The concept of disruptive technology goes to the top of my list as the biggest crock of the new millennium.

Yeah - sure thing, John. Coincidentally, many people consider John Dvorak to be the biggest crock of the old millenium (which begs the question why someone is still paying him to write?). I can only comment that John Dvorak would probably have told Johannes Gutenberg was wasting his time with the printing press. I guess history will be the judge.

We’re building a web OS::So says Marc Canter. And I think he understands what this is all about:

The ants are united in their intentions.

All this little grains of informational sand that we are pushing around do create a design that is bigger than any of us ants could imagine.

What is stigmergy, and how can a web be stigmergic?

Stigmergy is a term introduced to describe the coordination of activity that occurs in the activity of social insects, such as nest-building behaviour of termites. The coordination is not imposed by any central authority; there is a queen termite but her role is reproductive, not coordinating. Each agent in the group is autonomous, and the control does not reside with a central authority, but with the interactions between all members of the community. Termites, ants and other social animals create complex structures through the net effect of a very large number of interactions. The action of an individual agent in the system causes a change in the environment — perhaps a pheromone is laid down in response to finding a food source or being attacked — and the other agents respond not to the individual, but to the changes produced in the environment.

So how is the World-Wide Web stigmergic? In his essay Stigmergy and the World-Wide Web, Joe Gregorio says that we are all ants building a nest we cannot see.

The World-Wide Web is human stigmergy. The web and it’s ability to let anyone read anything and also to write back to that environment allows stigmeric communication between humans. Some of the most powerful forces on the web today, Google and weblogs are fundamentally driven by stigmeric communication and their behaviour follows similar natural systems like Ant Trails and Nest Building that are accomplished using stigmergy. The web is new. In the context of written human history is barely a blink of an eye. Yet as new as the web is, it is already showing it’s ability to support complex human interactions that mimic natural systems use of stigmergy. And we’re just getting started…

Clearly, the web has moved beyond a collection of individual pages, even pages that are joined together. Weblogs and wikis open the web up to a larger pool of authors than ever before. Discussion boards and chat rooms transcend geographic boundaries of discourse. Isn’t it time you joined in the conversation?