Robert Paterson's Weblog

Are Books Bad For Us?

Have books been bad for us?

by Rob Paterson

May 12, 2010 at 1:10 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Community, Culture, Innovation, KM, Network Effect, Relationships, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Objects, Trust, Trusted Space, User Revolution, Wikinomics, Wikipedia, Wisdom of Crowds 

A really weird thought has been building in me for months. Have books been a bad thing?

Is this better?

If so – why?

If so – Is this the campfire of all campfires?

So what’s my argument?

Many people are convinced today that the birth of the web is making us stupid. That the web is only superficial. That only dense books can contain and spread real knowledge.

I am coming to the conclusion that the opposite is true. That books make us stupid and that the web, like the campfire and for the same reasons as for the campfire is what makes us clever.

So here goes. All our foundational knowledge was discovered around the campfire. Imagine you a hominid sitting around the fire at night. You are awake. You are looking at each other. I would imagine that at first, before we could speak, we sang or made music together. The fire elicited a social dance of interaction and community.

I think we can surmise that the campfire helped us speak and so it helped us become conscious. Something like this happened about 100,000 – 60,000 years ago. For suddenly our tool development, art and technology took off. All the foundations of our world today were discovered in a 10,000 year period. Tools had been the same for a million years. Within a 1,000 years they were completely different. We invented pottery. We invented metallurgy. The wheel. Everything we depend on was discovered then. Not only discovered but widely disseminated in a short period of time.

How did this occur?

My bet is that it happened because of the social process created by the campfire and by our hunter gatherer culture of equality. Such an environment extracts order from chaos. Design from intuition. It is ideal for the exploration of implicit knowledge. It is ideal for discovering things that we don’t know exist. It is ideal for taking half baked ideas and refining them. Let’s use a thought experiment.

How did pottery get invented? Surely no one said “Let’s have a project to invent Pottery!” How can you invent something that had never existed? No it must have happened like this – The People stopped for the night after a rainfall. The next morning, as they prepared to leave, the fire keeper noticed that beneath the coals that she was harvesting, the ground had baked to a crust. Maybe she could carry the fire in this thing – this bowl. That night as they shared the food around the fire, she told the people what had happened and showed them the “bowl” that she had lifted out of the earth the day before. And the conversation began – how had that been? Did it hold the fire well? What else could it hold? What if we put it back in the fire? Would it hold water? And on and on. Experiments were made. Some earth worked better than others. At the seasonal meeting with the Cousin Peoples, the People shared their story with the others and gave up a “bowl” as a gift their elder. At the next season meeting, the two tribes spent days sharing the stories of the experiments that they had been making…….

There was no peer review. There was no authorized way of doing it. No one was telling anyone. They were sharing and asking and arguing. They were having conversations!

But with the book comes authority. With the advent of the book, much of knowledge development stopped. Only the in group was allowed to play. What mattered was not observation. Not trial and error. Not experiment. Not sharing. But authority. Most of the accepted authority were texts that had no basis in observation or trial and error. Ptolemy, St Augustine and Galen ruled.

Worse because of the “Book” people who did observe or test were killed or persecuted. The Book stood for the ONE WAY. It spoke not you.

For a while, with the advent of the press, knowledge opened up.

But where did the great advances then come from? Did they come from the Universities? No they came from amateurs – from Natural Philosophers. Who met in clubs over dinner to talk about their work. Gradually, the “BOOK” came back. Only papers written and approved inside the authority system counted as being right. People outside the authority system were discounted.

Knowledge was seen as an explicit thing – an object. The Book was its metaphor.

But now with the web, we have a global campfire. Once again, we can play with ideas, with observations and experiments. Once again we can share with equals who will not knock us down. Even better, this time the group around the fire is not 35 people but all of us.

What new things will come from such a process? Surely amazing things. Things that could never have come from the use of books.

As a person who loves books, whose life is reading, I now wonder……

via fastforwardblog.com

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

Inqusition - Stephen Downes - Blackboard

As expected, Stephen weighs in too.

As stated on the Academic Commons website, the move has raised concerns that action may also be taken against open source projects Moodle and Sakai. As Alfred Essa observes, "By filing a patent infringement lawsuit against Desire2Learn Blackboard has at the same time fired a shot across the bow of open source projects such as Moodle, Sakai, and .LRN, which are slowly emerging as disruptive innovations in the elearning space. In the long run Blackboard knows it can't win on product quality or innovation. Therefore, it will exploit patents as its WMD."

And he adds, in my view correctly, "What is Blackboard's diabolical strategy to crush open source? I don't believe they will directly go after the open source projects. They don't need to. Blackboard just needs to create enough FUD among lawyers, whose entire frame of reference is built around litigation avoidance, so that new institutions interested in adopting an open source solution just won't go there." .....

Martin Langhoff writes on a Moodle forum (stupid login required, sorry), "After a quick check on the ATutor forums, and seeing there was no discussion about the patents, I've gotten in touch with Greg Gay -- he says: "If you are looking for evidence of LMS type apps prior to 1999, here's a study we did early that year. We'll be in contact with the patent office in Canada, to make sure no patent is issued here. We're onboard on this too." and I think that study is good stuff and having them on board is great. Some more prior art has been posted at Seb Schmoller's site about a Learning to Teach Online Course he and others developed in 1997 or 1998....

Some people see the positive in the move. Alex Reid ponders, "Perhaps Blackboard's patent is the evil impetus to move us away from a "course-based system" of 'online courses:' the bad idea that they want to claim as their fundamental intellectual property." As Scott Wilson suggests, "I hope we can use this as an opportunity...perhaps Tony Karrer is correct and that we are at the point of technology disruption, and we'll see the LMS displaced by simpler technologies with different non-functional characteristics (following the typical technology pattern)."

Inquisition - Dave Cormier - Blackboard

More on Blackboard from Dave - This is scary.

"well…

The blackboard patent fun continues. The first email i sent to the company to invite them to our meeting this weekend bounced back at me. I’ll continue to try and contact them. I was reading through ‘an explanation of the CMS patent‘ on their website (notice the use of the term CMS (course management system) as the one used by moodle) Anyone who is not in the US and thinks this is a US only issue might want to reconsider. The following from the Blackboard website.

• What other countries are covered by the patent?
  Patents corresponding to the U.S. patent have been issued or are pending all over the world including in the European Union, China, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand India, Israel, Mexico, South Korea, Hong Kong and Brazil.

• updated THIS IS THE ONE WAITING TO BE ISSUED IN CANADA

There are also many people in the community who have suggested that the ‘bad press’ that will come out of this will be bad for Blackboard inc. I would also ask that they reconsider their position. If someone has managed to secure a monopoly ‘bad press’ is not very relevant. Those of us who are familiar with the University CMS/LMS/VLE decision making process know that a secure solution is a VERY important part of that decision making process. If we can’t guarantee that it will be legal to use a given product, how can we guarantee the longevity of that product. Blackboard wins either way… all they need is the suggestion that they might sue…

The third thing that I am reading is that people are suggesting that this is an opportunity to move beyond the CMS into a brave new world of online education. It’s important to remember that the ’series of tubes’ argument coupled with DOPA would make that difficult for many educators. However, i must agree, it is an opportunity. It’s an opportunity for many agendas. It’s also an opportunity for those who have been resistant to the change to dig their heels in and point to this situation as a reason to stick to old ways of teaching.

Following my blog post yesterday… we’re going to cover three things on Sunday over at edtechtalk (link above). What is going on? What can we do to stop it? What do we do if we can’t stop it?

We’d like to finish that show with a community response statement."

How does the New Nexus work in Real Time with Citizen Journalists?

Here is a wonderful piece by Elliott Massie (via Learning Post) who observed how the CNN News Team are drawing in and filtering and then broadcasting a flood of blogs, video, photos coming in from Citizens and how their own journalists are turning to use satellite and final cut pro locally to turn around material immediately.

Major extract follows

Wiki Night at the Commons Tonight

Want to know how Wiki's work and how to use them?
Alex O'Neill will teach us at 6pm tonight at the Commons - 224 Queen Street

This is an open meeting so if you are interested in either Wikis or the Commons please drop by

Going Home - More thought

I posted a first draft of my essay Going Home in February. This week I was talking to a friend, Kashmir Birk about the similarities between the Gutenberg Bible and Social Software and how Social Software may have the same explosive impact on human society and on who has power.

We had what we thought was a huge AHA!

In my draft essay, I had remarked how , as many others have, it was the cheapness and availability of the printed page that made the difference in giving the people the power.

But as we talked this week, a new thought emerged. I had been in a meeting offering a client a web site based on the new technology. A critical part of the new type of site is the use of powerful search rather than a book-like taxonomy. Wikipedia versus say a Government of Canada site - all tabs and navigation.

The client was stunned to understand that the search engine was not only very powerful but free. 5 years ago the search engine would have cost $30,000 and would have been peripheral to the site architecture.

Later the AHA hit me. As importantly as reducing the cost per page, the really huge idea behind Gutenberg was the use of the local language.

Until then not only were books produced by a high cost production system but they were written in this strange code called Greek or Latin that only a Priest understood! Has not technology been written in a language known only to priests? Called Fortran, Cobol or Flash, only the initiated could use it. Now not only are the new tools cheap but they can be understood by the layman.

As with the rise of Protestantism - we no longer need a priest between us and God. The tools will not only do away with much of the IT world/Priesthood but will of course take down their dependents - the monarchs/ large organizations.

Ross Mayfield - The Transaction Cost Issue an the Dissolution of the Monasteries

Ross is at the Wikimania conference and here is his outstanding post on the meaning that is emerging from the conference.

Transaction costs are 50% of US GDP. This is what Open Source and the 'sphere are after. 50% of GDP!!!!!!

As a historian I jump back to the point of take off in the English economy. It was after Henry VIII had adopted the protestant faith and went after the pool of locked in wealth that the Catholic Church had acquired over millennia. The Church was the largest landowner in the country. Much bigger than the King. Henry confiscated the lot, and monetised it. This, the dissolution of the monasteries, provided the capital for the new men and the foundation of the British surge above their weight in a Europe where France and Spain had the conventional edge.

Is this what is on the table???

The New Media - CommandN - A Future for TV - a Plug for Queen Steet Commons

CommndN is a personal TV Channel that comments on technology trends.

Amber Mac and Mike Lazazzera host the show with Jeff MacArthur (Halifax, NS) as a guest segment producer. Brian McKechnie is the cameraman, post-production editor, and all-around chief rendering champ. It is so low tech and yet so appealing. My bet is that in 2 years the low tech will have gone away and it will have a technical quality of mainstream TV.

(By the way they give a nice plug for Queen Street Commons)

I think that this is part of the Media Future - the infinite universe is emerging right now.

I think of the problem that this means for advertisers - who will be watching conventional broadcast TV, listen to conventional scheduled radio, read a print newspaper in 5 years - many people will but not those that you want to reach. They will all be inside the interactive, anytime, anywhere universe that is produced by millions of people and aggregated by some means as Bloglines or itunes do now for blogs and podcasts.

This shift is here now - but these are surely the first baby steps. Think of the speed and the ubiquity of high speed in 5 years time. My Aliant installer tells me that we can expect a 15 time improvement next year alone. Think of storage. My regular iMac has 160 gig and I have a 400 gig back up. What will a terabyte cost in 5 years? We will see an iMovie for sure where we will have all are favorite shows. There will be no technical barrier to the online anytime interactive world.

It's not just the technology. It is culture that is shifting and the new tools serve this culture. There is a Maslowian shift in how many feel about their needs. Marketing began with Sunlight Soap offering the buyer for the first time a predictable utility. The early cars were all about a predictable utility that we could afford. By the 1940's utility has had its day - as many had what they needed for life. Now convenience came into play. This was the era of the washing machine and the cleaner. Then when all had convenience, we had ego - if I have one of these I will be deemed to be cool, sexy, sophisticated etc. Then when all could buy a brand we have been left with only price. Now if it is not cheap we don't want it. The Wal*Mart syndrome?

BUT I note a new desire - the desire to have meaning not for my ego per se - but to have meaning in my relationships. Starbucks makes me feel that I am pampering myself. My son James has a friend, Jen who makes bespoke handbags. You can buy an expensive brand name hand bag anywhere but if you want to give the woman in your life a sign that you really care - you may consider a one of a kind handmade bag by Jen. You may reward yourself with one of Tom's suits or buy one for your man. You may think all banks suck but your sister has breast cancer and you join hundreds of thousands of Canadians and Run for the Cure as sponsored by CIBC. This changes your perspective about CBC and sets it apart. It has meaning for you.

A service or a product in a world where all things are available for a low price must now have a meaning for your relationships with yourself, those that you care about or for the issues that you care about.

The mainstream in this world are not important - they adopt later what the pioneers and early adopters want. You reach the mainstream via the early adopters. It is this group that demand meaning. No meaning = no market.

The cold top down mass-market ad is no longer going to reach the market that most need - the people that influence the mass. The channel that you relied will be ignored by the influencers. The TV, Radio and Print world that stands like a colossus and all the marketing world that is attached to this edifice is terminally ill.

What an opportunity - the forest is burning and all this new growth will have room to emerge. The asteroid of technology has hit the dinosaur world of marketing and the little furry mammals will have their day.

London Bombing - Tsunami - The New Media

It was clear during the Tsunami period that news had been reinvented by the immediacy of blogging and the Wiki. In the last week this shift has been confirmed as bloggers proved to be the front line and Wikipedia the authority.

Until now the "New Media" has been seen as competition to the old in terms of content. But have we not noticed the beginnings of an integration between the conventional media and the new? I have posted already about how the CBC is using Podcasting to gain a new place in the world. Now we also see the old media relying on the new as its primary source of content.

The Guardian added this comment (edited by me) - "within an hour of the explosions, according to Helen Boaden, the BBC's director of news, the corporation had received 50 images from members of the public. It was a similar story at ITN and Sky; even at the Guardian's website we had images sent from users' phones. We linked to citizens' galleries of images on websites such as flickr where dozens of images were logged within hours of the events.....

Boaden's analysis of what she rightly identifies as a gear change is interesting. It certainly represents a new dynamic in newsgathering and a fulfilment of the blogger's adage on journalism: "There's always someone closer to the story than you." At a time when the media have, we are often told, all but exhausted the public's trust, the engagement of the public in disseminating and surrendering news footage must mark progress....

it is important that all media owners engage as fully as they can in ensuring that it is a mutually beneficial relationship - one where the public becomes a partner rather than simply a resource."

London Bombing - Wikpedia the best resource again

Wikipedia - the best source of information after the Tsunami are doing it again after the bombs in London.
Simply outstanding in structure and content. Is there a conventional news site that can top this?

Here is Will Richardson showing how the Wiki page got built