|
| Friday, June 1, 2007 |
 |
Theory beyond practice 
| | The theme of IS2K7 (that's the license plate abbreviation for Internet & Society, 2007) is "Knowledge Beyond Authority. Karim Lekhani is doing the wrap-up right now, and giving an excellent summary of the day. Knowledge beyond authority is a challenge to the university, his current slide says. Earlier he showed a slide that contained a half-joke I sometimes heard (seriously) when I worked in France: "It works in practice, but will it work in theory?" Karim says that practice is leading theory today. So, to follow up on that, I'd like to suggest a few theories, based on the facts of practices that orignate, grow and spread knowledge far beyond and outside the academy. |
| | 1) The Net is a whole new environment. We live in it, we build on it, and we have no choice about taking advantage of it if we wish to be involved in the civilized world. The Net is not, as most phone and cable companies (and their invoices that arrive every month) would suggest, gravy on top of telephone and television. In fact, it's the other way around. Voice and video are forms of data that move on the Net: two among many others. "Content owners" and universities may oppose each other over what can be done by the former to protect the latter, but they will come to basic agreement about the nature of the Net for the same reason they have long agreed about the nature of gravity: it's an undeniable fact of life. |
| | 2) Facts of life in the new networked environment are radically different than those in the physical world. There are new rules around abudance and scarcity, among many other variables. Many methods of control that work in the physical world do not work on the Net, or work in flawed ways — and in fact insult its nature. Yet the two worlds coexist and coincide. It is essential that we understand the networked world on its on terms, and not just on terms borrowed from the physical world. This will take awhile. |
| | 3) Knowledge is not a thing. What I know is who I am and how I interact with the world — not a sum of "content" that has been "distributed" to me. We may speak of "information" as if it were a commodity (or worse, "content"), but to inform is to form. We are shaped, and enlarged, by what we learn. |
| | 4) Authority is the right we give others to improve who we by expanding what we know. We are all authors of each other. That goes for any of us, not just professional educators — whose job is to be exceedingly good at it. |
| | 5) Educational institutions need to build not only on their legacy advantages — buildings, libraries, faculty and so on — that give them high degrees of authority in all of their specialties. They need to take advantage of the fact that all these advantages now live on the Net and not just on the campus. |
| | Taking notes live here. I'll be adding to this and will change it, probably. |
| | Okay, Dr. Weinberger is talking now, about how he doesn't know which other folks he runs into here have Ph.D.s. (While not disclosing that, in fact, he has one.) Because that doesn't matter, he says. (I agree. I only have the nickname, not an advanced degree.) What they know and say matters more than the degrees they hold. He's also talking about knowledge, such as that revealed on an active emailing list where everybody talks to and learns from each other. The knowledge is in the list... The list is smarter than anybody on the list... We've always known that knowledge is better in conversation... Knowlege is not mental content. |
| | About authority... Because authority is metadata... And we all get to create that metadata. ..We're all qualified... You don't need a title. Authority knowledge gets split off from the thing itself... This doesn't fit in to the model of institutions. Good thing: now everything is becoming metadata. |
| | About Charlie Nesson (who founded and inspired this conference and is now presumably recovering from surgery)... I'm an optimist about the Web, but have also been almost clinically depressed about the politics of the Web. Charlie snapped me out of it. He said "There's always the university." It's committed to openness. That's something we can do here. We can preserve these values. There is no compromising on our core values. It's way too early to "be realistic." We need rules. We don't need too many rules. I don't want history to say we faced a choice between a new renaissance and a new dark ages and chose the latter. Not quite verbatim, but the best I could do. |
| | Great talk. And that wraps it. |
Never pick a fight with a journalist who earns his awards by the barrel
Library 2.0
| | I'm in the workgroup on The Library. Topics include What is The Library? Who uses? Shift? Public vs. Open, Library of Internet?, Fair use, Classification? Is scholarship 'mission critical'? |
| | My topic is the Public vs. Open one. |
| | I may not have a chance to talk about it in the session, so I'll talk here instead. For now. |
| | I've always loved libraries. Once I began living in them (Guilford College's, UNCG's, UNC's), back in the Sixties, I never wanted to live far from one. And I never have. I've lived near Duke, UNC, Stanford and UCSB, respectively. |
| | The one that stands out for me is Stanford's. And not in a good way. |
| | Back when I moved to the Bay Area in 1985, one reason why we chose to live in Palo Alto was the fact that it looked like a university town. Turns out it wasn't, apparently by Stanford's choice — even though the town was created by Leland Stanford himself, who even named all the streets. |
| | See, when I got to Palo Alto, one of the first things I did was visit the Cecil H. Green library there. To my astonishment, I was denied access, exept for one day per year — unless I purchased a pass for something like $500 per year. I told them I had free access to libraries at Duke, UNC and many other universities. They told me that Stanford was different. Stanford was, literally, exclusive. |
| | At that moment I became a Cal Bears fan. |
| | I politely told the person excluding me that I hoped my kids wouldn't go there, and would go to Berkeley instead. In my daughter's case, this in fact happened. (She even collected a Phi Beta Kappa key while there.) I've also encouraged other family members of her generation (including two nieces and a nephew) to go to Berkeley as well. |
| | I don't really dislike or disrespect Stanford. But I notice that it continues to have a highly restrictive use policy for outsiders. It's not as exclusive as Harvard's for the Widener Library — a cause of much annoyance and discussion here — but it's exclusive. |
| | The Net is a bigger library than all of them put togeter, and it's not exclusive. This is a fact of life (or death) for libraries and those of us who continue to care deeply about them. |
School 2.0
| | Having a very interesting day at IS2K7 at the Harvard Law School. There's a great list of questions we're visiting here. Here in Ames (a vast and beautiful courtroom), there are lots of questions and comments about What's Wrong with The System, about the Harvard and MIT "brands" and what they mean. |
| | I have four thoughts that I didn't have a chance to share with the room, so I will here. |
| | First, I'm here in as a fellow with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. I'm also a fellow with UCSB's Center for Information Technology and Society. I'm also a graduate of Guilford College, which is not exactly the most "branded" school in the country. Nor was I a scholar there. For my first two years there, my grades were barely good enough to get me back the next year. I did better the last two years, but I graduated with no distinction. Though I learned a lot, and I'm grateful both for that and for Guilford's willingness to put up with me for four years. |
| | What distinction I have today owes to two things: 1) the Internet, which in very real sense is where I live and work; and 2) my work around trying to understand the Net, to communicate that understanding and to help others take advantage of the Net as well. |
| | It is not ironic that I am a fellow at two universities that would not have let me in forty years ago. Because the world has changed. I've changed. And schools have changed. The Internet required much of that changing, and will continue to force more of it, until humanity and its institutions finish adapting to the fact of the Net's presence in the world. |
| | Second, in discussions we had yesterday in preparing for today, two statements stand out. One is, Our idols walk on clay feet when that's the only way to get around. The other is, We're building a new bicycle while we're riding it here. So, let's cut the institutions — not just colleges and universities, but newspapers, Hollywood and every other institution we tend to give a lot of crap and call "dead" here in the 'sphere — some slack. They need our help to stay alive and vital and relevant. |
| | Third, "brand" is a metaphor borrowed from the cattle industry. Apple is a brand. Tide detergent is a brand. Harvard isn't. Guilford College isn't. The Los Angeles Times isn't. You aren't. We are not cattle. To be human is to be much more than a brand. And universities are human too. In fact, I suggest they are human in ways that companies are not. (Though I need to think more about that one, because I believe companies are far more human than most of us give them credit for.) |
| | Fourth, the big projects many of us are taking on — fixing politics, fixing governance, fixing the academy, fixing markets, fixing personal identity management, fixing the regulatorium — are all huge: immodestly, ambitiously, and realistically huge. They have to be, because the challenges are more than huge, but so is the opportunity to meet those challenges. All are also required by the very fact that grants the same opportunities: the Net itself. That's because the Net is the new underlying infrastructure for civilization itself. It is the Giant Zero that puts us all at little or no functional distance from each other, and in a position to network and improve not only how we communicate but what we do. This is the Flat world that Tom Friedman writes so passionately (and rightly) about. It's why the generation John Palfrey says were "born digital" takes for granted opportunities that my generation, and even the next one (Gen X) could barely dream about just a few years ago. |
| | I'm just a lucky bastard to have been able take advantage of those opportunities myself. |
discuss
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
