Word Clouds

Well, I'm on a roll about Web 2.0. One of the key benefits of Web 2.0 is the range of tools, usually free, that users can access to aggregate data. In the past, only big organizations would have access to these kinds of tools, if they were available at all. Now, you and I can get'em.

Norman D'Arcy, whom we met in the previous post about aggregating life photos for one year, has another tool for aggregating data he finds on the Net: Wordle.

Wordle creates a word cloud, which groups words in a document and ranks them by frequency. So D'Arcy ran both acceptance speeches from McCain and Obama to generate the following word clouds. McCain's first:














Then Obama's:











So what do the word clouds tell you about McCain and Obama, especially in terms of their own positions on the five moral scales that we've been playing with. Do their conservatism and liberalism come through in the words that they use?

Google U

In a couple of posts to his blog O'Reilly Radar, Tim O'Reilly explores what it means to be Web 2.0, and for him, it's much more than just cool, online software such as YouTube, Google, and Facebook.

In the post Why Dell.com (was) More Enterprise 2.0 Than Dell IdeaStorm, O'Reilly defines Web 2.0 "as the design of systems that harness network effects to get better the more people use them, or more colloquially, as "harnessing collective intelligence." This includes explicit network-enabled collaboration, to be sure, but it should encompass every way that people connected to a network create synergistic effects."

For O'Reilly, then, Web 2.0 is a way of organizing yourself and implementing tools so that you are constantly collecting data about the people you interact with, so that you are aggregating, mining, and then using the wisdom of the crowds. For instance, Google is Web 2.0 because it constantly collects data about where crowds go on the Net and organizes itself so that it can respond to what it learns about that Net traffic. It gives the crowds tools to use—usually for free—so that it can collect data about the crowds as they use the free tools. It then places small ads on each browser window based on what it has learned about the crowds' Net habits. This has made Google very successful, and very rich and powerful.

In an earlier post called What Would Google Do?, O'Reilly explores what makes Web 2.0 companies such as Google and Amazon different than other, more traditional companies such as banks, credit card companies, and telephone companies. According to O'Reilly, the biggest difference is that Web 2.0 companies make data collection an integral part of their business transactions and then they keep that data in the transaction, the interface between them and their customers, so that they and their customers can use the data. They create an easy-to-use, interactive interface between themselves and their customers (and suppliers) that fosters a rich and well-informed space within which to conduct business. They don't move the data they collect to the back office and hide it, as traditional companies do. O'Reilly says, "one of the big differences between the 1.0 class of data aggregators and the 2.0 class is the difference between "back office" and "live" applications. The credit card company mines its database to select you for direct mail offers; it may even get close to real time in monitoring your card activity for fraud or credit limit detection. But Google or Amazon mines its database in real time and builds the results right into its customer-facing applications."

So how would Google do banking, for instance? O'Reilly says, "they'd let you know which merchants had the best prices for the same products, so you'd be a smarter shopper next time. They'd let merchants know what products were popular with people who also bought related products. They'd help merchants stock the right products by zip code. They'd let you know when you were spending more on dining out than you have set in your family budget. They'd let you know when you were approaching your credit limit, with a real-time fuel gauge, not just a "Sorry, your card has been declined."

So if a bank were to start behaving like Google by building in lots of information for its customers—information that it already has in its back office databases—and then making it easy for its customers to access that information, would you likely switch to that bank? I think I would.

What if your university were to start behaving like Goolge. What would it do differently? It collects lots of info about you and could collect lots more. It knows your eating habits, your living habits, your academic habits, your financial habits. How could it aggregate that info and then enrich the interaction between you and itself? For instance, Google U might handle registration very differently by showing you where you are in your graduation track (credits, courses, GPA, etc), highlighting the courses that fit well into your major as well as courses that students similar to you have taken, highlighting instructors that match your learning style, showing a list of reviews of various courses from students and professors, projecting a course track that will get you to graduation soonest, setting up a notification system for closed classes that might suddenly open. What about a bidding system so that you could buy someone's spot in a particular class? Or perhaps a trading floor where students could buy-sell-swap courses?

So tell me: what would Google U look like?

A Sliding Scale

Our country is in the middle of a four-year ritual that highlights for many of us our differences as conservatives and liberals, but we might ask if the conservative and liberal categories really mean anything. Well, as this TED talk video below suggests, psychologist Jonathan Haidt thinks that our place on the conservative/liberal scale is based on our moral dispositions. Consider Mr. Haidt's ideas:



This video has several points relevant to our book, I think. First, Haidt points out that society (the biggest crowd) benefits from a diversity of moral opinions, just as Surowiecki says in Chapter 3. If we are all liberal or all conservative, then our largest crowd (society) becomes dumber because we as a crowd see less of reality.

Then, Haidt's ideas explain how many of the conventions in society were formed and how we respond to these conventions (Surowiecki explored the importance of conventions in Chapter 4). Apparantly, our response to life depends a great deal on where we fall along each of five, innate moral scales. We are all born with the potential for these five moral points of view, and depending on our environment and experiences, we develop each of these five moral potentials or not.

But, and this is the key for diversity, we all tend to develop in different ways. For instance, some of us value loyalty to our various groups more or less than others do; some of us value the care and nurture of group members more than others do; some of us prefer very large groups that include many others, while some of us prefer very small, well-defined groups that exclude many others.

But however we fall on these five moral scales that Haidt defines, we will all confront social situations and conventions that will satisfy some of our moral sensibilities and, conversely, that will offend some of our sensibilities. And our moral responses help determine whether we see ourselves as conservatives or liberals. This is the point of Haidt's opening illustration of the two fellows visiting Michelangelo's David in Florence, Italy. Because of their different positions on each of the five moral scales, one fellow sees a beautiful expression of the human form and artistic genius while the other fellow sees only an embarrassingly obscene nude. One is moved to tears of joy at the aesthetic gift; the other is moved to tears of outrage at the public insult. One wants to build an expensive museum to house the great art so that everyone can enjoy it for centuries to come; the other wants to pass a law forbidding the public display of human nudity so that no one will ever see this sort of vulgar display again. One will vote for Obama, and one for McCain.

Haidt says we need different points of view all along the scale between these two extremes to make a rich, vibrant, and wise society. Do you agree?

And where do you fall on the various moral scales? You can find out by taking some of the surveys at the YourMorals website. I just completed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, and I as I thought, I scored mostly on the liberal side: like most liberals, I place higher on the harm and fairness scales than does the average conservative. I must be very concerned that people are cared for and treated fairly.

Again, like most liberals, I place lower on the purity scale than most conservatives. I seem not to be so concerned with what people do with their own bodies, so long as they don't harm others.

However, I place lower than even most liberals on the loyalty scale, so I seem to value independence of thought and action over loyalty to my groups. I want to be able to follow my own points of view, even if they are contrary to the points of view of my groups. This sometimes causes me trouble, sometimes a lot of trouble.

My biggest surprise, though, is that I score about mid-way between the average liberal and average conservative on the respect for authority scale. I value respect and deference to authority more than do most liberals, though not quite as much as most conservatives. This seems inconsistent with my low position on the loyalty scale, and perhaps it points to some dissonance in my personality that I still need to work through.

Or perhaps it points out a fairly typical human trait: few of us are ALL conservative or ALL liberal. Rather, we tend to be a mix of some more or less conservative traits and some liberal traits.

So take the survey, and then tell us what you find out about yourself, if you are comfortable doing that. We'll then try to aggregate all the different snapshots of ourselves into an image of the class. Are we a conservative crowd, a liberal crowd, or a diverse crowd? We'll see.

A Singular Diversity

Many of you seemed impressed by Microsoft's PhotoSynth software that aggregates diverse images from the Web and composes a single, three-dimensional image from them. This is a wonderful example of how diversity, in the form of different snapshots, can help create a more complete and robust image of reality.

But what if you don't have a tool to collect all those images from different sources and then stitch them together? Can you still collect images to create a more complete image?

I think you can. On his blog A Difference, Darren Kuropatwa mentioned a Flickr project by a friend of his, D'Arcy Norman. Basically, D'Arcy posted a photograph to Flickr everyday for one complete year, and then he built a video that aggregated the photos into a comprehensive, coherent image of his life in 2007, similar to the comprehensive, coherent images created by PhotoSynth.

I'm not going to tell you anything about D'Arcy Norman before you watch his video, which unfortunately, I cannot display directly into this blog. Still, go watch his video, and then come back here to answer some questions. You will find D'Arcy Norman's video by clicking here and then clicking on the video link, or you can just look at all the photos on Flickr. It's a bit long, but watch all of it.


Finished? Good.

I want each of you to post a comment about D'Arcy's video project. Mention one thing—just one—that you saw in the video and, thus, learned about D'Arcy Norman's life. Mention one thing—again, just one—that you did not see but think that you should have seen. You cannot repeat the observation of anyone else; thus, you must read the comments of your fellow students before contributing your own comment. This means that those who answer first will have the easier task. Slackers will just have to suffer. Sorry. Sort of.

Anyway, let's see what we learn about D'Arcy Norman. Let's see how complete a snapshot of his life that he created out of all those diverse snapshots that he took all year long. Let's see how complete a snapshot of his life that we can create out of all our observations. Should be interesting. It also gives us another way of exploring the diversity of a singularity.

PLEs and Smart Crowds

I've already posted about personal learning environments, but we can now enrich the concept with some ideas from our book, The Wisdom of Crowds. In a post to his blog Pontydysgu - Bridge to Learning, Welsh researcher Graham Attwell writes:

The idea of a PLE (Personal Learning Environments) is that learners can configure different services and tools to develop their own learning environment, bringing together informal learning from the home, the workplace as well as more formal provision by education institutions. The PLE is controlled by the learner and as well as offering an environment for accessing different information and knowledge allows access to web based publishing and other opportunities for creating content and expressing and exchanging ideas. The idea behind the PLE is to harness the power and potential of social software and web 2.0 applications for learning.

Attwell's post gives us a fine definition of a PLE, and I think we can tie it back to our book in several ways. First, a PLE is based on independence, your independence. You decide who and what is in your PLE, and you do the work to bring these resources into your PLE. This is unlike your university which exercises a great deal of control over who and what is in your learning environment, often determining what professors you work with, what classes you must take, and what kinds of work with what tool you must perform. Remember that independence is one of the key factors that can make a crowd smart. My own PLE is made up of people with whom I work, of people with whom I have worked in the past, of friends and family, and of people I have acquired on the Net, including Graham Attwell, whom I have never met nor worked with, but who has contributed much over the past year to my own learning about personal learning environments. But here's the key: he's in my network by my choice, not by his choice or the choice of some institution. The Net gives me great independence to build the kind of PLE that meets my needs, and for the time being, Mr. Attwell fits nicely into my network. I suppose I really should say thanks. Hmm.

Anyway, a PLE also plays upon diversity in a crowd. I draw upon people from all over the planet for my PLE: Graham Attwell from Wales, Vicki Davis from Georgia, Jeff Utecht from Thailand, Ian Stuart and Ewan McIntosh from Scotland, David Warlick from North Carolina, Julie Lindsay from Qatar, Stephen Downes from Canada — well, you get the idea. I also draw from students at GCSU, and from my sister who teaches gifted students in Bulloch Co, GA. Except for the fact that all these people speak English, they are a rather eclectic group who often illuminate issues from angles very odd to mine. That's a good thing. If we all saw the same thing, then none of us would see very much.

Then, a PLE plays upon decentralization. Heavily. All of these people in my PLE are pursuing their own careers and objectives in their local situation, applying their knowledge, skills, and resources to their professional and personal issues. When I engage them in my learning, I'm reading their local knowledge about local issues—I'm not reading some generalized textbook about educational technology. The interesting thing is that this personalized, localized knowledge tends to be infinitely more interesting than the bland, generalized, aseptic knowledge in textbooks. Strangely as well, it is often more relevant to my personal, local situation.

Finally, a PLE plays upon aggregation, another attribute of smart crowds. I could not build my PLE without the means to connect to all these diverse and well-distributed people and resources and to aggregate what they have to offer. I have the tools that make connection and aggregation possible, even easy. I have a web browser (Firefox), a feed aggregator (Google Reader), email (gMail & Apple Mail), chat (gTalk, iChat, & Skype), blog (Blogger), wiki (gSites), social networks (Facebook), collaboration productivity tools (gDocs), and a hundred widgets & gadgets. I can draw all this information onto my laptop screen (MacBook) and then make sense of it for myself, produce new information out of it, and reshare that new information with others, including my students.

In short, my PLE is a well-functioning smart crowd, and I'm sitting at its center. I'm in charge. I don't have to wait for my school, my university, my professors, or anyone else to enable my learning for me. I've done it myself. I like this PLE thing, and I can't wait to see where it's taking me.

So what about your own PLE? Who and what is in your PLE? Are they diverse? Are they independent? Are you pulling their stuff in, organizing it to meet your needs, and then producing useful products (documents, videos, blog posts, wikis, etc) which you can send back into the ecosystem? Are you in charge? What role does your university play in your PLE? How can you better control the university? Let me know.

Diversity & Facebook

One of the key factors that makes a crowd smart, Surowiecki suggests, is diversity, by which Surowiecki means lots of different people with lots of different points of view about whatever issue the crowd is concerned with. A uniform or homogenized crowd, on the other hand, lacks the different points of view to present a well-rounded and robust image of reality. However, most people seem to prefer homogenized crowds of people who basically look, act, and think like themselves. When people form groups, they tend to group themselves with people who are similar.

Facebook was like this. In the beginning, Facebook was mostly made up of college-age people in the 18-25 range. While this group is still the largest Facebook block, it is no longer the fastest growing, and it has even lost its plurality status. According to a post on the O'Reilly Radar blog, for the first time fewer than 50% of Facebook users are in the 18-25 age group. The fastest growth for Facebook is now in the teen (13-17) and young professional (26-34) groups, with middle-aged professionals (35-44) also growing.

It appears, then, that Facebook is becoming a much more diverse crowd, and I'm wondering what effects that might have on Facebook. Afterall, Facebook is a social network, and most people want their social groups to be fairly homogenous. So what will be the impact on Facebook? Do you welcome the influx of older and younger people to Facebook? Do you welcome all the growth in foreigners to Facebook? What effects, if any, will these new people have on Facebook? What effects, if any, will they have on you and your network of Facebook friends? Will these new people make Facebook smarter? Can you leverage that new intelligence?

Diverse Points of View

In Chapter 1 of The Wisdom of Crowds, Surowiecki says that diversity is one of the key conditions that helps a crowd become wise. In class last night, I was never confident that we actually saw why diversity works FOR a crowd rather than against it, but I've come across something that I can show you: Microsoft's Photosynth.

First, watch this TED presentation by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a member of Microsoft's Live Labs and co-creator of Photosynth, a program that takes any collection of still photographs and assembles them into a coherent, three-dimensional whole. Or as the Live Labs website puts it: Photosynth can "automatically reconstruct a three-dimensional space from a collection of photos of a place or an object."



The point for our discussion is that the more diverse a group of still photographs that Photosynth has to work with then the richer and more accurate a 3D image it can create out of aggregating all those photos together. Likewise, the more diverse a crowd with its more diverse individual snapshots of reality, then the richer and more accurate image of life it can create when all those individual mental snapshots are aggregated together.

Of course, this then leads us to the question of how to aggregate all those individual snapshots of reality. That's the trick. Fortunately, our book has a few things to say about aggregation.

By the way, I encourage you to visit the Photosynth website and try it out, but not on a Macintosh or older PC. Photosynth runs only under Windows XP or Vista. Sorry.

More PLN

Let's start putting some details into our discussion of personal learning networks (PLNs), and this makes us confront one of the core problems with joining and participating in a world-wide community: how to create a conversation out of the noise.

Consider what usually happens when you get a group of people together in one room, and they are all talking at once. Chaos. It becomes nearly impossible to create or to follow any thread of conversation out of the general cacophony. Imagine a conversation among the 250,000 people working on Linux or the millions working on Wikipedia. The din must be deafening, destroying all conversation.

What usually happened in the past to turn a mob such as this into a coherent crowd is that one one person, or a small group, took control and amplified their voice to be heard above the mob and they usually forced everyone else to be quiet. This is the lesson you learn in school. The teacher/leader talked, and everyone else shut up. It was one of the few ways we knew to turn a disorderly mob into an orderly crowd.

But what about now? Do we have new mechanisms that allow us to tap into the World Wide Conversation (Web) with its unbelievable hubbub and turn cacophony into conversation? Actually, we do.

You already do something like this with Facebook, which at the same time connects you to hundreds or even thousands of people and their conversations (text, pix, gifts, etc) and filters and manages those conversations into something coherent that appears on your Facebook home page where you can make sense of it. And it both connects and filters much better than, say, plain email, which is why you youngers are abandoning email for social networks such as Facebook, while we olders tend to stay with email or handwritten letters.

Facebook is great for joining you to a larger social community and conversation, but what tools exist for joining you to a professional community and conversation? Actually, Facebook can be used for professional purposes, but my experience tells me that most Facebook users resent that. They want to keep Facebook strictly social. We still may find ways in this class to use Facebook for your professional work and communication (I'm defining your professional role as university student), but are there other tools for us to use? Of course.

Recently, the ReadWriteWeb blog posted a list of 10 best online tools for students. We are already using the Google Office suite, but we could use the others, especially Google Notebook and Calendar. Which of the other tools mentioned could be of help in this class? Let us know. Give us some ideas.

Several of the 10 best online tools on the ReadWriteWeb post are fairly individualistic, especially the bibliography tools, and they don't connect you to your crowd, but a recent post by Miguel Guhlin on the Share More! Wiki is all about connecting to your crowd, especially to your personal learning network. Guhlin, the director of instructional technology for the San Antonio Public Schools, says:

While in the past, we were limited by the occasions that served as “learning experiences,” in the 21st century, learning isn’t restricted to a special event bound by time and place. We don’t learn just when sitting in a meeting, or at a conference or from 8:00 to 3:30 PM when school is in session. Today, we have the potential to tap into a flow of conversation, a web-based learning ecology, that we can learn from 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

I think Guhlin is correct, but imagine the overwhelming pressure of 24/7/365 school, or job, or anything else. How do you drink from that kind of fire hose? Guhlin says: The only way for all of us to deal with the current challenge to our particular approach to learning — aside from ignoring it completely, which is about as effective as ignoring an oncoming truck — is to seize the wheel and create our own learning network. So let's seize the wheel.

What wheel? Guhlin lists several, but I want to start with RSS feeds, specifically Google Reader. The following video will give you a useful introduction to readers:



This CommonCraft video will tell you about Google Reader specifically:



So here is your next assignment, which you should complete by this weekend, Sunday, 07 Sep 08:

• Setup your Google Reader using your gMail account.
• Subscribe to at least 3 different web sites, including this IDST-2215 blog.
• Share with me one of your other site feeds besides IDST-2215 (I don't need to know when this site is updated, given that I'm doing the updating :-).

I trust you are having a wonderful Labor Day break. Now get back to work. Remember: 24/7/365.