Summarizing Benkler

It's time for us to start summarizing what we've learned this semester from Benkler's book, The Wealth of Networks, and who better to summarize than Benkler himself. So listen to his presentation at TED, where he touches briefly, and more clearly I think, on the major themes in his book:



Is that clearer for you? What did you gather from this lecture that you didn't quite understand from the book? I'm attaching your final class quiz to this blog post. There are 9 questions, so be sure to answer them all. Enjoy.

It Ain't All Digital

One of the things that has bothered me most about Benkler's book is its focus on digital information so that networking is viewed almost strictly as an on-line activity. This is unfortunate for most of our lives are still conducted off-line, in the real world; however, networking works in the real-world as well as the virtual world.

Transportation is one of the huge network systems that we have developed and that most of us take advantage of every day. Many of you scholars have been knocking technology in this class, but you don't seem to have a problem with jumping into an automobile (very high technology) and transporting your body almost magically from place to place.

Still, I certainly agree that any technology can have a downside, and our current transportation systems certainly do. They are choking us to death with their emissions. So some people have decided to apply technology to the problem, and they've come up with a new car company: Better Place. If you haven't heard of it, you soon will, so give the following video a view:


Find more videos like this on Planet Better Place


What do you think? Can we convert from oil to electricity? Renault/Nissan, Israel, Denmark, Australia, and San Francisco are buying into the idea. What about you? You'll find another video from Shai Aggasi, the man behind Better Place, at TED. Check it out:

More or Less Human?

Many of you have expressed concerns that technology is making us less human. Obviously, I don't share that concern, but it is a serious concern, as this short, funny video by Renny Gleeson demonstrates:



Yeah, I understand Gleeson's call for us to invent technology that makes us more human, not less, but I'm having trouble figuring out what technology he is talking about, or what human. Any hints?

Seventh Sense

Well, yesterday's post was quite disruptive, as new technology often is, and you've waded in with lots of comments both for and against what you saw.

Jessica Friday asked some rather specific questions, so I'll try to answer them. She asked:

Doesn't this mean that people without the proper technical training coast along and possibly even advance with the aid of this new technology? And doesn't that allow the slackers to take over if they see fit? How will we deal with these slackers who can now just float along in the new network the same as they are in the hierarchical structure? Won't it make like easier for them?

And in addition to all of this...won't technology make people more lazy? Now, they don't have to go through the effort of searching Google (which is already lazy enough). Now, they can simply search everything in a matter of nanoseconds. What are they going to do with all that free time other than be lazy? Is there any way to repair society so that they will do something active with the time that this technology is granting them?

Will this technology allow people without the proper training and education to coast along? Only if you define training and education in its simplest terms: memorizing information. Yes, this technology will give all of us access to most all the information in the world, but I don't think access to information makes us smarter, though it might help you pass your history test. What will separate hard workers from the slackers is what we DO with the information, how we use the information to enrich our networks, to add value.

Will this technology allow total klutzes to repair their BMWs? I don't think so. It still takes a skilled technician to do the job quickly and accurately and to know if the problem has really been solved. The BMW magic glasses could be of use to me if I wanted to spend an afternoon repairing my BMW myself, but I can already buy a manual at the auto parts store that does something similar—if I really want to do that. I don't. Most people don't. And anyway, the trained, experienced technician has developed the sensitive feel to tightening a screw that I don't have. So while the augmented repair glasses can keep both the trained mechanic and me on task, the trained mechanic will still do it better and quicker. That's his value add.

Won't this technology make life easier for the slackers? Yes, but it will also make life easier for hard working people, so the distance between slackers and hard workers will be about the same. Technology always makes things easier, stronger, faster, more powerful. The purpose of technology is to enhance or extend some human function. If a technology doesn't do that, then we abandon it.

Won't this technology make us lazier? No, but it will change our skill set. For instance, the invention of books meant that we could stop memorizing 10,000-line poems, such as Homer's Iliad. Now, we can read many books without having to spend all that brain power committing them to memory. Once, common people could navigate across the wilderness without getting lost. Today, we rely on maps, road signs, and GPSes to get us where we're going. Technological advances don't necessarily mean that we will become lazier — indeed, research shows that people in modern, technologically-advanced societies work more than those in primitive societies. Rather, technology enables us to do things that we couldn't do before, but it also tends to displace skills and capabilities that we once had. A native American of 500 years ago could navigate through wilderness to get to the next trading post, and most of us can't do that. However, we can all drive to lots of different places in just a few minutes or few hours, and the native American couldn't do that. New technology is always a trade off, but it's one that most of us are willing to make.

Will technology give us too much free time? No. This has been the promise, or threat, of technology for 100 years, that machines would do it all for us. Well, I don't know about you, but I don't have any extra time. Technology seems to allow me to do more, but then my expectations seem to rise along with my ability to produce. In other words, I don't seem content to use technology to get the same amount of work done more quickly; rather, I use technology to get even more work done.

The Sixth Sense of Sharing Augmented Reality

First, let me point out that I am now over 200 blog posts—202 to be exact. I had no idea I'd take this blog thing this far, but here it is.

Anyway, I've a new video for you. It is considerably shorter and probably more entertaining than the last one I presented, so give it a watch. You'll be glad you did, for you will learn something about how we will all soon be accessing all that data that is out there on the Net. OUT THERE will very shortly move into IN HERE, and when it does, everything will start changing even faster. Anyway, consider what they are doing at MIT's Media Lab:



Amazing, isn't it? Think of it this way: Your parents had access to huge amounts of information, too, just as you do, but they had to go to the library, search card catalogs, ramble through stacks of books, copy notes onto 3 X 5 cards, and finally type on paper to get it. You think, "Ugh, that takes forever! I just whip out my laptop, get on Google, and all that information comes to me. I copy and paste into my Google Doc and print it out, or just share it with my prof. Sweet!"

But your younger siblings are going to say, "Ugh, Google! That takes forever! I just look at whatever, or whoever, my SixthSense device can recognize, and it tells me instantly all that I want to know about it or them. All of that info is already copied, so I just transfer it, along with my rating to my prof's SixthSense device. Sweet! Uh … print? What's that?"

So you still think that you will have to go to a university class to get world-class information? Not so. World-class information is going to flow right into you, more and better information than any teacher can ever hope to provide you in a lecture. We teachers had best get used to this idea, and we'd best come up with some new ways to add value to your education. Just giving you some info is not enough. Consider the video lecture you just watched: how can my lectures compete with that? They can't. I'd better have some other value-add, or you'll quit coming to my classes.

You think this is just science fiction? It isn't. All the technology already exists and is just being bundled together in a new class of applications called augmented reality. The concept is rather simple, actually. Wish I had thought of it first. The computer program:

1. looks through the web cam on your laptop—soon to be on your SixthSense device worn around your neck or as eyeglasses,
2. it recognizes some key pattern in your world—an image, a barcode, color tags, etc.
3. it then superimposes information from the virtual world onto the item in the real world.

Easy. Look what BMW is doing with augmented reality:



See? Well, you WILL see, and soon. Here's the Sunday School lesson, scholars: your world is becoming more transparent, and that puts more power in your hands. As Benkler, Wesch, and Pensce are saying: you are more free to engage with almost anyone about almost anything, and you have all the information on your fingertips, literally.

Now, what are you going to do with all that information and power? You'd better learn quickly.

Sharing

Another fellow that I like to follow is Mark Pesce. He does not post often to his blog hyperpeople, but when he does, he is well worth reading. You should add his blog to Reader.

In a recent post called Share This Lecture!, Pesce posts a video of a lecture he gave recently at the University of Sidney (Australia), in which he talks about hypersharing. As did Michael Wesch in his essay From Kowledgable to Knowledge-able, Pesce echoes many of the themes that we've learned from Benkler's book The Wealth of Networks. The lecture is a bit long, but give it a listen, and you'll learn something.


Share This Lecture! from Mark Pesce on Vimeo.

I hear Pesce saying that sharing is central to life on the Net, and this fits nicely with Benkler's observations that most people now have the practical means through computer hardware, software, and networks to capture most any information they want and then to share that information with whomever they want, thus creating an information commons that enriches the lives of all of us. Midway through his talk, Pesce notes that universities are joining the commons and putting all their lectures and class notes on iTunes University for everyone to access. Pesce makes a nice point here, though, when he says that this sharing not only enriches the commons, but it also enriches the universities. By giving away their class information, their crown jewels, the universities are reinforcing their position as the world's premier engine for creating new information. This actually entices more people to physically attend these universities to gain the face-to-face and campus experience (and pay for it) that they can't get on the Net. This reinforces a principle that we've mentioned often in class: to get value from the Net, you must first add value. MIT, Stanford, and Yale add value to the Net in the form of free lectures and notes, and this increases their reputations as world-class places of learning, which brings in more paying students. Radiohead adds value to the Net in the form of free MP3s, and thus connects them to more listeners, which brings more paying people to their concerts and to the merchandise store. You must add value to get value. This is a very hard lesson for slackers to learn.

Then Pesce talks about two new capabilities that humans now have because of the Net:

1. hyperintelligence, by which he means each us can be as intelligent as the most intelligent among us because we all have access to the same shared information in the information commons, and
2. hypermimesis, by which he means that each of us can watch the behavior of all the others and mimic the sucessful behavior (or the unsuccessful, if we wish).

Pesce explains how the impact of these new capabilities is most profound in the developing world, where some of the poorest of people are using mobile phones to connect to a wider network to gain access to wider intelligence and to learn successful strategies and techniques from others. These new capabilities are also profoundly disruptive. They are already undermining the music, book, newspaper, and movie industries, but they are also disrupting the legal system as jurors, for instance, consult Wikipedia to help make sense of information that learned in a trial (jurors are supposed to limit themselves ONLY to information presented in the courtroom). This new way of sharing and accessing information will disrupt everything.

Ultimately, says Pesce, our ability to share media and to share knowledge means that we will begin to share power. He notes how students use ratemyprofessors.com to share power with colleges and universities by rating professors independently of the colleges and then sharing those ratings among themselves. Pesce says that you college students will develop more and more ways to share power with your colleges. You may never take all the power away from the college, but the colleges will no longer be able to keep all the power to themselves. Pesce closes his lecture by pointing out that a similar power sharing is underway with government.

And what makes this power sharing possible? Transparency. Colleges can no longer hide their brilliant research faculty who are poor teachers. Governments will no longer be able to hide their backroom deals. This is, of course, the same transparency that Benkler talks about. As more and more of us share more and more of the same information, then we all become more transparent. Slacker students and slacker teachers find it more and more difficult to hide. Slacker government finds it more and more difficult to hide.

As more of lives unfolds over the Net, we all become more transparent. Think about it: you all know who has showed up, either in class or on the Net, for this IDST course. You know who has engaged, and who hasn't. Our work has been very transparent. You can check the comments on the blog. You can check work on the ClassWork wiki. You can check the engagement in class. You know who will take much away from this class, and who won't. And if you want to know even more, you can spend an hour on the Net checking more class traffic. You can know more about this class than most of your classes. If Pesce and Benkler are correct, then more of society will become more like this class. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I like this class. I like knowing, and I like you knowing. That shares the power for the class. Cool.

Knowledge-Able in the Network

I always seem to be enlightened by most anything I watch or read by Michael Wesch, the professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. You scholars saw Wesch's work in two videos we used in this blog at the beginning of this Spring, 2009, semester: Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us and A Vision of Students Today. I've just read an essay Wesch posted January 7, 2009, to Academic Commons called From Kowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments. I'll stop writing now so that you can go read it. Go on, I'll wait.

In this essay, Wesch talks about many of the issues that Benkler has introduced to us, but he discusses them from an educational point of view. Wesch's main point is that education needs to shift from making students knowledgable (able to store in their heads a sanctioned collection of facts and skills) to making students knowledge-able (able to identify and gather knowledge stored on the Net and use it to address issues). This is a profound shift in education away from traditional memorization of information for future use to utilization of information now. He's talking about moving from the traditional hierarchical approach to the network approach. As Wesch says it: As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information, and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information.

The Net makes this shift possible and necessary. Why? Because the Net can remember more than any of us can ever hope to remember. Wesch suggests that we all now have access to more information than any of us can ever store in our heads, and we are adding 2,000 gigabytes of information per second. And the Net is developing tools that help us cope with that tsunami of information, that put at our fingertips the exact information that we need when we need it. For example, I was pointed to Wesch's essay by a Diigo bookmark made by a member of one of my Diigo groups. On Web 2.0, I don't have to go to the information, it comes to me. The Net is becoming transparent to me in a way that I define.

If you looked at the information on the Net as a single mass, it would be overwhelming, opaque, too dense to make sense of, too imposing to approach. But tools such as RSS feeds (Google Reader) and social bookmarking and tagging (Diigo) help me to highlight those threads of the Net buzz that interest me. It's as if I have magic glasses that turn all the hay in the haystack clear and make the needle glow. Now I can find the needle in the haystack. What textbook can compare to this wealth of information? None. What teacher can bring this much information into the classroom? None. So if Wesch is correct, then we should dump the textbook and change the role of the teacher.

How? Neither of them can any longer be the only source of authoritative knowledge—not now that we all have access to more information than any textbook or any teacher can contain by themselves. You may ask, then, why do we need teachers if all the information is on the Net?

Because now teaching can be so much more than just the efficient transfer of information from the teacher's head to the student's head. From my point of view, this is so freeing for both teacher and student. Being the sole source of authoritative information is such a burden for teachers, and most of them are not up to the task. And now with the Net, the teacher as sole source of information is an actual impediment to students. Almost no teacher can provide students with either the breadth or depth of information that the Net can, so why attempt it?

Wesch says we keep attempting it because we still have old, antiquated physical, social, and cognitive structures (what in this class we've been calling hierarchical structures) that reinforce the idea of the teacher and the textbook as the sole authority. As Wesch says, The 'message' of [traditional classrooms] is that to learn is to acquire information, that information is scarce and hard to find (that's why you have to come to this room to get it), that you should trust authority for good information, and that good information is beyond discussion (that's why the chairs don't move or turn toward one another). In short, it tells students to trust authority and follow along.

But the new media environment (what Benkler calls the networked information economy) provides all of us, students and teachers alike, with all the information in the world. The important question then becomes not what can I remember about this information, but what can I do with this information. Class moves from students memorizing a few key terms—such as Benkler's networked information economy, autonomy, and transparency—to students exploring the networked information economy, autonomy, and transparency. I don't care if you can memorize the definition of personal learning network, so long as you can create one and use it to reach your educational and professional goals.

While I am more than happy to give up the burden of being the sole authority in my classes, I am not suggesting at all that teachers are not useful. Actually, I think they are now more useful. How? Wesch points to how in one of those pithy comments that ring that magic bell in one's head from time to time. When noting how the crowd- and peer-produced content of Wikipedia can rival and even exceed the content of experts, he adds: The message of Wikipedia is not “trust authority” but “explore authority.”

This captures nicely the new student-teacher relationship. As a teacher in the new media environment (Wesch) or networked information economy (Benkler) or GoogleU (Hamon), I still bring some authority to the class, but do not think of this authority as something you should blindly follow and memorize for the test. Rather, think of this as my value-add for the class which you are free to explore as an autonomous learner with your own agenda, your own objectives, and your own need for different kinds of information and knowledge. I welcome your challenges to what I bring (I certainly don't mind challenging what you bring—except for the cookies :-)).

As a teacher, I should be farther along on the path of education. I should have read more and thought more about the Net, and done more with the Net, so I have some authority to bring to our discussion, and properly, I should invite you to explore that authority. But I should not expect you to blindly trust my authority. That's too burdensome for me and too inhibiting for you.

My role, rather, is to guide you to the tools and resources and sensitivities that allow you to explore the Net (or any other subject: biology, cultural anthropology, physics, math) and to help you integrate this information into your own personal learning network. My job as teacher is to put you at the center of your own learning and to put myself on the edge. I should not be the center of your classroom. I should help you come to see that ultimately you are your own teacher, that you give yourself your own degree, as David Truss did in a recent post to his blog Pair-a-dimes for Your Thoughts.

To my mind, this is a much more interesting role for teachers to play, and it's far more productive for students.