https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/
Opening keynote for dLRN 2015. Delivered October 16th @ Stanford. Actual keynote may have gone on significant tangents…
A week or so ago, I was reading about the Oregon shooting. I’m a pretty standard issue liberal and when I see things that support my liberal views I tend to notice them.
So when I see this line in an article I get all excited. This is from the CSJ:
The prevalence of gun ownership in a given state is “significantly associated with state incidence of mass killings with firearms, school shootings, and mass shootings,” according to a study published last July from numbers compiled of mass killings in the US between 2006 to December 2013.
So the blood starts pumping. Dammit, I’m right. When will the world see it?
via xkcd
So a year ago I would have thrown the link to Twitter with a damning summary of the study, and everyone would have known I was a good liberal and retweeted it to prove that they were good liberals and if you listened closely you could hear our collective neurons harden.
But for the past year I’ve been experimenting with another form of social media called federated wiki. And it’s radically changed how I think about online communication and collaboration.
I don’t want people to get hung up on the technology angle. I think sometimes people hear “Federated Thingamabob” and just sort of tune out thinking “Oh, he’s talking about a feature of Federated Thingamabob.” But I’m not. I’m really not. I’m talking about a different way to think your online activity, no matter what tool you use. And relevant to this conference, I’m talking about a different way of collaborating as well.
Without going to much into what my federated wiki journal is, just imagine that instead of blogging and tweeting your experience you wiki’d it. And over time the wiki became a representation of things you knew, connected to other people’s wikis about things they knew.
So when I see an article like this I think — Wow, I don’t have much in my wiki about gun control, this seems like a good start to build it out and I make a page.
The first thing I do is “de-stream” the article. The article is about Oregon, but I want to extract a reusable piece out of it in a way that it can be connected to many different things eventually. I want to make a home page for this idea or fact. My hub for thinking about this. So I make a page like so:
This is the most basic page I can imagine — it’s pretty close to a tweet, and it took about as much time. I looked through the revision history and it took me about 45 seconds to make this much of the page, about the time it takes to tweet something. I started at 6:57 a. m. and had this up by 6:58.
I wander away from it for a bit. I go and get my coffee and make sure the kids are getting ready for school. When I come back I see this page and I think, you know what would make this page better? A link to the actual study. So I spend a couple more minutes and track down the actual paper and add it.