mcontainer

P2PU Lernen 2011

2011-11-18T09:03:00.000-08:00

How to scale peer learning online

by PHILIPP on SEPTEMBER 30, 2011 · 5 COMMENTS

Helping people learn with each other is the most important thing for P2PU to get right. In a few weeks we will be launching “Webmaking 101″ to try new ways of helping (many) more people learn together. It’s a pilot project for the Mozilla School of Webcraft at P2PU that is based around the concept of “learning challenges” and it has potential for other communities within P2PU. Learning challenges mix great content with social support and mentorship to create a P2P learning model that can scale in ways that traditional courses can’t.

This is a long post, because I felt it was important to talk a bit about our experience so far, and how the idea of “challenges” is a direct response to some of the things we have learned. I hope the post provides a good starting point for a conversation, so that as a community we can explore how P2PU can best support peer learning in the future – through courses, challenges, and other models that we haven’t even thought of yet.

Why this is important

We know that peer learning works offline. At Harvard University (of all places) the ability to get help from other students through informal study circles is the most important predictor of academic success among undergraduates. We learn more when we share our questions with others, and try to explain things that we just learned to them. In this way it is not just content we learn, but we get better at the process of learning itself.

The Internet supercharges the potential of peer learning. It gives us access to a huge (and growing) amount of high quality educational content that can be downloaded, translated, remixed, adapted and shared. And it puts us in touch with millions of other people to learn with. It is this combination of peer learning, the social web, and educational content that creates an unprecedented opportunity to make education more accessible, more engaging, more fun, and less expensive.

This is why figuring out how to support peer learning online is important – and why it has shaped everything we have done at P2PU, and how we have gone about it.

Peer learning online is hard

When P2PU was just a bunch of idealists and a hosted wiki, we were overwhelmed by the positive response to our simple idea – let anyone create and run a course online. People were excited by the opportunity to share their knowledge, and many joined our community and created great courses. But as we grew we started noticing a few challenges that seemed related to structuring learning as courses:

Not all courses promoted peer-learning > Some of our courses turned out like more traditional instruction, with experts leading the discussion, answering most of the questions, and pointing out the right from the wrong. That’s great for some learners and topics, and we are not abandoning it, but it doesn’t scale like peer learning and it doesn’t encourage learners to take active ownership of their learning.

Drop-out rates were high -> In retrospect this should not have been surprising, because drop-out rates are high in all online learning (even in courses where students pay and are working towards a formal degree) but it’s frustrating for volunteer facilitators to see participants leave, and it’s discouraging for learners to loose their peers.

Courses didn’t run consistently -> We have had many great courses run once, or twice, but rarely more than that. And yet there was a seemingly infinite demand for some topics (I’m exaggerating, but it did make our server crash a few times) and there is nothing worse than not being able to meet that demand.

Reasons

We realized that our model of courses placed a huge burden on the role of the facilitator, and that it is hard to facilitate peer learning online. It is even harder in an environment like P2PU where many of the usual incentives like fees and degrees don’t exist.

Great facilitators are hard to scale. One reason is the high level of commitment that is required. Many people are willing to help others learn, but fewer have the spare hours to create and offer an entire course. And offering the same course again, or offering a course that someone else designed, is less interesting than creating a new one.

And finally we realized that great content that is designed to support peer learning is scarce. When we started out we thought the content problem was solved. The reality is that there is a lot of content, but a lot of it isn’t engaging for self-learners, or easily suitable to support informal peer learning communities.

From courses to challenges

The realization that there may be a problem with the existing content led us to think about what we could add to the wealth of materials that exist already. Let me be clear, there is no shortage of open educational content, and much of it is very good. And we have no intention to produce more of what is already out there. However there are ways to make what’s out there more useful to peer learners, by turning content into learning challenges and:

Choosing the best, most relevant and interesting open resources

Framing them with the interesting questions that spark curiosity

Setting tasks that emphasize peer-learning and project-based-learning

Defining clear goals that signal achievement, with enough flexibility to take different paths to reach them

And ultimately involving the community into the development of more and better challenges add

Providing mechanisms for assessments and badges, and signal achievement

Weaving social learning features into and around the content

There is an important content foundation to the “challenge” model (also see this post by Chloe on what makes a great challenge), but the most exciting thing is not the content itself, but the social learning that it enables.

http://blogs.p2pu.org/blog/2011/09/30/loads-of-learning/

Philipp Schmidt, Peer learning that scales

Having great challenges makes great facilitation easier. It allows self-learners to get started on their own or in informal cohorts. It let’s us lower the bar for more people to get involved to answer questions, or act as mentors, which is much easier and takes less time than signing-up as a course facilitator. Learning cohorts can be organized around specific challenges, nudging everyone currently working on a particular challenge to support each other. And it’s straight-foward to attach badges to challenges, which act both as motivators to work harder, and map out a path along which to progress.

As a result many more people can get involved in helping others learn. And many more people can learn.

This does not mean that we have plans to abandon the course model. Quite the contrary, we will continue to get better at supporting it – by providing better resources to new facilitators, rolling out improvements to our site, and thinking about ways to motivate facilitators to run their courses more than once. But it’s time for something a little more radical.

Taking it to the users

In true P2PU style we decided that the best way to find out how challenges would work was to go ahead and try it. John, Jamie, Erin, Chloe, Zuzel Jessica (and many others) have done a really awesome job building out the first set of challenges for Webmaking 101, which will launch in a few weeks. We asked the Webcraft community for feedback on earlier drafts, and they have had lots of useful input which helped us make the challenges better.

But we want to broaden the conversation beyond Webcraft. I am excited about the challenge model because I think it offers an opportunity for P2PU to scale great peer learning to many more people than we can reach with courses. But I also have many unanswered questions about challenges. Here are three for starters:

How can we preserve the strong sense of cohort that traditional courses have?

Will challenges only work for technical areas, or can they be applied to other fields as well?

We created the first set of challenges for Webmaking 101. How can more people get involved in creating more challenges?

Lots of hard questions. Let’s experiment, find answers and keep getting better at helping everyone learn with everyone else.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

A basic “how to make” a School of Webcraft Challenge (poster included)

Last week I wrote a post about what makes a good challenge in School of Webcraft. This week I tried to break down the process of building such a challenge for content experts who wish to create a “challenge blueprint” of their own. The “challenge” model is a new approach for P2PU courses and we are trying it out for the release of Webmaking 101 in School of Webcraft along with the implementation of the Open Badge Infrastructure (check this post by Phillip to learn more about the challenge model in P2PU and this post by Erin to learn more about the Open Badge Infrastructure ). The steps below are based on the approach we have taken so far to create the challenges in Webmaking 101 and are open for you to mix and match according to your needs. (If you are the visual type like myself scroll down at the end of this post for an info-graphic poster that outlines the steps below)

Set a learning goal: Start by defining what is the big idea you want to teach in this challenge. What will learners understand (knowledge) upon completion of the challenge? what will they be able to do (skills)? Remember that a learning goal is not always tied to a specific piece of content, for example understanding the fundamentals of HTML. A learning goal can be connected to multiple skills like “working in a team”, “problem solving”, “creative thinking” etc.

Define a motivating “need to know”: think of a motivating situation that creates a need for learners to acquire the knowledge and skills you want to teach them. This is what we call a “need to know” and it can be connected to a narrative or to a real world context. Ask yourself why are the learners taking on the challenge? Are they casting spells against HTML zombies? are they activists trying to put together a website for a better cause? are they putting together a professional portfolio site?

Explain “what is the benefit?”: Think of how the materials will clearly convey their benefit to the learner. Each overview section might have explicit “after this challenge” language (aka “The Payoff” or “Victory”) that describes skill and knowledge gain in non-technical terms. For example you can say something like “you will be able to …” “build simple web pages”, “integrate video into a page’ , “learn how to work with others”, “become a mentor.”

Create clear objectives and expectations: Before you start breaking your challenge down to smaller tasks and milestones, think backwards: what will the final objective be? Make sure to create concrete expectations for the outcomes of the challenge, such as building a website that includes specific features. The objectives should be simple to understand yet challenging to accomplish, in order for the learners to be motivated enough to go through it.

Break it down to milestones: Create a trajectory of smaller milestones that a learner needs to reach in order to achieve the challenge objectives. You can imagine this like a map; what “places”do you want your learners to go first, second and so on in order to reach their final destination? For example in “Your Webspace” challenge there are three milestones; finding a hosting service, setting it up and creating a step by step tutorial of how you did it.

Look around you for inspiration and guidance: the point here is that you do not have to reinvent the wheel; research other courses, websites, games or activities that support similar learning goals. Don’t be literal in your research, sometimes things that are not obvious precedents can be very inspiring. For example, you could get inspired by Ze Frank’s sandwich project to scout a piece of HTML code like

around your neighborhood like we did to create the “HTML is all around you” challenge.

Embed Assessments and Badges: Be clear on how the challenge will determine whether or not one has met a learning goal. Try to integrate the assessment as part of the challenge, rather than after the fact. One way to do that is to have the learners create and share artifacts such as a video, a blog post, a game, a tutorial or a song. Artifacts can then be associated with different badges; for example in the “HTML is all around you” challenge learners have to understand what HTML tags mean. To do so they have to create a photo collage of HTML tags as seen in the real world. During that process they have to share their work with their peers and assess each other on wether they understand how to use the HTML tags. Moreover, the artifacts and the process they took to make those are tied to badges. Those vary from skill based such as the HTML basic that recognizes the ability to make basic use of HTML tags, to peer related ones such as the Super Blogger that is awarded to peers who consistently write informative and engaging blog posts. (This is one of the hardest parts about making a challenge so expect a longer post on the topic)

Think of Learners as Peers: Create opportunities for the learners to interact with each other as part of the challenge and to develop peer assessment habits throughout, such as giving feedback on each others work. Encourage participants to teach each other, hang out online and offline and hack and improve the challenge ideas and wording. Consider how learners can take the challenge, remix it and make it their own.

Keep it short and simple: when compiling your challenge avoid lengthy explanations and write tasks that are short and easy to understand. You can also consider Including interactive links, such as a video. Make sure that the size of the challenges is consistent in length and style.

Test and Iterate: once you have created your challenge you can think of it as a growing organism constantly evolving based on testing and iteration. You can test your challenge in three phases; first go through it yourself, then have other experienced users play through and then have new users test it out. Be clear on what you are looking for when you are testing your challenge; how long did it take for someone to complete it, where did they get stuck, was it too easy or too challenging and so on. Learn from this process and find ways to incorporate the feedback through various iterations even after you have gone through the initial testing. The School of Webcraft mailing list is a good point to start to ask for feedback.

It is our intention at P2PU and School of Webcraft to look at our work as ever-evolving. We view this “how to” as only one out of a series of tools that embrace different leaning styles and approaches to open education and we will be adding more resources like this one as we go.

In the meantime, stay tuned for the release of our Webmaking 101 and if you got inspired and wish to start your own p2pu study group you can do so here.

Special thanks to Allen Gunn, Pippa Buchanan and Jamie Curle for their help editing this post.

Info-graphic below can be downloaded in full poster size here

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

PippaBuchanan.com / Learning Learning

Where I share my work and experiences as an educator in alternative and collaborative learning

Exploring the Social: Challenges of Peer Learning

October 13, 2011 //

I wanted to respond to Philipp’s post about the use of challenges within School of Webcraft and to gather thoughts that have been developing over the last month or so. One of the changes that happened within the School of Webcraft at the same time as my transition out of a formal role with the project was the change from a focus on peer-led courses to the development of challenges that peers can attempt together.

Generally I think that exploring challenges is a good move for much of the learning that should be happening within Webcraft. It’s a learning space which makes defining “learning challenges” simple, attractive and easy to tie to tangible recognition models such as Badges. Jessy Kate’s written a really great response about the tension between recognition and heterogeneous learning, which has also kindled my response. What type of peer-learning do challenges support, do they let people learn “anything” and how are they scalable?

The curated, employment focussed nature of Webcraft makes it easy to say “Want to be a web developer? Show us that you’ve completed these specific activities. We recommend that you do them in this order. Here are some useful resources to help.” Online peer-learning with challenges support this approach very well, but I don’t think that they are an approach which will work across all disciplines and topics in a space such as P2pU.

With challenges learners are invited to interact with each other as peers, but the interaction that is invited seems closer to pre-designed peer-instruction than learning driven by the peers themselves. Chloe’s put out a great document about how to create a challenge , which is targeted at content experts writing challenges for learners. No teacher or facilitator may be present, but the creation of good challenges means that someone besides the learner is required to take the role of instructional “challenge” designer.

This isn’t to say that a challenge based model or peer-instruction is in any way bad, but they both rely on someone else besides the learners to fill the roles of facilitators and designers. Learners aren’t always going to learn things that have easy to find, pre-defined content, and experts aren’t always going to be present and able to voluntarily create the relevant challenges in time for learners to interact with them.

Learner access to pre-defined challenges such as Webcraft 101 is scalable, but peer-learning anything in this manner is not scalable. Learners wishing to explore other topics still need ways to create their own learning experiences, whether they are self-defining a learning pathway or co-creating a course of study with other people.

In many ways challenges are just pre-prepared online learning content with cues to write and comment via blogs. By itself, challenge content doesn’t solve the primary problem which makes “teacherless” peer-learning online (and offline) so difficult: the social.

Connecting and sharing a message with others is easy online, but effectively maintaining and developing a group of people in a shared journey together to a defined endpoint (end of course) is much more challenging. In order for challenges and learner driven peer-education to work out we still need to find ways of better learning with each other.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

NeuesDokument1004

2010-04-05T05:30:00.001-07:00

Ich müsste Templates festlegen.

Productizing_kraka

2009-10-16T08:02:00.001-07:00

Lab: Technology Prototypes

Research laboratories produce scientific findings and 'raw' lab technologies in the form of demos or "technology prototypes".

Lab technology is often entirely orthogonal to the product that will emerge from the process of successful technology transfer.
Nevertheless, we see many labs spending huge amounts of money and effort to investigate the marketability of their technology prototype as a product.
But a (lab) technology prototype is rather an aspect of a product still to be discovered.

A research
finding is NOT a product; a research result - in due time - may become part of
one or more different product.

Transfer: Usage-informed Prototyping, the process of 'discovering the product(s)'

The technology transfer process is really a process of
identifying and choosing between promising ways of "packaging" the
research result with other emerging and mature technologies into something that
provides discernible value to people using them.

Usage informed prototyping adds value to the
technology, transforming unfit technologies into fit ones. Some resulting product
concepts point to market opportunities that are outside the main stream of the
technology creator's primary business, that is, they could become likely
candidates for licensing.

Most interesting systems need to evolve during
development - and after deployment. Watching an emerging technology in the
hands of users is a powerful source of inspiration, made possible by robust
prototyping of the [user experience] design.

Pre-Productizing: Designing Product Concepts

Define the major user affordances of the technology
Identify and analyze plausible and sufficiently important usage domains where such affordances are likely to be important.
Build and design a robust technology prototype to be deployed in the most promising usage domain.

Watching an emerging technology in the
hands of users, in a process of "Constructive Deployment".
Discover product and service opportunities from observation of real behavior.
Observe early contingencies in the usage environment that can be deftly translated into opportunities.

(a) Survey: If any prior work exists on
markets, competitive analyses, etc., the survey will leverage such knowledge
but also complement it by applying a
usage-centered analysis.

(b) Concept Building: provides you with a data based value proposition for one or more
re-configurations of the technology, provides a "sanity check" with respect
to usage impact of such product concepts (may go direct to (d))

(c) Constructive Deployment: In return you
will get both an improved product concept and a substantiated value proposition
with data from before and after. ... It is much beneficial for the
final product concept when the study of the work practices has impact on the
(re-) design and packaging of the technology.

(d) Pre-product: improved product concept, substantiated value proposition, usage-validated
requirement specification (and research data) for handing over the technology to licensees or transferring it
to product development & marketing.

cornet_gdocs_index

2009-03-13T04:28:00.003-07:00

Here are the Links to the Open Documents that contain the current state of the (old) Proposal Text:

(For each chapter there will be one Google-document. The Old Proposal Text Building Blocks can be freely edited.
For the new draft text of the CORNET Full Proposal there will be fresh documents added here, again for each chapter.)

Evaluation Report (Click on link, add your thoughts)

000 | Old Proposal: Project Title (Click on link, add your thoughts)

001 | Old Proposal: Abstract (Click on link, add your thoughts)

002 | Old Proposal: Focus of the project (Click on link, add your thoughts)

003 | Old Proposal: Objectives of the project (Click on link, add your thoughts)

004 | Old Proposal: Scope / SME 2.0 graphical overview (Click on link, add your thoughts)

005 | Old Proposal: Old Workplan (Click on link, add your thoughts)

006 | Old Proposal: Old consortium description (Click on link, add your thoughts)

007 | Old Proposal: European innovation impact on SMEs (Click on link, add your thoughts)

008 | Old Proposal: Economical impact (Click on link, add your thoughts)

009 | Old Proposal: SME Innovation Community (Click on link, add your thoughts)

010 | Old Proposal: Exploitation (Click on link, add your thoughts)

cornet_gdocs_index

2009-03-13T04:28:00.001-07:00

Lev Manovich's new book

2008-11-20T06:39:00.003-08:00

"Software takes command" (pdf), here

"The new social communication paradigm where millions are publishing “content” into the “cloud” and an individual curates her personal mix of content drawn from this cloud would be impossible without new types of consumer applications, new software features and underlying software standards and technologies such as RSS. To make a parallel with the term “cloud computing,” we can call this paradigm “communication in a cloud.” If “cloud computing” enables users and developers to utilize [IT] services without knowledge of, expertise with, nor control over the technology infrastructure that supports them,”169 software developments of 2000s similarly enable content creators and content receivers to communicate without having to deeply understand underlying technologies."

Enterprise 2.0 (short) - Dion Hinchcliffe

2008-11-20T06:20:00.001-08:00

    * Freeform: Only minimal upfront structure, with simple lists, tags, and microformats at first, with more structure later if absolutely needed.
    * Zero Training/Simple: Any barrier to use means that automatically fewer people will use the application or its more complicated features. The most successful sites on the Web require no training at all and guide the user to do the right things. Your business systems can and should be similarly effortless to use.
    * Software as a Service: Online software, with its functionality and information available on any computer, home or work, anywhere in the world, day or night, is the most productive and useful software possible. Installed native software just cannot compete with such persistent availibility.
    * Easily Changed: If a user can’t easily make the necessary change to the structure or the behavior of a system, he or she must have an expert — usually in the IT deparment — to do it, and get in line to wait for it, not to mention pay for it. This simply won’t do when there are ways to put much of this control back in the user’s hands. Using the structure of the Web to chunk up functionalty, the increasing use of feeds, badges, and widgets, will transfer many common IT tasks back to end-users in the next few years.
    * Unintended Uses: Preconceived notions about how an IT system will be used can cut it off from the most valuable uses down the road. RSS syndication is teaching us a lot about this phenomenon on the Web, as well as mashups. It’s all about letting the structure and behavior of IT systems emerge naturally and organically. Having open APIs, easily wired together pieces, and loose and fluid tools helps enable this as well. Discoverability of all of these is essential too. Examples: Not UDDI, search. Not Web services, RSS. Not portals, widgets.
    * Social: Business software tends to harness collective intelligence and even e-mail is social to a certain degree (but darn it, it’s push isn’t it?). Enterprise Web 2.0 software enables pull-based systems that enable people to come together and collaborate when they need to and are entirely uncoupled when they don’t. Enabling just-in-time, freeform collaboration is the key, and so is capturing and publishing the results to be reused and leveraged afterwards by others. Wikis combined with enterprise search do all this automatically for example.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=57

July 26th, 2006
Enable richer business outcomes: Free your intranet with Web 2.0

FAQ E2.0: Was ist "Enterprise 2.0", ganz kurz?

2008-11-20T04:12:00.002-08:00

Eine radikale Umpolung: Alles, was ein Unternehmen tut, findet dann per default nicht im geschlossenen Kern der Organisation statt, sondern im Web - (a) im halbgeschlossenen Netzwerk-Web (Team/Projekt-Mitarbeiter), (b) im halboffenen Netzwerk-Web (Projekt-Partner, Communities of Interest), (c) im WildWildWeb selbst (offener Informationskreislauf, als offene Konversation mit Märkten/Kunden).

Erst dann wird festgelegt, was im geschlossenen Kern (Sicherheitszone) statfinden *muss*. Also Maxime:
"So viel wie möglich der Unternehmensprozesse im offenen und halboffenen Web abwickeln, nur so viel wie unbedingt nötig im geschlossenen Kern."

Der Sinn: Die enormen eigendynamischen Netzwerk-Effekte nutzen, die das Web bzw. Web 2.0 ermöglicht, um Mehrwert zu erzeugen, der sich am Ende irgendwie auszahlt.

Merksatz: Web 2.0 ist Vernetzung als Prinzip - technische Vernetzung über das Web, soziale Vernetzung über Social Software, Informations-Vernetzung über (im weitesten Sinn) semantische Software.

FAQ E2.0: Was bedeutet das für KMUs?

2008-11-20T04:12:00.000-08:00

KMUs sind aufgrund ihrer besonderen Struktur eigentlich prädestiniert für "Enterprise 2.0": flache interne Strukturen, Flexibilität und Schnelligkeit, Grenzen Privat/Arbeit verfließend, komplex ausdifferenzierte Organisations-Prozesse sind de facto zu aufwändig, Vernetzung nach außen (Partner, Märkte, Branche) ist immer ein entscheidender Wettbewerbsfaktor, kollaborative Projekt-Vernetzung mit anderen KMUs ist in vielen Branchen eher Normalfall als Ausnahme.

Die allermeisten E2.0 Tools sind von innovativen IT-K(M)Us für die eigene Arbeit erfunden worden! (Paradebeispiel 237Signals, aber das gilt ganz allgemein).

Aber bis jetzt wird E2.0 paradoxer Weise fast nur in größeren Unternehmen (> 250) als strategisches Thema betrachtet, weil nur die sich Experimente in abgegrenzten "Spielfeldern" leisten können (oder leisten zu können glauben).

"Enterprise 2.0" - ist das nur "Social Software" oder betrifft das auch 'klassische' Business-Prozesse, die bisher mit geschlossener Enterprise-Software (SAP, MS usw.) abgedeckt werden?

Hier muss man eben den kritischen Kern, also die Sicherheitszone des Geschäfts, genau identifizieren. Diese ist NICHT geeignet für E2.0. Das betrifft sicher die Abwicklung von finanziellen Transaktionen, auch Planungenund Kalkulationen.

FAQ E2.0: "B2B - E2.0" - wo verläuft die Grenze?

2008-11-20T04:10:00.001-08:00

Welche Business-Prozesse können davon profitieren, dass sie technisch in die "cloud", d.h. über IP/http verlegt und abgewickelt werden? Wenn das weiterhin völlig "geschlossene Prozesse" sein sollen, sind das eben klassische "Web Services". Die sind aber nicht "E2.0" - nämlich wenn die Daten im Web in geschlossenen Silos aufbewahrt werden anstatt benutzt werden, um Netzwerk-Effekte zu erzielen.

Cloud Services (link) wird dann erst zu E2.0, wenn Web-Technologie verwendet wird UND "Netzwerk-Effekte" eine entscheidende Rolle spielen: Also wenn dadurch, dass Information in offene oder halboffene Räume "hochgeladen" wird, Schneeballeffekte und Anreicherungseffekte entstehen, die auch für das Unternehmen als "Netzwerk-Teilnehmer" signifikanten Mehrwert schaffen.

B2B-Prozesse haben vielfach solchen potenziellen Mehrwert, insofern sie faktisch auf Vernetzung beruhen. Man müsste dann aber den Informationsaustausch-Layer ablösen von dem sicherheitskritischen Layer der Transaktionen von Geld und vertraulicher Information. Also: Informationen und Kommunikationen über kritische Objekte können im Halboffenen ausgetauscht werden, so lange die kritische Information selbst in einem anderen, geschlossenen System bleibt.

Grundsätzliche Maxime: Alle Geld-Prozesse müssen abgelöst werden von Informations-Prozessen. Alle Schnittstellen/Übergänge müssen sehr genau identifiziert und designt werden.

b2b definition (wikipedia)

2008-11-20T04:01:00.001-08:00

Business-to-business (B2B) is a term commonly used to describe commerce transactions between businesses, as opposed to those between businesses and other groups, such as business-to-consumers (B2C) or business-to-government (B2G). More specifically, B2B is often used to describe an activity, such as B2B marketing, or B2B sales, that occurs between businesses and other businesses.

The volume of B2B transactions is much higher than the volume of B2C transactions. The primary reason for this is that in a typical supply chain there will be many B2B transactions involving subcomponent or raw materials, and only one B2C transaction, specifically sale of the finished product to the end customer.

FAQ E2.0: Enterprise 2.0 (schnell und schlampig) - Ist das eine Technologie?

2008-11-20T03:05:00.001-08:00

"Web 2.0 is an attitude, not a technology." (Mc Afee)

"The most simple thing that could possibly work." (Cunningham, vgl. auch Einstein)

Es geht darum, die enorme Macht und Dynamik von Web 2.0-Information
& Kommunikation in einem quasi halbgeschlossenen Raum (dem
Unternehmen) zur Verfügung zu stellen. Das ist in sich widersprüchlich:
Die Effekte von Web 2.0 kommen um so besser zum Tragen, je größer und
je 'offener' das System ist. Und alle Unternehmen haben einen
kritischen Kern, der genau NICHT ins Netz soll (die berühmte, aber weit
überschätzte Sicherheit-Thematik).

Enterprise2.0 bedeutet im Kern eine radikale Umpolung: Offenheit und
Web-Vernetzung ist nun Normalfall, Geschlossenheit die absolute
Ausnahme:

    * Lightweight Applikationen (SaaS, Widgets) statt
überdimensionierter Silo-Software - wie Ward Cunningham, Wiki-Erfinder
sagte: "The most simple thing that could possibly work".

    * "Information wants to be free" (d.h. sozial und technisch extrem leicht austauschbar, nicht gebunden an Apps und Formate)

    * "Information will leben" , d.h. zirkulieren: Fokus auf
Zirkulation von Daten (nicht: auf Speicherung), d.h. data reside in the
cloud. Speicherung ist sekundär, nur zirkulierende Metadaten machen
Info-Objekte wirklich lebendig und virulent. Faktisch: Nur die daten sind im (Arbeits-)Speicher, die zirkulieren.

    * Lose gekoppelte MicroApps (> Eric Schmidt, Google, über "Web
3.0")) mit je einer Funktion statt Multi-Funktions-Software (Widgets,
Browser Plug-ins, auch als Desktop-App-Plugins denkbar)

    * MicroApps bewegen Microcontent - (> Mikro bedeutet hier sowohl
Mikro-Software als auch Mikro-Aufmerksamkeit, was beides in
"Micromedia" zusammentrifft - also in Mobile Phones, in kleinen
Widget-Interfaces ...)

    * MetaApps bewegen Metacontent - die zirkulierenden
Microcontent-Items bestehen v.a. auf Verweisen, die wieder auf Verweise
verweisen .... d.h. die sicherheitsempfindlichen KritischeKern
Informationen werden anderswo gezielt übertragen (in geschlossenen
Business-Prozessen) und auch das aufmerksamkeits-aufwändige
Makro-Wissen wird anderswo gezielt übertragen (in Büchern, F2F ...)

    * Perpetual Beta (> O'Reilly): Klein anfangen, aber sofort, und
immer mit dem Einfachsten, das gehen könnte (technisch wie usermäßig).

    * Design-driven / User Experience-driven: Ausgangspunkt ist immer
die/der User, nicht die komplexe Funktion (die Organisation ...).

    * Netzwerk-Effekte by default (> O'Reilly): Enterprise2.0 ist
nur dann wirklich gegeben, wenn es um Netwerk-Effekte geht: durch
schnellen, intensiven Austausch reichert sich Information laufend an
und weitet sich das Netzwerk laufend aus. Diese Effekte können eher
technisch hergestellt werden (filtering, aggregation ...) oder eher
sozial (Menschen in verbindung bringen), aber beides verschwimmt
letztlich in Gestalt von "Application Design".

    * Überall, wo Netzwerk-Effekte NICHT nützlich oder sogar gefährlich
sind, ist Enterprise2.0 NICHT geeignet. Hier geht es dann darum, die
Grenzen und Schnittstellen genau zu definieren. (Dass sie gegenwärtig
extrem schlampig und unscharf gehandhabt werden, ist eben ein Grund für
die ungelöste Sicherheit-Problematik von Unternehmen, die am
Internet/Web hängen.)

TV UX

2008-07-31T04:13:00.001-07:00

Der
PC ist trotz Maus immer noch sehr weitgehend eine keyboard-getriebene Textmaschine
(einschließlich semantisierter Grafik). Die mobilen Devices
werden tendenziell als Erweiterungen des eigenen Körpers erlebt
(thumb-driven, gesture-driven). Die Einheit von TV-Schirm und
Fernbedienung ist dagegen eher vergleichbar mit einem „magischen
Stab“, der bewegte und sprechende Bilder herbeiruft. Während
der PC-User den Screen als „Monitor unter Kontrolle“ erlebt, und
das Web zugleich als gedankliche Assoziationsmaschine, gehört
das TV-Gerät immer zu einem Raum – entweder als „kleines
Kino“ (HD), oder als „Fenster“ zu einer Ersatzwelt sprechender
Menschen, oder einfach als permanent flackernder
Einrichtungsgegenstand (die Zweit- und Drittgeräte).

Die LMS die! You too PLE! Lleigh Blackall

2008-07-07T11:16:00.001-07:00

Our dam walls of knowledge have burst! and no amount of sand bagging
will stop the flood that is clearly discrediting our authority over
learning. Media, and with it communications, will evolve (as it
certainly has in the last 50 years or more) well beyond the limitations
of our classrooms.

Some Comment ...

Microcintent definition (Anil Dash, SixApart)

2008-07-04T02:43:00.001-07:00

"Microcontent is information published in short form, with its length
dictated by the constraint of a single main topic and by the physical
and technical limitations of the software and devices that we use to
view digital content today. We've discovered in the last few years that
navigating the web in meme-sized chunks is the natural idiom of the
Internet. So it's time to create a tool that's designed for the job of
viewing, managing, and publishing microcontent. This tool is the
microcontent client.!

meta-information ...

Microcintent definition (Anil Dash, SixApart)

2008-06-25T05:45:00.001-07:00

Facebook will take over the World (AOL 2.0)

2008-05-25T13:25:00.001-07:00

saving comment to the lifestream. "basically it's about
metaphors. what is the metaphor one uses for "being on/in the Web"? it
could be "search", or "conversation", or "me & my friends", or even
"research", or "writing oneself into existence" (eg. via Twitter). or
some combination, of course. and yes, most people define themselves as
"social" in a quite simple way (to avoid the term "primitive"). like
"e-mail" (another social metaphor) still being the killer app of the
Internet, at least here in Germany, which is admittedly a late adopting
country. so i fear Josh may turn out to be right."

What does the Web 2.0 Office look like?

2008-05-25T12:45:00.001-07:00

According to Brian Lamb: "Email | Office Suite | FileStore/Share | VPN | Synchronous Voice | Wiki | Blogs | Backups | Calendaring | Project management [GTD]"

To add my view: The Office environment can be described systematically along these lines:

(1) Main focus (email, phone, face2face, workspace on desk/screen) -- semi-focus ("in between" & multitasking, with some focus - like link-blogging, delicious-tagging with comment, ) -- Continuous Partial Attention (partial, peripheral, intermittant; like status & twitter) -- background (the sea one is swimming in, without noticing it, both in realspace and in mediaspace)

(2) communicating - mailing - presence (sensing & making felt)- scanning information - reading texts - writing texts

(3) voice - text

(4) synchronous - asynchronous

(5) active - passive - neither nor (semi-active/semi-passive)

maybe there is more.

Information Work: 3 Types

2008-05-20T04:11:00.001-07:00

adapted from Mark Bower:

Knowledge Work
Creating, consuming, analysing, transforms and managing information
Managing ideas, projects and teams
Starting with ideas, which are then built into a new document/report/form/business process
Working in an unstructured, free-form way

Structured Task Work
Creating, consuming and processing information, but doesn't transform or manage
Finding facts quickly, creating documents, edits, writing & processing information
Working mainly within structured, pre-defined workflows

Data Entry Work
Creating and consuming data within pre-defined systems
Working with standardised documents, files, lists and forms
Working strictly within structured, pre-defined workflows

Anil Dash Copy & Paste

2008-05-16T06:09:00.001-07:00

http://www.dashes.com/anil/2008/03/embedded-journalism.html

Matt Webb Ripped: Getting Things Done As a finite-state machine

2008-05-05T14:19:00.001-07:00

(sorry for ripping, just to thin it over for myself, here's the original:)

Computer programmes are something else that have to not halt unintentionally. The way this is done is to model the application as a collection of finite-state machines. Each machine can exist in a number of different states, and for each state there are a number of conditions to pass to one or another of the other states. Each time the clock ticks, the machines sees which conditions are matched, and updates the state accordingly. It is the job of the programmer to make sure the machine never gets into a state out of which there is no exit, or faces a condition for which there is no handling state. There are also more complex failure modes.

Getting Things Done, David Allen, describes a finite-state machine for dealing with tasks. Each task has a state ('in,' 'do it,' 'delegate it,' 'defer it,' 'trash' and more) and actions to perform and conditions to be met to move between the states. The human operator is the clock in this case, providing the ticks. This machine does have exit points, where tasks stop circulating and fall off.

The cleverness of Getting Things Done is to wrap this finite-state machine in another finite-state machine which instead of running on the tasks, runs on the human operator itself, the same operator who provides the ticks. The book is set up to define and launch the state machine which will keep the human in the mode of running the task machine. If they run out of tasks, the GTD machine has a way of looping them back in with tickle files and starting again the next day. If they get into a overwhelmed state, the GTD machine has a way of pruning the tasks. If they get demotivated and stop running the task machine, the GTD machine has ways of dealing with that. Alcoholics Anonymous has to deal with this state too, and it's called getting back on the wagon. The GTD machine even has a machine wrapped around it, one comprising a community to provide external pressure. Getting Things Done is a finite-state machine that runs on people; a network of states connected by motivations, rationale and excuses, comprising a programme whose job it is to run the task machine.

13 #

Websites can also be seen as finite-state machines that run on people. Successful websites must be well-designed machines that run on people, that don't crash, don't halt, and have the side-effect of bringing more people in. Websites that don't do this will disappear.

Instead of a finite-state machine, think of a website as a flowchart of motivations. For every state the user is in, there are motivations: it's fun; it's the next action; it saves money; it's intriguing; I'm in flow; I need to crop the photo and I remember there's a tool to do it on that other page; it's pretty.

If you think about iPhoto as its flowchart of motivations, the diagram has to include cameras, sharing, printers, Flickr, using pictures in documents, pictures online and so on. Apple are pretty good at including iPhoto all over Mac OS X, to fill out the flowchart. But it'd make more sense if I could also see Flickr as a mounted drive on my computer, or in iPhoto as a source library just as I can listen to other people's music on the same LAN in iTunes. This is an experience approach to service design.

Users should always know their next state, how they can reach it, and why they should want to.

If I were to build a radio in this way, it would not have an 'off' button. It would have only a 'mute for X hours' button because it always has to be in a state that will eventually provoke more interaction.

Designing like this means we need new metrics drawn from ecology design. Measurements like closure ratio become important. We'll talk about growth patterns, and how much fertiliser should be applied. We'll look at entropy and population dynamics.

Maybe we'll look at marketing too. Alex Jacobson told me about someone from old-school marketing he met who told him there are four reasons people buy your product: hope, fear, despair and greed. Hope is when your meal out at the restaurant is because it's going to be awesome. Fear is because you'll get flu and lose your job unless you take the pills every day. Despair is needs not wants: buying a doormat, or toilet paper, or a ready-meal for one. Greed gets you more options to do any of the above, like investing. Yeah, perhaps. Typologies aren't true, but they're as true as words, which also aren't true but give us handholds on the world and can springboard us to greater understanding. We can kick the words away from underneath ourselves once we reach enlightenment.

Matt Webb Ripped: Micro/Macro Structures

2008-05-05T14:18:00.001-07:00

(one of his astounding notes from the 2007 notebook:)

Micro/macro structure is the first of the challenges that faces the Web: Micro Pattern recognition

What microformats and other forms of structure do is increase the resolution of the Web: each page becomes a complex surface of many kinds of wrinkles, and by looking at many pages next to each other it becomes apparent that certain of these wrinkles are repeated patterns. These are microformats, lists, blog archives, and any other repeating elements. Now this reminds me of proteins, which have surfaces, part of which have characteristics shared between proteins. And that in turn takes me back to Jaron Lanier and phenotropics, which is his approach to programming based on pattern recognition.

So what does phenotropics mean for the Web? Firstly it means that our browsers should become pattern recognition machines. They should look at the structure of every page they render, and develop artificial proteins to bind to common features. Once features are found (say, an hCalendar microformat), scripting can occur. And other features will be deduced: plain text dates 'upgraded' to microformats on the fly. By giving the browser better senses - say, a copy of WordNet and the capability of term extraction - other structures can be detected and bound to (I've talked about what kind of structures before).

The technological future of the Web is in micro and macro structure. The approach to the micro is akin to proteins and surface binding--or, to put it another way, phenotropics and pattern matching. Massively parallel agents need to be evolved to discover how to bind onto something that looks like a blog post; a crumb-trail; a right-hand nav; a top 10 list; a review; an event description; search boxes.

The macro investigation is like chemistry. If pages are atoms, what are the molecules to which they belong? What kind of molecules are there? How do they interact over time? We need a recombinant chemistry of web pages, where we can see multiple conversation molecules, with chemical bonds via their blog post pattern matchers, stringing together into larger scale filaments. What are the long-chain hydrocarbons of the Web? I want Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to be mining the Web for these molecules, discovering and name them.

Consulting 2.0: complexity vs. single tool software

2008-04-19T15:00:00.001-07:00

Lee Bryant, Headshift: (excerpts) The current beauty of the enterprise social computing market lies in the fact that there is no product. It is a consulting, not a software market: the value is to build processes from basic tools. Tools are "basic" in the sense that they do not conform the one problem one solution rule that prevails in IT. These tools are aliens: they have been built for individual web-users, not organisational processed work. These tools consequently require translation because they are unfinished products for the organisation. They offer room for intelligence and exploration as they need to be contextualised, mixed and tweaked to be organisationally relevant and compliant. It is this very nature of unfinished product that opens doors to thinking more profoundly processes and therefore, potentially, the whole organisation. These tools adapt to the organisation, not the way round (as classical software do). The level of flexibility and granularity they offer in terms of functionality open doors to building tailored processes, which is a source of efficiency.

A lot of decision makers do not offer their colleagues and organisation the chance to seize the opportunity offered by social computing. When working on an enterprise social computing project, we have the possibility to revamp / enrich quite a lot of fundamental processes. We have the opportunity to rejuvenate the organisation, create new sources of efficiency, competitiveness and wealth.
We often don't because the client is rarely educated for that. There is a whole literature on the blogosphere related to this reality so I won't detail. We have to trace this back to the education of managers. This would call to open the Pandora box of complexity and enter the field of thinking both the process and the organisation at the same time.

Enterprise 2.0 is not only the mere implementation of social computing behind the firewall (what and how) but more fundamentally the introduction of employee participation on managing the organisation (why). We have witnessed how web 2.0, i.e. people participation on the web, dramatically transformed the web. Enterprise 2.0 is there to have the same impact on organisations. Lee and Livio anticipated this in 2002 when they created Headshift.

Social networks are very powerful in mapping weak ties, those ties that prove in reality very strong. Mapping social relations (aka social network analysis) beyond the organisation chart offers a more realistic view over the organisation, the real organisation. It displays what connections are in place to have things work; what arrangements are in place to bypass official processes that are either too old or too narrow to really work. Getting to know these human connections is a dramatic advantage when it comes to managing or changing an organisation. It helps "change managers" change the organisation with less blood and tears. Enterprise social computing therefore helps organisations recover their real identity and evolve more easily.

What social computing offers are tools for idea generation, conversations and collaboration; to potentially all individuals. Not only it renews and enriches the whole process of managing knowledge from a blunt idea to a validated product (product, service, process, report, ...), but it opens doors for having employees voice to participate in improving the whole organisation. Enterprise social computing therefore fuels the dynamics for learning organisations.

But what is at risk with the growth of software instead of consulting is the disappearance of this opportunity window to profoundly modernize organisations and change our lives. One problem - one solution software can only favour status quo.
The risk is to close the Zoo and re-open the Museum.

MicroPulse Radio

2008-04-19T14:59:00.001-07:00

man könnte natürlich den Pulse auch wirklich buchstäblich für webradio verwenden.

man wirft einen titel, wie in MixWit, in den pulse. da ist er dann, in der queue, die abgespielt wird, wenn der pulse kommt.
default vielleicht: 3 stücke hintereinander. oder wirklich nur je 1.
dazu einzustellen: "heavy rotation" (5 wiederholungen), medium rotation (3x), quick scan (1x)

der sinn wäre dann, dass man bestimmte stücke "studiert", also gezielt hört, nicht als wallofsound.
also vielleicht die aktuellen favoriten aus irgendeinem webradio da hinein, in einen loop, der die aktuellen 10 stücke hat.
die wieder raten, taggen und in rss-lists = playlists schicken.

ich würde jetzt Ragoo von der neuen KingsOfLeon hineintun wollen.

IM on e-books

2008-04-08T03:59:00.001-07:00

Markus Flatscher: ...

Anti-Kindle von Charles Arthur im Guardian.

Fand (1) seine Beobachtung interessant, dass die Default-Schrift im Kindle viel zu groß sei, sodass man sie zum komfortablen Lesen kleiner stellen muss.

(2) ===quote===
it would be foolish to predict how electronic reading is going to pan out, because there are two unstoppable trends going on which have been continuing for at least 20 years and show no signs of letting up: people prefer to read bite-sized pieces of information, and people are reading more distinct pieces. Whether we're reading more in terms of the volume of words compared to 20 years ago is hard to tell, but I'd guess so. That means electronic newspapers - the sort that you update at the railway or tube or even bus station - will have some sort of future.
===unquote===

Stimmt sicher auch, jedenfalls viel eher als Steve Jobs hirnverbrannter Kommentar dass mit ebooks aus prinzipiellen Gründen nichts zu machen sei ("The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.")

Ja, ich glaube, dass flashige kleine Reader-Applikationen mittelfristig mal die Zukunft sind. Da wächst auch was zusammen -- weiß nicht, ob Du die neue Adobe DE-Linie gesehen hast:
http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/
Der Reader ist super -- ist wohl die erste wirklich kleine nicht gebloatete, wirklich schnelle Applikation, die Adobe je auf den Markt gebracht hat.

Keine Initialisierung von 500 Plug-Ins, keine Volltextsuche mit Response-Zeiten von vor zehn Jahren.
Ich verwende das ausschließlich für PDFs an Stelle das Adobe-Readers.
Die Bookmark-Funktion kopiert automatisch Snippets.

So was in der Art müsste man als kombinierten ebook- und Feed-Reader haben.
Würde mir erwarten, dass das im Lauf der nächsten 1-2 Jahre so der Fall sein wird.

Du kannst selber beliebige Files zu Deiner Library hinzufügen. (Falls es das ist, was Du meinst, bin mir nicht sicher) - aber wie gesagt, es ist nur ein Reader, die ganze Online-Schiene (feeds usw.) fehlen leider.

Martin: kann man mit FeedJournal hineinholen: das gibt PDF aus

Markus: Was ich auch gut finde:
===quote===
Digital Editions 1.0 supports bookmarks, highlights, and text notes via its "bookmarks" panel. These annotations are stored in an open XML format separately from publications to enable seamless annotating across PDF- and XHTML-based (epub) publications and to set the stage for future social networking features (such as sharing annotations within a community of readers).
===unquote===

Ich hoffe, dass es in diese Richtung geht. Ich bin da vielleicht altmodisch, aber ich möchte unbedingt, dass PDFs eine Zukunft haben -- das ist aus meiner Hinsicht die einzige Hoffnung, dass wir an den Endgeräten jemals vernünftige Typographie bekommen werden (was, wie gesagt, vielleicht altmodisch sein mag, mir aber ein großes Anliegen wäre.)

Martin: wie würde der workflow sein?
(1) Web-Text > merken in InstaPaper
(2) Aus InstaPaper heraus, bei schneller Vorlektüre, in ein Google Notebook werfen, das "FeedJournal_topic" heißt.
(3) Mit FeedJournal ein PDF-Journal generieren und downloaden
(4) alle PDFs kommen in einen Ordner, der ToRead heißt
(5) mit DigitalEditions importieren

Am besten automatisierter Workflow: man müsste sozusagen nur eine Pipe wählen, welche Foodchain man möchte (BOOK oder MICROCONTENT zum
Beispiel), und dann würde das alles entweder vollautomatisch ablaufen oder der
workflow step-by-step für mich zum nachklicken, wie bei einer installation,
vorgelegt.

On Personal Informatics, Social Objects, and Design for the Future

2008-04-06T10:21:00.001-07:00

This is a compressed version of an IM-Interview with Matt Jones (by Ryan Freitas of AdaptivePath, March 2007). I'm re-publishing it here a sort of - quite fascinating - essay. The full version is here. --

Well - let’s dial back the Delorean a little to Jyri’s coinage of “social objects.” He was coming at it from social science, specifically “Actor-Network Theory” where sociologists consider everything to act on everything else - people, environments, tools, and consider these systems to understand how people socialise with each other, mediated by tools, objects, environments etc. So the ’social object’ in Jyri’s thinking is the centre of gravity of some social transaction. And it’s also the trigger… and the transmitter of sociality. The canonical case being a photo in Flickr.

It functions as both artifact and instigator. In dopplr’s case it’s the “trip.”An information wake as it’s been called.
I guess the interesting thing we’re coming to see is that the ‘placing on the network’ is becoming less of a conscious act, and more the default state

Dopplr is about the future. [As a user,] you’re creating a model of the future - a proposal of behaviour if you like. That becomes the social object. Part of the sociality is negotiating and changing that - optimising it before it happens. Which is a little bit of what my talk is going to address - the act of making models together.

By participating in these communities, are are we in some sense commoditizing our behavior? While we’re experiencing it through the proscenium arch of the laptop - maybe. But we’re seeing the ‘everting of cyberspace’ into the real world as William Gibson put it. I’d take the example of Twitter at conferences compared to twitter as chatroom.

[I]t doesn’t help that the formfactors and UI of the devices we have still make us dive through the screen. Our devices compete with the world for our attention. [But our] services are starting to complement the world and our attention… at least they are taking the first baby-steps. The UIs aren’t there yet in most cases. But now we have service designers creating things that give timely amplification to our knowledge, decision making capabilities, sense of the world around us. I’m pretty hopeful actually. I posted something to my blog a little while back about this in terms of UIs that allow us to scamper up and down the attention scale. You can see hints of them in little disconnected piles right now.

[L]ast year at SxSWi I was talking about the mobile as a stub-maker / iceberg-tickler:
- Stub-maker - create a small mark that I like this thing, I need to do this later, I want to remember this.
- Iceberg-tickler - give me just the right cupful of the iceberg right now. And those are the sorts of services that are emerging for mobile.

And its happening much faster now that iphone fever has swept the valley.
[So here, with the iPhone, have we got one of Warren Ellis’ “genuine outbreaks of the future”?] Possibly.
[... the danger of “lost futures,” based on the success of a given device. ... other, more interesting ways of looking at the problem get cast aside… or at least ignored ...] [T]he gravity well of the iPhone is going to be hard for anyone developing innovative UIs to escape for the next few years. In hardware, you’re subject to the determinism of sourcing components

Exactly - the gravity well of the iPhone is going to be hard for anyone developing innovative UIs to escape for the next few years. In hardware, you’re subject to the determinism of sourcing components. UIs will not be so diverse in the next few years… inside a BigDeviceCo you’re going to find it hard to justify the investment in the out-there stuff (as always). But there’s still innovation a plenty to come, its just that for the next few years it’ll be all 16:9 touchscreens, I guess. And then… hopefully someone will Wii on their parade and breakthrough with something as different as the iPhone was to the existing crop of smartphones. That’s my hope anyway. And I think it might be in the area of physical/gestural interfaces, matched with ambient/visualisation tech to give us more natural ‘Everyware‘. I think there are already some awesome things being developed by people like Julian Bleeker for instance in this realm of possibility - he’s making reference designs for physical/digital/personal ‘toys’ and devices.

These are the things that interest me greatly - ‘personal informatics’. Imagine RescueTime extending off the desktop. Scary perhaps… I remember BodyMedia from a few years back and people being terrified of it. I wonder if they are more accepting now? “We’re all policemen now” as Mr. Morrison said. Self-sousveillance for all. We find data about ourselves - these patterns, somehow affirming.

[RF: It's about perfect self-knowledge. All of this data is hidden from us, and we’re the one’s generating it… we aren’t equipped, cognitively, to learn anything more than impressions from our own actions. In attempting to gather more complete pictures of our behaviors.]

... coming back to the social aspect. The overlays of these patterns with those of others are a new kind of feedback we haven’t had at any scale before. And we do flock well. So perhaps that’s how we will learn and change our behaviours… in a “supercontext” if you will… [wink]
[ed note, RF: In his groundbreaking comic book series, The Invisibles, Grant Morrison posited the "supercontext" as a sort of existence/construct that humanity is evolving toward. Within it, the bounds of ego and identity loosen up (we merge into one another) and time becomes something we can traverse like distance, dipping into and out of any moment in our lives at will.]

RF: Given your presentations on spacetime, Morrison’s supercontext (and time travel in general) seem pertinent to Dopplr. Morrison had a variety of means by which his characters moved through time ... With Dopplr, are you building your very own timetravel device ...

[As interaction designers, ] We’d like to increase joy, ideally. But we’ve a long way to go with air travel there… “Commodity, firmness and delight” - as Vitruvius said. In that order.

[Design methods as] singularities that just form from everything and nothing. ... You can pretend you have a process and sometimes process is the magic, the invocation you need to get those points to appear. But sometimes they will just come out of the foam. I think the weird thing is that process is seen as something for reducing risk and increasing the reproduction of predictable results. Whereas I’m more inspired by process that creates something unexpected.

[W]hatever you think of Ideo [Jen Learnard ], ‘Build to think’ is a pretty fantastic way of incapsulating that thought. And it’s cheaper than thinking now [nose wink] With mobile it’s essential, and yet hard to do.

[RF: As a Dopplr user, I’m creating trips, negotiating details - and then the ineffable march of time brings me to these social objects I’ve created and translates them into experience. ... The experience complete, I am left with a (massively valuable) trace of my movement in spacetime. ... I keep generating trips, and my context is forced to move forward, and so what I end up with is a constant forward to back stream of data to explore and optimize. If dopplr is the stream, there’s a missing piece, from my perspective. Something to navigate the stream with.]

I think if you look to some of the Glory-ous work of Stamen in things like Trulia Hindsight you get ideas about UI for poring over the past. Looking for patterns and instances. Interfaces for ‘poring-over’ is something I’m very interested in.

(6) Welche Methoden benutzen sie heute? Und warum?

2008-03-31T09:10:00.001-07:00

(1) Die Leute benützen eine Vielzahl von Tools, um Information zu bewältigen.

Typischer Weise sind das Office-Tools, die der Papier-Metapher der Information folgen, obwohl reales Papier (Ausdruck) immer weniger eine Rolle spielt. Der Austausch der "Objekte" funktioniert von Festplatte zu Festplatte: e-Mails, Word-Docs, Spreadsheets, Powerpoint-Slides ... Der typische Office-Workflow lässt sich beschreiben als Summe von bearbeiteten "Akten", die aus der "Inbox" entnommen werden und entweder
ins Archiv und/oder in die "Outbox" gehen.

Das Web ist in dieser Perspektive eine Ansammlung von "Seiten" in einem "Archiv" bzw. eine Ansammlung von Daten, die durch "Suche" "nachgeschlagen" werden können.

Zunehmend wird die tägliche Aufmerksamkeits-Kapazität aber beansprucht von web-spezifischen, flüchtigen Prozessen der Information/Kommunikation, die sich auch metaphorisch nicht mehr als Empfangen/Bearbeiten/Senden/Archivieren von relativ großen, dauerhaften "Papier-Objekten" begreifen lässt.

Das Zwischenstadium wäre das Getting Things Done-System, das selbst schon auf die Aufmerksamkeits-Krise reagiert und nicht mehr aus Dokumenten besteht, sondern aus Karteikarten und Post-Its, die "next actionable steps" beinhalten und physisch auf "Dokumente" und "Gespräche" nur noch verweisen.

Typisch ist das Nebenher der Nutzung von Makro-Methoden (korr. Desktop PC, Festnetz) und Mikro-Methoden (korr. Webtop, Handy).

(2) Die Leute benutzen daneben vage Methoden "geistiger Disziplin".

Das sind erstens äußerlich vorgegebene Routinen von arbeitsplatzspezifischer Disziplin, die vorschreiben, zu welcher Zeit man sich mit welchen Objekten wie lange und in welcher Folge beschäftigen soll. Das setzt einen tayloristischen Workflow voraus.

Das sind zweitens verinnerlichte, halb-intuitive Systeme von "Produktivität", die nahelegen, zu welcher Zeit man sich mit welchen Objekten wie lange und in welcher Folge beschäftigen soll, um möglichst "produktiv" zu sein.

Drittens spielen eine immer größere Rolle die medienspezifischen Muster von Aufmerksamkeit und Interaktion, deren Struktur nicht "im Kopf" ist, sondern durch das Medium bzw. das Device selbst vorgegeben. "Web-Worker" sind sprunghafter als Papier-Schreibtischarbeiter, weil sie nicht physische Objekte bearbeiten sondern digitalisierte "Ideen" und "Meme". Das ist erst einmal weder gut noch schlecht. Es ist.

(5) Wer ist noch in diesen Prozess einbezogen?

2008-03-31T08:46:00.001-07:00

Die Leute sind eher negativ beeinflusst durch die realen oder imaginierten "Sender" der Information. Jede Information ist - in mehr oder minder starkem Ausmaß - eine Zumutung, in die eingeschlossen ist, dass "jemand" etwas vom "Empfänger" erwartet.

Die Leute sind eher positiv beeinflusst durch "ihresgleichen" - also andere Leute, die in einer ähnlichen Situation sind und ähnliche Information bewältigen müssen oder wollen.

(4) Welchen Beschränkungen sind sie unterworfen?

2008-03-31T08:42:00.001-07:00

Der zentrale Zwang, dem die Leute unterliegen, ist der Mangel an nachhaltiger Kernaufmerksamkeit.
Es ist (in unterschiedlicher Gewichtung) ein Mangel an Zeit, an geistiger Energie, an Motivation, an Orientierung und Kontext.

Der Aufmerksamkeitsmangel kann auch beschrieben werden als "Overload": als Überfülle von Information, die auf die Leute eindringt. Er kann reduziert werden (a) durch Abblocken der Information, (b) durch Erhöhung der Aufmerksamkeits-Kapazität.

(3) In welchem Kontext befinden sie sich?

2008-03-31T08:31:00.001-07:00

Hier gibt es zwei sehr unterschiedliche Szenarien, zwischen denen die Leute hin- und herwechseln.
Szenario 1: Die Leute sind mit ihrem PC/Laptop an einem "Arbeitsplatz", d.h. sie haben Pflichtaufgaben, die ihren Hauptfokus und ihre Kernaufmerksamkeit in Anspruch nehmen. Der Kontext ist bestimmt durch die sozialen und inhaltlichen Linien, die sich an diesem "Arbeitsplatz" schneiden.
Szenario 2: Die Leute sind mit ihrem Mobiltelefon irgendwo "dazwischen", an einem der supermodernen "Nicht-Orte". Einen Kern-Kontext gibt es nicht. Der weitere Kontext ist bestimmt durch die flüchtige und undeutliche Stimmung und durch die mehr oder minder intensive Beziehung zum mobilen Device.

(2) Was wollen die User erreichen?

2008-03-31T08:21:00.001-07:00

Diese Leute wollen entlastet sein vom ständigen Stress noch mehr Information noch schneller zu verarbeiten.
Zugleich wollen diese Leute möglichst viel Information erhalten und verarbeiten, aber entspannt, ohne sich quälen zu müssen. Das ist widersprüchlich, aber genau dieser permanente Widerspruch prägt die alltägliche Erfahrung.

Diese Leute wollen mit jeder Information, die sie einmal in ihren Kopf gelassen haben, irgendetwas Sinnvolles anfangen. Irgendetwas soll damit weitergehen, um ihnen langfristig irgendwie zu nützen: durch konkrete Vorteile, die sie daraus ziehen können, oder einfach durch mehr Orientierungswissen, das zu besseren und schnelleren Handlungen und Entscheidungen beiträgt.

Die Leute wollen, dass einmal aufgenommene Information auch da bleibt, ohne zu belasten. Sie soll immer genau dann greifbar sein, wenn sie benötigt wird -- sei es durch Erinnerung oder durch ein externes system der Vergegenwärtigung.

Die Leute wollen einen Filter, der "Spam" aussondert, ungeordnete Information vorstrukturiert und hierarchisiert, aber nicht restriktiv vorenthält.

(1) Wer sind die User?

2008-03-31T08:13:00.001-07:00

Alle Leute, die viel Information über PCs, Laptops und Mobiltelefonen aufnehmen - täglich oder beinahe täglich.
Alle Leute, die das Gefühl haben, mit zuviel und zu sehr zersplitterter Information zu tun zu haben.
Alle Leute, die mit dieser Information irgendetwas anfangen müssen oder wollen, aber oft nicht genau wissen was und wie.
Alle Leute, die während ihrer normalen Tätigkeiten das unangenehme Gefühl haben, sie sollten sich auch noch mit anderer Information intensiver beschäftigen.

Design-Fragen

2008-03-31T07:59:00.001-07:00

Wer sind die User?
Was wollen sie erreichen? Warum?
In welchem Kontext sind sie? Warum?
Welchen Zwängen und Beschränkungen unterliegen sie?
Wer ist noch in diesen Prozess einbezogen? Warum?
Welche Methoden benutzen sie heute stattdessen? Warum?
Welche Worte benutzen sie? Warum?

Deisgn is ...

2008-03-31T07:04:00.001-07:00

... Design is enabling-by-constraint. It is defining and building a structure for a [product] that is enabling-by-constraint special forms of "use".

Design becomes part of the [product], inasmuch the "use" itself is fed back into the machine and creates additional functionality of the [product] itself that attracts further use, and so on.

- Visual design is just using consumer attention feedback for selling the product. It is not part of the product as long as this is done "outside". But as products [items] become brands [complex physical-human feedback machines], design becomes a substantial part of the product itself.
- Architectural design is creating "use" which is feeding back basic vitality into the architectural shell, and so on.
- Software Design is enabling-by-constraint data flows in way that certain complex requirements are executed well.
- User Experience Design is enabling-by-constraint user interactions that can be used a Soylent Green for nurturing and fuelling the machine.

lower case semantic web

2008-03-31T05:21:00.001-07:00

"lower-case semantic web" is simple semantics with microformats, don't try to "define the world", small pieces loosely joined, add semantics to today's web rather than create a future web, user centric design, humans first, machines second, "people are helping to create metadata". (tantek)

so the MicroWeb is a sort of lower case semantic web.

how does this integrate with kingsley idehen's "Linked Data Web", which replaces "semantic" with "linked" and puts the focus on the fact that this Web will not acting at the level of "documents" with "URL"s, but data objects/entities with URIs?

isn't the MicroWeb based on a kind of "documents" that at the same time ARE linkable data objects? like "microcontent/microformat chunks", both human-usable and machine-usable.

Media / Micromedia: Arbeitsdefinition

2008-03-31T01:18:00.001-07:00

MM sind digitale Medien, die optimiert sind für die Übertragung und Zirkulation von Mikro-Inhalten.

"Medien" ("Media") sind hier zu verstehen als (relativ) geschlossene Systeme, die Zeichen und Symbole prozessieren und sich so um eine besondere Technologie herum auskristallisieren, dass 'harte' und 'weiche' Faktoren in komplexen Rückkopplungsprozessen eng aufeinander bezogen sind: Es besteht eine permanente gegenseitige Beeinflussung zwischen Hardware (Devices bzw. Clients), Übertragungsformate und -protokolle, Interfaces, medialen Inhalte, Nutzerrollen und Nutzungspraktiken. Weder sind also solche Medien/"Media" bloßes Medium/"Werkzeug" für menschlich-kulturelle Absichten, noch sind die Menschen bloß "Nutzer" oder "Bediener" des technischen Systems -- sie werden zum Bestandteil des komplexen Mediensystems. Solche "Media"-Systeme sind bisher "das Web", TV, neuerdings Mobiltelefonie, zunehmend aber auch sich ausdifferenzierende Sub-Systeme(xxx). Sie sind systematisch klar zu unterscheiden von Medien als bloßen "Mitteln zur Übertragung", wobei im übrigen die Grenzen niemals klar zu bestimmen sind. (Sogar die Telegraphie bildete durch technisch-sozial-kognitive Rückkopplungeine Art "Media-System" aus.)

MM sind also komplexe Systeme, die (1) um die Übertragung von Mikro-Inhalten herum entstehen und (2) zu neuen Systemen der Zirkulation führen, und zwar jeweils (a) auf der technischen und (b) auf der humanen Ebene.

(1) Erst einmal geht es darum, möglichst kleine "Botschaften" zum Element zu machen.
(1a) technisch: Anfangs, weil eine Technologie nichts anderes zulässt (frühe PCs, SMS),
(1b) kulturell/sozial/kognitiv: dann, weil die neue Struktur der Aufmerksamkeit auf komplex sich überlagerndes Microtasking angewiesen ist (notgedrungen oder emphatisch = Gewinn eines "Raumgefühls").
(2) Dadurch entstehen neue Systeme der Zirkulation:
(2a) technisch: Es entsteht eine elektronisch-digitale Infrastruktur, die eine völlig neue Qualität von Feedback ermöglicht - dadurch entstehen Zirkulationssysteme, die es vorher nur auf einer sehr viele langwelligeren und abstrakteren Ebene gab - Beispiel Reformation, Yellow Press und Firmen-Workflows;
(2b) kulturell/sozial/kognitiv: diese Feedback-Effekte erzeugen durch ihre schiere Anzahl und Dichte ein qualitativ neues System der Zeichen-Zirkulation und damit der Kommunikation (von Call-ins via Blogosphere bis zu Twitter Mobs).

MicroPulse Radio

2008-03-28T16:25:00.001-07:00

habermas 2.0

2008-03-26T10:51:00.001-07:00

(#) "Das Web liefert die Hardware für die Enträumlichung einer verdichteten
und beschleunigten Kommunikation, aber von sich aus kann es der
zentrifugalen Tendenz nichts entgegensetzen. Vorerst fehlen im
virtuellen Raum die funktionalen Äquivalente für die
Öffentlichkeitsstrukturen, die die dezentralisierten Botschaften wieder
auffangen, selegieren und in redigierter Form synthetisieren."

so kann man das auch ausdrücken. oder applikationen bauen.

design-driven research

2008-03-26T09:51:00.001-07:00

Harry Saddler is an information and interaction
designer with experience in both research and commercial development,
and an abiding interest in "socio-technical" design-the design of
technology that enables and enriches social interaction.

At Xerox PARC, Saddler
conducted design-driven research into new document genres for capturing
informal knowledge, user experiences for distributed computing, and the
user experience architecture of portable document readers.
At Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group, Saddler
conceptualized, designed, and engineered prototypes of computing
systems modeled on patterns of human activity and social interaction;
developed concepts for new personal computer user interfaces; directed
a multiyear international student design collaboration; was a founding
member of the User Experience Architect's office; founded and managed a
user interface design group within the Advanced Technology Group; and
designed interactive instructional products.

As Director of Technology at MetaDesign in San Francisco, Saddler
directs the firm's technology strategy and provides creative direction
on user interface and technology- related design projects.

notizen zu application-led research

2008-03-26T09:16:00.001-07:00

"the vast majority of ICT research is published and forgotten long before it has any impact on everyday life, let alone woven into its fabric."

die alternative wäre ja, im labor eine neue technologie zusammenzubauen, und in laborexperimente nachzuweisen, dass es tatsächlich geht und dass es im prinzip anwendbar ist. das ist das forschungs-modell
von gentechnologie.

das geht aber nur, weil (und wenn) von vornherein klar ist, was hier "das stück technologie" sein soll, um das es geht.

anders ist es, wenn dieses "stück technologie" überhaupt erst greifbar und für andere weiterdenkbar wird, sobald es da ist und real funktioniert.

das trifft insbesondere auf alle ICT zu, die menschliche aktion mit einbezieht, also eine "soziale maschine" ist.
es war ja nie ein prinzipielles problem, HTTP/HTML zu definieren. genau so wenig wie RSS, wie WIKIs, wie BLOGs.

wenn Berners-Lee einen demonstrator gebaut hätte, und dazu ein paper geschrieben, wäre GAR NICHTS passiert.

die probleme, die man lösen musste, und bei allen Web 2.0 und (fuzzy) Semantic Web sachen lösen muss, waren und sind im kern DESIGN- und Usability-probleme im substanziellen sinn. es war ja immer klar, dass das IM PRINZIP technisch geht. die frage war, ob man es so bauen kann, dass es IN DER PRAXIS geht, d.h. dass es wirklich und spontan von vielen menschen ständig benutzt wird.

FORSCHUNG im emphatischen sinn wird das insofern, als durch das bauen einer innovativen applikation eine NEUE DIMENSION entsteht, die man erkunden kann: sowohl technisch wie auch inhaltlich. (so wie durch Berners-Lee WWW etwas völlig neues entstanden ist, das ein unendliches feld für neue forschungen eröffnet hat, und zwar genau deshalb, weil es weiter verwendet, verändert und erweitert wurde.)

es geht also nicht um eine einzelne spezifische technologie, die alleine etwas ganz anderes kann als andere technologien. es geht hier immer um ein bündel von technologien, das zusammen mehr ergibt als die summe der teile, und zwar für den user bzw. die user experience. es geht um das know-how für das finden und das richtige zusammenfügen der richtigen bausteine, um eine neue qualität zu erzeugen. (wobei diese bausteine selbst wieder "state of the art" sein können, also selbst neueste forschung repräsentieren.)

das problem mit app-led research ist, dass das sehr aufwändig ist: man muss alle die kleinen hindernisse kennen und umgehen, sowohl auf der technischen seite wie auf der anwendungsseite. da könnte man ja längst was neues forschen.

das ist genau dann nicht möglich, wenn die anpassung an die unübersichtlichkeit und unberechenbarkeit der realen user experience scenarios entscheidenden einfluss auf "das stück technologie" (bzw. auf das "bündel") selbst hat. wenn "das stück technologie" also nur in anwendung überhaupt denkbar ist (und sonst quasi in ein paar bausteine und schrauben auseinanderfällt). also eine "application technology".

damit ist klar, dass app-led research sich iterativ organisieren muss, weil ja das feedback der anwendung substanziell zur erweiterten "maschine" selbst gehört.

inwiefern ist das dann aber nicht einfach "applikationsentwicklung", sondern "forschung"?
indem es "open, reusable infrastructure for the wider community’s benefit" konstruiert. indem es viele andere forschungen und applikationen anstoßen kann. insofern es mehr als nur proprietäre produkte erzeugt, sondern eine grundsätzlichen WEG für die erzeugung verwandter produkte, oder auch einen kristallisationspunkt, um den herum sich neue produkte definieren lassen.

MC Template: symptoms/diagnosis

2008-03-16T15:44:00.000-07:00

prototype is a medical case:
you see some symptoms and - flipside - get a fitting diagnosis, or just a fitting description.

other way round: you see the diagnosis, you could think of possible real cases (people with vague symptoms).

generalized: each clipped "meme" should (1) be stripped to it's propositions, and (2) complemented by something like 'symptoms'. then the 'symptoms' usually will be the 'impulse', while the proposition will be the 'answer'.

try this with different types oft content.

Commodification

2008-03-16T15:39:00.001-07:00

Commodification is defined as the link between domestication and design.

During the commodification process, objects and technologies ”emerge in a public space of exchange values and in a market-place of competing images and functional claims and counterclaims” (p. 46).

Commodification is defined as consisting of two components:

first, the design and marketing of a product, ”the industrial and commercial processes that create both material and symbolic artefacts and turn them into commodities for sale in the formal market economy” (p. 63);

second, the ‘construction’ of the product by its potential or actual consumers (as they imagine it, desire it, weigh its potential utility, etc.).

web 3.0 applications #1

2008-03-12T10:26:00.001-07:00

"With more concern over my attention comes a need to manage the flow of information. This is about pushing and pulling information into a flow that accounts for time and context.

Market based reputation models applied to information flows become important. Quality of Service (QOS) at the application and economic layer where agents monitor, discover, filter and direct flows on information for me to the devices and front-ends that I use.

The very notion of application disappears into a notion of components linked by information flows. [Application is a very stand-alone PC world-view. Forget the Web, Desktop, Offline/Online arguments]"

"Some comments past on to me ask how is this different from what Web2.0 is about? At a technology level it really isn’t, the technology is already here. From a cultural and hence practice level it is. As we starting seeing more value in using things like Atom, Meta-Data, Open-Data and feed remixing etc, then how we use the Internet and our connected devices will change. That is what, at the core, is the basis of Web2.0 - changing usage and practice."

microinformation layer

2008-03-06T01:01:00.001-08:00

Microinformation
Layer & (Micro-)Attention Management

Um unbegrenzte
und komplexe digitale Inhalte verfügbar und für die
begrenzte Aufmerksamkeits- und Erinnerungskapazität der
menschlichen User verwendbar zu machen, braucht es einen Layer von
„Microcontent“, der zugleich als „Metacontent“ auf die
Ressourcen verweist, aber eben nicht nur „Index“, sondern selbst
bereits Material für Denk- und Arbeitsprozesse ist.

Das
Research Studio Microinformation Ecologies befasst sich mit den
Folgen des gegenwärtigen strukturellen Umbruchs von
gespeichertem „Macrocontent“ zu flüchtigem und permanent
zirkulierendem „Microcontent“ für das konvergierende Mobile
Web der Zukunft.

Das
Studio erforscht und entwickelt neuartige, einfache und intutitive
„human-centered“ Konzepte, Applikationen & Termplates, um
diesen digitalen „(Micro-) Information Overload“ zu kanalisieren
und für einzelne User „verdaubar“ zu machen.

web 2.0 definitions dump

2008-02-27T10:52:00.001-08:00

Dario de Judicibus (IBM)

"Web 2.0 is a knowledge-oriented environment where human interactions generate content that is published, managed and used through network applications in a service-oriented architecture."

Eric Schmidt (CEO Google, Seoul Digital Forum, May 29 - 31 2007)

Mature Web 2.0 (in fact he said "3.0", identifying 2.0 with AJAX) ... "will ultimately be seen as applications that are pieced together. They are relatively small, the data is in the cloud, the applications can run on any device, PC or mobile phone, the applications are very fast and they are very customizable. They will be distributed virally ... That's a very different application model than we'd ever seen in computing ..."

Tim O'Reilly:

"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform." -- many of the technology components of "Web 2.0" have existed since the early days of the Web.

O'Reilly considers that Eric Schmidt's abridged slogan, don't fight the Internet, encompasses the essence of Web 2.0 — building applications and services around the unique features of the Internet. ...
They argued that the web had become a platform, with software above the level of a single device, leveraging the power of the "Long Tail", and with data as a driving force. According to O'Reilly and Battelle, an architecture of participation where users can contribute website content creates network effects. Web 2.0 technologies tend to foster innovation in the assembly of systems and sites
composed by pulling together features from distributed, independent
developers (a kind of "open source" development and an end to the
software-adoption cycle (the so-called "perpetual beta"). Web 2.0 technology encourages lightweight business models enabled by syndication of content and of service and by ease of picking-up by early adopters.

Level-3 applications, the most "Web 2.0"-oriented, only exist on the
Internet, deriving their effectiveness from the inter-human connections
and from the network effects that Web 2.0 makes possible, and growing
in effectiveness in proportion as people make more use of them.

"...all those Internet utilities and services sustained in a data base
which can be modified by users whether in its content (adding, changing
or deleting- information or associating metadates with the existing
information), or how to display them, or in content and external aspect
simultaneously."

According to Best,
the characteristics of Web 2.0 are: rich user experience, user
participation, dynamic content, metadata, web standards and
scalability. Three further characteristics that Best did not mention
about web 2.0: openness, freedom and collective intelligence by way of user participation – all should be viewed as essential attributes of Web 2.0.

The sometimes complex and continually evolving technology infrastructure of Web 2.0 includes server-software, content-syndication, messaging-protocols, standards-oriented browsers with plugins and extensions, and various client-applications. The differing, yet complementary approaches of such elements provide Web 2.0 sites with information-storage,
creation, and dissemination challenges and capabilities that go beyond
what the public formerly expected in the environment of the so-called
"Web 1.0".

Web 2.0 websites typically include some of the following features/techniques:

rich Internet application techniques, often Ajax-based
semantically valid XHTML and HTML markup
microformats extending pages with additional semantics
folksonomies (in the form of tags or tagclouds, for example)
Cascading Style Sheets to aid in the separation of presentation and content
REST and/or XML- and/or JSON-based APIs
syndication, aggregation and notification of data in RSS or Atom feeds
mashups, merging content from different sources, client- and server-side
weblog-publishing tools
wiki or forum software, etc., to support user-generated content

microinformation client = transistor radio

2008-02-27T06:51:00.001-08:00

So a tiny start-up company called "Sony" built portable,
battery-powered transistor radios people could carry around with them.
Sure, the sound was terrible, but who cared? Then, with the experience
and revenue stream from the portables, Sony improved its technology to
produce cheap, low-end transistor amplifiers that were "good enough" for home use, and used
those revenues to improve the technology further and produce better
radios. Today, vacuum tubes are only used in ultra-high-end amplifiers
in concerts or recording studios. Vacuum tubes still sound slightly
better, but most people find the much cheaper product adequate. (another review of Innovator's Dilemma, Motley Fool, 1999, from Google Cache)

...
" * Don't try to build a better X, where X is something dominated by a large company. X can be an operating system, personal computer, car, whatever. I think Be Inc. was a classic example of this (great computer/OS but crushed by incumbents)
* Don't build something that could be a feature for one of the X above. Chances are the big company will re-implement your feature. (Apple Dashboard vs Konfabulator)
* Create something new in a "niche" market. This something new can have amazing future potential, but it should by niche-y enough to be ignored by the large players, at least until its too late
* Become self sustaining as quickly as possible. The lower cost structure of a startup allows the revenue from new technology to be significant. This allows the startup to enter what Christenson calls the "sustaining innovation" part of its curve. Thats where all companies want to be."

technology transfer / innovation is highly rhetorical by nature

2008-02-27T06:02:00.001-08:00

But these processes are quite complex, and "highly rhetorical in
nature. That is, at their core these processes involve individuals and
groups negotiating their visions of technologies and appliacations,
markets and users in what they all hope is common enterprise." (Stephen
Doheny-Farina, Rhetoric, Innovation, Technology. Case Studies of
Technical Communication in Technology Transfer. MIT Press 1992, p.4)

>> Most people thought that technological innovation, "the entire process from R&D in the laboratory to successful commercialization in the marketplace," was automatic: "Traditionally, we have thought that siccessful commercialization of R&D was the result of an automatic process that began with scientific research and the moved to development, financing, manufacturing, and marketing ... " (Kozmetsky 1990, p.23)

mobility

2008-02-25T05:38:00.001-08:00

i'm interested in the dialectics of mobility:

(a) geo-mobility: ICT enhancing the concrete embodied experiences of the First World, and

(b) supermodern 'mobility': being mobile in "Non-spaces" (Marc Augé), like public transport, the car, the Mall, the airport etc., where one really is being mobile within an abstract digital mediasphere ("the Web", but also immediate nearness via mobile phone). In this case the embodied 'primary' world is enhancing the abstract one, turning the notions of #primary' vs. 'secondary' upside down.

attention flow: Mind like Water, Beached Fish, River of News, Panta Rhei

2008-02-21T23:48:00.000-08:00

der unterschied zwischen Linda Stone's Continuous Partial Attention (cpa), bzw. der continuous cpa (als dauerzustand), und der micro-attention ist ja der: es geht um das design einer User Experience (CPA-UX), in der man keinen alert-stress hat. stress, weil man glaubt etwas zu verpassen (Linda Stone) bzw. weil man glaubt sofort "antworten" zu müssen (der berühmte Telefon-klingelt-Effekt).

es geht darum, einen zustand herzustellen, der dem "Mind Like Water" von David GTD Allen entspricht, der ohnehin eine versteckte theorie der Microcontent-Zirkulation geschrieben hat. ich brauche keinen stress zu haben, weil ich weiß, dass das system (das ich mit minimalem aufwand bediene) mir alles wichtige früher oder später wieder zuspielt. es ist "in the loop".
genau das sollte der MicroPulse tun. er ist sozusagen eine McLuhanMaschine (siehe auch Yiibu's mobiles McLuhanMicrocontent Dings.)

das entspräche dem unterschied des "fisch im wasser" der medien, den McLuhan beschrieben hat, und einem gestressten menschen im taucheranzug, oder bloß mit schnorchel, oder mit gar nichts, der sich in schmutzige meeresfluten wirft, nach dem tsunami. es ist ja argumentierbar, dass der Information Overload eigentlich nur genau da entsteht, wo eine alte art, mit medien und information umzugehen, auf eine neue ökologische situation trifft. abschmelzen der polkappen.

dann geht es eben gar nicht um "zuviel information" -- die welt ist eh immer zuviel information, mitmenschen sind eh immer stress, nachdenken ist eh immer mühsam, schreiben noch viel mehr, und jedes informations- und kommunikations-ereignis wird dann noch stressiger, wenn permanenter vibirierender selbst/weltzweifel untergründig wirkt.

im übrigen: auch was Stone's cpa betrifft, müsste man wohl unterscheiden die cpa der Blackberry-junkies (e-mail-driven) von der cpa 2.0, Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder. die ist nämlich anders, mehr die idee, dass draußen "etwas geschieht", und das kann twitter-mäßig social presence sein, oder "news", und man will davon vitalisiert werden, intellektuell und emotional. (also nicht als persönliche botschaft, sondern als teilnahme an einem größerem geschehen, das nicht mich persönlich meint.)

Winer, Allen, McLuhan, Gelernter, Heraclit. Große Antike Philosophen. Der River of News ist der Heraklit'sche Lifestream. "Denjenigen, die in dieselben Flüsse steigen, fließen andere und andere Wasser ... denn in denselben Strom vermag man nicht zweimal zu steigen."

MicroPulse Pitch deutsch

2008-02-21T06:14:00.001-08:00

versuchsweise und halb-privat in Slideshare hochgeladen, um zu sehen, wie sich das anfühlt. Work in Progress.

Interessant: Erstmals kann ich anscheinend Ernst machen damit, Sachen anders aufzuschreiben als mit Word. Die letzten Powerpoints waren ein Anfang, aber da ging es um Bilder.

Jetzt gleich mit G-Presentation begonnen (ausgezeichnet als Mikrotext-Editor).
Dann die Texte in ein Text-File kopiert und wieder überarbeitet. Dann wieder in G-Presentation. Interessant, dass dann plötzlich anders formuliert wird (in beide Richtungen).

attention (research)

2008-02-21T02:49:00.000-08:00

Scott Wilson, who is a psychologist too, has pointed me to his teacher's (Steve Tipper) work on attention.

here are some quick findings following the hint (pdf):
(#) Steve Tipper (2005), Memories of attention. On the retrieval of attention processes from memory.
(#) Steve Shimozaki , Lecture/presentation on Attention (good visuals!)
(#) Jon Driver 2001, A selective review of selective attention research from the past century
(#) The Study of Attention User’s Guide (1996, literature)

(Two Multiple Choice Tests on Memory and Attention I could use for a KP-demo)

I will add below a list of links from my exploding delicious-attention-tag ...

(#) Linda Stone, Continuous Partial Attention vs. Multitasking (2008)
(#) Howard Rheingold's linklist on attention/multitasking
(#) Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder. ("I am unable to function at my desktop unless I’ve got, at least, five things going on at the same time." - good blog post)
(#) John Hagel on Goldhaber
(#) Phil Jones summarizing the Attention Economy macro-meme
(# and #) Linda Stone and Stowe Boyd on Continous Partial Attention
(#) Arnaud Leene on the explicit and implicit TagSphere as the fundament of the MicroWeb
(#) Ross Mayfield, Attention Saturation (he als did blog about Linda Stone)
(#) Goldhaber's seminal article, see also Georg Franck and (NN)
(#)Fred Wilson, The Looming Attention Crisis - link bundel, Umair Haque et al., about feeds ...

Scott Wilson's Metaphors

2008-02-21T01:50:00.000-08:00

met Scott Wilson yesterday in Innsbruck. funny that he was here (merely by accident), because the ideas about micro-attention design were so similar. his brilliant FeedForward project basically is a personal RSS feed-mixer, a desktop client (but), as opposed to other RSS client's mailbox'n'files-paradigm.

best thing yesterday was Scott's virtuosity in thinking in metaphors for microcontent circulation and ambient microcontent flow experience. alas, i remember only parts: misguided unremarkable trunks circulating on an airport luggage line, with lots of interesting tags from airports all over the world. Sigurd Rinde's (in fact: Jyri Engeström's) beachball thrown into some congregation, a social object carrying the tracks of where & when (and by whom) it has been bounced. (Sigurd's www.thingamy.com is an intersting business plan builder software: demo.)

there was the idea of enhancing the basically empty new "Learning Spaces" built into new university architectures in UK with adaptable collective "interesting-stuff-in-looped-microcontent-channels"-feeds (the newest or highest rated items collectively tagged with "attention", for example).

so if FeedForward (newest version) is a mixer (claim is "Remix Your Information Environment"), the MicroPulse (bad name, just placeholder) will have to be a sort of ambient transistor "radio" with all sorts of channels (based on tags) where content items run in loops, just "being there" (which means you don't have to fear to miss something). (Hey, a FeedFoward blog post mentioned the radio metaphor the day before yesterday! and, of course, there was Radio Userland.) of course the MicroRadio cannot manage all of the interesting feed items. it is a secondary tool: looping microcontent after it has been clipped and filtered through e.g. delicious, microblogging, digg etc., or a similar proprietary authoring tool. i always idiosyncratically dream of using TiddlySnip here somehow.

R&D mash-up

2008-02-19T15:03:00.001-08:00

... Der Unterschied zur harten, großtechnischen Version von R&D ist, dass es hier nicht um Bits geht, sondern um Text. Text bewegen, Text anzeigen, Text organisieren, Text geschickt speichern. Blogs -Text. MySpace - Text. Delicious - eine ganze Menge Text. Der Kontext macht den Wert aus. ...

Data is the next Intel Inside: Das Web 2.0 wird getrieben von
Data (eigentlich eher: microcontent). So weit, dass wir
gelegentlich schon von Infoware statt Software sprechen ...

Micro-Apps sind "Produkte" analog zum iPod, aber nicht physisch
angreifbar. Das Mobiltelefon könnte sie angreifbar machen, ihnen die Faszination des technischen Dingens leihen.

Von IT zu ICT, von Hi-tech zu Lo-tech, von Software Engineering zum 'Design': F & E verändert sich

2008-02-19T13:56:00.001-08:00

(#) Deutsche Übersetzung von: Brad Burnham, Research and Development
Blog at www.unionsquareventures.com/
February 15, 2006

"Es sieht so aus, als erlebten wir gerade einen Gezeitenwechsel, der das Wesen von R & D betrifft.

Bisher ging es in IT Forschung immer darum, sehr harte technische Probleme zu lösen. Wie man mehr Bits von hier nach dort bewegt, wie man noch mehr Bits speichern kann, wie man Bits so organisieren kann, dass sie sich effizient wieder aufrufen lassen. Oft war es nicht klar, ob das Problem überhaupt lösbar war, und es brauchte spekulative Forschung, um neue Ansätze für das problem zu finden. Sobald die technische Nuss geknackt war, ging das Projekt in die Entwicklungs-Phase. Ingenieure übernahmen das Ganze, der lange Weg zum vermarktbaren Produkt hatte begonnen.

Damals präsentierten die interessantesten neuen Unternehmen ihre technischen Innovationen als das Kernstück und beschrieben dann erst ihre Marketing-Strategie, eher als eine Art Fußnote. Heute sieht es so aus, dass die meisten der Unternehmen wenig Zeit damit verbringen um uns zu überzeugen, dass sie ein wichtiges und schwieriges Problem ertsmals gelöst haben. Sie behandeln die ganze technologische Problematik als etwas, das sich grundsätzlich machen lässt. Kurz gesagt, sie behandeln Software Engineering als ein Entwicklungsproblem, nicht als ein Forschungsproblem.

Aber sie betreiben eben schon Forschung, nur eben nicht technologische Forschung im traditionellen Sinn. Die schwierigsten Probleme sind nun eben nicht mehr Software Engineering Probleme, sondern Social Engineering Probleme. Die innovativsten Unternehmen, die wir heute sehen, scheinen sich die ganze Zeit damit zu beschäftigen, warum MySpace oder Facebook wächst, während Friendster stagniert, oder warum del.icio.us populärer ist als Furl, oder wie man Microblogging am besten auf den Punkt bringt.

Man mag einwenden, dass die technoilogische Forschung, wie sie etwa bei Google betrieben wird, immer noch ein wichtiger und verteidigenswerter Vorteil ist. Vermutlich stimmt das, aber wie viel von dieser Forschung ist denn wirklich fokussiert auf fundamentale technologische Probleme? Ist die Evolution der Such-Algorithmen getrieben von der Notwendigkeit nach besserer und schnellerer Suche, oder geht es darum, den Leuten immer einen Schritt voraus zu sein, die den Algorithmus austricksen wollen? Ist es ein Informatik-Problem oder ein Social Engineering Problem?

Forschung ist nicht einfacher als früher, aber sie hat ihr Wesen verändert. Sehr wenige Entrepeneurs versuchen technologische Software-Innovationen hervorzuheben. Sie gehen davon aus, dass sie das bauen können, wenn sie das Social Engineering hinbekommen."

Smart Technologies, MirrorWorlds

2008-02-15T02:56:00.001-08:00

Neue, web-basierte "Smart Technologies" sind zunehmend nicht mehr rein
abstrakte, quasi-physikalische Maschinerien, die klar getrennt sind von
der "Anwendung" durch die "User". Die vernetzten digitalen Medien sind
nicht mehr bloße Werkzeuge. Sie konstituieren einen komplexen Arbeits-
und Kommunikationsraum, in dem menschliche Handlungen und Inhalte in
Datenereignissen "gespiegelt" werden (> David Gelernter, Mirror
World).

(Das entspricht dem Unterscheid zwischen dem Microsoft Office und der Google Galaxy: zwischen Software, die es ermöglicht, digitale Dokumente zu erzeugen, die dann als geschlossene Objekte "versandt" und "publiziert" werden, und Software, die eine Umgebung für die Produktion, Zirkulation, Anreicherung und laufende Transformation von Microcontent herstellt.)

Die Aufgabe innovativer IT-Applikationen ist es, mit diesen
Repräsentationen menschlicher Aktionen und "Inhalte" zu rechnen, und
zwar so, dass sich dadurch neue Möglichkeiten für Anschlusshandlungen
für "Wissensarbeiter" und "Digital Beings" eröffnen: neue Typen und
Ströme von Information, neue Arten der Kommunikation und Kollaboration,
neue Chancen für Wissensaufbau und Lernen, neue Dimensionen der
Produktivität.

The CloudBook

2008-02-13T00:08:00.001-08:00

(#) In fact the Microcontent Radio Client is a sort of virtual machine: an instance of "The CloudBook", but running on devices parallely with the more traditional "virtual machines": the Typewriter, the Desktop, the Database, the Phone, the MailClient, the InstantMessenger ...:

Nick Carr, who has just written a book alerting the world to "The Big Switch" (a title so appropriate I wrote a blurb for the book) from PC to the cloud, has also coined a neat term for this gadget: the CloudBook. On his blog he lists the attributes he imagines for the CloudBook, which he fantasies could be designed by Apple and run on Google's servers. The device is primarily a well-designed screen with powerful batteries and an embedded wifi card ...

Bottom-Up vs. Top-Down: Circulation goes beyond

2008-02-12T23:53:00.000-08:00

_
Kevin Kelly, The Bottom is not Enough, is a good discussion: bottom-up vs. top-down vs. intelligent mix 2.0. but where exactly IS the intelligence? the metaphors are still wrong, because they follow the old idea of creating and processing original "content" (or ideas, or ...). the most fundamental thing is not processing content matter (neither bottom-up nor top-down).

smart creators, smart crowds, smart filters, smart editors > technologically enhanced (1) smart creation, (2) smart crowdsourcing, (3) smart filtering, (4) smart editing.
human smartness, cultural smartness, technologically enhanced smartness.

It is the CIRCULATION of memes, semes and chunked "microcontent", which is dynamic and atomized micro-texts from one perspective, but from the other perspective TEXT-SHAPED STATEMENTS that are un-original by default.

there always has to be a PERSONAL dimension to each step, and an ORGANIZATIONAL dimension.
(what are these? how can they be implemented and designed? There is the *metaphor* of CONVERSATION and the *metaphor* of COMMUNITIES of PRACTICE ...)

perpetual motion machine

2008-02-10T15:09:00.001-08:00

So here’s my approach: the Web as movement.

Some of the words associated with this metaphor… flow, experience, trajectory, cycle, feedback, ecosystem, dynamics.

But pragmatically, what does this mean? Let’s take Flickr, which is
exceptionally good at doing this. It’s a useful website, sure, and it
is sure of its place among a constellation of people – the social world
of sharing and identity – and a world of other products like cameras,
and screensavers, and toys based on the pictures.

But also it’s structured to bend the trajectory of users
back into itself. External widgets capture users and send them into
Flickr from blogs and other services. Internal groups, discussions, and
the “recent activity” feature keep users cycling round. A way of
sending temporary invites by email to show pictures to friends who
aren’t yet members – guess passes – turn ever user into a pusher, and
every photo into a gateway drug that will end in Flickr membership.

Flickr is a perpetual motion machine that puffs out beautiful photographs.

So we can have a bit of a breather, I want to have a look at a few
other systems which are self-contained or a series of movements.

[Facebook is another great example. Read about viral loops and widgets for more.

And, just incidentally, I’m reminded of the Greg Egan short
story in Axiomatic: “Unstable Orbits in the Space Of Lies”. Highly
recommended!

Oh, the image: I’ve been playing with solutions to Laplace flow equations, and this is some of the output.]

Bush #2

2008-02-05T14:45:00.001-08:00

"Finally, all but buried in his conclusion, he offers up the critical
insight on which a man named Mark Weiser would build the doctrine of
computational ubiquity some forty years downstream: work with
information-processing devices is both more effective and more
enjoyable if the user “can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the
manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.”"

Adam Greenfield on Vannevar Bush

2008-02-05T14:39:00.001-08:00

"By contrast, decades before hypertext, HTML or the World Wide Web,
Bush’s memex proposed to allow its user to organize bodies of knowledge
along individualized “trails,” each permanent and immediately available
for lookup in exactly the same way that we might use a Web browser’s
bookmarks. Moreover, any one item could belong to an arbitrary number
of different contextual trails - trails that could be stored
side-by-side in one’s own memex, or passed entire to friends and
colleagues for them to explore at their leisure, like an analogue
del.icio.us."
(see Matthew Chalmers' RECER path model here too, he explicitly did relate this to Bush.)

Vorstellend das Microcontent Auftraggeber Gerät

2008-02-05T13:56:00.001-08:00

Ziel ist es, einen "Microcontent Radio Client" zu bauen:
d.h eine (1) personalisierte und kollaborative (2) Attention Management (3) Client-Server Applikation, die (4) Microcontent verarbeitet -- als (5) Player/Recorder und als (6) Empfänger/Sender. Damit wird (7) innerhalb von Organisationen und verteilten Teams ein (8) neuartiger ökologischer Informations-Kreislauf geschaffen (auch eine neue Schnittstelle), in dem laufend (9) Mikro-Wissen (Semantik) gefiltert, aggregiert und angereichert wird, was (10) die Produktivität und Innovationskraft Information/Knowledge Workers fördert.

"(Re-)Introducing the Microcontent (Radio) Client"

2008-02-05T13:51:00.001-08:00

Goal of the project is to build a (1) personalized and
(2) collaborative (3) Attention Management (4) App that
acts as (5) Microcontent(6) Player/Recorder as well as
(7) Receiver/Sender, such creating a(8) Micro-ecology
inside (9) organizations and distributed teams and
leveraging the productivity and innovative energy of
(10) Information Workers.
Technorati Tags: mc_radio

RippleRap

2008-02-05T13:44:00.001-08:00

Assuming the user opts-in to note-sharing, their notes will
automatically be sent up to the web, where the notes will be collated,
and then shared back down with allRippleRap users at the event via RSS.
This process happens automatically when users are connected to the web.
If they're not connected, the note taking capability will still work, and the sharing will take place the next time they're connected to the web - which is handy as conference wi-fi can be unreliable at times!

2008-02-04T14:41:00.000-08:00

What is "Knowledge Pulse"?

It is a client-server-application enabling a whole new learning experience we call "microlearning".
The name of the application is derived from "Cardiac Pulse Generator": A tool that creates a flow of microlearning-impulses, a continuous, organic process over your whole work day that you (almost) won't notice.

When does the "Knowledge Pulse Widget" show up?

During these familiar idle moments in the day of a information worker or knowledge worker—in-between doing e-mails, after having been interrupted by a phone call, while changing tasks and applications, minutes before the next meeting, just having finished another Google search ... But there is no pressure, just an impulse: "You wanted to be proficient in this knowledge? Well, here's a chance to make another small step."

It is something like Ist das also so etwas wie eine digitalisierte "Lernkartei"?

Der Knowledge Pulse nutzt ein bekanntes Konzept, das Sebastian Leitner aus der kognitiven Lern- und Gedächtnisforschung abgeleitet hat und das auch in den sogenannten "Lernkarteien" angewendet wird. Aber das Internet und die digitale Technologie des Knowledge Pulse erweitern dieses Konzept um eine wesentliche Dimension: Das Neue ist die organische Art und Weise, wie eine Kette von Lernimpulsen gleichsam nebenbei in Ihren täglichen Arbeitsfluss eingespielt wird. (Und neu ist natürlich auch, dass Ihre erzielten Punkte auf einem Server gespeichert und dokumentiert werden.)

What do I have to do?

If you decide not to discard the active micro-impulse, you take a short glance. Usually it is a question, or, more generally, some "call to think". You respond as quick and spontaneous as possible, with just a click. Then you see the answer provided. Your response is instantly recorded to further shape your learning path, which will determine the next microlearning-impulse, and so on.

You mean, this is like being under permanent exam stress?

No. This is not an exam! It is more like asking yourself questions. And it doesn't matter how often you are "wrong". The idea is to casually keep bringing some relevant information to the mind, until it is really understood and committed to memory. Basically, your answers effect whether some chunk of microcontent should be presented again, and more often, or whether it should gradually slip into the background.

But I have no time anyway! And the last thing I need is more interruptions!

You will only see just a small bubble sliding into your peripheral vision, in the lower corner of the screen. And if it really doesn't fit in your flow, you just brush it away with a click of the wrist. But even overloaded workdays have lots of unproductive gaps in between—in fact, the number increases with the number of tasks that are processed. Microlearning uses these gaps in an easy, casual way.

How often does the "Knowledge Pulse" turn up?

The pre-selected default is 2 minutes. This means: After 2 minutes of inactivity at the keyboard, in the corner of the screen a micro-bubble slips in. But the configuration can always be adjusted on the fly, with just two clicks.

How many times a day will the "Knowledge Pulse" be actually used?

According to our experience, the microlearning impulse will be accepted 20 times a day, at least. (Of course this is subject to current workload and personal motivation.) But even 20 microlearning activities a day make a steady flow, and have a persistent, sustaining impact: Constant dripping wears away a stone.

How much time does a microlearning step take?

Each combination of impulse/activity doesn't take longer than one, two minutes. If there is some extra time, you even have the chance for some additional quick focusing—with a click you can get a short outline of the context. Sometimes you may even, via an embedded URL, open a browser window with background information, thus floating from micro- to macrolearning, and back again.

How often will a microlearning item be repeated before vanishing from the game?

By default, until the responding activity has been "right" three times in a row. Each time this item will move into the "background", so that it will only turn up again when the other items, which still were in the "foreground", have been processed too. Over time, a personal learning rhythm will develop.

How many items are presented in one "micro-session"?

By default, the client will show three items in a row. But it could also be only one, or five, or infinite. And the widget window can always be closed with just a click to terminate the current "micro-session".

-----
For now the client is a PC-based "widget" (from window + midget). Soon there will be a client for Java-enabled mobile phones too.

---- deutsch

Was ist der "Knowledge Pulse"?
"Knowledge Pulse" ist abgeleitet vom englischen "Cardiac Pulse Generator", Herzschrittmacher. Ein Strom von Mikro-Impulsen hält den Lernprozess in Gang , ohne dass Sie viel davon merken.

Ist das also so etwas wie eine digitalisierte "Lernkartei"?
Der Knowledge Pulse nutzt ein bekanntes Konzept, das Sebastian Leitner aus der kognitiven Lern- und Gedächtnisforschung abgeleitet hat und das auch in den sogenannten "Lernkarteien" angewendet wird. Aber das Internet und die digitale Technologie des Knowledge Pulse erweitern dieses Konzept um eine wesentliche Dimension: Das Neue ist die organische Art und Weise, wie eine Kette von Lernimpulsen gleichsam nebenbei in Ihren täglichen Arbeitsfluss eingespielt wird. (Und neu ist natürlich auch, dass Ihre erzielten Punkte auf einem Server gespeichert und doumentiert werden.)

Wann erscheint der Knowledge Pulse?
Sobald Sie eine Zeitlang nichts an Ihrem PC zu tun haben. Wenn Sie wieder auf den Schirm schauen, ist dort die nächste Frage erschienen. Es ist ein Lernimpuls, kein Zwang: "Du wolltest dir das doch einprägen? Hier ist eine Gelegenheit."

Was muss ich tun?
Sie werfen einen kurzen Blick auf die Frage und beantworten Sie möglichst schnell und spontan. Danach sehen Sie die vorgesehene Antwort.

Das heißt, ich bin jeden Tag in einer permanenten Prüfungssituation?
Nein. Das ist keine Prüfung! Es spielt keine Rolle, wie oft Sie etwas "falsch" beantworten! Eine Lernkarte, die nach einer nicht richtigen Antwort noch einmal erscheint, ist keine "Niederlage". Beim Lernen mit dem Knowledge Pulse geht es darum, sich Inhalte gleichsam nebenbei zu vergegenwärtigen und einzuprägen.Für die am Ende erreichten Punkte spielt die Anzahl der "Fehler" keine Rolle.

Ich habe sowieso nie Zeit! Ich kann wirklich keine Ablenkung gebrauchen!
Wenn es wirklich stört, ist der Knowledge Pulse in einer Sekunde weggeklickt. Aber auch der ausgefüllteste Tage hat sehr viele kurze Zwischenräume -- eine halbe Minute, zwei Minuten. Solche Atempausen braucht der Mensch. Nur wird in diesen Mikro-Freiräumen oft die Aufmerksamkeit nur in Beschlag genommen, von lästigen Nebensächlichkeiten. Der Knowledge Pulse schafft einen unaufdringlichen Anreiz, solche Freiräume zu nutzen, um "nebenbei" Wissen aufzubauen.

Wie oft erscheint der Knowledge Pulse?
In den Zeitabständen, die unter "Einstellungen" eingestellt wurden. Die Voreinstellung ist "2 Minuten". (D.h. nach 2 Minuten Inaktivität am PC erscheint eine Frage.) Sie können diese Einstellung jederzeit persönlich anpassen -- klicken Sie auf "Einstellungen" und verändern Sie das Intervall.

Wie oft am Tag wird der Knowledge Pulse erfahrungsgemäß verwendet?
Erfahrungsgemäß wird der Lernimpuls an einem Tag, an dem der PC ständig präsent ist, zumindest etwa 20 Mal genutzt. (Das variiert natürlich je nach Motivation und Arbeitsbelastung.) Aber bereits 20 Mikro-Lernaktivitäten pro Tag sind viel: Ein beständiger Fluss von Wissens-Impulsen, der das Thema vergegenwärtigt und einprägt.

Wie lang dauert so eine Mikro-Lerneinheit?
Solche Mikro-Aktivitäten zwischendurch dauern maximal eine Minute. In einem Augenblick entscheiden Sie, ob Sie die Frage wegklicken oder ob es gerade passt. Sie erhalten dann eine Antwort zur Frage. Wenn gerade etwas mehr Zeit ist, haben Sie hier auch die Gelegenheit zur schnellen Vertiefung: Mit einem Klick können Sie eine Kurzdarstellung des fachlichen Kontexts aufrufen. (Gehen Sie sparsam mit dieser Möglichkeit um, um den Lernfluss nicht zu oft zu unterbrechen!)

Wie oft wiederholt sich eine Mikro-Lerneinheit?
Bis Sie eine Frage dreimal in Folge richtig beantwortet haben. Nach jeder richtigen Antwort wird die "Lernkarte" nach hinten verschoben, so dass sie erst dann wieder erscheint, wenn Sie die anderen Karten, die noch "vorne" sind, durchgearbeitet haben. So ergibt sich ein persönlicher Lernrhythmus.

Wie viele Lern-Einheiten nacheinander bietet der Knowledge Pulse an?
Voreingestellt sind Bündel von je drei Mikrolern-Einheiten. Diese Mini-Sequenzen können und sollen sie jederzeit mit einem Klick abbrechen, wenn es gerade nicht passt. In den "Einstellungen" können Sie sofort auch die Zahl der Mikro-Lerneinheiten verändern, die nacheinander angeboten werden (z.B. jeweils nur eine oder jeweils fünf ...).

Understanding Micromedia Convergence

2008-01-27T23:19:00.000-08:00

Martin Lindner

Understanding Micromedia Convergence.
How Microcontent Is Creating a New Media Space Between the Phones.

Media Convergence

Thinking about ‘convergence’ makes you feel dizzy. You start with the concrete convergence of access channels and connected services, and you end up with just everything: Every media user having access to everything on every device, every media company selling every type of media product, every kind of media content or communication service getting delivered through every platform or channel. And ‘convergence’ can relate to access channels to the home (triple play), technical protocols of transmission (over IP), economic channels (one provider for all services), culturally encoded ‘contents’, associated social practices, mental and cognitive structures …

One reason lies in the nature of media. Every kind of convergence imaginable is a media phenomenon, and media is a mass noun not to be mistaken for the plural of mediums. Media are more than transmission technologies. They are complex systems of sign circulation. They have their own inner logics and dynamics, in three dimensions:

a technological dimension (the physical constraints, the technical tools, the technical ‘protocols’, the degree of professionality needed),
a semantic dimension (the sign system used, with the associated cultural codes or ‘protocols’^¹),
a twofold systemic social dimension: the functional apparatus (including ‘protocols’ of production), and the emergent social network connecting the participants and users (including ‘protocols’ of usage).

Single instances of ‘the media’ are mostly identified with the main device: e.g. TV, PC, mobile phone, the press. This is false. In fact they are parts of media constellations and ecologies which always include other media – electric, digital, print. These constellations have their own technical, cultural and social dimension, and they are quite different historically and geo-culturally: They are not the same today in the USA or in Japan, or in Germany in the 1970s and in the 1990s.

In the system that each specific instance of the media resembles, every profound change of one element does also have a profound effect on the media constellation around it. This may sometimes lead to convergence of media, but often to divergence as well (diversification of technologies, of markets, of contents, of user attention). Right now, it seems like everything is happening at once.

But if convergence is just one of synchronous tendencies in the complex evolution of media systems, constellations, and ecologies – why and since when did it become necessary to speak of ‘Convergence’ with a capital C? Short answer: Because the borders of a supposed ‘natural order of the media’, which supposedly had unfolded in the last 100 years, have increasingly become porous.

A Very Short History of “Convergence”

In the first hundred years the electric media environment^², although permanently changing, still seemed to develop towards a ‘natural’ structure. When TV took over around 1950, and bundled functions and characteristics of radio, movies, and the press, nobody did speak of ‘convergence”. It just appeared like the last piece of a puzzle falling in place.

The history of electric media had started with the constellation of telegraphy, photography and mass print around 1870. It was expanded by telephony, cinema and radio/audio. Finally, with TV/video and the transistor radio, electric media filled all possible channels of the private environment. Since the 1960s, the computer was already there, but for some decades a large gap divided ‘mediums for thinking’ from the ‘mass media’ dealing with entertainment and news. This did not change even when the mainframe computer (a.k.a. the ‘Electric Brain’) got replaced by the Personal Microcomputer as a magical writing machine.

So until the 1980s, a ‘natural order’ seemed to define the interrelations between technological constraints, perceptive channels, attention patterns, and cultural structures. “A one-to-one relationship used to exist between a medium and its use”.^³ There was private and professional media; audio, visual, and audiovisual media; one-to-many broadcasted media and one-to-one ‘private’ media; static and moving pictures; sound recorded and sound transmitted ‘live’. Further change was believed to be merely related to technological sophistication: remote control, cable TV, video, high resolution screens, digital storing and transmission, but also new electronic printing processes.

True, there were conflicts and paradigm changes, but all in all a hundred-year-long development looked like a ‘natural’ process aiming to fill all parts of the human environment. Actually it was the other way round. Electric media created an emerging cultural field, shaping new human identities, consciousness, sensibilities, and even physical experiences. Marshall McLuhan recognized this, but he still saw no clear difference between a mere bundle of mediums of communication, resembling quasi-natural “extensions of man”, and the completely new “total and immersive field of electric media” he discovered and described.^⁴

Indeed, between ca. 1950 and 1990, we lived in the McLuhan Galaxy. But at the same time, there was a tension growing between the expanding universe of multiple technologies and channels, and the hidden emergence of a unified media culture, with ‘pop culture’ as a forerunner for experimenting with new practices and experiences. The term ‘convergence’ came up at the historical point, when technologies seemed to start converging too, creating the irritating possibility of many-to-many relationships between a medium and its ‘content’.

Still there were two independent sources of irritation. On the surface, it was all about technology. ‘New media’ came up, which still were understood as mediums, digital technologies for encoding and transmitting. At first, this didn’t have much of a direct effect on the everyday life of the typical media consumer. But at the same time the use of old electric media had dramatically changed too. With remote controls and multi-channel 24-hour-TV, Xerox photocopies, audio- and videotaping, McLuhanism had become an everyday practice. ‘Mass media’ had finally turned into ubiquitous and omnipresent media: ‘ubi-media’. And in the following two decades, it became digital.

When underground SF-writer William Gibson introduced the notion of cyberspace in 1984, he just combined in a highly suggestive way this set of revolutionary developments: new digital media, an immersive “mediasphere”^⁵ augmenting ‘first life’, media consumers becoming competent media users and then media beings. Meanwhile, much nearer to the mainstream, the Macintosh 1984 TV ad proclaimed the dawn of a ‘digital lifestyle’ and the downfall of IBM’s ‘Big Brother’ office computing paradigm. At the same time, though largely unnoticed, the cellphone was introduced to the mainstream market. So the parts of a new media constellation were there, and “convergence” was its label.

The following decades struggled to understand the inner logic of this constellation. There were two mainly independent concepts. On one side, the “convergence of modes of delivery” was leading to the erosion of the quasi-natural order of the old mediasphere, “blurring the lines between media, even between point-to-point communications, such as the post, telephone, and telegraph, and mass communications, such as the press, radio, and television.”^⁶ On the other side, “Content is King” was the word of the day. Disney, Vivendi, Sony, Murdoch et al. were trying to build cross-platform value-chains all over the media industry, connecting and bundling TV, cinema, pop-radio, records, print media.

The high time of convergence talk came in 1995, because digital multimedia seemed to provide a ‘natural’ technological platform for merging the technological and the economical vision. Cross-media strategies were in full bloom. “Life after television” meant that, sooner or later, all media content would flow into the living room through a single black box, a synthesis of the PC, the TV set, and the Hi-fi. The Internet/Web was only seen as a powerful medium for transport and paying: a digital multimedia superhighway. These were the years when Bill Gates built his futuristic fully-digital hi-tech home. It became outdated very soon.

In fact, convergence again became a puzzling and complex thing. The game station grew into a strong competitor for the strategic position of the unified media box. The idea of pulling/pushing personalized ‘content’ collapsed with the Dotcom Bubble. The Web proved to be much more than a combination of superhighway and archive – it turned out to be a mediasphere, a life-world of its own. And the mobile phone too developed into much more than just another complementary medium for transmitting and marketing the same old media content (news, celebrities, weather, sports, and porn).

So around 2003, a third wave of convergence discourse began. Just now it has been brilliantly summarized by Henry Jenkins in his book Convergence Culture: “If the digital revolution paradigm presumed that new media would displace old media, the emerging convergence paradigm assumes that old and new media will interact in even more complex ways.”^⁷ But in which ways, we have only barely begun to understand.

The Place Between the Phones

“Cyberspace” is the “place between the phones”.^⁸ The slogan is from a time when modems still got fixed on phone receivers, and it was put literally in the film “Matrix”, but it can be re-used for our era. Between mobile phones (and other mobile networked devices) a new kind of media space is emerging. It is not a means for communication, but a place to live.

This was the epiphany Howard Rheingold experienced in 2000, in the streets of Tokyo: When he saw hundreds of people at Shibuya Crossing, looking at their phones instead of talking into them, it blew his mind. And when he observed similar behaviour at the other end of the world, in Helsinki, he really became convinced that a fundamental change of the global media environment was happening. In his book Smart Mobs,^⁹ the view of convergence is focused on new forms of technologically enabled social networks and collaboration. Although it starts with the Japanese i-mode, the very first successful realization of a Mobile Web environment, in this book mobile phones are just one form of ubiquitous computing and digital networks.

Jenkins, in contrast, sees the transformation of ‘the media’ as a new synthesis of movies, TV, and digital gaming. For him, the Web is more of an augmentation of audiovisual media – a digital jukebox and a meta-medium for reflecting and communicating media. The same goes for the mobile phone. For Jenkins, it is either just the smallest device to consume and produce audio/video, or a means of communication about other media usage.

A third perspective on convergence puts the Web in the center, as a media of its own, neither reducible to ‘interactive mass media’ nor to being just an interface to networked communication. Although not mentioning the mobile phone, in Small Pieces Loosely Joined (2002) David Weinberger described a media space characterized by “voices” and “conversations”.^¹⁰

In the meantime, we have seen the boom of the Web 2.0 and the beginnings of the Mobile Web, and it seems to be clear that both will melt into a more unified for of media soon. Until now this did not happen. Indeed, the long-awaited mainstream adaptation of the Mobile Web still has yet to come. I-mode was an exception although we now have UMTS, web-enabled smartphones and the iPhone. There are technological, infrastructural, and commercial difficulties (see Jaokar/Fish 2006^¹¹). But the cultural side of this is even more unclear. Neither enterprises nor users seem to know, how the new ‘media space between the phones’ should look and feel.

What would be possible cultural forms? Enthusiasts of the mobile phone tend to focus on the unique quality of ‘mobility’: the intimate experience of really of personal and physical ‘extension’, and the importance of the geographic position.^¹² Paul Levinson’s Cellphone (2002)^¹³ presents a radical McLuhanistic account of this concept, but poses severe questions: Does it really make sense to add ‘mobile intimate media’ as a new category besides ‘mass media’, ‘electric media’, and ‘digital media’? And is there really a direct line from the ballpoint pen, the Kodak camera, and the transistor radio? What is the complex relation between media and mediums? And what exactly does ‘mobility’ mean in the age of electric digital media?

The first modern media space was the metropolis: the augmentation of physical space with media (telegraphy, press, cinema), including telephony in public and professional spaces. The second media space was the suburban home. (The office is just another instance of such a walled ‘home’ space, with the Microsoft PC finally becoming its main media interface.)

In this constellation, the telephone was not yet really part of “the media”, like TV, magazines, and radio. It was more like the car and public transport, part of the commodities that defined the space. But, as McLuhan noted, there were already tendencies anticipating present practices and experiences. It is the teenager, he said, who “understands the telephone”, while “the Bell Telephone research department … are oblivious to the telephone as a form, and study only the content aspect”.^¹⁴ Fixed-line telephony became used here in a swarm-like and immersive manner not reducible to exchanging ‘messages’ between ‘sender’ and ‘receiver’. These teenagers already lived in a ‘place between the phones’ (and radios, and jukeboxes), preparing the way for hackers and ‘Generation Txt’. Pop culture always showed a strong tendency toward media convergence.

So what now the new ‘place between the phones’? Is it really primarily a geo-space, just because people are travelling much more, both locally and globally. Even before mobile phones and the wireless Web, Marc Augé, a ethnologist, had argued that places tend to lose their characteristics in a globalized “supermodernist civilization”. Although (or even because) permanently changing position all the time, people stay in uniform non-places – cars/highways, public transport, shopping malls, hotels, and airports.^¹⁵ In such an environment, the mythological killer application for the commercial Mobile Web doesn’t make that much sense: What’s the point in getting pointed to the next restaurant in a standardized coffee-to-go world? And doesn’t the fascination of mobile phones lie very much in the possibility ‘to beam oneself up’ into a non-space, a world made of signs, everywhere and nowhere at once?^¹⁶

Mobile phones do not mark a return to primary, less alienated life forms: to orality, to the body, to geographic space, to a world of ‘real communication’. Again, a new media space is emerging, with its own characteristics and inner logic. Just like in Matrix, the real world of today already resembles an ubiquitous media space. The body and oral language are becoming ‘secondary’ themselves in a world where the air is filled with ubiquitous visions and ‘oral’ statements that, like only printed statements in earlier times, do not go away, lingering above the heads of the crowd like an omnipresent cloud. And it is also the other way round: With SMS and the Web 2.0, literacy is just now taking on characteristics of traditional orality.

So whatever the new media space will be like, it is located in between and beyond: between and beyond the old opposition of body/orality and literacy/mind, between and beyond geographical places, between and beyond ‘Web pages’, between and beyond the old oppositions of ‘reality’ vs. ‘media’ and ‘real world’ vs. virtual world’.

Micromedia

In 2000, Russian media theorist Lev Manovich noticed that people were fascinated by playing old games like Tetris on the mobile phone. So he came to postulate two diverging lines of media evolution: Macro-media and micromedia.^¹⁷ We are, he said, used to expect media to develop “toward ‘more’ – more resolution, better color, better visual fidelity, more bandwidth, more immersion”. Media of that kind have macro-screens and deliver macro-content, calling for single-focused, long-term attention. But micromedia are, on the contrary, “characterized by low resolution, low fidelity, and slow speeds”. They are typically made for small screens. Or, in the case of the Web 2.0, they are “widgets” using only small fractions of a bigger screen. Either way, they request only semi-focused or peripheric^¹⁸ attention.

In Manovich’s perspective, this is not just a less satisfactory early stage of “rich media”, but a remarkably stable cultural form of its own right that has just been moving “from platform to platform” – from early PCs to early game consoles, from the early Web to mobile phones. And these “minimalist media or micro-media”, he said, would “not only successfully compete with macro-media but may even overtake it in popularity”. It turned out that he was right.

The open, ubiquitous non-space created by micromedia is not just an alternative space like the futurist macromedia home still being presented at hi-tech trade shows. They have to be micro to transform the ‘real’ space into a whole new media space by adding multiple layers augmenting the world with objects designed for peripheric and casual attention. Before the internet-enabled cellphone, this kind of multitasking multimedia-experience had mainly been restricted to the home. Now, with the small “fourth screen” of the mobile phone acting as a “background device”,^¹⁹ micromedia is been taken to the streets.

To use many devices and interfaces at the same time, media have to be casual, “seamful”, and “cool”.^²⁰ This means that traditional media formats and contents will be fundamentally changed, and many macromedia-based business plans will be shattered.^²¹ Content will have to become digital “microcontent”, “with its length dictated by the constraint of a single main topic and by the physical and technical limitations of the software and devices that we use […]”.^²²

Anil Dash, a weblog visionary and businessman, gave the first definition of digital microcontent, when he discovered in 2002 “that navigating the web in meme-sized chunks is the natural idiom of the Internet.”^²³ The double nature is crucial: Microcontent is both human and technological. It is the basic ‘unit of attention’ (“meme-sized”) in digital networked media, and it is a chunk of digital data formatted in a way that allows easy production, aggregation, annotation, and re-use.^²⁴

We are now witnessing a ‘Cambrian explosion’ of mostly mobilized microcontent applications, including text/presence (e.g. Jaiku), pictures/graphics (e.g. Flickr), videos (e.g. YouTube), Web radio (e.g. Pandora, LastFM …), ‘geo-bookmarks’ (Socialight, Qype …), user-generated micro-video (Qik), micro-audio (Utterz) .... From this soup new cultural forms will crystallize. It is still very early, and predictions are difficult. But some points about micromedia convergence can be made:

In the future, the mobile phone will become a main microcontent client for consuming, recording, producing, annotating, aggregating, publishing. It will be a main part in a foodchain.
The micromedia space is based on circulation, not on communication, transmission, or consumption. It will neither be a 3D ‘virtual world’ nor the seamless space of the visionaries of “pervasive computing”. Written text will merge with voice and visual elements to create new cultural forms beyond the old notions of orality and literacy.
Micromedia design will have to understand concepts like “lifestreams” (David Gelernter), “points of presence” (Kingsley Idehen, Martin Lindner), “personal and local info-clouds” (Thomas Vander Wal), “seamfulness” (Matthew Chalmers), and “user experience flows” for “Continuous Partial Attention” (Linda Stone).^²⁵

Beyond outdated visions of techno-futurists, and fulfilling the old promise of electric media, the mobile phone will help to transform ‘real life’ through the open, dynamic, unpredictable, virus-like, and ubiquitous circulation of micromedia.

1 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press, 2006. Jenkins introduces the concept of “protocols“ taken from a forthcoming publication of Lisa Geitelman (pp. 289, 291). Although still being vague, the term covers all those practices which are so closely associated with one medium that they seem to be a ‘natural’ condition of its usage: technological, economic, legal, social, cultural.

2 I follow Marshall McLuhan in insisting of the unique quality of “electric media”, although he himself did blur this many times by calling nearly everything “media”, including cavemen engravings, cars, and electric light.

3 Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies of Freedom, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1983, p. 23.

4 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man [1964], Routledge: London, 2001.

5 John Hartley, Uses of Television, Routledge: London, New York 1999, pp. 217f. For Hartley, the mediasphere is the “universe of all media”, across all platforms, genres and content types, and part of what Jurij M. Lotman called “semiosphere”. This mediasphere is not the same as Régis Debrays’ mediosphère, which is still sort of an anthropological super-structure in the tradition of Harold Innis or Teilhard de Chardin.

6 De Sola Pool, op.cit., p. 23.

7 Jenkins, op.cit., p. 6.

8 Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown. Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Bantam, 1993.

9 Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, New York: Basic Books, 2002.

10 David Weinberger, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined. A Unified Theory of the Web, Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002.

11 Ajit Jaokar, Tony Fish, Mobile Web 2.0, London: Futuretext, 2006.

12 e.g. Mark Aakhus, James Katz (eds.), Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk and Public Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002

13 Paul Levinson, Cellphone: The story of the world’s most mobile medium and how it has transformed everything, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

14 McLuhan, op.cit., p. 292

15 Marc Augé, Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, London, New York: Verso, 1995.

16 New ‘locative’ Web 2.0 applications like Plazes, Dopplr, Jaiku, Socialight, Qype … do not simply mark a return of the mobile generation to ‘real places’, but even more the transformation of ‘real’ places into parts of the wider non-space of the digital mediasphere.

17 Lev Manovich, “Beyond Broadband: Macromedia and Micro-media”, in: Geert Lovink (ed.), net.congestion reader, Amsterdam: De Balie, 2000. Digital version at URL: http://www.manovich.net/docs/Mass.cro_micro.doc

18 Martin Lindner, “Human-centered Design for ‘Casual’ Information and Learning in Micromedia Environments”, in M3 - Interdisciplinary Aspects on Digital Media & Education. Proceedings of the 2nd Symposium of the WG HCI&UE of the Austrian Computer Society (ACS) 2006, ed. by. Andreas Holzinger et al., pp. 52 – 60. I owe the notion of “peripheric design” to John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid, “Borderline Issues: Social and Material Aspects of Design”, Human-Computer Interaction, v 9 (1994), n 1, pp. 3-36. URL: http://www.johnseelybrown.com/Borderline_Issues.pdf

19 Charlie Schick, “What are the true qualities of mobility?” (2005), Entry in Weblog Lifeblog. URL: http://cognections.typepad.com/lifeblog/2005/09/what_are_the_tr.html

20 See Lindner, op.cit., for a closer look at the concepts of casual and cool media, and the notion of “seamfulness” (Matthew Chalmers).

21 Umair Haque, “The New Economics of Media. Micromedia, Connected Consumption, and the Snowball Effect” (2005). This is a Powerpoint-essay published at Haque’s weblog bubblegeneration, URL: http://www.bubblegeneration.com/resources/mediaeconomics.ppt

22 Anil Dash, “Introducing the Microcontent Client” (2002). URL: http://www.anildash.com/magazine/2002/11/introducing_the.html

23 Dash, op.cit.

24 Lindner, op.cit.

25 Ibid.

Neulio Grazr

2008-01-14T08:14:00.000-08:00

using Neulio educational video site for video-feeds, some YouTube tools too: #

Foodchain (Scott Wilson)

2008-01-14T03:14:00.001-08:00

Scott Wilson's visualization of the microcontent foodchain. His remarks are here.

microinformation ecology, multitasking

2008-01-14T02:24:00.000-08:00

was nötig ist, ist ein flow von microinformation, IN dem man ist, und in dem sich die impulse nicht behindern, sondern gegenseitig verstärken: kettenreaktionen von aussage-ereignissen.

negatives multitasking passiert dann, wenn kommunikation/information als "anderer raum" verstanden wird, im gegensatz zur "eigentlichen arbeit".

je mehr aber die "eigentliche arbeit" in den mikro-raum ausgelagert wird, desto mehr findet die dynamik DORT statt.

typisch für manager (die sich v.a. im phone- und email-space aufhalten). typisch für web-worker (IM-space, delicious, ...) .

executive summaries ist der versuch, makrodokumente in mikro-form zu bringen, damit sie als aussage-ereignis im mikroraum, in dem die entscheidungen fallen, funktionieren.

es geht also darum, im dynamischen und wolkenhaften mikro-raum jeweils situationen der 'aufladung' zu erzeugen und wahrschenlich zu machen, aus denen heraus die "eigentliche" arbeit quasi-eigendynamisch getriggert wird (als 'entladung'). dazu ist v.a. kollaborative rückkopplung nötig -- solipsistisch funktioniert das eher nicht.

blogger design ...

2007-12-05T08:20:00.000-08:00

... i do not get it. does strange things with text posted from ScribeFire. need to fix it if i really will make this a work blog in own microcontent eco-cycle.

Feeds, Mushrooms and Shamanic Urine

2007-12-05T07:52:00.001-08:00

For some time now, I’ve eventually been discussing with an ingenious friend the innovative use of feeds as a “microcontent foodchain”-tool, bridging the gap between aggregation, “continuous partial attention” management, re-publication and circulation.

Just yesterday I found related posts by Scott Wilson, whose FeedForward project indeed is sounding extra-cool, by Brian Lamb, and – commenting on Brian’s entry – the pioneering Stephen Downes. I really wish these forces could be loosely joined in some way …

Interesting why it seems to be difficult to fund this, as Brian remarks. This sounds much bigger and more important than 90% of 2.0 apps still shooting up like mushrooms. (But this mushroom soup might be still worth a look.)

Another soup-loving friend coined the “Shamanic Urine” metaphor for the Feed Project we are thinking about. We really should use this as codename for the project … Here is why:

MYCEL: The amanita muscaria mushrooms grow only under certain types of trees, mostly firs and evergreens. The mushroom caps are the fruit of the larger mycelium beneath the soil which exists in a symbiotic relationship with the roots of the tree.

EX NIHILO: Ancient peoples were amazed at how these magical mushrooms sprang from the earth without any visible seed. They considered this "virgin birth" to have been the result of the morning dew, which was seen as the semen of the deity.

URINE: The active ingredients of the amanita mushrooms are not metabolized by the body, and so they remain active in the urine. In fact, it is safer to drink the urine of one who has consumed the mushrooms than to eat the mushrooms directly, as many of the toxic compounds are processed and eliminated on the first pass through the body.

RSS/ATOM: It was common practice among ancient people to recycle the potent effects of the mushroom by drinking each other's urine. The amanita's ingredients can remain potent even after six passes through the human body.

BEYOND THE METAPHOR: The really interesting thing is how to enrich the RSS-stuff through using it, so that feeding it back and sharing it makes it even more powerful … any ideas?

wie corporate learning geht

2007-11-29T04:19:00.001-08:00

Auf Web-Leanring beziehen:

National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) hat britische Angestellte befragt, welche Aktivitäten ihnen nützlich waren, ihren konkreten Job zu erlernen. Hier die Ergebnisse (die Prozentzahlen geben an, inwiefern diese Aktivität als sehr bzw. ziemlich hilfreich eingeschätzt wurde bzw. in Klammern gesetzt die Anzahl der Personen, die diese Aktivität als etwas hilfreich einschätzten):

Doing your job on a regular basis 82% (13%)
Being shown by others how to do certain activities or tasks 62% (23%)
Watching and listening to others while they carry out their work 56% (26%)
Training courses paid for by your employer or yourself 54% (20%)
Reflecting on your performance 53% (30%)
Drawing on the skills you picked up while studying for a qualification 45% (21%)
Using skills and abilities acquired outside of work 42% (29%)
Reading books, manuals and work-related magazines 39% (24%)
Using trial and error on the job 38% (27%)
Using the Internet 29% (18%)

2007-11-28T13:22:00.000-08:00

Microcontent Links

Microcontent - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Today, microcontent is being used as a more general term indicating content that conveys one primary idea or concept, is accessible through a single ...
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcontent
clipped from Google - 11/2007

Microcontent: Headlines and Subject Lines (Alertbox)
Online headlines must be absolutely clear when taken out of context. They should be written in plain language (no puns or clever headlines).
www.useit.com
www.useit.com/alertbox/980906.html
clipped from Google - 11/2007

Minding the Planet: Defining Microcontent
In my previous articles on the Birth of the Metaweb and the name "The Metaweb" I have focused on the general paradigm of the emerging microcontent ...
novaspivack.typepad.com
novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2003/12/defining_microc.html
clipped from Google - 11/2007

magazine: Introducing the Microcontent Client
Microcontent is information published in short form, with its length dictated by the constraint of a single main topic and by the physical and technical ...
www.anildash.com
www.anildash.com/magazine/2002/11/introducing_the.html
clipped from Google - 11/2007

Microcontent Design, Part 1
This is the first post in a series in which I will explore microcontent design.
www.readwriteweb.com
www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microcontent_de.php
clipped from Google - 11/2007

Joi Ito's Web: Thoughts on micro-content, metadata and trends
Small morsels of content, created by users and shared is called micro-content, as opposed to expensive commercially produced and protected content. ...
joi.ito.com
joi.ito.com/archives/2003/07/22/thoughts_on_microcontent_metadata_and_trends.html
clipped from Google - 11/2007

XML.com: Interactive Microcontent
Adding behavior to data can make it a lot smarter. In this article, Jon Udell explores and experiments with the DOM API for making small sections of web ...
www.xml.com
www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/10/08/udell.html
clipped from Google - 11/2007

How to Write Microcontent
Microcontent — or the headlines, decks, subheads and other "small" pieces of Web copy — actually do most of the communicating on your Website. ...
aboutpublicrelations.net

Linda Stone on Attention

2007-11-28T03:19:00.000-08:00

near-verbatim notes from Linda Stone's Supernova2005 talk at O'Reilly radar, re-blogged as a quote for my personal convenience:

"Pop quiz. It's okay to answer "yes" to a question even if you're contradicting an earlier answer:

Technology has improved my life
Technology has harmed my quality of life
I pay full attention to people when they talk to me, when I am in meetings, when I work
I pay partial attention to what I'm doing and I'm scanning my devices or software for other inputs
Technology sets me free
Technology enslaves me

In 1997 I coined the phrase "continuous partial attention". For almost two decades, continuous partial attention has been a way of life to cope and keep up with responsibilities and relationships. We've stretched our attention bandwidth to upper limits. We think that if tech has a lot of bandwidth then we do, too.

With continuous partial attention we keep the top level item in focus and scan the periphery in case something more important emerges. Continuous partial attention is motivated by a desire not to miss opportunities. We want to ensure our place as a live node on the network, we feel alive when we're connected. To be busy and to be connected is to be alive.

We've been working to maximize opportunities and contacts in our life. So much social networking, so little time. Speed, agility, and connectivity at top of mind. Marketers humming that tune for two decades now.

Now we're over-stimulated, over-wound, unfulfilled.

Are you beginning to ignore call-waiting? At some companies, email-free Fridays are taking off. Debby O'Halloran article excerpt: casual office phenomenon. Turning into a generation of email junkies. Email creates way of doing business but a new headache. Nestle Rowntree first company in Britain to do email-free Fridays. Email banned on Friday to see whether employees will be more creative when they discuss things face-to-face.

Another consequence of email culture is that we don't make decisions: send emails around. Saw an increasing tendency for that in latter years at Microsoft. At once company, CEO requires people going into a meeting to drop Blackberrys, cellphones, etc. at door: disarm.

Bill Gates has three types of meetings: free-for-all, mixed (sitting at back indicates paying half-attention), and full (if you're sitting at the table, you focus on what's going on).

We're shifting into a new cycle, new set of behaviours and motivations. Attention is dynamic, and there are sociocultural influences that push us to pay attention one way or another. Our use of attention and how it evolves is culturally determined.

I see twenty year cycles. Coming through in the cycles is a tension between collective and individual, and our tendency to take set of beliefs to extreme then it fails us and we seek the opposite.

1945-1965: organization/insitution center of gravity. We paid attention to that which we serve. Lucy paid full attention to phone conversations, Seinfeld does not. Belief that by serving insitution of (marriage|employer|community) we'd leave happy and well-ordered lives. Marketing, command-and-control lifestyle, parents and authority figures, all fit in. Service to institution would bring us satisfaction. We paid full-focus attention to that which served the institution: family, community, marriage. We trusted experts in authority to filter the noise from the signal, to give us the information that matters. As those things failed us, we embraced what we'd suppressed.

1965-1985: me and self-expression. Self and self-expression new center of gravity. Trusted ourselves, entrepreneurial. Apple, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines. Marketers said we have our power to be our best. Fashion broke free. We paid attention to that which created personal opportunities. Paid attention to full-screen software like Word and Excel. Willing to fragment attention if it enhanced our opportunity. Multitasking was an adaptive. Our sense of committment dropped: rising divorce rate, 3 companies/career, etc. Became narcissistic and lonely, reached out for network.

1985-2005: Network center of gravity. Trust network intelligence. Scan for opportunity. Continuous partial attention is a post-multitasking adaptive behaviour. Being connected makes us feel alive. ADD is a dysfunctional variant of continuous partial attention. Continuous partial attention isn't motivated by productivity, it's motivated by being connected. MySpace, Friendster, where quantity of connections desirable may make us feel connected, but lack of meaning underscores how promiscuous and how empty this way of life made us feel. Dan Gould: "I quit every social network I was on so I could have dinner with people."

So now we're overwhelmed, underfulfilled, seeking meaningful connections. iPod as much about personal space as personalized playlists. Driving question going from 'what do I have to gain?' to 'what do I have to lose?' Success turning to fear.

Attention captured by marketing messages and leaders who give us a sense of trust, belonging in a meaningful way. Now we long for a quality of life that comes in meaningful connections to friends, colleagues, family that we experience with full-focus attention on relationships, etc.

The next aphrodisiac is committed full-attention focus. In this new area, experiencing this engaged attention is to feel alive. Trusted filters, trusted protectors, trusted concierge, human or technical, removing distractions and managing boundaries, filtering signal from noise, enabling meaningful connections, that make us feel secure, are the opportunity for the next generation. Opportunity will be the tools and technologies to take our power back."

soup test

2007-11-05T10:44:00.001-08:00

gonna try the soup, again.

soup

2007-11-01T16:37:00.001-07:00

this is way cool.
i just did install a google.docs feed here.

Glaser, Skywriting

2007-11-01T16:36:00.001-07:00

Ein Text am Computerbildschirm ist in jedem Augenblick im Zustand der
Reinschrift. Das ameisenhaft Rege am Denken, das sich an den
Bearbeitungsspuren herkömmlich abgefaßter Manuskripte ersichtlich macht,
verschwindet.

Glaser, Das Elektronische Papier

2007-07-29T11:41:00.000-07:00

Ein Text am Computerbildschirm ist in jedem Augenblick im Zustand der Reinschrift. Das ameisenhaft Rege am Denken, das sich an den Bearbeitungsspuren herkömmlich abgefaßter Manuskripte ersichtlich macht, verschwindet.

workshop demo

2007-06-20T05:54:00.001-07:00

ich kann hier schnell reinschreiben

Discontinuous Partial Attention

2007-05-29T00:06:00.001-07:00

Linda Stone (look up quote)

Information Overload

2007-05-29T00:04:00.000-07:00

The cure to information overload is more information

The power of tags shows that the way to manage information overload is more information. That's what the doomsayers of the 90's — Information Anxiety! Information Tidal Wave! — didn't foresee. [Technorati tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous tags]
Posted by D. Weinberger at May 24, 2005 11:36 AM

http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/004037.html

shibuya freising google map

2007-04-06T00:30:00.001-07:00

Shibuya Freising Map

Dreaming in Code

2007-04-04T04:25:00.001-07:00

Amazon.de: Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software: English Books: Scott Rosenberg

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software (Gebundene Ausgabe)
von Scott Rosenberg (Autor)

nano3

2007-03-16T08:39:00.001-07:00

sun earth moon

http://www.nanolearning.com/users/dclough/SunEarthMoon#

nano 2

2007-03-16T08:34:00.001-07:00

better goal setting

nano object

2007-03-16T08:29:00.001-07:00

http://www.nanolearning.com/users/intuit_LD/MentoringStarterKit#

Microcontent Office

2007-02-11T23:48:00.001-08:00

Observer, 12/2/2007: Microcontent Office

The signs of the paradigm shift are everywhere. Here's an intriguing
one. If you're a Google Mail user and someone sends you a message with
a Microsoft Word document attached, Gmail will offer you two options:
do you want to download the attachment to your hard drive (from where
you can open it in Microsoft Word)? Or do you want to open it as a
'Google document'?

If you choose the latter, the document appears
looking exactly as it does in Microsoft Word, with a toolbar offering
many of the same formatting options. You can insert comments. But there
are also some other buttons available. One is marked 'Collaborate': it
allows you to invite other people to collaborate on editing the
document. Another option is 'Publish': it publishes the document on the
web with a unique URL so that you can direct readers to it. Similar
options are available for Excel spreadsheets. And it's only a matter of
time before PowerPoint files receive the same treatment.

Stephen Downes on Learning/Knowledge

2007-02-08T03:13:00.001-08:00

# (Log in as Guest) Where connectivism differs from those theories, I would argue, is that
connectivism denies that knowledge is propositional. That is to say,
these other theories are 'cognitivist', in the sense that they depict
knowledge and learning as being grounded in language and logic.

Connectivism is, by contrast, 'connectionist'. Knowledge is, on this theory, literally
the set of connections formed by actions and experience. It may consist
in part of linguistic structures, but it is not essentially based in
linguistic structures, and the properties and constraints of linguistic
structures are not the properties and constraints of connectivism.

In
connectivism, a phrase like 'constructing meaning' makes no sense.
Connections form naturally, through a process of association, and are
not 'constructed' through some sort of intentional action. And
'meaning' is a property of language and logic, connoting referential
and representational properties of physical symbol systems. Such
systems are epiphenomena of (some) networks, and not descriptive of or
essential to these networks.

Hence, in connectivism, there is no
real concept of transferring knowledge, making knowledge, or building
knowledge. Rather, the activities we undertake when we conduct
practices in order to learn are more like growing or developing
ourselves and our society in certain (connected) ways.

This
implies a pedagogy that (a) seeks to describe 'successful' networks (as
identified by their properties, which I have characterized as
diversity, autonomy, openness, and connectivity) and (b) seeks to
describe the practices that lead to such networks, both in the
individual and in society (which I have characterized as modeling and
demonstration (on the part of a teacher) and practice and reflection
(on the part of a learner)).

learning environment (read the full post)

2007-02-08T01:14:00.001-08:00

IN Savage Minds: I eventually came to the conclusion that “teaching” is a hindrance to
learning. The word, “teacher” in itself suggests that learning requires
teaching. In fact, the best learning almost always occurs in the
absence of a teacher.

[The teacher's role is being a - very - important part in the ecology.]

Before I go much further in my
description of “anti-teaching” I might say that I do not recommend it
for everybody, nor do I think anti-teaching is necessarily superior to
teaching. Both must co-exist, for together they are greater than the
sum of their parts. If you are a “teacher” please do not take offense
to my anti-teaching philosophy. All I am attempting to provide is a
necessary companion to traditional teaching.

The only answer to the best questions is another good question. And so
the best questions send students on rich and meaningful lifelong
quests, question after question after question. [because what you learn is structures, frames, a "language"] ... Frustrated with this question (“What do we need to know for this test?”), and hoping to get my students to ask
better questions, I decided to get to work creating a learning
environment more conducive to producing the types of questions that
create lifelong learners rather than savvy test-takers.

blogger site feeds for labels (tags)

2007-02-07T10:52:00.001-08:00

If a blog you read is using labels and also has site feeds enabled, then you can pick and choose which topics you want to subscribe to. The format for label feeds is this:

http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/labelname

Be sure to substitute in the correct blog address for blogname and the label you're interested in for labelname. Also, don't miss the hyphen ("-") in the URL. That's not a typo!

abfall 070206_3

2007-02-07T10:38:00.001-08:00

1616 keine Urteile zur aktuellen Arbeit, klar das wirkt immer so furchtbar zuletzt bei Rühmkorf bei Krausser weil ich eben dies und das dachte, zum Stück JA UND! get on with it halts Maul! ist ja gut, ist ja gut bremsenlos fahren und trotzdem irgendwie steuern kontrolliert, klar (schon beim zweiten Mal ist es ein MANIERISMUS: Problem der Form - lächerlich) PRAXIS

abfall 070206_2

2007-02-07T10:36:00.001-08:00

VORSICHT Literatur alles aussteigen bitte geil auch: neulich mit Theo die Debatte über Tagebücher, Krausser, wer war da noch?, ach ja: der Andreas Bernard Ar-tikel in der SZ: ob er den gelesen hat, der war toll - nee, hat er nur angefangen, war ihm dann zu langweilig - zu LANGWEI-LIG?! - ... Tageücher also: kann er nicht, mag er nicht, langweilt ihn; darf dann im Grunde natürlich auch sonst niemand ma-chen (kleine Übertreibung); ob ich denn Tagebuch schreiben würde - Nö. Wie das schon klingt: 'Tagebuch schrei-ben' - Blödsinn - Meine Minutendinger durfte ich dann trotzdem vielleicht weiter machen - wenn ich ihn richtig verstanden habe - Theodors Negationsmaschine: absoluter Irrsinn Wobei der Abend neulich in Wirklichkeit ja seit langem wieder speziell nett war - hatte ja eben noch in Hamburg Benedikt gegenüber nur vom Streß-Theo geredet - so richtig fies und böse - aber er hat uns alle eben bißchen ZU lange ge-quält, gernervt, terrorisiert - und jetzt erst, mit Verspätung, kriegt er dafür zurück ist das fies? ist das normal? 1718 time time time - time marches on -

abfall 070206

2007-02-07T10:35:00.001-08:00

dann heute Nacht

Brief

kaputte Szene

dann heute mittag soll der und der vorkommen?

Verrat?

WIE vor allem

das meiste muß schweigen, sonst gehen riesige Lügen los, Spastereien, im Grunde Literatur

und das wollen wir ja gerade VERMEIDEN hier

manovich media history

2007-02-07T10:26:00.001-08:00

What had also come by 1995 was Internet—the most material and visible sign of globalization. And, by the end of the decade, it has also become clear that the gradual computerization of culture will eventually transform all of it. So, to invoke the old Marxist model of base and superstructure, if the economic base of modern society from the 1950s onward started to shift toward a service and information economy, becoming by the 1970s a so-called “post-industrial society” (Daniel Bell), and then later a “network society” (Manual Castells), by the 1990s the superstructure started to feel the full impact of this change.

starting mcontainer

2007-02-07T08:42:00.000-08:00

this is planned to be a container for all sorts of microcontent i create and want to process in the microcontent foodchain:

performancing > container-blog

> rss-feeds for tags > suprglu pages / protopage
> somehow formatting it for mobile > mobile blog
> with TiddlySnip to TiddlyWiki

...