A little while ago, the semi-ubiquitous learning management system Blackboard announced it was going 2.0 – in its own proprietary fashion. Lumped under the name BeyondInitiative are a series of properties that are designed to connect users worldwide, across education segments and disciplines, and thus leverage the wisdom of the community for teaching and learning.

The first of these properties launched as Scholar.com. It’s built into the basic Blackboard LMS package, and allows for tagging and RSS feed subscription. Course tags are automatically generated for students enrolled in a given course.

But, of course, this worldwide tagging, subscribing, collecting takes place within the world of the Blackboard Learning System(TM):

HOW DO I CREATE MY OWN COLLECTIONS? To create your own bookmark collections, you need a Blackboard Scholar(TM) account. Only users of the Blackboard Learning System(TM) (including former WebCT Vista and CE products) can create an account, and you do so through your Blackboard course or by clicking the Scholar tab within Blackboard if your institution has it enabled.

As an IT manager at a school not hooked into Blackboard World complains, “it seems social in the way that lunch table with the cheerleaders was back in high school - I didn’t get to join that clique either.” Then again, what if your social world were limited to cheerleaders — or any one type of population, however spirited & fascinating?

Even if you’re happy discovering and sharing resources within the horizon of this LMS, what happens to your collections when you’re no longer a Blackboard customer – that is, connected to your participating institution? Limit social software to affiliates of Blackboard institutions, and you may get nothing but a big dying outdoor plant starved for light.

***

Christian Dalsgaard’s Social software: E-learning beyond learning management systems represents a wholly opposite approach, one that argues in an earnest, Danish way for ditching the LMS altogether in favor of an open world of social software. Committed whole-hog to a social constructivist view of learning, Dalsgaard argues that

Students’ self-governed and problem-solving activities are considered the focal point of a learning process. This conception of a learning process means that it is not possible to structure or pre-determine the students’ activities in a learning process – the activities must develop on the basis of the student’s own problem-solving.

This means, in practice, passing out a lot of personal tools to students that they can use to build social networks on their own. Gone are standalone silos, built course by course, delivering assignments and swallowing submissions; taking their place is a frenzy of networking:

1. networks between people working collaboratively
2. networks between people sharing a context, and
3. networks between people sharing a field of interest

As a student swimming in such open networks, I set up my social bookmarking tool, or blog, or wiki, or RSS reader, to subscribe and affiliate, depending on the courses I’m taking, the groups I’m working with, the field I’m tracking. It seems such a Scandinavian claim, somehow:

It is important to stress that the argument for using separate tools instead of an integrated system is a pedagogical argument. The argument is that the learning activities of students cannot be structured or pre-determined. Choice of a variety of tools will better support the required flexibility of open-ended activities than any one integrated system.

The Small Pieces Loosely Joined approach certainly has its appeal. And yet in the debate between centralized and decentralized learning, there are plenty of reasons to sit on that proverbial fence and wonder. Some various questions occurring to me as I ponder the wisdom of leaping into the self-organized learning camp:

• Do students really want to erode class walls? Is that inviting distraction and incoherence into their lives? I mean, imagine using some kind of university-supplied dashboard to subscribe to 45 different feeds, push blog entries into several different contexts, manage 3 group projects, and maintain a personal profile that will get you into all the right parties. I know it’s fashionable to maintain that this NetGen lives effortlessly and shamelessly online — but might even NetGeners approach classrooms as a place of concentration and respite? Do we owe them a break from constant identity-defining affiliation? And by insisting on a sink-or 2.0 environment, do we alienate those whose background for one reason or another hasn’t led them into active participation in online networks ?
• If learning is an affiliations and subscription-based, individualized, pull-push business, how do we track or promote a community of use around a certain resource? Let’s say we are building a learning object repository of some kind — one designed to push its riches out into distributed arenas, where they will then be transformed and discussed by independently affiliated groups. Without some sophisticated tracking back, discourse around those objects — indeed, the whole sense of their use — will get scattered to the winds. Put it this way: does social affiliation come at the cost of object- or subject-based discovery? Will the next person to look at that object have any idea of the ways it’s been contextualized somewhere out there, by groups unaffiliated to him?
• Is it best, sometimes, to enter a learning resource through a front door like anyone else, wide-open to what may be found? Dalsgaard speaks approvingly of the creation of individual profiles that would then shape your searches, “narrow down” what you stumble upon. But such channeled searching may encourage premature hardening of the arteries: college is precisely the time to play with your “profile” in ways you can’t predict. It would be a shame if your immature preferences limited your horizon. And how attentive would a ‘distributive’ university be about proffering effective advice about preference settings?
• Is it right to dump the messy dilemmas of open access and permissions creations into students’ laps? Just because faculty does an abysmal job, on the whole, of raising awareness and defining good academic practice in this area — it seems unfair, somehow, to make students make all the decisions for themselves, at the age of 18, about what stays private and what circulates. Of course, this is a free country — sort of — and kids make MySpace/Facebook/whatever decisions along these lines on their own. But academic work is another matter: rightly or wrongly, among students there is a deeper sense of revelation, often, about serious work than about drunken pictures. Academic work is often graded on an individual basis, and that only complicates the decisions about what gets published to whom. Those evaluating instructors, seems to me, have a responsibility to weigh in–and perhaps even enforce a standard.

If I were Sophie making a choice, I’d of course toss Blackboard & its ersatz social software away, and take my chances in a distributed world. But let’s hope for third ways, options that promote student-directed learning and university-cultivated resources all at once.

If you agree that Wikipedia presents more thorns than roses to academic experts, you have good company: one of Wikipedia’s two founders.

The split between Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger has a certain Old Testament character: Wales (the Web 2.0 brother) reigns over the miraculous worldwide flourishing of the anonymously and communally edited encyclopedia that nobody predicted, while Sanger wanders in the web wilderness, in stubborn pursuit of distinctly pre-2.0 constructs of expertise.

Nupedia, Sanger’s original attempt to build an expert-authored online encyclopedia (and the predecessor of Wikipedia) crashed and burned. Now Sanger’s back with a similar idea: a “progressive fork” off of Wikipedia called Citizendium. His vision of harnessing “educated, thinking people who read about science or ideas regularly” into rival encyclopedia generation awaits you here.

In Sanger’s new scenario, regular Joes and Janes would be welcome to pitch into Citizendium as long as they deferred to ‘editors’: subject-area specialists who “meet certain benchmark requirements–the same straight-up credentials that the offline world relies on.” These expert editors would claim the right to patrol topics by flashing credentials. If several editors with the right credentials claimed a topic, well, “the more the merrier”: disputes among them would be settled “by discipline-oriented editorial workgroups” that would be “staffed only by editors.”

Wikipedian anonymity is quite obviously out of the question here. If the world of Wikipedia is mythically flat — built by faceless if not selfless peers — Citizendium is stunningly hierarchical, as if brandishing one’s identity could settle most any question of authority. One can easily imagine, though, a “straight-up credentials” demolition derby: institutions impugned, publications trashed, countries belittled, research areas broadswiped. If the offline world relies on credentials, it also relies on heterogeneity, microclimates, and quite local constructs of authority.

Citizendium would begin by mirroring Wikipedia, and, presumably, refine this populist chaff into premium wheat. Expertise standing on the shoulders of undifferentiated pygmies, as it were. And since Citizendium content would be freely available under the GNU Free Documentation License, Wikipedia could in theory suck the refined content back into itself, without directly compromising on its disdain for egghead experts.

The reigning smackdown of Citizendium is Clay Shirky’s blog post last month entitled Larry Sanger, Citizendium, and the Problem of Expertise — a precise attack that drew a defensive response from Sanger. I generally agree with Shirky, who sees disaster looming in Sanger’s dream of a self-certifying expertocracy shorn of institutional context. Shirky’s concluding dismissal, however, gives me pause:

Sanger is an incrementalist, and assumes that the current institutional framework for credentialling experts and giving them authority can largely be preserved in a process that is open and communally supported. The problem with incrementalism is that the very costs of being an institution, with the significant overhead of process, creates a U curve — it’s good to be a functioning hierarchy, and its good to be a functioning community with a core group, but most of the hybrids are less fit than either of the end points.

Such categorization is ominous for any of us skating the half-pipe of that ‘U’: those of us, that is, applying social software to learning environments. Ours is a hierarchical world, we want to build communally supported processes: are we doomed to hybrid mush? Admittedly, even the most starry-eyed 2.0 prophets have trouble describing how communal software is to work its magic, once it’s scooped out of the vast flickring seas and let loose within the tiny microclimate of a classroom. Yochai Benkler, for example, says much about networked production of educational texts, but little about peer production within a class (in, for example, his article Common Wisdom:. Peer Production of Educational Materials).

If social software depends on scale — the happy fact of human diversity that guarantees that someone, somewhere, is bound to perform a necessary function — then what happens when your field is winnowed down to, say, eight bright-eyed students with the same major? If your software is thoughtlessly cribbed from a quite different environment, one that depends on scale or interconnection that is foreign or even inimical to a classroom, you’re courting failure. Shirky’s notion of situated software — “small, purpose-built apps” — is well worth bearing in mind in this respect.

Whatever the tool it’s using, customized or off-the-rack, a classroom exists in a microclimate that consists not just of a gaggle of students, however skilled and productively interactive — it also contains a super-entity, an authority akin to Sanger’s editor: the credentialed teacher (and plenty of other shadowy figures behind her — but we won’t go into that here). Whatever is peer-produced in such an environment will be some fairly complicated blend of authoritative fiat and collaborative discovery. It will be as forced as it is fortuitous — a provenance quite different from Wikipedia, but perhaps a bit like Citizendium. However quixotic Sanger’s dream of expertise within a collaborative framework may seem, and however displaced onto a grudge match with Wikipedia it may be, it is worth tracking from the curvy heart of the U.

Reading Roy Rosenzweig’s thoughtful appraisal of Wikipedia in the current Journal of American History (“Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past”), I was particularly struck by this passage:

If Wikipedia is becoming the family encyclopedia for the twenty-first century, historians probably have a professional obligation to make it as good as possible. And if every member of the Organization of American Historians devoted just one day to improving the entries in her or his areas of expertise, it would not only significantly raise the quality of Wikipedia, it would also enhance popular historical literacy.

Let’s step back and marvel at another indication of the power and sudden inexorability of Wikipedia — can you imagine a distinguished historian feeling that he owed it to the world to improve the Encyclopedia Britannica, and urging colleagues to do their part too? For no credit and no money?

If historians and other academic experts should really be raising the quality of Wikipedia, this begs the question of who their exertions would be for. An initial answer, I suspect, would be: not for each other, and not for their students. As Rosenzweig writes (in a peer-reviewed journal, of course, and not an encyclopedia),

Most readers of this journal have not relied heavily on encyclopedias since junior high school days. And most readers of this journal do not want their students to rely heavily on encyclopedias — digital or print, free or subscription, professionally written or amateur and collaborative — for research papers.

And so an obligation to Wikipedia seems outwardly directed, keyed to a general public’s understanding (that Cleaveresque ‘family’ using a family encyclopedia). This raises further questions. Are we seeing a technologically-enabled resurgence of the public intellectual? If so, what would it mean to take on this role in a communally edited space impervious to individual identity and, as Rosenzweig notes, suspicious of expertise?

Since an edifying or even identifiable relationship with Wikipedia users seems impossible, let’s posit that obligation to it is not primarily to a public, but really to a field of knowledge as it is represented in public. In other words, if the Wikipedia page on the American Revolution is becoming the de facto online summation of this event, and if historians don’t weigh in, their knowledge fails to apply where it’s most needed.

But I wonder about how good academics generally are at writing encyclopedia articles. In many cases, it’s not at all the kind of work they do when researching or teaching — it’s not what their intellectual life is about. In general encyclopedias have settled into tended repositories of knowledge, not the active sites of inquiry that universities strive to be.

As Rosenzweig says, “Wikipedia (like encyclopedias in general) summarizes and reports the conventional and accepted wisdom on a topic but does not break new ground.” To get a sense of the progressive quiescence of encyclopedias, you could look at Wikipedia’s entry on Diderot’s Encyclopédie:

The Encyclopédie played an important role in the intellectual ferment leading to the French Revolution. “No encyclopaedia perhaps has been of such political importance, or has occupied so conspicuous a place in the civil and literary history of its century. It sought not only to give information, but to guide opinion,” wrote the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.

This reliance on a hundred year old hedged claim in another encyclopedia about the political impact of a 200+-year-old encyclopedia may seem abundantly timid, but it exists — at least today — in an Wikipedia article whose neutrality is nonetheless flagged as disputed. Wikipedia strives to resolve dispute, to traffic in the indisputable — while a university that lived by that principle would be a zombie campus, at best.

Whether or not you believe in the power of online collectivism, and whether or not you think that Wikipedia represents that collectivism, you have to hand it to it (them?): Wikipedia knows what it is and what it is not. It couldn’t be more explicit about its limitations: it accepts no original research, no original ideas. And it does not pretend to satisfy research; its founder, Jimbo Wales, reportedly offers this advice to students: “For God sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia.”

So, again, why might thoughtful and original academics pay particular attention to an environment that is in many ways alien to them — and even entertain notions of obligation to it? I have a few guesses, all of them broad, none of them substantiated:

Academic publishing is sluggish — Is there any write-up about Wikipedia that does not refer to its vast coverage, its low barrier of entry, and what Rosenzweig calls its “open-source mode of production and distribution”? Academics yearn to see their work actually get distributed in the world, and they are caught in increasingly sluggish and narrow channels of communication. Wikipedia actually publishes effort, instantly and in retrievable form, to an audience that can respond to it.

No doubt about it, academic publishing constricts the discourse it should support, but the invigoration of it in a digital environment will probably be quite different from the structure and dynamics of a wildly popular collaborative encyclopedia. Wikipedia may have the most to teach us through its stubborn emphasis of what it is not: are we listening? This is a world in which, as the entry on ‘expert’ tells us (today, at least), “an intellectual elite may or may not be correct about a particular issue in their field of expertise.” The “may or may not” ambivalence about expertise, the faith in correctness at all cost… not exactly the environment for nuance, originality, or intellectual leadership.

The academic star system is stifling — This is a corollary to the above point, because recognized stars get into print more often, or at least can lean on the rusty gears of publication. And stars are stars — let’s face it — they energize events, they get the grants, they make things happen. But I suspect many academics — even stars — are titillated by Wikipedia’s oft-noted indifference to expertise. By depersonalizing and flattening and opening the field of contribution, Wikipedia seductively suggests that truth will prevail on its own — no lollygagging on laurels here.

Whatever we think of laurels, it is indisputable that peer-review, the basic engine of academic appraisal, depends on identification and reputation. Escaping the burdens of apprenticeship, labor-validation, review, and professional development may seem liberating, but a specified affiliation and whatever responsibility (or lack thereof) that implies are enabling conditions of academic discourse. A university can’t function without overt hierarchies–campus rituals are almost entirely organized around the individual’s passage through sanctified levels. Anonymity may prove surprisingly difficult for those whose sense of work is so deeply rooted in acknowledged position.

Neutrality is only fair — Wikipedia’s sternly enforced Neutral Point of View policy seems to offer respite from a world riddled with clashing theoretical frameworks. Humanists and scientists alike may feel that it’s exhausting to interpret morning noon and night — all the while moving practically through the world, negotiating its incoherencies. Wikipedia’s banishment of originality lightens the burden of this reconciliation; it sings the siren song of the incontestably evident.

The ban on spin attempts to keep things calm and cordial, but to what end? Wikipedia’s NPOV might seem related to the disinterested analysis beloved of academicians, but, as Rosenzweig points out, Wikipedian neutrality leads to a great deal of waffling and prim skirting of controversy. When it comes to the pursuit of knowledge, a polite series of self-cancelling on-the-other-hands proves a poor substitute for interpretive power and conviction. Poor and censorious. For a surprising little totalitarian chill, I recommend Wikipedia’s page about NPOV disputes : “there is a strong inductive argument that, if a page is in an NPOV dispute, it very probably is not neutral.”

Facts are simple, fact are good — A corollary, again, to the above point. Wikipedia leads us into a world of passive construction, where things have been proven, have been shown, have been accepted. Once all that messy agency is wiped out, we are left with qualified data in its proper place. Enjoy a small chuckle that the “Fact” entry in Wikipedia is today double-flagged as containing “disputed factual accuracy” and “original or unverified claims” . The fact remains that in Wikipedia, things are either proven or not, accepted or not, controversial or not — it’s an organized and binary landscape.

The pursuit of just the facts ma’m orients Wikipedia towards what’s been commonly agreed, but it can also lull thought to sleep. As a historian, Rosenzweig knows very well that “good historical writing requires not just factual accuracy but also a command of the scholarly literature, persuasive analysis and interpretations, and clear and engaging prose.” Let’s go back to that “Fact” entry in Wikipedia and partake of its droning tautology: “A fact that was once a fact and hence becomes disproven may once again become a fact if the factual evidence supporting its validity become increasingly factual in light of new and, ultimately, factual evidence.” ‘Nuff said.

Data is (are) cool — Though Rosenzweig gives props to the factual accuracy of Wikipedia — finding it to clock in somewhere in-between the Encyclopedia Britannica and the prohibitively expensive American National Biography Online — you can sense in his article a purer enthusiasm for Wikipedia as object. Its open content can be exported for research — “downloaded, manipulated, and ‘data mined’… Wikipedia can therefore be used for other purposes.” One of these purposes might start to feel like research: measuring activity in a somewhat transparent online environment. As faddish tracking of Wikipedia contrails suggests, passage through it becomes an enticing reflection of its users — you can trace patterns and behaviors to your heart’s content.

But what is all this data telling you? Who do Wikipedia’s users represent? How much should we take Wikipedia’s ground rules as exemplary? Tautology looms: we’re studying Wikipedia to learn how Wikipedia works. Take a research paper like “Ambiguity and conflict in the Wikipedian knowledge production system” — here’s how its it resolves: “Wikipedia is a fascinating topic of study and requires careful examination of its underlying social and cultural processes…. One of the most urgent items on the research agenda is to describe and explain the concrete processes by which knowledge and truth is produced and adjudicated.” What’s behind this compulsion — the requirement of examination, the urgency of such a research agenda? Could it be mirroring of Wikipedia’s own faith in neutral truth-production?

Again this feeling of compulsion attending Wikipedia. Maybe you feel it too. If so, it’s probably too late to suggest that another wiki, another platform, another construct might better deliver your truth.

Oh to have been a fly on the wall at the just-wrapped Mashup Camp - a fly safely high up on the wall, because a) I’m no programmer and would likely be in the way, and b) its ‘geek dating’ program - a frenetic dance of speed demos and the “law of two feet” - sounds downright dangerous.

But I would have loved to buzz with the buzz, because it’s clear that the proliferation of web applications and reusable APIs is causing an explosion of tinkering, playing, discovering. As Web 2.0 guru Dion Hinchcliffe puts it, The theory is that you can be much more valuable to the rest of the world if your software can be reused in unintended ways. In other words, don’t just provide a fully created end-product for one pre-intended use. Encourage others to use the good pieces of what you provide in new and innovative ways. And thus the torrent of new services cobbled together with bits of preexisting web services — some of which is tracked by Mashup Feed.

What can nontechnical endusers can expect from all this mashing? More customized information and the power that goes with that, as data feeds get mixed for real-time information on weather, parking, airfare, restaurants, skiing, and general calamity.

A glance at David Schorr’s Weather Bonk confirms, at once, that the Mission is the only somewhat warm place in SF, and the GG Bridge is flowing pretty well at the moment:

Looking for more monetizable information? Flyspy is planning to bring to you a 30-day overview of airfares:

But no matter how clever or useful the mashup, it’s only as good as its datafeeds. Another mashup service, Cheap Gas, looks great until you notice that the gas prices you’re being quoted, contributed by ‘anonymous’ (maybe Eddy from Texaco down the street), dated from last summer:

Such flashy inaccuracy is bound to make people who are in the business of reliable information — for example, librarians — nervous. Many mashups are anarchic sandboxes, and who knows what use your data will be put to or what company it will be keeping or to what ends it will be mashed (that’s the point).

As Tom Owad demonstrated a little while ago , pinpointing ’subversive’ (yet acquisitive) persons is as easy as mashing up Amazon’s Wishlists with Yahoo People Search with Google Maps. Here’s a map of readers hoping someone buys them a shiny new copy of Orwell’s 1984:

And that’s all *legal* — just imagine what our government is up to.

Nevertheless, the rise of APIs may save libraries from the rusty chains of closed-box ILS packages , and allow them to dream up a range of new community-oriented services. Certainly we should be glad that programmers plugged into the potential of libraries, such as the Superpatron, were doing the monster mashup this week.

Scanning mashupfeed’s indexes… here are some mashups that strike me as library-intriguing, with pasted descriptive blurbs (ie, I didn’t write ‘em, because I didn’t try ‘em all):

Using GoogleMaps API

• Blosh Blosh finds blogs mentioning locations and displays them on a map.
  
• Boston RSS Alley This map displays the locations of some of the companies and bloggers actively working with RSS in the Boston area.
• Find the Landmark Test your knowledge of US landmarks with interactive, timer-based Google Maps game.
• Flyr Search Flickr for geotagged photos and then plot them on a Google Map. Nice nested map-within-a-map.
• GeoWorldNews The latest worldwide stories from the Washington Post plotted on a Google Maps satellite image.
• Healthia Use the Healthia doctor search to find doctors the United States. 800,000 doctors listed.
• History Timeline Wiki A history plus geography wiki that allows readers to contribute items of historical interest and plot their locations. Initial dataset is US battles.
• Libraries411 Find public libraries in the US and Canada. Data for more than 20,000 libraries available.
• Maplandia Comprehensive searchable gazeteer based on Google Maps. Referenc guide has full world coverage.
• Placeopedia Geographically place Wikipedia articles on top of Google maps:

• Solar Eclipses This Google Map shows the path of solar eclipses across Earth’s surface.
• World Airport and Airspace Database Database of over 11,000 airfields and airports across the world.
• World Volcano Browser Displays volcanos of the world on a Google Map. Data from the Smithsonian Institution, Global Vulcanism Project
  

Amazon API

• Albumart.org Uses the Amazon API and an Ajax-style UI to retrieve CD/DVD covers from the Amazon catalog.
• O’Reilly Book Page Mashup of Backpack and Amazon.com APIs to generate Backpack pages with Amazon.com book data.

Flickr API

• flickr graph Social network visualization using Flickr API:

• Flickr Related Tag Browser Search and visualization tool that lets you surf Flickr’s tag space. Flickr tags are keywords used to classify images. Related tags shown based on clustered usage analysis.
  
• Flickrscape Enter a word and watch the flickr photo stream. Click to interrupt stream and try another word.
  
• geobloggers Google Maps + Flickr photos. It also consumes del.icio.us for geotagged bookmarks and the Upcoming.org for US events, which it then geocodes.
  

del.icio.us API

• Cloudalicious This nice graphing application shows you the count of del.icio.us tags applied to a given URL over time. Here’s the Romantic Audience Project so graphed:

• Delancey This nice del.icio.us enhancement allows you to see which of your del.icio.us bookmarks are used most frequently.
• thumblicious Use thumblicious to quickly preview the most popular sites bookmarked on del.icio.us via thumbnail screenshots.

Google API

• Copyscape A website plagiarism search tool that uses the Google Search API.
• DoubleTrust Shows the best search results from both Google and Yahoo in a new way. Also allows user to alter his trust in either engine to bais combined rankings.
• QTSaver Uses Google and Yahoo APIs to extract microcontent from multiple sites and allows you to rearrange the excerpts.
• SpellWeb Compares relative popularity of spellings or concepts based on web frequency. An experiment in sidesifting the Web for useful patterns of information:

You get the idea… you probably get a thousand ideas. That’s the problem with mashups — too many ideas, too many variously commercial or incomplete datastreams, too much sheer buzz. But quickly, perhaps within a fly’s lifespan, your library may truly catch on.

Inevitable? Sure. Useful? We’ll see. Wikilaw, an open-content legal resource, is up and running — soliciting off-the-clock, copyleft work from the million lawyers running around the U.S.

At least one or two of them must be frustrated graphic artists - imagine if tort reform could be similarly explained:

Wikipedia is abandoning the anonymous editing model, after being beaten up in the press recently for defamation; but Wikilaw, for the time being at least, is allowing users to weigh in anonymously.

So here’s a suggestion for faceless counsel: there’s an immediate need for guidance on the Communication Decency Act - authoritative guidance, please.

Fresh outta Norway, here’s an intriguing marriage of wikis, folksonomy, and metadata harvesting: meet Collib, an experiment launched by a student at the University of Tromsø.

The idea here: records are harvested from OAI-PMH-compliant repositories and brought into the wiki. Users - now end-users of these records - then ‘tag’ them in the wiki. Presumably, discussion can ensue - though in my tour of the wiki today, I’m not seeing such discussion.

Let’s take a peek at a tagged record:

The record is in the middle of the screen, and Collib user tagging is on the right. Note that further tagging is always possible, ala Flickr. The original record and other indexing services are also linked (no guarantees, though, that you’ll find the item actually indexed elsewhere).

In the nav bar on the left: “Untagged records” are helpfully grouped together, awaiting end-user angels to tag them. The relationship of “Subjects” and “categories” is a bit of mystery to me. And I wonder who gets to stipulate which repositories are being harvested.

While Wikipedia is the standard reference for what wikis can do, its newer cousin Wikibooks is, in many respects, a more daring venture. This is a collection of open-content textbooks - that is, modules freely available to and updatable by anyone, covering a wide range of subjects. (General FAQs here)

Material on Wikibooks is searchable by bookshelves, by category, and, most quaintly, by Dewey Decimal System.

The site claims to offer almost 11,000 books by now - all editable by anyone, and none hostage to the infamous pricing practices of textbook vendors. A cursory tour today yielded many more placeholders than actual textbooks, but the venture is only two years old.

The September Wikibook of the month is rich and impressive, however, and though it’s a computer programming text, it’s also of sentimental interest to this renegade Byronist: Ada Programming.

Ada! sole daughter of my house and heart …. (CHP III.1)

As New Orleans was flooding, and burning, and suffering, two young computer programmers quickly launched Scipionus - a visual wiki of the calamity, charted onto Google Maps. On this site, users mark a location and report on it. The markers are color-coded - indicating new (green) and updated (purple) posts. A snapshot:

As this Wired News article notes, some of the postings are less than helpful - some beg for information on a particular spot, rather than report any - and none of the postings is authoritative. But at least it’s some communication.

Imagine if FEMA or some communication arm of the government had a disaster wiki like this ready to go. Any given marker could be made up of various layers: documented damage, immediate needs, community discussion, updated satellite images…. Properly marked, official and anecdotal data could share the same platform and the same goals: letting everyone know, asap, what’s happening at a given place under assault.

An essay by Clay Shirky, called “A Group Is Its Worst Enemy”, has been floating around for a couple of years - but I just ran across it. It’s an interesting meditation on group dynamics and social software, shaped by crushed hopes for Usenet as well as a book about neurotics thwarting group goals (by the psychoanalyst W.R. Bion: “Experiences in Groups“).

What comes across in the Shirky piece is a sense of fragility - the need to protect group rights against “sandbagging” individuals. This protection cuts against bromides of democracy, generally, and some tenets of wikiland, in particular. For example, Shirky on the rights of a group:

The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that’s quite common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in.

The essay also emphasizes the importance of reputation as a regulating principle - which, in turn, suggests that functioning collaboration depends on recurrent, accoutable identity. OK so I have to sign in and get recognized. What about ease of use? Full access? Equal rights? Nope, Shirky argues for the virtue of barriers: ” It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves.”

All in all, a forthright argument against anonymity, scalability, equality, and, perhaps most surprisingly in the context of software devoted to group interaction, ease:

Now, this pulls against the cardinal virtue of ease of use. But ease of use is wrong. Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation…. The user of social software is the group, not the individual.

Not exactly the Wiki Way, is it?

It’s all in the visualization.

When I describe wikis to someone still grappling with the oddness of the word ‘wiki’, my description inevitably kicks into abstractions about joint authoring, organic development, networked interactivity. What is likely to lodge, in an innocent auditor’s mind, is an amorphous sense of wide-open vulnerability: You mean, anyone can change any page? - or Why would anyone want to risk having their work distorted/mangled/deleted?

Assurances about communal good will and self-policing don’t always reassure. It’s a world of vandalism, terrorism, and error; the Internet is never secure, the Web is never authoritative; without accountability there is no truth… und so weiter. Descriptions of ‘rollback’ functionality are more comforting to our skeptical strawman, but of course that’s just damage control.

So here’s a better picture. Back in 2003, the Collaborative User Experience Research Group at IBM began publishing some illustrations of wiki posting activity. Authors were assigned a range of colors, in order to track the influence of any given individual, revision activity, and information persistence in a collaborative environment. This tool, called History Flow, is now available as a download at IBM’s alphaWorks.

These are visualizations that are immediately graspable. Here’s an example of three persons contributing to one wiki page over the course of four versions. Their words are color-coded:

And here’s the same content, now shaded to show persistence. The oldest surviving content is darkest:

This all gets very interesting when the researchers visualize the activity of a particularly controversial page, such as Wikipedia’s entry for abortion. This page does indeed attract outright attacks and vandalism; it’s a wonder that such a contentious topic is at all viable as an ‘open’ forum. But History Flow shows how quickly a wiki can recover from sabotage - “so quickly that most users will never see is effects” (text and illustrations here). Here’s a chart of the ‘abortion’ page, charted by saved versions; the gaps represent deletions:

And here’s the same page, now represented across a time axis: the attacks on this page are, by this measure, pretty much undetectable:

May History Flow keep flowing, keep rendering snapshots of how wikis actually work. They can be reassuring, arresting, even beautiful, given the right colors.

A 2004 report on History Flow entitled Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with History Flow Visualizations, by Fernanda B. Viegas, Martin Wattenberg, and Kushal Dave, is posted here.