Britannica has announced that it’s going to enable some measure of reader participation in the extending of the online version of their encyclopedia. You can see the beta of the new site here.

The detailed overview of the planned site says:

two things we believe distinguish this effort from other projects of online collaboration are (1) the active involvement of the expert contributors with whom we already have relationships; and (2) the fact that all contributions to Encyclopaedia Britannica’s core content will continue to be checked and vetted by our expert editorial staff before they’re published.

Excellent! We needs lots of variations on the theme of collaboration. Editing and expertise add value. They slow things down and reduce the ability to scale, but Wikipedia’s process makes it possible to read an article that’s been altered, if only for a minutes, by some devilish hand. It all depends on what you’re trying to do, and collectively we’re trying to do everything. So, this is good news from Britannica. It’ll be fascinating to watch.

To pick a nit, I’m not as convinced by Britannica’s insistence on objectivity as a value, however. The blog post says “we believe that the creation and documentation of knowledge is a collaborative process but not a democratic one.” It lists three positive consequences of this. The third is “objectivity, and it requires experts.” In a reference that makes you wish they’d at least once use the word “Wikipedia,” the post continues: “In contrast to our approach, democratic systems settle for something bland and less informative, what is sometimes termed a ‘neutral point of view.’” I think it would be reasonable for Britannica to tell us that an expert-based, edited system is likely to yield articles that are more comprehensive, more uniform in quality, more accurate and more reliable. But haven’t we gotten past thinking that expertise yields objectivity?

Anyway, I think it’s amazing that the Britannica, in its 240th year, is taking this step. Britannica will be better for it, and so will we. [Tags: britannica wikipedia knowledge everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Berkman’s Publius project keeps rolling along. There’s already lots of excellent stuff there, exploring how the Net is constituting its own governance mechanisms and norms. For example, today Peter Suber and Melissa Hagemann discuss open access, science, research, and education. But you can just browse through the topics and be pretty sure you’ll hit on something well worth reading.

[Tags: berkman publius governance ]

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Walter Bender, who was president of the One Laptop Per Child project, is now the founder of Sugar Labs. [Live blogging. Getting it wrong. Missing stuff. That's just the way it is. Also, this will be much choppier than the talk actually is.]

The aim of OLPC, says Walter, was to transform education around the world. Laptops aren’t the solution the world’s problems, but learning is. And laptops can help with that. “It’s all in service to learning,” he says. He refers to the book Predictably Irrational. Chapter 2 is on “anchoring.” Walter says that he’s anchored to the idea that a “connected computer is the most powerful tool we have” for knowledge creation and sharing. It’s not a panacea, and you can’t just throw the laptops over the wall and wait for the magic to happen, but laptops can be a catalyst.

School reform is impossible, he says, if it’s top down. But it will be accomplished by students bottom up.

Walter’s talk to us is titled “Confessions of a Fundamentalist.” His Open Source fundamentalism was taken as “distorting OLPC in a way that distorted its mission.” He is a fundamentalist about what are the best ways of enabling learning, of planting seeds for learning. He’s willing to bend his principles about Open Source but not about learning.

He subscribes to constructionism, a theory of learning developed by Seymour Papert. Papert was a student of Paiget. “You learn through doing. If you want more learning, you want more doing. And what’s a better tool for doing than a computer?” The corollary is that “love is a better master than duty, so you want to engage people in things they’re passionate about.” Computers, as Turing machines, can do anything. Computers are a “damn good” vehicle for working on what matters to you. He gives an eample of a Thai village where the children used computers to figure out where the reservoir should be built.

Everyone is a learner and everyone is a teacher. “It’s just inherent in our being.” And we’re expressive and social. The teacher-student dichotomy is false. We should instead by learning centric, Walter says.

“Proprietary tools are often associated with the delivery of knowledge,” he says. The criticism is that we’re trying to turn every kid into a Linux kernel hacker. “Yeah. we are,” he says, to chuckles. But they don’t expect every kid to become one. They really want kids to appropriate rather than merely access knowledge. “Open Source has a culture around appropriation that’s important to the culture of learning.” (Of course, he says, you can do constructionist learning with proprietary, or service-oriented with Open Source.)

When OLPC designs its gen 2 that’s more like a book, they’ll be making the mistake of forgetting the dyna in the dynabook (Alan Kaye’s idea that a ebook is more than an analogous), he says, in response to a question. We want books that make it easy to insert comments, for example. “You want to build in affordances that encourage the type of behavior you want to see.”

In a digression, he says that when he headed the MIT Media Lab, he had a three part process: Build, critique, iterate. “Use your time at university to make really big mistakes.

“Learning wants to be free.” There’s a difference between governance and the engagement of the ommunity The Open Source community has developed a “number of very powerful tools around engaging in collaboration and engaging in critique. Those tools are for the most part lacking in the world of education. Certainly in primary education.” They started a pilot in Nigeria where there are 300-500 languages. They were in a school where the primary language was Igbo. The OLPC’s dictionary was only in English. So the kids wrote their own. The kids discovered they had the power. “To me, that’s a real game-changer.”

Walter now talks about Sugar, the user experience that has come with the OLPC by default. It’s available on Ubuntu. Sugar is based on the first principles: be a learner, be a teacher, be expressive, be a learner. Three things abbout Sugar:

1. It wraps applications in “activities,” adding sociality: everyone is right there with you. E.g., when you’re writing a doc, anyone is one click away from “putting their cursor in your document.”

2. The Journal makes sure that everything is preserved, but the importance is that it creates a diary, a portfolio of your work. You can there have a conversation with a teacher or parent about your progress. That march through time “is an important feature of learning.”

3. The framework is simplified and transparent. The transparency means there’s no upper limit. E.g., TamTam starts out as a “busy box”: choose a sound and slap the keyboard. But you can progress to TamTamJam, which is more network-centric and lets you layer instruments. From there you can go to TamTamEdit, where they can compose music. Then, in the SynthesizerLab you can create your own instrument. Then you can edit the Python code underlying the instruments, or hack C-sound (”midi on steroids”). “No upper bound on complexity.”

Sugar is now reaching out to be a general-purpose environment in the Linux “and perhaps even in the Windows” world. “I don’t know how to do it in the Windows world,” he says, but …

“Sugar is pretty raw. It’s alpha. It’s flaky. And it’s in the hands about about 600,000 kids…which is pretty good!” The kids are giving feedback and making improvements.

“Now I come to David Hilbert.” In 1900, he posed 23 problems to mathematicians. Walter has 23 problems facing people interested in technology and learning. He’s going to blog them. They include: How can we make the damn network work? Create malleable code that doesn’t turn into malware? How to get localization/internationalization tools that are two orders of magnitude better? How do we a better job of using more wisely a very scarce resource: power? Does constructivism scale? We need better tools to introduce change. How to transplant the culture of freedom and critique from computer science into education? Economic challenges. Research correlating learning and economic development?

Q: Learning should be free? Which senses?
A: Not free as in beer. But you learn to program by copying code.

Q: OLPC has inspired a bunch of commercial tiny laptops. Will this help?
A: Five were announced last week. It’ll help.

[me] Is the constructionist theory cross-cultural?
A: Constructionism is built on first principles that are not culturally dependent. It’s no more culturally tied than Piaget. What children love — what matters to them — is culturally dependent. And what’s the role of the teacher? The teacher is unleashed. They have a lot more fun.

[clippinger] Constructionism has implications for authority, which have dramatic cultural implications.
A: The finance minister is always interested because they see that that’s how they’re going to get entrepreneurs.

[roger] Have the proprietary software companies gotten there first? How does that play out?
A: That will be one of the big social-economic battles over the next 20-30 years. The ones who go with Open Source will do better.

[harry] That’s part of your fundamentalism. For me, the question is how many types of cheap laptops there will be in five years. Will there only be a couple?
A: OLPC tries to keep the pressure on. The market will be big enough. But I worry. If these things are used to replace chalkboards, it’ll be a drag on the process.

What about when you look at college students? Some of these principles are not being taught.
A: Part of one’s education should be getting dirt under your fingernails and building stuff.

Q: [ben] We changed so much after Nigeria. Do you think the trial was successful?
A: What we have today is much better, but those kids were learning and constructing.
Q: Much of what was broken were the social affordances. Maybe the lesson is that we can achieve success without the fancy features…
A: There’s a bit of a placebo effect, sort of. You say “This is yours. It’s about sharing, expression, communication.” That in itself was enough to make the change. Those early systems couldn’t support the growth, but they had enough to introduce the change in culture.

Q: The idea of glossiness. If you present an interface that looks a bit broken, people are much more willing to get their hands dirty and play with it, and think they have something to contribute.
A: You don’t want things to break, but you do want people to explore. Rather than trying to make everything hard to break, we’ll make it easier to repair. As long as it’s easy to get back to where you were, people will try things out. [Tags: berkman walter_bender olpc constructionism education open_source ]

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When I blogged about Flyp on Tuesday, I didn’t know it was about to run an article about Charlie Nesson’s poker university, a place where students learn about life by playing poker online. The article is short and showy, but it’ll give you the idea… (Charlie is the founder of the Berkman Center. [Tags: poker charlie_nesson ]

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It’s official. John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center has been put in charge of the Harvard Law Library. This is great news, although John’s contribution to the Berkman Center cannot be overestimated.

To be precise, JP — with whom I’ve had the privilege of co-teaching a course this semester — has been appointed associate dean of library and information. (He was also given tenure.) That means he is in charge of the greatest law library in the land. Open access just got a champion installed at the head of one of the most important collections in the world. This is pretty damn exciting.

JP is going to stay affiliated with the Berkman Center, but not having him at the helm is going to hurt. He is both a strong leader and a selfless facilitator. Enthusiastic, kind, humble, brilliant, pragmatic, funny, articulate, instantly likable, learned, visionary, down to earth, committed, articulate, sweet … in a word, we love him. And always will.

Congratulations, John!

[Tags: john_palfrey harvard_law libraries ]

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Over at the Web Difference class blog, I’ve posted my qualms about posting here (i.e., at Joho) some thoughts about the course. Very circular and self-involved, I know.

Anyway, the question over at the Web Difference blog is whether a teacher should be neutral/fair/objective or transparent… [Tags: education media objectivity transparency ]

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John Palfrey has blogged about Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected (open access version here), reflecting on the essays and enticing us to read them ourselves. The book sounds terrific, and the post is a treat to read just to see the generosity of JP’s intellect. (Disclosure: JP is the exec. dir. of the Berkman Center, and, I’m thrilled to say, I’m co-teaching a course with him this semester.) [Tags: ]

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According to this excellent blog, Kentucky is considering a bill banning anonymous online speech. (The blog is the class blog for “The Web Difference” course I’m co-teaching, with John Palfrey, at Harvard Law.)

* * *

And speaking of courses, I find it heartwarming that today I’m able to open our session on whether the Web has changed marketing by using some slides on “what is marketing” from John Hauser’s Spring 2005 course on marketing at MIT, which is available as open courseware. Gotta love the open courseware.

[Tags: berkman anonymity digital_rights marketing open_courseware mit ]

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Eric Lease Morgan has a good post (from a couple of weeks ago) about the Open Library project’s developers meeting. Such interesting questions… (Open Library wants to give every book its own home page to accrete metadata, and, of course, make all that info open, public and standard.

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I spent yesterday at the NFAIS conference. After I spoke, Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet group gave an interesting, informative and funny talk, and then there was a kick-ass panel on Web 2.0 in the edusphere. Steve Sieck has done an excellent and pithy job blogging both Lee and the panel (Chris Willis of Footnote.com and Bryan Alexander

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Session description:

By lowering or bridging barriers, cyberinfrastructure can bring different institutional, enterprise, and policy models into unaccustomed proximity. The result may be powerful complementarities – or it may be competition or conflict. Since the separation between institutional and public policy also blurs, what kind of stewardship should the academy provide for advancing knowledge infrastructure? When should it take the lead in developing standards? How should it account for industry and sector differences? How should voluntaristic and cooperative models fit with market-based models? How should universities navigate/mediate between open and controlled models of knowledge?

Kaye Husbands-Fealing (U of Minn) leads the discussion. [I'm live-blogging which means I'm being sloppy, hasty, uneven, and erroneous.]

Arti Rai (Duke) reports on her study of how U’s have patented software through the 1980s and 1990s. The percentage of sw patents have been increasing, especially since the legal decisions making it easier to patent sw. [Unfortunately, I can't keep my blogging up with her. Lots of info, and I don't know the jargon well enough. Sorry! Here's a paper by her on the topic.]

Eliot Maxwell (Committee for Economic Dev.) Think about openness in terms of access and responsiveness. Responsiveness means people can contribute, distribute, etc. In the continuum of open to closed, the appropriate degree of openness is context sensitive. E.g., you don’t want medical records to be totally open. It’s not about IT but about the ability to get contributions from very different sources. It’s not always just the experts. It’s an attitude as much as it’s an instantiation in the infrastructure. What matters is adopting an ethos of sharing and collaboration, Eliot says. Instead of being the best and the only, the U should think about collaboration as a way out of the zero sum goal. The U should change the tenure system so getting info out onto the Web counts. Maybe U’s — including small liberal arts colleges and community colleges — should study how collaboration works and doesn’t work. We need to make info available, findable, searchable, interchangeable. Also, we need an attribution system since that’s the incentive. We have a technology to doing that, but we don’t always design it into our systems. In 15 yrs, U’s won’t be as associated with a place, about 4 continuous years, or about producing paper.

Brian Kahin (U of Mich) says we’ve been discussing different parts of the cyberinfastructure. We are seeing a rapidly expanding ecology of knowledge. How do you present this to industry, to the board of trustees, to legislators, to prospective students, etc.? Are U’s aligned with their own researchers on the nature and role of knowledge? None that Brian knows, he says. Open access is a paradigm for transformational effect. I don’t see the same thing on the tech side. I see very little interaction between legal scholars on patents and the U’s administration of patents. And this brings up the question of stewardship. What credibility does the U have to speak for public policy? And, we need to think about collaboration science, Brian says. We don’t have a lot of good info. We also ought to be working on strategies for developing standards. How do we have innovation policy when we have so many different models of innovation? Finally, is collaboration the be-all and end-all? On the Net we also see complementarity; that’s part of the Internet and probably should be considered part of the ecology of the cyber infrastructure. [Sorry this is so choppy.]

Q: (Kaye) Eco-innovation looks at the well-being indices and considers how innovation affects the end-users. How can we use the cyberinfrastructure to take the pulse all the way to the end user?
Arti: Erich Von Hippel has done a lot of work on distributed innovation. Users are innovators. Feedback to the researchers would be very helpful.
Eliot: Openness is consistent with that type of feedback. On the Internet, if you make a crappy product, everyone knows it’s a dog.

Q: What is the governance procedure for sunsetting data? Who decides how much data to store?
A: As organically as possible.

Q: Do we really want all projects to be sustainable? Shouldn’t some of them just die when they’re done? And some of them need non-open control of IP
Eliot: Yes, the openness should be appropriate to the project.

Q: It’s easy when talking about data to simply say that it’s a community issue and each community will develop its own ways of sorting these things out. But re-use and recombination of data for purposes far away from their original purpose is very exciting.
Arti: Great point.
Eliot: Maybe funders can help.

Do we really want funders to decide what’s sustainable? Shouldn’t it be a Darwinian process?
Eliot: Not decide. Funders should make applicants think hard about sustainability from the beginning.

Q: We still don’t know what we mean by “cyberinfrastructure.” Are we any closer to agreeing on it? How do we show its value if we can’t agree on what it means?
Brian: We can think of it as an asset (something you’ve already invested in) or as a prospect (where things are going). Those two questions come out in different ways. The asset vision is the Internet. The prospect points to semantics and ontologies that let you do more things with knowledge.
Eliot: I’m less interested in defining what cyberinf is that in what we’re trying to get from it, i.e., to be more collaborative and open.

Q: In my view, cyberinf is not just ICT. We should think of the infrastucture as being collaborative.
Brian: Part of what you’re talking about is virtual organization.

Q: A group of research U CIOs have been meeting to talk about what they can to shape the growth of a national cyberinfrastructure.

Q: We need to be able to talk about this simply and clearly.

[Too fried to blog. Sorry.] [Tags: cyberinf education standards universities patents ]

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Linda Katehi (U of Illinois) asks how we can design an infrastructure that enables and sustain collaborative work. [Standard live-blogging disclaimer holds: hasty, error-free, subjective, unworthy.]

John Wilbanks of Science Commons talks about the cultural infrastructure that enables content to move so rapidly and easily around the Net. He’s posted his comments on his blog. [Thank you!] “We are swimming in cultural infrastructure for content, but not for knowledge.” He is going to argue against having an end goal for the Network. “The end goal is to create a world we cannot imagine.” We shouldn’t even be talking about “papers,” etc. on the Net. We should be talking about namespaces, not just ontologies. “If we can’t use the same names for things, we can’t have knowledge.” Intermediate goals: End to End. We should make it easy to get answers to difficult questions. And we need to build human capacity. We should focus on getting greater throughput so data turns into knowledge and innovation. [Read his remarks on his blog.]

Mackenzie Smith from MIT Libraries asks what a knowledge infrastructure is. Now that John has given us the why, she’s going to talk about the “what.” There are seven layers, she suggests:

1: Repositories.

2 : Data management.

3. Linking (interoperable semantics). We need namespaces and identifiers, and encoding standards (e.g., RDF), and ontologies like Object Reuse and Exchange.

4. Discovery. Finding data on the Web.

5. Delivery.

6. Social.

7. Business models. Policies.

The IT view, Mackenzie says, is what you can plug into the layers. She talks about some of the various tools available.

The organizational view: Different areas of the U are responsible for the various layers. The one layer generally no one is addressing is the business layer.

Chris Mackie (Mellon Foundation) wonders how many infrastructure “successes” are really just “steaming piles of integration.” What’s the right way to do design? Bottom up? Top down? Knowledge needs to emerge and for that it has to be bottom up and open. But that won’t get us where we need to be. We also need it to be top down; we need global optimization. How do we pull these things together?

We cannot allow our cyberinfrastructure to be so top-heavy that it flattens all other organizations, including community colleges, etc. We need the diversity of the educational ecology, Chris says.

Sara Kiesler (CMU) has been studying collaborative research projects. About a third are successful, but about a third are failures, and a third struggle. What surprised her was that the problems in collaborating were not due to differences in how different disciplines approach their work. The biggest problems were inter-institutional. The two institutions have different bureaucratic procedures, regulations and cultures. No one in the institutions watches out for the welfare of inter-institution collaborations. And they don’t like it if the budget goes to the other institution.

John: We need both top down and bottom up. The key is to make sure they use the same standards. Standardize around names and transactions. You want to make it easy to stitch them all together.

Q: This is the first time the full range of institutions has been brought up, probably because the attendees come from major research institutions. So, good to have acknowledged there are other types of educational institutions.

Q: Physicists are used to collaborating. And the funding agencies drove the senior scientists to collaborate. Don’t underestimate the role of the funding agencies.

In the context of U’s, are there any warnings the panel has for us?
Chris: The challenges to collaboration are getting more real all the time. E.g., IP issues prevent some collaborations.
A: There’s the centralize-everything clique, the decentralize clique. Any preferences?
Linda: The totally centralized one doesn’t work in the US.
John: You can’t order people to innovate. You have to build systems that enable explosive innovation, based on standards. Making control the default doesn’t work. Harvard’s Open Access policy switches the default to sharing, with an opt-out. I think that’s the right way, but we don’t have the evidence yet.
Mackenzie: The decentralized model is a little more maintainable.

Sara: The collaborations that succeed tend to be the ones that have some practice doing it.

Q: Collaborative technology is still bad. And IP gets in the way. Also, U-industry collaboration seems to work best when the academic wants to have an effect in the real world.
John: The standard contracts for the life sciences depends on your tax status. Every collaboration with a commercial entity, even at a very early stage, gets complex very quickly. A simple design decision has made this hard.

Q: How do you align interests for collaboration?
Sara: Interdependence.

Q: The right question isn’t decentralized or centralized. It’s what you’re going to do that’s between those two, because neither of those will work.
Mackenzie: Dropping a governance onto a project at the beginning can kill it. There are many approaches.

[I've begun to fade — didn't get much sleep last night, and live-blogging is really tiring... [Tags: cyberinf education standards universities ]

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Jeffrey Lehman of the Woodrow Wilson Center (and chair of Internet 2) says for a long time we’ve opened our universities for people from other countries to study and teach. And we’ve had out-bound programs as well. But in the past decade there’s been an explosion of interest in increasing the outbound activities of US universities. What does the increased outbound globalization mean for cyberinfrastructure? What does it say about university policy? Does it change the mission of the U? To whom does the U owe its responsibility — state, feds, the world, knowledge as an abstraction, or to the highest bidder? Should gov’t funding promote or inhibit the widest dissemination of info as a free, public good? [As always, I'm typing too fast, making mistakes, getting things wrong...]

Pradeep Khosla of CMU (a robotics researcher and a dean) has built five global campuses in the past few years. But there aren’t global universities the way there are global corporations, he says. The products from global corps meet the same standards around the world, but global campuses don’t always meet the same educational standards as the parent U. Education is key but it hasn’t changed in hundreds of years. We should focus on globalizing research and use the infrastructure for that. We should also use the infrastructure reduce tuition costs. Universities can do more outsourcing. The governance model is another hurdle. And we should be looking at the IP policies. Finally, we haven’t spent enough time understanding how to assess education in multiple places at the same time.

Lesa Mitchell (Kauffman Foundation) We’ve been trying to understand all the different pathways how innovation moves out of the U and into the commercial sphere. E.g., we built the iBridge network to aggregate research, as per Simon’s comments earlier. About 37 universities have signed up. Kauffman also supports ScienceCommons. Also, we funded BetterWorld, trying to shed light on the innovations coming out of universities. But researchers aren’t rewarded based on this. We’re looking at collaborative models as well, such as Citris and Rosetta Commons: multi-U, multi-industry collaboratives.

Gerald Barnett (UCSC) says computers draw us together in conversation. They’re very social. When we look at IP we shouldn’t think it’s fundamentally about law. It’s about behavior. IP is a social convention that aims to manage the competing interests of groups. Companies are much sophisticated than U’s because companies have decision processes, such as markets. U’s just have principles, which is bad for grounded discussions. If you look at how screwed up the U’s IP policies are, he’s not sure he wants an innovation policy. He wants an attitude. We have an opportunity globally to broaden our models. IP policies are absurd: You probably are not authorized to click on the “I accept” button when you download Acrobat at your U because you’re entering into a contract. We should learn from other countries as they put together their environments. Let’s build models that are normalized, that people understand, as CreativeCommons does. The infrastructure is a bonfire around which we do social things, and we need to adapt our policies to it.

Susan Tuttle (IBM) says in 2007 we passed the America Competes act. What does the USA need to do to compete globally? IBM says innovation has to be: open, collaborative, multi-disciplinary and global. How does this apply to the U? 1. Open: New approaches to IP? 2. Collaboration: Collaborate with other U’s, with your students… 3. Multi-disciplinary: Often students graduate without the skills we need as a company. Their skills need to be broad and deep. Engineering and Business Depts ought to work together. 4. Global: U’s need to be global.

Q: Students would be happy to collaborate if they could. The presidents and the provosts often don’t get it.
Jeffrey: The problem I hear is that American U’s are structured around the old model of the student as a lone wolf, and that doesn’t map well in the real world where people act as teams. In China, the critique is a mirror image: They say they teach people to march together but there’s little ability to break out from the pack. The obvious comment is to say that there’s truth on both sides. The pedagogic problem is: How do we teach people to be members of effective teams? You have to be able to bring something of your own to the table. But you also need to be able to transform what you bring to the table into a group product, and that’s a separate set of tools. No place I’ve seen has been very good at helping their students to develop all those skills. US universities divide the labor: The U nurtures the individual and industry then nurtures team skills.
Pradeep: You wouldn’t have this impression if you went to CMU. And US universities are not as siloed as people think. We have a broader idea of what education is. We are more formative and less prescriptive than most of the rest of the world.
Susan: Our children are looking at have ten careers by the time they’re done. We at IBM need people who can adapt quickly and be flexible.
Gerald: Students are now the leading practitioners. We need to learn how to learn from them. We need wisdom appreciation for the fifteen year olds. We need to be out in the community seeing what they’re doing. [But hen we do, we think what they're doing is trivial, etc.We're getting older. It's their world.

The tenure system is so conservative and so prone to stove-piping. There's a basic U structure that keeps us from going too far.

A big part of U is the cultural experience of being on campus. Cyberinf lets you deliver the course content, but how do you get the cultural experience?
Pradeep: We shouldn't think of cyberinf as about delivering content. E.g., SecondLife is an experience.
A: Do you expect at-distance undergrad students to spend 20 hours a week on SecondLife?
Pradeep: We should begin at grad level. We don't want to mess with the first four years until we've tried it at the grad level.
Lesa: We've had this discussion with a number of different universities. Should I globalize my U by going somewhere else, or make my U larger?

[I missed some because I was waiting on line to ask a question, but I gave up because there we're running out of time. I was going to ask: Since we think our cyberinf embodies and enables certain values, how do we keep it from being a tool of colonization rather than of globalization.]

Gerald, in response to a question, said that we have to embrace many tones and tonalities, welcoming diversity, not just a single way of doing research.

[I went back into the queue because the moderator decided to take the entire list of questions at once.]

Pradeep: I see no problem with a U furthering it’s own goals because U’s have different strategies. There’s a diversity of strategies. It’s a good tension.

Lesa: The Kauffman Foundation is focusing on K-12. We have a cellphone-as-teaching-tool project underway. We believe you can only make change from outside in.

Gerald: Info tech is the first great revolution U tech in 500 years, says Clark Kerr. The U has many roles, including education, stewardship, economic, etc. We can’t go forward in this world with one-size-fits-all policies. We need attitudes. And we should be looking at how the “tribal chiefs” are directing us.

Susan: We need to recognize global differences. [Tags: conference_coverage cyberinf globalization education ]

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Peter Freeman of the Washington Advisory Group introduces the first panel, on “Cyber-Enabled Knowledge”, by asking how the infrastructure can support the university’s essence as the creator, transmitter and preserver of knowledge. [As always, I'm paraphrasing, typing quickly, and undoubtedly getting things wrong.]

Guru Parulkar of Stanford says that we must build the cyberinf on the right foundation. That’s one that enables many layers. It requires supporting the end-to-end principle because that facilitates innovation. We should make the infrastructure programmable so that providers can give users empowering services. [Seems non end-to-end to me. But I think he's talking about university infrastructure providers enabling experimental services, not having, say, Comcast build services.] It’s not enough to deploy vendors’ infrastructure on campuses. The CIO and researchers ought to get together on this.

Simon Porter, eScholarship Research Center, U of Melbourne, wonders what the world looks like when we can find about all the research going on in our university. We could manage portfolios of research under an overall university agenda. [Hmm. Possibly scary.] They could develop a data research plan. The university could plan its storage needs. The way the research is represented to the public will change: it won’t be left to the researchers to be the lead communicator about the project. There will be a single portal — like Amazon or eBay, perhaps — where you can find out about research. We will be able to evaluate research by the effect it has on other projects. Researchers will be able to cooperate more, especially if there are standards. Crystallographers have software that lets people annotate online models; this is promising.

Q: Simon and Guru both pointed to gaps between network engineering folks and the CIO. What’s blocking progress here?
Simon: It’s not a natural progression. You have to take a leap.
Guru: The infrastructure is so complex, there’s a reluctance to “muck it up.” But at Stanford there’s a lot of openness.
Peter: Market forces will bring about the healing of the gap.

Q: The infrastructure didn’t arrive on a gold cloud all at once. It’s built on standards. In a recent survey, only 30 universities (G7) had courses on standards. Standards aren’t taught or shared at universities.
Guru: I disagree with you completely. Universities should be doing research much before people think about standards.
A [we've been asked not to identify speakers without asking permission :( ]: The U’s are incredibly creative now. I believe the next thing will come primarily out of U’s. Things bubble up, and the standards follow after that.
Simon: Standards are fundamentally important for development of cyberinf.

Q: How do we change the research processes to take advantage of the new cyberinfrastructure. This is not a decision for the CIOs but for the college presidents, etc.
Peter: By acclamation, we agree.

Q: [me] Knowledge currently reflects the old infrastructure: You get published or not. Knowledge is binary, fenced in and managed. How will the new infrastructure change the nature of knowledge itself?
Simon: Especially with shared standards, research can be more open.
Peter: Simon has proposed a specific way to make available info about current reseach projects. That’s key to enabling cooperation and the development of standards.
Guru: The cyberinfs we deploy on our campuses should allow experimentation in networking, cooperation, etc. That type of infrastructure doesn’t exist because we haven’t been asking for that leel of programmability and flexibility.

Q (John Wilbanks): When we try to move from network standards to knowledge standards, we get into semantics. It’s hard to have enduring semantics because they change as research happens. We could have project-based standards and allow people to share what they mean about something, not just sharing the content. So we have to change the idea of standards. [Go John!

Q: Is it the U's role to fund research into infrastructure? You can't make a case to the provost unless you show some dollars coming from somewhere.
Guru: Yes, someone has to pay for it. Maybe vendor partnerships will help.
Simon: If it's strategically important to the U, the U ought to do it.

A: I'm in bioinformatics. BTW, my U doesn't teach any of the standards. Anyway, industry folks tell us we're training students to be like you, not to be what we in industry need. E.g., not team players. How can we make more industry-academic partnerships?

A: There is something big going on that we don't understand. We're good at big networks, etc., but we don't understand how to solve problems for small groups of collaborating domain scientists. Universities don't just store, transfer and develop knowledge...

I direct one of the portals where project-based info can be shared. People keep asking what the incentive is for professors. Right now the reward structures are not geared towards publishing on the Internet. What can be done to fix the incentive system?
Simon: Making info available is always going to be a chore to researchers. But Facebook makes it possible for marketers to find info based on participation by users. We need something equivalent for researchers, surfacing info about projects without requiring additional work by the researchers.
Guru: If it's a problem of aggregation? People are very eager to make their work public. Where is the disconnection?
Peter: It largely depends on the field.

A: I develop provenance metadata in my field. There are problems. Ontologies don't exist yet. They require expertise in RDF as well as domain expertise, and that's hard to find in the same person. The ontologies have to be developed internationally.

A: Maybe there are some Web 1.0 opportunities that haven't been take advantage of yet. E.g., we could make available to any NSF researcher a Web page at the NSF site. That would also provide some authentication.
Simon: It's not a web page. Every researcher needs a persistent identifier. [researcher or proejct??

A: Standards that have followed research experimentation and productization have been the most successful. E.g., Internet, LANs, the Web. The most spectacular standards failure was the OSI in the 1980s because they did it before they had the sw and the experiments.

A: At my [hardware infrastructure] company, we do a lot of rolling out of products internally that are not quite ready. We are probably more willing to risk failure than universities are. And we are seeing more demand for programmable infrastructure hardware.

I urge us to adopt a more expansive, active and empirically-grounded notion of infrastructure. We shouldn’t think of infrastructure as being primarily hardware. 1. The layer model encourages thinking of the hardware as the “real” stuff. 2. We need to be teaching our students the practices by which interoperability is made possible. The standards in ten years will be different, but the tensions and dynamics will stay roughly the same. 3. We should learn from previous attempts to build infrastructure.

A: Infrastructure is extremely important but that occurs in a multicultural environment that we should bear in mind. Second, it all comes down to open access. [Tags: cyberinf research science universities ]

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According to The Times, British school kids will be assigned a unique number that will be associated with their school records and that will follow them for life. Privacy advocates are concerned.

Not to mention that in the UK, when they say this is going on your permanent record, they’ll really mean it.

Tags: privacy uk education

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From Timothy Falconer:

Waveplace is a non-profit starting an XO pilot in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, in ten days. OLPC was going to be giving us laptops, but it fell through, which is why I’m trying to get twenty XOs from elsewhere.

Your laptop may end up in the hands of one of the most needy children in the Western Hemisphere. The school where the laptop will be sent is run by Susie Scott Krabacher, who has been the Mother Theresa of Haiti for 15 years. In fact, a major motion picture is being made about her life right now, based upon her autobiography: Link.

You could really help by agreeing to sell us your laptop. We’ve only got ten days to get the laptops to Miami, as we’re leaving for Haiti on Feb 17th.

To see the kids that will get them, watch this video, which we shot last month: Link

Susie’s organization:Link (click slideshow to see the conditions)

To read an article by Susie from our newsletter: Link

One way or another, we’ll be in Haiti in ten days. Please help us bring more laptops.Please pass the word, and if you have a laptop to sell, click contact on the Waveplace site.

Thank you!

Tim Falconer
Waveplace Foundation
Waveplace

I’m giving them mine.

[Tags: olpc xo haiti waveplace ]

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A student in each session of The Web Difference will blog the class, so I’m not going to live blog the course, which I could only do when John Palfrey is leading it, as he is today. So, what follows are some some notes and comments. (The class notes will be up on the site tomorrow, probably.)

JP explains the “layer” view: Infrastructure, Logic, Apps, Content. He indicates that the layers are messy and that this is over-simplified. But I’m struck by the layer-cake look of this, with each tier slightly narrower than the one beneath it. Presumably, this is so the structure will look sturdy. But if it were drawn to scale, the content layer would be like a frisbee balanced on a pin.

The main topic today is whether you can see the same Internet from anywhere in the world. Answer: No, you can’t. JP points to Internet Services Unit where you can report sites to the Saudi government as deserving to be blocked. The Saudis block by having a single big pipe out to the Internet. Everything has to flow through the Saudi proxy. The Chinese filter similarly but also at every layer of the stack.

JP points to a site that compares the results of Google searches run here and in China. In poking around during the class, we discover that Chinese language searches seem to get the same results whether you’re searching from google.com or google.cn, as if google.com is assuming that if you are looking for search terms in Chinese, you want to see the censored results. Odd.

John takes the class through the many, many ways countries can filter the Net. Then he leads a discussion of which elements of a society might be interested in either filtering the Net or keeping it open.

John is going to Turkey tonight for talks with various interested parties there about the virtues and vices of maintaining an open Internet. [Tags: censorship filtering open_net_initiative china ]

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I’m too nervous to be able to blog about the course I’m co-teaching with John Palfrey, beyond saying that we had our first session yesterday, and there’s a course blog open to the students as posters and to anyone as a reader. (We didn’t have time yesterday to tell the students the URL, so none have posted there yet.) Well, I will say a couple more things: The title of the course is “The Web Difference,” and it’s about whether and how the Web is different, and what that means for law and policy. Also, JP is an awesome teacher. OMG.

What the heck. Yesterday, after going through preliminaries and intros, JP led the class for half an hour in a discussion of a case in which awful things were said on a discussion board, yet the discussion board owner was not held liable. If those things had been said in a newspaper, the paper could have been sued. What’s the difference in the two situations and why might the law be different in them? I led a similarly-themed discussion, far more awkwardly, about whether friendship on the Web is “real” and how it differs from real world friendship. [Tags: web john_palfrey webdiff harvard ]

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