On the Notepad: The Evolving Palette of My External Memory

Posted on 27 January 2009 by Alex Leavitt

Ever since my laptop battery died in Kyoto (currently, it runs only via wire) back around October, I’ve been constantly musing about purchasing a new computer. A post is forthcoming on the issue. However, in my ponderings, I have thought about many of the motivations and consequences of said purchase. One of which happens to be its benefits in the classroom.

Aside:

I will now unabashedly plug a panel (not that I haven’t already) that I’ll be moderating in March at SXSW:

“Blackboards or Backchannels: (Social) Technology in the Classroom of Tomorrow”
Five students will come together to discuss technology in the classroom and the implications of technology to help improve (or utterly destroy) the social elements of education.

</digression>
One of the debates I’ve had over the past year in writing for this blog concerns the essence of note taking. I’ve written in the past about my aversion toward liveblogging and my affinity for accurate notes, however meticulous. Over the past few years, I’ve come to terms with the fact that my notes, when typed or written, culminate in roughly verbatim reproductions. I grasp at words. I ingest language and digest meaning.

My realization: pencil on paper no longer does the trick. As minute as my script has become, this semester I churn out two to three full-length, handwritten pages per class period. Yet I still snatch at my teachers’ dictations, trying to capture the entirety of every phrase. The readability of my notes thence suffers, as my pen dances from left margin to right, without lifting from the page even to spare the spaces between syllables, while I battle between lecture transcription and lecture absorption.

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Notes from the Berkman Luncheon with Ned Gulley & Karim R. Lakhani

Posted on 24 June 2008 by Alex Leavitt

For the rest of the summer, I’ll be in the office on Tuesdays, so I won’t be able to attend the Berkman luncheons in person. However, I tuned in today via live webcast (oh the wonderful innovative potential of technology) and took down notes. The discussion about borrowing and novelty in collaboration hit home a bit, from my very strange experiences in Calculus AB during junior year of high school. I won’t get into why my teacher limited the number of questions I could ask per class (maximum of three per day), but the two or three quizzes we had per week were collaborative efforts between two or three people to arrive at a shared grade. I still find it weird that my best group ended up during my pairing with one of the slackers of the class, while I performed near the top. A strange team, yet I’d say there was limited tension between the novelty and reuse of applying our skills to solving the few questions on the quiz sheet. I’d usually bring to class the necessary new material while my partner would go over my work, rework it in places, and sort of the small mistakes that I missed in review. The value of my original material and his reuse of my applied knowledge, I’d say, was fairly equal.

So, on to the notes…

—

The Dynamics of Collaborative Innovation: Exploring the tension between knowledge novelty and reuse

Karim Lakhani, Ned Gulley

Karim:

we think collaborative innovation as more modern: open-source/Wikipedia
most major innovations: highly collaborative in history

airplane development: not just Wright brothers, but creation with multiple people
pre-Wright brothers: network of 10 individuals
locus on innovation: moved over to Europe after Wright brothers

collaborative innovation: Meyer’s Analysis

dynamics of collaborative innovation: how people build off of others’ work

Ned:

contest at MathWorks: MATLAB programming contest
usually: smartest person gets the prize
but: not how ideas move/work in the world
contest: notion of borrowing/stealing ideas in contest: create page of code

Competitive Wikipedia
everyone: encouraged to edit articles
if article made worse: thrown away; if better: article edit it kept
would Wikipedia display article editing winner?

MATLAB week-long open collaborative competition for programmers
- entries automatically scored, ranked, displayed immediately
- code author score are visible at all times
- anyone can modify other’s code

leaders –> view entry: person makes new entry and becomes leader

first place: completely objective
good code: gets better optimization score from test lead

really about reputation and interaction with community

what we see in practice:
people: anxious to acknowledge people they took code from

types of changes:
- Big changes (leaps)
I know a much better way to do this, replaces previous code
- Small changes (tweaks)
minor optimization; tweakers don’t need to understand full optimization to improve code

code: improves over time
sometimes: people take best code at certain point in time & make it worse

by inserting new idea after previously solved problem: people swarm on it to work with and improve idea

tough question: how would you value tweakers over leapers
hard to say who really is making the important contributions

systematic variations: tweak bombs: take the entry in the lead, sniff around for secret number replacements to test
changes to the lead entry: fly off like sparks

social signals: sent through entry titles
- scrambled eggs
- rotten eggs
- I didn’t start the fire
- Don’t get obfuscated… follow the light
- You Call This Collaboration? Give Me a Break

motivation:
to participate: opportunity: for personal glory or collaboration?

behavior of successful code:
high rank, time on top, high status author, clarity, elegance, novelty, etc.

tension: not between any two coders
code: wants to propagate
coder: wants to block code propagation

a chicken is only an egg’s way of making another egg
a hacker is only code’s way of making more code

—

Karim:

collaborative innovation: implicit tension between collective and individual:

collective point of view: value contributions that get reused more often
individual view: value being the top amongst peers

social value of contribution (code) = # of times lines of code reused
relative novelty: helps you; too new: others don’t use it/know what to do with it
value of adding new things, after a while: gets too complicated
not much value in borrowing code, but if you use it in the right way it’s very valuable

leaders: borrow > novelty, in this setting

Notes from Berkman Luncheon w/ Anne Balsamo

Posted on 10 June 2008 by Alex Leavitt

As soon as I saw a derivative of the term “culture” in Anne Balsamo’s bio linked to from the Berkman website, I knew I wanted to attend this luncheon. Ironically, there was only mention of cultural reproduction (though it’s apparently present in her book, soon to be released), with much of the discussion focused around the future of libraries and museums (still interesting). The initial idea that jumped out at me from Anne’s presentation was her point about media as reproduction, specifically alluding to biological functions, and how this metaphoric/literal process defines and reworks our notions of gender online. Three other points were brought up that I want to discuss in future articles:
- Memory, remembering, and the evolution of stories and their telling in the move to the digital environment
- The future of the meritocracy of professorships in relation to publications
- The potential importance of Harvard’s Houghton Library after digital literary curation/publication and the hypothetical revolution of personal paper-based printing & publication

For now, the notes:

—

Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work: Anne Balsamo

—

book: transmedia project

addresses 3 points:

technological innovation: transform what is known to what is possible
technological imagination: engage materiality of world to create conditions for future world making
cultural reproduction: development of new narratives, myths, rituals;

technology, the world, culture: created anew
training of technological imagination: necessary

designers: work scene of technological emergence

ch. 1 – culture in the age of innovation

polemic of book: need to train imaginations to take seriously technological innovations: responsibility of educators across curriculum
how humanities can serve as resources: to engage new technologies

ch. 2 – gendering the technological imagination

always gendered, but we didn’t recognize it as such
biological reproductive technologies: connects to media technologies as premier reproductive technologies of our age: draws from feminist criticism on reproduction

ch. 3 – the performance of innovation

work on future of reading: w/ embryonic technologies

ch. – public interactives and technological literacies
designed to communicate history that is all of ours
future of literacies

ch. – working the paradigm shift
focus on literal labor: participatory culture: call people to the hard work required by the paradigm shift

ch. – the work of the book in a digital age
Q: why are you writing a print-based book?

—

transmedia project: relates to other previous projects:

interactive multimedia documentary (“women of the world talk back”) on women’s rights held by UN in Beijing

practices on new media journalism

museum exhibit: designed to probe how we might read in the future: not abandon but rethink the print-based book

—

we need to do something different to bridge the two cultures
need to create new institutional places: multidisciplinary research/projects

new participants: women, underrepresented participants
new commitments: requires everyone to be learners again
collaborative teams: from early work in feminist organizing
new spaces: where people can work together on technological things

—

distributed research network: in UC Irvine, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago
scholarship in a digital age: will look different: local and distributed
understanding technological infrastructure to support distributed research network

digital research & learning @ McArthur: funded: museums, libraries, schools, recreation, home, after-school
claim: learning is changing in a digital age: eg. learning occurs in distributed environment, not just one local place
think about how museums/libraries will function in distributed learning environment

—

What’s next?

XFR: Take 2
Digital Learning Objects: Open Education
MIxed Reality Learning Environments: Morse’s Law, Nintendo Wii (gesture-based interface)
Thinking with Objects: DIY movement, makers culture movement (making things with your hands; virtual: only simulations of what we used to do with our hands)

—

Q: what has everyone been thinking about futures of museums/libraries

—

Q&A:

Q: what is the future of designing librarians; how do you design professionals to adapt to new changes?

A: information designers: need standardization of metadata; also need people to understand how (meta-)information also has narrative, cultural effectivity; when we get to semantic web: it can’t be stupid

Q: Weinberger: future of paper-based books?

A: many genres of paper-based books that will migrate to the digital space; other genres: that aren’t going to disappear, because of physicality: paper-based: will long outlive human lives: part of case history; have to maintain digital archive
libraries: becoming museums of books that have ‘collections’

Q: Weinberger: in future w/ electronic readers: publishers won’t actually print books: will want to move directly to digital

A: things that are slipping away in a digital age: we will want to preserve

Q: humanities in the future: esp. w/ focus on publication

A: rethink scholarly publication, but I’m not the one to take on such a project;
have to learn to read again
UChicago: thinking about new paradigm of peer-review process for publication
tenure cases for those w/ digital scholarship

Q: printing a book: just output form; talk about crafting in digital environment: you: on laptop, w/ word processor

A: these kind of questions are critical, esp. w/ close reading of electronic text
authoring backwards
designer parallels with author

discussion:
libraries: providing ACCESS to books, etc.; cost of maintaining digital libraries: low, but not zero; decisions will always need to be made about curation
assumption: possibility of a canon: where all the ‘good’ books are

Q: “science fiction: the mythology of the industrial age”

Q: what do you think might be lost?

A: course: history of literacy: ongoing question of why is it important to remember?: disturbing: youth: just-in-time learners/rememberers
we haven’t taught value of remembering
culturally: remembering was more valuable to the other generation: ties to why history is important: ties to “future of the past”

—

digital divide: the other way: economic/social reasons
need to have interdisciplinary places of learning