Year: 2003

Learning and Community

Article : Learning is a Community Experience : By …. Article : Learning is a Community Experience : By Adele Goldberg – “Perhaps it is obvious – you do not learn alone, but you do take responsibility for your own education. (14-pages, 206 KB PDF)
* Go to Learning is a Community Experience, published in the July/August 2002 edition of the Journal of Object Technology [SynapShots]

Adele was one of the creators of the Smalltalk programming language. She worked at Xerox PARC with Alan Kay and later became the CEO of ParcPlace Systems where she worked to commercialize object-oiented technologies. This article contains her reflections on introducing object-oriented technologies and thinking to the technology world. Lots of good material.

I was struck by this definition of an educated person:

We think that an educated person is one who knows a little about a lot, and a lot about some focused subject area – one who reads broadly so is conversant on many topics, but one who holds his or her tongue when the hard data is not there to back up the inclination of that tongue.

Wouldn’t the world be a nicer place if more of us took that advice to heart?

Some other excerpts:

learning on your own is preposterously hard given the quantity of new material regularly generated. Both filtering and selection techniques have to be taught so as to be able to focus without losing sight of the intellectually stimulating neighborhoods that surround any focus of attention.

…

Here is a small experiment to try when in a room with a group of 10-30 people.

Step 1. First, ask each individual to decide whether the group should consider the individual to be an expert in object technology. If you are an expert, then signal (by standing up) and remaining standing. (Note definition of “expert” vs proficient professional or virtuoso as defined by Peter Denning in the August 2001 issue of the CACM.)

Step 2. The non-experts, those who did not stand up, should find an expert to be physically near (they should physically leave their seats and move near the expert so as to be able to converse).

Step 3. Each non-experts should think about a question that relates to object technology, one whose answer the non-expert does not know and that is a reason why he or she is not to be considered an expert. Ask this question of the expert near you.

Step 4. If the expert was asked a question he or she could not answer, could the expert now designate himself or herself to be a non-expert and look for an expert who has the answer? After finding an answer, the individual can decide whether to stand up again as an expert.

An interesting outcome of this experiment is that, ultimately everyone designates him- or herself as a non-expert at some time in the process, with minor exception. And the exception is typically a developer who, although acknowledged to be an expert, can always find an unknown as a learning challenge but who, in the context of the experiment, was not stumped

Although, Goldberg’s focus is on object-oriented technology, her observations apply to learning and knowledge management issues in other settings as well.

Finally, I have to share one other comment from the article for those of us who have been afflicted with the programming bug at some point or other in our careers.

my colleague David Leibs likes to joke: programming is a personality disorder that you can test for

Getting your blog on the map

Metatags for Geographic Locations. GeoURL ICBM Address Server is a location-to-URL reverse directory. This will allow you to find URLs by their proximity to a given location. Find your neighbor’s blog, perhaps, or the web page of the restaurants near you.

Add yourself to the database.

For an example, check for sites near New York City and San Francisco. You can also get an RSS feed: see New York City RSS and San Francisco RSS (the RSS has an attached XSL stylesheet, so if your browser supports it, you will actually be able to see a reasonable rendering.)

Why is it called an “ICBM Address?” Old Usenet historical precedent [Smart Mobs]

Took me about 30 seconds to add myself to the database.

Social Network Mapping and Blogs

Blog Tribe Social Network Mapping.

Here is the initial social network analysis of the Blog Tribe at Ryze — which maps the Friendship networks and Blogrolls of Tribe members. What’s unique about this collaborative project is the mapping of blogspace and of how two unique communities intersect.

Thanks to the contributions of Valdis Krebs, Pete Kaminski, and those who volunteered to contribute their blogrolls, this is one of the largest online communities mapped. The data was captured within a month of the founding of the Blog Tribe, a snapshot in time that will be useful to return to, with 1,108 nodes from approximately 100 members. [full story]

[Ross Mayfield’s Weblog]

This seems like an appropriate item to launch 2003 with. I was one of the contributors of data for this experiment, so if you dig into the pictures and such you’ll find my name in there.

Ross did a great job pushing this along. He’s also tracking some of the early reactions to the data from others. Phil Wolff makes an interesting observation on the underlying differences between the Ryze and blogging environments. Most of the social network analysis efforts I’ve seen tend to look at reasonably homogeneous environments such as organizations. We did something along those lines in the early days at Diamond, when we worked with Wayne Baker from the University of Michigan to look at the network structure within our partner group. Very helpful to see the underlying structure of even a relatively small network of executives within a single organizations.

As I reflect on this particular analysis, I’m struck by the potential to find additional insight in mapping the bridges between multiple networks. Here we have a group who all belong to two explicit networks. How can we use these tools to get a better sense of how to more effectively navigate through half a dozen different yet interconnected networks?