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Half-baked ideas
In Guadalajara on Wednesday, I talked to IT folks from
25 countries about ways social software can connect citizens
and governments. And I found out a bit about the differing approaches
they're taking to the rollout of digital IDs.
Yesterday I met serially with a long list of faculty and grad students
at the University of Michigan's School of Information, and gave a
talk to which my sensors have so far detected two
reactions.
Although I've written from time to time about the ways in which
bloggers can be both like and unlike academic researchers,
I haven't hung around in the university environment
for a long while -- with one recent
exception. So this visit is, among other things, a chance
to compare these two fairly distinct cultures.
One comment that came up several times, in response to my queries about
why an academic would or wouldn't want to use a blog in the narrative
style that I enjoy (and advocate) was: "I wouldn't want
to publish a half-baked idea."
Ironically, I had included a half-baked idea in my talk:
the notion that digital "learning objects" might wind up being units
of barter. So, for example, you'd trade me a video of your guitar lesson
in exchange for my screencast on animating scatterplots in Excel.
It wasn't the most important part of the talk. I think
my other theme of network-enabled apprenticeship -- for example, the
way in which the
transparency of work products and processes in open source
development enables anyone to observe and join -- matters a lot more.
But I tossed out the barter idea anyway because, though it felt shaky
to me, I wanted to know how this group, with roots in both
economics and information science, would react to it.
The initial response was to shoot it down, for reasons
that I don't disagree with. But it didn't completely crash
and burn, as Todd Suomela's report notes:
The biggest conversation with the audience was about the economic
incentives for people to share knowledge on the web. Jon initially
proposed the idea of barter to explain the process, some people were
skeptical that this would work, while others supported it.
That outcome left me wondering again about the tradeoffs between
academia's longer cycles and the blogosphere's shorter ones. Granting
that these are complementary modes, does blogging exemplify agile
methods -- advance in small increments, test continuously, release
early and often -- that academia could use more of? That's my
half-baked thought for today.
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