The Auricle

by Derek Morrison, originally posted 11 January 2008 (updated 13 January and 28 January 2008)

For some time I’ve been mulling over the thorny question of leadership in this era of “digital democracy”, Web 2.0, “user-generated content”, and “wisdom of the crowds”. Consequently, I much welcomed the 9 January 2008 posting All about me by Jane Plenderleith and Veronica Adamson from the Academy’s Evaluation & Dissemination Support Team (EDSuT). Jane and Veronica’s posting raises a number of interesting questions about the nature and use of weblogs as well as other so called Web 2.0 technologies, not just by the institutions taking part in our Benchmarking & Pathfinder Programme, but also more generally. Because my response is considerably longer than is comfortable either to author or read in a comment field I offer readers this posting to complement All about me.

In order to help me out of the mental starting gate I’ve distilled Jane and Veronica’s posting down to its bare essence; this has provided me with the necessary catalyst for a reflection of some of the issues that, hopefully, other readers will find useful.

Jane and Veronica say:

“In common with other social networking applications (like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo) , blogs are ‘all about me’. The networking aspect is the invitation to others to come and learn ‘all about me’. Very few comments are posted, blog entries are read by others but are not generally challenged.”

“… no matter what support is offered, people still want more or different, and many will adapt their own independent resources from what is offered.”

I’ve separated the posting into two related parts. In Part one, I respond directly to the above extracts. In Part two, I broaden my reflections to consider the role of leadership in the so called Web 2.0 age.

PART ONE

“All about me” and “Very few comments are posted, blog entries are not generally challenged.”

There are those who assert something called a “blogging culture” as though it is a single homogenous entity or set of behaviours.

I am not one of them.

The weblog is but one variant of a family of easy-to-use online publication tools. Such tools can be utilized for a rich variety of purposes, some trivial and some serious. Unlike the wiki, however, the blog preserves the concept of an information owner in that an individual posting always has a recognized author. What the author chooses to do with this ownership is little different from being the author of a book, report, or journal article except that the speed of conception to publication is much accelerated.

In academic terms this ownership of blog postings is actually a good thing in that those who frequently post what are perceived to be high value content become de facto “Thought Leaders”. Ok, we could assert that such Thought Leaders would fit into your “All about me” category but in that case every book/journal/report author, journalist, or mass media columnist in the world would also have to be included. Having been the primary author of the Auricle blog hosted by the University of Bath for several years (now at www.auricle.org) I can totally identify with the comment about very few comments being posted or challenges made. Auricle aquired a reasonable readership and I believe was even utilised by some courses in other universities, but commentary was sparse (and mostly superficial) with the vast majority of readers being more than happy to consume rather than contribute.

Did that bother me?

Not at all.

The consumers were getting what they wanted and Auricle provided another ‘publishing’ vehicle where I could rehearse and refine my opinions and arguments before they were exposed to other milieu. In this context that’s no different to what Peter Day the BBC radio 4 journalist used to do with his ‘Works in Progress’ online essays which eventually appeared in his ‘In Business’ radio editions. Ironically, when I wound down Auricle at Bath, some of my ‘readers’ were not happy so I assume that although they weren’t commenting that didn’t mean they weren’t listening. So personally, I’ve got no problem with a lack of commentary but I do think that those who author postings should put effort into whatever they post and so offer some value beyond ‘All about me’ trivia.

“… most of the … project teams and clusters have established other means of communicating (email, and their own blogs or wikis).” and “… people still want more or different, and many will adapt their own independent resources from what is offered.”

Again “no worries” here although it would be interesting to explore a little more why this is the case. I do think a perception of ownership and sustainability is all important and so unless the Academy or JISC is prepared to offer a permanent easy-to-use and confidential hosting service similar to WordPress.com or Blogger.com then individuals and institutions will be erring on the side of caution. I think even if, say, JISC did offer such a service then the take-up could still be somewhat constrained but I could be wrong. I suppose had such a central service existed and it allowed me some degree of design freedom and total author freedom then I may have hosted Auricle there rather than move it on to my own domain at auricle.org.

We need to acknowledge that people like feel they have some degree of ownership and control over the things that effect their personal and working lives. Part of that ownership is the ability to disaggregate the aggregated and then repurpose the disaggregations for their own purposes. Each one of us who makes a quote, uses an image, video or sound clip is doing just that. Indeed that’s what I did with Jane and Veronica’s All about me posting when I used it as the framework for my own posting and I anticipate that’s what will in turn happen with this posting. Elemental objects are ‘it’. Big, difficult to disaggregate, objects are less useful. But for such a repurposing engine to keep working in the digital age, however, we perhaps all need to remember to be signed up members of the attribute and share-alike brigade in a way that wasn’t necessary in the privacy of the seminar room or lecture theatre before the internet, wireless access, and portable recording devices changed that dynamic.

“… need constantly to encourage people to engage with online environments and to make this engagement task-oriented.”

Totally agree. Unless there is a goal then why bother? The time limited project task or student assignment is certainly one example where a blog, wiki, mailing list etc can be utilised. The blog or wiki can provide a useful ‘thought archive’ and or document repository. I would argue that our Academy Benchmarking & Pathfinder blogs mostly come into this category although, arguably, there is the odd ‘deeper’ reflective posting in there somewhere (maybe even this one).

The ‘goals’, however, can be quite long term, sophisticated, and not always made explicit. I suggest that “Thought Leader” type blogs in the e-learning part of the blogosphere probably come into this category. For example, I think Dr Stephen Marshall’s (the original developer of the e-Learning Maturity Model benchmarking methodology) contributions to our non-public blog exhibit the characteristics of ‘Thought Leadership’ plus task orientation.

At a minimum, our efforts setting up a network of blogs has provided some consistency of interface-type across the programme whilst leaving the choice of specific solution to the institution teams. At the same time we have encouraged institutions to engage with some of the technologies their students now either treat as commonplace outside the institution or are increasingly expected to use within it. My EDSuT colleagues suggest that there are now some ‘good’ examples of blogs emerging from the programme but from my perspective I’m fairly relaxed about the lack of a ‘white heat of high intensity interaction’. The one-to-many model still has something to offer. We don’t necessarily all have to be seeking the level of interaction asserted for a MySpace or Facebook for a technology to be useful.

From my personal perspective I’m delighted to be able to employ such an easy to use tool with instant information dissemination potential no matter where I am in the world at the time. A conventional web site may be fine for relatively static material but for publishing dynamic material which requires a date, time, and author stamp at a minimum cost (no mega expense content management systems here) then it’s hard not to justify the use of weblogs as part of the digital age armoury.

Wait a minute! … Did I just mention an ‘author stamp’? … this brings me neatly to part 2.

PART TWO

So is there a role for ‘lurkers’ and ‘leaders’ in this era of user-generated content and social networking?

To start the ball rolling here’s an extract from a recent article by Aleks Krotoski Game on from our wiki community of developers (Technology Guardian 6 Dec 2007) in which she reflects on the importance of leaders in collaborative endeavours.

We expected that the Wikigame would bring Gamesblog readers together in an unprecedented orchestra of collusion. In fact, after a storming start, the development process settled into a familiar pattern of collaborative endeavours: nothing much was decided until leaders emerged and put into practice what the community had started … Now, a handful of talented and dedicated drivers are supported by the creative input of the rest of the rabble, who take up the mantle in response to weekly blog-based tasks. The community is responsible for the descriptions of characters and objects, five designers put them into context and three programmers cement them in the code.

Or reflect on this offering from Holohan and Garg

… in the wider context of collaborative activity, the majority of participants do not have to be very skilled, but a core of highly skilled participants is required to drive the project forward. This core imparts its knowledge to the less skilled participants, eventually bringing some of them to the same level, and provides the vision and leadership necessary to the success of the collaboration. (Holohan, A., and Garg, A. (2005). Collaboration online: The example of Distributed Computing. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(4), article 16).

What’s a thought leader? According to wikipedia it’s “a futurist or person who is recognized among their peers and mentors for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights”

See for instance the ALT-C 2005 summary of keynote speakers where the term is both explicitly used in relation to Etienne Wenger but also implied in the description of other keynote speakers. So if you are invited to be a keynote that implies someone somewhere considers you a thought leader … but of course that doesn’t necessarily imply they agree with you 🙂

But what about the “wisdom of the crowd” or the concept of “collective intelligence”? I like what Ed Chi of the Augmented Social Cognition PARC research group’s blog offers here, i.e.

… the group of people who are experts on World War II tanks will write that part of Wikipedia; the group of people who are experts on politics in Eastern Europe at the end of World War II will write those articles. So there is an implicit self-organization according to interest and intention. It’s not everybody voting on the same thing — it’s everybody collaborating on different areas to result in something, so that the sum of the parts is greater than the parts themselves. That seems to be at the spirit of this kind of collaborative intelligence.

There are of course those (perhaps with a vested interest) who promulgate a more jaundiced view of the “wisdom of the crowd” mantra undperpinning Web 2.0. Jane O’Grady’s mainly negative review of Damian Thompson’s book Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and Fake History (Sunday Times, 27 January 2008) puts this rather uncomfortable anti-Web 2.0 view rather well:

Thompson starts off by deploring the unregulated freemarket in websites and books that renders all claims to knowledge equally valid. “Free culture knows no bounds,” says Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. How marvellous that sounds. In fact, of course, the new technology’s egalitarianism leads to the tyranny of those websites and gurus that are most skilled at proliferation and presentation. Once hierarchies of expertise are levelled, truth is trampled flat.

Gilly Salmon has of course reinforced the role of the leader in much of her work and commentary, notably e-Moderating (updated in 2004) and E-tivities (published in 2002). More recently, as part of the panel at last year’s Pathfinder symposium (Symposium 1306, 5 September 2007, ALT-C 2007) Gilly said:

We need leadership rather than direction …We need to offer principles, goals, frameworks, models, and solutions to academics so that they can make activities/artefacts their own … It’s all about learning design and leadership that crosses all disciplines.

Another leadership example is offered by the 2006 ‘webinar’ collaboration between the University of Adelaide and the Institute of Education’s London Knowledge Lab.

A particularly interesting study in the context of this posting is provided by the recent University of Minnesota work Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia (Priedhorsky R et al, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Group 2007 Conference proceedings, 4 November 2007). This work found that only one tenth of one percent of Wikipedia editors account for about half of the content value of this uber Web 2.0 exemplar. Content value is defined as the actual number of page views of a Wikipedia entry and not just the number of page edits measured by previous studies. So far from the “widsom of the crowd” a significant proportion of the value of Wikipedia appears to derive from the contributions of a relatively small proportion of authors/editors, i.e. the wisdom of an ‘elite’? 🙂 Incidentally, the same Minnesota study found that only ~5% of Wikipedia edits are damaging and that 42% of these malicious edits are fixed within one page view. Another of the contributors to the Wikipedia study was Loren Terveen who is also involved in a number of other projects related to online communities, e.g. see Community Lab.org.

For those wishing to explore online contributions (or not, in the case of social loafers/lurkers) in more depth then as good a starting point as any is Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities (Ling K et al, 2005, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(4), article 10). The open access Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication moved from Indiana University in October 2007 and is now hosted by the Blackwell Synergy journal portal.

There are alternatives to the apparent anonymity of the Wikipedia model, albeit currently much smaller in scale, where the role of the thought leader is explicitly recognised. For example, Larry Sanger’s Wikipedia derivation Citizendium attempts to add a quality aspect to content by engaging with expert authors. An interesting posting called Encouraging people to contribute knowledge appeared in the official Google blog of 13 December 2007 in which Udi Manber (Google’s VP of Engineering) effectively introduced the concept of a Googlepedia. The Googlepedia concept appears to push the author back to centre stage. Googlepedia explicitly eschews the collective ownership model of Wikipedia in favour of ownership of a “unit of knowledge” which Google is calling a “knol” (anyone for knowledge objects?). The most popular ‘knols’ will, therefore, have the potential to create thought leaders in an area with the caveat of course being that a popular ‘knol’ doesn’t necessarily mean being an accurate ‘knol’.

There are those who argue (or choose to believe) that the internet, particularly in its current Web 2.0 incarnation, will demolish all established social norms. Those who are grounded in one dimension of this ideological pre-determinism take comfort in their belief that the technology now so empowers end-users that this permanently undermines the power of the State, the corporation, or the institution. Those grounded in another dimension of this ideology of technological pre-determinism, however, take an opposite view, i.e. technology provides an opportunity for the State, the corporation, or the institution to reduce its dependence on local or national human resources and expertise. Seth Finkelstein’s recent column The writers, not the internet, will decide who wins their strike (Guardian, 3 January 2008) provides a usefully provocative consideration of some of these issues. If the views of Finkelstein prove insufficiently destablising/comforting (depending on your viewpoint) then Nicholas Carr’s Does the future of the web lie in workers paid with trinkets may do the trick (Guardian, 10 January 2008). Here’s a sample from Carr’s column.

In other words, the money-changers and their managerial goon squads will be thrown out of the temple, and the people will share their creative gifts freely over a dense network of fibre optic cables, a new and serpentless Tree of Knowledge hung with tasty digital fruit … I, on the other hand, tended towards the less revolutionary outlook. For example, the invention of the radio – the original “wireless” technology – spurred the creation of a vast network of amateur broadcasters, but that non-professional network was soon displaced by a smaller set of commercial radio stations, better able to fulfil the desires of the listening public.

But what do I think?

I think it’s important not to get ideological. Of course technology will change things as it has always done but attempting to pre-determine what these changes will be is more ideology than science; futurology is risky.

Q: What’s futurology?

A: The prediction of what’s going to happen next year – but if it didn’t happen, the explanation of why it didn’t 🙂

The most, therefore, that I would risk asserting is that the societies humans construct plus unanticipated events (or unexpected or unplanned consequences from technological innovation) have a habit of confounding or distorting prediction, e.g.

Television won’t last. It’s a flash in the pan. (Mary Somerville, pioneer of radio educational broadcasts, 1948).

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons. (Popular Mechanics, March 1949).

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. (Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) makers of mainframe computers, a polemic against the PC concept in 1977.

Self-operating [vacuum] cleaners powered by nuclear energy will probably be a reality a decade from now. (Alex Lewyt, president of vacuum cleaner company Lewyt Corp., in the New York Times in 1955).

The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys. (Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer, British Post Office, 1878)

And as for Congress, Perot promises to bypass it and go directly to the American people in the “electronic town hall” … It is here, says Perot, that the American people will, in direct communion with the leader, solve those knotty problems that have eluded a clumsy, corrupt Congress. (Ross Perot, US politician and failed Presidential candidate, 1992)

At the risk of becoming victim to the same hubris as the examples above I think it’s important that we allow for the possibility that Web 2.0 technologies when used in an HE context may take considerably longer to impact on the processes of education than some current champions may like. At the same time I also think that we need to be mindful of the “law of unintended consequences” in which the introduction of a technology has major impacts in unplanned and sometimes unintended ways. For example, some would argue that the revolution currently sweeping the music industry is fast reducing the value of the physical CD and the MP3 download to promotional ‘giveaways’ by the artist in support of newly resurgent live performances and tours where the real money is now being made. Simon Jenkins’ article (Sunday Times, 13 January 2008) It’s the bling they’re paying you for Tony, not the brainpower captures this rather nicely, e.g.

Electronic recording and the internet are not profitable in themselves but a means to an end, that of making money from live performance … You could buy Madonna’s entire recorded output for less than it costs to see her for two hours on stage … People appear to crave not screen-based entertainment but the opposite, propinquity to flesh-and-blood … They may use the new electronics to work markets, exchange information and keep in touch, but the value of the internet is in guiding them to congregate in affinity groups and form new relationships. Human beings, above all, seek an encounter with other human beings … In the Middle Ages Chaucer undertstood that “folk long to go on pilgrimages to escape the humdrum of their lives”. They still do. The internet has facilitated such congregation. It has not driven people into themselves but the opposite, into seeking ever more frenetic human contact.

With reference to my earlier examples, what technologies seems to be providing at the moment are ever more efficient platforms for communication, dissemination, and influence but these are apparently still being sustained by a limited number of contributors with the interest, stamina, and motivation (for whatever reason). Such contributors may be nominally anonymous (as with Wikipedia) or not (as with Finkelstein, Carr, Jenkins et al) but all are thought leaders whether they intend to be or not. The irony here is that even the “end-user is now in charge” ideologues have their own thought leaders. If anything rather than the “wisdom of the crowds” Web 2.0 and whatever follows may be actually creating ever more efficient platforms, services and tools from which those with the time, stamina, motivation and ‘stickability’ have the opportunity to become thought leaders.

What’s somewhat challenging for Higher Education is that it already has a long established and resistant model of “thought leadership” at complete variance with that of the Jimmy Wales et al view of the world. Indeed, the whole business of Higher Education could be construed as being based on such a premise with the ‘thoughts’ and the ‘leadership’ being the outcomes of processes clearly defined by discipline peer groups (and hierarchies within said groups). Hence, at best, content or opinion generated outside the traditional mechanisms can easily be viewed as transitory, disposable or, in the case of students, assessable… but certainly not ‘publishable’ by the traditional routes. But of course Web 2.0 technologies offers more than the traditional routes for communication and recognititon, and that is where the challenge for Higher Education lies. One strategy for HE of course is to either completely ignore what Web 2.0 offers or to more actively declare all such content to be worthless for scholarly purposes or, more subtley to declare it to be “non-quality assured”. Another perhaps more useful strategy would be, not to reject, but to “embrace and extend” and allow for the possibility that at least some of the “thought leaders” in the non-traditional multiverse may also have something to offer.

In conclusion, my colleague’s assertion that blogs are “All about me?” was a useful catalyst for this response and, sure, it’s fairly easy to express ‘fired from the hip’ opinions. But the challenge is to add value to ‘me’ by backing this up with the arguments, work, and opinions of others; that’s what really makes it worthwhile, both for the author and the reader (hopefully). It’s that added value in collating and repurposing what others express in support of what ‘me’ wants to get over which I contend makes any publication vehicle whether that be a blog, wiki, journal, or book more than an exercise in vanity and unsubstantiated opinion. But that, of course, is not for ‘me’ to decide.