Contemplating the Beauty of Complexity

Good blog posts are not just aesthetically pleasing. Good blog posts are beautiful. But how does one define that beauty? There's lots of measuring sticks: attractive visuals, well-written content, an obvious purpose fulfilled. Trying to include everything you want creates complexity.

Like the human body, complexity can still be beautiful and natural. Ariel Szuch made a great case when she published about her book club on her blog. Ariel integrated several great outcomes into one post.
First, she read a historical book that gives context to the content of our class.
Second, she created a Prezi of her own accord. This shows some self-directed learning.
Third, her Prezi was a remix of the section of the book she read. It sounds like she is embracing the digital culture by remixing content.
Finally, she spread the love by publishing the simple steps to familiarize her readers about Prezi.

The blog hit so many points of our class that it needed a nomination for great blog posts from this semester. Way to go Ariel.

Web2.0 Project continues

The semester is coming to a close. Deadlines are now days instead of weeks away. My project team has been updating our wiki and blog with Web2.0 tools and I got to thinking beyond the tools of the Web2.0 movement.

Paul Anderson states 6 big ideas surrounding Web2.0 in his article "What is Web2.0? Ideas, technologies, and implications for education". One of the big ideas is titled architecture of participation. The idea is that Web2.0 is based on easy, open collaboration. Anderson uses the example of citizen journalism on CNN.com that gives the public the ability to report on breaking news as it happens.

I have been collaborating with fellow students to update and improve our blog and wiki formats of Backpack2.0 and I've noticed that we aren't perfect architects. The architecture of participation for our websites is based mostly off of the hosting service (blogger and wikispaces respectively) so we don't have much room to change everything we want to.

The frustrations that I felt in Blogger wasted a lot of time. I still can't figure out why my blog posts didn't carry the desired format. I typed everything how I wanted it in "edit posts" section, but it all the spacing disappeared upon posting.

Comparatively, the wiki was a dream. I clicked the "edit" button, edited what I wanted, and saved it. Done and dusted.


Perhaps if I had the appropriate skills, I could adjust the formatting problems. My teammate Brandon McCloskey chalked the problem up to Bloggers difficulties with hosting more than one editor at a time. I don't know if that's the case. What I do know is that a wiki is a proven collaboration tool.

Digital Revolution begins December 9th

Web2.0, microfinance, diigo, prezi, wikipedia: does any of this interest you? If you want to see some of the coolest stuff online, come to an evening of presentations by your peers. There will be 10 five minute presentations with questions after each. The presentations begin at 7 p.m. at 3108 Jesse Knight Building on Brigham Young University campus.

Backpack 2.0: Breaking Free from the Spiralbound

Backpack 2.0 is a developing resource for students to update and get updated on the new web tools at their disposal. We need your help. I'm part of the team making the beta series of the site (a realization of a past blog post), and we want the site to live beyond this semester.

Backpack 2.0 has everything to do with the "Web 2.0" movement. When the internet first came out, it was used by a very specific community of programmers and researchers. That has all changed. Now that practically everyone is on the internet, we need to create time-effective ways of handling all the information and tools that are coming out everyday. Web 2.0 is the new version of the internet, an ever changing version.

Backpack 2.0 is an ever changing guide to the most important web tools of today and the tools to be discovered. The efficacy of a tool is not only related to its use, but also to its popularity(why we still use Microsoft tools even though their frustrating and difficult to learn). Through Backpack 2.0, students can find the useful tools that are growing in popularity.

Web 2.0 is a broad topic, but I believe that community building, sharing, and improving the digital world are at its heart. If you want to check out the Backpack 2.0 sites, give suggestions or contribute posts on your favorite web tools follow these links: Backpack 2.0(blog) and Backpack 2.0(wiki)

Don't forget to check back often to see the new posts and stay updated on the newest tools. Thank you for adding your wisdom to the web.

Create: A digital resource for digital students

My life is so easy. I'll restate that: my life is easier thanks to google.docs.

I've got this project for my Civilizations class to create an online resource for students, so they can learn digital tools to help them in their education. Though we've got a group of dedicated students to hash this all out, making a good site takes a lot of planning and execution.

We're just finished our data mining stage and now we're going to make sense of it and try to make a quality site out of all the information we've obtained. Each group member spent a couple hours finding links on the internet to dozens of new tools like Prezi and google.docs. We posted all of these tools on a google.doc and it was a mess of information. Their was some order since the tools had been put into a table as shown.

I wanted to do some organizing, so I used copy and paste functions to move all the tabulated info into a google.doc spreadsheet. One of the nifty tools (under the "Tools" menu on the toolbar) is a sort Column from A to Z.

What took possibly 12 hours of collaborative work took 30 seconds to sort. It still needs some clean up, but the worst is over. Thank you google.docs for saving me enough time to write this post and a paper.

Obligations: Condemning and Redeeming

What's in an education? Being a college student, I sometimes ask myself why I'm taking classes on art history or Latin when my career plans necessitate the sciences only. It's easy to rant about the general education credits that every student of formal education is required to take.

Before this semester I was certainly one to condemn G.E.'s for the time they take from my specialty. However, I was struck this week with this remarkable thought: obligatory education is its condemning and redeeming quality. Let me expound.

The obligations of a formal education take time from a busy schedule. By forgoing all these extra classes students could graduate sooner and enter the workforce with specialized training from the classes they absolutely needed. To keep back students from working to pay off their increasing educational debts is condemnable. I certainly felt this way about an art history course I took last year that taught me nothing of importance and in so far as I can tell did nothing to improve my education.

Oppositely, these same obligations can afford special educational opportunities that would not happen in specialty classes. For instance, I'm obligated by my honors program to take classes and attend events that increase the amount of writing I do perhaps ten-fold (compared to earlier semesters when I wasn't in the honors program). This extra writing was condemned in the process and is now praised. This semester I have been forced to improve my pre-writing and that has improved my writing only through practice and volume. This educational outcome would not have taken place without the obligations of formal education.

The obligations of education, though condemned now, are justified in the end. That sounds like Machiavelli's Prince and perhaps what would be his approach at education.

Crowdsourcing!?! What Can I do with It?

Crowdsourcing is a new way of getting a lot of work down by a lot of people in a short time. I've posted before about Jeff Howe and his book on the subject and now I state my views after reading the book.

WOW!

That's a bit dramatic, but crowdsourcing is really cool. I have become a solver for Innocentive (though I'm no where near solving anything on their website). I've seen the inexpensive, high-quality photos at iStockPhoto and the cool T-shirts at Threadless. All these websites incorporate crowdsourcing (people create and compete against others for reputation and/or prizes). There are limits to crowdsourcing (I'm sure), but I'm not sure what they are. Crowdsourcing is finding ways to make so many things better: better quality, better prices, and always merit-based.

In Howe's book, he concludes with his ten pointers on crowdsourcing which I've mostly paraphrased below for everyone who would like to get their work crowdsourced.

1. Pick the right model--Crowdsourcing can be used in different ways; Collective Intelligence uses the wisdom of the crowd to solve problems (Innocentive is an example); Crowd creation facilitates the crowd in the creative process (iStockPhoto gives a place for people to sell their photos to the masses); Crowd voting(Threadless lets the designing community vote on the posted designs to choose a regular winner: also crowd creation); Crowd funding lets the crowd fund small businesses through loans that are impossible through corporate banks (Kiva and 40billion.com)
2. Pick the right crowd--in order for your idea to take off you need a bunch of people who are willing to participate; find the people who are interested
3. Offer the right incentives--even a token amount of money will excite some people. There has to be a satisfaction factor from participating, whether it comes from money or a reputation in the community of volunteers.
4. No pink slips--be careful about restricting people and punishing users. Crowdsourcing is also community building and improving.
5. Benevolent Dictator--People are generally good, but they often need infrastructure and commands to tell them what to do. The crowd is usually sensible and will recognize if someone is taking advantage of them.
6. Keep it simple; break it down--Whatever the big picture for the project is, keep it simple so people understand your purpose and know what to work towards. Then break down the work into manageable pieces so that people can do their part and get the satisfaction of finishing something.
7. Sturgeon's Law--Sturgeon said, "Ninety percent of everything is crud." Don't expect everything that the crowd gives you. Especially in creative circles, a lot of stuff isn't worth your time.
8. 10% is the antidote to sturgeon's law--The reason crowdsourcing works is that the 10% is not crud. And when we consider the millions of people on the internet, ten percent is a lot.
9. The community is always right--Once you've formed a community, the community makes decisions. As a benevolent dictator you have some power, but your power over the community is lent from the community and the community can take that power back whenever they want.
10. Ask what you can do for the Crowd--Remembering the famous quote from our beloved JFK, "Ask not what (the crowd) can do for you, ask what you can do for (the crowd)."

I encourage everyone to find the excitement of crowdsourcing and to use it. It's not an evil entity. The Church uses crowdsourcing to improve the church media sources.

I invite you to check the links to the different crowdsourcing websites that I have liked thus far. You can also check out some cool posts on member crowdsourcing and crowdsourcing analyzed by my professor, Gideon Burton. Finally, I invite you to comment with other cool crowdsourcing sites and ideas.

Crowdsourcing has potential, so get in a community and make a difference.