Every once in a while Clayfox drifts into the tag clouds. And yet its heart has never quite followed. Maybe that’s because most often those clouds don’t prove to be so very informative after all.

Let’s review: tag clouds are a way to visualize the frequency of application of (usually uncontrolled) keywords to a corpus of stuff by a number of people. In many — even most — cases I wouldn’t call these taggers a ‘community’, unless we water down the definition of ‘community’ to a collection of people who have signed up for an online service. Even within the context of one academic tagging experiment, that can be thin or lumpy tea….

Even populous and richly tagged environments like Flickr can puff up clouds that seem, well, rather vaporous. Look at the cloud of “all time most popular tags,” and what is revealed?

It seems that when taking digital pictures with NIKONS and CANONS Flickrites gravitate to WEDDINGS and PARTIES, they focus on FRIENDS and FAMILY, they like to TRAVEL on VACATION to the BEACH or to places like CALIFORNIA and FRANCE and JAPAN. Well, well, blow me over with a feather.

Even as a means of self-portrayal, cloud tags come up short — at least to an unstrategic tagger like myself. I use and love del.icio.us — but the cloud that it serves up of my tagging activity has never been of more interest than, say, an alphabetical list of my tags. And I’ve never really discovered much about anyone else by scanning a cloud of their del.icio.us tags. Have you?

I’m willing to be convinced that appending tag clouds can be a smart search engine strategy. Perhaps this is their real utility: providing another way for the machines to read us.

***

But I’m not anti-cloud, far from it. I just happen to think that clouds are a lot more interesting to human beings when they are of words in a text, rather than of tags applied to objects. Tag clouds open up all kinds of blurry mysteries: who’s doing the tagging? how canny or consistent are the taggers? what is the extent of the corpus being tagged? But a word cloud of a given text can be as revelatory as word mining — a re-mapping of a document to bring out its frequencies, its quirks, its long tails.

And word clouds, at least those generated on the addictive new Wordle , can be quite beautiful as well. I can imagine students really learning from them, or at least investigating the vocabulary field of, say, a poem from new angles.

As an example, I’ve created word clouds of two poems by William Blake: the introduction to Songs of Innocence, and the introduction to Songs of Experience. Compare them below, and you’ll quickly see that the Innocence poem is more repetitious, aural, interactive, while the world of the Experience poem is more disperse, visual, occupied by distances. You could get all that by reading the poems themselves, without any scrambling of their words and plumping up of their frequencies. But word clouds are a way of remapping a fixed world of meaning, visually exploring it — an engaging thing to do even if they drive you back, in the end, into fresh appreciation for syntax and line structure and the very contexts they explode. Enjoy!

Innocence

Experience

Who is this woman, and why is she crying?

This photo, from a collection of early news photos housed at the Library of Congress, is part of an experiment that has that venerable institution dipping a toe into the Web 2.0 waters. Compare the photo on LC’s own website, versus on Flickr.

By publishing some of its holdings into Flickr, where items can be annotated by anyone, LC is taking seriously what you often hear now but rarely see yet: in a digital environment, libraries have to move beyond providing access and into facilitating use.

Access has been traditionally provided by libraries by the application of pre-determined, hierarchical subjects; that’s what allows physical objects to be sorted and found. It’s a system that puts the onus on one cataloger to master a relatively fixed universe of related subjects, and apply this system to an object so said object can be placed and later found in its correct place.

On the web, of course, objects are easily replicated, dispersed, recontextualized. They can be represented in any number of places, found through any number of pathways and connections. They travel unpredictably across an increasingly read-write landscape, wherein someone just might improve and embellish the guess of that lonely cataloger about what an object is ‘about,’ making it thereby more discoverable. Accommodation to an endless amount of comment and annotation seems a nascent effect of the dynamically networked use of objects.

But back to the photo: how has being Flick’d out of LC’s precincts improved our sense of its subject? Somebody had scrawled a title, “Mrs. Belmont at gunmen’s trial,” and the LC record left it at that. Just a few days after it appeared in Web 2.0-land, commenters had connected the photo to a Wikipedia entry about Alva Erskine Belmont –a rather remarkable socialite and promoter of the women’s suffrage movement–as well as another photo in the same LC collection documenting the sensational Rosenthal murder of 1912.

Wikipedia, blog postings, tags, and comments are bringing this photo to life on Flickr, giving us a better sense of its context and content. But lest we get carried away with the wisdom of crowds, we should also acknowledge a misogynistic annotation on the photo in Flickr: “dr_ass2001″ has taken up himself to draw a square around Ms. Belmont’s head and write, “Stop crying, you moron.”

***

So will LC be modifying its records based on the annotations these digitized photos catch in Flickr? Their FAQs about the project demure:

The Library will decide what to do with data added through Flickr once the pilot is over. Because resources to update catalog records are limited, the Library cannot promise to incorporate contributed data into its own records.

Still, on Flickr pages such as that housing Ms. Belmont, an LC librarian has promised to alter records based on contributed information; and as of this writing, a search for ‘flickr’ in LC’s Prints and Photographs online catalog calls up 127 instances of metadata being added or altered as a result of the “Flickr community project, 2008.”

So what are the criteria for bringing information contributed through this “community project” into LC’s more authoritative catalog? How much time and effort are LC librarians putting into that crosswalk? It will be interesting to learn answers. As a member of RLG Programs observed three months into this experiment:

Social tagging in this framework doesn’t mean letting others catalog your collections for you - it really means offering up materials for a conversation which you have to follow closely to extract the bits worth bringing back.

“Conversation” seems to be the operative word here — but until LC makes its activities in this experiment a little more transparent, it’s rather like a conversation held in a confessional booth. In any event, the move towards opening up cataloging into a conversation with the public over the web is certainly a paradigm shift. Web 2.0 endeavors like LibraryThing have for years now facilitated the interplay of LC Subject Headings and free-form annotation. But now here’s LC itself, the very mortar of brick and mortar libraries, striking up conversation.

***

This has implications that range into epistemology. A recent article by David Pimentel traces the implications of treating knowledge-making as conversational: “the nature of knowledge is increasingly viewed as an iterative process, with each individual attempting to make sense of the world s/he encounters.” We live in a world increasingly impatient with indexing done by professionals, “inevitably limited to one individual’s perceptions of an information object at one particular moment in time.”

A conversational world, growing out of Gordon Pask’s Conversation Theory, Pimentel reminds us, is one of “participants communicating and seeking a shared agreement, or mutual understanding.” What is correct is formulated by participants in this communication, not some “external absolute.”

As Pimentel suggests in passing, an iterative and unfixed arena of exchange is of increasing importance in an world so often formulated as heterogeneous or interdisciplinary–the only way, perhaps, to “unif[y] theories and concepts across disciplines.” To be sure, most any uncontrolled conversation contains trivial or inane or erroneous noise, and crowd-tagging experiments seem especially full of that. It may be the price to pay for being able to talk at all in an environment that is still often known for the big stern Shushhhhh.

A post on Flickr that accompanied the launch of this LC experiment last January was cheerfully titled “Many hands make light work.” I doubt the LC librarians trolling the comments on the two photo collections so far released onto Flickr would agree–but assuredly, many hands make different work, and perhaps more interesting work all around.

Librarians get to come into a closer and more collaborative relationship with users of the objects they collect. Those ‘users’ (or patrons?) are able to participate in the detective work that is so often at the heart of subject identification, perhaps gaining a stake in culture as a result. The collection gets marked with new pathways through it, becoming less of a sterile pile and more of an ongoing seeding of discourse.

***

The very first aim of the pilot though, as outlined in the “Many hands” post, has less to do with rethinking cataloging or conversational theory or anything like that, and more to do with publicity: “to increase exposure to the amazing content currently held in the public collections of civic institutions around the world.” Indeed, if you look through the LC collection on Flickr, a goodly number of comments are, shall we say, merely appreciative:

Like so much else about this pilot, this mere enthusiasm expressed for objects that have been online for many years –as if they have just now been made accessible–is striking. If LC had simply switched on annotation tools on their own site, I doubt that so much enthusiasm and activity would have arisen around these photographs.

The trick seems to have been to bring these objects to Flickr, a “major gravitational hub” that is “driven by network effects,” to borrow terms from Lorcan Dempsey. The willingness of LC , no slouch itself when it comes to gravitational hubs, to open up a dialog with a very different kind of hub, is heartening — less for the new exposure it can bring to the vast collections of august institutions (though that’s always valuable) than for the dynamic friction that is bound to arise from the commingling of authority and the crowd.

Though the immediate impulse is to breathe a vast sigh of relief that Mrs. Belmont has been released from the gloomy dungeon of LC’s sterile, unchanging gallery and is now facing a new public on Flickr, I suspect the ultimate value of such liberation will be renewed appreciation for the thin skein of metadata so laboriously pieced together by specialists over the years that can now be embroidered, tested, interrogated. From what little I now know of Alva, I think she would value the old standards, even while pushing for new ways of living.

With some notable exceptions, the willingness of English Departments to seriously engage with current communication technology has advanced “one funeral at a time,” to quote one voice in the wilderness. Denial, nostalgia, tenure pressure: all part of the tweedy sluggishness. Meantime the hungry sheep look up and are not fed.

But I’ve found a video that stirs hope — at least for the Rutgers English Department. In it Richard Miller, its chair, posits that training students to express themselves in the communication channels they actually inhabit should be a core concern of English Departments.

Because we live in a read-write world, it is essential that the English Department provide training to our students about how to live in this world. This is a world which has radically defined what authority means, what expertise means, and how you define labor.

Exactly, and how refreshing to hear an authoritative voice engaging with a Board of Governors in this clear, simple, true way.

Miller’s video pitch defensively emphasizes the traditional publication prowess of Rutgers faculty, and it announces the advent of Web 2.0 as if to Rip Van Winkel. But then the video warms up to its convictions–or at least mine….

When professors of English start thinking like this, can Spring be far behind?

From its earliest days, the promise of the Semantic Web has been to bring networked computers closer to the forms and priorities of human inquiry. This promise depends on mark-up language that gives data some structure, and frameworks that bring such structure into recognizable relationships. As a May 2001 Scientific American piece by Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues put it, “for the semantic web to function, computers must have access to structured collections of information and sets of inference rules that they can use to conduct automated reasoning.”

Automated reasoning! This dream may be coming to life in e-science, with its highly structured and interoperable datasets, but in many other contexts the idea of a Semantic Web sits uneasily with the younger and more popular kid on the block, the Participatory Web. Web 2.0 environments amasses a lot of data and, more importantly, a lot of information about this data generated by humans downright impervious to the need of machines for identifiable and consistent structure. Such tags are generally free-form, non-hierarchical, not expressing relationships in a predictable and consistent way; they dance to “folksonomy” not “taxonomy”; they are blithely untethered to “ontologies,” to any URI-based language standards.

Nevertheless there is intriguing thought out there about the potential interplay of the Semantic Web and Web 2.0. The Tagcommons sites lays out Use Cases that envision sharing tags across databases, and sketches out some functional requirements to make that interoperability happen. Tom Gruber, in particular, has argued energetically for “collective intelligence systems” built from syntheses of structured data and social software; his travel-review site RealTravel uses a “snap-to-grid” model to disambiguate and structure user-supplied tags.

And now in Yahoo! Research Berkeley labs, algorithms are starting to take into account aggregate patterns in order to sift out meaning from vast oceans of community-generated tags despite all their unstructured messiness — or, as computer scientists like to say, despite all their “noise.” It’s a matter of inference and cluster analysis. Case in point: the photo-sharing site Flickr’s new experiments in extracting “practical information about the world” from the snapshots and tags poured into it by the great unwashed. The report “How flickr helps us make sense of the world: context and content in community-contributed media collections,” describes a layered process of tag and image analysis–one that can be conducted entirely by machines–that identifies representational tags as well as place and event semantics.

What does all this do for us? For one thing, it can improve a search through piles of community-contributed materials; my search for “Harlem” stands a better chance of coming up with the most representative picture of the neighborhood, or a set of iteratively varied views of the neighborhood, or even a conglomeration of views for a composite view. I could determine the most visited place in the neighborhood, or the scenes of important events. Yahoo!’s researchers are even thinking about automatic tagging of photos, or suggestions for tags, that are generated by visual content abetted by contextual and geographical cues.

Here are a couple of spins of Yahoo! Labs’ TagMaps:

^ TagMap’s World Browser analyzes Flickr tags to locate “Harlem” on a map and offer a set of representative photos (on the right). Harlem seems pushed to the west, and the chicken picture is a little odd, but this machine-generated guess seems viable enough.

^ A search for ‘Paris’ in TagMap’s World Browser whisks us to a city in the middle of France, not Texas, and avoids any pictures of over-photographed heiresses. See: machines have taste too.

Teasing meaning out of cacophony, evaluating ‘where what & when’ through dumb processing of inconsistent human traces: it’s not hard to sense an artificial intelligence awakening here with its own priorities, despite the human decision (conscious or not) to ignore machine-oriented information conventions. What is the ultimate effect of algorithms trained to crunch through the idiosyncratic and identify the representational? Could such aggregate processing of unstructured data fuel a general regression to the mean, as alchemist Jonah Bossewitch muses? As a Trekkie (or is it Trekker?) might say, streaming into yet another convention, resistance is futile.

The fear of human conglomeration coming into sudden sentience is nothing new, of course. I just re-read Frankenstein with a set of fresh young readers, and alarmist correlations of that good old story to a improbably persistent, flexible, and collective-mashed form of AI doubtlessly come too easily to me now. But I do sometimes wonder whether we too will wake up from our most logocentric tagging idylls to sense senseless and unblinking eyes, watching us in the dark and hungry for more.

It’s taken long enough, but Clayfox has shaken off summer dreams to engage with a little edu-distopia, 2007-style.

Michael L. Wesch, the Kansas State University anthropology prof who brought the YouTube-fueled world a much-referenced little primer on Web 2.0 some time back, has had his students produce a new video, this one a decidedly grim picture of the college classroom grandly titled A Vision of Students Today. The jaunty electronica is back (CC-friendly Tryad), but this time it’s frosting a world of disjunction and guilt.

Behold sallow college students flashing sign after sign of disengagement with an scene of education that may as well be some boring corner of the moon — blandly self-absorbed, at any rate, in creaky rhythms and technologies and communication patterns dating from 1840-something, tagged as Death-in-Life by Marshall McLuhan forty years back already & still death-in-living.

They’re ignored and distracted, these laptop-toting prisoners of the Havisham lecture hall; they’re indebted, claustrophobic, self-loathing, and lazy. Their lives are being drained away by Facebook twittering, while off in the lectern distance some dork scratches at a chalkboard and impervious-anyway book spines sit uncracked. And oh, the fluorescence, the fluorescence…

Tragic, no? I’m struck by the ways our young victims express and don’t express themselves in this YouTube cri de coeur. It’s a Vision of Students Today that’s clearly filtered through Alienation, Adolescent 101; one suspects that Catcher in the Rye is a rare one of the eight books these kids have managed to find time to read (or not…). Did you glimpse that Google Doc, that hub, presumably, for planning the video? “200 students made 367 edits to this document.” Collective expression in action! And… action!

And yet we hear no voices. Instead, here’s the tour of a sterile wilderness of signs–some scrawled on furniture, several displayed by kids fixing the camera with a a look of bale. Sometimes a sign is two-sided; it says one thing, then their holder flips it over to counter or complicate. One turn of the screw. But that’s as deep as it gets: the flipped succession of surface statements.

I’m sure these students recognized themselves as doing something provocative, challenging norms, goading the world to rethink the process of college education . It’s a start, but just a start, a register of sad: using collaborative communication to hunker down in oversized sweatshirts behind a slogans that say, with variation: We don’t get you (flip over) you don’t get us.

Let’s hope that the next YouTube sensation from Wesch — who clearly knows how to make ‘em — shows students in a more active mode, trusting themselves with a subject beyond disfunction.

Clayfox has never been deluged with comments, despite some provocatively insouciant — if not downright ignorant — claims. It’s a quiet place, this blog, offering arcane pondering that trips barely a ripple in the chat-o-sphere. But let’s consider quality as an inverse of quantity. Indeed, I’ve been honored to net responses from a few mindful colleagues, nostalgic friends, quizzical strangers, and producers of a couple of the projects touched on here — reacting to or extending my quick generalizations.

Spam has been kept largely at bay by the popular Wordpress plugin Spam Karma 2. Dr. Dave gets fooled once in a great while — I too was an early sucker for those “I love your blog!” Trojan insincerities — but on the whole, he’s been a valiant defender against relentless bots, and commentary has been a quiet and easily managed thing here.

So why change what ain’t broke? Walking home, listening to a Digital Campus podcast (another fine offering from George Mason’s CHNM, oft-mentioned here), I heard about a little validation program that is such clever good citizenship, I had to install it: reCAPTCHA.

You’ve doubtless already proven to a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) that you’re a human being, not a computer bot, while submitting a comment or voting in a poll or registering for something online. CAPTCHAs are those funny distorted words that you’re asked to type out, using powers of discernment that extend beyond an optical character recognition (OCR) program.

reCAPTCHA’s twist is that it uses actual ‘rejects’ from OCR processing — image patches of text that OCR software isn’t sure what to make of during digitization — and works these mystery patches into the validation process. It is up to you, flesh and blood, to recognize the distorted word and type it back. When you ’solve’ a reCAPTCHA to post a comment, say, you’re also contributing human brainpower to the digitization of a book in the Internet Archive . The reCAPTCHA motto conveys the doubleplay: “Stop Spam. Read Books.”

This is just a picture. For a true reCAPTCHA experience, you’ll have to post a comment.

You might wonder how much effect your little ’solution’ has in the scheme of things. reCAPTCHA claims that 60 million CAPTCHAs are daily solved: that’s a lot of blurry text getting cleared up, a steady current of human recognition. You may also wonder how reCAPTCHA determines that your submitted solution is correct. The key is delivering two words to you to ’solve’ at once: a word for which the answer is known, and a word that can’t be determined by OCR. If you correctly solve the ‘known’ word, reCAPTCHA has more confidence in your solution of the mystery word, and compares your solution to other presumed correct solutions of the word.

So that’s what you’re doing, should you favor Clayfox with a comment going forward: proving your human identity while hastening along the migration from print. Oh, and you’ll be registering — at least here — what you thought.

Virginia Tech’s Center for Digital Discourse and Culture recently debuted The April 16 Archive, with some help from the prolific Center for History and New Media at George Mason,

…in order to support ongoing efforts of historians and archivists to preserve the record of this event by collecting first-hand accounts, on-scene images, blog postings, and podcasts.

It’s worth keeping an eye on this project as a model of user contributions, clustered around a contemporary and tragic event. How do we use new media to process such things? What does it enable us to capture and collect and learn?

So far the April 16 Archive is fairly bare-bones; it only accepts ‘images,’ ’stories,’ and the vaguely termed ‘other files’. And as of now it’s impossible to search, hard to browse. There is some tagging, but the lumped-up organization makes you wish for some other ways in to the content–perhaps a map interface along the lines of the CHMN’s last tragedy-archive, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. A simple uploading interface provides a cut-and-paste field for Virgina Tech stories, or an upload field for files (maximum 5 MB). You can choose to just contribute to the archive, or to have your contribution appear on the website (with or without your name). Submitters are told that they retain copyrights to anything they contribute, which broadly bans use for any public purpose without the permission of the April 16 Archive and the original contributor. No CC options here.

The April 16 Archive FAQs take on the question of veracity: How do I know that the content of the April 16 Archive is factual? The answer here:

Every submission to the April 16 Archive–even those that are erroneous, misleading, or dubious–contributes in some way to the historical record. A misleading individual account, for example, could reveal certain personal and emotional aspects of the event that would otherwise be lost in a strict authentication and appraisal process.

Besides, this FAQ rather blithely continues,

…the April 16 Archive harvests metadata from every contributor–including name, email address, location, zip code, gender, age, occupation, date received–and suggests that these metadata be examined in relation to one another, in relation to the content of the submission, and in relation to other authenticated records. Sound research technique is the basis of sound scholarship.

After picking my way around the Archive for a little while, I’m struck by the number of images of Second Life memorials. I just don’t know what to think of such screen grabs. Collective therapy, sure – but an historical record of this tragedy? You tell me.

The web is spinning ever-faster, shards of content are scattering every which way, RSS and podcast feeds radiate in all directions, each new day brings new ways of grabbing & saving & sharing digital bits shorn of context.

It can seem so… centrifugal. Now that web content has slopped out all over the place, churning and reprocessing itself in a puppydog frenzy to deliver customized services, we might take a nostalgic moment to recall when “webmasters” published “pages” that we “surfed.” Somehow, while you were downloading that mp3, emailing your baby pics to all and sundry, setting up your personalized sports news alerts, punching up maps in your car — the very notion of a website became quaint.

To defenders of edifices and books and beautiful places, the 2.0 web world might seem a wilderness of fleeting, fractured signification: a million ephemeral pokes. Of course the web is still designed, even triumphantly, but that architecture is more likely to be in the form of submerged code — design that delivers a teeming, unfixed front end, the on-the-fly, just-in-time, gotta-go whimsies of what I want at the moment.

Two ways of plucking at the web at will — as if it were a lo-fat all-you-can-eat banquet — crossed my path lately. The first, Clipmarks (”Just the best parts of the page”), offers a browser-integrated clipping tool that will grab words, paragraphs, selected images, even video posted on YouTube & its ilk. The Clipmarks demo says it all, and will only detain you for 49 seconds:

The Clipmarks Vision celebrates reach-for-scissors epiphanies, “moments that snap people out of a day dream.” A Bartlett’s Familiar Quotes dream, that is:

Think about when John Kennedy said “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” That line was part of a much longer speech. Imagine if instead of being able to clip that line from the speech, people were forced to listen to the entire speech every time.

Now imagine if that was a web page. What if you were forced to bookmark the entire page, but you really wanted to clip the part that mattered most. How many people would have the time or attention span for the whole thing?

We believe that information is easier and more enjoyable to digest in small portions. Kind of like movie trailers, sushi and cliff notes.

Armed with virtual scissors, web readers are less passive, less hostage to what someone else packaged, less hostage to the ‘writerly,’ as Barthes might suggest from the grave. But is improved appropriation of web content leading to a world of Cliff Notes movie trailers with the shelf life of sushi? Or, more portentously, “obnoxious, mean-spirited dialogue” conducted by anonymous clippers, fueled by uncertainly sourced and possibly stolen material?

Fortunately not every such tool is so blithely delivered into the Whatever Zone. The second grab-it tool coming across the transom recently is more purposeful in emphasis: MediaMatrix, developed at Michigan State University.

In an informative video introducing MediaMaker (a video that, ironically, can’t be easily embedded inline here), we see similarities to Clipmarks: server-side application, browser integration, links-driven. The difference here is that clipped objects load into an editor that encourages annotation, resizing, cropping, notes association, and metadata assignment. Streaming audio and video can be segmented without actually being copied or downloaded — through clever use of just URLs and text parameters. This is sophisticated, task-oriented clipping of media that Clipmarks can only dream about (at 3 a.m., drooling into its Cliffnotes).

With the exception of text, which can be custom-selected, Clipmarks grabs elements in the form that they have been fixed on a webpage (the image, the video, the song as is). MediaMatrix, on the other hand, lets you edit those elements for yourself: it lets you create out of what you collect, even as it encourages responsible tracking and attribution through “metadata skins” that appear during the annotation process.

A clipped sound file is edited on MediaMatrix

MediaMatrix encourages metadata application

But what then happens to your MediaMatrix clip-derived creations? Well, they hang like fruit on an individual’s “tree”…

Clipped and edited assets hang on a MediaMatrix tree

…and await plucking into essay/presentation spaces:

A MediaMatrix workspace, where one prepares presentations or multimedia essays

It’s here, oddly, where MediaMatrix starts to feel outpaced by the bubbleheaded Clipmarks. We’ve had recent occasion to think about centralized versus distributed models of publication; here we have a comparison that exemplifies the dichotomy. MediaMatrix imagines that you will collect and analyze the assets you’ve plucked out of various contexts within a rather gloomy, solitary, pre-formulated workspace. It’s a one-way ride: bits and pieces come out of the web and get imprisoned in “my portal”; if you want to work with them, you have to use MediaMatrix editing tools in a MediaMatrix environment. To publish your work, the best you can do is send out a URL that draws right back to MediaMatrix. What happens in MediaMatrix stays in MediaMatrix.

Clipmarks, in the other hand, cheerfully offers you any number of ways to fling your clipped treasures in any direction. You can save them on their site (and share them with fellow clippers, tossing them up into the communal winds to see what happens — sociability entirely lost on MediaMatrix), or you can push them to your email client, your printer, even your blog (a connection that was fairly easy for me to configure).

Where do you want it? Clipmarks sends your selection any which way.

Clipmarks frankly doesn’t care much about what happens to what you’ve clipped — leaving options for you if you do. Route your purloined selections of web content to the publication platform of your choice, private or public, online or off.

While we’re waiting for perfect digital object recontextualization engine, one that mashes up Clipmarks’s flexible and social publication with MediaMatrix’s editing power, analytic focus, and sense of responsibility, we might think about how to emphasize new wholes out of digital fragmentation. When “the torch has been passed to a new generation,” it will have to know about how to create connections with virtual splinters; “divided there is little we can do.” It is with an exhortative spirit that I clip here the whole Kennedy inauguration address, grabbed in two pieces from YouTube:

A little while ago, the semi-ubiquitous learning management system Blackboard announced it was going 2.0 – in its own proprietary fashion. Lumped under the name BeyondInitiative are a series of properties that are designed to connect users worldwide, across education segments and disciplines, and thus leverage the wisdom of the community for teaching and learning.

The first of these properties launched as Scholar.com. It’s built into the basic Blackboard LMS package, and allows for tagging and RSS feed subscription. Course tags are automatically generated for students enrolled in a given course.

But, of course, this worldwide tagging, subscribing, collecting takes place within the world of the Blackboard Learning System(TM):

HOW DO I CREATE MY OWN COLLECTIONS? To create your own bookmark collections, you need a Blackboard Scholar(TM) account. Only users of the Blackboard Learning System(TM) (including former WebCT Vista and CE products) can create an account, and you do so through your Blackboard course or by clicking the Scholar tab within Blackboard if your institution has it enabled.

As an IT manager at a school not hooked into Blackboard World complains, “it seems social in the way that lunch table with the cheerleaders was back in high school - I didn’t get to join that clique either.” Then again, what if your social world were limited to cheerleaders — or any one type of population, however spirited & fascinating?

Even if you’re happy discovering and sharing resources within the horizon of this LMS, what happens to your collections when you’re no longer a Blackboard customer – that is, connected to your participating institution? Limit social software to affiliates of Blackboard institutions, and you may get nothing but a big dying outdoor plant starved for light.

***

Christian Dalsgaard’s Social software: E-learning beyond learning management systems represents a wholly opposite approach, one that argues in an earnest, Danish way for ditching the LMS altogether in favor of an open world of social software. Committed whole-hog to a social constructivist view of learning, Dalsgaard argues that

Students’ self-governed and problem-solving activities are considered the focal point of a learning process. This conception of a learning process means that it is not possible to structure or pre-determine the students’ activities in a learning process – the activities must develop on the basis of the student’s own problem-solving.

This means, in practice, passing out a lot of personal tools to students that they can use to build social networks on their own. Gone are standalone silos, built course by course, delivering assignments and swallowing submissions; taking their place is a frenzy of networking:

1. networks between people working collaboratively
2. networks between people sharing a context, and
3. networks between people sharing a field of interest

As a student swimming in such open networks, I set up my social bookmarking tool, or blog, or wiki, or RSS reader, to subscribe and affiliate, depending on the courses I’m taking, the groups I’m working with, the field I’m tracking. It seems such a Scandinavian claim, somehow:

It is important to stress that the argument for using separate tools instead of an integrated system is a pedagogical argument. The argument is that the learning activities of students cannot be structured or pre-determined. Choice of a variety of tools will better support the required flexibility of open-ended activities than any one integrated system.

The Small Pieces Loosely Joined approach certainly has its appeal. And yet in the debate between centralized and decentralized learning, there are plenty of reasons to sit on that proverbial fence and wonder. Some various questions occurring to me as I ponder the wisdom of leaping into the self-organized learning camp:

• Do students really want to erode class walls? Is that inviting distraction and incoherence into their lives? I mean, imagine using some kind of university-supplied dashboard to subscribe to 45 different feeds, push blog entries into several different contexts, manage 3 group projects, and maintain a personal profile that will get you into all the right parties. I know it’s fashionable to maintain that this NetGen lives effortlessly and shamelessly online — but might even NetGeners approach classrooms as a place of concentration and respite? Do we owe them a break from constant identity-defining affiliation? And by insisting on a sink-or 2.0 environment, do we alienate those whose background for one reason or another hasn’t led them into active participation in online networks ?
• If learning is an affiliations and subscription-based, individualized, pull-push business, how do we track or promote a community of use around a certain resource? Let’s say we are building a learning object repository of some kind — one designed to push its riches out into distributed arenas, where they will then be transformed and discussed by independently affiliated groups. Without some sophisticated tracking back, discourse around those objects — indeed, the whole sense of their use — will get scattered to the winds. Put it this way: does social affiliation come at the cost of object- or subject-based discovery? Will the next person to look at that object have any idea of the ways it’s been contextualized somewhere out there, by groups unaffiliated to him?
• Is it best, sometimes, to enter a learning resource through a front door like anyone else, wide-open to what may be found? Dalsgaard speaks approvingly of the creation of individual profiles that would then shape your searches, “narrow down” what you stumble upon. But such channeled searching may encourage premature hardening of the arteries: college is precisely the time to play with your “profile” in ways you can’t predict. It would be a shame if your immature preferences limited your horizon. And how attentive would a ‘distributive’ university be about proffering effective advice about preference settings?
• Is it right to dump the messy dilemmas of open access and permissions creations into students’ laps? Just because faculty does an abysmal job, on the whole, of raising awareness and defining good academic practice in this area — it seems unfair, somehow, to make students make all the decisions for themselves, at the age of 18, about what stays private and what circulates. Of course, this is a free country — sort of — and kids make MySpace/Facebook/whatever decisions along these lines on their own. But academic work is another matter: rightly or wrongly, among students there is a deeper sense of revelation, often, about serious work than about drunken pictures. Academic work is often graded on an individual basis, and that only complicates the decisions about what gets published to whom. Those evaluating instructors, seems to me, have a responsibility to weigh in–and perhaps even enforce a standard.

If I were Sophie making a choice, I’d of course toss Blackboard & its ersatz social software away, and take my chances in a distributed world. But let’s hope for third ways, options that promote student-directed learning and university-cultivated resources all at once.

It’s a trainwreck, of course, but I can’t look away: Penguin Books and a creative writing program in Leicester have launched “A Million Penguins”: a crowd-sourced wikinovel.

Don’t worry, you know it’s a real wiki because all the usual Wikipedia pieces are in place, including the good old Mediawiki environment & some ethical guidelines evocative of the Neutral Point of View (TM): “Please be respectful of issues of decency and legality on matters of sexually explicit language, and potentially controversial areas such as race, gender and sexuality. Be polite.” Now there’s a recipe for great art!

As you might expect, chapters written so far are as squirming and oblivious of each other as a gaggle of hungry babies. The most entertaining thing about them may be their content-free structure-fetish, somewhat reminiscent of David Foster Wallace. For example, here’s “Chapter 8 1/2,” which currently begins: ‘”Did you know Fellini,” he asked. She couldn’t answer.”‘

“Meanwhile” is a popular word in these environs. Hard-core lurchers are sprouting alternative versions of the novel, providing alternatives to alternation.

The flurry of hypertext novels in the ’90s never amounted to much, it seemed to me, and this 2.0 sequel doesn’t seem likely to renew the genre. “A Million Penguins” does contain one gripping, downright chilling passage, though: the Terms and Conditions. It’s not editable.