Thing 16: Wikis

Here's a perfect example of why each of these assignments takes many hours for me. I've been reading and thinking for nearly 4 hours and haven't gotten past the first link in the assigment!

I clicked on the link to the ALA conference wiki, and was sidetracked after the first session, David Free's "Welcome to the Twitterverse". What got me off track was a connection to Michael Gorman who is not a fan of twittering, or indeed, of what he calls "The Siren Song of the Internet".

Then I read articles that disagreed with Gorman, and even a sidebar article about personal computing in 1988. (Anyone remember having to touch metal before the keyboard, that RadioShack and Exxon made computers, and that geeks salivated over the portable Osborne 1 that weighed only 23 pounds and could be stored under an airplane seat?) All of these initial articles address misgivings I've been having about the tools of 2.0. (Research I read today shows most will skip reading the rest of this post because it is "too long".)

With RSS feeds, social networking, Technorati and tags for my photos, my personal books , my posts, and favorite sites--and now wikis and tweets--I feel overwhelmed by data. There also seems to be increased respect for and reliance on what's been called "the hive mind" and it unsettles me to think that "keeping up" could involve hours of reading the thoughts and ideas of hundreds of strangers whose credibility is unknown.

Here are some immediate events that have given me pause.

A few days ago, I made the mistake of answering yes when my computer asked if I wanted to upgrade to Internet Explorer 8. I began to have immediate problems, including the inability to cut and paste into my blog posts (I'm using FireFox to write this). I thought I'd use Technorati to find out what people are saying about the pros and cons of IE8 before I rush my machine to the tech doc to have it removed. I spent 45 minutes reading posts and comments, and was taken aback by the amount of flaming and bad language. It made me long for the integrity of Consumer Reports or the authority of Forbes favorite Slashdot.

Three weeks ago I attended an 8-day Highlights Foundation Writer's Retreat on the beautiful wooded farm of the family that founded and still publishes Highlights Magazine. We had individual cabins, gourmet meals, and unfettered writing time after a morning session from an award-winning author. There was no TV, no radio, no cell phone reception.

After the first two days of techno-withdrawal, I felt my mind settling. It was as if my thoughts, especially because of all I'm learning at 23Things, were a whirpool of thrashing waters. When they had unplugged time to calm, my thoughts cleared into a transparency that allowed me to produce 5 manuscripts! I also had slow time to re-examine the complexities of my life and the desire to simplify and find peace came to the forefront. I think that's why the following quote resonates with me:

"In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas...

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button." from "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr. (Atlantic, July/August, 2008)

I've still to read all the rest of the links on this Wiki Thing, and that will require even more thought and introspection. Somewhere deep in the links of all the articles I read this morning was a quote about the four levels of information: data, information, knowledge, wisdom. I still have much to learn about wikis, but one thing I know already, we need to teach students that an accumulation of data doesn't push us to the next step--information--any more than a plethora of information leads to knowledge.

Instead, synthesis and application must be employed before the next level can be reached. Because 500 people say "me too" in tweet responses to a statement doesn't make the statement wisdom, nor do 100 posts that supply the same incorrect data to a wiki make it knowledge. The best of conventional learning and wisdom needs to be applied to 2.0, because efficiency, accessibility, and speed do not equal merit.

POSTSCRIPT: Though he is often dismissed as a ranting Luddite, I find these considerations from Michael Gorman's various articles to be important: "Let me be clear at the outset, the Internet in particular and the digital resources available to us in general are ineluctable forces that are shaping our lives, in many ways for the better. We cannot turn away from these forces, nor should we. But we must exercise judgment, use digital resources intelligently, and import into the digital world the values that have pervaded scholarship in Western societies for many centuries.

"Human beings learn, essentially, in only two ways. They learn from experience—the oldest and earliest type of learning—and they learn from people who know more than they do. The second kind of learning comes from either personal contact with living people—teachers, gurus, etc.—or through interaction with the human record, that vast assemblage of texts, images, and symbolic representations that have come to us from the past and is being added to in the present. It is this latter way of learning that is under threat in the realm of digital resources."

At the risk of being labeled outdated, or worse, is anyone else having reservations?