Every once in a while, you read an article where the author seems to be able to read your mind and anticipate your every reaction. Brian Lamb’s EDUCAUSE piece on wikis is one of those articles. I’ve never been all that interested in wikis; they just don’t seem like they should work (even though I’m aware of examples where they do, like the Wikipedia). But Brian answered my every objection in a thoughtful, thorough, and honest way.
I may just have to try these thingamabobs.
I’m going to do something I normally don’t like to do an echo blog this. Stephen Downes’ piece on educational blogging in EDUCAUSE is currently the definitive piece on blogging in education. Well worth the read whether you are a newbie or a veteran. I don’t really have anything of use to add here; Stephen pretty much covers it all.
Stephen Downes’ mention of my article on informational cascades (thanks for the plug, Stephen) led me to his post in the trdev discussion group. He writes:
In network theory, ‘groupthink’ is an instance of what is known as a cascade phenomenon. A cascade occurs (all other things being equal) when the propogation of a property (an idea, a software acquisition, a disease) exceeds 1 – that is, each instance of the phenomenon replicates on average at least one time. It is important to note that the political organization of the group is irrelevant – that’s why mixing ideology with the study of groups can be dangerous.
Classic examples of this principle include stock market bubbles, ranging from the tulip mania that swept through Holland in the 1630s to the Tech Bubble we just experienced to the widespread adoption of email to the influenza epidemic of 1919.
While Stephen is correct to point out the interest that network researchers have in cascades, and while some network researchers are interested in informational cascades in particular (for example, Duncan Watts has a small section on them in Six Degrees), it may be worthwhile to point out that informational cascades come from a different intellectual lineage.
For many decades now, economics has been dominated by the “rational choice” model of human behavior. This basically says that, when making a decision, humans look at how likely it is that that a given option will produce the desired outcome and the expected utility of that outcome. People (according to the model) choose the option that is most likely to produce the best outcome.
Except there are lots of cases where people clearly don’t perform these calculations as the rules of logic and statistics would require. They are doing some kind of calculations, but not exactly the ones that we would expect from the rational choice model. So a school of thought has developed within economics and psychonology that suggests that humans use mental shortcuts to make approximations of those utility calculations. Often those shortcuts will lead to a “good enough” answer with much less time and mental effort, but occasionally they lead people astray. This model, called the “bounded rationality” model, is the heritage from which informational cascade theory comes. Listening to the advice of trusted friends and colleagues is one of those short cuts, and it is the essential mechanism that leads to informational cascades. (A whole list of these shortcuts is being researched in the field of psychology called “heuristics and biases.” There’s also a rich literature on it within behavioral economics.)
At any rate, what’s interesting is that informational cascades happen to map so well to network theory despite the fact that they come from a totally different research thread. In my view, one of the more fertile and interesting ways to start figuring out what kinds of wild and whacky things can happen in online knowledge sharing is to overlay heuristics and biases theory on top of network theory.
If you liked my article on informational cascades then you will probably want to read Cass Sunstein’s Why Societies Need Dissent. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, writes in detail about the impact of informational cascades on democratic dialogue, the rulings of panels of judges, and other critical areas related to civil discourse. He also writes about their counterpart, reputational cascades (where people go along to get along) and about polarization effects (where people talking to like-minded people tend to come out more extreme in their positions than when they started the conversation). As a bonus, the end notes are just chock full of great references. Its the kind of book where you spend half your time jumping back and forth between the main text and the notes because you just want to know where he’s coming up with this stuff.
This is a very important book, in my view. Oddly, it doesn’t read quite as compellingly as it ought to (possibly because it is taken from a series of guest lectures at a law school) but it’s not a terrible read by any stretch of the imagination. It just needs a few good stories to spice it up a bit. At any rate, the content is incredibly informative, and even if it doesn’t quite read like The da Vinci Code, it’s a page turner in its own way.
My new article just came out in eLearn. It started out wanting to be about “emergent learning” but, once I realized that I still have no idea what emergent learning actually is, I removed all references to it in the article. At any rate, I feel pretty good about the piece.
The question will arise whether the arguments I make contradict optimistic pieces like this Cialdini article in HBS Working Knowledge that has been making the rounds on elearning blogs lately.
Nope. Not at all.
You can believe that properly functioning groups can arrive at better judgments than their smartest individual participants and still believe that problems such as informational cascades can derail performance. That’s why studying these problems is so important; we can learn the weaknesses of group processes and shore them up to produce more reliably positive results. Ain’t science grand?
Please feel free to use the comments section on this post to add your thoughts and feedback regarding the article.
Update: If you came here from Stephen Downes’ Online Daily post, then you were probably looking for my article on informational cascades, which you can find here.
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Last night I posted a longish comment to the OpenACS discussion boards. (OpenACS is the Open Source toolkit upon which the dotLRN course management system is based.) OpenACS, with it’s heritage as a system originally designed by Philip Greenspun to support the Photo.net knowledge-sharing community, has one of the best discussion board implementations I’ve seen. The development community keeps the big picture simple and focuses on small but usability-enhancing features.
Well, they’ve done it again. In the process of posting, I discovered a (relatively?) new feature in the current version that I absolutely love. One of the problems with a discussion board (or blog) that supports email (or RSS) is HTML support. On a web page, there’s no reason not to support hyperlinks in posts. But many people turn off HTML in their email clients for security reasons, and escaping into HTML within an RSS feed is somewhat controversial and problematic. So how do you provide hyperlink support that degrades gracefully for non-browser clients?
What OpenACS does is it scans your post for hyperlinks, removes those links, replaces them with footnote markers, and writes out the URLs in footnotes at the bottom of the post. On the web page, these URLs a clickable hyperlinks. But in an email message or RSS feed where the user can’t or won’t receive HTML, they still get the URLs exposed.
Brilliant. This should be a plug-in for every blog package out there. I would gladly give up escaping into HTML within my RSS feeds if I could only find a way to send the hyperlinks without a whole lot of extra manual work on each post.
As an aside, I highly recommend looking at dotLRN as an alternative for a CMS. It’s a bit quirky, particularly in its choice of core technologies (AOLServer, Tcl, and PostgreSQL), but in certain aspects it is far ahead of every other CMS (Open Source or not) out there.
I almost appended this as a comment to a previous post, but I decided it was important enough to elevate to the top level. I received this email from a person who wishes to remain anonymous but who has at least some first-hand knowledge of OKI:
I didn’t want to publicly disparage the OKI project but privately I have severe doubts at its role in edu software development. I can’t think of any comparable edu project to OKI in terms of hype and funding.
Sakai is using some of the OKI OSIDs but they also acknowledge that they need to go far and beyond OKI and have thus created their own set of Sakai APIs. Furthermore, as you alluded to in your post, this is not lightweight development at all. My biggest fear about all of these recent Mellon-funded edu tech projects is the immense barrier to entry because of the development difficulty. I fear that only the elite, the MITs, UMiches, Stanfords, will be able to contribute and play in this field.
This strikes me as a very serious concern. In our quest for technical standards of interoperability, are we losing sight of loose coupling? Are we trying to over-engineer something that perhaps would work best through organic growth?
