e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Designing for Emergent Behaviors in Humans

    This post on a new kind of group performance art gives a good example of how emergence can work in groups of humans. Key here, again, is that the players have no clear sense of the larger emergent pattern, i.e., there is no “learning” on the part of individuals, though there may be adaptation by the group as a whole.

    How might this be useful? Imagine situations where the individuals can’t know what their counterparts are doing. The first (and scariest) example that springs to mind is al Qaida. We don’t know what their communications are like, but the typical structure of a guerilla or terrorist group is around cells that don’t know even about the existence of other cells. That protects the organization should one group get caught. The down-side, of course, is lack of the ability to coordinate. Unless, that is, you engineer in some behaviors that only require each cell to respond to simple cues from easily observable actions that other nearby cells are taking (e.g., terrorist attacks). I’m not sure what those rules would look like (and I’m not sure that I would post them on the Internet even if I did), but the idea is that emergence is a useful tool where coordinated global information sharing is not practical.

    Another more mundane example would be inside a modern large corporation or govermental agency. While global communication is often highly desireable, it rarely happens in a consistent and coordinated manner. If workers (and even workgroups and offices) follow rules that mandate behavior changes based on relatively simple and easily obtainable cues from their local environment about what their immediate neighbors within the organization are doing and experiencing, it’s possible that you can have the entire organization respond as if there were global communication and coordination.

    I realize this is all vague; I’m thinking out loud at the moment. But this idea of engineered emergence in communication-hostile environments is how I’m thinking that emergence will ultimately be a useful concept in knowledge management.

  • Emergent Popularity

    So far, my most popular post (by far) has been Emergent Learning is an Oxymoron. This post has gotten more than five times as many hits as the next most popular one. And more people keep coming to it.

    The trouble is, I have no idea what people are actually thinking about it because nobody has blogged or emailed me about it. I’m not even sure how people are continuing to find the post. (As near as I can tell from my server logs, it seems to be making the rounds in Australia via webmail.) So I’ve turned on comments for both the original post and this one. Please let me know what you’re thinking about this stuff.

  • Pattern Languages and Learning Objects

    It took me a while to find it on my shelves, but I finally dug out Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community, which is a book on applying Christopher Alexander’s ideas to software engineering. For a good chunk of this book, you could take out words like “software,” “code,” and “objects,” and substitute “courses,” “content,” and “learning objects” without too much problem.

    Here’s a good example:

    What gets in the way of software [courseware] habitability is overdesign, overabstraction, and the beautiful, taught monument of software [the Course]. Alexander calls this large lump development:

    Large lump development hinges on a view of the environment which is static and discontinuous; piecemeal growth hinges on a view of the environment which is dynamic and continuous….According to the large lump point of view, each act of design or construction is an isolated event which creates an isolated building–“perfect” at the time of its construction, and then abandoned by its builders and designers forever. According to the piecemeal point of view, every environment is changing and growing all the time, in order to keep its use in balance; and the quality of the environment is a kind of semi-stable equilibrium in the flux of time….Large lump development is based on the idea of replacement. Piecemeal growth is based on the idea of repair.

    Recall that one of the tenets of encapsulation is that the interface [content] be separate from the implementation [context] because this permits the implementation [context] to be replaced when needed.

    The problem with traditional approaches to abstraction and encapsulation is that they aim at complete information [context] hiding. This characteristic anticipates being able to eliminate programming [rewriting] from parts of the software development [instructional design] process, those parts contained within module boundaries. As we’ve seen, though, the need to program [design] is never eliminated because customization, modification, and maintenance are always required–that is, piecemeal growth.

    Good stuff!

  • Let's All Live In Jay's House

    I’m insanely jealous. It turns out that Jay Cross lives in a house built by the great architect Christopher Alexander. I’m a huge fan of Alexander’s work. Furthermore, I think anyone who does instructional design should read Alexander’s book. No, I don’t mean The Nature of Order, which is the book that Jay is apparently reading now; I haven’t read that one yet (though I intend to). I mean A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction.

    To begin with, if ever there was a book that prefigured hypertext, this is it. Written in 1977, it is a honeycomb of short, cross-referenced entries. You can’t really read it cover-to-cover; instead, you browse. You scan. You jump around. You…surf.

    But the real value is in the way Alexander changes your thinking about design. In stark contrast to the whole idea of architect as designer and architecture as engineering, Alexander sees the architect as an ecologist and architectural design as the product of natural selection. He points to the distinctive qualities of old buildings throughout the world that have stood for hundreds or thousands of years while other buildings around them were torn down. What qualities do they have in common? What features can we deduce as natural, as creating a pleasurable and healthy living environment? What remains useful to people generation after generation? And what remains beautiful? What are the patterns that emerge?

    Then notice how these things fit together. Certain patterns will fit together nicely while others will not. There is a grammar for stringing together architectural elements, Alexander argues. A natural language. A pattern language. If you surf his book and see the pictures, I’ll bet money that you’ll become convinced he’s right. I did.

    We should be thinking about our instructional design, our information architecture, and our software user interfaces in the same ways. Despite the newness of computers, there are going to emerge more or less natural ways of interacting with it. The only way to find out what the more natural ways are is to let people build their own systems, move the furniture around, tear things down, and start over again. That’s hard to do with software, though HTML makes it somewhat easier by lowering the knowledge requirements. (Hypercard was probably the first step in this direction.) Likewise, we need course management systems that are highly configurable, allowing instructors to experiment with plugging in new pieces and arranging them in different ways. And above all, we need a pattern language for learning objects.

    Perhaps this sounds like a stretch. If so, then it’s not the furthest stretch that anyone has made with Alexander’s work. Software engineers have taken to pattern languages big-time.

  • Decentralized Intelligence – What Toyota can teach the 9/11 commission about intelligence gathering.

    This piece on Slate by Duncan Watts (author of the outstanding book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age) captures both the Nirvana of decentralized intelligence that everybody seeks and its frustrating elusiveness. It’s a must-read for anybody interested in “emergent learning” or social learning or communities of practice or…you know…that stuff.

    Watts is a sociologist and an expert in the theory of networks, i.e., how that whole “six degrees of separation” thing happens. If you take that and add in a dash of distributed cognition, then you get something very close to the idea that everybody is sniffing around. It’s not emergence, but who cares? A rose by any other name smells as sweet.

    Now. If we can only figure out how to actually make it work….

  • SAP Design Guild — Dissolving Boundaries with Distributed Cognition and xApps

    Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks that distributed cognition is a good fit with workflow and workflow learning; SAP is pushing it too. This article doesn’t contain a whole lot of info beyond what was in the Dickelman and Greenberg piece I cited earlier, but it’s interesting to see a vendor talking this up.

  • More on RSS, the Power Law, and Blogger Sites

    Reader Alan Levine (of MLX and cogdogblog fame) writes in with this tip regarding Blogger sites with no visible syndication links:

    I commented to James, but all of the Blogger.com sites, e.g. http://yanknowwhat.blogspot.com actually have fully functional RSS feeds- the problem is that the default templates do not have the link- you can easily access the feed yourself by tacking “atom.xml” on the end:

    http://yanknowwhat.blogspot.com/atom.xml

    Oddly, Blogger does not provide RSS feeds; only Atom. Sadly, my RSS reader (NetNewsWire) doesn’t support Atom feeds yet. (C’mon, Brent, get that Version 2.0 out already…please?!)