Category: From the Editors

I just spent the afternoon editing e-Literate’s site theme organization. There are a number of reasons why I felt this was necessary:

• Too many posts were going into too many themes. While I deliberately chose to create a system of overlapping themes rather than a rigid taxonomy, an organization system starts to lose its value when more than half of the things being organized fit into many categories. I wanted to reduce the overlap somewhat.
• I often wasn’t sure which categories to use for a post. There were two reasons for this. One was that I needed to add a few new categories. But the other was that some of the categories I had didn’t fit quite right. For example, as much as I love Amy Gahran’s “Arranging Ideas” angle on KM, it’s a bit too…painterly for the way my own mind works. I don’t come at KM from a writer’s perspective the way that she does. So I had to change a couple of category names to make the boundaries clearer to myself.
• The posts listed under each theme didn’t seem to cohere well. Posts in a theme should ideally read something like a sequence of reusable learning objects, in the sense that there should be some feeling of common threads even though the individual posts were not written to be read in that explicit sequence. I didn’t have that sense of coherence when I went to the site themes page.
• Not all theme titles were helping readers to find content. Some theme topics, like “instructional design,” were getting lots of hits from the search engines (which pay special attention to words that are written as titles on the top of your pages). Much as I like the title “Aggregation Sciences,” nobody is entering that phrase as a search term on Google. So I tried to add more searchable phrases into at least the majority of the titles.

After reviewing the categorization of all 154 (!) of my blog entries, I feel a lot better about the organization now. And actually, I’m quite proud of an accomplishment that I didn’t even realize until I reorganized my categories. I created a new theme called “Build This, Please” which highlights my ideas for tools that I don’t have the skill to build myself. Despite the fact that e-Literate is only a little over three months old, I have actually had technologists respond to a surprisingly large number of my requests/proposals. That feels good.

As it turns out, the mailing list manager in Expression Engine (the blog tool that runs this web site) doesn’t support daily email digests. So I’m switching the mailing list over to Bloglet. I’ll let you know how it goes.

In order to help with the book selling thing, I have created a new site theme called Books I Like.

Since I seem to be sending a lot of business in Amazon.com’s direction with all of my book recommendations, I figured it’s only fair to ask them to cut me in. So I’ve become an Amazon Associate. All that means is that when you go to Amazon from a book link on e-Literate and end up buying the book, I get a small commission. I won’t be taking any trips to Tahiti on the profits, but it will hopefully help pay my hosting fees and possibly pay for a few more books for me to read and review.

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.

I’m going to try turning comments on for the next couple of posts. If there are no problems with spammers then I’ll go back and retroactively turn them on for all previous posts as well as enabling them for future posts. You’ll have to register with the site (sorry, but I really don’t want to give spammers any opening) but I promise to never share your registration info with anyone or flood your inbox with spam of my own.

Keep your fingers virtually crossed.

It’s been bothering me that the only category on my site where I can put these posts about emergence is “Blogo-eroticism and Other Hype.” Since I intend to get past all this back and forth about what emergence isn’t (as quickly as possible) and start posting on what it is and how I think it could be valuable, I need a place to put those posts.

But for me, emergence is only one piece of a larger puzzle. I’ll never forget hearing financial engineering professor Andrew Lo wax poetic about what inspired him to go into his field. As a child, he had read Isaac Asimov’s science fiction classic Foundation
and became enchanted with the idea that human history, both past and future, could be explained and predicted if only one could find a rich enough mathematical model and deal with a sufficiently large number of people (to average out the quirks introduced by free will). Lo sees his research as very much infused with that idea.

I believe that emergence, network theory (popularized by Duncan Watts’ excellent book Six Degrees) and certain elements of behavioral economics together can form a basis for us to understand how learning and other forms of knowledge sharing will work differently in a networked age. So I’m collectively labeling these ideas as “aggregation sciences” and giving them their own theme on e-Literate.