Dave’s Whiteboard

Thanks to Ray Sims, I got to hear Clay Shirky speaking at a Web 2.0 expo last April. If you haven’t heard it, I found it well worth the 17 minutes. Watch for yourself, or skip to my musings below.

Shirky talks among other things about cognitive surplus — the free time created by technology. We’re at the beginning of such creation now — as he says, “we’re still in special cases.” Web 2.0 tools are sufficiently new that Shirky says they’re like the physics of weather. We know about the individual elements, we can see people doing things, but we can’t predict the results yet because the whole is so complex.

So he says it’s important to fail informatively — a great phrase. Really, it’s the closing loop in any performance system: figure out what didn’t go right, and figure out why, so you can apply that understanding in your next venture.

Shirkey offers an estimate for the total time spend bringing Wikipedia where it is today — talk pages, articles, edits, the whole shebang, in all Wikipedia languages. He and a colleague guess at 100 million hours. Good enough for analogic purposes, especially when he compares that to television watching in the U.S.: 200 billion hours a year.

In other words, the time spent watching TV in one year is the equivalent of 2,000 Wikipedias. Or, from another angle, each weekend in the U.S., we watch enough commercials to create one Wikipedia.

Obviously, most people aren’t going to do that — but as Shirkey said, more and more people are doing something. Get the emphasis clear: doing something. I have a friend who’s developed an attachment to a man who invited her to play World of Warcraft. She talks with some bemusement about her character and her adventures as a night elf.

Shirkey would point out that my friend has moved from consumption of media (watching TV) to production and sharing. She’s interacting with other people (in a virtual world). She’s actively engaging.

I’ve seen the term “mommy blog” used with derision. My notion is that the creators of mommy blogs (or cat blogs or fan blogs or my-political-solution blogs) are well aware that their creations have a limited audience. Hell, I have a blog with an audience of two (no, not this blog), and I consider it a roaring success.

Prior to personal computers and cheap or free tools, we didn’t have many options. As MCI said in mockery of its long-distance rival AT&T, back when you actually thought about long-distance charges, “For over 100 years, when you reached out to touch someone, you didn’t have a choice.”

If like me you hadn’t heard the phrase “looking for the mouse,” I encourage you to spend the 15 minutes with Shirkey.

The Neurophilosophy blog reposts a 21-minute interview with Erik Kandel, who won a Nobel Prize in 2000 for his work on learning and memory (see my comments on his book, In Search of Memory).

The original interview appears at Scienceblogs.de, a German-language cousin of Neurophilosophy. That site includes some highlights and related timecodes in German (which I can’t read).

I also found an online episode of the Charlie Rose television show, with guest host Dr. Harold Varmus (CEO of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center) interviewing Dr. Kandel. (Note: this is a one-hour program. At the link, you can download the program for iPod or PSP.)

Just a snippet from around the 21-minute mark in the Charlie Rose video, regarding short-term and long-term memory:

…the critical thing that we found…is that short-term memory involves a transient strengthening in the communication between nerve cells…

With long-term memory…the signaling systems move into the nucleus, and there they turn on genes… Genes will be altered in your brain…

Many people think that the genes are the determinants of behavior… In the brain, genes are the servants of the environment…

It was a bit surprising to me.

Anyone concerned with how learning occurs owes a great deal to Kandel, who readily acknowledges owing a great deal to the sea slug Aplysia, whose large and relatively few neurons provided the ideal subject for Kandel’s research.

I came across the Xyleme Learning blog and then their podcast series, Xyleme Voices. I’ve got a long drive today, so as I write this, I’m downloading the four items currently shown.

In case you’re interested, they include:

• Dr. Conrad Gottfredson on Learning at the Moment of Need
• Elliott Masie on Informal Learning
• Dr. Allison Rossett on Sidekick & Planner Performance Support Tools
• Bryan Chapman on Single Sourcing

Many thanks to my friend Kate Trgovac, who was at TED this year and told me about this unique presentation by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor.

One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened — as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

(About 18 minutes, 44 seconds)

Ian Delaney’s post, 25/M/S or Maybe Not, introduced me to the Lift conference (and its website, which offers recorded talks in a TED-like fashion).

The post focused on a talk by Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist working for Intel. She discusses lying online, starting with her frustration when she couldn’t remember what date of birth she’d given to Flickr — meaning that she was locked out of her own account.

That remark alone hooked me, because I often manufacture dates of birth or ZIP codes. I realize that the Washington Post online site wants to have demographics; I just don’t see why they need to have mine. (For speedy retrieval, when a store asks my phone number, I give one from a job I left seven years ago.)

Here’s Bell’s talk:

I especially enjoyed Ian Delaney’s musing about transparency and online connection:

On Twitter, you are allegedly telling the world ‘what are you doing right now?’. But I did a little search on Twitter for ‘having a wank’ (sorry, mum) and the lack of any direct matches would seem to support Bell’s contention.

Bell points out (sensibly, I think) that technology changes far faster than people do. I read lots of opinions about technology transforming how we live and work; Bell reminds us that internal transformation can take a bit longer. As she says, deception and self-deception may be necessary parts of human survival.