The Pacific

Tag Clouds

I have now been publishing The Pacific for one year. To celebrate I decided to feed the entire year’s worth of posts into a dandy piece of software that creates a visual image of words used with those used most frequently expressed in larger and bolder type. So, for those of you who want to know what The Pacific is all about, here’s a snapshot of year one:

For those of you who want to create your own tag clouds, I recommend Tag Crowd. It’s quick and easy to use. Just remember to create a list of words to ignore or you will end up with some pretty strange looking clouds.

My fave five - or six

Last week my friend and colleague Chrystie Hill challenged me to name my five favorite blogs. What fun! It made me think about what makes a blog different from other types of publications and what makes me return to some blogs and not to others.

We all know that blogs are fast, unmediated, and personal takes on whatever interests the blogger. Additionally, the technology makes it possible to combine text, images, and links that provide layers of information in a relatively short space. My favorite blogs generally have the following characteristics:

• A distinctive voice.
• Topics that are generally of interest to me.
• Integration of text, images, and links.

So here they are – in no particular order:

Belltown Bent. This is the blog that inspired me to start my own. Bruce is a photographer who specializes in photos of musicians, especially jazz musicians, but he also has a keen interest in everything going on in Belltown.

Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. OK, the posts are long and there are not a lot if images but Henry Jenkins is Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and has a lot to say about media and contemporary culture. So if you’re interested in gaming or the phenomenon of Sanjaya Malakar on American Idol you may want to check it out.

How to Change the World by Guy Kawasaki. So you’re interested in starting a business. This is the blog for you. Some recent posts include: The 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint, The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs, and the Top Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists. And here’s one especially for Chrystie: The Art of Creating a Community.

A Lake Count Point of View. I know his name is Hank and that he lives in one of the 12 Lake Counties in the US. I know he likes birds, plants, dogs, horses, and wood. I’ve never met him but find his blog oddly compelling. I visited the blog once at the urging of a friend and can’t seem to stop reading it.

Weibel Lines by Stu Weibel. Stu hasn’t written much lately but love the posts that combine his professional interests with personal discovery. Also a wonderful photographer.

Urban Nature. This one is a photo blog for all of you frustrated photographers out there. Some of the pictures are so good they make me want to go home and break my camera.

Photo: Cherry blossoms at the U. of Washington, taken April 2006.

Books: The Wisdom of Crowds

Over 50 years ago Pierre Teilhard de Chardin published a seminal work, The Phenomenon of Man, in which he theorized that for mankind to survive it was necessary for the species to evolve into a global human consciousness called the noosphere.

Now comes James Surowiecki with his The Wisdom of Crowds, subtitled “Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies, and Nations.” In an age that glorifies and rewards individual achievement, this book causes us to rethink conventional wisdom about individual versus group performance.

Some of his observations and conclusions are easier to accept than others. I couldn’t help wondering, for instance, how some of our crazy election results demonstrate any wisdom at all, collective or otherwise. And he explains away market bubbles and other distortions as the result of a herd mentality.

Fair enough. He is careful to define crowds with the potential for wisdom as having four characteristics: diversity, independence, decentralization and aggregation. In other words, it is not large groups of people working as a conscious collective, but large groups of people that are diverse and independent working as individuals. Wisdom is the result of the aggregation of their individual efforts.

On the face of it this can be hard to achieve but two examples provide a compelling picture of what can happen. Scientific advancement is the product of individual effort spread among many scientists working on problems that are most interesting to each of them as individuals. Results are aggregated through scientific publications. Surowiecki uses the case of the international search for the SARS virus to demonstrate how scientists working in a diverse, independent, decentralized environment were able to collectively crack the code and identify the virus.

A more popular, and controversial, example of collective wisdom is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia created by volunteers, many of whom are not specialists in the field they are writing about. Amazingly, a recent survey by the science journal Nature found that science entries “are not markedly less accurate” than those found in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

In the same vein, an organization called Shared Insights is teaming with Wharton, MIT, and Pearson Publishing to create a “network book” tentatively titled We Are Smarter Than Me. Place your bets and stay tuned.

Image: Ha Long Bay, Viet Nam. Taken May 2004.

21st century skills

Several days ago Bob and I attended a reception to celebrate education technology innovation. Although most of the attendees were specifically interested in the use of technology and innovation to enhance K-12 schools, one of the speakers, Ken Kay, had a lot to say that we should all be paying attention to.

Ken Kay is the President of Partnership for 21st Century Skills and Chairman of Infotech Strategies. In a five-minute presentation at a stand-up wine and cheese reception he managed to capture our imaginations and inspire us to believe that schools can become effective in changing the lives of children and the adults they will become. He talked about the fact that most of us received “fact based” educations that taught us bodies of information with the expectation that those facts would remain true for at least a sizeable portion of our lives.

As all disciplines have changed – sometimes with blinding speed, even in what we think of as hard science – the notion that teachers can teach and students can learn a significant portion of the facts they will need throughout their lives during their school years seems almost quaint. Ken talked about 21st century skills that we all need to be happy and productive at work and at play. These skills are:

♣ Critical thinking
♣ Problem solving
♣ Communications
♣ Collaboration
♣ Globalization
♣ Life skills

As he talked I couldn’t help thinking that these are skills we all need, regardless of age or level of education. It isn’t enough to try to cultivate these skills among our children (although we should certainly do that). It is, in fact, hard to imagine teaching these skills without having them yourself. These are skills that need to be embedded in everything we do and cultivated in on-the-job training and the way we run our organizations. These are skills that can help us make better choices and be more productive as employees, as citizens, and as human beings.

For more information about these skills, the latest report is available for download.

Image taken June 2006.

Not all fun and games

Depending on how you define your terms online gaming is either a $3.4 billion industry poised to grow to $13 billion by 2011 or is part of an interactive entertainment industry (that includes PC games, online games, and dedicated portable systems) that is set to overtake the music industry at $42 billion/year by 2010. However you look at it, that’s a lot of playing around.

And it’s not only teenage guys glued to their Xboxes that account for the phenomenon. It’s my friend Heather, who plans to spend a little more time gaming when she retires from her career as a forensic pathologist and Don, who handles mergers and acquisitions by day, and Charlie, who can tell you more than you want to know about petroleum exploration.

While there are plenty of games that feature sex and violence, the best seller to date is “The Sims,” which sold over a million copies in the first two months after release. My colleague Betha, who blogs on our own BlogJunction, recently alerted me to an online, multiplayer game called “Second Life” that, like “The Sims” allows players to create avatars, or imaginary versions of themselves – but in this case they interact with each other online in real time. This alternative universe already has a population of over 240,000. While reading a recent article about Will Wright, the creator of “The Sims,” I was startled to discover that his new game “Spore” will not only allow players to create their own creatures, planets, and civilizations, but these creations will automatically show up, through the Internet, in other players’ games.

The point of all this is not to promote gaming but to think about how gaming is effecting other parts of our experience in subtle and not so subtle ways. Elements of personalization, disaggregation, collaboration, and globalization (all part of the online gaming experience) are appearing in almost everything we do – especially online. As we at WebJunction become increasingly involved in delivering online learning we expect to see courses begin to look more and more like games. Content will be serious but it will be personalized, collaborative – and fun.

Image: Taken May 2006

Embrace your technology: the role of social software

Social software enables internet users to connect, to form online communities that sometimes spill over into their offline worlds. Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook are examples of internet sites that emphasize the social side of social software. They enable users to discover others with similar backgrounds or interests and to contact them in real time and space.

Sites like Amazon.com (among thousands of others) offer an opportunity for customers to post reviews of books and other products. Although there is no expectation that reviewers will ever contact each other directly, they do form an implied, informal community around shared interests. This form of product evaluation has become so popular that consumers have now come to expect it.

Blogs, like this one, provide an opportunity for individuals to self publish content that may be of interest to only a small group of people. But the connections among bloggers writing about related topics suggests that this, too, is becoming an important movement. For the first time, and at a reasonable cost, one individual can combine text, images, and links to cover a broad variety of topics.

At sites like WebJunction we, among many others, are exploring the creation of online communities around professional topics. Our goal is to provide tools that enable individuals with similar professional concerns to share information and experiences.

Although the use of social software started slowly it has picked up speed dramatically. The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently reported that 87% of Americans between the ages of 12 and 17 are online, and more than half have uploaded content to the Internet. This suggests a growing acceptance of active online communities.

Some of the implications of these developments will be explored in future posts.

Graphic: Robovie ATR welcomes a guest to a reception and demonstration of humanoid robotics at the University of Washington. Robovie and his siblings, a product of ATR, is used in research at universities around the world to evaluate the reaction of people to a robot that looks like a tin man but acts like a human.