Related concepts are grouped together according to common usage habits and memory triggers. In this interface sketch, you quickly have access to your personal food choices, and you can navigate down into your friends' tag clouds for new recommendations.
Press [2] and zoom to the "Restaurants" cluster.
Distributed creativity presents us with a new model for learning, free from the physical bounds of the institution. Increasingly, young people are seeking alternative ways to learn, to share, to create. YouTube, Wikipedia, and Facebook offer an abundance of user-generated content free from audit & order. We, all of us, are forming digital pools of knowledge that are targeted, specialized, and personally relevant. Where there were once towers of wisdom, we have nodes. Where there were libraries, we have the Internet.
What is lost, however in the great democratized, open network, is a sense of place and space. The very way in which we make meaning has become jumbled and unwieldy by the fact that is it so easy – easy to trackback, upload a video, add a comment, and yet hard to maintain a sense of context and ongoing dialog. We are left with information overload, the remarkable overabundance of creativity and intellect without scope. This is increasingly the case as we break down the walls of the classroom. What is needed next as we learn to corral our distributed consciousness, our slightly twisted global village, is a way to maintain the value of locational presence, as it is this which gives true meaning and relevancy to data. Our daily activities, our classrooms, our meetings, the events we attend; anywhere and everywhere is a space for learning.
There is a great opportunity in mobile and casual learning to explore and enjoy truly social aspects: real-time interaction between experts and students, peer-to-peer exchange. We are not idle voyeurs of history, watching passively the course of our world, mapped cleanly onto a blackboard. We are in our world, learning every day. It is a dirty, confusing, dangerous world, but one we can love nonetheless. This imperfect reality calls for something new to handle the recent surges in governmental control and influence, higher education expenses, and the web2.0 commodity blitz to our wallets and mental spaces. It calls for natural, humanizing education that operates on the basis of shared motivations rather than capitalistic imperatives of the educational institution. It is my personal hope that this dream speaks to the current generation of students, of which I am one, who struggle to find meaning in an increasingly irrelevant system. We must now re-imagine how technology can be used to the benefit our students, our youth, indeed anyone who seeks to learn outside the limits of institutions but within some sort of true community.
"Info Wraps" is a toolkit for trading knowledge amongst tiny communities. By changing the flow of knowledge in intimate spaces, simple mobile technology can stand in opposition to the powerful memes of big business, social networks, and mass media. "Info Wraps" piggybacks off of the del.icio.us bookmarking network in an exploration of social change, freedom of information, and the limits of technology.
Underneath the democratic forms of the Internet is a dangerous thread of commercial expansion and a desperate grab for our eyes and thumbs and blog posts. Free as citizens and yet entrenched behind walls of commercialism by our own desires; we often forget, or try to forget, that the web is controlled by Google and pay-per-click advertising and service providers filter and analyze our content; that the very tools of democratic exchange are ruthlessly comodified day-in and day-out.
Participatory media and decentralized creativity are struggling to fight back against privatized interests. How, we ask, can the bad guys control our speech if we’re all talking, everywhere, all the time? In response, companies like MTV and Verizon are redoubling their efforts and their spending in the web2.0 sector. The new economy of reputation, memes, and mashups is only an act. We are, more than ever, shaped by the mediums of the day. Our own contributions to social networks and media sharing are repackaged as a piece of a single, beautiful product.
Yet as new tools of broadcast threaten to deluge our minds with pop media, hipster ambitions, glocalized stories, they open new possibilities for community. They offer networks of knowledge exchange that can be taken back, appropriated for citizen use. "Info Wraps" demonstrates both this and the inevitable influence of privatized interest. While seeking to empower the tiniest of communities in intimate spaces, it is designed for closed, mobile systems and powered by Adobe and Yahoo technology. Info Wraps asks us to consider how the very platform of distribution affects what information we receive, how we understand it, and how it can be affected by interests beyond those of the intended audience.
The application uses networks and encryption and proxy techniques to bind web data to the mobile device. The process begins on the Nokia N80 or another device with support for Adobe Flash Lite. The user must first enter a Del.icio.us (Yahoo! owned) username and password. Once connected, the user can interact with his/her tags and content, easily launching URLs and calling related phone numbers through Flash Lite.
The entire exchange is routed through a private server where it is encrypted/decrypted and modified transparently. A custom PHP class acts as a proxy between the Del.icio.us API and the mobile device, filtering the responses and preparing them for on-the-go access.
The bulk of data is sent using XML feeds, which are open to exploit at four central points: 1) the Yahoo del.icio.us servers, where the API transforms database content into consumable feeds, 2) the private hosting server, where the server owner, administrators, or hackers can insert arbitrary data 3)through the mobile network itself, and 4) on the device, by way of a background listener written in a language such as Mobile Processing or Python
Last weekend I attended the Mobilized NYC event at Brooklyn's Polytechnic University and Eyebeam. The "unconference" was a loosely organized and attendee-run chance for collaboration, and a great chance to see what others in the field of mobile are working on.
There's a flickr group and del.icio.us tag for media generated from the event, and of course the official wiki contains the most detail.
I'll try to post a real summary of the event later on, but for now I'll give the short of it: on Saturday night we met at Eyebeam and watched a presentation by Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Anarchist in the Library, which pitted commercial technology interests against the ebb and flow of information, attempting to reconcile the problems between oligarchy and anarchy in the communication sense. There is a great relevance to the recent work I've been doing in regard to distributed systems, freedom of information, and bottom-up systems.
Sunday was more hands-on, as we attended workshops on everything from Flashlite to Mobile Processing and Semapedia.
There was also a lightning round of projects loosely related to the mobile sphere, which helped give context to much of the work I've been doing. I was greatly impressed by several of the projects I saw there, but mostly noticed a deep divide between the theoretical discussions which call for change, and the technological products of this thinking. Many people there, including myself to a degree, were of an activist mentality. The problem is translating the desire for a better world, in which information can be free and corporate interests are not king, into an actual set of usable technologies. I do think we're on the right path and I was intrigued by the reference to Mobilized! as a sort of Critical Mass of mobile technologists.
Created a new del.icio.us account today: the infowrapper. I've been working to get Info Wraps to import data from any account. Finally I have a solution. It involves encryption and shared objects and all kinds of other goodies. It means is that if you want to access your del.icio.us bookmarks via mobile you can do that very easily with my app, but that's not all. I'm also using del.icio.us as a prototyping platform for the real knowledge exchange system. It stores enough test data to work with for now. My sample links are setup for restaurant-hunting in the Greenwich Village area. If a mobile app can help out with the simple task of locating food, then maybe we have a chance at something more advanced.
If you're reading this and you have del.icio.us, please take a moment to send me a few of your favorite places to eat around the area. You can do this by tagging an item in your library with for:infowrapper (or just email me). Thanks!
At first n2 was an educational tablet device that provides constant interaction between teacher and student. I had to put away the idea when research revealed just how hard this would be on the teacher, and even the students to keep up in an actual classroom environment. Fortunately a new form of in-the-moment information trading has surfaced, and it's like an oddly misshapen (but beautiful) grandson of the original ideas and project proposal.
What is this new-spangled form I speak of? It's nothing fancy. The best way to explain it is a way to send links and other context-sensitive bits of information to the right people at the right time. For example, a teacher sending reference URLs to a class of a few hundred, with all students easily pulling the URLs onto their phones. I started to get at this here but what I have in mind is a little simpler, and requires much less overhead. It involves a dynamic community to have a flash app that can save and sort links (Info Wraps) and someone who posts to a shared board owned by the community. The idea is you press a button, your link (either pre-entered or newly found) gets posted in real-time to a central place, and everyone gets it quickly. Yes, you can just write it down on paper – but not everything you want to share in the final n2 will be quite so concise, or single-dimensional. More to come
An MFADT student by the name of Carrie Burgener developed Jot, a tool for "collaborative information capture" for her thesis work in 2002-2003. The project was overseen by Morry Galonoy, Ted Byfield, Golan Levin, and Dennis Yuen. Carrie went on to teach at Parsons, intern at Yahoo Research Lab Berkeley, and later attended the School of Information Management and Systems at Berkeley. All of this makes me wonder how I could have missed her work. The important thing now is processing it, as well as all of her references (StuPad, Nugget Mine, NotePals, and Live Notes) into my larger thesis goals.
I feel lucky to have this research as a reference point. The details of these systems, all from before the explosion of web2.0 and mobile remind me just how different things were only several years back. Which means, all the more chance for innovation. The information marketplace has transformed completely in this time, but the ideas put forth in Carrie's work are still extremely relevant to mine. More on this later, once I process the project fully.
If you're interested, have a look at the Jot thesis website, especially the PDF document here.
An early prototype build for Info Wraps, a mobile platform for rapid information requests. This is an n2 derivative project that explores cell phones and other mobile devices as a rich platform for learning and knowledge exchange. You can get a preview of Info Wraps connected to del.icio.us for testing.
In my research for n2 I just stumbled upon Kayuda, a collaborative and visual wiki that uses some pretty advanced multiuser features. This web app reminds me very much of a student's work from here at Parsons. Morgan, an undergrad in Design and Technology, explored a similar idea using the Flash Media Server. After finding Kayuda, my first impulse was to send Morgan a note and let him know about the site.
I think it's a natural thing to want to share references with your colleagues. It's also natural to lose touch. How do I get Morgan a note if I have no idea how to reach him? See, knowledge exchange only works if there's an open channel for it. Without Morgan's last name or an email address to send to, my note does no good at all. The info connection is lost.
Relays. If I don't know how to reach Morgan, someone else from my program at Parsons surely does. The easiest thing is to ask my friends in DT to email Morgan with my note. Let's say for our purposes it's very important to get this link for Kayuda out as soon as possible.
Well, email has a major problem: it isn't reliable. First it's quite possible that my friends will ignore the email because, they think, "someone else will get to it", eventually. Or they wait some time, either hours or days, before getting around to pressing "Forward". Even still, there is no promise that any one person will take the time to actually forward out the email I send them, and of course I just generated tons of junkmail by broadcasting one person's note to a dozen or hundreds of people. Oh, also the email servers themselves are unreliable. Junk filters, delivery problems, full mailboxes and so forth. What all this means is that my knowledge, the simple little link I want to send to Morgan, just can't get through email. Hopefully I've convinced you that we need a better system.
Let's call it a "knowledge relay" for the time being. Instead of sending a note to Morgan directly, I'm going to place it in "knowledge purgatory", where it waits on a server to be picked up. I then try casting a search for Morgan's contact info by way of my friends, people I think might know him from class. Each person has a shareable address book (not a global address book like LDAP) that can be searched by friends, family, and colleagues who have appropriate permissions. Using these books like databases that can be searched by a computer agent, it's possible to actually conduct the entire process without any human interaction at all.
This extends the idea of six degrees of separation. If all people are tied together by common connections, then it's theoretically possible to reach anyone on earth (that is, assuming that everyone on earth keeps their shareable address books up-to-date and has an Internet connection). But right now the process is not instant, and it's subject to human error. What happens if we eliminate the delays in email forwarding or the chance for mail getting lost or rejected? Then, let's apply this beyond email messaging into a richer form of knowledge exchange. I want to gift some knowledge about Kayuda to Morgan, and about classic films to that girl I met at the party, and so on. Yes, I don't know these people well, but I'm a friend of a friend. A friend by association. There seems to be a field for "knowledge by association" as well, and one worth exploring.
A shameless borrowing of my blog as a public notepad:
Phone networks bring the added advantage of spoken word, not just speech recognition but VoiceML, CallerID, conference calling, voicemail etc. It's a pretty rich platform for communication, and I've become increasingly convinced that spoken language must play a part in this system for its power beyond text/multimedia. I would like to push forward ideas of phone-number-as-IP-address, that is the conversion of standard phone lines into server/client connections. What can we do when we learn to understand the number as a way to connect people together in a real-time environment, not only a human-to-human system?
Tags and folksonomies have underlined the importance of visual weighting. In one quick glance we can see the popularity or relevance of dozens of tags, whether for blogging or social bookmarking or anything else. What happens when we take this out of the realm of tags and start connecting people together with valence? I've always been fascinated by the psycho-social relations between people and how they form almost tangible bonds. Right now most social networking exists in the realm of very simple associations. "Is x friends with y? Oh, and how did they meet?" But there's so much depth in human relations, not to mention one of the most ever-changing sets of data possible. New associations, changes in friendship status, professional ties, all kinds of good stuff. Very little of this is maintained because a) it changes too quickly and b) it may violate privacy or be uncomfortable to put this into digital, set form. Still, we need to take the idea of weighted social connections into the mobile realm.
Mailing lists and blogs are not enough. Individuals need new and effective ways to reach a very limited group of people with questions (see Infusion) or announcements, especially daily little things that just are hard to broadcast without mobile. We need new systems for organizing relationships and groups in a way that allows for fast multi-person messaging via phone. SMS and MMS is surprisingly limiting, and "Address Book Groups" just won't cut it.
Mobile is clunky. What we can do on a tiny little box just can't compare to the freedom of a 23" monitor with a nice mouse and keyboard. I think as mobile evolves it will become a popular interface addition to offer "saved actions" of sorts that allow a user to program parts of a phone via computer. In other words, the mobile phone becomes much more an extension of the computer rather than synchronizing with it. We need ways to populate phones and other mobiles with individual behaviors. An example: sending an SMS to a small group, all at once, and then organizing their responses into a single folder.
When we can start taking advantage of mobile space and place, we then unlock a much more free-flowing sense of exchange. Whether for casual use, professional, or academic, a platform that lets people interact often leads to social progress. Too often these tools are reduced to very mundane uses, like getting movie times. A flexible enough system can accomodate multiple levels of personal interaction and adapt to the setting, so mundane can co-exist with life-changing.
