There was yet another Andrew Keen inspired article last week bemoaning the age of “wikiality” — an age of supposed gullibility of us internet sorts. It begins with shocking news — people are getting quotes wrong, and Web 2.0 is at fault:

Truth: Can You Handle It?
Better Yet: Do You Know It When You See It?
By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 27, 2008; Page M01
…

How many legs does a dog have, if you call the tail a leg? Four.
Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.

Abraham Lincoln *

[*Note: Lincoln never said this. He liked a similar, more long-winded anecdote about a cow, but the dog version? Nope. Still, the quote is credited to Abe on some 11,000 different Web pages, including quote resources Brainy Quote and World of Quotes.

Though not technically “true,” the quote makes a nice start to this article about truth, being topical and brief, so if we want to go with truth-by-consensus (very popular now), we can go ahead and just say that he said it.]

Hesse then explains the crisis:

Andrew Keen describes it as “the cult of the amateur” in his same-named book. Stephen Colbert called it “wikiality” — meaning, “a reality where, if enough people agree with a notion, it must be true.

Information specialists call it the death of information literacy.

What’s really amusing about the Hesse article is that her initial example – the Lincoln quote – is an example where the web was more correct — and the web could have shown her that. The web has well known conventions for dealing with authority and making truth more verifiable, and when these conventions are embraced rather than rejected, one gets better results.

Follow along while we compare what it takes to verify truth on the web, and what it takes the “old world”…

Score one for wiki-world

Hesse seems to be claiming that the web (and it’s tendency to magnify casual opinion over scholarship) was responsible for this quote being wrong. But was the quote actually wrong? That seemed an important point — and nothing in the article seemed to prove the “Brainy Quote” version false — nothing, that is, beyond her simple assertion.

I decided to use the web to find older, more authoritative references to the “false” quote. It was easy once I realized that I should include the phrase “said Lincoln” to filter out simple non-contextualized quotes, such as one finds in quote lists. In fact, once I figured that out, an extremely early instance was on the first page of results [Note: my posting this article appears to have altered that result set].  It appears in a work called Lincoln’s Own Stories published in 1912:

Once when a deputation visited him and urged emancipation before he was ready, he argued that he could not enforce it, and, to illustrate, asked them: “How many legs will a sheep have if you call the tail a leg?” They answered, “Five.” “You are mistaken,” said Lincoln, “for calling a tail a leg don’t make it so”; and that exhibited the fallacy of their position more than twenty syllogisms.

It took less than fifteen minutes to prove the Hesse article wrong: far from being an false product of the wild web, the quote has an extremely good provenance. There’s a small matter of it being a sheep mentioned, but it matches the “wiki” quotes far better than the “long-winded anecdote” about a cow that Hesse favors.

Incidentally, the web can even show you how the “sheep” may have become a “dog”: Christopher Morely uses the modified Lincoln quote in Parnassus on Wheels in 1917 citing a dog, Wikipedia shows us he was an editor of several editions of Bartlett’s Quotations, which probably explains why the quote appears in his editions of Bartlett’s in the dog variation (no full text online, but see cites here).

That doesn’t seem to me a problem of authority. And it certainly has nothing to do with Web 2.0.

Score zero for the world of “authority”

Then, I decided to try it the other way round — could I prove the Hesse version of the Lincoln quote was from an even more trustworthy source?

Here’s where it gets ridiculous — the article that is bemoaning that people simply believe what they read provides no source for their version of the quote. So whereas you, the reader of this blog, can click the link “Lincoln’s Own Stories” to verify my assertion, to verify something in traditional media requires launching a federal investigation.

To try to find the source for her quote, I took the fact that it involved a cow, and probably contained the core phrase “calling a tail a leg”. Google Web search turned up nothing of use. Google Scholar turned nothing up, neither did Google Book Search. Figuring the author probably read this in a book (or saw it in a documentary) I tried Amazon’s full text search. Bingo.

The keywords I had chosen occurred in the biography “Lincoln” by David Herbert Donald. But the book was not providing a useful context snippet to Amazon. So I went down to the library, and got the book out. I looked up “emancipation” in the index — far too many pages listed. Looked up cow, and of course found nothing. Ugh.

My lunch break was slipping away. In a moment of insight, I went to the terminal in the library and pulled up Amazon.com. I did “search inside the book” again. While the snippet didn’t appear, it gave me the page number: page 396. I turned to the page — Aha! There was the source of the Hesse version. It talked of a long-winded anecdote about a Western case involving a cow.

Which raises the question: why do the defenders of “truth” want to make it so hard to verify their sources?

(The answer, in case you haven’t guessed yet, is they aren’t defenders of truth. They are defenders of authority. And from Ancient Egypt on, authority was maintained by having exclusive access to information… )

I won’t belabor this much longer. The source of the quote in the Lincoln biography is an obscure quarterly from 1950, the nearest available copy of which is in Worcester, about an hour and a half away. I thought of getting the article through Interlibrary Loan, but realized from the title “A Conference with Abraham Lincoln: From the Diary of Nathan Brown” that even if I got the journal, the article relied on a diary that would not be accessible to me.

So the Hesse version appears based on a single, non-primary source which references a journal article the author didn’t read, and the journal article references a diary that neither the author of the WaPo article or the author of the biography has ever seen.

It’s a big circle of trust, none of it linkable. And yet the web people, who are insisting on verifiable, linked sources are somehow the intellectually sloppy ones.

A final check

Still, given my source was from 1912, and the unverifiable source was likely contemporary, I could only prove that the quote being bemoaned as a prodct of “wikiality” had a good history, and was more verifiable. I couldn’t prove that it was more likely. So I called in a favor. I used to be a programmer for the amazing Readex “Early American Newspapers” project, the project to create a searchable full text database of this nation’s periodicals from pre-revolutionary times until 1876. So I emailed a person I know that still programs there. I asked them if they could punch in “Lincoln” and “calling a tail a leg” into the product and send me back the first results.

Sixty seconds later I had my answer — Web: 1, Books: 0.

What Lincoln said to the party visiting him — well, it was reported in the Chicago Tribune at the time.

And it’s not a “long-winded anecdote about a cow”, but rather, it’s much closer to that quote that appears in all those crazy wikis.

Headline: Lincoln’s Own Construction of His Proclamation;
Article Type:News/Opinion
Paper: Macon Telegraph, published as Macon Daily Telegraph;
Date: 10-23-1862; Issue: 841; Page: [3];

LINCOLN’S OWN CONSTRUCTION OF HIS PROCLAMATION — A little while anterior to Lincoln’s interview with the clerical committee (says the Chicago Tribune) a couple of other abolition fanatics found their way to the President and pressed upon him the emancipation scheme, and this was his reply: “You remember the slave who asked his master — if I should call a sheep’s tail a leg, how many legs would it have? ’Five’ ’No, only four, for my calling a tail a leg would not make it so.”

(Incidentally, the Readex Collection of Early American Newspapers is the most exciting thing going on in historical databases today — if your institution doesn’t have a license to it, you’re not serious about American History. Go check it out…)

I realize this is a Macon paper (hardly an uninterested party) quoting the Chicago Tribune (as was the custom in early papers). But there are plenty of other hits from other papers in the list as well — I’m staying on the clear side of fair use here, but they are there to be discovered by any user of Readex.

Suffice it to say, however, that the quote, and Hesse’s problem with it, are far more telling than she anticipated.

The subtitle of her article asks if you’ll know truth “when you see it”.

It’s a good question, but Hesse has the battery wired backwards.

The answer, from any web literate scholar, is if you make it easy for me to check it, maybe I will know it when I see it. The web does that in spades, which allows us, ironically, to repair the errors that the Washington Post generates.

If I go often to the well of what’s going on in the Politics 2.0 and Reporting 2.0 space, it’s because few areas are going through such a radical high stakes change.

Not change in a political sense, mind you. Much of the change going on is a rather frantic bid to make sure that new technologies don’t erode existing power structures both in media and politics. But the stakes involved and the very real wakeup call received by the establishment in 2006 has led to a situation where the political space is ahead of the curve in use of new technologies and organizational principles.

So it’s no surprise that we see a glimpse of the new world of work today from Huffington Post’s Off The Bus group of reporters (disclosure: I’m one of those reporters).

It was a normal subject they covered today: Sen Obama’s campaign did a massive door-to-door operation this past weekend. The average coverage of this would be to send a reporter out to one of the 40-odd cities where this canvassing was taking place.

Off the Bus had a better idea: since they have dozens of reporters already in these locations, why not ask them all to stop by their local event, and get some basic information about the canvass — people involved, why they were there, basic turnout numbers, doors knocked on, general level of commitment of people talked to.

It was information a local person could gather in about 30 to 60 minutes, both by talking to the organizers and tagging along for a couple door-knockings. And since the people tagging along were local, they could put the information in context.

Off the Bus set up a Survey Monkey form, and mailed it out to any of their reporters who could spare the half hour. One blogger was responsible for compiling the data and putting it together, but the data was made available to all involved (in fact, the raw reports were made available to the general public).

And what was the result of this? Well, it was a mixed bag. The reporters were in many places stonewalled by the Obama campaign. Where they did tag along though, they found that for the most part support for any candidate was far softer than what polls have shown, and that people as a whole are tired of talking about the Iraq war.

Briliant? Groundbreaking?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. But look at the mechanisms and philosophy on display: radical transparency (in making all reports viewable), distributed tasking, use of simple online tools such as Survey Monkey, multi-literate reporters taking video, writing copy, all coordinated through a Google group, and done at almost no cost — because the reporters are already in place…

This is not just the future of reporting. It’s the future of our networked world. In fact, it’s the present already in many industries where need for the coordination of people with different specializations exists.

Do our students know how to work this way? Are we teaching them?

I’d argue that projects like UMW Blogs do just that, showing people through that ecosystem of Google Reader, WordPress, and MediaWiki the power of the network.

(and you can add any of my previous endings here — you know the screed. Why in the world would we send kids out into the networked world with a Blackboard^TM understanding of life?)

Via SmartMobs, regarding our millenials:

“Young people don’t see “tech” as a separate entity - it’s an organic part of their lives,” said Andrew Davidson, vice president of MTV’s VBS International Insight unit.

“Talking to them about the role of technology in their lifestyle would be like talking to kids in the 1980s about the role the park swing or the telephone played in their social lives — it’s invisible.”

The more you get into “tech”, the more you realize there’s no such thing. As any systems analyst will tell you: there are processes, and some pieces of them are automated and some aren’t. Some pieces have hardware components, and some don’t. Some storage is on paper, and some on tiny electric switches.

The process is inviting your friends out for a drink. It’s not using the telephone in drink invite mode. You don’t start out and say I need a product to invite my friends out for beers and optionally gin and tonics. And we don’t really worry that the phone is from one vendor, and the cab you take down to the bar is from another.

What we say is — hey, wouldn’t it be neat if instead of having to call everybody seperately I could communicate with them all at once? And slowly that process evolves…

What’s my point? I suppose it’s that from a process standpoint, if we see our personal algorithms as the higher order application, loose coupling has been the norm, more than we realize.  And given the worldview of the current crop of kids, we’re likely to get back to that. And that’s a good and powerful thing.

Prometheus, holding a torch, enters a small office in a corporate IT department. At the desk is Fred, who looks up when he enters.

Prometheus: Behold, I bring you fire!

Fred: Great! We’ve heard about the fire market. Very exciting. So is that it? That flaming stick you’re holding? That’s the product? How many do we need?

Prometheus: Well, no. By “bring you fire”, I mean a set of skills by which you can create your own fire at will.

Fred: Yeah, sorry, that’s not going to work. What if our personnel changes? They’ll take these skills with them, and we’ll be stuck looking for skilled workers to replace them. How much does a firemaker cost? Do we have to pay relocation? You see the problem…

Prometheus: Yeah, but I mean, it’s fire. I’m bringing you fire.

Fred: What if we ASP it? When we need fire, we’ll have an SLA with you that you’ll bring us fire within 20 minutes.

Prometheus: But it’s not a product or a service — it’s a set of methods. The amazing thing is anybody can make their own! I can teach you..here, you take two sticks like this…

Fred: Oh, there we go! Why didn’t you say so? The sticks are the product, right? How much are the sticks?

Prometheus: Um, nothing. Free. You can use any sticks you want.

Fred: That doesn’t sound very safe. Can you supply approved sticks?

Prometheus: No, but I can show you how to select sticks that are appropriate for…

Fred: Once again, there you go with all these skills. What happens if the person you show how to select sticks leaves? We don’t want firemakers. We want a firemaking product.

Behind Prometheus, A Systems Vendor enters, holding shrinkwrapped box.

Vendor: Behold, I bring you the Fire Management System.

Fred: Finally!

Prometheus (sulking off): I’m going back to my rock…

Here’s the thing – it’s 2000 all over. Eportfolio is the new LMS.

Watching a recent vendor presentation I thought – I can’t believe this is happening again. That single phrase. In a loop. In my head.

Because remember — this happened once before. The LMS vendors came in with an assessment and management tool, and told us it was an elearning solution. At the time, I was on the other side of the equation, with a company trying to sell award-winning goal-based scenario software to colleges who were saying — but we already HAVE an elearning solution. It’s called Blackboard. Or WebCT. Or whatever.

And so Blackboard, an assessment and management tool, determined the pedagogy of colleges for eight or so years. Because teachers wanted to import rosters, we put students in a closed box and told them it was elearning.

When it wasn’t. The truth is the kids were doing more elearning on MySpace than in Blackboard.

How do we avoid it again? How do we avoid imposing something that is just pedagogically WRONG on a new set of students because we need to meet some institutional assessment needs?

There’s only one way — loosely coupled assessment.

If we are going to talk assessment, we are going to have to segregate it. Your assessment tool should ONLY assess.

We don’t need to talk more about student needs wth vendors that supply assessment tools. We need to talk to them less about student needs. It’s not their business.

Literally: it is not their business.

In fact, we should remove student needs entirely from the equation.

The students know they can get far bettter solutions to their problems for free elsewhere. They don’t need a eportfolio system to post thier resumes on.

So enough of letting assessment vendors tell us what facilities we will be forced to use in their walled garden, and expecting us to be excited about it. Enough with assessment vendors selling us “environments”. What we should be doing is describing the the enviroment that might exist – students using Wordpress, Blogger, S3, GDrive, email, messaging, etc. And then we should ask if they have a tool that can evaluate that. How will their tool interface with the learning environment we’ve constructed?

Anything else is insanity.

The most invigorating job I ever had was working for CognitiveArts programming learning “simulations”. Founded by Roger Schank, CogArts was truly a company with a mission — to revolutionize education through technology rather than simply extend the current system. And we pushed the envelope in every way we could. I worked with a large team of programmers whose goal was to make the ultimate Choose-your-own-adventure multimedia learning experiences.

The core idea was simple: people learn by doing, so learning should simulate doing in a low risk environment. Schank’s favorite talking point was this “Which would you rather your airplane pilot have — 90 hours of the flight simulator, or 90 hours of book study?”

Simulations would generally lead a person through a “goal-based scenario”: perhaps as a Governor’s economic advisor they had to make decisions for a hurricane torn state on things like price controls and rationing, and observe the effects of the action. Perhaps they had to negotiate a house price as part of Harvard Business School Publishing’s Negotiation class.

The key to the system was failure-based learning paired with just in time instruction. Students would be encouraged to develop expectations about what would happen as a result of their actions. When they failed, they would be provided with context-sensitive instruction, and encouraged to try again. It had been shown in a number of studies  that by providing the bulk of the instruction after failure that you could get retention of information significantly higher.

The system was later copied (often poorly) by other corporate training companies, and is now a pretty standard offering of most custom elearning vendors (although I would argue that the desire of many vendors to push such modules into a one-size-fits-all assessment harness profoundly degraded the experience — at CogArts we built an LMS that was precisely tailored to the needs of our scenarios).

This autodidactic gaming approach to elearning seems miles away from the PLE and the Inverted LMS (I still haven’t quite resolved if those are the same thing yet — please excuse my transitional use of both terms). The Inverted LMS is inherently social and collaborative; the CogArts model was solitary and self-taught. Indeed, if there was one flaw with what we did at Cognitive Arts, it was probably that in the move from CD-based non-networked learning to web-based instruction we were not radical enough in our rethinking of the social element of education.

Despite that, I’d argue that simulations are very close to the PLE/Inverted LMS in theory. Why?

Because both focus on learning by doing. Where there is high-risk to real life failure simulations make a lot of sense. And where the definition of success in a field or task is very narrowly defined, simulations shine. The flight simulator, one of the first computer applications ever built, still remains the model here.

But the web has introduced us to plenty of low-risk ways to engage in disciplines. And that’s where the new approach comes in.

An example? At CogArts, one of the apps I admired most was the “Is it a Rembrandt?” simulation, which provided students with detailed pictures that could be faked paintings or undiscovered Rembrandts. The students, through learning about Rembrandt’s style, had to make the call. Experts were there to give them the just in time instruction should they fail — explaining this or that about brush strokes or subject matter.

I’d still pay good money to use that sim — I think it remains a wonderful way to learn, and one that appeals to our gaming culture. Put software like that in a current high school, and you’re going to blow the doors of education. In a good way.

But what is striking nowadays with the web is how it supplies plenty of real low-risk problems for students to engage in. The Rembrandt simulation was built during a mid-90s rash of discoveries that certain Rembrandts were fakes. Ten years later if such a thing happened, there’d be a good chance you could get hi-res photos of detail from the fakes, if you asked nicely.

So what happens then? You gather your students, you put up a wiki and series of student blogs, you roll your sleeves up, and you get your class analyzing the paintings. Google becomes your just-in-time learning application, which is cool, because that’s what your JIT solution will end up being in real life. Success or failure is determined, as in life, somewhat fuzzily by the reaction of the experts in real life: if you can get them to engage with your work at all, that’s a high level of success; if they actually start agreeing with you or noting things as valuable insight, even better.

I miss both producing and playing with the Schank software, just because of how much fun it was, and if I could buy those titles shrink-wrapped from the local Staples today, I’d spend my own money to buy a title a week. Heck, I may go home tonight and play the Cable & Wireless simulation, which I still have a disc of somewhere. In a perfect world the government would fund more of these sorts of simulations.

But the brilliance of the internet is how much it matches, for a certain subset of problem, the perfect learning environment CogArts was simulating in its courseware. As with the simulations, on the internet you can try out ideas without much risk, you can get information from Google on a Just-in-Time basis, and you can talk to experts about the validity of your decisions. And, yes, it’s a lot fuzzier, and I certainly don’t want my pilot to have put in 90 hours of BLOGGING, but for certain types of learning (and possible for most learning), it’s a preferred method of engagement.

So, I’ve just stumbled into a gold mine. Via an inbound link from Stephen Downes, I’ve discovered that much of what I’ve been calling an inverted LMS has been called elsewhere a PLE (personal learning environment):

Helen Barrett receives an email from Mike Caulfield describing an Inverted LMS, which turns out to be the PLE, independently discovered. More here. She also gets a note from a graduate student, who writes, “I’m trending towards the view that the system we will end up with will use RSS to expose content, tags to organize it, and open ID to selectively share content with certain people.” Yes, as people look at the potential of online technology, they begin reaching similar conclusions. Independently, autonomously.

And it’s true! There is much overlap. But just as I’m about to object that the Inverted LMS goes further than the PLE, I find this post via connections to Downes: Leigh Blackall’s Die LMS Die! You Too PLE! And stuff like this warms the cockles of my heart. All the cockles. Every single one:

Question to the PLE: Why do we need a PLE when we already have the Internet? The Internet is my PLE, ePortfolio, VLE what ever. Thanks to blogger, bloglines, flickr, delicious, wikispaces, ourmedia, creative commons, and what ever comes next in this new Internet age, I have a strong online ID and very extensive and personalised learning environment. Actually I think the PLE idea is better envisioned by the futurist concept known as the Evolving Personalised Information Construct (EPIC). I think we already have EPIC, so why do we need the PLE?

OK — apart from the fact that his was written over a year and a half before, and that it spells personalized with an “s” — isn’t it really Enterprise Learning Systems Considered Harmful to Learning?

The gift keeps on giving: there’s apparently a del.icio.us tag for PLEs. I know because my article was tagged by someone under it. And among those articles are ones that deal with these questions of how loose the PLE should be, ala Blackall.

(Why so few American representatives, I wonder? It’s all Canada, England, New Zealand, and Australia…)

I don’t think any of these ideas are new, really; it’s more that they’ve been refined during the long dark reign of the LMS. Looking at the network of people I’ve stumbled into I can see that they’ve been pushing these ideas outside the mainstream for some time too.

But I can’t help but feel that something is starting to happen here, when so many unrelated people are coming to the same conclusion. The very power of blogs to do what we see here — to organize people and refine ideas, to propel thought forward, to get things done — is what has revealed the LMS model to be such a cruel joke. So it’s not surprising, perhaps, that as blogging becomes ubiquitous these ideas, once considered digital utopianism, now can be expressed in very real and practical terms.

And even where the ideas are old, they now relate to a trailing-edge frame of reference — or soon will.

Over the next couple of days I’ll sift through my newly found goodies, and share what I find. I have a feeling it will be pretty extraordinary.

This is fascinating, to me at least. Marc (are we allowed to call him Marca?) came late to blogging, but he’s clearly making up for lost time and talking to the right people.

But what I noted in his recent post was how much his view of the larger web (via Sifry) matches exactly what we’ve been talking about over here vis-a-vis the Inverted LMS (or really the Inverted CMS idea applied to education). Marc writes:

The first time I met Dave Sifry, over three years ago, he told me that conversations on the Internet would eventually all revolve around every individual having a blog, each individual posting her own thoughts on her own blog, and blogs cross-linking through mechanisms like trackbacks and blog search engines (such as Dave’s Technorati).

The advantage of this new world, said Dave, is that each individual (anonymous or not) would be publicly responsible for their own content and in charge of their own space — substantially reducing the risk of spam and trolls — and the communication would flow through the links. There would still be the risk of link spam, but at least this new world would make people more responsible for their own content, and that would tend to uplevel the discourse.

I think Dave is exactly right, and the implications of this new world are very interesting.

The rest of the post is worth reading too — it’s more of a head-nodder, mostly reiterating stuff that ALL bloggers learn very quickly, but it’s great to have it all in one place. And it has the neat advantage that you can send it to the non-believers with a note that says “From the guy that co-founded Netscape.”

I’m saying, it doesn’t hurt.

Gardner Writes has a good critique of of my Inverted LMS post, which raises a number of important issues.

So let’s say first I am both manifesto-prone and conversation-addicted, and those things generally equal out. 

This is conversation Mike speaking.

The question Gardner poses is whether “student-centered” swings too far in the other direction:

But I’m driven to respond because the matter is not simply one of awakening from a “hasa” world into the brave new “isa” world. If only it were that simple. “Hasa” and “isa” are not alternatives. They are partners in a dance. They are both parts of the inescapable, imperfect, provisional, necessary work of conceptualization itself. Of identity.

There’s a “hasa” element in our experience that we should not reject, lest we swing from one mistake to another.

I absolutely agree on this point. The interplay between who we are and what we are contained by is inescapable.

Or rather, I should say the tension between those two models is inescapable, since we can model most things either way.

So are we entering a brave new world of isa? Partially. I heard Dave Weinberger the other day on IT Conversations, talking about his latest book, Everything is Miscellaneous. It seems related to this. One of the advantages of modern tagging systems is that we break free of having to impose a single hierarchy on things. In the world of data, you can file the spatula both in the silverware drawer and by the grill.

I think that’s a really major thing, and we’ve only scratched the surface of the ramifications of that. And at the same time I think that the chance of hierarchy and taxonomy going away completely is exactly zero. As I said in the original post, it’s too comforting. Inspired by your post, I’ll clarify even further: it’s too useful.

I’ll give a great example — in my free time, I co-run a pretty prominent online political community called Blue Hampshire. It’s run on a piece of software called Soapblox, which allows all 600 members to post their articles on the site and comment and rank them and so forth. And compared to the blogswarms I’ve been a part of, Soapblox is very much a box. You’re in that community or you’re not.

Now would I dismantle that community and break it into 600 Wordpress blogs x-reffing each other? Not on your life. Or at least, not yet. There’s a whole bunch of reasons why that would be a disaster, but I’ll mention four:

1. Comfortability: People on the site very often come from DailyKos, a national site that runs similar software. They know how this system works. Why not capitalize on that?

2. Power in Numbers: As one of three managing editors of this 600 member site, I represent the community. Because we’ve pooled our effort here, I can get candidates to talk to us. I recently got all the Democratic campaigns to write up a short paragraph for us describing explicitly what their differences on Iraq policy were. Had we been seperate blogs, they never would have considered that.

3. Shared Identity and Unique Experience: People sometimes x-post to other sites, but what the community really appreciates is stuff written for them precisely. There’s something about having something very precisely keyed to members and not available anywhere else (including one’s personal blog). You see people express this feeling often in comments.

4. Policing: The nice things about boxes is you can very satisfyingly kick people out of them if they break rules of engagement.

Is all this possible in a more distributed model? Maybe. I’d say most likely. You can kick someone out of an MU aggregator by unsubscribing to their feed. You could syndicate more selectively. You could collect stats to show your bargaining power….etc.

But the point is this: the very simple model of Soapblox, for all it’s faults, enabled us to become the number one blog community in New Hampshire within three months of our launch. And more importantly, it has allowed our members to have a real effect on both New Hampshire and national politics. We’ve involved over 600 people (that have signed up to post),  and we average about 70 comments and ten posts a day. Campaigns contact us, rather than we them.

And I’ll admit we couldn’t have done that, on that level, using a more loosely coupled model.

At least, not yet.

There’s a lot more I want to say, but I will end with this — where Gardner says…

But the impulse of which the LMS is an institutional perversion is not, I’m beginning to think, wholly wrong. The challenge is to re-imagine school so that the boundaries can be artful, changeable, semi-permeable, and the result of creative decisions, not administrative convenience.

…I think we’re in complete agreement.

 So if I know all this, why the manifesto?

Because I think 99% of people don’t even know there is another way. And they can’t imagine another way things might work.  And frankly there’s no really extant example that goes as far into the attribute model as Blackboard goes into the container model.

So while it might seem unneccesarily Hegelian, I think we need to talk about what the antithesis is, and hopefully build it. It’s not always obvious, for example, how one might model a study group vs. a class using a less container-oriented approach. Part of that is doing what Gardner describes — understanding the good things the modern LMS/CMS has done for us.

But I think the other part is building the antithesis and taking it for a spin. It’s only in that way that we can really know it’s efficacy, and to my knowledge no one has tried that yet.

My gut is if we do this we will find ways to deal with many of these issues — if we give it a chance.

If you’re interested in education and technology, go (now!) and listen to Jon Udell’s recent interview with John Willinsky. Then go listen to Willinsky’s fascinating 1 hour lecture which deals with everything from Issac Newton as proto-blogger to Wikipedia error rates to why our exam-book culture is selfish and anti-intellectual.

You might want to listen at home. I made the mistake of listening just now at lunch, and I don’t know how I’m going to work for the rest of the day.

I want to march. I want to start a revolution.

But since I left my musket and pitchfork at home, I got off the Willinsky lecture hyped up, and put the energy into browsing the web instead. And I bumped into an old friend in a surprising place.

Back in 1996/97 I worked at Northern Illinois University. And long story short, I sold them on an idea I called visible education. We did this site called The Persona Project, which was supposed to be a student produced encyclopedia of biographies.

Then I left grad school, and the site died a slow lonely death.

Here’s the weird bit. The site still exists. I just found out it’s still on NIU’s servers, here:

http://www.clas.niu.edu/persona/index.htm

Apparently no one had the heart to delete it.

What a time machine that site is. And what a trip to see that I’m saying exactly the same things today, and calling them “Web 2.0″.

I’m not showing this to prove how smart and visionary I was in 1997 (although, come on, it *is* kind of cool).

But rather, reading through the site and seeing how much it matches with the Willinsky pieces, it just really brings something home for me.

We’ve been fighting this battle, off and on, for 10 years now. Some of us more than that. But when I listen to John Willinsky the ideas don’t sound old, or tired. I don’t roll my eyes and say “We’ve pushed for this for 10 years, it has no legs.”

When I hear Willinsky, I think, we’re almost there. One more push.

To some people that might sound like I’m in denial.

So be it. I’ve waited (and pushed) 10 years to get to this point. I can do another 10 years if I need to.

When you believe in something passionately, time just scales differently.