Announcements and Reflections

Thanks for the comments! I am starting to get ideas about your interests are and what you might choose for your website project. If I know that a group of you are interested in the same sorts of ideas it will help me decide how to group your for the wiki project (which we are going to discuss on Tuesday).

Note that Stephanie's blog is now linked to this page. Check out her entries and give her some comments.

This week we moved away from defining/discussing features of cyberspace and began some in-depth analysis of the writing in online spaces. On Tuesday we analyzed the architecture created by the links on two sites which have some of the same customers -- but very different approaches to marketing and developing their products: Mozilla and Microsoft.

This analysis raised questions which were beginning to cloud the horizon in your blogs about Woolley, Heim, and wikipedia. The questions are about the reliability of information, the value of scholarship versus open discussion with respect to creating knowledge, and so on. In particular, Matt and Ryan have staged a running swordfight up and down the stairs of their classmates blog. Lots of feinting and lunging -- but it looks like the victor is yet to be declared.

What is interesting to me about this discussion is that within your comments you have raised most of the assumptions, values, and beliefs which are identified either with the print generation (learnng is through reading + being taught, knowledge is best expressed in language and it is best taught by experts, knowledges exists in the world to be discovered. . .) and the internet generation (learning through doing rather than talking, knowledge is interactive, dispersed and created. . .). See:

AOIR Conference Papers

What is more -- these differences are at the heart of a struggle for control/regulation of the internet, and the outcome of this struggle will have an inestimable impact on our futures with respect to how our educational system -- and eventually our government and economic interactions -- will be structured.

Check out:

John Perry Barlow

So there is some thinking left to do here.