Deanspace, #rhizo15 and the Singularity
I’ve spent a bit of the day immersed in the #rhizo15 discussions, and for my own sake, as well as for people who aren’t involved on Facebook, I’m pulling some of my comments together into a slightly more organized set of thoughts here.
Much of today’s discussion focused around Lenandlar Singh’s Facebook post pointing to a blog post listing #rhizo15 blog posts. I had been building up a #Rhizo15 Wiki designed to do some similar things. Lenandlar’s effort morphed into a Google Doc listing #rhizo15 blog posts.
There was a discussion of RSS feeds, and I tweaked the wiki to pull in posts via RSS. I also gave a little bit of a discussion about how RSS forks
There was also a discussion of using Storify and Paper.li I had set up a #rhizo15 Paper.li, so I shared that link. Paper.li is a bit weird with its automatic gathering, categorizing, and distributing information, but it is a good tool in a situation like this.
All of this made me think of the Deanspace days. I commented:
As an aside, all of this is very reminiscent of the Deanspace days back in 2003 where we tried to find ways of enabling and organizing volunteers creating content, mostly on blogs, in support of Gov. Dean's presidential bid. We used Drupal for RSS aggregation as well as tracking individuals. We used FOAF for some of our tracking of people. I plan on writing more about this soon.
Later on in the discussion, Penny Bentley asked the question, “is Rhizo15 an accurate representation of the external world?” She expressed her skepticism, and I returned to my Deanspace idea.
I'm finding many ways that Rhizo15 represents my experiences. I suspect the experience of desperately trying to keep on top of incoming information, and failing to do so is fairly common, perhaps note unlike Toffler's Future Shock. I've run into this in the world of politics [Deanspace]. I've run into this in the world of health care [The idea that doctors can no longer stay abreast of advances in medicine simply by reading peer reviewed journals. There is too much to read]. I've run into this in the world of finance [In many ways trading is an information business. You need to get as much information related to a stock as possible to make a good decision]. So, we learn to cope, with new tools, with new modes of behavior, to try and get by.
Penny responded that this was helping her tease out her understanding of objectives and subjectives and asked if what I described in the comment was my subjectives.
I explored this a little more with
I wasn't particularly thinking in terms of subjectives or objectives when I made that comment, and I'm not positive I know what my subjectives are. As I think about it, I go back to my blog post "#rhizo15 A Primary Task?" where I try to think about subjectives and objectives in terms of a primary task of a group relations conference.
There, I described what may be my overarching subjective, in the form of a primary task. "The primary task of this learning organization is to explore, experience and learn from the development of learning networks, content, and the use of technology in promoting online learning."
If that is, in fact, my core subjective, finding ways to manage an ever increasing amount of incoming information may be another facet or component of my subjective.
As I wrote this, and thought back to the issue of subjectives and objectives, words from Randy Pausch's Last Lecture
experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted. And I think that’s absolutely lovely. And the other thing about football is we send our kids out to play football or soccer or swimming or whatever it is, and it’s the first example of what I’m going to call a head fake, or indirect learning. We actually don’t want our kids to learn football. I mean, yeah, it’s really nice that I have a wonderful three-point stance and that I know how to do a chop block and all this kind of stuff. But we send our kids out to learn much more important things. Teamwork, sportsmanship, perseverance, etcetera, etcetera. And these kinds of head fake learning are absolutely important. And you should keep your eye out for them because they’re everywhere.
I think this helps a little in thinking about subjectives. They are the experience we get when we don’t get our objectives, what we wanted. They are the things that those encouraging us to pursue something hope we will learn, like teamwork, even though they may not tell us that this is what they really want us to learn.
To switch from the inspirational to the futurist, perhaps another way of looking at the possible subjectives I’m considering for this is, learning how to process information in the singularity. Information is expanding faster than we can track or process on our own. How do we deal with it?