jason

Originally published at Lemmingworks. You can comment here or there.

Ross Mayfield notes that Jotspot Finally Revived as Google Sites: Welcome to Google Sites

Google Sites, a new offering from Google Apps, makes creating a team site as easy as editing a document. Use Google Sites to centralize all types of information — from videos to presentations — and share your site with just a few people, your entire organization, or the world.

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Building a site is as simple as editing a document, and you don’t need anyone’s help to get started.

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Create a single place to bring together all the information your team needs to share, including docs, videos, photos, calendars and attachments.

Work together
Invite co-workers, classmates, or your entire organization to edit your site with you to keep it fresh and up-to-date. And let as many or few people view your site as you want.

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

My friend gary sent me Jaron Lanier’s article Digital Maoism:

The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it? The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous.

I’ve always found this guy to be problematic. But I’ve never read enough to consider myself well versed on the topic of his ego to say anything. In this context, we’re talking about wikipedia and how it is upsetting to some peeps. It reminds me of when I was presenting at SXSW in 2003. You didn’t miss much, and few were interested in hearing me talk about the cultural hegemony of blogging and the net in general. What was interesting was hearing how upset the people who made $$ off selling their words and ideas were to an online consumer market. If everyone started blogging, where would WE (i.e. the jokers writing content) be? Text is the turf of the journalist, writer, publisher and librarian. And if just ANYONE gets to write, the blogosphere [sic] will just get filled up by the idiot ramblings of non-professionals (i.e. readers) who should be consuming out quality rather than producing dross. Yawn. They all have blogs now and compete with the plebes.

Now for the world of wikipedia. In a moment. As an academic for almost 20 years, I can tell you where i find poor scholarship and errors in fact and argument and judgement: in published books and academic peer reviewed articles. Of course there’s a lot of great stuff in published books and academic peer reviewed articles, but there’s a lot of junk, and the quality control can be rather poor. AND the amount of useless drivel that gets into print can obscure the material of value. And as for the cabals that control the gate; I think that hive mind might be appropriate. Driven by vainglory, the tenure track or the dollar the good can be overwhelmed by the bad. I’m not trashing the field, but rather showing that it is not a great good place, but a normal place full of normal things that go on throughout the world.

Now for the world of wikipedia. It’s pretty much the same. It seems to accurately reflect what goes on outside of the world. Stupid articles on people we don’t care about, topics that don’t interest us and the like; disproportionate to important things. Issues relating to children and minority issues get overlooked and pages on geeks and geekery overblown.

Lanier points out that this notion of collectivism is a problem, but it is no more collective than the collective energy of the USA leads it to reproduce itself, and export it. No more collective than the hive mind of corporate america, or the ecologies of our global societies. Wikipedia is not a collective in any meaningful sense any more than a watershed or microclimate is maoist. It is a socially constructed space that is, for a change, useful. And wonderfully free of the rampant individualisms and cults of personalities that to me reflect maoism when you look at it.

Originally published at .... You can comment here or there.

Vicki tells us, at Cool Cat Teacher Blog, about a convo, with links, she had with Stewart Mader about Wikis in Education: “On Friday, I had an enlightening discussion with Stewart Mader, an instructional technologist in math and sciences at Brown University, about the use of wikis in education. He will be posting a series from our discussions.”