ETech day 3: High order bits and Ontologies

It truly feels like ETech today -- I'm underslept and over-caffeinated at medium levels. Tomorrow is not going to be pretty -- tonight the Maker's Fair will go until late and then Larry Lessig speaks early in the morning. I predict dangerous levels of caffeine for tomorrow. About par for the course for ETech.

Today was just as action packed as yesterday -- the high order bits sessions focused on emerging technology in the classroom as opposed to the research labs from the search companies. We heard about a number of cool projects happening in Tom Igoe's Networked Objects classes at NYU's ITP program. For instance, one student was fed up with walking around with an open laptop in NYC's freezing weather while trying to find a wireless network connection (this was before keychain WiFi sensors). So she decided to build an attractive WiFi sensing purse -- both practical and athestically pleasing.

Another student project was a little bit more off the wall -- the assignment was to create a piece of furniture that chats in a chatroom. The students rose to this novel challenge by creating the junkie's little helper. The helper is a medicine cabinet that monitors the stash of Courtney Love's illegal drugs in the cabinet. If the stash gets low and Courtney says anything in the chatroom, the bot will chime in with a "Don't listen to her! She is high!" And should the stash of drugs gets really low it will automatically call the ambulance. I love it! Why couldn't my instructors in college give such cool assignments?

Tom Hoffman and Tim Lauer told us about their projects to introduce Wiki's into Portland, Oregon classrooms. After much research and some hassles in dealing with the school's inflexible IT department, Tim and Tom settled on using Instwiki on the teacher's iBooks because the IT department refused to setup a dedicated server for hosting the Wiki. Once the system was in place, the students were taught to create their writing assignment in the Wiki that is running on the teacher's iBook, and the teacher could then use the Wiki to grade and comment on the student's writing by taking home the iBook and using it outside the classroom. While these are baby steps for introducing emerging technology into the classroom, it its a step in the right direction nonetheless. Ironically enough, the students took to the new system with ease, but the teachers took a little more time and effort to adapt to the new system.

Then later in the afternoon, Clay Shirky talked about the difference between ontologies and folksonomies in his "Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata". With his usual flair Clay delivered a great overview of classic ontologies and all the issues that limit their usefulness on the Internet. Clay gave the classic example of the Dewey decimal system that has a dozen or so categories for Christian religions books, but only a single category to emcompass all of the worlds remaining religions. This may have been appropriate at the time when Dewey created his decimal system, but in today's globalizing world it is not acceptable to lump 95+ percent of the world's religions into one category.

Clay went on to outline the conditions under which classical ontologies can thrive:

• Domain: small corpus, formal categories, stable entities, restricted entities, clear edges
• Participants: Coordinated users, expert users, expert catalogers, authoritative sources

In a nutshell, ontologies work best in small and controlled environments where experts are using the system. Unfortunately, the Internet is the the exact opposite of all of these. And thus, argues Clay, ontologies are not suited for the Internet. Fortunately, the Internet has brought us a solution to all these problems in the form of Folksonomies.

A folksonomy is an organic categorization system that Del.icio.us and Flickr have pioneered. The basic idea is that any user can apply any number of tags (read: words) to a bookmark or picture. Then people can view all the bookmarks/pictures that have a given tag applied to them. This very simple and intuitive process is what Clay called Voodoo Categorization because it brings order out of chaos by sheer magic.

Clay further elaborates that folksonomies are borne from individual motivation, such as users tagging their pictures in Flickr in order to be able to find them again in the future. This individual motivation brings about group value in that when all the tags are considered in aggregate, an ad-hoc classification system emerges that allows users to browse/search a large body of information with more context than a traditional text search.

Overall, the ad-hoc nature of a folksonomy is perfectly suited to the bottom up and ever changing nature of the Internet. While folksonomies are not perfect, their benefits drastically outweigh their drawbacks -- at least when applied to chaotic systems like the Internet.

And with that, I'll take in one more session and then prepare for showing off my own "Home water purification still" at the Maker's fair tonight -- I'll post more about the fair tomorrow.

Do you have any thoughts about emerging tech in the classroom or folksonomies?