“All Taliban are Pashtuns, but not all Pashtuns are Taliban.” Musharraf argues that the resurgence of Taliban activity since 2003 is because the coalition forces have not included the Pashtuns in the political process. The Pashtuns comprise over 40% of the Afghani population. Not being involved in the political process means that they’ve been driven to the city and hills; to effectively rebuild the prior national covenant, the Pashtuns must also be engaged in the political process.

On why Pakistan has nuclear arms: 80% of India’s military force is reportedly oriented towards the country. Pakistan has an “existential threat” to its existence.

On relations with Afghanistan: “They have always been bad.”

Why hasn’t Osama Bin Laden been captured? “I think he’s smarter than us [...] Operations are going well, let’s see if we can get him.”

On the practice of stoning women to death, and what a recent act might do: “If you think by enacting laws you can change mindsets, that doesn’t happen. Not in developing countries.” It is not in all of Pakistan that people stone their neighbors, just in the backward wilds of some areas. Musharraf argues that misunderstandings forwarded by the media make this more of an issue than it is.

What kept surfacing in my mind was this: how does minimum viable democracy change from country to country and context to context? I feel that, all to often, we unfairly judge a country’s politics in comparison to our own standards of success and failure. Musharraf notes that when he came to power at the end of 1999, through a non-violent coup, the country was considered a failed state and that by 2006 the World Bank was praising the country for its economic progress.

The recording of the lecture, if made available, will be recommended.

#sxsw has jumped the dinoshark. #wxwtf is the new awesome.

Why shouldn’t every university – every school – copy Google’s 20% rule, encouraging and enabling creation and experimentation, every student expected to make a book or an opera or an algorithm or a company. Rather than showing our diplomas, shouldn’t we show our portfolios of work as a far better expression of our thinking and capability? The school becomes not a factory but an incubator.

Reflecting on the entire post, I have two thoughts that come to mind. First, to what degree are the qualities he observes as broken actually broken, and to what degree are they rhetoric to emphasis the overall message of his presentation? Second, if things are as broken as he says they are, what comes next?

If there are parallels between how the internet has affected the media industry and how the internet is beginning to affect the education industry, then surely there are lessons to be learned from how the media industry reacted and where they failed to. The opportunity, however, is more likely with what can be distributed (lessons, mentoring, accreditation, etc.) than trying to reform command and control. Build the tool for the public to educate itself.

It took way too long, but I finally had my sweet Kilowatts mounted with G3 Onyx AT bindings. The setup is complete with a pair of Dynafit ZZero boots with heat-molded liners which, if you’ve never experienced, I would highly recommend trying at least once in your life. I can’t wait to see how they ski. With CoPress closing down, more on that shortly, my goal is to make it happen more than the once a month I’ve been averaging.

A quick memo for the future: I’ve been able to sneak by the Amtrak baggage czar with a single pair of skis multiple times, but if they catch you with two pairs of skis and boots, they’re probably going to make you check them. Considering I wasn’t schlepping a ski bag, I have my fingers crossed that they don’t get mangled.

Collaborative learning redefines the information presentation model from that of broadcast, or one-way transmission from transmitter to receiver, to that of many to many. As discussed in the article, it defines how the culture of education process flattens and shifts. Given proper access to intellectual resources, also known as a wireless connection to the internet, students can assist in the role of teaching. More often than not, there are students who pick up any given material quicker than the others. With the established pedagogy, there is no advantage to being a quicker learner; with collaborative learning, being the quicker learner means that other opportunities arise to take a more active role in the teaching process and practice leadership skills. The responsibility of the professor is to be a curator, or act as a master guide to the learning process.

Collaborative learning also implies learning through practical application of knowledge, as opposed to simply being a static vassal to be filled. Choice quote:

As Seymour Papert, one of the world’s foremost experts on how technology can provide new ways to learn, put it: “The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.” Students need to integrate new information with the information they already have — to “construct” new knowledge structures and meaning.

Collaborative knowledge production, however, articulates how the dynamics of the web can alter the traditional content production role of the university. Instead of an emphasis on scarcity, it would instead focus on abundance and universal access, and it describes how this might affect intellectual content from course material to academic research. To achieve this goal, however, you need effective tools for distributed collaboration:

What higher education desperately needs is a social network — a Facebook for faculty. But it shouldn’t be a standalone application; it should be integral to the Global Network for Higher Learning. One such project, part of the Portuguese education system, is creating an online community of teachers across the country. The system will use collaborative methods for creating, managing, sharing, and deploying curricula and for tracking the results via a sophisticated learning management system. There are many benefits, including much greater collaboration among teachers and a more consistent measurement of students’ progress.

The real world gives professors collaboration opportunities in their department and with whom they meet, but just think of the potential serendipities a people-indexer like Aardvark could produce.

Most importantly, however, is that all of these ideas are business opportunities, and innovations the efficiencies of the market will be able to capitalize upon a lot quicker than those invested in the ivory towers.

Thanks to Suzi Steffen for sharing this with me.

Plug two: Marshall Kirkpatrick floated a related idea the other day that Facebook is now the world’s leading news reader. There are at least a few reasons: Facebook has the largest, most active user base on the planet, Facebook gives you control over who has access to your content which leads to a greater willingness to share, and Facebook wraps the whole creation/consumption experience into a nice, easy to use interface.

That last point is the most critical, in my opinion. As average Joe, it’s much, much easier to publish with Facebook (or Twitter) because there is tremendous attention paid to the experience of how content is consumed on a regular basis. Both Facebook and Twitter have dedicated dashboards for your subscriptions where you get visual reinforcement that other people are coming across your content. With my blog, I have a home page which my dad or mom might read occasionally, and X number of faceless RSS subscribers who may or may not “Mark All As Read” on a daily basis. Figuring out how to use Google Reader to read other blogs almost requires the scientific method, which could be a good thing if you consider yourself a geek but is almost certainly a bad thing if you’re a Normal just wanting to read the national news and your friends’ writing.

Moral of the story: Always take studies with a grain of salt. I suspect The Youth are publishing more than ever, but it’s coming in the form of Facebooking and Tumblring instead of maintaining a blog because the proprietary tools, unfortunately, have better readers right now than the open source ones.

Related to this, I’m hoping to take Ryan Sholin’s lead and write more on my original home space. It’s a muscle I think I need to exercise. I’m also going to take Gruber’s lead and turn off comments because I get way too many comment notifications like, “Hi, cool blog, just curious what spam system you use for cleaning up comments because I am getting so many spammers on my blog.”

?!

One’s Guild

I couldn’t function without them, and I suspect the same is true for nearly all effective people. By “them” I mean my closest intellectual collaborators. They are the major players in my social extended mind. How I think is shaped to a large degree by how they think.

Our association is looser than a team but closer than a cohort, and it’s not a club or a workgroup or an elite. I’ll call it a guild. Everyone in my guild runs their own operation, and none of us report to each other. All we do is keep close track of what each other is thinking and doing.

Absolutely the most perfect word.

$config['mail']['backend'] = 'smtp';
$config['mail']['params'] = array(
'host' => 'smtp.gmail.com',
'port' => 587,
'auth' => true,
'username' => 'username@domain.com',
'password' => 'your_secret_password'
);

Adding these settings to your config.php file will allow your StatusNet instance to send email notifications over SMTP when your web host doesn’t support sending mail from the server (ahem, WebFaction). The trick is to use the proper port, 587 instead of 25, and to enable authentication.

I’m still trying to configure Google Apps as the XMPP provider for StatusNet too; I’ll put together another post if I can figure that out.

AFG85: @cshirky Classes would create wikis for specific topics and students would be graded on the quality of their contributions.

AFG85: @cshirky And the same wikis would be used year after year, so new students would have to add to the contributions of last year’s students.

digiphile: @cshirky Fund multidisciplinary labs for applied innovation & incubation. And learn from the example of PCU & “Accepted” http://j.mp/4LHTkG

sewsueme: @cshirky instead of having a college counselor you would have a concierge/ curator who would help you make sense of your education journey

sewsueme: @cshirky as @ccoletta & I were debating earlier in the evening: there would need to be a new accred system. Employer or performance based?

sewsueme: @cshirky learners cld collect “credits” (learnings) from anyplace–Apple store, a uni course, an apprenticeship as long as they cld prove

sewsueme: @cshirky there might be some new course creation but aggregation from multiple places wld be important

ricetopher: @cshirky Why build anything? College as aggregator, filter set, facilitator of networked learning better model in an age of ubiquitous info.

AFG85: @cshirky for professors, have a small full time staff supplemented with practitioners from different fields teaching for one semester

AFG85: @cshirky for students, go YCombinator style–systematic applications, then one weekend of ten minute interviews.

ekstasis: @cshirky single biggest failure of education is the focus on grades as a proxy for learning. they don’t always track. #CollegeFromScratch

I still think that accreditation is going to be the toughest nut to crack. All of the other pieces, distributed collaboration, access to learning materials, etc., are falling into place thanks to the disruptive tendencies of the web. People are learning, by golly, but the record of their learnings is all over the map. For any of these zany ideas for new universities to fly, the students will need to have an equally new method for articulating their accomplishments. Right now, this legitimacy comes from the accreditation board.

If you can convince employers that your new mechanism for accreditation is more accurate and effective than the standard college degree then, well, I think you might have a new college worth starting from scratch.

What is happening is the superimposition of publicy on top of, and partly obscuring, privacy. Those raised in this brave new world are already living in a cultural context based on publicy, and therefore they are running afoul of social conventions based on privacy. That’s why young people find job offers rescinded when pictures of drunken or naked pictures are discovered on their Facebook pages. Their prospective employers are judging their actions from a privacy-based attitude, in which the facets of an online self are averaged, instead of being considered as a constellation of selves. Publicy says that each self exists in a particular social context, and all such contracts are independent.

[...]

Some will dismiss my theorizing as a simple reprise of cultural relativism, making the case that all cultures can only be understood in their own cultural terms. I am making part of that case, in essence, by saying that the mores inherent in online social contracts are self-defined, and any individual’s participation in a specific online public does not have to be justified in a global way, any more than the cultural mores of the Berber Tuaregs need to be justified from the perspective of modern Western norms.

What strikes me as slightly off-kilter about this future is that these new publics are defined by tools like Twitter, Facebook, and Gowalla, and those tools are the bedrock for the most active social spaces.

There are nuggets I was able to suss out, however. If you’ve indexed your feeds, there are search capabilities that will also give you the frequency of any given term. The mapping functionality is also very slick. You can get all of the recent stories on a map, or stories limited to a specific term. It’s misleading to have the initial view of the map be the entire world, though, because the most useful view to an end user will be whatever region they’re interested in.

This brings me to my biggest observation: a tool like this would be most useful for managing feeds of raw data, not feeds of news articles. News articles are products where the data has already been through the rock tumbler. Where Managing News wants to be headed, I think, is towards building a tool that allows you to map and visualize all manners of data.

The difficulty then is both building the visualization tools and finding, or even brainstorming, properly geo-coded RSS feeds of the data you’re interested in.

One: when everyone you follow on Twitter shares the same link over and over again. There should be a version of the word for when it’s a dumb post I’d rather never had read, and another version for when it’s a smart post I’d like to share too but don’t want to join the crowd of oversharers.

Two: the act of subconciously comparing your writing with that of the best authors on the web. The difference between paper and pixels is that your production, your mind babies, are public by default. Knowledge of this, from my perspective, drives a much stronger awareness of how other people interpret your communication skills. Offered just in paper form, pieces of Andrew Spittle’s senior thesis would gather a readership of his professors, close friends and family. On the web, his potential readership grows exponentially and is far more likely to gather critique and feedback. I believe it’s this underlying awareness that drives more people to write more things that are worthwhile.

This is a new frontier. We need to actively create the words that best articulate the web’s nuances.

Huge buildings in the middle of the desert. You can play slot machines with a credit card. This side of America blows my mind.

After a couple month trial, I’ve decided to move back to Google Reader from Shaun Inman’s Fever. Originally, I made the migration on the allure of several shiny gems: a gorgeous interface, code that I could host on my own server, a refresh rate I could dictate with cron, and an innovative approach to filtering the signal from the noise. With each feed you add, either as Kindling you read on a regular basis or Sparks to feed the fever, the links count towards “what’s hot”, a visualization of the most popular stories for any given time period based on the information flow you’ve curated.

The deal breaker, however, is the mobile interface. In terms of reading experience the two RSS readers are comparable but sharing from Fever is a multi-step pain. Google Reader is at most a two-step process: open the item in a new Mobile Safari tab and hit the Tweetie bookmarklet. Because Fever is a standalone web application on the iPhone, I have to copy the link, close the application, open Tweetie, and then paste the link. I do a significant percentage of reading on the go, so it’s back to Google Reader.

It’s also a golden opportunity to again rethink how I structure my information flow. The art of how people organize their RSS readers is fascinating and writing about it offers tremendous learning potential; consider this a nudge to reflect and articulate how you’re managing your information flow.

My approach is to organize feeds by both priority and topic. I originally started with three priorities, A, B and C, and slimmed that down to A and B when I moved to Fever. If it’s a relatively low traffic feed with content I’m very interested in, then I’ll drop it in the “A-List” bucket. Publications that fit in this category include Daring Fireball, Nieman Journalism Lab, Publishing 2.0, Snarkmarket, and Open the Future. The “B-List” bucket acts as a second tier of importance and includes sites like … My Heart’s in Accra, /Message, and Oregon Media Central. Feeds I’d like to read/skim on the days I have the time to, or that I don’t mind marking all as read, fit into different topical buckets including Business & Economics, Education, International Development, Media & Journalism, and Technology.

This functions, but I’m ready for something new with a couple of goals in mind. First, I’d like to add more feeds to my stream. In the move from Google Reader to Fever, I culled my subscription list down to 262. This metric says “amateur web worker.” So, secondly, in the process of adding more feeds to my stream I need an approach that adds more nuance to my prioritization system. The filtering offered by Fever was this in parts, however I don’t believe I had the breadth of data to make it a useful daily tool. Whether using Google Reader’s system of folders can actually scale remains to be seen, but I shall experiment. And continue searching for other peoples’ approaches to structuring their information flow.

Later: There’s an additional piece to this puzzle. I’m obsessive compulsive about getting my RSS reader to zero nearly every day. This I am proud of. What it means to my method of parsing information is that I ideally want to weight everything in such a manner that I maximize the my efforts in relation to amount of time I have.

I’m curious to see if there is a reputation system built into it. As they say, this works based on the participation of experts and non-experts. How do you gauge the expertise of a sweeper? And I don’t mean to imply as a journalist that I think that journalists are ‘experts’ by default. For instance, I know a lot about US politics but consider myself a novice when it comes to British politics.

To take a step back, Swift River is a project to “crowdsource the filter” for real-time crisis reporting. Ushahidi provides a platform for aggregating the information around a crisis but, when a crisis situation explodes metaphorically or literally, the information coming in can quickly overwhelm the people trying to make sense of it. Swift River will enable an observer to create a new instance for a given situation, add RSS feeds from various sources including news publications and Twitter, and then additional users will be able to come in as “sweepers” to curate those incoming bits of information and float the most important to the top.

In the comments, Jon mentions that the three “most critical aspects are the trust algorithm (veracity), predictive tagging and filtering out redundancies and inaccuracies.” The first, in my opinion, will be the most challenging, and hopefully most rewarding, piece of the riddle. They’ll be able to scale their ability to float accurate information if they focus on identifying the trustworthy people instead of the trustworthy information.

A couple of weeks ago on Twitter, I observed that the crowd is the least important part of crowdsourcing. More often than not, you could care less about the opinion of the crowd on a whole. What you really want is an authoritative answer, or field report, from the most knowledgeable person in that crowd.