Beautiful Synchronicity

Beautiful Synchronicity – Saw American Beauty for the first time yesterday, and thought it a magic film, though I didn’t analyse why. Today I find a review of American Existentialism (following a William Barrett link) that lists the release of American Beauty as a significant Existentialist event (ditto the release of Fight Club). [George Cotkin at John Hopkins Uni.]

Social Software Alliance

Social Software Alliance – Interesting that a main topic of the early work of this group, apart from ontologies / definitions of “topics” / interoperabilities, is unique identity of (social) individuals and communities – Friend of a Friend (FoaF) has been suggested. Given the significance of identity (URI’s) for knowledge factoids, and the need for context information “about” these resources, it is also interesting that FoaF covers a great deal of information “about” an individual. In fact, the context information about the resource is pretty much one and the same as that about the individual. It’s contextual information, including the “motivation” of the individual communicator, that allows the recipient to assess the validity of the information. In fact FoaF is very much along the lines of who cites who – Why should I believe that – Who said that – What are their credentials ? (FoaF even includes the individual’s Myers-Briggs classification !)

So identifying individuals is more about their credentials than their identity per se. (Reputation Management.)

SSA is organised via a Wiki – the first one to which I’ve signed up – a kind of communal web site where you can add new, and edit each other’s, pages. Often seen as a more interactive alternative to blogging.

Stealing Ideas ?

Stealing Ideas ? – Quote by David Gurteen from Howard Aitken [Quote] Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.[Unquote] Compare with this apparently conflicting Victor Hugo quote blogged earlier. [Quote] An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.[Unquote] Ah, the wonder of metphorical aphorisms.

And two clicks later here is another metaphor from blogroots, quoted by David Gurteen [Quote] Weblogs spread memes like no other medium. More ideas are being pushed around the network of minds connected by blogs than any other set of communications. It is like a petri dish for knowledge. [Unquote]

So how do you spread a good idea – warlike invasion, ram it down throats or sow tiny seeds ? How is it all three metaphors ring true ?

Conflicting Models of Learning and Knowledge

Conflicting Models of Learning and Knowledge – Excellent analysis from Oliver Wrede at Seblogging (Seb Fielder’s aggregator ?) [via McGee] (Such a tangled web it’s getting hard to distinguish whose thoughts are who’s in this analysis). Anyway [Quote] Needless to say that the same dilemma can be found in countless corporate environments, too. [Unquote]

Seblogging is an interesting collection – Is “cognitive architects” an interactive community or merely an aggregation ?

Interestingly, McGee’s musings on this blog make deferential reference to the late Donald Schon, the other half of the Argyris and Schon works to which I also I keep making reference.

More on Motivation and Context

More on Motivation and Context – A little parable brought to my attention by Seb arising from a misunderstanding between two “communities” of knowledge personified by Stephen Downes and David Wiley. Of course bloggers are not “the” community, just one (set of) many (sets of) communities with vaious levels of communication links between them. In fact even within any one such “community” the communication links vary enormously. Anyway, the conclusion, and my main point of interest, is in “knowing the communicator” – without any context or understanding of the motivations of those with which we are communicating, very little of the information content communicated can be considered to be knowledge.

Repeat after me, “Motivation is a necessary component of any knowledge model.”