Mathemagenic

Browsing my archives and realising that I’d better quote those comments to Context and attribution (12 Feb 2004!) in a blogpost, which is easier to find later.

By Alex Halavais (#):

This is, arguably, easy enough with words, but much harder when it comes to ideas. I came up with some thoughts that, I will assert, are my own. Someone noted that these followed closely some things you had written about in your blog. I am a regular reader of your blog, and I think it is likely that these entries–at the very least–prompted my thinking in a particular direction. This tendency to remember the ideas but forget their source–the “sleeper effect”–has been shown in communication research several times over the last 50 years.

You actually know about this, because someone else made the connection and hyperlinked it. But otherwise, I would have been abscounding with your ideas without due credit. As interersted as I am in encouraging hyperlinking as attribution, there has to be a limit.

I wonder whether a standing set of citations (your “Regular reads/dialogues”) constitutes a kind of “thought group”–an indication that your ideas are at least in some part attibutable to the people you communicate with every day?

By Piers Young (#):

Crikey - all sounds like we’re beginning to enter the murky world of Intellectual Proprty Rights. Have a few brief comments: 1) that this trail is happening at all is a good thing. It underlines the fact that there is value (however intangible) in blogging. 2) I don’t think the “thought group” idea’s is quite enough. Most, or at least many blogs have a “thought group” anyway: a blogroll. Most, or at least many bloggers have diverse interests: they may be into KM and skiing, KM and whiskey or KM and needlecraft or - you get the picture. One of the great things about links is that it allows me to get an idea which blogs most interest me. Without specific citations, I - as let’s say a needlecraft afficionado - would have to wade through a whole load of stuff on marketing, whiskey and skiing. Links, along with a whole load of other good things, help you filter. 3) That said, I agree there has to be a limit. In many cases it just isn’t practical to search all the citations and make all the links. But surely you do as much as you’ve got time for? And with the joys of trackback, bookmarklets etc, you almost by definition have time for one.

Alternating between typing, reading, browsing my weblog and walking around (usually means writing flow :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/06/12.html#a1908; comments are here.

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Thinking of blogs vs. wikis to support thinking. For me blogging is easier - it shows how ideas unfold over time and somehow I don’t have a problem when I create new page (I do think twice in wikis - because it increases navigation mess). Blogging is also about permalinking and hypertexting half-baked ideas…

The problem is that at the certain moment there is a critical mass (critical mess ;) of bits related to a theme. At this moment you need a least an overview of all of them and then a way to construct something more coherent. Wikis are great for that. It’s much easier to get an overview of ideas (if they collected on one page :), edit them into something better or even go for refactoring the whole thing.

But then you get the clarity of a final product and lose an overview of path that took you there. And I’m getting more and more convinced that process and artefacts on the way is as important as the final product.

Of course, some wiki/weblog combination can make life easier (but not those where weblog post is edited as a wiki - you lose the path then).

The funny thing that so far I have my own work around: I use weblog for thinking in progress and then ideas are ripe I write papers. It also makes pretty clear distinction for content ownership in a case where someone (like me) gets paid to produce ideas: I’m building my “thought repository” (weblog) while my company benefits from more polished “knowledge artefacts” (papers and reports) I produce.

Hmm, have to dig out some research on process of creative thinking - something about stages in which clear ideas emerge from a mess of doing and thinking, reading and writing…

Lot’s of associative thinking instead of working :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/04/08.html#a1160; comments are here.

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Comment by Scott Leslie to Best Set of Tools to Support Communities:

One capability that may be specific to the type of communities I support (though I expect applies more widely) is the ability for a community member to easily extract their contributions (and possibly also the contributions of others) so that they can use them in other parts of their online lives. Alternatively, the ability for a community member to easily contribute materials that have been developed elsewhere.

The majority of online communities I participate in aren’t organizational in nature - the cross institutional and organizational boundaries. As such, it is likely that they are not the only community that any one of the participants is a part of. Software that acts as a restrictive ‘container’ where a community member can make a deposit but not a withdrawal or a transfer is of less and less interest to me. Software, or the models we set up, needs to recognize that most of us are a part of multiple communities and thus must help (instead of hinder) in participating in as many of them as possible given our limited time and resources.

I think this is important not only because we are members of multiple communities, but also because we are taking more responsibility for our own learning and we need traces of our thinking to reflect and to learn (recent example: Circadian Blog Rhythms). This need also explains why weblog can take place of participation in forums.

See also related post: Who owns narrated experiences?

Btw, definition of social software in the same comment:

This is why I think the whole ’social software’ movement is in fact different from many of the collaborative technologies we’ve seen before - it’s software that is centered around individuals (instead of the community ’site’ or server) but that creates conjunctions of these individuals by accepting various interfaces, feeds and formats from those individuals and coalescing them.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/08/11.html#a716; comments are here.

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