In
the opinion of David Weinberger, author of Too Big To Know and “one of the most
important thinkers of the digital age*,” we ain’t there yet. The networking of
knowledge is not yet the blessing it might someday be, and we'll need to do more, he says, to help the Net live up to its potential. (as the place for people to go to get smarter faster and to [in turn] get more productive) As it relates to what I'm most concerned about: There's no reason the Net couldn't be a much better place for empowering and enabling the disabled.
Here are some actions people of all stripes can take...while online, starting now...to become better knowledge workers and help bring about a smarter Net. These represent three of Mr. Weinberger's five parting suggestions.
LINK
“More
links, more links.” Links encourage and help others to chase their interests. Links enable us to be transparent about how we reached a conclusion. Links increase the authority of a work. Links promote independent thinking.
LABEL
(I get a kick out of this:) In
Weinberger’s words, “Most of what’s posted will be crap. So, we need ways to
evaluate and filter, which can be especially difficult since what is crap for
one effort may be gold for another.”
Ironically enough, the antidote to the crappy-information overload problem is to provide information about the information we contribute. Metadata (think "labels", like the ones that appear at the bottom of this post) enables your information to be found more easily, i.e., it makes your information reusable. If and when we can get to the point where we’re labeling all of our information using standardized formats, we’ll be on our way to realizing the vision of the semantic web. Computers would then be able to do more of our filtering for us and the Net would spit out a lot more knowledge than was put into it. We'd have ourselves a truly smart network.
Ironically enough, the antidote to the crappy-information overload problem is to provide information about the information we contribute. Metadata (think "labels", like the ones that appear at the bottom of this post) enables your information to be found more easily, i.e., it makes your information reusable. If and when we can get to the point where we’re labeling all of our information using standardized formats, we’ll be on our way to realizing the vision of the semantic web. Computers would then be able to do more of our filtering for us and the Net would spit out a lot more knowledge than was put into it. We'd have ourselves a truly smart network.
LEARN
For the Net to be all it can be, we'll
all need to learn how to:
Operate the dang thing. (the Net and its component parts, that is) Really just a matter of clicking buttons. Simple as ABC.
Evaluate knowledge claims. The ones others make, and the ones we make ourselves. Critical thinking skills to shore up? Being able to "distinguish lying crap from well-documented conclusions." Becoming more open to new ideas. Learning how to participate in multi-way, multi-cultural conversations.
Learn to love difference. We need to "push past our urge to stick with people like us." Easier said than done, but the author sees in the Net both an opportunity ("to encounter and interact with that which is different") and a model ("we can understand ourselves as a Web page interpenetrated with links, connected to a world that takes us up and makes us interesting.”).All o' this is applicable when we blog, leave comments, contribute to Wikipedia, rate products…
*per Daniel Pink
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