David Weinberger Keynote transcript 2006
Presentation
Thank you. Unlike the minister, I will not come out unless there is theme music, so it’s a pleasure to be in Scotland. It’s an honour to be able to talk with you and I would like to begin by pandering, but I mean it sincerely, that you’re educators, you’re the people who support teachers, and you’ve been responsible for helping to create three children that I know of, who are ours, who are curious, engaged, smart, really interested in things, so thank you very much.
I want to talk about what I think is a disconnect between what’s happening with knowledge, because something is happening with knowledge, and what’s going on in how we teach knowledge and in education. I’m coming from, directly from an American perspective, in particular I’m rooted in our local schools, our state schools that our children have gone to. The primary school is three doors down from us. It’s been an important part, part of our lives, so in some ways this will be a parochial view, but it’s the best I can manage. So, something is happening with knowledge. It’s changing in ways that we might not have expected; I certainly didn’t. So, since I’m going to be talking about knowledge, I want to talk about, initially about seven properties and this will be very, very fast, don’t worry; the seven properties of traditional knowledge.
And the first is simply that we have assumed since the beginnings in the West, that knowledge is a three term relationship. By the way, I’m sorry for my very strong American accent. If … I’m not sure how intelligible it is - do I need to speak more slowly? Oh really? Okay, good. Maybe I’ll speak a little more quickly then. So, we’ve assumed that it’s a three term relationship, knower and knowing and knowledge itself, which for Aristotle was in fact, the knowledge was between. It’s where the self, the mind and world met and over the course of time, over the past twenty-five hundred years, we’ve managed to move knowledge so that it’s actually a content of our …. it sits in our skulls, which is a very, very bad idea, but it’s gotten firmly implanted that knowledge is something inside of individuals’ heads. Nevertheless, that’s, that’s where we are. So that’s the first property of traditional knowledge.
And the second is that we’ve assumed that there is one knowledge and secondly …
… the third property is that it’s the same for everyone. We don’t even have a plural of knowledge. It’s, there’s no knowledges, there’s only knowledge, so we’ve assumed that it’s one thing.
And along with that, we’ve also assumed that if I’m right and you disagree with me, then you’re wrong. And if two people disagree, at best one of them is right. It’s just the way it is. And that’s because the world is, is only one way and knowledge is supposed to be a reflection of that world, so knowledge has become binary.
Next, we’ve assumed that it doesn’t matter who says it, if something is true, it’s true. We’ve abstracted the statement from the person who’s uttering it. So, say it in French, say it with, well, it’s not a Scottish accent here is it? – with an American accent, it doesn’t matter. The sound of the, of the voice, the person who said it, the way the person said it, that doesn’t matter. What the knowledge is, is this abstract thing that’s abstracted from the individual uttering it.
The next is that knowledge is simple and it’s not …. there are string theories, so knowledge isn’t simple simple, but it’s simpler than the world it explains. That’s been our assumption; that the world seems to be this, this blooming, buzzing confusion until there’s knowledge, and knowledge finds the simpler truth that explains this profusion of appearance, so knowledge is simpler than what appears. When the, when the Greeks first came up with the idea of knowledge, it was because they needed to decide among all the speakers, who to believe. There were too many opinions; we needed a way to figure out which, which opinions to believe and this was as a matter of guiding the state, very practical decisions. Well, so knowledge is relatively rare. There’s more belief in things that aren’t knowledge than there are knowledge, and over time is there’s been more and more and more and more and more to know, there’s so much to know that we can’t rely on any one individual, and so you need experts in particular topics who know their stuff, and we rely upon them to help us sort the mere belief from the actual knowledge.
Sixth in this procession of properties is that we’ve assumed that knowledge is orderly; it’s not a bundle of apples sitting apart and discrete, but that there’s order to it and that the order is an important part of the knowledge. If you want to know a subject, you can’t just know a set of facts, you have to know how they go together. And our preferred, not exclusive, but preferred way of ordering knowledge, ever since Aristotle, who noticed that we were constructing something like trees, although he didn’t see it graphically as a tree, it took another six hundred years and a Syrian philosopher named Porphyry to actually draw it as a tree. Nevertheless, Aristotle recognised that we were, we were organising knowledge in tree-like ways. And trees are actually quite remarkable structures. If you know that that’s a robin at the end, you know that it’s a robin because you know that it’s a bird, so it has something in common with other birds; and you know that it’s not a penguin and an ostrich, so you know it’s different from other birds. So in, in this structure of similarity and difference there’s incredible power, mainly for what it doesn’t say, because the real strength of the tree is that it’s simply by knowing that this is a robin, you know that you can work your way up, you can say “it’s a robin, so I know it’s a bird, I know it has a backbone, I know it’s an animal, I know it’s a physical object, therefore it has atoms, therefore the string theory applies”, and you can get the whole universe back in if you need it, but generally you don’t need it, so trees are useful because they have so much implicit information that we don’t have to pay attention to, unless there’s some good reason to. I don’t have to think every time I see a robin, “oh, it’s got a backbone”, but if I need to I can, so a very powerful way of organising complex things, like the universe.
And the seventh property of knowledge I want to point to is, this is Francis Nixon at the university of Texas, Austin, who put it well, I thought, but the idea is that we’ve thought that knowledge is a realm, and it’s a realm that spans generations and if you work really hard and study and do your research, maybe something that you write will be accepted by the keepers of this realm, to be put in there and then it will last for generations as well. Knowledge as a realm, is independent of us, it’s a cultural object we can contribute to, perhaps, if we’re lucky.
Well, it’s not an accident that so many of these seven properties, in fact most of them are in fact properties of the real world as well. There are a couple of reasons for this. That is, there’s one knowledge is the same for everybody, it doesn’t matter who says it, you know, the real world is independent of us, it goes on after we’re dead, it’s bigger than we are. It’s not an accident that the properties of knowledge are also the properties of the real world, and one of the reasons for this is that in addition to well, … it doesn’t matter. One of the reasons is that the way that we preserved and communicated knowledge is through physical objects, through books, primarily. And books as physical objects for example, have to be placed on one shelf and not another when you’re categorising them, it’s just the way atoms work. If it’s about the history of military cooking, you can’t put it on history, military and cooking shelves, you’ve got to pick one, that’s, atoms are tough that way. So you do that. Well, that’s how you get trees, by making binary decisions about which piles to put things in. That’s also, by the way, how you sort your laundry. The way that we’d sorted our knowledge into trees turns out to be using the same principles that we use for sorting physical objects, like laundry. And because books are physical also, they’re, they can’t be infinite, they’ve got to fit between covers. There are practical issues of binding and economics as well, and so books are on topics, and knowledge gets atomised into topics and even though there are references from one book to another through footnotes, trying to follow a footnote in a book, to another book in a physical library, especially at Harvard, where the physical library is laid out in two towers that connect in sort of magic portal ways, you have to find the magic portal to get from one to the other, physical libraries are like an attempt to keep ideas separate. How far away can we keep this book from that one, when they are referencing? So, books do make references, of course, because that’s how we thing, but the physical nature of them gets in the way of that. It lends itself towards thinking about knowledge in terms of topics that fit between covers, and the relationship of publishing of books and of expertise is close, and the Maklunites will say absolute, the two things come together. But now we’re digitising everything, just about everything we can lay our hands on, not much is going to remain undigitised when it comes to knowledge and information, so I think it’s useful to think about there being three orders of order; three ways that we organise.
The first two are traditional, and in the first order, this is, this is the Bettmann archive, which is eleven million historic photographs in the US, the most important collection. It was bought by Bill Gates because it was melting, literally melting in Manhattan, and moved two hundred and twenty feet below ground into a cavern, which is this. So in the first order of order, you take the physical objects, the photos, the books, whatever, and you physically arrange them, you organise them and in this case, you lower the temperature over time to two degrees centigrade, because you want to preserve them. And as a result, when you leave this chamber, this first order chamber to go into the second order chamber in front, you have to go through an airlock.
But there’s the second order of order. In the second order you separate the meta-data, that is the information about the information. You separate it physically from the objects themselves, and then you organise it, and the card catalogue is the most familiar way. This gives you obvious advantages; you can sort things in multiple ways, whereas the photographs themselves only in one way. With card catalogue you can do subject, title, author and so forth, but you can’t do too many because then the card catalogue gets too big. You also have to reduce the information from everything that’s in the book to what fits on a small card. And once you’ve done that you can … there’s five hundred and sixty-five miles of shelves, of bookshelves in the United States Library of Congress. It’s a lot easier to go to the card catalogue than it is to go through the shelves.
Well, now we’re entering the third order, in which the, the meta-data is digitised and so are the contents. Both are on-line and this enables you to do things you cannot do in the first two orders. And I want to point, quickly again, to four principles of organisation that change in the third order, which we’re now entering.
In the first order, the robin only goes on one branch of the tree, so to speak. If you get a camera, a new camera into your physical store, you’re going to have to put it onto one shelf, and you’ll put it on a photography shelf in that department, very likely. If it’s a digital store, an on-line store, you’re going to put it into as many categories as you can possibly think of; this is what Amazon does with its books, because it’s good for you because more people will find it, it’s good for your customers, because more people, they’ll be able to find what they need. So, sure, put it into as many categories as … the more categories, the better. A leaf can go on many branches in the first order, excuse me, in the third order.
Second principle that changes is that in the, in the first two orders, if you’re organising stuff and there are too many exceptions and the miscellaneous category gets too big and there are too many … you’re erasing too much, having lines hop over other lines then your organisation has failed. In the third order, if your website has so many links coming into it that you can’t even count or follow them, then it’s a huge success. There’s no disadvantage to messiness in the third order, because we can find stuff because it’s computerised. The messier, the better, the richer the relationships, the better.
Third is that we’ve gotten used to the idea of … though we don’t talk about it exactly like this, but you’ll see what I mean … that there’s a difference between meta-data and data. There’s the stuff we’re trying to find and the information that we’re using to find it. The card catalogue, or the search engine, or whatever. So let’s say that we want to … we can’t remember the name of the book that Herman Melville wrote, so we go to a search engine and we press search and it tells us that. So, Herman Melville is the meta-data, in this case, and the book is the data. Well, as efforts like Google Print and others, as all these books get digitised, as many of them as we can, and if the copyright laws would veer back from total lunacy, we’d be able to digitise more and make more of our culture available. As we digitise these books and bring them on-line, the distinction between data and meta-data disappears, so for example, I could take some content from Moby Dick. I can take the first line and say “what was that, what book begins with ‘Call me Ishmael’, I can’t remember”, use that content as meta-data and have Herman Melville come back as the data. In the third order, there’s no difference between meta-data and data except that data is what you’re looking for and the meta-data is what you’re using to look for it with. So, there’s no formal difference, and this has implications that I’ll talk about in a minute, about how you organise your data. We’re so used to thinking about “well, what meta-data are you going to need in order to be able to find this material?”, and so we come up with, generally, a narrow set of terms. Not any more. That’s, in the third order, you don’t have to do that.
And the fourth principle that changes, and I want to warn you, it’s going to sound like I’m beginning to end the talk, I’m not, sorry. There’s actually two, two biggish chunks I want to talk about, but okay, so, and the fourth principle is that if you go into a local, large department store, for example, I don’t know, what’s a good example? John Lewis, unless you’re making fun of me. Okay, John Lewis is a clothing, a large clothing store. If you go in and you do the rational thing, which is to take a shopping cart and start pulling off the shelves everything that fits you and nothing else, because everything else in the store is noise; you don’t care about that. So if you do the rational thing, you start pulling everything in so you can make a big pile and then sort through it to find the stuff that you want, you’d be thrown out before your cart is halfway up, because the people who own the stuff, who own the information, have traditionally owned the organisation of that information, but on-line that’s exactly what you want to do. You, on-line, you only want to see the stuff that fits you, and in an on-line store that didn’t do that, you would never go back to. If you’re browsing and you find exactly the right thing and it turns out it’s not in your size, you’ve just been disappointed, so on-line it makes, it the third order, it makes absolute sense to do the equivalent of filling up the trolley cart.
So this is … these are some examples. This is university of North Carolina’s, sorry, North Carolina State University’s library, which uses faceted classification, which in the interests of time I will not explain, except to say that it dynamically builds a tree to suit the user’s way of navigating. Rather than having a static tree that says you will start with fiction or non-fiction and then move onto century and so forth, it lets you start with any branch and dynamically reconfigures the tree behind the scenes. This is based upon work done by (s.l. Rongen Offen), the great Indian librarian, well before there were computers around for him to imagine that this would be the result.
Another way that I think is increasingly important and very significant is that users are organising information owned by people is through tagging. This site is called delicious dot com. Is anybody using delicious, or tagging? Yeah, a smattering of hands. Okay. Delicious is a free site. If you come across … it’s a book marking site, so if you come across a webpage that you want to remember, you put it, you put the address on your free page at delicious. But let’s say you have hundreds or thousands of these bookmarks, how are you going to find previous ones? So when you, when you bookmark a page, delicious lets you enter some words, tags, that will help you find it later. So maybe it’s a page about robotics, and you’re interested in and so you tag it robotics, and you might tag it other things as well. Delicious is a social site though, so that you can see other people’s tags, you can search for all the pages that anybody at delicious has tagged robotics, and you can subscribe to a fee, so that every day you see all the pages that everybody at delicious has tagged robotics. This is like having the world do research for you. And over time, as you grow to appreciate this, you may well find yourself going out to find pages on robotics, so that you can tag them and contribute to this, for all the reasons that humans contribute to things, because it’s a social good, because it makes us feel good, because it helps to build our reputation, a whole mix of, of why we do things. Tag streams like these, I think, are going to be really important. They’re a way of coalescing knowledge across a highly miscellanised world. So, I think that we are beginning to move … sorry, right, this sounds like the end; it’s not. So I think that we’re beginning to move away from a view that says the right way of organising the world of ideas, the way that reflects how the world itself is organised is through trees, that is let’s get some experts together, they’ll decide on what the place of everything is, and each thing will have one place and it will be perfectly set and the miscellaneous box, at best there won’t be any, if there are, if it is, it’s going to be minuscule. And we’ll filter on the way in, we’ll use this tree, we’ll populate it with the information that’s worth looking at, not at all of the, the dreck that isn’t. That’s a very powerful technique that we’ve used. It’s especially powerful when the means of publishing is limited, where only a handful of authors get to publish that … you have to limit and that makes sense. But I think now what’s happening is that basically, we’re pulling the leaves off the trees and making a huge pile, and the pile consists of every type of resource and idea and artwork, piece of creativity available on-line and adding as much meta-data as we can to each of these and then linking them up in a way that a real pile of leaves isn’t linked up. So, this changes the basic strategy for organising information. It says, rather than having value because we’re excluding all the dreck, dreck is Yiddish for crap, and crap is American for junk, okay? So instead of the, the collection having value because all of that it excludes, so we’ve only got the, the limited set of material that we can deal with, rather it has value if you include everything. Storage, digital storage is basically free. It’s so cheap and generally it costs more to throw something out than to keep it, I mean, literally, you have to examine it … you know this, if you’re taking digital photos, that it’s easier just to upload the whole thing and by the time you’ve got, you know, a couple of thousand, it’s too hard to go through them even to delete them, so it’s actually cheaper to keep than to exclude. Storage is basically free. The thing that you would keep out because it doesn’t meet your standards, or because you think it’s crap, you may be depriving a graduate student of valuable research material twenty years from now, you never know. So include everything, and postpone, rather than deciding what the place of everything is ahead of time, postpone the moment when that decision is made; postpone it until the moment when the user says “here’s what I’m interested in, here’s how I think about the world, show me what you have”. The organisation can happen instantaneously because it’s computerised. So include and postpone.
So now I want to go back pretty briefly, over some of these seven properties and I want to focus on, on two in particular. Well, I’m not going to be … this will be initially relatively fast. And then slowing down, and I should maybe also mention that as I slow down and head for the two big chunks, I’m going to get increasingly speculative and flighty. So that’s meta-data, that’s important meta-data you should keep in mind.
So, knowledge has been simple. Well, one of the reasons that … we have a culture that is sick to death of simplicity. Thanks to marketing and to, to the media that’s had to rely upon mass markets and politicians who’ve relied upon marketing and mass markets, we’ve been fed, for a hundred years, the most effective way of communication with us has been through the mass media, which requires dumbing things down to the point that will reach the most people, and we’re sick to death of it. And I think it’s one of the ways of explaining the popularity of web blogs, so for example, a couple of months ago, President Bush went on the air and gave a talk about immigration issues, very complex issues. And we know without being told, that of course his speech writers work very hard on simplifying it; that’s what they do, that’s, you know, I mean, “take this message and make it really simple”, so he went on air and he gave the simple message, and it’s twenty-five hundred words long. Within hours, twenty-five hundred web blogs had been posted and indexed and within days many, many more than that. So that’s within a few hours, one web blog per word, basically. And with, … I didn’t look at all of them, but I did sample them, and it’s predictable that this is what web bloggers do; they take something and they turn it over in their hands and they say “oh, did you notice here on the bottom, it says this?” or “you look at it in this light and you notice that, isn’t that interesting?” and then somebody else responds to that. In other words, they’re taking this thing that was designed, crafted to be dead simple, and they’re making it more complex. And of course, it’s not just web bloggers who do this, this is all that we do in conversation, every conversation is like that; it takes something simple that we agree on and then looks underneath it and looks to the side and makes it more complex. We are so sick of being, of being treated like simpletons, of being fed the simple, that we’re rushing to a new environment in which we are allowed to be as complicated and as interesting as we can. And that’s one of the reasons why web blogs are so important. There is a dialectic, and as teachers, you know this; that a good portion of what you do is to take something that’s very complex and make it simple enough to understand, but you also know that you then immediately, when a student puts, puts something forward that’s too simple, your job is to say “well, no, it’s not as easy as that”, and to help tease it out, to help the student tease it out, so that dialectic has always been there. Now it’s occurring in public, and I believe that we are seeing, I don’t know, a shift, with increased emphasis on the complex. We are revelling in the complex. So, we’ve been taught that knowledge is independent of the person who speaks it; the, in some ways the most credible journalist on TV in the United States is John Stewart on the daily show, and he’s a comedian. And one of the reasons that he’s credible is that what comes from his mouth is not generalities, is not abstracted from the person who says it, it has a punch line, it sounds like him.
The next two points I want to talk about … they’re both points about Wikipedia. How many of you use Wikipedia? How many of you have edited Wikipedia? So users, way more than a smattering, good. So you know then, it’s the bottom-up encyclopaedia, written by anybody who wants to? The encyclopaedia Brittanica, if you were to open it at random, you would have every reason to believe what you read there. Things are credible simply by being put, by the fact that they are in the Brittanica. The same is not true with Wikipedia. The fact that, the mere fact that something is in Wikipedia does not give it credibility because you might happen to hit the page at the moment that some idiot vandalised it. And I want to be very careful, because I do believe Wikipedia is credible and I think it’s getting more credible every day, and that there are areas and topics in which it’s far more credible than the Britannica is. So I’m not saying Wikipedia’s not credible, what I’m going to try to talk about is why is it credible? Brittanica is credible because it has all this, starting at the top, a board of, an editorial board of advisors and then it has competent editors who hire competent experts who are … and there’s a chain of credentials so we know how Brittanica works and where it gets its authority from, where it gets it credibility. Wikipedia obviously does not have any of that, so why do we and should we believe what we read in Wikipedia? And there are a number of reasons.
One is that if it’s a major article like the JFK assassination, then first of all, you probably know something about it. So if there are obviously wrong things in it, big wrong things, you’ll spot it. But we also do the same sort of evaluation we do when we sit down next to somebody at a conference, whom we don’t know and we’re having breakfast, and we listen to her, and we engage in conversation, and we realise that she seems to know what she’s talking about, she’s willing to admit errors, she has some sense of humour, she isn’t so full of herself that she, you know … the same sorts of … we do the same thing for writing in Wikipedia that we do conversationally, and that’s, usually a good guide. It’s not perfect of course, but it adds to the credibility. We can also check the list of edits at Wikipedia, and if something has been edited a lot, it’s more likely to be accurate than if it’s been posted and never edited. We can also read the discussion pages about all of the edits, which are fascinating documents, and we can look and see why people said what they said and use our own critical skills, which we need help, and especially our children need help, well, I’m not sure especially our children, I’ll take that back, which we need help developing. So we can look at the discussion pages. The discussion pages in fifty years … imagine we had had Wikipedia fifty years ago, we would now be able to look at the discussion page over the entry in the United States, for example, on segregation. That would be pretty interesting. Colonialism, it would be fascinating to see what we were arguing about over those terms in the 1950s. This is going to be an important archaeological resource for us in the future. Nevertheless, we can read the discussion pages and we can make up our own mind. Wikipedia also does this really interesting thing, which is to put in warnings, to tell us, don’t believe this page entirely, or here’s why we think it may be going wrong. Well, that by itself tells us something about Wikipedia. It tells us that it’s more interested in our coming to good judgements, than in Wikipedia pretending that it has all the answers. This is one of the important notices that you’ll find there because Wikipedia aims at a neutral point of view and the first time I ever talked with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, I said to him, “you know, neutrality is such a contentious world”. Sorry, excuse me, “a contentious word and there’s so much thought about the impossibility of neutrality”. He more-or-less gently cut me off and said “you know, I’m not all that interested in French philosophy”. To me, he said “an article is neutral when people stop editing it”. And that’s a pretty good operational definition of neutrality. If the contending parties all find it acceptable then operationally, yeah, okay, that’s a pretty good working definition. So this is one of the important warnings; there are dozens and dozens. There are scores of these as well, they’re like a catalogue of all the ways that an encyclopaedia can go wrong. “The factual accuracy is disputed”: “This article contradicts another article”: “This article contradicts itself”: “It’s, it may not be worthy of encyclopaedia, this topic”: “It doesn’t cite sources”: “It reads like an advertisement” “It reads like a sermon” “It’s got weasel words in it” And, “Just a reminder that this is a hot topic, please try to be a rational, kind human being when you engage in the discussion”. These warnings tell us something really important about Wikipedia. It’s not just about the article. They make these disclaimers, these notices that this article may be wrong in this way actually add to the credibility of the article. And the question is, for me, why is it that you will never, ever see these in the authoritative sources? You will never see this in the Britannica. You will never see this in the Times, yours or ours. And you have to wonder why. Is it because they’re never wrong? No! They’re wrong, the Times was wrong for a year and a half and got us into a war and had to apologise. Our reporting on the run-up to the war to Iraq was wrong, factually wrong; we’re sorry. These institutions make mistakes because they’re human institutions so why can’t they admit it? Why can’t they help us understand what we should believe and what we shouldn’t by acknowledging their own weaknesses? And the only, and reluctant answer I can come to is that they’re more interested in preserving their authority than they are in helping us to the truth. I get a better lesson on this from Wikipedia than I have gotten from any of the major authoritative sources that I read growing up. In Wikipedia, which is frequently wrong, by the way, there’s an article on tomatoes. And part of that article on tomatoes is a section on pronunciation; tomato (U.S.) or tomato (English). There’s a sub-section on this because it’s crazy and it’s Wikipedia, and Wikipedians are, you know, they’re a little nuts. So, there’s … apparently we needed a section on this, and there it is. And you can go to the discussion about this tomato versus … “you say tomato, I say tomato” section. So, let’s imagine, and let’s simplify, let’s imagine there are three participants in this discussion. And they’re having this discussion because each one has proposed text that one of the other objects to. And they finally come up with this text that all three agree with, but not one of which would have put forward as his or her own, which means that the knowledge that is represented in this text, which is presumably better than what any one of the three would do, is not in the head of any one of the three. The knowledge is not in their heads, ex hypothesis. It is in the conversation, it is between them, it is social knowledge, which is where knowledge really has always been. If you are the world’s greatest expert on the pronunciation of tomato (or tomato) and you refused to play, so you post your article and the first person who edits it changes it in significant ways and you get all in a huff, you’re the world’s greatest expert and so you go and change it right back, you just revert to your previous. You are the world’s greatest expert and so the person changes it back and somebody changes something else, and something else, and you keep changing it back. One of the ways of getting banned, at least temporarily, from Wikipedia, is to keep reverting without explaining, without engaging in the discussion. That will get you banned. You will be left out of the conversation entirely, which means, that the tradition expert, who is unwilling to engage in the public negotiation of knowledge, is frozen out of this world, will not have influence, will not be a recognised expert. The knowledge that’s in her head, locked in her head will remain locked in her head, and be of no value, and not be recognised. To be an expert requires now, and this is not true simply with Wikipedia, it’s true across the web, that the person who pronounces and refuses to engage, is not listened to. Our students are doing their homework on-line, that is they’re on the computer. Most US households have computers and access to the internet, so American students are doing their homework on their computers. They’re connected to the internet, which means, you look over the shoulder of most students and you will see that as they’re doing it, they have their instant messaging session open. They have four or five, six instant messaging sessions open and they’re talking with their friends, they’re talking about boys and girls, they’re talking about sports, or whatever, but they’re also doing their homework together. They’re saying “I’m having trouble with number three, what did you get?”. “I don’t have any ideas for this stupid paper, do you?”, or “I can’t find any information about her, can you help me Google it?”, whatever, they’re doing their homework together. Good! That’s what I want! Of course I want my children to be working together on intellectual pursuits with other students. What more could I want? I want them to learn, not to lock themselves in a closet like Descartes and come up with a psychotic view of how the world works. No, I would rather have them engage. This is what I want for my students, my children to do. And yet, they’re learning socially, they are already doing that, they are going to be reading socially, as these texts go on-line, the price of text books is, is astronomical, it’s not supportable, it will fall. That regime will fall as quickly as the recording industry should have fallen as we have both books on-line and, and screens big enough to read them, devices to read them. When that happens, it’s already happening to some degree, they will, our students will, our children will be reading socially. This act that we have defined as the, as the very, very paradigm of individual activity, solitary activity, they’ll be reading on-line and they’ll say “I’m on page seven, anybody know what she means by this here? What does that word mean? Is this going to be on the test?” They’re going to be underlining, they’re going to get the text that’s been underlined by the A students, that’s how it’s going to work. Reading will be social. Homework is social, learning is social, it is for us, why shouldn’t it be for them? But we test them like this. And this is a serious disconnect. This is a real problem, and in the States, in, in where I live, in Massachusetts, I’m watching splendid, wonderful, caring, State schools, against the will of the teachers, get turned into regimes that have confused the measurement with what’s being measured. And the parents are in despair and the teachers are in despair. It’s being done in the name of accountability but I think it’s actually a form of accountablism, in which you end up eating your own young. It’s a magical belief that what’s wrong always goes back to an individual. If we just root out those bad individuals then everything will work. There’s no sense that what’s wrong is social; what’s wrong is conceptual; what’s wrong is not the failings of an individual, it’s a magical belief in the power of individuals, and if you just empowered the individuals then everything will work. And that’s not right. We’re fallible, it doesn’t work that way. Accountablism has taken over the US school system, right from the top. It’s being imposed with good intentions, but who doesn’t have good intentions? It’s being imposed with good intentions and the results are students who are no longer interested in learning, who don’t know what learning is. All they know is testing. Their curiosity is being kicked out of them. And it’s a shame.
So, the, the second chunk, which is only a little related to this, but it is a bit, has to with … and then I’ll be done … has to do with the, the role and the sort of prestige and status of knowledge, which we’ve taken to be at the pinnacle of the educational system, the aim … knowledge and education go together, but I’m not sure that that’s actually, that’s actually what I want, personally. So, here’s why. This is Martin Heidegger, he’s a philosopher, this was 1927 when he wrote “Being in Time”, a lot of things wrong with Martin Heidegger, including the fact that he was a Nazi bastard, and I say this as … I did my dissertation on him and I’m a Jew, so this, you know, … I have some issues, but some of the stuff that he said was really right, I think, and this is, this is part of it. So Heidegger asked what does it mean to be a hammer? He was interested in the question of meaning, not hammers. So, ultimately of being, it doesn’t matter. So what does it mean to be a hammer? Well, to know that this is a hammer, and he doesn’t mean like, you know, on Mars it could be used for something, he means in the real world that we live in, this is a hammer; what does that mean? Well, you can’t know what this is in our culture unless you also know about nails. You’ve got to know about nails. But you also need to know about the wood that the nails connect and you also … we do know about lumber, and lumber yards, but that means we also know about trees and if you know about trees, then you also know about the forests that they grow in and you also have to know about the economy that connects the forest to the lumber yard and how, how that works. And to know about forests, you have to know about the sun, you have to know about the earth, you’ve got to know everything, you’ve got to know everything. The hammer, to be a hammer means to be in this, this context of cross-references. Just as with the bird, you don’t have to think that it’s a vertebrate every time you see it, but that information is there, it’s available in the same way. To be a hammer means, also you know, what nails and forests are. If context is a little bloodless, it’s an okay word for this, so is intelligibility, yeah, okay, but it’s not something necessarily we do just with the intellect. I think Heidegger’s word for this is actually the right one, which is what we’re talking about here, is meaning. Meaning as the context in which individual things like hammers can make sense.
So, there’s a philosopher computer scientist named Andrew Clark, who wrote a book called “Being there”, in which he makes one of these obvious points that wasn’t obvious until he said it, which is the best sort. He says that humans have always externalised functions of consciousness and we think in the world and that this is good, so that a physicist has to have a blackboard. If she can’t write on her blackboard then she can’t do physics. You need the blackboard, you need that external part of it, so we’ve invented ways of externalising parts of consciousness, so writing externalises memory and books externalise knowledge and calculators externalise calculating. So I want to propose this as the, the spacey, air-headed part of it. I want to propose a possibility, which is that this miscellaneous set of stuff that we’re building is so intensely connected, the web and beyond, all of the sources of data we can reach, that what we’re doing here is externalising meaning and that we’re just at the beginning of this and we’re going to be doing this for a long time. That in tagging it, we are pulling it, for example, we are pulling together leaves, we’re enabling people to pull together leaves that otherwise they would never have found and make connections they would never, ever have been able to do before, and that we’re doing this also through, through traditional trees, you know, those are very valuable, you know, you can have as many of these as you want and if some are useful then we’ll use them. In the third order of orders, you don’t have to actually rearrange the pieces, so you can have as many different types of order as you want. It we’re doing this through the Symantec web, which is a highly ambitious attempt to bring some more meaningful order to the web, that’s unlikely in my opinion to succeed globally, but will succeed in any locality, so we’re doing it through the Symantec web, we’re adding the sort of connections and relationships through, through links, through web blogs. Every link pulls pieces together. We’re doing it through play lists, not just for music but for syllabi, for example. We doing play lists, and play lists are very important and we’re making millions and millions of them. We do it through sites like Digg, D,I,G,G dot com that enable readers to list, to build a front page based upon their interests. We’re doing it through Wikipedia, we’re doing it through every hyperlink that we make and the result is that rather than knowledge being bigger than we are, I think what we’re seeing that in a sense, knowledge is becoming the same size as we are.
If you wanted to know what humans are interested in, because, let’s say you’re a Martian, you could open up the Britannica and see sixty-five thousand topics of high value and that would give you one … it would be a good place to start. You would be far better to open up Wikipedia and look at the million plus topics in English. There’ll be all sorts of embarrassing topics, trivial ones, but they’re not so … they’re important enough that somebody bothered to write it and somebody else bothered to edit it. Wikipedia’s a better reflection of human interested than any printed encyclopaedia can be. There’s a sense … but on the other hand, you won’t get a very elevated view of humans by looking at Wikipedia. The, the connections that we’re drawing are making knowledge more like us, a better reflection of our interests, for better or for worse, including the messiness of those interests; the inability to keep them between covers. They keep exploding from out of the covers, and that’s a good thing. [coughs] Excuse me. So I think we are … we’re entering an age in which knowledge is taking a different place. We’re never going to stop knowing. We are amazingly good at knowing things. Our techniques for knowing, expand the disciplines, each with its own methodology, from science through the arts, we are really good, as a species at knowing things. We will never give that up. We’ll never stop researching in the ways that provide the sorts of answers that we need in those disciplines. That’s not at risk. But I think we are entering a time when knowledge is longer seen as the single aim, or even as the pinnacle. I think we are engaged in a generation, generational pursuit now, to construct meaning, and we’re building a web of meaning for ourselves that will serve as an infrastructure within which knowledge makes sense, within with we understand what we know, within which creativity happens, within with connection happens, fundamental connection of ideas and an even more fundamental connection of people. That, I think will change the nature of knowledge and necessarily therefore, the nature of eduction. Thank you.
Thanks - Heather Reid
Thank you very much indeed for that fascinating presentation about wide ranging knowledge through the traditional to the digital; a tremendous tour of Wikpedia, delicious dot com, web blogs. I’ve certainly learned a lot and I’m sure everyone here has. In fact, the next time I’m shopping for a [unclear 00:46:20] jacket in John Lewis, I might just try that different meta-data approach and let you all know how I get on. So, once again, thank you very much to David Weinberger for being here today. I know some people will now have to move on to your next session. We’re almost coming to an end of the first day at SETT. Tomorrow is another very busy day indeed and I think the weather should improve just slightly. So, that’s it from here in the Clyde auditorium. I hope you’re enjoying your day. The exhibition’s still open, there’s lots going on ….
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