The great collective

When there is live TV coverage of an event do you watch the entire broadcast or just the highlights? The answer of course will depend on a number of factors, including how interested you are in the event, and how much time you have available to you. It's exactly the same with content on the web. Earlier this month I wrote about the 'tsunami of content' online that threatens to swamp us all. Just about everyone using the web today is creating content on a daily basis. How do we find the gold dust content amidst all the dross and trivia that exists on the internet?

Search engines have their place, and of course, we tend to use them a lot. Some of the more intelligent search engines are morphing into answer engines, computing your question against highly structured data (see for example Wolfram Alpha), and providing focused information. Often, for busy professionals, even this is not enough. Then there is problem of how to organise your content when you actually find it. Many are using tools such as Delicious.com or Diigo.com to tag, store and share their favourite content. These tools are also excellent and well used, but are they enough to cope with the vast quantity of content we want to keep? Wouldn't it be nice to have up to date, regular content, all presented in one place?

Enter the digital curation tools. There is a very special breed of web users out there that we call 'the curators.' In a sense, curators are a little like their counterparts in museums, because they tend to trade in very specialised, focused content. Anyone can be a digital curator. As a part of the great collective, curators choose a topic they are interested in, and then search and display dynamic content related to this topic, using one or more digital curation tools. They are collectors of the virtual and ephemeral and they have some great tools. Scoop.it is a very useful and attractive curation tool, enabling summaries and snapshots of related content from blogs, media sharing sites and other social media to be displayed, usually in two columns. Check out my own Scoop.it site Future School. Storify is another style of curation tool, enabling the curator to search for specific content from social media sites that can be sequenced into a blog style story. The curator can add their own text, and embed the final product into their blog. This short video explains how it's done. A third curation tool is Pearltrees, which works as a kind of connective network of content, which can be shared, repurposed and linked in a number of ways across social media platforms. The Pearltrees Teams group function also enables users to collaborate to create shared curated collections of content. Here's the video demonstrating how Pearltrees works. All three tools allow conversations and further sharing, and all three are very attractive as a means of making sense of the vast amount of content there is on the web. There are of course many other tools being developed that can also perform similar tasks of consolidating and accumulating content, and offering it in a digest form to busy professionals. The great collective it seems, are becoming the great collectors.

Image by Dieter Drescher


The great collective by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Interview with a Wolfram

Conrad Wolfram is a man dripping with ideas and innovation. He is also a decent, unassuming and thoroughly pleasant guy. He has a high powered vision of the world 'where computation meets knowledge.' Since May 2009, when it was released for general use, Wolfram Alpha has caused some waves. For the Wolfram brothers Stephen and Conrad, Alpha is less a search engine, more an answer engine, because it processes queries against structured data rather than simply presenting a list of pages or hyperlinks found through word-matching.

I had the pleasure to hear Conrad Wolfram give a keynote speech on semantic search at LearnTEC recently, and I was even more delighted when I got to sit with him on the train all the way back to the airport, and the opportunity to converse with him about semantic web, computation research, intelligent search and the nature of knowledge. A graduate of Cambridge University and now Strategic Director of Wolfram Research, Conrad has some marked ideas about technology and learning. He is also good friends with a number of luminaries in the world of computing including Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. He drops their names into the conversation as if they are sitting across the room from us. Software engineer Theodore Gray is mentioned in the conversation, and we discuss how Wolfram research is developing. Conrad also tells me how he felt just before walking on stage to present his TED talk. We talk about how Wolfram's earlier intelligent knowledge engine Mathematica was founded. We talk about the future of knowledge, we touch on David McCandless' and Hans Rosling's amazing data visualisation tools, and we discuss the need for better understanding of how to use search terms. Time went by quickly and we parted company at Frankfurt Airport, promising to stay in touch. As I made my way over to the check in counters, my mind went back to his speech earlier in the day...

During his LearnTEC keynote, Conrad Wolfram (pictured left with conference chair Peter Henning and I) had given a live demonstration of both the Wolfram Alpha answer engine itself and also a new experimental site which 'I'm not supposed to show you just yet.' It is impressive stuff, with powerful computation that goes beyond simple interpretation of the words entered, generates 3 dimensional visualisation of data and promises the capability to automatically create widgets when the user asks the right questions. How old was Queen Victoria in 1890? It will give you the answer and then create a widget to deal with other, similar queries. Where is Victoria Falls? It provides a location map, and offers a number of geolocation options. The four pillars of WA, said Conrad Wolfram, were linguistic analysis, curated data, dynamic computation and computed presentation. If used correctly and intelligently, WA is indeed an extremely powerful research and computational tool.

Conrad Wolfram also had a lot to say about learning during his presentation. He argued that the value chain of knowledge is changing. By this he suggested that knowledge brokering is no longer the domain of the experts, but echoing sentiments of the wisdom of crowds and the power of tribes, he argued that repositories of knowledge can become even more powerful if they are searched intelligently and using visualisation computation. And as each new node and connection is created by individuals, a new democratisation of knowledge emerges - that is Wolfram's vision. 'If you drive yourself,' he said, 'you learn more about the route than you would if you are a passenger.' This suggests that most search engines make the enquirer a mere passenger in the journey to knowledge, whilst WA puts the enquirer firmly in the driving seat.

And what about education and Wolfram Alpha? He has a message for teachers: 'Stop teaching calculating', he advises, 'and start teaching maths.' The tools are already available for students to do calculation, what they now need, he states, is the ability to test things and verify results. The knowledge balance in schools, said Wolfram, is all wrong at present. There is too much knowledge giving and not enough opportunity for students to test things, experiment and discover for themselves.

Images by Gudrun Porath

Interview with a Wolfram by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.