Here Comes Clay Shirkey

How the changing media landscape is changing education

Clay Shirkey keynote highlights from BlackBoard World 2013:

What's changed? Clay referred to a DARPA study on how people collaborate, using weather balloons. The study encouraged people to find means of collaborating in locating the balloons, with a cash prize as the incentive. An MIT team won, largely by inventing others via cash awards to identify the balloons.  The problem was solved in a mere nine days, blowing DARPAs time to solution estimate by a factor of 80.

There are now new ways of leveraging communication and information, but like the DARPA project, we can't anticipate the outcomes. This kind of cognitive surplus is readily available, as evidenced in the mushroom-like growth of Wikipedia.

As a measure of work, Shirkey estimates that we spend a Wikipedias's level of creative work every weekend passively absorbing TV commercials.

So, how do we leverage tools? Shirkey referenced ethnographers doing field work using Instagram-clearly not its intended primary use.

Again. another example of adaptive reuse is printing-first came porn (what? really?) followed by scientific journals.

So theses new stories, such as Napster and file sharing bringing down the walls of the record industry, can shatter the norm ( a Black Swan event, if you will).

But like the Napster story, unanticipated adaptations such as study groups in Facebook lead to a clash of metaphors -cheating (the academy) vs collaboration (the students).

Collaborative filtering, such as cataloging and recommendations services such as BibSoup and the Digital Public Library of America bring together affinity groups in higher Ed.