Class Acts

This week, I will be teaching a Master’s level course in “Human Rights and Information Technology” at the University of Siena.  The first challenge is of course determining the level of technical understanding of the students.  Given the number of internet cafes that dot Florence, largely populated by student-aged population, and reflecting the increasingly multi-cultural nature of the city, I am optimistic.  My experience in traveling back and forth to Italy is that the rate of diffusion of technology from the US to Italy has been steadily increasing over the last ten years.  The extent to which they use and are fluent in social networking tech–ubiquitious in the form of LinkedIn, Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook, will be the most critical item.

One of the cardinal elements of modern on-line communications is, since 2003, the use of blogs.  The tricky question is whether to have students do them within a closed community, in our case a wiki structure, or to have them be public.  When I taught a version of this course last year, I left the option open to the students, and most of them understood the distinction–if you are essentially doing an internal journal of your thoughts on the readings, then internal makes most sense.  If you want engagement with the world, then post on blogger, WordPress, etc. 

This year I am going to ask students to do two different blogs

1.) an internal one in which they respond to questions in preparation for class, and reflect on the readings and issues that emerge in class.

2.) An external one,  using the Zimbio social news site, as a home base.  This is a site which allows for collaboration, and enables users to put up links to many different types of news feeds, blogs, tagging, and anything that you can link to with an RSS feed.   By surrounding students with news they can choose, the idea is to facilitate their engagement with the web as a news environment. 

In a revealing article in the London Times, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”, Charles Leadbetter advertises his book, “We-Think” which seems to be a popular(ized) effort to think out the implications of distributed intellience.  The “bare-bones” (his words) portrait in the Times does not reveal anything new, but what is striking that he practices what he preaches.

As I was researching and writing We-Think, it became evident that I could not write a book about collaborative creativity in a traditional way — which is why, with the support of my publishers at Profile, I am releasing the book in draft form before its physical publication, which is planned for summer 2007. Most of the first draft was made available online this week, with the final three or four chapters following over the next few weeks. I hope that by opening up the book to readers’ comments before it hits the bookshops, we can make it a better book. But the real point is to provoke a conversation about the emerging opportunities for us to organise ourselves in more collaborative, creative ways.

If anyone drops in, let me know.  I will get there, eventually…