Thoughtless Fire Hydrants

David, one of my old students, rests on a nearby fire hydrant after his graduation. Our graduation was at the Paramount Theatre in downtown Oakland. By design, there aren’t many places to stop and sit in this area of town. Police seem to want to keep people from hanging around street corners for some reason.

It’s hard to find a place to rest after huge events in Dolores Park. Street corners are places for traffic to flow, not to gather. Fire hydrant designers often discourage would-be-sitters by placing a huge nut and bolt at the top of the hydrant. Sitting becomes quite uncomfortable after only a few moments. However, in cases where a wheel-valve is used, sitters might find respite for longer periods of time. Designers could take context into account when designing their hydrants. Pokey-topped hydrants might be more useful in high traffic areas, while flat-topped designs might be more thoughtless-user-friendly near parks or other recreation areas.

Imposing standardization upon a domain (Education): 

Our discussions about authority and vocabulary authoring remind me of the recent attempt by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law of 2001 to standardize public educaton. For those that don’t know, the goals of NCLB were lofty:  to close the achievement gap between high performing and low performing school by implementing a system of accountability and high standards. This included giving annual academic assessments, having consequences for schools that fail to improve. NCLB was met with a great deal of hostility and resentment from many teachers. I had the chance to see observe this during my time teaching. And as 202 is reframing my worldview, I’m coming to see that some of the backlash against NCLB might be linked to the imposition of a new ontology upon a fragmented community of interest.

What happens when a new ontology is imposed upon a collection of thousands of communities of interest when each member of the community of interest is expected to be an expert in his or her own practice? 

NCLB could be seen as an ontology that defines the terms used to describe and represent the various processes surrounding public education. Few would argue with the intent of the law: NLCB seeks to reform public education and close the gap between high and low performing schools. In order to do this,  the federal government acts as an authority that imposes a certain redefinition of vocabulary and processes that carry with them a set of assumptions and values, not to mention  consequences. 

Fragmented Community of Interest (Teachers). 

For many teachers, NCLB came down to the five terms that defined the categories each of their students were placed into based upon their standardized tests scores: Well Below Basic, Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, Advanced. Students were tracked over school years, and schools were rewarded or punished based on the numbers students in each category (as well as numbers of different kinds of students in each category). At the time of its implementation, most teachers had already developed unique tracking and assessment systems over their many years of teaching. Suddenly they were asked to give up their own framework, and replace it with a new and unfamilair one. Soon, school communities were filled with angry cries directed toward NCLB: “They’re doing it all wrong. They’re making it worse”. They could have been saying, “They’re not speaking my language!”

I am suggesting that the national body of teachers is a fragmented community of interest. Rosenthal defines communities of interest (COI) as “a set of stakeholders who must exchange information in pursuit of their shared goals, interests, missions, or business processes and who therefore must have shared vocabulary for the information they exchange”(Rosenthal 47). As a small COI, it was difficult enough for the English department at my high school to define a shared vocabulary to exchange information. NCLB asked all teachers in all schools to use a system of standards, categorization and information exchange that they had no hand in developing. Oh, and teachers would be held accountable for it as well. 

The idea here is not that authoritative ontologies don’t work or can’t work. They are immensely useful. The point, I guess, is for us to be aware of the ontological inertia of a given domain. Any change in the structure of a system of categorization and accountability will be difficult to implement, and will probably be extremely painful to the existing users, especially if they have historically been free to create and implement their own systems. 

Rosenthal, Arnon (2004). From Semantic Integration to Semantics Management: Case Studies and a Way Forward.. SIGMOD Record.33, 44-50.

I came across this TechCrunch introduction to a Japanese online game called Webkare. The site is a mix of social networking and online dating with virtual boyfriends. (I didn’t get it either.) After signing up, members try to hook up with one of four male characters at their virtual high school. Members have to use the social networking feature and collaborate in order to advance in the game. 

My initial reaction toward the Japanese Webkare was critical. How will a virtual-boyfriend-social-networking-game affect the millions of Japanese girls? What need does it fulfill? How can teenagers and twenty-somethings feel connected to a virtual boyfriend? Will our increasing use of technologies that keep us connected lead to an increasing feeling of loneliness? Perhaps I was just reacting to what I think is a certain proclivity toward quick-fix internet solutions for human problems. (I am growing increasingly skeptical of their effectiveness.)

Sally Abrahms, a freelance writer in the Boston area, writes about what she calls “Loneliness 2.0″. She laments that the same technology that has been developed to bring us closer together seems to be isolating us. She writes on behalf of telecommuters who work from home and sometimes go without face-to-face human interaction for days. Loneliness, apparently, begins to set in after three days of no physical human contact. *wince*

While no one can deny the incredible power of the internet to organize, collect, analyze, and display information, maybe we overestimate its ability to change or override human nature (e.g. Cory Doctorow and the problems of a meta-utopia: “Metacrap”). Abrahms cites studies to show our need for face-to-face interaction in establishing meaningful relationships and successful working environments. 

Most new technologies are met with apprehension and fear: books will make us forget; calculators will make us lazy; Google will make us stupid. But if Cory Doctorow is right, the sword cuts both ways. Any technological solution must carefully and intelligently design around the quirks of human nature. Why? We cannot escape ourselves, even online. Societies change and we adapt. But what does not seem to change are our essential human qualities.

Cohen makes an interesting comparison of the textbook and pharmaceutical companies. They both provide a service that is essentially good and beneficial; while they both have customers who are willing to sacrifice a lot of money for their services. All this while those who recommend their services do not notice price changes (doctors or professors).

Also notable is M.I.T.’s OpenCourseWare, where students and teachers rewrite, edit, swap materials as long as the original author is credited. Obvious benefits are that professors get the sections of books that they really want to teach. Most of my professors are already doing this in the form of readers. But an online version of this would save a lot of paper, and raise a few  legal issues.

Robert Pear of the NYT writes about the recent mismanagement of information at the highest levels of government. Government agencies, both federal and state, have increasingly used the web as a place to publish documents but have not managed those records appropriately.

It’s more than just losing track of a few emails; imagine when new administrations take office and hundreds or thousands of governmental materials disappear. With no published version of these documents, they become lost to history.  

This is another example that will surely bolster the Svenonians among us. In the past, clerks were employed to organize and preserve government documents in centralized locations. Now each person (federal employee) is now a clerk and must manage his or her own records. So far, not so good. Weinberger’s vision of collectivist structure and organization seems to break down here.

With the explosive popularity of social networking sites in the last few years, business analysts have been scrambling to find a way to incorporate employee networking into their companies. The task of improving efficiency of communication and building corporate culture for large companies with thousands of employees stretched across the world might be best achieved with these emerging platforms.

In “A Case Study in Employee Social Networking at Sabre” Toby Ward, Founder and CEO of Prescient Digital Media, documents some of the impacts a strong employee social network has made on the airline reservation company Sabre. He notes that while email is still the dominant application for company communication, more value can be delivered when a single employee can communicate “both actively and passively” to all connected employees. Users of“SabreTown”, Sabre’s employee networking platform allows for most of the features any social network platform does: employee profiles, photo sharing, blogs, comments, etc.

SabreTown and other platforms might just be more than another excuse to ride the Web 2.0 and social networking wave. As users complete their profile; write, comment on and edit blogs; ask and answer questions, the platform engine compiles and categorizes relevant information in order to improve employee search and helps “members find the right people with the right answers.” Sounds a lot like Google’s quest to display the exact result the user wants at the number one spot by collecting as much data about the user as possible.

Somewhat obvious is that these emerging platforms will become increasingly useful in industrial and public service domains. When I was teaching, I had my students complete MySpace profiles for characters from Romeo and Juliet. They had to fill out their profile according the specific details of each character as well as comment and send messages to other characters. As oft-nebulous Shakespeare characters began to have personalities they could relate to, my students became more engaged and enjoyed reading the play much more.