Blogs vs. Books for learning

October 30, 2007 | comment3 Comments

This post is rather abstract. It depicts me being puzzled about choosing between blogs or books. The question is if these two media could even be compared at all? Today I heard a presentation on which it was said that the internet is no medium, in the way that you absorb no knowledge from it, and so, only printed publications make you reflect the content.

Flickr giandoObviously, I have doubts about the previously said, but there are many differences between blogs and books. Just to describe a few, here, on blogs, links give further information and also feedbacks are commented directly. On books, the content stands for itself and in many cases only the bibliography shows a reference. Blogs are quick and informal, hold personal–short or long–reflections and often try to keep up with the rapid pace of the web. Books are well thought and take months or years to be published, and are based on a framework of hypothesis. Books were for centuries the ultimate way to share and acquire knowledge, but this has changed with the Internet fundamentally. In the early days, the Internet was great as a book searching tool, yet the overall knowledge offered was rather weak.

Nowadays, the Internet offers tremendous resources to learn and even allow us to share and create new knowledge. This is a way of how we process knowledge and learn completely different, as indeed Philosopher Konrad Paul Liessmann points out in this quote I translated into English:

We do not approach things causal linear. We do not try to tap a text from its inner structure, instead, we approach associative information; we sample much more, we work much more on the principle of collage/montage. Peaces of knowledge, texts, photos, all we find in Internet, we rearrange, sort it individually. We do not tap and understand things in the classical approach of the hermeneutic, simply because this new medium supports much more to tackle problems in an associative manner.

This is an interesting description which shows how networked learning can look like. Blogging, therefore, is a mean to start reflecting the sheer mass of information or bring it down to some puzzle pieces. The sheer incredible pace of information, however, cannot be reflected just by blogging and linking. Books give still space for reflection although on the next page there are not dozens of links to follow. To read a book from beginning to end is consequently a very different experience than to read blogs. I do not want to miss any of them, but I start wondering how to keep up with the pace of information.

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Wikinomics: Being open, peering, sharing and acting globally

May 23, 2007 | commentLeave a Comment

Recently I finished reading the book Wikinomics. I wondered whether it is just another buzzword or if it contributes to the discussion of how the Internet changes our world. In any case the authors left some answers open to be written by the readers themselves.

After reading the introduction I was fascinated to read how Dan Tapscott and Anthony Williams link different developments from the last year together and describe its implications. They argue that virtual networks, collaboration through the Internet, and the open source concept will have increasing influence on businesses, organizations and science. Those companies, which do not open up to these changes will have decisive competitive disadvantages in the future. The authors underpin their thesis with many interesting examples like Procter&Gamble’s approach to cooperate in research via innocentive.com, or a gold-mining firm, that got striking results by a innovative contest over the Internet to find new exploring methods.

“Just as collaborative tools and applications are reshaping enterprises, the new Web will forever change the way scientist publish, manage data and collaborate across institutional boundaries.”

The way the new web will change science is manifold. A key will be open access, so “the world is your research department.” An outcome will be rapid diffusion of best-practice techniques and standards, the availability of just-in-time expertise and increasingly horizontal and distributed models of research and innovation. An interesting example is how young scientists design open-source at NASA. But I wonder how developing countries have opportunities to participate in this process?

“Peer producers apply open source principles to create products made of bits - from operating systems to encyclopedias.”

Through crowd sourcing or commons based peer production new products will be developed collaboratively over the web. In my opinion this peer to peer approach is a serious alternative to traditional business models. Open source promotes this approach and is already extended to videos, music or design. The organization  for social entrepreneurs, Ashoka coined the phrase open sourcing of social change (but to have a copyright on that phrase is quite counterintuitive).

In my opinion the open source concept and the need of companies and organizations to open themselves are going hand in hand. Both are horizontal mostly bottom-up driven processes. Both indicate the need to share knowledge in an open manner. In particular the difficulty of dealing with complex problems, an overload of information and increasing competition pushes us to engage and collaborate in open networks.

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