Through h+ magazine I encountered the Proactionary Principle. This principle emerged as an alternative to the Precautionary Principle during the Vital Progress Summit in 2004 and is written up by the extropian thinker Max More. Let’s start with the precautionary principle:
The precautionary principle has been used as a means of deciding whether to allow an activity [..] that might have undesirable side-effects on human health or the environment. In practice, that principle is strongly biased against technological progress so vital to the continued survival and well-being of humanity. […] The precautionary principle [..] inherently biases decision making institutions toward the status quo, and reflects a reactive, excessively pessimistic view of technological progress.
The proactionary principle tries to overcome this problem, by nine component principles (liberally reworded from the original article):
Freedom to innovate – our freedom to innovate technologically is so valuable that the burden of proof should be with the nay-sayers. Objectivity – use a decision process that is objective and make decisions based on science and not on emotions. Comprehensiveness – consider all reasonable alternative actions. Openness/Transparency – be open to input from all possible affected parties and keep the decision process transparent. Simplicity – don’t complicate things unnecessarily. Triage – give precedence to known risks over hypothetical risks. Symmetrical treatment – treat technological risks in the same way as natural risks and make sure to fully account for the benefits of technological advances. Proportionality – only consider restrictive measures if the bad impact of the technological impact is probable and severe, also take into account the benefits of the technology and make sure that all restrictive measures are proportional to the extent of the probable effects. Prioritize – give priority to risk to human and other intelligent life over risks to other species.
These principles were written with large social and environmental issues in mind. I think some of the philosophy inside these principles can be very useful in a different context: the acceptance and implementation of new technology inside large corporations. Very often these corporations have a very conservative look towards using technology in the workplace. In my field of work, learning technology, this shows itself through an over-focus on integration, excessive rationalizing towards a single platform and only trying out new technology after a long process in which governance has to be negotiated between HR, IT and legal.
Corporations and institutions focus on the problems and risks of new technology without taking full account of the benefits of using it and the opportunity cost of not using it. So here is my resolution: whenever next I am trying to defend the use of some innovative technology I will call on the proactionary principle to try and win the argument.
Let a thousand flowers bloom! By all means, inspect the flowers for signs of infestation and weed as necessary. But don’t cut off the hands of those who spread the seeds of the future.
My employer, Stoas Learning, organized a Moodle seminar today. I did two presentations in the morning (both of them in Dutch).
The first one was titled: “Moodle 2.0, een sneak preview”. I discussed the new features that will appear in Moodle 2.0 and did a quick demo of how you can use the repository API to pull in an image from Flickr, hand that in as an assignment and then push it out to GoogleDocs for savekeeping. You can find the slides below:
The second presentation was titled: “Moodle, Elgg & Mahara – Samenwerkend Leren, Kennisdelen & Sociale Netwerken – Van Formeel naar Informeel”. I tried to use three cases to explain that e-learning can be more than just a web-based, unfacilitated, content to single learner experience. These were my slides:
I do realise that these slides lose a lot of their meaning without my spoken words. When I posted Slideshare presentations previously, I wrote I would try and record the audio for the next time. I guess I failed…. I am sure there will be another chance.
Over the next couple of weeks I will write a series of blog posts about corporate social networking. I will be looking at some open source tools that can facilitate the creation of these kind of networks in a corporate setting and I will try and make a business case for why you want to start experimenting with these kind of tools in your company.
Ellg.org
In this first post I will take a look at Elgg, a tool that will allow you to build your own social network. You should see it as an open source version of Facebook, Ning or Hyves. Unlike these services, Elgg will allow you to retain full control of your implementation and of your data.
Elgg has been around for a couple of years now. Recently the core developers have completely rewritten the application and version 1.0 came out on August 18th 2008. They have used the pretty standard PHP/MySQL combination to implement their own MVC framework. This will allow you to easily change the user interface without changing the functionality and makes extending the existing functionality a pain-free experience.
Community@Brighton: a social networking system for students and staff at the University of Brighton. This university has been using Elgg for quite a while now (they seem to use the old platform still), using it for blogging, sharing of different media files and for the creation of internal communities.
Rucku: a virtual clubhouse for rugby. Rugby enthusiasts share forums, videos and pictures. Note how even the language of the site is rugby themed (e.g. “sledge” instead of “message”).
Harvard University: recently some courses were taught in an Elgg environment instead of in the standard (home brew) Harvard LMS. Weekly blogging instead of threaded discussions was the central activity. This way the content of the posts stayed with the students even after the course had finished.
If I were to summarise Elgg in a couple of words I would say that the core functionality revolves around a dashboard, user profiles and groups and that these are linked through tags and a flexible access infrastructure allowing users to build their own networks.
Each user has their own dashboard. This is their launch page and contains widgets showing recent activity in the network:
The dashboard, each user has one (click to enlarge)
Users can add their own widgets to this page by clicking on the “Edit page” link and using the drag and drop interface (Elgg makes extensive use of jQuery) to fashion the page to their own liking:
Adding your own widgets to the page (click to enlarge)
Developing your own widgets is trivial for any web-programmer. This will allow Elgg to play nicely with other systems (e.g. a Twitter widget already exists). The Elgg developers write on their homepage: “We are committed to open source, data portability and transparency”. Their support for OpenID, OpenSocial, openData and Elgg’s RESTful API clearly demonstrate this. Because of this it is very possible to use Elgg data inside another application.
There is a user profile for every member of the site. Users can upload their own picture and fill in a couple of profile fields. These fields can be created by the site administrator and will allow connecting different users on the basis of their interests, location or field of work for example. The user profile has the same widget based approach, so that the user can decide what people see when they view their profile:
User profile, note the Twitter widget (click to enlarge)
One of Elgg’s most celebrated features is the way that groups can be created inside the system. Users can start their own groups around projects or communities of practice. A group has their own files, forums, activity stream and pages and can have open or closed membership:
The group homepage (click to enlarge)
Every thing that is added by users to the system will allow multiple tags to be attached. These tags make finding relevant materials in the network very easy:
A search for the term "Elgg" (click to enlarge)
Finally the access controls make it a snap for users to share any of their materials with the world, their friends, a particular group of friends, a group in Elgg or to keep them private. You can set these permissions for anything, be it user profile information, uploaded files or blog posts:
Tagging and providing access
All the other functionality inside Elgg is completely modular and can be turned on or off with a couple of clicks. The main modules that are relevant for businesses are:
Each user can have their own blog. The blog is quite rich in functionality: it has comments, pingbacks can be installed and access to each post can be set.
The files repository will allow the uploading of any file type. Files can have a description and tags and their level of access can be set. Image files get special treatment, automatically allowing them to be viewed in a gallery.
Messaging comes in two forms. There is an internal messaging system allowing one to one private messaging and there is a facebook-like “wall” connected to the user profile page.
Elgg calls their wiki functionality “Pages”. It is a mix between a true wiki and a collaborative hierarchical web-page writing tool. Each page has separate access permissions for reading and for writing. A very simple revision history is kept.
The social bookmarking tool (including a bookmarklet) allows users to store their favourite websites and share these with selected friends. Websites can be tagged of course.
A user can easily update their status. Each status update is stored so that this can also function as a microblogging platform, especially in combination with the activity river which shows the most recent updates of your friends. There is a plugin that will push status updates to Twitter.
Many information streams inside the Elgg installation have their own RSS feeds pushing the content to your feedreader of choice.
In the next social networking post I will try to build a business case for a tool like Elgg inside corporations. Why would it be useful to have this inside your business? I can imagine that you as a reader might have ideas of what could be the added value or maybe you have some examples of businesses that are already doing this. It would be great to get your input and feedback in the comments.
Wilfred Rubens recently wrote a (Dutch) post asking whether the current cloud computing trend will influence how we learn. I posted a reaction in the comments linking to a couple of Kevin Kelly’s posts on the Technium (if you haven’t subscribed to the Technium, you should right now).
Technology creates feasibility spaces for social practice. Some things become easier and cheaper, others become harder and more expensive to do or prevent under different technological conditions. The interaction between these technological-economic feasibility spaces, and the social responses to these changes -both in terms of institutional changes, like law and regulation, and in terms of changing social practices- define the qualities of a period.
So, I know for a fact that cloud computing technology will create new feasibility spaces for social practice and I am sure that this will include learning. The question is not whether cloud computing will change the way we learn, the question should be how will it change the way we learn. In that regard, I think George Siemens has started asking the right questions.
More than 140 well known authors have answered the question and it provides for fascinating reading. What struck me was how many of the writers see some technological development as game changing.
The mobile phone. Within my lifetime I fully expect almost every living human adult, and most children, in the world to own one. (Neither the pen nor the typewriter came even close to that level of adoption, nor did the automobile.) That puts global connectivity, immense computational power, and access to all the world’s knowledge amassed over many centuries, in everyone’s hands.
Many match a development in technology, to a change in how we educate and improve our knowledge (usually to then make this world a much better place; most of these writers are very optimistic).
Chris Anderson (curator of the fabulous TED) has a very rosy-eyed view on how the low physical cost of digital distribution will transform global education through the dissemination of knowledge and inspiration:
Five years ago, an amazing teacher or professor with the ability to truly catalyze the lives of his or her students could realistically hope to impact maybe 100 people each year. Today that same teacher can have their words spread on video to millions of eager students.
Of the six billion people on our planet, at least four billions are not participating in the knowledge revolution. Hundreds of millions are born to illiterate mothers, never drink clean water, have no medical care and never use a phone. […] The “buzz words” of distant learning, individualized learning, and all other technology-driven changes in education, remain largely on paper, far from becoming a daily reality in the majority of the world’s schools.
He then asks a very interesting question:
How come the richest person on the globe is not someone who had a brilliant idea about using technology for bringing education to the billions of school children of the world?
Next he posits that the time does seem ripe for this to change:
Globalisation forces us to see the enormous knowledge gaps in the world.
Technology advances make designing tailor-made solutions for schools and education worth considering.
The generation that grew up with computers is know turning up to teach in the classroom.
Children participate in web-based social networks forcing education to radically adapt.
A connected child cannot be taught the same way people were taught decades ago.
Do you think Harari is right? Will we live to see a game changing development in education through the use of technology?
