From Bootstrapping Innovation to a Dashboard for Change

Last week in the New Media Faculty Seminar at Baylor University we discussed Doug Engelbart’s  1962 report Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework abridged in the New Media Reader. This week we examine the outgrowth of this work in the report on the Mother of All Demos (1968). Christina Engelbart joined us via Skype. She also posted to the seminar blog.  For me the most captivating part of the conversation was the idea of bootstrapping innovation. The Doug Engelbart institute has produced a guide to bootstrapping innovation.

I hope you will investigate in more detail than I will present here but the five elements include:

  1. Focus on Capability: Especially collective IQ/Innovation
  2. Engage your innovators: Innovation networks
  3. Leverage your collective IQ: This is enhancing the dynamic knowledge/innovation ecosystem (the DKE)
  4. Walk your talk: Bootstrapping leverage
  5. Push the frontier: Accelerating co-evolution

When I think of technology and new media augmenting human intellect I think of Gina Trapani. She was the founding editor of Lifehacker.com and now she blogs at smarterware.org. These five principles of bootstrapping innovation pioneered by Engelbart and his team have continued to inspire. The New Media Consortium has done more than just pick up on these ideas they have taken them and transformed them into a type of dashboard for the organization.Bootstrapping Innovation: NMC

What the NMC has done can be done by schools such as Baylor University or George W. Truett Theological Seminary, accrediting agencies (most relevant to my life Southern Association of Colleges and Universities, Association of Theological Schools) and scholarly communities (Society of Biblical Literature an Catholic Biblical Association) to assess how they are doing bootstrapping innovation. I will explore in coming posts the ways these organizations have been bootstrapping innovation.

Curating Conversations

We learned last week in the new media faculty seminar at Baylor the importance of linking blog posts. This transforms a blog from a loud megaphone that no one attends other than the writer to a conversation. But like most learning it comes with a cost. The cost and the benefit are curating the conversation. If Web 2.0 is the read write Web then the blogger who makes a difference is one who reads and curates good material for others. Without this value added the traffic to a blog should dry up fairly quickly.
Last week’s reading introduced us to Bush’s imagining of a memex machine but a number of posts this week have accented the network of memex machines. Gardner describes the context of the network phenomenon as outlined in the New Media Reader in his post The Network Emerges. The machines changed the world but also the networking of the machines provided remarkable leverage for that change. Ellen Filgo’s Britannica on Microfilm vs. Wikipedia on the Web explores the network effect of hordes of memex machines. The business world may have a better handle on this than the academic world. An interesting book to look at again is Shel Israel and Robert Scoble’s Naked Conversations: How Blogs are changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers.
What I wonder is how can I develop new strategies for discovery. Yes there is are the RSS feeds but what escapes me if the best way to curate the rich resources. I begin my day by going to about favorite six websites form the NY Times, Washington Post, USA Today, the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast and Christian Century. However, after last week’s session I am going to have to re-think my orientation to the day and week with new conversations to curate.
Whether it is Twitter, Facebook, or blog post one must devise a strategy of scanning for interesting material. However such a commitment must be put in the ongoing workflow of a mind worker.
I was just listening to Gardner talk about the participants with Alan Levine of New Media Consortium. He referred to the participants as “seminarians.” I had never thought of seminarians as members of a seminar not just a seminarian as one who matriculates at a seminary. I will have to continue to think about that as a key to help me think about the nature of a seminary.

This week I began to be frustrated about  moving from the word processing to the blog post. The Word 7 publish to blog was more than I could get to work.

The Memex Machine

This week’s reading for the new media faculty seminar at Baylor is “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush. The article published in 1945 in Life and Atlantic Monthly imagines a machine that has similarities to what would become the computer. He called it a memex machine. The name memex was short for memory extension. Leibnitz invented a calculating machine and Bush wants to push out the implications of a new machine that displaces the calculator by memory extension. While he raises the possibility of life with a memex machine his article also indicates the core assumptions and questions.
Two questions that require further exploration. 1) If one has constant access, or ubiquitous access to the memes machine then what does one have to remember unaugmented? 2) Bush says on page 44 of the New media Reader “The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association.” While I agree and generally like the affirmation I wonder if the plasticity of the brain is such that it can remap itself as new tools become available. If so can we still say how the brain works as if that is a independent reality form the context of technology?
If we can talk about the intellectual history of new media in terms of form Memex to Hypertext then we might think about how the memex machine that was to be a memory extender has through new media become a meme machine sharing cultural ideas, practices and the like. The move form extending memory to shaping the interpretation of memory is not a very far walk.
Speaking more practically are Evernote and LiveNote examples of the memex at work?

Family Matters

Genesis describes the Flawed Families of the Bible. It also reminds today’s readers of the ongoing struggle to develop healthy and faithful ways to maintain human community. We used the language of endogamy (marriage inside the group) and exogamy (marriage outside the group). I was reading Lisa Miller’s article in Newsweek “The Cost of Being Jewish.” She mentions the concern the concern for the future of American Jewry with a intermarriage rate of 50%.
The book of Genesis is full of opportunities for today’s readers to review the categories of identity that shape us. Renita Weems Just a Sister Away and Sharon Pace The Women of Genesis: From Sarah to Potiphar’s Wife invite the reader to understand the role of gender, race, and nationality frame these texts and our understanding of identity today.

We see the search for identity not only in the Bible but also in more contemporary culture such as American jazz music and culture. Ken Burns’ television series Jazz the rise of jazz in America tries to give voice to personal and group identity. Fats Waller to Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie explore the roots of the African American experience in a way that would not overly alienate the European audience. Yet there is a place for Benny Goodman and Dave Brubeck. The book of Genesis to the jazz clubs of the United States in the twentieth century endogamy and exogamy, how we shape our identity through marriage and other institutions of affiliation remains a lively and debated question.

Family Matters

Genesis describes the Flawed Families of the Bible. It also reminds today’s readers of the ongoing struggle to develop healthy and faithful ways to maintain human community. We used the language of endogamy (marriage inside the group) and exogamy (marriage outside the group). I was reading Lisa Miller’s article in Newsweek “The Cost of Being Jewish.” She mentions the concern the concern for the future of American Jewry with a intermarriage rate of 50%.
The book of Genesis is full of opportunities for today’s readers to review the categories of identity that shape us. Renita Weems Just a Sister Away and Sharon Pace The Women of Genesis: From Sarah to Potiphar’s Wife invite the reader to understand the role of gender, race, and nationality frame these texts and our understanding of identity today.
One can track the identity deliberations of the jazz community. Ken Burns’ television series Jazz the rise of jazz in America tries to give voice to personal and group identity. Fats Waller to Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie explore the roots of the African American experience in a way that would not overly alienate the European audience. Yet there is a place for Benny Goodman and Dave Brubeck. The book of Genesis to the jazz clubs of the United States in the twentieth century endogamy and exogamy, how we shape our identity through marriage and other institutions of affiliation remains a lively and debated question.

Memex Machines and the future of Memes and Books

Last March I read a paper on the Death of the introduction to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. A key part of that was the observation that the introduction as book will increasingly be out of touch with the digital student. Janet Murray observed in her introduction to the New Media Reader (MIT 2003) that new media is always distrusted. Reading Alan Jacobs makes a similar point.
This summer as a member of the Baylor summer faculty institute I heard Tom Hanks of Baylor University suggest that the lecture goes back to the medieval university where the lecture was for students who did not have available books. The professor functions as the walking book. The lecture, the professor as walking book still maintains a linearity. The introductions to the Hebrew Bible book and the lecture share a fundamental linearity.
Linearity survives even in the digital world. Many faculty members thought that they were moving into a hip new world when we took on PowerPoint as a mantel of the avant garde professor. However, PowerPoint does not easily move to a nonlinear classroom. Parker Palmer in his Courage to Teach invites the reader to shift from a professor focused pedagogy to the subject focused.
Subject focused pedagogy is not linear. This has implications for the introduction to Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Both the book and the course in a post-modern digital age with subject centered pedagogy need a different type of book. When Bush describes the memex machine in his article “As We May Think,” he talks about a machine that contains books. What he did not explore in that book would be transformed by the memex machine.
What would the new course look like? What sort of textbook would support a subject centered ? Does the new tablet like the i-pad? What do you think?

Star Trek the Next Generation Meets Herman Gunkel

We are looking at Genesis 1-11 in class. We framed the discussion with a quick look at the episode of Star Trek the Next Generation “Darmok.” We explored how a common narrative creates a community. Genesis 1-11 gives the background for the social world of ancient Israel. Herman Gunkel the German scholar in his groundbreaking work on Genesis makes two points. First the relationship between protology, that is first thing and eschatology last things. The second idea was that etiologies become the narrative framework that builds a community. Gunkel’s book The Legends of Genesis published in 1901 continues to organize how many of us approach the book.
The challenge for today’s reader is how do we appropriate these stories in order to provide a narrative cohesion for a common life? The last session we began some initial soundings on the topics of the nature of God and the experience of gender. Today we will examine social institutions such as marriage.
We will talk about exogamy, endogamy, patrilineal, matrilineal, and other anthropological terms that have become part and parcel of biblical interpretation of Genes in the twenty-first century.