An Artisan in Social Software...
I'm going to take the unusual approach of linking through to a comment I've made on someone else's site. The comment is flawed - it's full of typos and errors and gets a bit over-excited every so often - but essentially I stand by most of it - particularly this part which is about the relationship between research/debate and hands-on experience running an online community:
From my response to 'Falling in with the wrong crowd'
"There's a pretension around our work that says that we're scientists - but mostly we�re not - we're artisans. We build things for people to use. We build things that extend the abilities of individuals in one way or another. As such people who work in this field should be doing apprenticeships as much as they should be doing research. They should be managing a community, understanding the tensions and the collapses, noticing the problems and the benefits, seeing where people get stuck and where they need to get stuck - where they need structure and where that structure will kill them."
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
What I was trying to say in my post--and my comment to my own post (could this get any more convoluted, I wonder? no, don't answer, I already know it can)--is that I think you're setting up a false dichotomy here.
One of the things that a lot of people don't realize about the school where I teach (RIT) is that it takes the apprenticeship idea pretty seriously. All of our students in IT are required to do a minimum of three quarters of co-op work. And most of the people teaching in our program have "walked the walk" before "talking the talk."
The reason I feel as though I'm a good place to talk about--and do research into--things like online communities is that I have indeed been a part of them for so long. From local BBS communities (where I met my first husband) to Fidonet echoes (where I met the second); from BITNET listservs to Yahoo! Groups, from CompuServe CB Simulator to my 7-digit ICQ ID...I figure I've earned my stripes as a participant.
(Heck, I was participating in Michigan's online conferencing environment--CONFER, I think it was--back when you were still listening to Deniece Williams in the back seat of your mom's car. :-)
The fact that I'm now in an academic environment shouldn't mean that my credibility as a participant goes away. What I'm striving for is better partnerships. Give my students co-op experiences...and I'll give you back people with the technical and social skills to build the tools that you're imagining.
And yes, I know I sound defensive. It's hard being the ivory tower scapegoat sometimes. :-)
→ Posted by: Liz Lawley at April 5, 2003 10:57 PM
Don't for one moment think that I don't know that! While playing online (which I started doing a mere ten years ago now - probably making me a bit of a newbie) I was also trying to complete my doctoral thesis in Freudian concepts of identification, lesbian and gay theory, ancient Greek tragedy and screen theory. I'm more than familiar with both the resentment of the implication (and the concommitant anxiety) that one is safe in an academic ivory tower. But I think the important thing for me to repeat is that when I talk about my anxieties surrounding emerging conversations in social software, I'm often talking about people who haven't had that level of engagement - certainly not in the position of a builder or a community leader - and certainly not for any decent period of time. My knowledge of how your students work is highly limited, so I wouldn't want to make statements like that about them - and nor would I want to make absolutist statements - as long as someone is talking sense, I don't give a damn whether they've walked the walk or not. In Delphi, the oracle stood on top of a pit of fuming scents and burning substances and went into an ecstatic trance from which she'd reveal the future in a form of pre-Christian glossolalia - speaking in tongues. She'd use words either without or stripped of all meaning which would be interpreted subsequently by high-priests and reported as a glimpse of "the future". The way people are using fascinating and interesting theoretical developments (and newly popularised concepts like smart mobs, distributed networks and the like) often feels to me like a similar process - the words are stripped of all context and insight or meaning, and are pulled into discourse in order to convey a sense of hipness or 'now'. It's a weird and uncomfortable place for someone like me to occupy suddenly... Ach. I'm droning. Basically - (i) lots of good discussion going on, (ii) but everyone's getting too caught up in language and hipness and needs to be dragged back down into tiny micro-building projects (iii) otherwise the whole enterprise will combust, taking this opportunity for the pushing-forward of human collaborative and/or social working and flushing it down the loo...
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at April 6, 2003 10:26 AM
I think, at the end of all this, we're in pretty close to the same place. I agree, the micro-building needs to happen. What I'm encouraged by, however, is that nearly every discussion I've been involved in on this topic (including the much-maligned "emergent democracy" group that Joi pulled together) has been very cognizant of this. The "wouldn't it be nice" rhetoric has a constant drumbeat of "we need to *build*" accompanying it.
(Just tried to put in line breaks...will see if they take.)
What you're talking about is exactly what I'm trying to do with my students...I feel like I've got this golden opportunity to take all this enthusiasm and skill that's passing through my classroom and turn it in the direction of these projects. So my reading and participation in these discussions is all targeted towards making things really happen.
The grant that Alex Halavais and I submitted to NSF is also geared toward making things happen, and getting the developers and toolmakers to talk to the researchers to talk to the content experts (folks like you and me, who have lived in this world, not just studied it). I doubt it will get funded--didn't have enough time to work on it, or to schmooze the program manager--but the concept is there, and if NSF turns us down we'll look elsewhere to move that project forward.
All of which by way of saying I understand your concerns, and see them as valid--but I'm less pessimistic than you are right now, because I'm seeing so _much_ movement towards actual building and not just talking/writing.
→ Posted by: Liz Lawley at April 6, 2003 3:09 PM
Learn by doing and do by learning. Learn and do what's new.
→ Posted by: Ross Mayfield at April 7, 2003 8:46 AM