ICTlogy

Lead: Jonathan Zittrain

The Internet of tomorrow will not much resemble the Internet of today. What are the changes sweeping over the Net, and who stands to gain and lose by them?

The big change the personal computer brought in — compared to big mainframes — was that one solution — the PC — fitted many problems/questions. It was a multipurpose machine that let the customer use it for whatever he could imagine (or almost). And software was the tool to be used to accomplish any purpose.

The “Hourglass” architecture follows a similar purpose: let’s get anyone connected, but let anyone get connected the way the want and exchange whatever they want. Just some standards are of consensus to make thinks work. Reference: The Internet’s Coming of Age (2001).

With the “hourglass” architecture, one layer can develop and know anything about any other layer (provided you respect the standards that make layers communicate one to each other). Same happens with Internet Science… or not. It depends on what you’re planning to accomplish. Nevertheless, it is clear that you have to have a general awareness on how the other layers work to get deep into your personal research field/layer.

Generativity: third parties can contribute and second parties can benefit from the improvements. i.e. one plugin for WordPress

You get generativity on the four layers:

• social: i.e. CouchSurfing
• content: i.e. Wikipedia
• logical
• physical

Limits, Lockdown

• Captcha: a generative solution to a generative problem… which can be tricked by means of generativity.
• Certificates
• Web code is highly generative, thus easy to hack to do whatever evil

Is this (these threats) the end of the generative computer? of the actual systems design? are tethered appliances/devices the future/present (and the death of generativity)?

My reflections

While most of these threats to generativity might be true, isn’t the pendulum of “threats” getting overridden by:

• Free software and the way it’s changed politics?
• Open access and the way it’s changing science and knowledge building?
• The changes that Law (Intellectual Property, Privacy, etc.) is suffering (and will be) in the most recent years?

Jonathan’s just answered Rachel Cobcroft‘s question and, indirectly, commented my reflections: it is not an apocalypse he’s depicting — the end of generativity — but a warning: if we focus too much in our layer, we could have the freest Internet ever but the end point can be caught under control for lack of our “surveillance”, because we just forgot. And most important (as an answer to Chintan Vaishnav), the question is if generativity will become a thing for geeks, or it is supposed to remain for everyone.

Readings

More info

• 3rd IDP Congress on Internet, Law and Politics. Briefings, part I: Jonathan Zittrain keynote speech, post in this blog around the same issues.
• A Generative Presentation, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• Generativity, by Aaron S. Veenstra
• OII Day 1, by Alla Zollers
• J.H. Saltzer, D.P. Reed & D.D. Clark. End-to-end arguments in system Design (PDF)
• Committee on the Internet in the Evolving Information Infrastructure, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications, National Research Council. The Internet’s Coming of Age

Leads: John Palfrey, Urs Gasser

With over a million young people “born digital,” now is the time to examine the emerging trends of how these digital natives construct identity, learn, create, and socialize in an ever-changing “always on” landscape. How do we give digital natives the tools (in terms of know-how, technology, social norms, or other means) to navigate safely in the emerging digital social space? How can copyright holders work with digital creators to understand their needs and practices in a way that doesn’t stifle their creativity? As a global society, can we come to understand what’s happening with a generation online, to embrace a digital present, and to shape, in constructive ways, a more digital future?

• Digital Native Wiki
• Digital Native Facebook group

Working papers on Digital Divide, the Spread of the Internet and Political Institutions

What does it mean to be a Digital Native?

• Digital Identity: Identity was something I could control… can I control my Digital Identity? Or, on the contrary: online identity can be shaped, created absolutely the way I want it to be
• Multitasking: Distraction or multitasking?
• Digital Media: Flickr, Google Print, YouTube…
• Digital Creativity: Consumers in the past… what now? Quite a switch. Can we relate it with… Democracy?

Technologies that enable/empower the digital native

• RSS feeds, of course, that link together (free) web 2.0 applications.
• Lightweight collaboration: Wikipedia?
• New contexts, new meanings
• Tagging
• International scope: shrinking the world

• Example: Couchsurfing

Issues:

• Security
• Privacy: unintended audience; how to remove information about me on the Internet, information that can be massively processed (i.e. image recognition); identity theft, erosion
• Intellectual property: copyright, trademark
• Credibility: specially relevant in the academic business
• Information overload: we move from an environment of high quality information — because it is produced professionally — towards an amateur created information environment. Related: quality mechanics, reputation, etc. How many RSS feed subscriptions or e-mails a day can you tolerate?

Opportunities

• Media literacy skills
• expression/identity
• empowering creators
• information sharing
• maintaining connections
• semiotic democracy
• access to information

My reflections

• Wealth of Networks and peer production
• Wikinomics
• Prosuming
• Connectivism
• It’s the knowledge economy, stupid
• Speaking in tongues
• e-Awareness
• How are enterprises and employer/employee relationships going to change?
• What’s the role of Education (specially Higher Education) in the XXIst century?
• How is values transmission going to be affedted?
• The end of Democracy (vs. smartmobs and goal focused cyberactivism)?

Readings

More info

• UNESCO Seminar on the Web2.0 and e-Learning. John Palfrey: Born Digital, post in this blog.
• Nativos Digitales, a post of mine in another blog.
• OII Day 1, by Alla Zollers
• Digital Natives – OII SDP notes, by Cuihua Shen

As already said, I’d be at the Berkman Center to take part into the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme 2007. Thus, along the next two weeks I might be reporting “everything” that’ll happen here.

So far, we’ve been provided tons of bibliography to read, whose references will be progressively referenced here:

• Bibliography for the OII Summer Doctoral Programme 2007 at the Berkman Center
• H2O Playlist: Summer Doctoral Program Playlist

When possible, references include direct access to the resource, but keep in mind that we’ve been provided with drafts of unpublished works (lucky us) that for evident reasons cannot be linked here. By the way, you can stay tuned to the bibliographical updates by subscribing to the bibliography RSS feed.

More info

• Technorati tag: sdp2007
• del.icio.us tag: sdp2007
• Flickr tag: sdp2007
• OII/Berkman 2007 Summer Doctoral Programme planet aggregator
• SDP 2007 Wiki
• Presentations Slides

And yet more info

• Summer Doctoral Program(me) Comes to Cambridge, by John Palfrey

One of the things that thrills me about attending the Second Annual ICT4D Postgraduate Symposium is seeing Hans Rosling in the flesh, as he will be there as keynote speaker. I’ve always loved his work with Gapminder and how information or statistics, graphically presented, can be so revealing — and appealing.

My friend and colleague César Córcoles now reminds me that prof. Rosling was back at TED this year (he also was there on 2006). The presentation, as usual, is impressive, fun… and impressive. But, over all, I loved the common sense he showed when he explained the way he understood the dimensions of development, where crosses state the importance of each item as a mean and as a goal:

As shown in the table, Economic Growth is the most powerful mean, but the real goal is not GDP increases, but Human Rights and, over all, Culture, which is what makes people’s live happy. For your enjoyment, his two speeches at TED.

As I already announced, next August 30th and 31st 2007 the Second Annual ICT4D Postgraduate Symposium will take place at Karlstad University (Sweden). If you’re doing research in this field and can somehow manage to attend the meeting, this is an absolutely not-to-miss gathering.

I’m planning to be there and present a communication named Unpeeling the layers of the digital divide: category thresholds and relationships within composite indices, which is the evolution or follow-up of the one presented last year: The e-readiness layers: thresholds and relationships.

The results of the Project Internet Catalonia, directed by , were presented yesterday at the Open University of Catalonia headquarters. Actually, it was just a formal presentation, as the [reports] are to be made public and available to everyone […] between October 2007 to January 2008.

Nevertheless, professors Castells and Imma Tubella, directors of the project, gave some highlights of their (40 researchers were involved) main findings.

Under my point of view — and own interests, of course — there are two important statements that would explain both successes and failures in the field of Information and Communication Technologies for Development, digital (il)literacy, and digital content and services use:

• The study shows that the more independent and capable people are in developing projects, the more they will use the internet. And the more they use the internet, the more autonomy they can achieve.
• The Internet […]requires some educational level, because we live in an uninformed Information Society, and this will not be solved by the Internet. The Internet deepens a historical divide: the educational: It is not just a matter of access, but to receive the appropriate education to know what for and how to use the Internet

Put short: ICTs are catalysts and multipliers. Capable people — and developed countries — will find an amazing tool to boost their abilities and the reach and scope of their energies. Illiterate will enter new — digital — illiteracies that will make them opt out of something they don’t understand or find useful at all, widening the gap of their illiteracy, unpowering — impoverishing — them.

Hence, the role of education is more important than ever — let aside health and economic development, of course — and the teaching staff is the key element in the incorporation of the internet into school education, but the scenario is quite sad:

• the presence of internet in the classroom is very low in comparison to the use made of it by teachers and students outside of school
• the majority of computers with an internet connection were to be found in the computer studies classrooms to which students had much less access than they did to their own classroom
• until very recently teachers tend to use the internet to maintain the traditional teaching patterns, rather than trying to use it to innovate
• a good number of school directors do not prioritise the integration of ICT and the internet for educational ends

This is something I wrote about in my post Nativos Digitales [Digital Natives — post in Spanish] at the Educación y Cultura [Education and Culture] blog, were I stated that:

It’s likely that one of the steps we have to make, as teachers — but also as parents, as education begins (or should begin) at home —, is accelerating our “nationalization” in the digital world: we’ll always have the accent of our mother tongue, but only by speaking in the same language understanding will become possible. And, let’s face it, digital natives will not learn a dead language, ours, the one of letters and mail, phone calls, or incunable facsimile editions with yellowish pages.