Liz thinks systems that let students rank professors tend to be skewed, unreliable and nasty … and important. An interesting discussion follows.

It’s a problem. There are lots of reasons to be disappointed in a professor, including some that don’t actually reflect on the teacher as a teacher. Some courses that are unpleasant experiences may yet be worthwhile. So what do you do? The systems seemingly have to be anonymous if they’re to work, although one of Liz’s commenters suggests tying them into social networks. Having them structured more like discussion boards so that students can respond to one another’s comments might help. More metadata about the students might enable a system to note that a particular professor is rated low by science majors but high by humanities majors, low by women but high by mean, and maybe even low by C students but high by A students (??).

The truth is, I don’t really know what might help. [Tags: liz_lawley teaching social_software ]

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Jimmy “Wikipedia” Wales is starting his next big project. “[B]roadcast media brought us broadcast politics, and now participatory media will bring us participatory politics. But for this to happen, we have to make it happen.”

Will it work? We won’t know until we invent it.

Mission statement here. Mailing list here. [Tags: politics wikipedia jimmy_wales wikis]

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Having just done a reinstall on my wife’s computer, I’ve then had the annoying pleasure of extirpating the various ways arrogant programs try to take the machine over. Norton Antivirus takes up an inch of the task bar. Real thinks it owns everything that makes a sound. Everything installs an entry to the Explorer popup.

But not Open Office, bless its modest soul. During the installation process, when it asks if you’d like it to be the default program for opening Microsoft Office documents, it clearly says:

If you are just trying out OpenOffice.org 2.0, you probably don’t want this to happen, so leave the boxes unchecked

The bigger the app, the more likely I’m going feel I’m at war with it. Except for Open Office. It’s so clearly on our side.

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Found at Pink Dome thanks to Andy Oram:

Omigod. [Tags: george_bush mashup bloodysunday youtube video broadcast_flag]

You can add your name and good wishes to the virtual birthday card the Republican National Committee is sending to our President on July 6. You’ll have to make a campaign contribution first, though. Great idea! That’s how I’m going to manage my next birthday!

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Christopher Lydon had me on in the final segment of Open Source Radio to talk with Jaron Lanier about his article, “Digital Maoism.” I came on after James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds argued with Jaron about whether crowds are ever wise, although there was more agreement than argument. Suroweicki made one of the right points: Jaron focuses on a few examples that Jaron considers to be negative, slighting the importance of collective thinking in top down environments.

Then Ze Frank , the comedian, came on to talk about his experience letting readers write comedy for him on a wiki. He was the most serious and thoughtful of us all, I thought. Damn comedians. (I’m a big Ze Frank fan.)

Then I came on. I’m not happy with how I did. I tried to say that Jaron is warning us of something, but his examples of the danger don’t hold up and, even if they did, they are exceptions, not a trend. The article focuses heavily on Wikipedia. But the Web isn’t really becoming like Wikipedia, and Wikipedia isn’t the result of “hive mind,” which I take to mean people who all believe the same thing, just as Maoists supposedly all chant out of the Little Red Book. In truth, Wikipedia results from vigorous conversation (and some rigorous administration, but I left that out), the opposite of hive mind. Not to mention, I don’t agree that Wikipedia is an example of what’s wrong with the Web. Yes, it’s voiceless, but that’s appropriate for an encyclopedia, and it is definitely not typical of the Web. Jaron denied that he meant “hive mind” as anything negative — then what is his article about? — and repeatedly went back to his unsupported assertion that anonymity dehumanizes discussions. (I have a cheap suspicion that his animosity towards anonymity has something to do with the fact that Jaron is a highly visible public personality and thus thinks we all should be equally comfortable speaking strongly in public. But we’re not all like that.)

BTW, Jaron claimed on-air that his research shows that the more edited a Wikipedia article is, the less accurate it is. I wish I’d said that that research should have been included in “Digital Maoism.” It would have made the piece much stronger. I hope he publishes that research now.

And since this is my blog, I’m going to take the opportunity to dispute Jaron’s on-air denial that his article is mainly negative about blogging. Here is the substantive paragraph about blogging:

…it must at least be pointed out that writing professionally and well takes time and that most authors need to be paid to take that time. In this regard, blogging is not writing. For example, it’s easy to be loved as a blogger. All you have to do is play to the crowd. Or you can flame the crowd to get attention. Nothing is wrong with either of those activities. What I think of as real writing, however, writing meant to last, is something else. It involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday’s moves in a conversation.

If you’re going to lob handgrenades, you ought not later claim that the handgrenades were meant only in the best sense.

Clay Shirky’s excellent response to Jaron’s article is here. You can listen to the Radio Open Source show in its entirety here. I’m afraid to. [Tags: jaron_lanier open_source_radio wikipedia digital_culture ze_frank james_surowiecki]

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Terry Heaton has an insightful response to the Nielsen Normal research about the marketing effectiveness of RSS. Along the way, Terry raises a key point about usability: It aims at making user experience better but not always for the sake of the user. [Tags: terry_heaton usability rss]

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DroppingKnowledge.org is trying to create a “blogstorm” to support what seems like a well-intentioned project. The site is trying to collect 100,000 important questions facing the species. Then, on Sept. 9, 113 “scientists, social entrepreneurs, philosophers, writers, artists and activists from around the world” will get together to talk about 100 of them.

If they make progress, great. If they focus attention on important issues, great. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if, instead of relying on 113 experts sitting around a table, there were some medium by which the people of the world themselves — at least the ones with a Net connection — could talk about for themselves, over the long term? If only we had such a medium…if only… [Tags: droppingknowledge]

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BradSucks has posted some potential designs for the guitar he’s sanding down. Feel free to alter the PhotoShop.psd file he’s posted… [Tags: bradsucks guitar]

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Víctor Pérez-Díaz of Harvard’s Center for European Studies is talking about his paper, Markets as Conversations. He is the author of 30 books, most recently several on civil society. [As always, I am at best paraphrasing.]

He says the most important part of this paper are sections 3 and 4 where he interprets markets as conversations. These conversations generally are implicit and non-verbal, but they help to shape the public sphere, politics and policy. [I’m sitting behind him and can hear him only intermittently.]

Emma Rothchild responds after Pérez-Diaz’s summary. She looks at various historic reactions to markets. [ I can pretty well hear her, but I’m missing some still.]

The word “market,” she says, was quite concrete in the 18th century, so stopping a market was a very concrete action: Preventing a person from taking produce for sale, e.g. Arthur Young [I’m getting this name embarrassingly wrong] she says has a diatribe against the French peasant who walked for days to sell a dozen eggs at market. The peasant isn’t valuing his time, he says. But a Marxist commentator [couldn’t hear the name] said that the diatribe misses the mark because the market wasn’t just about the transaction. It was also about getting the news and gossip, meeting friends, etc.

She talks about some of the historic worries about markets. Adam Smith was concerned about “corporations”, i.e., islands of non-market relationships. Some worried about markets backed by state coercive power. In the 19th C, some wondered if markets made people more passive — people becoming more concerned with trivial matters. She also raises concerns about unequal participation in markets by women, ethnic distinctions, etc. “This takes us to the realm of violence, of national security, of the non-market. Many of us have the sense that that realm is increasing in the past two or three years in Europe. Probably in this country as well.”

Perhaps, she says, technology has “prodigiously extended” markets. The anonymity of the Internet goes against some of the positive processes Pérez-Diaz points at. Meanwhile the technologies of persuasion work against market openness, as does the rise of the national security state.

Pérez-Diaz replies that he does not expect the market to solve problems such as universal hatred. And, he says, conversations are very ambiguous. His paper talks about Rilke’s characterization of Cezanne’s artistic process as a conversation of paint with paint. [It’s a lovely passage.]

Q: It’s not clear to me if you mean “conversation” as a way of regulating markets or as a characterization of markets. And your notion of protecting the market from politics marks you as of a particular generation of social thinkers. I think we need to protect politics from the market.
A: I don’t mean conversations as the talk around the market that regulates it. And politics and markets are interconnected.

Q: Markets are limited even when they’re at their best. Market conversations are about anything that’s for sale. But we don’t want everything to be sale, and we want to have conversations also about things are not for sale.
A: (He explains that that’s not what he meant.)

Q: I worry about the overuse of the term “conversation.” And I’m not as optimistic as you.
A: [I couldn’t hear. Plus I have to leave. Damn.]

[It seems to me that not only are markets conversations (thank you, Doc), but the Internet is erasing the distinction. When I read reviews at Amazon — a marketplace — written by people who may not have bought the book or people who already bought it elsewhere — the market and the conversation are indistinguishable. Likewise when I use local.yahoo.com and read what people write. Even when I buy a commodity from the lowest possible supplier, there may be reviews on the site or I may have gotten there by engaging in conversations on other sites. Not only are markets conversations in that we’re talking with one another, the marketplaces are themselves becoming inseparable from those conversations.]

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Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law professor who wrote Who Controls the Internet: Illusions of a Borderless World with Tim Wu, is giving a lunchtime talk at the Berkman Center. He comes from studying multi-jurisdictional conflicts. [Note: All quotes are approximate at best. I’m paraphrasing throughout.] The book is a history of why the vision of the Internet as something apart from meatspace governments didn’t work out. The book makes three claims, he says:

1. Nations can do a great deal to regulate Internet transactions within their borders. States can do a lot more than people thought.

2. The Internet is becoming bordered by geography, i.e., it’s becoming balkanized. Some of the borders come from states applying their laws. But a lot is coming from bottom up pressures, i.e., Internet consumer demand. “This is most obviously true with respect to language.” A great deal of the information that people want is about local stuff. Geographic identity technology lets applications know where Internet users are in real space; this has started not because government regulators want it but because advertisers do.

3. This emerging bordered Internet is not a terrible thing. “Obviously, in most respects it’s a bad thing in China,” although the fact that the Chinese Internet is in Chinese is a good thing for the Chinese (Jack says). The bordered Internet is good for the same reasons federalism is a good thing: You can maximize people’s preferences if you allow them to have law at the local level. E.g., France forbids eBay from selling Nazi goods. Among democraciess, the differences in free speech are legitimate. A bordered Internet allows the French to use its own free speech laws, and the alternative would be for the US to impose it’s view of free speech on France or vice versa.

Self-governing Internet communities can’t flourish without government, he says. E.g., eBay relies on the government, including for fraud control. eBay employess 800-900 fulltime people who work closely with state and local prosecutors to minimize fraud. Without government assistance, eBay would be overrun by fraud. Also: Contract enforcement, postal services, etc. Government sponsored public goods are essential for the fourishing of Internet communities.

One of the lessons of the book is, Jack says, that geography matters and government matters. “The experience of the Internet over the past 10 years is an antidote to the breathless claims of globalization.”

Q: How about the segmentation of the Internet outside of democracies?
A: China’s deprivation of free speech is a bad thing. But the bordered Internet is good for the Chinese people in the use of the Chinese language and by the relaxed rules on IP. But the bordered Net argument doesn’t work as well where citizens don’t have control over their government.

Q: Corporate response to this?
A: I have much less of a problem with Google than Yahoo. As far as I can tell, the Chinese people are better off because Google is there. As far as I can tell, no one is made worse off by Google being there. Contrast that with what I think Yahoo is and was doing: To the extent to which a corporation’s making money requires turning people over for engaging in political speech…But it’s also a fault of the US government.

Q: So you must think the Global Online Freedom Act doesn’t have much chance?
A: I haven’t followed it since the hearings, but I don’t think there’s any chance of it passing because it would mean that US companies can’t do business in China.

Q: What about issues that can’t be controlled by individual governments, e.g., the Internet naming system?
A: Actually, that’s an example of something controlled successfully by a single country. Originally people thought ICANN was going to provide private control of the Internet. But it’s firmly under the control of governments. US control of it is not sustainable.

Q: [me] You’ve said a bordered Internet has advantages. The examples of natural clustering — around languages, e.g. — are not controversial. But the ones where it’s enforced by law are more so — e.g., French laws about eBay sales. If it’s goods for states to have this control, is it an implication that it’d be better if we altered the Internet infrastructure to put in more info to enable more local control, e.g., a copyright bit, author bit, adults-only bit, etc.A: I haven’t thought this much. But I suppose if you could increase the degree of control within democracies, that might be an implication. But you’d have to weigh that against the harm done within totalitarian states. But the bordered Internet is a metaphor. Most nations don’t care about most of what goes over the Internet. We’re talking about the small percentage of neutral between different regulations in demorcacy…or I don’t even want to go that far. I’d have to think about it in a discrete context. I guess I don’t have an answer to this question. [Hard to capture this. Jack was thinking out loud and an open and frank way. Nice to see.]

A: This book isn’t optimistic about what public international law can accomplish. Treaties aren’t happening. There are lots of things can’t control very well: gambling, pornography. Every new tech has a shock on the government. State authority persists. The state as an institution will survive this revolution because the revolution needs the state. In fact, every communication revolution has strengthened the state.

Q: Amara’s law says that first we overestimate the consequences of a new technology and then we ignore the long time consequences. There’s a possibility that we’ll start seeing each other around the globe as being more like one another than not. It seems to me inevitable that we’re becoming more alike. Our interests are necessarily merging if we’re to survive. That’s my normative statement.
A: Reinhold Niebuhr said that knowledge of difference increases hatred. Every communications revolution has said what you say, but it hasn’t worked out. It’s impossible to tell which way it’s going. Rorty claims that as soon as we see people as humans not as foreigners, we’ll cease to have as much conflict. That’s the hope of globalization. But I think the opposite is just as possible. I don’t know which force is more powerful and I don’t think we can say systematically. [Tags: jack_goldsmith globalization tim_wu net_neutrality]

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