Looking at Burke’s KWeb, I love the idea of tracing networks of thinkers, inventors, scientists, political figures, and key innovations to investigate the history of technology. Because it provides the opportunity to study innovations from any of a number of starting points, and allows for free motion among the various people and innovations, it allows users to investigate the innovations and people that most interest them, leveraging the learner’s own curiosity.

But what about looking at the system the other way round? How about constructing your own knowledge webs?

Burke has noted that KWeb provides a facility for creating one’s own webs, so this isn’t a new idea, but I’d like to look at it through the lens of turning recent Wikipedia conversations on their ear… rather than worrying about whether Wikipedia can ever really represent “the sum of all human knowledge,” what about using it as a tool to help people construct knowledge and learn to source that knowledge?

When I was at Tech there was research going into wiki based knowledge systems for higher education courses. I’ll chase some things down when I get a few minutes to rub together.

In educational technology circles, people (rightly) talk a lot about the value of constructivist learning and invest a great deal of research into computer-based learning systems that support it. At the heart of this kind of learning are the ideas that

• we learn by making things
• we learn best by making things that interest us (in part because these are the kinds of things we actually finish)
• as we stop to think think about how we make things and about the things we’re making, we learn more effectively about the things we’re making and the process of making them than if we just make things without reflecting on what we’re doing. (What education researchers call intentional learning.)

While events in the news sparked some discussion over Wikipedia‘s value as a knowledge resource that users consume, I’ve seen less talk recently (possibly because I don’t keep up as well on education technology as I’d like anymore) about the value of the Wikimedia foundation‘s MediaWiki in providing students a platform for constructing and sharing their knowledge.

More to come…

As a means of facilitating interdisciplinary thinking and to help enfranchize informal learners, Burke presented a knowledge map project he’s been working on called the Knowledge Web. Through this tool and others like it, Burke hopes we will foster a more relational approach to learning and learn to think more innovatively.

His KWeb knowledge map focused on a web of significant individuals in art and science history, connected by relationships including friendships, working relationships, enmity, etc. The idea is to take journeys through the network, see what interactions led to innovations and how those innovations rippled through the network of people and ideas.

To show this network of knowledge, KWeb uses a navigation metaphor of nested spheres, inner spheres representing periods farther back in time, outer spheres representing more recent events. Once you pick a node in a sphere, it shows that node’s direct connections to other nodes in the web, and secondarily highlights directly connected nodes’ directly connected nodes.

Burke’s intent with this approach to representing knowledge is to hook people with interesting connections and get them to trace through the network with the kind of thrill people experience when reading through a mystery story. He means to take advantage of curiosity about how ideas are connected to drive users’ learning activity.

Using KWeb to trace through a path, Burke illustrated the kinds of connections across discipline, business, market or culture that have led to important innovations in history.

Burke provides an example beginning with Richard Arkwright, a man who made weaving equipment. He had all the usual connections you’d expect to people in the textile industry. But look, he’s talking to this guy who has nothing to do with textiles, he fixes machines for Glasgow University. “This guy” turns out to be James Watt, who as Wikipedia tells us was “a Scottish inventor and engineer whose improvements to the steam engine were fundamental to the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution.”

During the demonstration Burke suggests that as we pay attention to similar information in the present, we can predict where, when, and what kind of innovations will happen. (Though the thought of tracking people’s associations part has a certain invasion of privacy feel to it.)

Social ecology

Burke puts forth an idea he calls social ecology describing society applying the predictive capabilities society develops for understanding the secondary or ripple effects of a given technology in sufficient detail and far enough ahead of that technology’s development to understand what we think about that technology as a society before it develops, and develop a consensus as to whether we want to encourage the development of that technology or not.

After describing this he quickly notes that he’s not proposing centralized government controls upon innovations or the entirely free reign of market forces. (Citing past repressions of communism and excesses of captialism.) He hopes for a solution that will educate and enfranchize people so they are capable of contributing meaningfully to decisions about innovation. The ultimate hope he puts forth is “that in balancing entrepreneurial dynamism with the public good, we can have our cake and eat it.”

In relation to Social ecology, Burke notes there will be resistance to change. As innovations continue, technologies will develop that people won’t like, and in many cases, it will be the “old fogies” that don’t like the changes, because they will require a change of mindset.

Mozart got kicked down the stairs. The Catholic church censured [and] burned people who said the earth wasn’t the center of the universe. Some people still don’t like the theory of evolution. We have a built in resistance above all to the extension of inclusion. It rocks the boat.

He finishes the presentation returning to the need to expand education to properly enfranchise people, pointing toward a future in which such enfranchised global citizens will be able to focus resources on the most helpful innovations for both commercial interest and the public good.

Our institutions

Burke also made reference to institutions frustrating innovation because they are based on the problems, solutions, and knowledge of the past, and are continually looking backward, hoping to continue to innovate based on what straight lines of discovery they can extend from that past knowledge. The problem with this otherwise reasonable approach being that “The future you might want to plan for is almost never a simple straight-line extension of the present,” and that such a focus on the historical and present achievements of an institution artificially discourages the collision of previously unassociated ideas that leads to innovation.

A further symptom he cites of this institutional problem lies in the western approach to higher education focusing at the graduate and postgraduate level on “learning more and more about less and less,” a case in point being a colleague whose work apexed in studying John Milton’s use of the comma. Burke traces this to “the man I blame for everything… Rene Descartes” and his reductionism as put forth in Rules for the Direction of the Mind_. (See especially rules V – VII.) To properly study complex things we must reduce them to simple propositions to which we devote our full attention.

As a result, we compartmentalize knowledge into an array of disciplines where everybody focuses on the details of their own discipline, leaving other areas of knowledge to the other disciplines to make sure that we’re attending properly to our own. Conventional wisdom says that until recently we rarely broke the invisible walls between disciplines to cross pollinate among them within higher education.

I see this as conventional wisdom in that I hear many people say this was true, but have never been presented documented proof of how long it’s gone on or that it has necessarily changed despite our best intentions. It has the reasonable sound of conventional wisdom, which is part of such wisdom’s treachery. I also find this concept hard to reconcile with the historical examples of technologies or ideas in one discipline rippling into innovations in another that Burke is so fond of highlighting.

Where innovation lives

Burke notes that the most likely places we will find ideas that will lead to innovation lie in today’s gaps between disciplines, markets, and social needs. He cites Norbert Wiener saying “Change comes most of all from that unvisited no-man’s-land that lies between the disciplines.” Or in his own words earlier in the presentation…

When differing types of data come together in new ways, 1 + 1 = 3. The rules of math change. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

When ideas collide that people haven’t brought together before, innovations develop that can (and often do) bring historical change through their primary or ripple effects. That being the basic thrust of Burke’s work on the Connections series, his lecture series, and his KnowledgeWeb project.

For those unfamiliar with his work, Burke was the mind and the voice behind the PBS series Connections, which focused on the connecting threads that led to some of the innovations that changed the world, however unlikely those connections may seem on the surface.

The BYU presentation appeared to cover topics from both his Staying Ahead and The Knowledge Web presentations. Seeking methods for predicting innovation and its secondary effects provided the primary focus of the presentation, and the Knowledge web provided a tool for making those predictions and fostering innovative, interdisciplinary thinking.

Predicting secondary effects

Burke presented the problem of predicting secondary effects by noting technologies whose secondary effects proved detrimental despite the high value we placed on their primary effects. Items like asbestos, thalidomide, chlorofluorocarbons, nuclear power, and carbon emitting machines were all invented and/or used with the intent of making our lives better. It was after adopting them that we discovered that asbestos fibers caused respitory illness and cancer, thalidomide caused birth defects and deformities, CFCs depleted stratospheric ozone, etc.

These secondary effects move beyond disciplinary barriers as well, as seen in one of the secondary effects of the invention of the stirrup in Afghanistan: the modern English language.

By adapting the medieval Afghani stirrup, the French enabled their horsemen to fight more effectively and defeat the Anglo-Saxon British in the battle of Hastings in 1066. French Norman rule over the British Isles brought changes to the language spoken in Britain, as the Anglo-Saxons sought to prove their refinement by learning the Anglo-Norman language of their French rulers. This contributed to the shift from Anglo-Saxon “Old English” to Middle English, which later developed further into the English we use today on either side of the pond.

Barriers to innovation

Our intellectual boxes

We would clearly have liked to avoid the unexpected problems associated with these and other technologies, or found the way to predict the problems before we encountered them. The problem is, these secondary effects aren’t often visible to us until we adopt a technology. We see things from within the “box” of our current understanding, and it requires effort to see outside of it.

Burke points out that this can even be true in our hindsight, citing a story told about Ludwig Wittgenstein in a conversation on Copernicus.

Somebody apparently went up to [Wittgenstein] and remarked what a bunch of morons we in Europe must have been (800 years ago before Copernicus told us how the solar system works) to have looked up there and thought that what we were seeing was the sun going around the earth, when as any idiot knows the earth goes round the sun, and you don’t have to be Einstein to understand that.

To which Wittgenstein is said to have replied… “But I wonder what it would have looked like if the sun had been going around the earth.” The point being of course that it would have looked exactly the same.

What he was saying is that in any decision about what to do next, you’re stuck with your view of things. If, as an astronomer, the contemporary paradigm says the universe is made of omlette, you make instruments looking for traces of intergalactic egg…

We’re all in a box.

And incidentally, you’re right. The box you’re inside and the box I’m inside may be very different. So I may have trouble buying into how you see things from your box, and you may have trouble buying how I see things from mine.

In the end, we have to get over ourselves and our boxes or we’ll paralyze our natural ability to connect ideas and innovate.