[american army takes on some web 2.0 ideas]

"Join the Army, where you can edit all that you can edit.

In July, in a sharp break from tradition, the Army began encouraging its personnel — from the privates to the generals — to go online and collaboratively rewrite seven of the field manuals that give instructions on all aspects of Army life.

The program uses the same software behind the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and could potentially lead to hundreds of Army guides being “wikified.” The goal, say the officers behind the effort, is to tap more experience and advice from battle-tested soldiers rather than relying on the specialists within the Army’s array of colleges and research centers who have traditionally written the manuals.

“For a couple hundred years, the Army has been writing doctrine in a particular way, and for a couple months, we have been doing it online in this wiki,” said Col. Charles J. Burnett, the director of the Army’s Battle Command Knowledge System. “The only ones who could write doctrine were the select few. Now, imagine the challenge in accepting that anybody can go on the wiki and make a change — that is a big challenge, culturally.”

In recent years, collaborative projects like the Firefox Internet browser or Wikipedia pages have flourished with the growth of the Internet, showing the power of thousands of contributors pulling together.

Not surprisingly, top-down, centralized institutions have resisted such tools, fearing the loss of control that comes with empowering anyone along the chain of command to contribute.

Yet the Army seems willing to accept some loss of control. Under the three-month pilot program, the current version of each guide can be edited by anyone around the world who has been issued the ID card that allows access to the Army Internet system. About 200 other highly practical field manuals that will be renamed Army Tactics, Techniques and Procedures, or A.T.T.P., will be candidates for wikification.

As is true with Wikipedia, those changes will appear immediately on the site, though there is a team assigned to each manual to review new edits. Unlike Wikipedia, however, there will be no anonymous contributors.

Many in the Army have been suspicious about the idea, questioning if each soldier — specialist or not — should have an equal right to create doctrine, Colonel Burnett said.

“We’ve gotten the whole gamut of responses from black to white,” he said, “ ‘The best thing since sliced bread’ to ‘the craziest idea I have ever heard.’ ”

The colonel said that he was hopeful that by reaching out to the 140,000 members of the Army’s online forums, he would be tapping the kind of people who would be comfortable collaborating on the Web.

“Our motto is, ‘If you ever thought what would I do if the Army let me write doctrine, now is your chance,’ ” he said."

Read more here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/business/14army.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2

[a million penguins: change and order in a wiki novel]

This afternoon Dr. Bruce Mason shared with us some of his indepth research on the joint Penguin/DMU creation (some call it a wikinovel) A Million Penguins...there are some notes I jotted down by pen (imagine...a pen and paper...)


guiding research questions:

1. what was the role of the discussion around the wiki?
2. what patterns of social behaviour occured among the contributors?

There is loads of commentary (on and offline) about A Million Penguins and most of it is negative...I wonder if most of this has to do with the way A Million Penguins was described...a mean, equating it with a "novel" is bound to cause reactionary behaviour. A collaboratively created multiple wiki cannot be a novel...perhaps it can have narrative aspects but a novel...maybe if it was initially described as a wiki experiment rather than a novelistic one the initial feedback/response would have been more positive?

Bruce mentions in wiki lore there is the garden metaphor however Penguins isn't really about order/organisation.

In 5 weeks of the wiki-story:
1500 registered users
over 11000 edits
75000 visitors
280000 page views (!!! good marketing!)

since it was closed down (no more edits/additions allowed) there have been a further half a million page views.

Different types of users:
Performer
Vandal
Gardener

• the performer made 1780 edits in 4 weeks (he didn't register in the first week)
• focused on adding content and linking together - bringing himself to the front
• edits frequently viewed pages (so others can always see him)

• the vandal was about destruction through changing text - a type of performer who also foregrounds him (or her) self
• the edits were all about her/him
• 166 edits so one of the least frequent however the most frequently talked about and instigated the most contributions and began patterns of behaviour (inspired similar kinds of vandalisation)

• the gardener focuses on organizing
• made 1144 edits, the 2nd most frequent
• made person-to-person edits (more private)

More stats:

650 pages with significant content

366 don't contain any links 9dead ends)

150 pages don't have any incoming links (orphans)

Thus - a lack of "wikification" because pages are not linked, walled gardens which only link to themselves (like a high-school clique?)

Bruce suggests that the kind of negative behaviour (vandalism etc...) might be explained if we think of the wiki as a Bakhtinian "carnival":

"gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies,it buries and revives"

there is a kind of social sanctioning for bad behaviour and two normes are reversed:

the reversal of normal rules of wiki
the reversal of normal rules of wiring/publishing

see the wikipedia entry

See Bruce's report for more indepth information and (sometimes hilarious!) examples coming tomorrow here.

[exploring a million penguins - order and chaos in a wiki novel]

@ the IOCT on 23 April 2008

presenter: Bruce Mason

In February 2007, DMU and Penguin Publishing collaborated to host the world’s first wiki novel - “A Million Penguins” - using the same software that runs Wikipedia. Over a five week period nearly 1,500 people signed up to edit the novel, over 11,000 edits were made and it was viewed over 500,000 times leading the CEO over Penguin Publishing to muse that it was maybe the “most written novel in history.”

In this seminar, Bruce Mason will outline the results of a research project held at the Institute Of Creative Technologies (IOCT) which investigated the social behaviour that unfolded during the writing of “A Million Penguins.” What kinds of collaboration, conflict and compromise occurred and what did it tell us about future online writing possibilities? Did a sense of community arise or did we see nothing but chaos and vandalism?

The seminar will not require any particular knowledge of wikis or online writing.

About the presenter
Bruce Mason is an IOCT Post-Doctoral Research Fellow specialising in social research and web2.0 activities. He previously worked at DMU with Professor Sue Thomas on an Arts and Humanities Research Council Funded Project (http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/tnn/) that investigated the potential for folksonomy in academic research.

About A Million Penguins
A Million Penguins is a collaborative online novel, a wiki which was open to anyone in the world to write and edit. The project ran from 1st Feb to 7th March 2007, was organised by Kate Pullinger (http://www.katepullinger.com) of De Montfort University and Jeremy Ettinghausen of Penguin, with Sue Thomas, Professor of New Media at De Montfort and an editorial team of students enrolled on De Montfort’s Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media.

[web 2.0 resources]

I recently came across this excellent compendium of web 2.0 resources via Dawn Hogue's own useful "Blogs, Wikis, & Web 2.0 in the Classroom" site.

Some of the more interesting ones:

• pimp my news: "scours the web 24/7 for text news and blogs you love and instantly converts them to MP3s that you listen to on your iPod, iPhone or your computer, anytime, anywhere."
  

• trackr: "Use trackr! to let people know where you are and where you have been. All you need is the Internet, a GPS receiver and your mobile phone (or a mobile phone with an internal GPS receiver). Download the application to your mobile phone, create a friendslist and let your friends know where you are."





• arenAsia: "a good way to get ahead in Asia. Professionals use ArenAsia to cultivate business relationships, promote their skills or services, and share insights, opinions and information through discussion groups, event listings, marketplace and knowledge base."






• trutap: "allows you to take your online social life where you go. You can send group messages, SMS and email from your mobile phone for free. You can also chat with your friends on IM (e.g. MSN) and post to blogs, photo-sharing accounts and social networks - all from your mobile phone."






• ecolet: "a web–based company that provides the design community timely, accurate information and news about sustainable materials for product design, architecture, furniture design, graphic design, and more. With headquarters in both Providence and San Francisco, Ecolect LLC aims to be the place for individuals and businesses to learn, connect, share and discover the best in eco–materials."






• guru del vino!!!: "a place for people passionate about wine where they can learn more, share their knowledge and meet with other people who share their passion. It relies on intuitive drag & drop functionality, behaving just like a normal desktop. It is especially easy to use for elderly persons, who form a great part of the wine business target group."






• songza: "allows you to find songs, share them with your friends, and even create playlists."






• wise mapping: "the web mind mapping tool that leverages the power of Mind Maps using new technologies like vectorial languages (SVG and VML)."

[collaborative book]

I've just been reading the Marketing Profs blog again (I highly recommend it) and one of the top five reads of this week is Christina Kerley's post on "The Age of Conversation--a precedent-setting collaborative book by 103 authors hailing from every U.S. time zone, Canada, Australia, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, India and Oman."

"In what began as a half dare, the editors, Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan challenged bloggers around the world to contribute one page — 400 words — on the topic of “conversation”. The resulting book, The Age of Conversation, brings together over 100 of the world’s leading marketers, writers, thinkers and creative innovators in a ground-breaking and unusual publication. And in the spirit of conversation, you can follow-up and extend your interest in the topics covered in the book at the Age of Conversation blog — http://www.ageofconversation.com/."

This collaborative novel is reminscent of DMU's online MA in Creative Writing and New Media's One Million Penguins project. I wonder how it might have evolved if the idea was to produce a printable book rather than a wiki-novel? Perhaps a future project for Penguin and the Master's group...

This also raises questions for the concept of transliteracy and collaboration. Is transliteracy analogous to collaboration and community? To be transliterate must one also approve of the spirit of community and collaboration? How might the individual feature in transliteracy (or is there an "individual"?) I suppose we'll need a way of negotiating the wisdom of crowds and independent thinking.

[narrative and multimodality conference - day 2]

Today marked the second and final day of the Narrative and Multimodality conference organised by Dr. Ruth Page and held at UCE. The morning began with 4 presentations after which we were divided into 3 smaller groups.
Each group settled into a room and prepared for an exciting workshop with the focus on pedagogical and narratological implications of web work. Our group, the structure and suspense group, first read Inanimate Alice episode one so that everyone in the group would be able to talk about the same thing. Bruce guided us through the reading on a huge screen and I must say that Alice really should be experience with such a screen and volume. The booming music really helped build suspense (although people in the group didn't all agree that it was in fact suspensefull but rather anxiety-inducing). After the reading we discussed using Inanimate Alice in the class/lecture room and how we might encourage students to recognise that reading multimodal works such as Alice means reading all of the modes (I think so anyway) involved in the storytelling - not just concentrating on the textual apparatus (as one member of our group thought was more apt).

After the illuminating discussion we gathered back in the main room for a panel (which I chaired!). Jennifer Harding presented some fascinating insights thanks to her use of wikis in her undergrad. English classes. She def. gave us all some ideas to try.

The afternoon sessions were all fascinating and ranged in topics concerning high-tech uses of multimodality (Sarah Hatton and Melissa McGurgan on Using Sound Maps in Multimodal Environments to Promote Interactive Narrative) and multimodal print (Alison Gibbons' reading of a print text which, through its use of multimodality, encouraged an embodied reading). Fascinating stuff.


In his plenary session, Michael Toolan focussed on the literary/narrative potential (or lack of) of what he calls "high-tech multimodal works." Toolan explained that because certain hypertexts are "too open, too interactive" problems arise because readers cannot share the same "object" (as a book) - something that remains the same across multiple viewers and platforms and time. Therefore (according to Toolan) hypertext is not narrative art. It's "too protean in seqence and event to let us analyse hypertext as narrative." While Toolan is certainly right that some hypertexts and web fictions are open, I would argue (as I did in our workshop session) that most readers would share the same general understanding of plot. After all, the author (hyper or not) has written a story (if we are confining ourselves to web fictions and not poetry or art although those too can be narrative) for a reader. Though there are links, it is ultimately the author who controls access to them and would probably want a story to evolve. Texts such as "afternoon" were mentioned but that seems to be an example where reading paths might differ however readers do visit the same lexias. So, the order of events might be different, but the reader encounters the same narrative fragments. Also, does that mean narrative only exists if "we" can share it? What about each reader narrativising each reading experience? I'd like to hear more about what Toolan meant and I wonder if his views would change after reading stories like Inanimate Alice which is pretty teleological so readers would then share the same "object," or even These Waves of Girls where the underlying story is apparent from most nodes. Toolan successfully got us all thinking (which deserves congratualtions as it was the final session of the day) and his talk has helped me think about what place web fictions can play in pedagogy - what kinds of ideas we'll have to teach students before beginning to teach them multimodal works.

**Thanks to Ruth who did an incredible job organising the whole conference and making sure it all ran smoothly.**

UPDATE: Ruth has also shared some reflections on the conference.

[narrative and multimodality symposium]

Narrative and Multimodality: Language, Theory, Contexts Symposium of PALA's Narrative Special Interest Group 27-28 April, 2007, Birmingham, UK.

A reminder to all conference delegates about the narrative workshop wiki.

Feel free to add your thoughts and questions by clicking the "edit page" button on whichever wiki page you'd like to edit.