Interconnected The idea of a social rhetoric has been bubbling round my head. I’ll outline my thinking first, and defend it next.

* Groups act in a way that is more than the sum of the individuals.

* There is communication going on at a group level, a social language.

* Given the paths of spoken language are hardwired into the brain, maybe social language is too.

* We need to develop a social rhetoric to harness and direct this social language.

Groups act in a way that is more than the sum of the individuals. Now you can invoke emergence and say that the behaviour of the group is nothing more than the interactions of individual behaviour, aggregated and displaying properties we couldn’t have predicted. Firstly, that’s indistinguishable from true group behaviour. But more importantly, second, that’s too reductionist for my taste — groups need to work well together, there’s evolutionary pressure for this, and nature will make use of anything that’s around. Watching a group making a seemingly logical decision is massively different to a single person or even two people. Anyway, if groups were simple enough to study as the addition of individuals we’d still need to look at individual-to-group communication, we’d still need to make abstractions because the number of one-to-one relationships increases massively as the group expands, and we’de still be exploring a new area. Groups are different.

There is communication going on at a group level, a social language. We know there’s non-verbal communication going on, and from there it’s the same argument as above: non-verbal communication with a number of people is different enough from one-to-one that we can label it “social language” and move on. But ultimately, it feels right that there’s something special going on here. It’s a whole other ballgame speaking in a group where pheromones, many-to-many gestures, body language, feedback loops, group think, social pressures come into play.

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Edge 59 As for her discussion of memes, however, I wonder exactly how her notion that “BETWEEN groups there’s a motivation to reject the memes of the other group and do something different” really plays itself out. If the meme is ‘strong’ enough, the new group adopts it. Their pride simply forces them to rename or recontextualize the meme to make it *seem* original.

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‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ by Jo Freeman During the years in which the women’s liberation movement has been taking shape, a great emphasis has been placed on what are called leaderless, structureless groups as the main form of the movement. The source of this idea was a natural reaction against the overstructured society in which most of us found ourselves, the inevitable control this gave others over our lives, and the continual elitism of the Left and similar groups among those who were supposedly fighting this over-structuredness.

The idea of ‘structurelessness’, however, has moved from a healthy counter to these tendencies to becoming a goddess in its own right. The idea is as little examined as the term is much used, but it has become an intrinsic and unquestioned part of women’s liberation ideology. For the early development of the movement this did not much matter. It early defined its main method as consciousness-raising, and the ‘structureless rap group’ was an excellent means to this end. Its looseness and informality encouraged participation in discussion and the often supportive atmosphere elicited personal insight. If nothing more concrete than personal insight ever resulted from these groups, that did not much matter, because their purpose did not really extend beyond this.

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Uglow’s book reveals how simplistic our view of groups really is. We divide them into cults and clubs, and dismiss the former for their insularity and the latter for their banality. The cult is the place where, cut off from your peers, you become crazy. The club is the place where, surrounded by your peers, you become boring. Yet if you can combine the best of those two states—the right kind of insularity with the right kind of homogeneity—you create an environment both safe enough and stimulating enough to make great thoughts possible. You get Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and a revolution in Western philosophy. You get Darwin, Watt, Wedgwood, and Priestley, and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. And sometimes, on a more modest level, you get a bunch of people goofing around and bringing a new kind of comedy to network television.

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Computers & Writing…2010? But the future of computers and writing isn’t just with the future of

computers and the evolution continued changes in computer technologies and

learning will bring. In fact, if we as a field tie ourselves only to

studying and writing about and trying to understand only the latest thing to

ooze from the broadband, we might just evolve ourselves out of being, and

break apart, into those new niches Bill identified.

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Sidebars: Inside Out One of the reasons that learning objects are so difficult to define is that they can be virtually anything. Any stand-alone chunk of information capable of teaching something can be a learning object. Examples include a chapter in a book, a map, a graphic, an interactive application, a video, a wiring diagram, a simulation, and so on. As well as being any thing, a learning object can be any size. While some organizations, such as CISCO Systems Inc., have precise rules for what constitutes a learning object or an information object, definitions across the field of education as a whole remain quite loose. What might be considered a complete learning object by one educator, might just be a component of a learning object to another. In current practice, a learning object might teach a single idea or it might cluster several concepts to deliver a more substantial chunk of learning. While there many interpretations, most educators would agree that learning objects have the following characteristics

* Smaller units of learning: Learning objects usually comprise a smaller unit of learning than a course, typically ranging from two to 15 minutes.

* Self contained: Each learning object is self-contained and can be used independently of other learning objects.

* Reusable: Learning objects are reusable. The same learning object can be used in multiple contexts for multiple purposes.

* Can be aggregated: Learning objects can be grouped into larger collections of content to create more substantial units of learning.

* Tagged with metadata: All learning objects are tagged with metadata that describes the lear

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Hiptop Nation

a wireless community of practice

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Technology Item 325 “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution” 1200 Total Responses But the MOST amazing thing was what happened at my friend Marc Smith’s house. He has rigged up a little laser barcode scanner to a handheld computer (pocket pc) with a wireless connection, and has written some code that connects the info that is returned from the universal product code database to Google. I went in? his kitchen and scanned a box of prunes. Then I googled the vendor, Sun-Diamond Growers cooperative of California and learned all about “bromide barons subvert democratic process.” Then I scanned “Crackling Oat Bran,” googled, and learned about the FDA warning and recall of early releases of the product because of unlabeled dairy and egg contents. Talk about your sentient things! As Marc says, “every thing has a story.”

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Wired News: Plot Twist for ‘Indie’ Filmmakers The neorealists, Kliot said, “ripped the cameras out of the studios, which were controlled by the fascists, and took them into the streets.”

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FreeMind

Web based mindmapping.

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