Also cool is that this group from Finland is using Zope/Plone as their platform. Their product, unlike a fine Canadian Knowledge Building product, is dedicated to an open source philosophy. They are currently working on the next version, their current, FLE3, is described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fle3 I’ve used FLE3 a bit in my middle school classroom and it is a great start in the right direction, I think.

I wonder if having more substantive, richer conversations won’t require us to learn ‘graphic-organizers’ to provide structures for these discussions e.g. concept mapping though not necessarily via bubbles. This will probably require breaking out of the linear chat mode and the pseudo-2D threaded-discussion mode. Does anyone know of other, rich, discussion tools?

Also, thanks Yves for making explicit the difficulty people/I have with editing wikis. I’ve not pinpointed it, why do many of us have an aversion to this? And, Thanks David, I’ll check out your invention and the group… I’m interested.

Keep on,
David

Great site, BTW.

For those who are interested in the topic of how much better online discourse could be, I gave a Google Tech Talk: http://tinyurl.com/yy7yxm that’s WAY over the top (they must have slipped something into the fruit juice!) But it covers a whole lot of ground.

My own inventions to improve discourse are at http://www.holocenechat.com

Best of luck to us all and to the Enlightenment.

With cordial regards,

David Brin
http://www.davidbrin.com

I too am amazed at how little the web is used for “serious” matter. Leisure is important and being able to share pictures and info with a group of friends definitely is useful. A little further along the usefulness axis, social apps like Facebook can even be used for people to organize, like artists doing their self-marketing and inviting their “friends” to shows they produce themselves. Why don’t people jump on things like OpenPlans to organize themselves is a mystery for which I’ll provide a hypothesis.

Out of the 3-4 projects I’ve started on OpenPlans, I had 1 edit from a user other than me. One of my close friends, who I invited to add his thoughts to the wiki, told me he feared interfering with my work, as though the content of the wiki page was mine and nobody else’s. People are so used to a passive Web that they won’t readily jump in and edit the work of others, even when the platform they are using allows just that. The hypothesis I’m putting forth to explain that is that the notion of property is entrenched to such levels that people are inhibited to participate for fear of “trepassing” some “intellectual property” [I hear RMS yelling ].

First nations in our country had (still have ?) the notion that the land was not owned by anyone. One can roam the land and harvest its richness but the underlying tenant the land does not belong to anyone means that one must think of others when one uses the land, which pretty much summarizes the modern definition of sustainable development. I wish we could free ourselves from the inhibitions that plague us and that the internet becomes the locus of true citizenship in action, rather than (or in complement to) the leisure/commercial mart it currently amounts to. I wish citizens could ventilate issues through blogs/forums and then follow on to action through wikis and the other tools of collaboration. I wish there were a true participative democracy infrastructure as there are roads and other infrastructure that belong to all.

Goes back dreaming

Yves