Creative Conversation

This is the subject of Chapter 4 of Prof Pierre Lévy’s book:
THE SEMANTIC SPHERE COMPUTATION, COGNITION AND THE INFORMATION ECONOMY Volume 1, which he has shared with ChangeMooc this week

This is a fascinating chapter on many counts and I found it easier to read and relate to that Chapter 1. Prof Lévy discusses the role of creative conversation in personal and social knowledge management, personal and collective intelligence and the ways in which knowledge and information will need to be shared, distributed and managed to keep pace with changing times. He writes:

To transform the deluge of information into useful, organized memory carrying knowledge across language barriers, moving with ease through the diversity of cultures, the creative conversation that arises from cyberspace needs a symbolic medium in keeping with its scope. (p135 – the last sentence of the chapter).

The focus of his book is the need for a symbolic medium and a new indexing system to replace current systems such as those based on the ways in which libraries organize information.

There is also a very interesting section in the chapter about strategies for personal knowledge management, but Lévy warns against reifying these, reminding us that these strategies will need to constantly change and evolve.

Particularly interesting for me, given the recent paper which Carmen Tschofen and I worked on ( http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1143 ) to explore dimensions of individual experience in a connected world, is what Lévy has to say about the relationship between the collective and the individual. He writes that ‘the crowd’ is not stupid; it is essential to our collective intelligence and knowledge, but the individual’s role in collective, creative conversions is not forgotten or underplayed.

The process of collaborative production of shared memory favours individual learning insofar as the individuals involve their personal experience in the conversations (the process of explication is always instructive) and involve the results of the conversations in the reorganization of their personal experiences. (p.122)

Prof Lévy will be speaking to ChangeMooc at 4.00 pm GMT (11.00 am EST) today and I am looking forward to learning more about his work and ideas.

https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/launch/meeting.jnlp?sid=2008104&password=M.C5CCF43B9CF818DDB4113D9A1017A8

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Prof Pierre Levy: The IEML Philosophy

Prof Pierre Lévy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada
Holder of the Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence University of Ottawa, is the speaker this week in Change Mooc.

This is part of his introduction:

The human species can be defined by its special ability to manipulate symbols. Each great augmentation in this ability has brought enormous economic, social, political, religious, epistemological, educational (and so on) changes.

I think that there has been only 4 of these big changes. The first one is related to the invention of writing, when symbols became permament and reified. The second one corresponds to the invention of the alphabet, indian numerals and other small groups of symbols able to represent “almost everything” by combination. The third one is the invention of the printing press and the subsequent invention of electronic mass media. In this case, the symbols were reproduced and transmitted by industrial machines. We are currently at the beginning of a fourth big anthropological change, because the symbols can now be transformed by massively distributed automata in the digital medium.

My main hypothesis is that we still did not have invented the symbolic systems and cultural institutions fitting the new digital medium. So my research in the past 15 years has been devoted to the invention of a symbolic system able to exploit the computational power, the capacity of memory and the ubiquity of the digital medium.

Prof Levy has posted a PPT on the wiki  set up by George Siemens

I hope he will talk to this as it looks fascinating; I haven’t attended all the ChangeMooc weeks, but is this the only one that gives us a historical overview of change and a projection into the future? It’s that word ‘Control’ for where we are now, i.e. living in a world of surveillance etc. that grabs my attention and I look forward to hearing more about what he has to say about it.

I have started to read the first chapter of his book – THE SEMANTIC SPHERE COMPUTATION, COGNITION AND THE INFORMATION ECONOMY Volume 1 – which was published last year, and have to say that I am out of my depth. But it is so interesting to read the autobiographical section in which he describes how he has arrived at his current ideas.

What struck me is that this is a perfect example of ‘slow learning’. What Levy describes is years of work and the slow incremental development of ideas.

What also struck me is how broad is his range of interests – he has a cross-disciplinary approach, having studied cosmology, cybernetics, human sciences, economics, mathematics, molecular biology, philosophy, history, cognitive science, computer science and linguistics – and there’s probably more that I have missed.  This is a sure example of how we need to embrace diversity.

I have yet to read another two chapters of his book – but I am intrigued as to how he will approach the diverse changemooc group who will be attending Wednesday’s synchronous presentation (11.00 am EST, 4.00 pm GMT).

I need to read more – and understand more – but at the moment I am thinking about:

• Knowledge management – how best to tap into the tacit knowledge of an organization, group, community etc?

• Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome concept in relation to Prof Lévy’s work

• Intellectual mastery of digital data flows – what does that mean for the ‘man in the street’ – or is all this just for the intellectual elite.

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