Matthew Allen

I commented recently on Twitter that Facebook = the new AOL and, not surprisingly, then discovered that many others (e.g. Kottke.org had already had my apparently novel insight! (This effect can either deflate one’s confidence or increase it – I am not the first, but I am as wise as the crowd – some examples from the crowd thanks to googlesearch). And, clearly, Facebook is trying to create an experience of online life / augmented reality / social and cognitive networking that stands apart from, or is potentially isolated from the ‘web’ within which Facebook exists – though it claims to be embedding itself into the web, of becoming a sort of underlying social networking of people, data and places throughout the web, I actually see the plan as one to enable its users to never leave the facebook environment except when prompted to do so by something in facebook, and then be returned to facebook. So, in this model of online behaviour, Facebook users would look out over the low walls of the garden and observe interesting things elsewhere in the jungle of the net; would at times scurry out into that jungle, but otherwise would remain safely inside the habitat of Facebook. As Siliconbeat reports, Google should be worried about this new wave of Facebook’s expansion of the way it will encompass online behaviours into a single space: communities that serve Facebook.

There’s a real sense of imperialism about Facebook. Sure we worry about the approach to privacy (see Raynes-Goldie, First Monday and the casual manner in which Facebook treats its users, by changing rules on them, making them feel (and indeed be) disconnected from their data bodies. But what worries me more, at this stage, is how Facebook is attempting to exploit more and more of the Internet for its marketing purposes (through the ‘like’ function, and by embedding internet affordances into its environment) and to claim that what matters in information acquisition and production is what is liked, or networked, between its users. (note too – Facebook acts as if everyone online is a Facebook user – a lot of them just don’t know it yet). So the challenge we face in responding to Facebook and its extraordinary (and network-effect growing) power is not how Facebook works in its own terms (after all, one can opt out, to some extent, if you don’t like it), but how it acquisitively eyes the Internet as the source of the raw informational material which it needs to sustain itself.

Google has an equally imperial view of information – witness the book digitisation issue, the constant acquisition of individual online behavioural data. What I find interesting to consider, though, is the difference between how these two behemoths of the online world approach their activities. Google achieves its empire (an empire of mind and data) by networking diverse nodes together – there is, really, no one place where Google ‘is’ and can be found / managed or located. Googlemaps tells us that Google is everyone and nowhere all at once. Note how Facebook is absolutely locatable – it’s all about what happens inside that Facebook environment (content brought into that space); Google is all about what happens everywhere else (but monitored by Google). And, while Google ‘profiles’ us when we sign up for its services (and even when we don’t), there is one key component of most online activities which we don’t find through Google – the public profile. Google is, truly, ‘faceless’ book – except that your face is very clear to google, if you choose to embrace its multitude of data services.

Facebook, then, strikes me as the inheritor of Yahoo!’s location in the web-world of the 2000s – a place for ‘us’ to form networks; the networks are a consequence of accepting what we give up when we use Facebook. Google is the service where the network is t he starting point: the network of data, the networking of us within the infoverse of the Internet. While Facebook might be viewed as a force for the enclosure of the net, as a company that seeks control (and market profitability) through a very explicit presence, an overlording curator of those within its domain, Google – equally potent – disperses itself throughout the Internet; invisibility, implicitness and distributed power work for this company.

Since both of them are searching, in the end, for revenue streams from advertising , Facebook and Google compete (though Facebook is far less pervasive, less successful in those terms). But the competition is not just for ‘who wins the most revenue’: like most deep struggles within capitalism, Facebook and Google are engaged in a kind of ideological struggle to define the Internet in ways which (in the minds of users) will constrain and shape the Internet’s future. So, in years to come, will the Internet be – largely – seen and used inside the low walls of Facebook’s crowded gardens? Or will it be itself the garden, and Google a kind of viral thread interwoven with its every use?

Following my presentations on the ‘top 10′ web 2.0 applications for learning which exist in the real world of the Internet, I have started to develop a model of knowledge networking which allows us to understand how the contemporary web (a better description now that Web 2.0?) serves to enable knowledge networks, and how those networks might exist within the complex digital ecology of the Internet. These ideas are still under development.

In 2009, I argued that learning was a special case of knowledge work and, that as all knowledge work becomes, or tends towards, being knowledge networking, so too learning changes in its character (regardless of whether students and teachers actively engage with such a change). In doing so, I claimed that knowledge work is best understood in quite simple terms (at least initially), as involving the classic input – process – output model which has dominated information sciences and systems research for many years. I don’t doubt that knowledge is far more complex than this model at first suggests (see Allen and Long, 2009). But, the complexity cannot be ‘explained’ by making the model appear more sophisticated, for the complexity comes from the social conditions within which knowledge work occurs. Therefore, superficially, we might as well continue to think in terms of knowledge work being done within the input-process-output circuit, and just remember that every output is an input (and vice versa) and processing is also continuous, influencing how information even comes to be considered as inputs and outputs.

To gain more understanding, however, and to emphasise the way that the Internet promotes distributed and collaborative knowledge work (why it is networking, not just working), I want to now model knowledge networking in the contemporary Internet in slightly different terms, though the relationship to input-process-output should be obvious. I identify four crucial elements which, collectively and interactively, generate the system of knowledge work conducted through and for the web; in doing so, I hope to provide a better way of thinking about the purpose and possible application to elearning of the entire system.

First, we can identify online behaviours and web services that work as information pumps: these pumps draw on the apparently infiinte (though actually limited) reservoirs of information within and around the web and then circulate the information with various degrees of filtering, flavouring, and transformation through many different channels and pipes. Note that information pumping involves both humans and computers. Some examples of the web services that might naturally appear as information pumps can be found at Newsmap, or at Evri; but do not think that it is the ‘sites’ alone that are the pumps. Delicious also serves as an information pump, distributing the work between its users and the systems maintaining the lists of tagged links. Pumps can either be sites that are visited (such as the innovative new instance of Cuil, Cpedia ; or they can be feeds (primarily RSS) from sites, gathered and analysed in various ways and presented to users (see RSS Voyage for an elegant version; and many different variations thereof.

Second, we can observe that many web services entice and require uses to engage in the manipulation, creation, re-expression or other forms of cognition using the service as a partner in these activities. Thus, the second element of knowledge networking online is the existence and use of cognition engines: these engines – fuelled in part by the information pumps – work with users to ‘do’ the knowledge work. There is an incredible variety of cognition engines, from complex and highly structured (Cohere for example), to deceptively open and simple (wikis would serve as these kinds of engines – a current personal favourite is Springnote, with its elegant notebook metaphor). Engines can involve innovative creative activity (making simple movies from text at xtranormal; the delights and frustrations of Prezi) or some traditional cognitive forms – the visualisations that can be made at Manyeyes for example, or mindmapping as at Bubbl.us. Cognition engines can promote reflection, too – like a personal current favourite Betterme

Cognition engines often contain significant affordances for collaboration: yet we can also see that many web services are specifically designed for the kinds of collaborative endeavour, which generates the third key element in the knowledge networking system: social environments. Ranging from loose social networking utilities (Ning), to detailed groupwork systems (Wiggio), but also including real-time interaction channels, such as the simple Tinychat conference room system or more sophisticated systems like Elluminate, these environments establish an array of spaces, mediated by technologies, within which people can act socially in knowledge work.

The fourth and final element discernable within the contemporary web as a knowledge work system is the publication outlet.

In conclusion, then, we can say that the knowledge networking dynamics of the web involve distributed, conjoint action by humans and computers through web services which serve as information pumps, cognition engines, social environments and publication outlets. But, to be clear, it is not the case that each web site we encounter online serves for just one of these dynamic elements. Indeed, most web services include a combination of features which means they serve as all four elements at once, whether closely coupled (as for example in facebook), or more loosely. That said, individual users, as they form and participate in networks of knowledge, traverse several sites, use many services, to carve out from the available opportunities their own particular kinds of knowledge networks. Let me finish by providing two examples: one that is contained largely within a single service; and one that spans several.

Diigo, a bookmarking, collaborative research and web annotation service, is a clear example of how one single website can host services and permit user behaviours that constitute an entire knowledge network. Diigo pumps information (both from the web and within its own system), with a significant degree of filtering and enrichment by users; in the work of organising, analysing and reframing information, it serves as a cognitive engine; yet, since many people are engaged in that task – often in well-defined and purposive groups – it is a social environment as well; finally, the results of this knowledge work can become public, so Diigo serves also as an outlet, with an audience, for publication.

Yet, knowledge work systems can span several services and sites as well. RSS feeds found and managed through Feedmil can push information into a cognition engine involving Listphile: the cognitive work here is to array and manage individual items within a pretermined list form; and, while listphile is itself a social environment, the collaborators using it choose Wiggio as the locus of many of their active collaborative endeavours. Finally, the list – while available in Listphile for public consumption – is pushed to the world as embedded code within a blogging-based website linked to Twitter, using Tumblr. Note that, in this example, the Tumblr site is itself also serving as a cognition engine at times; the listphile service involves collaboration, social action and a degree of publication, but that the specific knowledge network formed emphasises specific uses for these services within the model I am outlining.

Ultimately, the contemporary web demonstrates the fluidity and agility of the so-called Web 2.0 approach – data and human endeavour is no longer necessarily concentrated at specific places and times, in forms that are unique or limited in their re-usability. Within such a web, many forms and examples of knowledge networking, using countless varieties of applications, will occur. But, in general terms, I would argue that all knowledge networking involves the collective activation of the four distinct elements I outline – information pumps, cognition engines, social environments, and publication outlets. Higher education must learn to imagine and build its own knowledge networks that draw on this model, and on the many excellent services for knowledge work available on the web.

A definition of knowledge work might be something like this (and, thereby, includes a definition of knowledge):

Knowledge work is the development (and ongoing redevelopment) of mental constructs that internally represent for an individual the world to be ‘known’; such constructs consist in claims about the world, both what is and what ought to be, and the associations between these claims which form consistent and plausible relational structures; the mental constructs that knowledge work produces enable knowledgeable action in and for the world which is, through knowledge, represented in this manner to an individual; this potential to act in the world is intimately linked to the work of understanding world, such that knowledge always has the potential (and often the actuality) of acting as an intermediary between thought and action.

And, in terms of thought, knowledge work is cognition, but it is not just internal mental processes. Knowledge work, if we were to attempt to isolate its constituent components, proceeds from intent or purpose, through a variety of activities exploring or fulfilling that purpose, towards completion and reflection upon that process. At all stages, knowledge work involves acquiring, arranging and expressing information-as-knowledge; (as an aside I would suggest that the frustrating difficulty of attempting, ontologically, to separate information and knowledge, should simply be resolved by accepting that they are inseparable). Put simply, knowledge work is about inputs, processes and outputs; while this model might echo attempts to link information science and cognitive psychology that have been criticised for their simplistic nature, I believe there is real value in reducing knowledge work to such a simple core; but, at the same time, recognise that every input is someone else’s output; that my outputs are others’ inputs; and the processing does not neatly occur between the acquisition and expression of knowledge but is a continuous process which from time to time can be recognisably differentiated as involving flows of information in or out of a knowledgeable system.

So, knowledge work is also collaborative because of the circuits of interaction between knowledgeable subjects that are implicit in the simple recognition that inputs and outputs are merely a matter of perspective and that processing of information, the constitution of knowledge, occurs continually. Moreover, the dialogic nature of language, within which claims always speak to someone (even if only our own inner ear), calling out for interpretation and association, ensures that knowledge work is communicative, quite apart from a common tendency for people to discuss and share their constructs of the world – their knowledge – as a fundamental part of experiencing ourselves as social beings.
 
I would suggest that knowledge can be conceived of, understood from, four perspectives, all of which are reasonably common in the literature devoted to understanding what knowledge is. I would summarise these four perspectives as follows:

• Knowledge as object, in which we can discern a distinct and transmissible ‘thing’, existing in forms which can and do regularly externalise knowledge (if only temporarily) from knowledgeable humans and make it distinct from their social and other organisational contexts;
• Knowledge as conversation, in which knowledge only emerges from and through the communications between people (in a variety forms) and in such a situation knowledge comes to be more than just the sum of each individual contribution to the conversation (and the additional, unaccounted for value is largely to do with the the meta-knowledge supplied by conversational context and the social bonds formed through communication);
• Knowledge as process, in which – essentially – there is no object, and conversations are but part of a wider and deeper continual process by humans of ‘coming to know’, creating, critiquing, changing, and confirming their knowledge;
• Knowledge as enactment, where knowledge is discerned through observable actions in the world, inferred from what happens by observers and, perhaps more importantly, understood by the knowledgeable subject themselves through actions, and never as abstract from the world which knowledge represents.

Crucially, all four perspectives are of the same indefinable entity; yet it is also worth remembering that – in many cases – people do not naively do knowledge work without reflecting on what it might be. In other words, all these perspectives play a real part in the doing of knowledge work, as people employ them as categorisations to make sense of their own knowledge work, as much as we might use them to define knowledge for academic purposes.