“Boosting mankind’s capability for coping with complex, urgent problems”
- Doug Engelbart
This week’s reading for my New Media Faculty-Staff Development Seminar is Douglas C. Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (1962). Two nuggets worth noting:
1. I believe the "Collective IQ" has improved vastly in the last ten years, however, people do not collaborate exactly how way he envisioned. For example, people collect and build on ideas via wikis on the Web and video game execs often give gamers the means to alter games and encourage them to send their ideas back to the company. While not exactly what he had in mind, it is similar. One key component that is missing for today’s “Collective IQ” is the immediate brainstorming affect. People in the same room tend to generate more ideas. While the Internet is interactive, I believe a great deal of energy is lost over the airwaves. There is less urgency to prove one’s self when you are not in the same room with people you want to impress. This is idea is explored with is bootstrapping concept below:
1. I believe the "Collective IQ" has improved vastly in the last ten years, however, people do not collaborate exactly how way he envisioned. For example, people collect and build on ideas via wikis on the Web and video game execs often give gamers the means to alter games and encourage them to send their ideas back to the company. While not exactly what he had in mind, it is similar. One key component that is missing for today’s “Collective IQ” is the immediate brainstorming affect. People in the same room tend to generate more ideas. While the Internet is interactive, I believe a great deal of energy is lost over the airwaves. There is less urgency to prove one’s self when you are not in the same room with people you want to impress. This is idea is explored with is bootstrapping concept below:
2. Bootstrapping is a good idea in theory. It’s true that people have different talents and strengths. This is one reason I like to the dynamics of group projects. I usually encourage students to figure out one another’s skills and to brainstorm to come up with great ideas. However, as Engelbart mentioned this type of communal work is often deemed inappropriate by prevailing paradigms of management, engineering and computer programming. While social media and networking are a dominant part of society, people prefer creating patented ideas alone and improving self-knowledge rather than “group” knowledge. This was one reason Engelbart met resistance with bootstrapping concepts. It is also the main reason he is often misunderstood and his inventions are not used for what he originally had in mind.
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