Dull Networks – How microblogging might turn the wisdom pyramid upside down

According to Russell Ackoff, a systems theorist and professor of organizational change, the way humans process input from their environment can be classified into five categories:

• Data represents a fact or statement of event without relation to other things.
  Ex: It is raining.
• Information embodies the understanding of a relationship of some sort, possibly cause and effect.
  Ex: The temperature dropped 15 degrees and then it started raining.
• Knowledge represents a pattern that connects and generally provides a high level of predictability as to what is described or what will happen next.
  Ex: If the humidity is very high and the temperature drops substantially the atmosphere is often unlikely to be able to hold the moisture so it rains.
• Wisdom embodies more of an understanding of fundamental principles embodied within the knowledge and is essentially systemic.

Underlying this theory is the assumption that there is enough content in each of the related input streams to create relationships, identify patterns as well as identify and understand principles.

Recently, microblogging tools like Twitter emerged, which forcefully restrict users’ input to 140 characters, while still allowing for references to original authors’ tagging of keywords and providing URLs for content and location.

News channels like CNN, celebrities like Oprah and many companies are embarking into the microblogging adventure up to a point, where it seems that we often can read about people’s comments before they had the time to think about them.

Recently, a colleague attended his first event at which heavy underground twittering accompanied a formal presentation-style conference. He claimed, that the dynamics that this underground chatter – combined with occasional public outbursts of emerging self-proclaimed representatives of the twitter community – added a completely new and possibly valuable dimension to the knowledge exchange at these types of professional gatherings.

Well, I don’t know…

While I am sure there are some smart uses of microblogging tools, let me here inspect specifically Twitter’s use for knowledge transfer and knowledge augmentation:

Let’s look at it more closely: The knowledge and wisdom that a well-prepared speaker is communicating to the crowd based on a lifetime of experience in the form of simplified slides, multimedia materials, his or her voice, mimicry and gestures are absorbed by a most likely less experienced attendee whose mind is in parallel occupied by competing with others in the crowd commenting on the input in rapid sequence – 140 characters or less at a time.

Experiment: Turn on the TV, take a sheet of paper and capture what’s being said…. Done? Easy, isn’t it !

Now: Instead of capturing content, comment on what you hear while listening to the TV show. Still easy? What if I asked you now about details of the show? Most likely, you would draw a blank, since your mind was so occupied with creating an opinion and putting it to paper, that you had to stop following the show. We humans are just not good in parallel processing once we turn on our cognitive abilities and start thinking about the data we are absorbing.

In addition, since there is not enough space to put any contextual information and most twitterers don’t know each other personally, the communicated information is reduced down to bits and chunks of data flying through the twittersphere. Since the speaker might not have had his twitter address on the first slide, he might not even get referenced appropriately for the space, thus removing the last hope for the data being interpreted in context.

So we have just reduced the wisdom of an individual down to a multitude of data chunks being broadcasted through the networks. What makes matters worse is the way some people use microblogging tools like Twitter to seek information and build knowledge. Busy with keeping up with their legions of followees (people they are following) and trying to make sense out of the multitude of parallel discussion threads they are engaged in, many people don’t seem to have the time anymore to reflect while critically inspecting the origin and context in which the data was presented. However, this process is crucial to finding relationships between data samples in order to turn them into information.

In consequence, any data is elevated to the level of being trustworthy information, which then makes pattern recognition easy: Knowledge is what is read more than once from different sources. However, usually that should mean – for instance also in serious journalism practice – from independent sources. Unfortunately, microblogging sites are also social networking sites. The social networks propagate information multiple times and it is very hard to ensure independence. Surowieki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds emphasized that such wisdom requires independent knowledge contribution and aggregation rather than the unfiltered propagation of word of mouth data.

Don’t you think there are better ways to gain information and build knowledge?

And what’s wrong with listening to and trusting the wisdom of an expert?

Healthcare and STEM Education – Siamese Twins in Reform and Innovation

The US has lost ground in recent years to other leading industrial nations in attracting new generations to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers. This has resulted in decreased enrollment rates in STEM college and university programs. Much of this trend is related to issues of global outsourcing of many of the related jobs in established industries, thus eliminating corresponding career incentives for high-school graduates. Industry and academia are in agreement that this educational trend is threatening the US economic and intellectual future and is one of the biggest challenges for current generations. Other reasons are related to an antiquated school system that has not changed significantly since the industrial revolution, and is, therefore, still favoring universal education over academic excellence on the PK-12 level.

National reform of our public school systems will take a long time, so one shorter-term solution is to specifically on women and minorities that are traditionally underrepresented in these careers. We need to find new approaches to attract minority groups to STEM programs, plain and simple.

One way we might do that is to embed STEM curriculum into currently desirable career fields. For instance, in a previous career at the University of Rhode Island, I wrapped traditional computer science education into the context of game design in order to attract more students. Another related initiative combined colleagues’ traditional STEM education with industrially relevant experiences and international exchange in order to emphasize the diversity and breadth of related career paths.

I will admit, however, that while this kind of approach can demonstrate isolated successes, it cannot change fundamental issues in career choice that are closely tied to gender differences: Although girls increasingly outperform boys in K-16 education, consequential female dominance does not seem to translate well into higher education or even STEM careers.

An extensive body of scientific research suggests that the apparent difference of career choice is in part related to gender differences in risk preferences, social preferences and competitive preferences. These differences have largely evolutionary roots, leading apparently – together with workplace discrimination and social acceptance pressure – to women’s ‘attraction’ to jobs with lower mean, lower-variance salaries. This relationship between evolved gender differences and occupational segregation might be hard to influence, so a bigger benefit may come from channeling these differences into new opportunities:

“The tendency of men to predominate in fields imposing high quantitative demands, high physical risk, and low social demands, and the tendency of women to be drawn to less quantitatively demanding fields, safer jobs, and jobs with a higher social content are, at least in part, artifacts of an evolutionary history that has left the human species with a sexually dimorphic mind. These differences are proximately mediated by sex hormones.”

What about healthcare reform?

It is widely accepted that healthcare reform will heavily rely on information and telecommunication technologies. Whether you are talking about electronic medical records or personal health records, telemedicine, telemonitoring or teleconsultation, online social communities of interest, remote caregiving, or Aging in Place, the trend from provider-centric healthcare to home- and individual-centered health and wellness is on the horizon.

This new found demand is creating an unprecedented need for scientific, technological, and engineering innovations. The corresponding career paths have the potential to combine both the job recognition and safety with the social content and rewards according to studies sought after by many women.

Could a potential to channel gender differences into new opportunities lie somewhere within healthcare reform? Early signs point to yes. Women are at the forefront of many of the emerging multidisciplinary research fields underlying the aforementioned healthcare IT R&D opportunities. These research fields combine aspects of Computer Science and Computer Engineering with Psychology, Social Sciences, Anthropology, Medicine and Communication and include Human-Computer Interaction, Affective Computing, Privacy Engineering, Health Communications (incl. Games for Health), Assistive Robots, and Online Social Networking, to mention a few. These women are the role models for new generations of women in STEM careers.

However, the emergence of such role models and the mere existence of the described opportunities for reform in health, wellness, and STEM education are not enough to catalyze the rapid change that is required. STEM education reformers are struggling to understand how to attract women and minorities to traditional STEM higher-education programs. There is also a struggle in determining how to develop frameworks for providing stronger workplace support for these underrepresented groups in STEM careers.

Where are the STEM curricula and initiatives specifically addressing the opportunities promised by home-centered healthcare and personalized health and wellness?

Where are the interdisciplinary centers communicating these opportunities to today’s high-school graduates?

And where are the public-private partnerships that can provide political decision makers with the implementation frameworks to link healthcare reform to STEM education reform?

The answers to these questions will not come from tweaking standardized testing or from providing in schools an additional hour of health and wellness per week … So where will they come from?