Jody Williams, on collaboration via fax

Chief spokesperson for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Jody Williams used the fax machine to help build organizational capacity:

Imagine trying to get hundreds of organizations – each one independent and working on many, many issues – to feel that each is a critical element of the development of a new movement. I wanted each to feel that what they had to say about campaign planning, thinking, programs, actions was important. So, instead of sending letters, I’d send everyone faxes. People got in the habit of faxing back. This served two purposes – people would really have to think about what they were committing to doing before writing it down, and we have a permanent, written record of almost everything in the development of the campaign from day one.

The quotation comes from the FAQ section of the ICBL website.

Dutch Dialogues

A New Orleans architect has organized a partnership between Dutch and Louisiana engineers, planners, and scientists.

History repeatedly shows the folly of living in a delta: disasters are common there. …

“Living with the water” has recently become an ordering, corollary principle of Dutch policy. Dutch Dialogues participants believe that adapting a Living with the Water principle is necessary in post-Katrina New Orleans; they likewise reject the false choice posited by those who see only a choice between safety or amenity from water in the Louisiana delta.

Blurts and collective creativity

There are four example formats for blurts that I want to consider here, although there are many others floating about that I could have discussed. They are: 1) facebook status updates, 2) twitter’s tweets, 3) moves in signtific’s forecasting games, and 4) comments in Tim Gowers’ mathematical blog. Each has a different character but each shows how the properties of length, rapidity, and openness can play into a successful conversation.

The author equates blurts to a form of brainstorming in which the participants—and not a moderator—shape the structure of the conversation.

Nielsen's posts tagged Science2.0

For a while now, Daily Clique member nielsen [his blog is here] has been bookmarking articles and blogs devoted to the Science 2.0 movement—basically, massively multicollaborator online problem solving. Here are some of his recent bookmarks tagged Science2.0:

Questions of procedure from Gowers’s Weblog: Timothy Gowers updates the rules to his massively collaborative mathematics experiment. He posted the first project for this experiment a few days ago and has already received 145 comments.

Williams Math/Stat blog: The blog of the Williams College mathematics and statistics department.

For communicating ideas in the mathematics and statistics communities, the common media have been conference talks and journal articles. Neither of these options provides the freedom given by a blog.

Snark Attack: UCLA Research Dissing Technology Bombs: Clay Burell smartly dismisses a study from the latest issue of Science, which claims “multi-tasking and the use of computers, the Internet, and video games” have led to declines in our critical thinking and analytic abilities.

Creating an opposition between “critical thinking” and “reading and discussing,” on the one hand, and electronic/social media on the other, is a logical false disjunctive (in plain talk, a false either/or). Any competent teacher can use the new literacy tools to create new possibilities in critical thinking, reading, discussing, and more, that were only dreamt of in pre-Internet philosophies.

Poincaré’s legacies: pages from year two of a mathematical blog
from Terry Tao’s blog: Tao announces a blog book based on all his mathematical posts from the past year.

E. Kowalski’s blog: I’ve never been good at math but I know a dedicated blogger when I see one.