The Future of ISE--Maturation
From Media and Informal Science Learning
In typical business parlance, maturation signifies a market's approach to senescence and ossification. But in an environment-technology--in which price, performance, capacity, and bandwidth double every year (or halve in the case of price) and have been doing so for years (with a number of successors to Moore's Law already in the offing[1]), and in which paradigm shifts have arguably been happening on a logarithmic scale for an even longer time period,[2] maturation in media and technology refers more to a relentless "growing up" that must be taken into account in any analysis of what the future might hold for science education.
Kevin Kelly says that the first rule of the Internet is: "we have to get better at believing the impossible."[3] He meant it, of course, about concepts that seem theoretically and practically undoable like Wikipedia. But it could also apply to cherished beliefs about change itself. Google sits astride the online world today, and the notion that this might someday be otherwise is likely to be greeted with knowing talk about "first mover advantage" and "network effects." Yet end-user dissatisfaction with search results is increasing, and at nearly 50%[4] is approaching the level of dissatisfaction that existed in 1998 when the "search wars" were widely declared "over," with Yahoo the winner. Similarly, Facebook may look to be at the top of the social media world, but it has made a series of apparent missteps in the last year[5] that may remind one of some of those made by AOL, the old online community king, after a much longer ascendancy.
The relentless rate of change applies to much smaller niches as well. Consider the 'online community for dogs and cats' space, for example, meaning spaces or opportunities for dogs and cats, presumably represented by their owners, to talk to each other. One might expect this to be a 'one and done' novelty, but since 1996, the space has been ruled by Bad Dogs, Meow Mail, Dogster (and Catster), LOLCats, and now, rising quickly, Facebook applications Dogbook and Catbook. Should there be any doubt there will be more? First-mover advantage, as it turns out, is temporary, and the same network effects that bring new offerings to the fore are capable of bringing forward others to take their place, or at least move them to the side.[6] After all, the top expectation the Internet generation has of the Net is that through it they will "always find something new and exciting."[7]
In short, it's difficult to say for sure who will be on top, but there's no question there will continue to be a number of areas of growth and innovation in addition to those already mentioned. Here are a few, in hopes that other participants will add more.
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People-Powered Search
One of the hot topics on the Net today is the semantic Web, an effort headed up by Tim Berners-Lee to tag every word and other object on the Web with semantic context so that machines will be able to read Web pages as easily as people do. If ever completed, users doing searches would not get lists of pages, but taken directly to the relevant points on pages-instead of pages linking to pages, data would link to data.
At first it was thought that the daunting problem of in effect publishing (or re-publishing) every page on the Web in two formats--one HTML, the other semantic--could be solved by developing creating a machine-readable format that would generate the semantic data automatically whenever new data was published, or whenever another machine requested such data. But human communication has proved sufficiently complex that it's proven necessary to develop different formats for different types of communication-a microformat for resumes, another for reviews, another for events, and so on. This effort, however, has lost steam-there have been no new microformats published since 2005.[8] Critics argue that even if a full set of microformats were completed, there would remain seven major barriers to successfully tagging every word and object online appropriately, summarized in Cory Doctorow's essay, Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia.[9] As MIT's Technology Review recently observed: "If there is to be a Web 3.0, it is likely to include only a portion of the semantic Web community's work, along with a healthy smattering of other technologies."[10]
If only a portion of the semantic Web is to be developed, it probably behooves the informal science education community to try to insure that what gets developed is most useful to us. But the struggle to develop the semantic Web is part of a larger understanding. Although the ultimate goal of the project is to allow machines to read Web pages, no matter how many microformats and other tagging tools are created, at the end of the day, its success will depend on Herculean labors of people reading pages for the machines, if only to determine what words and other objects mean in every possible context. As Technology Review observes: "Google's remarkable success at taming the jungle of text-based Web pages fostered the dream among some researchers that all digital information could be indexed, organized, and comprehended algorithmically--that is, using software alone. If this dream ever comes true, it will be far behind schedule."[11]
Many companies, having understood that even the semantic Web is really a people-powered search masquerading as a machine format, are not waiting for its completion to directly leverage this fundamental truth. A myriad of people-powered search services are in the offing, including:
- Yotify, which allows searchers to access and use other users' searches (an application so far primarily focused on shopping and limited to Yotify's partners).[12]
- Microsoft's SearchTogether, a tool that, once installed, allows a user who has initiated a Web search to invite the others to join him/her. The tool tracks the work done by the group, making it easier for the initiator to assign tasks and for group members to keep track of what they've done.[13]
- Groupization: Microsoft is also researching whether people using search data from several people of the same social group (e.g. individuals who share a demographic or psychographic characteristic, irrespective of whether they know each other or not) produces better search results for that group. So far groups made up of individuals with similar interests are proving more successful than traditional demographic categories.79
- Yahoo's Build Your Own Search Service, which gives entrepreneurs and individuals access to Yahoo's continually updated index of Web pages (prohibitively expensive for many start-ups to generate themselves) so that they can create their own search engines, e.g. focused on and customized for specific niches.[14]
- Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which allows users to earn micropayments for completing small search-related tasks that are easy for humans, but hard for machines, e.g. quickly searching hundreds of thousands of satellite images for signs of a boat missing at sea.[15]
- Search assistance site ChaCha, which employs 30,000 live guides paid on piecework basis to help users with specific searches in their areas of expertise, a model not unlike About.com from the dot-com era, but focused specifically on live search help.[16]
- Wikipedia's Wikia Search, which envisions users working together to build the engine, with volunteer editors organizing and highlighting the best content, and average users voting on the usefulness of each search result.[17] (Note: since this article was written, Wikipedia has abandoned Wikia Search--a casualty of the economy--although the source code is being made available to other sites)
- Music sites like Midomi, which hopes to allow users to find music by humming a few bars, provided the hum matches other previously successful searches by other users.[18]
- Most of the services on this list rely on a model of 'technology plus the wisdom of crowds'; Pandora Radio is an example of what can be achieved in new media through the dedicated efforts of a small group of people-with a staff of fifty, working on what they call the "Music Genome Project" Pandora has cataloged hundreds of musical attributes of tens of thousands of songs to allow users to create-and share-their own music stations, e.g. a "Paul Simon station" that not only plays Simon, but potentially any song which, through its collection of attributes, sounds like Paul Simon or appears to have been influenced by Simon's work.
- Twitter recently refused a $500 million acquisition offer from Facebook in part because it believes it will soon be offering a unique people-powered solution, where users will be able to query the company's 6 million+ users and get real-time results, an element that could be particularly useful for searches that are temporal in nature (e.g. where's the best place to go for x right now?)[19]
At the end of the day, as Technology Review observes: "what's increasingly clear is that different kinds of order, and a variety of ways to unearth data and reuse it in new applications, are coming to the Web. There will be no Dewey here, no one system that arranges all the world's digital data in a single framework."[20]
Authoring 2.0
One of the big findings in Grunwald Associates LLC's 2007 Kids Social Networking study is the extent to which children are engaged in a wide variety of sophisticated authoring activities online; many clearly aren't satisfied with what's available to them generically.[21] But even a cursory look at a "blank page" site like MySpace shows that many lack the skills or resources to really create the online offerings one would think they'd really like to represent them. Many children say they are already borrowing branded, professional-looking content from corporate sites to improve the look and feel of their own.[22] And the accessibility of large, royalty-free libraries of quality audio, video, animation, and images, ultimately with easy to use tools to enable repurposing and manipulation of these materials is only one of a number of ways we expect providers will step up to help user-created content and services get to the proverbial next level (particularly since both kids and parents will have strong positive feelings towards the brands that step up[23]). Others include:
- New generations of site-building tools designed specifically for kids or other specific demographics (like the elderly)
- Site-building offerings specifically designed for particular interests and occupations, making the design and functionality that's most useful for those interests and occupations easy to generate--e.g. a site-building toolset for doctors that differs from the set of tools a birder would use to set up their representation online, and tools that help users with multiple personas (doctor and birder, for example) integrate their offerings if they wish.
- New generations of easier-to-use image, video, and audio editing tools, with large libraries of templates and macros to help users achieve specific effects.
- Tools that do a better job of helping users create high-quality animations
- Tools that help users generate more compelling text content for their sites (e.g. by allowing the user to tell the application what he/she is writing about and having the app generate questions it could be interesting to know the answers to about the subject)
- Tools that make it easier for users to find, capture, understand, and implement source code from other sites (including source code that's not accessible at all today).
- More tool sets for creating specialty content-a tool set specifically for designing chairs, for example (or even a particular type of chair), or for creating a wide variety of objects in a particular style (including styles the user him/herself creates).
- In general, more tool sets that find better, more sophisticated syntheses between giving users a blank page and something completely pre-fabricated to work with.
- Tools that create new authoring forms (like PostSecret) or enable new, specific variations on an existing form (e.g. tools that support the creation of a new type of mash-up)
(Fellow participants, if there are any of these needs that you think are already being well-met, even for relatively novice users[24], please include the names of those toolsets in the bullets above; if you think there are other types of authoring tools that are going to arise that aren't referenced, please add them)
As a special case that can perhaps also serve to indicate the type and magnitude of what's still to come, consider the case of friend-to-friend communications in the authoring context. Two years ago, friend-to-friend was limited mainly to 'send to a friend' and a few fairly simple applications like 'poking' a friend on Facebook, despite the huge increases in viral velocity that had occurred in prior years. [25] Since then there has been an explosion of such applications both in social networks (especially Facebook, where most applications are designed to include a reason to send the app to other Facebook users) and the commercial world (e.g. Office Max's Elf Yourself, Coke's Sue-A-Friend, Pizza Hut's Message From Dick (Vitale) campaign, etc.).
Yet there is still a great deal of room for growth and improvement. Most greeting card offerings, for example, still don't let users have control of even basic, simple parameters like font and color, and very little true interactivity is supported within them, let alone interactivity employing sender-generated content. And a recent analysis of one of the most popular types of Facebook send-to-a-friend applications found there were more than thirty fairly basic authoring features that none of the leading providers support.[26]
Collaboration 2.0, Assessment-based Communities
In 2007, nearly one in five kids 6-17 said they had dropped their membership in at least one social networking site because it "didn't seem to have a purpose."[27] It was easy to imagine a child getting done with their MySpace or Facebook page and wondering, is that all there is? Since then, of course, Facebook applications have provided a plethora of things for users to do with their friends (to the point there are growing groups of FB users that want to ban them), and Facebook's news feeds (along with Twitter and its clones) provide a sense of always-on connection with friends that didn't exist before.
But communities that have lasted have always been defined by shared enterprise, from cathedrals to sports stadiums. And when one looks at the Facebooks of the world, one can wonder: have they created a version of community that can persist without collective action (or collective action limited to periodic cause-related flare-ups over temporal issues)? And if not, what will their cathedrals be? The fact that collaboration has become a fashionable word again suggests that there's a hunger in the social media world for something more than profile pages, news feeds, and apps to share with friends.
But most of what currently passes for collaborative opportunities online is more or less individual and haphazard. A user creates something from scratch using a toolset, posts (or shares) it online, and then others can add to it. This can work well for relatively small concepts that one individual can carry forward to the point where others can just surf its momentum, not so well for larger scale endeavors. For the latter, we can expect a proliferation of adherents to two models, which, borrowing from Eric Raymond, we'll call the Cathedral and the Bazaar.
In what we would call the cathedral model, a project is determined, and perhaps to some extent built out, by an existing organization, then needs are identified (data, art, music, marketing, QA, etc.) and made known to users, who decide how and where they fit in, then plug in and contribute to the collective enterprise. Grunwald Associates has done some research that indicates a high degree of interest in this kind of collaboration on the part of both parents and kids (i.e. "working with companies and other kids to create new products"[28]), but so far there hasn't been much of it online, though there are a number of indications this is changing.[29] We'd also put informal science/citizen science projects like eBird and Project Feederwatch in this category, albeit in a limited way, since only data is asked of participants.
In the bazaar model, collaborations emerge organically: a group of people with different capabilities who don't necessarily know each other come together, decide on a project, and then execute it together. In the real world, this rarely happens with projects on a scale any greater than an impromptu jam session in a jazz club, but in theory it ought to easier to generate online, though we haven't seen any services set up to date that really enable it outside the software development world and to a certain extent the social activism space, e.g. MobileActive). (Fellow participants, if you know of some services that really do this, please insert here) The closest-and it isn't that close-is a service like Microsoft's Photosynth, which stitches together photos taken by hundreds of amateurs of specific locations to generate immersive online replications of those locations. It may turn out that the best way to create these kinds of collaborations will be to start from communities of shared interest that then, in an asynchronous way (with perhaps some external guidance and prompting) generate collaborative products iteratively over time, in the way that mountain bikes and rap music were created, for example.[30]
More generally, deliberate efforts to generate communities of interest could be another way for social media to add a sense of meaning and purpose for online users. In today's new media world, there are thousands, if not millions of groups, but very few utilities that help users find groups they ought to belong to; it's just (wrongly) assumed people know themselves well enough to know. This in spite of the fact that every time an assessment-based community approach (i.e. users taking an assessment and then having the opportunity to join a community with others who 'scored' similarly) has been used, it's been successful: Ringling Brothers' Be A Performer, Discovery's Automatic Adventure Personality Profiler, various online iterations of Harry Potter's Sorting Hat (e.g. in which kids sorted to Gryffindor gathered together with other Gryffindors), PatientsLikeMe.com, among others. Moreover, assessment-based community is one of the few values Internet users have proven they're willing to pay for, in the form of online dating services like eHarmony.com (where the community consists of the user and his/her matches).
Over time, we expect that not only will assessment-based communities become more prevalent (as users increasingly seek to find their way through an ever-rising sea of groups), but that the kinds of question batteries used in assessments will be used in other kind of new services as well. For example, sites currently under development like Equilib360, a psychological game in which users compete to create, using pass-along assessments, the largest 'balanced' circle of friends online (the bigger a group gets, the weaker its ties from end to end, the less imbalance it takes to 'tip it'), or Who I Helped Today, in which users complete batteries about their daily, weekly, and monthly activities, then can check in daily to see all the positive effects they've had in the world (that day, cumulatively) and periodically, at certain milestone points, get (anonymous) thank you emails from other service users who've been helped by their actions (or get asked to broadcast such mail to others themselves). The mounting evidence that even relatively simple psychosocial interventions (such as requiring students to write a single essay on their values) can have on long-term academic performance will also increase the use of assessment-based services online.[31]
New Groups, New Audiences Online
Both parents and their children have been online for some time, but to an unprecedented extent they are online together--even parents and teens-and increasingly joined by grandparents and other family members as well. For example, Grunwald Associates found in 2007 that 63% of kids 9-17 (including 60% of teens) go online with their parents at least monthly, 22% of kids (including 23% of teens) go onto social networking sites together at least monthly, and nearly 4 in 10 parents say they text, IM, or email their children at least weekly.[32] Both parents and kids-including large numbers of teens-say they wish there were more things online to do together (including games).[33] So far, services and tools that reflect these realities (e.g. services designed specifically for whole family use or to help families stay connected) have been scarce, but we expect them to be more prominent in years to come (and that this is a prime opportunity for informal science practitioners to 'exploit'). Family services that emphasize opportunities for grandparents could be particularly appealing, since this is the fastest growing demographic online. And in some areas-such as games-that have been stereotypically considered for the young, there are still many opportunities for providers to design for adult/mature audiences in general.[34]
But the biggest meaningful demographic trend currently in the process of taking place is probably that tens, if not hundreds, of millions of users from the developing world are now coming online every year (a trend that the current financial crisis may delay, but not for long[35]). Many poor locations that still lack paved roads and clean running water now have Internet access (albeit mainly limited to wireless devices), and companies like HashCache are in the process of greatly accelerating their Net access speeds.[36] Already Facebook groups in some categories are dominated by groups from Asia and the Middle East; in coming years they will be joined en masse by Africa, which experienced record growth rates in the past decade.[37] Increasing online interactions between Western and developing country users (inevitable even if both groups want to keep largely to themselves) can be expected to result in a flood of new cultural memes, not only those coming from the developing world directly, but resulting from the interactions. To the extent that one accepts that a globalized world means global responsibilities for educators, developing world users will represent both challenge and opportunity for informal science practitioners, who could (and should) also seize upon the new online presence of so many places previously unrepresented to teach our own citizens about other lands, other cultures, and the science therein.
Other Trends to Follow as New Media 'Grows Up'
Fellow participants, please add trends here.
Implications for informal science education
Participants, please add your thoughts here about implications of any of these trends.
The Elephants in the Room?
Now, more than any time in recent history, it seems naïve to talk about the future of anything in a socioeconomic vacuum. Can we really project what will happen to media without taking into account a global economic crisis that could be protracted, looming shortages of raw materials like energy that media and technology depend on, serious environmental threats like global warming, a dysfunctional formal education system, and record levels of inequality within and between nations that could result in substantial social disruptions in coming years?
In the shortest of runs, the current crises could actually be a spur to innovation as software developers, no longer chained to payoffs from the conventional wisdom have the opportunity (or are forced) to work on the innovative ideas they actually feel passionate about-certainly that was the case in tech's last dark period (2000-03).[38] And the venture and entrepreneurial communities have clearly already started to engage with some of our overarching problems, generating a dizzying array of new businesses that promise to deal with energy issues, for example, and reduce our carbon footprint along the way. In fact, tech optimists look at all our current issues as one blip in an inevitable line of progress that will ultimately make each of us virtually immortal and omnipotent.[39]
Short of that, it's possible we will be able to identify and prioritize solutions that have ripple effects on a variety of other issues. Renewable energy, for example, promises to impact not just our energy issues, but a variety of economic, environmental, national security, and health care issues as well. More prosaically, and closer to home, the resources devoted to the semantic Web (i.e. getting computers to be able to read and understand Web pages) might one day allow computers to read and grade essays and other creative work so that we can actually test students on what has traditionally differentiated products of our educational system--creativity and entrepreneurial initiative--instead of putting our educational system in service of a race to the bottom by 'teaching to the test.'
But we're leaving space here for conference and site participants to tell us what external issues they feel could most impact the future of media and technology (presumably in a negative way), what impact they expect these issues to have and what, if any, steps are available for media and informal science practitioners to mitigate them, either directly or through our influence on others (such as policymakers) who might take these steps.
Participants please add and discuss external issues here.
References
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The original version of this article was written by Tom de Boor, Principal Analyst, Grunwald Associates. To access a complete, unabridged version of the Future of Informal Science Education article, click here.
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