Making connections online and off
Submitted by Richard Smith on June 10, 2006 - 1:07pm.
The Pondering Primate has a story on the use of mobile phones as a form of universal remote control device. If you don't keep up with this guy's blog, you might want to check it out. It is usually stimulating and - refreshingly - isn't just a rehash of press releases on mobile phones and such. In this posting he makes the case that having a device that links from the world of things to the (virtual) world of the web is what we need to bring us to "part 2" of the internet.
Much of what mobilemuse is focused on - especially the metrocode project - is all about making connections between the virtual (information rich) world and the physical (sometimes information-poor, at least in terms that we can deal with) world, and by making those connections we enhance, extend, and realize the context that David loves.
A few years ago, when some colleagues and I were working on a project called "NewMIC," we had time to imagine new technologies and applications. One of the things we spent some time brainstorming around was just this "universal remote control" that Scott at the Pondering Primate has us focused on. We called it the "gimme" device because you could point it at something and get information about whatever it is that you pointed it at. With a camera in your phone (ahem, mobile multimedia computer) that can read bar codes (or something like them), and then do a quick lookup on the net, you immediately have a way to make those connections.
It turns out that these connections are a key step in the process that human beings use to turn information into knowledge. According to Tom Davenport, a writer with a long pedigree in popularizing science especially in the areas of knowledge management, has created a list of things that people do to turn information into knowledge:
- Comparison: how does information about this situation compare to other situations we have been in?
- Consequences: what implications does the information have for decisions and actions?
- Connections: how does this bit of knowledge relate to others?
- Conversation: what do other people think about this information?
If you consider that list, the mobile phone, er mobile computer, is a great tool for engaging in the conversations, making the connections, reviewing the consequences, and doing the comparisons. It is particularly enhanced for this purpose when it can make a quick and error-free data transaction with the global semantic web (or "SUV" as David is calling it... talk about repurposing a term!).
References
Davenport T. and Prusak L. (1998). Working Knowledge. How Organizations Manage What They Know. Harvard Business School Press.
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Perhaps I can offer a couple of extra “c” words for your list above, Richard.
One of the interesting dimensions of mobile experience design is that we don’t really have a theoretical basis for it yet. There are two from the education domain that have some potential merit for making the transition. Constructivism suggests that learning is about experimentation that extends from past experience, which is very much what we do as we make our way through a mobile environment. Connectivism is a more recent theory that incorporates social networking concepts and the learning potentials of inanimate objects in environment, which are both essential.
Perhaps we should work together and generate a new theory – how does "Contextivism" sound?
Good post!
David