Michael Jensen [ 2 May 2007 10:22 AM]

I'm most interested in your take on self-learning, and self-education. Innovation is highly prized, especially the Internet sector, but innovative problem-solving is a quality that formal education rarely rewards.

The most innovative thinkers I know are people who followed what they were interested in, teaching themselves what they needed to know, to scratch an itch -- usually in spite of their formal education. In a broadband world where facts are free and perspective cheap (while judgment still is costly), the No Child Left Behind model is madness -- we need to teach creative problem-solving and a love of learning. In a rapidly warming world we need innovators who can think their way beyond the existing limits.

steve [ 2 May 2007 10:24 AM]

It would be an interesting exercise to correlate your nuanced view with where you differ from Free Software. As I remember your early years, you always had a drive for business instead of freedom.

Scott [ 2 May 2007 01:07 PM]

The initial impetus for what has become The O'Reilly School of Technology was to employ methods that helped people learn to self-learn. Tim is spot-on with tinkering, playing and doing when it comes to learning. The problem is that not everyone is lucky enough to have the environment to initially engage in this type of activity, so we provide one and then lead people through the process of tinkering and building. Most of what they learn they learn themselves by building mental models and self explanations of how things work.

Scott [ 2 May 2007 01:09 PM]

The initial impetus for what has become The O'Reilly School of Technology was to employ methods that helped people learn to self-learn. Tim is spot-on with tinkering, playing and doing when it comes to learning. The problem is that not everyone is lucky enough to have the environment to initially engage in this type of activity, so we provide one and then lead people through the process of tinkering and building. Most of what they learn they learn themselves by building mental models and self explanations of how things work.

Scott [ 2 May 2007 01:14 PM]

I just learned that when posting if the site is slow to respond, don't hit post again.;o)

Coruscation [ 2 May 2007 02:46 PM]

It was once called distance learning, and its prophets hailed student centered, not
teacher-centered approaches.

Michael R. Bernstein [ 2 May 2007 07:28 PM]

"I hope I didn't say a few of those things, especially the one about Web 2.0 being antithetical to open source, since I don't believe that -- though I do have a far more nuanced view of their relationship than most people."

Well, you did. Here is a transcript of that portion of the interview:

Steve Hargadon: "How much do you think that what we're seeing of web 2.0 has been iformed by the pholsophy of open source?"

Tim O'Reilly: "I think that.. there is really two aspects... I think there is at least a philosophical sort of leaning towrad the idea of openness, and the idea of sharing. But as I argued in my paper 'The Open Source Paradigm Shift', the actual... the fundamental dynamic of Web 2.0 is actually antithetical to the ideals of Open Source. Now, people haven't seen that yet, but they will.

"And the way I mean that is, it is really driven by what Clayton Christensen called 'the law of conservation of atractive profits'. And in business people are always trying to figure out where they're going to make their money. And when something becomes cheap, something else becomes valuable. And so, well, I spend a lot of time in my thinking of... about web 2.0, thinking about the implications of open source, drawing a lot from the history of the IBM PC, because in a lot of ways the PC was *almost* open source hardware. It was a HUGE change in the structure of the computer industry. Here there were, people who, uh... y'know companies whose business model was focused on the idea that you had absolute control over your hardware. And IBM broke that model, without meaning to, when they released this personal computer where the specs were published and anybody could make them.

"And the net result of that was that hardware became much less valuable, as the commodity model of the personal computer took over, all the margin went out of hardware. But value didn't go away, it migrated to software. Software became very valuable, and very proprietary. And, yknow, so we saw effectively a huge shift of power from IBM to Microsoft, because Microsoft realized that they could concentrate value and attractive profits in software, whereas IBM was still thinking 'hardware'.

"So, I looked at that situation, and said "Oh! The same thing is actually happening with Open Source." Alot of people imagined, they simply imagined "Well, we will substitute Open Source software for, Microsoft software, and won't that be great. We'll have everything be free, and open." And I said "No. What actually is going to happen is we're gonna commoditize software, just like the hardware used to be commoditized, and something else will become valuable, and it will be dominated by companies that are working on extracting that value."

"My thesis was that that would come in the form of databases that got better the more people used them, that harnessed network effects to create proprietary data value. And so wing this today with companies like Google.

"Now Google is still sort of talking and thinking alot about openness, and they're working to try to keep a balance, but you're already starting to see that backlash, as people say "Whoah, Google is getting more and more valuable, they're getting more and more powerful, they have more and more data that they own that they are using for their benefit and nobody else's", and that proccess is well underway.

"And so, I think what's going to happen, as a result of all of this openness, is we are actually, in all of our sharing, we're actually contributing to the increase of power of large new companies that are figuring out how to harness and collect our intelligence. And that power will be, I would hope, will largely used for good, but sometimes it will be used for evil (laughs) so to speak, and I guess the way I see it is this is this alternating cycle in which things become opened up, and that creates opportunities for innovation, for new markets, for entrepreneurship. But then the market consolidates, and it becomes much harder for new entrants, the power goes to incumbents who become increasingly powerful, but as they become powerful they tend to exert more control over the marketplace until it becomes stagnant, and then that human impulse to create breaks out again somewhere else and then the story repeats.

"And so, I'm just looking at this in the computer industry, but you see it in every industry. Somebody basically has a breakthrough that upsets the applecart and the scramble for innovation and new opportunities begins again until somebody figures out the secret sauce, and then the market starts to consolidate again. And I think the same will happen with web 2.0. So we are in this stage, which is going to go on for another ten years, where this whole idea of harnessing collective intelligence is going to be incredibly exciting. But the net result is going to be a very very different world in which there is a huge amount of power that belongs to people who have these massive databases in which the collective intelligence has been collected."

Ian Lynch [ 3 May 2007 12:31 AM]

Take a look at www.theINGOTs.org. The International Grades in Open Technologies are UK government accredited qualifications that require students to use Web 2.0 technologies as part of their assessment and to learn about web development communities by participating in them. The aim is to make students self-sufficient and independent learners showing them how they can get all the resources needed from the web freely and legally.

Lee Bryant [ 3 May 2007 02:38 AM]

Hi Tim,

I think you did in fact have something interesting to say, especially the points about the importance of learning by doing and the role of social tools in a creative renaissance.

I have been talking to the UK government's education technology agency (BECTA) about the potential role of social tools in schools, and published a chapter in their Emerging Technologies publication outlining how I think this might play out - discussed here.

Michael R. Bernstein [ 3 May 2007 07:31 AM]

Tim, I'm particularly interested in one sentence you said:

"we are actually, in all of our sharing, we're actually contributing to the increase of power of large new companies that are figuring out how to harness and collect our intelligence."

So, what do you see as your role (or ORA's) WRT to this concentration of power? Merely documenting (or heralding) it, accelerating it, watchdogging it, shaping it, or slowing it?

I am asking specifically about the concentration of power in corporations where it is ripe for abuse, and not, say, about the underlying capabilities that are making the power itself possible (and therefore amenable for concentration).

Michael R. Bernstein [ 3 May 2007 11:27 AM]

Thanks for the reply, Tim.

"But you're also (correctly) implying that there may be technological counter-measures, in the architecture of systems that protect people's rights against the collective."

Not quite. (I mean, I believe that, but wasn't what I was trying to set aside).

I guess what I was implying is that blogging for example unleashed a lot of 'power', but that despite the '100 top blogs' effect there is no real concentration of corporate ownership of blogging's value (this despite Google acquisition of Blogger, etc.), nor do I think such is possible. Blog portability may be imperfect, but no-one can be locked-in to a blog vendor. Now, obviously that moved the value 'up the stack' to blog search, but what concentration of power there is in sites like Technorati is relatively tepid.

Wikis are a counter example: Wiki technology could have evolved to a more federated model (ie. by using InterWiki links) that would have prevented the concentration of power we now see at Wikipedia (which isn't actually a for-profit, but it could have been).

So, I was asking what you see as your or ORAs role in promoting technical decisions (in infrastructure, APIs, and so on) that prevent (or slow) power from concentrating, even while advocating the changes that make that power available more generally (and hence, available for concentration if we don't pay attention).

Michael R. Bernstein [ 3 May 2007 05:18 PM]

Michael, I actually don't agree about blogging. The top 100 blogs have a huge amount of all blog traffic, and a significant number of them are owned by blog publishing companies

Tim, do you have data on what percentage of all blog traffic the top 100 currently get?

But in any case, simple media ownership concentration is a very different thing than the collective intelligence dynamic we were discussing as a new form of lock-in, or for that matter lock-out, in the industry. The top 100 cannot prevent a new entrant into their ranks, and there quite a bit of turnover.

No blog platform vendor currently has any control and little leverage over the market. Neither do any of the blog search vendors, where arguably much of the value migrated.

BTW, I also think it's unlikely that any of the current crop of collaborative bookmarking sites will be able to create any lasting value in proprietary data because they are all hitting diminishing returns in quality (ie. they are now getting worse the more people use them). I do think that creating value in proprietary data is possible in this space, however the 'secret sauce' is going to be more subtle than just counting votes.

Makio Yamazaki [ 3 May 2007 08:59 PM]

"Blog has the power which changes the world ---".

The world is Flat about the information.
However, it says that people who knows "the big change"
which occurs in the network-waorld and the person who doesn't know the existences.

When Thomas Freedman(WSJ columnist) visited in Japan, he said the follwing words.

He described, using the reservation of South Westas an example.

It often came across the person who is broadening white paper for some reason near the check-in counter.

They only show the ticket which was reserved in the Internet and could easily take the seat which they hope for.

However, the most travelers doesn't know even that there is a such convenient reservation system(using internet).

There would be the new problems of the "Digital divide" between the internet use.

"Education" would be more and more important for us in the new age, I mean.

Paul Wenninger [ 3 January 2008 02:47 PM]

Tim,
Let me refer back to the top of this discussion about education.
There actually are schools organically committed to changing the world through growing independent thinking and intellectual curiosity. Some of them are known as Montessori based schools. The better, more future aligned, are going way beyond feeding college/university programs or the job market. I beleive your conversation is relevant and accept your challenge, the innovation industry's challenge, to bring education into focus with its background; real life.