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(Doherty's Thread)
Kairos logo circa 1996. |
Popularity engines — and that, in essence, is what is proposed — usually lead to a lowest common denominator. And to date, nobody has figured out how to make the money aspect work (the closing of the grand writer's experiment ThemeStream is prosecution item #1]; meanwhile, search engines which alter rankings based on link popularity have created an entirely new cottage industry in the search engine optimization game which is geared toward fooling the logic of the program. Granted, smarter people than I am would inevitably end up designing the algorithms to Mike's Hypertext Studio, so perhaps there are ways around the roadblocks those outside the academy have not yet found. But I also think it is quite likely that the fact Mike has stayed in academia indicates that he has greater faith and patience than me in the ability of students to gravitate to challenges rather than to look for the easiest way to finish. Mike has written demonstrably more than I have here in part because I have focused on the historical aspect, which is temporally finite, and he has focused on a future which is not — but also because he has continued to think hard about how multimedia can influence the future of education while I have been preoccupied with figuring out how to use intranets to communicate with 100,000 airline employees located internationally about the information they need to do their jobs. The proliferation of needs based on the wildly varying cultural and sociopolitical background which inform how those communications are received is a daily challenge. Come to think of it, maybe we are working on the same thing ...
Now, if you haven't already —
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