Ted Nelson's Computer Lib 40th Anniversary to be Honored at Chapman University

I forgot to mention an additional item in my post on meeting Ted Nelson. Chapman University will be honoring the 40th anniversary of the publication of Computer Lib on April 24th-26th, 2014, presumably at Chapman's campus in Orange, California.

Here are images of the flyer (once again, apologies for the fold. I put it in my hip pocket since I wasn't toting anything else to carry things at the time.)

Ted Nelson & Computer Lib at Homebrew Computer Club Reunion

I had a great time at the Homebrew Computer Club Reunion last night, which, I learned, was made possible by a Kickstarter (thank you, KS backers!)

One of the great conversations I had there was with Ted Nelson, author of Computer Lib/Dream Machines and his wife, Marlene Mellicoat. My wife and I had a wonderful time speaking with them. Ted has published a new edition of Computer Lib. It's not a reprint from scans of the original, but a new printing from the original negatives. It's as clear and sharp as the original was back when, possibly even better. It's in the same large format, as well, not scaled down for the size of paper that happens to be cheap and convenient for most books.

Sorry about the fold, I only had my hip pocket as a place to put his flier last night.

I was working so hard at being social last night it didn't even occur to me that I could probably have purchased a copy directly from him right then. I saw that he had a number of copies in his bag, too. It's little things like this that I always think of when people tell me how smart I am. Yeah, about some things, maybe, but about other things I'm not so much.

Nevertheless, I'm going to purchase it now, after the event. I read someone else's copy back when, having noticed it as a pillar on a bricks and boards bookshelf among a number of copies of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers (Fat Freddy's Cat was my favorite of the crew.) Now I'm looking forward to having a Computer Lib/Dream Machines book of my own.

If you're not familiar with Ted's work, I strongly recommend correcting that. The web could be so much more than it is, and require far less human "curation" than it does, if it hadn't turned into the mishmash mess of information without proper structure that it has become. I'd say more, but rather than reading my take on what he thinks, go to the source:

Hopefully I'll have a chance to post more about last night's event in future articles. There was so much packed into so little time that my head is still spinning from it. (They managed to recreate the atmosphere of the original meetings perfectly in that regard.)

It was great that my wife got to hear Ted speak during the formal presentation portion of the evening, too. I got to hear him speak a few times back when, he's a dynamic and engaging speaker. He makes you think about how things could be, possibilities that are better than reality. Now we have hearing Ted speak as a shared experience.

Reliable Website? Ask the Conscious Burritos

Today I had my high school class do a second assignment on finding reliable information on the web. I used part of the excellent ICYouSee: T is for Thinking guide to critical thinking about what's on the web.

Specifically, I had the students group in pairs then go out to look at sites on the Mayan Calendar and The Sixties. The selection of sites given is excellent. They cover the range of reliability well, and different sites draw in different students. The result was that no two teams did full evaluations on the same sites, but there was enough overlap to make things interesting.

While I asked the students to evaluate how reliable the information was on the websites they chose for deeper evaluation, I did little to define reliability for them beforehand. We had one prior exercise in web research during which I covered the idea. In the course of the class I had the question raised, as one group struggled with the distinction between honest but misinformed and reliable.

This triggered a short conversation about the distinction between belief and demonstrable, or at least supportable, truths.

When the groups finished their evaluations we did round robin reports of our findings.

The link to Conscious Burritos on the Dreamspell site pretty well sealed that site's degree of authority with the class.

The evaluations opened up a number of conversations about reasonable measures of authority. We agreed that the appearance of a website definitely affects the perception of its authority. If, for example, a science website has images of little pink ponies dancing across the screen it'll be hard to take seriously, even if it's written by an authority in the field with excellent supporting links. On the other hand, sites that have a spartan design say less in a direct fashion about reliability one way or the other.

The subject of quantity arose, as well. One of the student groups felt that the volume of data on a site added to its authority. In another case, a large volume of information on a wide variety of loosely related subjects was felt to detract from the site's reliability. After I provided some possible counter-examples in each case, it seems like the class pretty well agreed that volume of content had no direct bearing on the reliability of information on the website. However, in each case I think the students were expressing feelings concerning the approach to organization of the website, and how that reflected the thinking of the creators.

We also had a discussion about supporting material. We talked about sites that link to like-minded sites while ignoring divergent points of view, as well a the idea of "sock-puppets" and other techniques for creating a false appearance of supporting data. We also discussed potential conflicts of interest and how these might color the information that people post on the web, as well as the fact that a single conflict of this sort may affect a large number of people, having a similar effect on them, creating what appears to be a large body of consensus, when actually we're seeing a small community that's heavily cross-linked.

I saw more lights going on in people's heads today than after our prior exercise. It turned out really well, and the feedback I've gotten from the students so far has been positive. Time constraints kept us from covering things as well as I would have liked. For example, I would have liked to have the class study some websites with very authoritative appearances and find the "gotchas" that undermine their reliability as sources of information.

I may yet do this in a future class. The number of sites on subjects such as health and ethics that maintain a very authoritative appearance while having a decided slant and underlying purpose are many, and I would like to give my students an introduction into applying their critical facilities to these sites.