The end goal will be to move toward a common language/mental model that can be used by multiple stakeholders who work with software that includes an API. In preliminary conversations with people who have worked on API’s, different stakeholders have referred to API’s as a sort of “door,” a “language,” a “piece of software,” a “platform.” As a result, many have described confusion between stakeholders around the process.  In an email conversation with one of the founders of NetBeans, he explained that “it was really hard to convince [the business folks involved in the project] about the importance of compatible public APIs during the first five years. At that time the credit we get back by doing it was not that visible.”

For my research, my plan is to start by interviewing some teams from different organizations who are working with API-based software to find out how they talk about it. The initial steps would be a series of 30-60 minute interviews with a few stakeholders. This would ideally include one person focused on the technical design, another focused on the coding, another on the user experience, and another focused on the business/organizational side of things. Ideally, it would also include interviews with one or two of your external stakeholders who use one of your API’s.

Are you and your team be willing to participate? The goal would be to take a minimum of your time, and the benefit to you will be some insights into your process.

If you are interested, please contact me at chmbrigg[at]indiana[dot]edu.

To start off with a simple example of this dilemma, it might help to recall the scene toward the end of the movie The Sound of Music when a nun steals parts from Nazi cars (stealing is a clear violation of her professed moral code) in order to let the Von Trapp family escape from almost certain imprisonment and possible death. The nun then says to her superior: “Reverend Mother, I have sinned.” But did she? She clearly violated her own moral code in the short-term, which forbids stealing and lying. And we are all fairly sure that she prevented a longer-term ill from occuring.

In American democratic discourse, people seem to be faced with a similar dilemma. Glenn Beck, for example, violates his own moral code* in the short-term by stating at least partially untrue, inflammatory things like “This president I think has exposed himself over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture,” presumably because Glenn feels that doing so will help to avoid what he feels is a larger ill in the long-term. Sarah Palin also violates the same moral code in the short-term by stating inflammatory, at least partially untrue things like “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel..Such a system is downright evil,” presumably because she also feels that doing so in the short-term will help to avoid what she feels is a larger ill in the long-term. I could also violate the same code by making up lies to discredit both Beck and Palin because i feel that doing so in the short-term will help to get them out of the public consciousness and avoid a larger ill in the long-term.  But how do we figure out which of these dilemmas might warrant violating one’s own moral code?

Note: The reason i am choosing Beck and Palin as examples here is because they profess to be Christians, who have fairly standard written moral code. Many other people in all parties seem to be violating their own moral codes in the way they conduct democratic discourse.

There are two facts i thought of when considering this:

1. Keeping the short-term moral code is the only course of action which guarantees that there will be some morality involved. In other words, if i tell the truth about Beck and Palin in a civil, upright manner, then even if they go on to create ills in our country, then the situation has included some level of moral action.
2. Violating the short-term moral code is the only course of action which guarantees that there will be immorality involved. If i make up lies about Beck and Palin, even if that action helps to undermine their ability to create ills in our country, then there has been immoral action in the situation from the start. If i make up lies and they are still able to create ills in our country, then the whole situation is fraught with immorality from start to finish.
3. The justification for breaking a moral code in the short-term must be related, then, to a person’s ability to foresee the likelihood that doing so will prevent a future ill.

The nun in The Sound of Music could foresee that the Nazis would have done horrible things to the Von Trapp family. If i were placed in her situation, i would feel fully morally justified in taking the actions that she did.  As for me, can i foresee that Beck and Palin are going to hurt our democracy? No. There are too many variables involved. So would i be morally justified in trumping up lies to discredit them? Absolutely not. In fact, i am called to “..be kind and compassionate” (Ephesians 4:32) to them.  Can Beck and Palin foresee that Obama’s administration is going to lead to bad things in our country? No. Far smarter people are unable to foresee such things. So are they morally justified in telling half-truths? Probably not.

* Each of the people in the examples are professing Christians, who are smart enough to know that our statements are at least partially untrue, which means that making such statements is a clear violation of the biblical code which calls for them to “..put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body” (Ephesians 4:25), and for them to “.. not give false testimony against your neighbor” (Exodus 20:16).

1) increase profit
2) make people’s lives better
3) improve the world by ensuring that the people within them develop as human beings.

Rather than write a long polemic here, i’d like to make a short statement, and offer a very particular example.

The Statement:
Spending more than 30 seconds arguing about the difference between formal and informal learning is a waste of time. If we must distinguish between the two at all, then we must conclude that they always happen simultaneously, as any reflective person who has taught something to a person or group knows.   Ignoring one or the other (again, if we must distinguish between the two) in any learning situation always results in sub-optimal outcomes.

The Example:
Me teaching a 300-level course in new media theory at the Indiana University School of Informatics:

Some of the “formal” learning occurring in this moment:
I’m guiding students through a series of readings and theories on the mass effects of the electronic revolution (first photo) and on the notion of identity construction and stereotypes (second photo) that they would not likely encounter in their “informal” interactions with other students, popular media, or other technology classes.

Some of the “informal” learning occurring in this moment:
I am letting my passions for serious study, inquiry, media and playful exploration of ideas show through, mindful of the fact that i am both being authentic and modeling these passions for my students. It’s not something i plan ahead of time, but it tends to come out in my classes. Also, notice that i am forsaking the many-thousand-dollar computer/projector setup in the room, and using a chalkboard to teach a new media theory class to students in Informatics. I do this for many reasons, one of which is to informally demonstrate that media isn’t all about tablets, screens, bits and bytes.

Why Distinguishing Between the Two Is A Waste of My Time:
Simply put, if i were to teach hard theory without showing my passion, the learning outcomes would be pretty crappy. Students would get a bunch of great information without any sense of how to integrate it into their lives. On the other hand, if i were to demonstrate my passion without a formal syllabus and some sort of academic rigor, the learning outcomes would also be pretty crappy. Students might be excited about new media theory, but have gained no useful tools to put into practice.  Instead, i let the two mix as i go (really i am mostly oblivious to the distinction), continually reflecting on how both are affecting the established and emergent learning goals for the class.

Here is the poem (i hope Ann would approve of my sharing it here)

Robert Gibbs recently used Twitter to give a shout out to a local bike store.  Here is the original tweet, which reads:

#FF @CraigatFEMA so you know the latest @RevCycles a great bike store & special thanks to Ken and others there for helping me with my bike

This has been spun as an abuse of power by the right, of course, and i haven’t taken the time to see how the left is spinning it, but leaving the power issue aside for a minute, this gets me thinking about fluency.  

Generally, when people do something which looks like it violates a norm or a rule, there are three different reasons for it: 

1. They are not fluent in the norms or rules, and accidentally violated those norms or rules
2. They are fluent in the norms or rules, and intentionally violated those norms or rules because they don’t really agree with the norms or rules
3. The are fluent in the norms or rules, and intentionally violated those norms or rules to undermine the norms or rules

This tweet on the official white house Twitter account seems to me to be a violation of a norm if not a rule that people in a position of power, as we currently conceive of the notion of governmental power, should be extremely careful not to promote one commercial enterprise over another when speaking/writing/tweeting on behalf of the institution (it might be a similar violation for me to promote one of my students’ side business ventures on an official university website).  

Assuming for a moment that it is a violation of a norm or a rule, which of the three reasons do you think accounts for it? And if it was a lack of fluency, was this a result of a misunderstanding of Twitter as an official channel? Or do you think it was not a violation of a norm or rule at all?

I just posted the following comment to a post by Guy Kawasaki on his blog about the premise that people favor cognitive fluency – the idea that people prefer things that are easy to think about compared to those that are not.

Here was my comment: “I presume you may want to include a chapter on the contexts in which “easy” has the opposite effect. During the course of my firm’s (socialens.com) recent research on the adoption of new media in organizations, an executive suggested (i’m paraphrasing heavily here) that one of the biggest reasons that C-Level folks have a hard time taking new media seriously is the simplistic names like “Twitter”, “YouTube” etc. She jokingly suggested that, if they were to have been named with acronyms or something like “Ascendant Video” C-Level folks would have been all over these new technologies. I think she is probably correct, and if so, the counter-intuitive fact is that publicly espousing or using things which seem too easy is often associated with either a real or perceived loss of institutional or symbolic capital within the group.”

I think the concept of cognitive fluency is interesting, but i wonder what happens to people’s decisions when we marry cognitive fluency with social pressures?  In my experience, humans do lots of cognitively, physically, and otherwise very difficult and uncomfortable things in the presence of others that they do not do when no one is watching.  For example, many of the women i know will wear uncomfortable high heels in public, but take them off the minute they get home.  Also, many academics do amazing work in their profession, but when they have some down time the first thing they watch is 80′s television re-runs.

I have no specific answer to this question, but it bears consideration, i think.

Posted via web from SociaLens Zoo Channel

I just read an article on Salon magazine about the fact that Constantin Films, the producer of the original the 2004 filmDer Untergang which has become the spoofed series of YouTube viral videos, has begun pulling the videos off of YouTube.  Without knowing the whole rationale behind their decision, i’m guessing this is a big business mistake on their part for reasons mentioned in the Salon.com article.  I will probably dissect this a bit further in a later post, but for now, i wanted to highlight a few important factors in the Hitler viral video phenomenon.

Prevalence
There are literally thousands of versions of these videos.  A search of YouTube for “Hitler finds out” returns 2,230 videos, and a quick scan of the screens suggests that 99% of the results are a part of this meme.

Speed
These videos are often produced with a great deal of speed, which is important, since they often comment on a current event.  One of the videos, for example, depicted Hitler ranting about losing his March Madness basketball office pool as a result of top-ranked Kansas State losing to the University of Northern Iowa.  The video was created and uploaded the same day as the basketball games to which it refers, and as of the writing of this post, has 856,952 views.

Creativity
While it is easy to pooh-pooh the amateurish creativity in these sorts of videos, a slightly closer examination reveals that there is often more sophistication going on here than might meet the eye.  Mind you i’m not suggesting that these are Cecille B. DeMille quality films, but when you consider the fact that the March Madness video was created in one afternoon, and managed to get 800k people to look at it and chuckle at least a little, it bears more than a passing glance.

One form of creativity is in the marriage of the narrative structure of the scene (Hitler finds out a first piece of bad news, then rants, then expresses a false hope, which keeps his advisors from telling him the second piece of bad news) to a current event.  In the March Madness video, for example, the first piece of bad news is that top-ranked Kansas State had lost to Northern Iowa.  Hitler rants about this, then takes solace in the fact that he still has Villanova as one of his picks, who he thinks could never lose to “..a college like Saint Mary’s” – a statement that makes his advisors squirm, since Saint Mary’s did beat Villanova later in the day – an inside joke not lost on a portion of the audience seeing this video.

Another simple form of creativity is the matching of certain key words in the subtitles to the German words spoken by the actor.  When Hitler mentions “Stalin” for example, the subtitles reference Kansas State’s “stalling” on the court, and there is a simple reference to the SS sprinkled in for the viewer who knows their history.

Viral Spread
On the day that i first viewed this video it had been online for five days.  In that span of time, it had already been viewed hundreds of thousands of times (the exact number escapes my memory).  Since i do not have the time right now to do a full scientific study into the science of its viral spread, i will make an estimated guess that its spread was due to a few key factors:

1. It contained intertextual references, inside jokes, pointing to the hugely popular cultural meme of the Final Four, and perhaps more importantly, a sub-meme of the two major upsets that occurred on the day that the video was uploaded
2. It was produced and uploaded to closely coincide with the games to which it was referring, so that anyone searching YouTube for clips by using the search term “KU lost to UNI” would find this video at or near the top of the search results
3. It is part of a longer-running, large scale meme of similar videos which adhere to a similar aesthetic, and who no doubt are also watching this video and others like it