Seb Paquet - guestblogger intro

Hi everybody - Sébastien Paquet here. Mark invited me to guestblog here for a little while, following in Rob's tracks. I'm glad to be here - I've looked at some of your blogs and am impressed by the quality of the thinking that goes on in them. Kudos to Mark for giving each of you a public voice!

OK so I thought I'd kick it off by telling you a bit about who I am and some of the things I care about. I'm 27, originally from the Ottawa region, and seem to be moving to the east every 13 years or so. I love making music and wish I had more time to do it. I love computers too, got my first in 1983 and my first modem a year or two later. On the academic side I'm interested in a lot of things. I started out in physics, dabbled in theoretical computer science, then got interested in computer graphics.

Then I figured out that what I really liked more than deepening knowledge in a particular field was to connect knowledge between disciplines, and ended up writing a Ph.D. thesis on just that, tools for interdisciplinary knowledge sharing. My thesis started from the observation that most physicists don't talk to biologists, most psychologists don't talk to philosophers, etc. This is a bad thing because some of the most interesting and some of the most pressing problems lay on the boundaries between disciplines. Progress on those problems will be slow as long as cross-disciplinary dialogue between scholars remains a difficult and unusual thing. In my thesis I examined the usefulness of tools such as weblogs and wikis for fostering interdisciplinary communication and scholarly networking. (I started my weblog as part of that investigation.)

And last summer I became a researcher in the eLearning group at the National Research Council of Canada's Institute for Information Technology in Moncton, New Brunswick. Our group has about a dozen members and does all kinds of neat research and development in the areas of learning objects, social software, web-based learning and such. The staff includes researchers, programmers, and business development officers.

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I'd like to say a few words on the general problem of organizational inertia, which I think plagues our societies as change accelerates. So many of our organizational structures were invented at a time when we could assume that the context in which they operated changed slowly. In many cases that assumption is by now no longer tenable, and many organizations (especially the larger ones) appear frighteningly unresponsive to changing conditions, which sometimes renders them practically unable to fulfill what they are supposed to do.

Many people see this happening and try to do something to change these organizations using a top-down approach. They try to convince the people in the organization who have some kind of authority that things must change, and count on them to implement the required change. I'm skeptical that such efforts often pay off when the change that is required is radical and the context is complex and difficult to see through. First, there are all kinds of feedback loops and vested interests that make an organization very stable and resistant to change. Second, the people at the top are very often the best products of the system that now has to change, and as such have all kinds of habits ingrained in them that make sudden turns unlikely.

I am more interested in the potential inherent in the so-called DIY ethic. I think that when we see that some things don't work well it's often a good idea for us to try and personally take charge of making them work. It is not always possible, but as regards problems that at their core relate to information and communication, this era of ubiquitous networking and connectedness, cheap computing power, and improving interfaces means there's tremendous power available to the individuals who have decided to take things into their own hands.

I'm tempted to stop for now and leave the task of coming up with examples of individuals or groups who have used the network to take things into their own hands to the reader... can you think of anything?