Below are four of the seven roughly two-minute excerpts from my 2007 talk “The Disruptive Nature of Technology” (EDUCAUSE podcast, 404, nothing in Wayback).
Jim Groom made the excerpts for his post “Syndication-Oriented Architecture: a Solution to Problem of Coherence” on bavatuesdays, May 16, 2013.
See also hosted lifebits and hosted lifebits 2.
Recovered context: I was supposed to give this talk with Gardner Campbell, but his flight was delayed for weather. So tried to channel where he was hoping to take the University of Mary Washington's IT systems.
It's brutally apparent to him that a lot of things that formerly seemed possible only in the context of relatively monolithic IT systems are now creeping in from the edge, just like you were saying the PC crept in from the edge 20 years ago. We're seeing that turn in the cycle of history again, and he just so wants to go with that. He so wants it to be the case that the university can embrace this loosely coupled, syndicated world, where we didn't necessarily have to build the blogging system that you're using, or the content management system, or this, that, or the other piece, because these things really do interoperate, and students can come to them in an extremely lightweight way and use them on their own with little overt support from us. And that's not flying. He's not making the case, and he's not making it for valid reasons: as things stand today, from the perspective of his bosses, the people who run IT and the people who run the university, there's a coherence problem with this kind of loose arrangement. In theory, all the student needs to do is tell the school: this is the work I've done, at these URLs. It's a network, everything's interoperable over HTTP, and it all does sort of work, but that seems to be the problem. There are no enterprise-y service guarantees available.
And so they're at loggerheads. They're not really getting past this. I have been proposing to various people that there is an architecture which will help us break this logjam. This is very speculative, and it doesn't exist today. I can't point you to examples of it, and I can't prove that it's going to come to pass. But I have a feeling that it will, and I have, for what it's worth, a decent track record in predicting these kinds of things. So, this scenario that I'm envisioning, I've started to call hosted lifebits. The lifebits part comes from Gordon Bell, who's a Microsoft researcher now, a former famous computer designer. You may have heard about this; recently there was an article in the New York Times about his lifebits project. Gordon's project is basically to create an archive of all of the digital assets related to his life, going all the way back as far as scannable documents are available, but also moving forward in an era of high-bandwidth networking and storage. So he's capturing, close to real time, a digital log of his life. That's an interesting idea, I think, to all of us. It harkens back to Vannevar Bush's Memex concept. But when I say hosted lifebits, I'm talking about something very different. When I say hosted, it lives in the cloud. This digital archive of mine is not something that's attached to my computer, or that lives on storage only I can access. Rather, it's a repository of my life's work that exists in a place where it can participate in relationships with other people's repositories and with other people.
Let's start at the beginning. Susie is born, and Susie gets a Social Security number, and she also gets a digital token, which is a handle to a space in the cloud that's going to be her lifetime digital archive. A couple of years later, Susie shows up in kindergarten and makes a finger painting, and the teacher says, "Let's put the finger painting up on the school website, along with the other kids' stuff, so that everyone can see." You know how that would happen now: the teacher would collect all the photos and upload them, probably to the school's content management system, and they would be there for a couple of years, and then they'd go away, because the school's just not going to be in the business of guaranteeing reliable, permanent, durable access to that archive of stuff. What if, on the other hand, when the teacher says, "Susie, let's take a picture of your stuff," she also says, "Give me your token, Susie," and she sticks the token in her camera, and the photos go up to Susie's archive, which is being managed for her by some service (we'll speculate more about that later) in a really serious, robust, secure, safe, long-term way? The school, from its point of view, gets the same effect, but it gets it by way of syndication. It doesn't have to store the photo; all it has to do is refer to the photo. Of course, you can do that today, but again you're back to that volatility problem, that coherence problem. What is the likelihood, if 30 students have random stuff in 15 different blogging and photo-sharing services, that I'm going to get a coherent result when I syndicate all that in? Just as it's not in the business model of the school to guarantee real permanence and reliability, it's also not in the interest of any of today's breed of personal publishing services. I think that can change big time. I think it will change. I think it's going to be a huge business opportunity, and there are a lot of forces working in that direction. So if you play this forward, you get to fourth grade with Susie, and she does a science project, a poster. Same thing. She submits her poster, the PDFs, maybe a video or an audio. It's up there in her archive, and it syndicates to where it needs to be for the ePortfolio, or where it needs to be in order to be assessed. Because I guess, ultimately, what the school is doing when it assesses and measures stuff is assigning metadata, and that, it seems, can be decoupled from the responsibility of primary management of storage. But if it were just school stuff, it wouldn't be that compelling. At the same time, in fifth grade, Susie breaks her elbow and gets an x-ray taken, and guess where the x-ray winds up? In the same place, okay? Because we're going to get there. I believe I will live long enough to see that we will get there, and we will actually have coherent personal digital archives that include our educational records, our financial records, and our medical records.
To Susie and her school records and her health records, what does the federation that's going to make those guarantees on her behalf look like? I don't think it looks like a federation of schools, because this is a lifelong thing we're talking about. She's going to move through multiple schools and multiple employment situations. We really do need and want to get to a scenario where her personal life record and work record is a portable thing that can reliably interoperate as she moves through all of these phases, but that is managed in a way that none of those entities, I think, ultimately has the business incentive to assure. Because ultimately, we care about our own stuff more than anyone else is going to care about it for us. I think we will be very happy to pay for tiered levels of service that, at various price points, give us assurances: your stuff is coherent for 10 years, or your stuff is going to be accessible to your grandchildren. I think about this a lot, because I've got kids I've taken a bunch of photos of since digital cameras came in, over the last eight or so years. It's really unclear whether those digital photos of my kids are going to be around for their kids in the same way that the shoebox of pictures of my parents' parents is available to me. We just don't have any coherent system here for everybody.