Techlearning blog

I guess that title got your attention.  If you're like me, all you know about freebasing is that it has something to do with drugs, is addictive, and it probably involves a bic lighter.  Not interested!  However, I am trying to learn as much as I can about a product called Freebase.  It comes from Danny Hillis, a computer scientist's computer scientist, who,while at MIT, built a tic-tac-toe playing computer out of tinkertoys.  Hillis founded Thinking Machines, which developed the Connection Machine and was also a cofounder of the Long Now Foundation, with Stewart Brand.

Freebase comes out of Danny's new company, Metaweb Technologies, and it is an attempt, in the words of Tim O'Reilly, to be a

..bridge between the bottom up vision of Web 2.0 collective intelligence and the more structured world of the semantic web. (O'Reilly )

The product is still very much in Alpha (I'm on the list to be an Alpha tester, but no word yet) and apparently its features are just barely working, but the idea is HUGE.  O'Reilly has probably done the best job of defining the service in his blog, but I'm going to make a stab at it from an educator perspective.

You look up Fort Ticondaroga and can learn of its construction and its part in the French and Indian War and the American Revolutionary War.  But with Freebase, a number of data fields are associated with the article, based on the nature of topic.  In the case of this topic, it is identified as a place, so certainly data items are there (long/lat, other nearby landmarks, broader political/topographical location base etc.).  Because it is also associated with events, other items will be present (date, players, broader event base, catalyst, outcome).  If any of these data items are empty or incorrect, as with the Wikipedia, you can volunteer to fill them in. 

So, as a result, we have a growing and evolving information environment that is connected together by a set of community-maintained metadata -- data about the data.  As you look up Fort Ticondaroga, automatically linked to that article are other articles about Lake Champlain, Iroquois language, two 18th century American wars, Fort William Henry, General James Abercrombie, and more. 

As you look up Fort Ticondaroga, a textbook of content forms around it!

It isn't perfect.  Since Ethan Allen capture the fort during the American Revolution, you might also find links to information about contemporary furniture.  So it doesn't do it all for you.  Our intelligence is still required.  But the affect is a growing intelligence in the network.  In a sense, you and I would be adding in the synapses that make up a global brain.

OK, it won't help kids pass tests.  However, this is one more indication of an information landscape that is undergoing apocalyptic change.  Are our definitions of literacy keeping up?  Are we even being allowed to keep up?