Mikhail recently pointed out to me the cover article from the December 3, 2006, New York Times Magazine: “Open-Source Spying” (available digitally to NYT members or for a one-time charge here; or through “Proquest Newspapers” or “Business & Company Resource Center” databases). As he noted, and I have been spending some time thinking about, the article raises some interesting questions related to our use of blogs, wikis, and other information sharing technologies in the realm of education.
Despite intelligence analysts’ emphasis on secretiveness, their success relies heavily on collaboration. This phenomenon is not new, but has been gaining more attention post-9/11 as agency leaders consider (or are forced to consider) altering traditional, hierarchical structure in the face of a newly-defined enemy. “To fight a network like Al Qaeda,” says a professor of defense at the Naval Postgraduate School, “you need to behave like a network.”
Based on this philosophy, U.S. intelligence agencies are piloting new (relatively cheap) information systems modeled after “Web 2.0 technologies” such as blogs and wikis, to see if systems that favor rapid, relatively free flow of information can outperform their current (very expensive) systems, which favor secrecy but restrict inter-agency communication. Supporters of the new technologies hope they will enable analysts across agencies to effectively ‘connect the dots’ (disparate shreds of evidence turned up across the world). They aim to harness “the wisdom of the crowd” (ranging from large groups of government analysts to huge groups of public amateurs depending on the security level) in the manner of Wikipedia, drawing conclusions that even the sharpest experts can reach in isolation.
Not surprisingly, the use of information technology to disperse more information to more people raises challenges for spies, some of which overlap with those encountered by educators. The most prominent problem is data overload. One interviewee points out that the already difficult challenge of finding a needle in a haystack is not alleviated by new technologies that make it easier for more hay to be dumped onto the pile.
Additionally, there is the hurdle of achieving a critical mass of users. Particularly in the case of wikis, the power of collaboration lies in numbers. In the case of an inter-agency intelligence wiki now being piloted this means persuading thousands of employees to participate in the new venture, requiring a major cultural shift in communication. In the case of blogs, a similar situation arises where traffic remains low until a dense enough network of links moves a certain blog into overlapping discussions.
The bottom line here is that the spies are taking a page from the social networkers. Whether they succeed or not is yet to be seen. My question is what can educators learn from the spies? To what degree do universities face an analogous problem as the intelligence agencies, and what might effective inter-departmental, inter-faculty, or inter-student collaboration look like?
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