Jon Udell: Wiring the web (redux)

The following is a very interesting blog from Jon Udell on December 4th:

Effective social information management is quite severely constrained by the fact that regular folks are not (yet) taught the basics of computational thinking ....

For example, when I explain my community calendar project to prospective contributors, they invariably assume that I’m asking them to enter their data into my database. It’s quite hard to convey: that the site isn’t a database of events, only a coordinator of event feeds; that I’m only asking them to create feeds and give me pointers to their feeds; that this arrangement empowers them to control their information and materialize it in contexts other than the one I’m creating.

That said, I’m finding that once I can get people to walk through one of these experiences, and see the connection — OK, I do this over here, and that happens over there, and it can also happen somewhere else, and I’m in control — the light bulb does go on ....

For the complete blogged entry, go to Wiring the web (redux).