Taxi-to-Praxi notes: summarizing the morning session

jonasandersson — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:55:56 +0200

Armin Medosch: Collecting good points of practice

- Facilitating shared, open and free platforms
- How much work and/or investments are required?
- What drives people to participate?
- Drupal: every item of information a node

Jaromil: Proposal for ‘solid knowledge’

- Co-operation among people active in education
- Try to compile an ontology of possible knowledge paths
- What makes knowledge solid? 4 points for educational institutions;

Notions (actual items of knowledge) – these are increasingly getting available for all
Maieutical (Socrates, making ideas having birth in students) – still there?
Heuristics (the choices where to look, the direction of discovery) – how are these changing? For good, for bad? What to do about it?
Infrastructure – unevenly distributed

What is meant by solid knowledge? “Producing something that will be useful in 20 years”; something that has durability and is not based on short-term profit and/or exclusivity.
Questions of heuristics and infrastructure: How do I choose programming language – and why do I choose it? Why are certain languages neglected and others taken up?

Lindsay Brown: How does one find categories of knowledge to illustrate and generate methodology?

- Compiling other artists’ work as examples to be inspired by…
- …then incorporating this inspiration into actual experiments
- Thenextlayer.org as a means for this categorization;

Heterogeneous types of data (images, film, text etc.)
Enabling participation with multiple users
Ideal for re-edits and amendments

Danger: Lest Taxi to Praxi be Forgotten

Lindsay — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:15:43 +0200

Over a day has passed since the Taxi to Praxi seminar at Goldsmiths University. People have discussed, moaned, laughed and tried to disseminate some kind of coherent theme that is relevant to us all whether that be for Art, PhD or a way of working that incorporates some kind of collaborative openness. We are all now back in our own countries, homes, domestic situations and some of us are probably, like myself, trying to edit and analyse the proceedings of that day.

For me, one major theme seemed to reoccur again and again, and this was one of ownership and dissemination of knowledge. From the individual researchers data collection, to projects such as Cel Crabeel’s thesis proposal that incorporated seven other participants within a theme of Documentary, the notion of who owns what and how we are all individually working around/within this, is fascinating. What came to light, was that there are no set hard and fast rules within the University system. Each institution having their own ideas over what constitutes ownership, and how much freedom that they are willing to offer the individual student with the manner in which they store, disseminate and publish their data, theories and theses.

In going back to the original introductory text of the day then, my questions now are:

Coalitions: How do we embed a collaborative open source culture into institutions that utilise a business ethos?

Technologies: How far can we make use of tools and technologies that incorporate multiple contributors, within an institutionalised system that holds copyright over individual work?

Solutions: What mechanisms, subversions and methodologies will allow us to work around and within an institution that recognises the sole author as one of its main output statistics?

My end thoughts on this initial text ramble are that

1) I hope that someone responds
2) Working within groups is the way forward
3) Lets not become institutionalised and loose sight of a potential new way of looking at or thinking about a problem.

Best wishes from a methodological meanderer.
Lindsay

knowledge transfer

Taxi-to-Praxi notes: summarizing the morning session

Armin Medosch: Collecting good points of practice

Jaromil: Proposal for ‘solid knowledge’

Lindsay Brown: How does one find categories of knowledge to illustrate and generate methodology?

Danger: Lest Taxi to Praxi be Forgotten