As we increasingly augment our minds I sometimes pause to reflect on the trade-offs we are making. What powers does the unaugmented mind possess? What do we give up when we outsource our memories to the collective electronic mind? In Dilemma of a Cyborg Carina Chocano writes:

For everything that’s gained by our ability to store and maintain more information than ever before, something is lost that has to do with texture, context and association. The science journalist Joshua Foer, author of “Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything,” said in a lecture to the Royal Society of Arts that people once “invested in their memories, they cultivated them. They studiously furnished their minds. They remembered. Today, of course, we’ve got books and computers and smartphones to hold our memories for us. We’ve outsourced our memories to external devices. The result is that we no longer trust our memories. We see every small, forgotten thing as evidence that they’re failing us altogether.” As we store more and more of what makes us us outside of ourselves, he said, “we’ve forgotten how to remember.”

The mnemonic techniques rediscovered in Moonwalking with Einstein were first popularized by Cicero. You bind memories to images, and then you bind the images to a path through the rooms and hallways of a “memory palace.”

Here’s another technique that isn’t so well known. I attribute it to Carlton Fisk by way of a story I heard from the baseball writer Roger Angell. Somewhere in the 2000s, Angell asked Fisk to reflect on what had most altered the game of baseball since his playing days. The salaries? The drugs?

No. The game-changer, Fisk said, was instant replay. His game-winning 1975 home run is one of most-remembered moments in all of sports. The video of that event is one of the most-watched clips. You might think that Carlton Fisk has seen that clip a million times. But in fact, he told Roger Angell, he never watches it. That’s because he doesn’t want to overwrite the original memory, which is his alone, recorded from a point of view that was his alone, with a memory we all share that was recorded by a camera up in the stands.

We can’t do away with instant replay, nor do we want to. But it’s worth remembering how to experience life, even when we know it’s being recorded externally, as if the only cameras are the ones in our heads.

The other day Tim Bray tweeted a Google+ item entitled Geeks and repetitive tasks along with the comment: “Geeks win, eventually.”

Here’s the chart posted on Google+ by Bruno Oliveira:

A couple of things bothered me about this. First, there’s the adversarial tone. The subtext is a favorite geek quotation:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

That gem is often attributed to Gandhi. Wikiquote disputes that and finds a close variant in Nicholas Klein’s 1918 speech to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Either way it’s the story of a persistent underdog overcoming an oppressor.

In geek ideology the oppressors are pointy-haired bosses and clueless users. Geeks believe (correctly) that clueless users can’t imagine, never mind implement, automated improvements to repetitive manual chores. The chart divides the world into geeks and non-geeks, and it portrays software-assisted process improvement as a contest that geeks eventually win. This Manichean worldview is unhelpful.

But the chart also fails to capture the reality of repetition and automation in the realm of information systems. Here’s an alternative world view that I choose to imagine and strive to create:

In this view of the world, tasks that involve data manipulation (as so many modern chores do) are undertaken by teams. There is an infinite supply of manual chores. Everybody tackles them. Ideally there is one member of the team I call the toolsmith. Working shoulder to shoulder with the team, the toolsmith spots an opportunity to automate some piece of the work, writes some code, deploys it, observes how it gets used (or doesn’t get used), assesses its impact (or lack of impact), and then iterates on the code. Meanwhile the toolsmith keeps working alongside the team, chipping away at the never-ending and always-evolving list of manual chores, looking for more opportunities to automate, and exploiting them in an incremental and collaborative way.

Software-assisted automation of repetitive work isn’t an event, it’s a process. And if you see it as a contest with winners and losers you are, in my view, doing it wrong.

Before my podcast went AWOL I had been meaning to interview Toby Considine about his efforts to mesh schedules for things with schedules for people, and to define Internet calendaring extensions for that purpose. So when Phil Windley wrote to ask me how I thought calendaring might relate to the personal event networks he wants to bootstrap, I suggested that we ask Toby on an episode of Phil’s Technometria podcast.

Phil, I suspect, is actually one of five identical quintuplets. One teaches at BYU. Another runs a startup called Kynetx. A couple of others take care of family, church, and political matters. Finally there’s the one who does a podcast and also serves as executive producer of ITConversations. I don’t think I could handle being a quintuplet but it’s lucky for all of us that Phil can!

It was a real pleasure to meet Toby and learn about his comprehensive vision for a world in which our buildings, our cars, and our energy grid work with us, appearing as the intelligent agents that science fiction always encouraged us to imagine. One of his favorite examples involves a meeting room that’s scheduled for a 9AM meeting. A really intelligent system wouldn’t start heating or cooling the room at 9AM, it would start sooner. How much sooner? That would depend on the number of people attending.

Orchestrating that kind of dance requires the sort of loosely-coupled event-driven programming at the heart of the Kynetx technology that Phil is creating. Toby is layering that orchestration on top of existing Internet standards: iCalendar (for events), vCard (for resources), LDAP (for directory services). I love that approach for two reasons. First, I’m forever being reminded that we have barely scratched the surface of what might be accomplished with these existing standards if we really put them to use. Second, I violently agree with Toby that automated systems need to build on the standards that people actually use.

Toby chairs the OASIS Web Services Calendar Technical Committee and is an editor of the WS-Calendar specification. If standards whose names begin with WS- give you the heebie-jeebies, take a deep breath. I guess at some point there will be a SOAP profile for WS-Calendar but for now it’s a straightforward set of iCalendar extensions that define intervals, sequences, and relationships.

The web succeeds, in part, because its atomic particle — the hyperlink — can be manipulated both by automated systems and by people. When systems use hyperlinks it’s called RESTful web services. When people do it’s called emailing links. We tend to forget how profoundly the dual nature of the hyperlink binds the web together.

The hyperlink is atomic with respect to location. It says where. The fundamental particle of calendaring — iCalendar’s VEVENT — is atomic with respect to time. It says when. To me it makes perfect sense that smart buildings and energy microgrids will schedule their interactions with us in the same way that we schedule dentist appointments and soccer games.

As I build out the elmcity network, launching calendar hubs in towns and cities around the country, I’ve been gathering examples of excellent web thinking. In Ann Arbor’s public schools are thinking like the web I noted that the schools in that town — and most particularly the Slauson Middle School — are Doing It Right with respect to online calendars. How, I wondered, does that happen? How does a middle school figure out a solution that eludes most universities, theaters, city governments, nightclubs, museums, and other organizations with calendars of interest to the public?

It’s not technology. Slauson Middle School is using the same web services (in this case, Google Calendar) available to everyone.

It’s not budget. The web services required for this solution are free.

It’s a way of thinking. I wrote to Slauson’s principal, Chris Curtis, to congratulate him on the excellent example his school is setting, and to identify the thinker responsible. That thinker turns out to be Chris Curtis himself. And it’s no accident that the implementation pattern on display at Slauson is also evident at Pioneer High. Chris did the same thing there before coming to Slauson.

Now I am not an educator, I only watch from the sidelines. But to me the K-12 “computer skills” curriculum seems uniformed by the kinds of core principles that will make students effective in a web-augmented world. So I asked Chris:

What you’ve done at Pioneer and now Slauson builds on an important conceptual foundation. Do you think that K-12 education could build that foundation?

Here’s what he said:

I agree with the notion that the basic principles of computer science should be generalized more broadly across the curriculum. In many ways, teaching computer and technology skills courses absent a meaningful application of them is ineffective and silly. We wouldn’t teach driver’s education and not let students drive. We don’t teach a “pencil skills class” in which we learn the skills for using this technology tool without an immediate opportunity to apply the skills and then begin to consider and explore the many ways that the pencil and writing change how we organize, perceive, and interact with our world.

This issue gets at the heart of the challenge of technology and education. Often the world seems to divide into separate interest areas: those interested in technology and those interested in education. The result is often to send the technology nerds to a room and make them teach technology and send the other teachers to their rooms and let them teach. In order to be effective at integrating technology into the instructional environment there has to be a merger between a technology interest and and educational interest, within the same person. The awareness of what is possible via technology resources and the desire to perform educational functions can lead to the educator realizing that a task could be done differently, more efficiently, more effectively, with more precision, or in some other manner improved.

Of course the schism that separates technologists from educators also affects practitioners of all kinds. In his most recent essay, Bret Victor meditates on this point:

My piano teacher played the piano. Like, all the time. He had to; it’s not easy to make a living as a musician. Between tours, his band played restaurants, bars, weddings, anywhere they could get a gig. He chose this life because he loved music, and when he taught music, he was teaching what he did. In that way, his teaching was honest.

…

Back in high school, I was taught differential equations by a working engineer. He spent his days at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and for whatever reason, chose to spend his evenings at the local community college. Differential equations wasn’t some abstract arcana to him. It was his bread-and-butter, and he apparently found it important enough to share.

…

My information theory professor would teach me information theory in the morning, and then spend the afternoon furthering the field. Sure, what she taught was somewhat elementary by her standards, but she was well aware that this elementary theory was the foundation on which her life’s research was built. It showed, and it stayed with me.

…

Real teaching is not about transferring “the material”, as if knowledge were some sort of mass-produced commodity that ships from Amazon. Real teaching is about conveying a way of thinking. How can a teacher convey a way of thinking when he doesn’t genuinely think that way?

I’m preoccupied with a related question. The way of thinking that I most want to convey is web thinking. Which is, by definition, openly available to anyone who wants to learn. Schools everywhere can observe and emulate what Chris Curtis is doing at Slauson. In so doing they can become practitioners in the way that Chris is. Their students might then see them as practitioners and learn from their examples.

I would be delighted if the elmcity project could help bootstrap that virtuous cycle.