Integration of services and content

The information revolution and the development of society may have brought along an idea that was already hidden in the incident of the closure of the patent office in Prussia, which was closed down at the end of the 19th century with no significant discoveries or inventions. Nobody expected quantum physics and the theory of relativity, computers or even a large part of modern chemistry to come. People seemed to live in the belief that everything had already been invented. This can be added as a sign that discovering something new is much more complicated than before, and we can be reliably thrown into a particular dystopian society of scepticism.      

But the situation turned out to be different. There is no finite number of discoveries that can be detected by a person, with each discovery reducing the chances of others. On the contrary, man is intensely drawn into what is often referred to as an ecological paradigm - his being and activities in the world are closely connected with the environment in which he finds himself with other people with whom he is in contact.    

This fact has an interesting reflection on the creation of digital content. For some of it, there is something we could call a “redundant culture," a kind of content that deals with a topic that has been worked on many times in an unoriginal way, instead of using existing artifacts to find a way to connect them. An example is the manuals on how to write a diploma thesis. There are dozens of them, and they usually differ in details that would be more suitable for an article or motivational lecture than as an impulse to create a new book.    

This situation has several sources, some of which we would like to draw attention to. One of the nicknames given to contemporary culture is that it is a culture of remixing, i.e. a way of working with objects that are newly interconnected and intertwined in a specific context to communicate what is needed. However, the lack of leadership of the school and society to this approach became a problem. It seems more valuable to create something new than to rely on the work of others. Most people are not very good at connecting and using existing artifacts.  

Apart from the fact that connecting content or services is not devoted to education, people who do not know are either not aware of this or ignore it. There are also other essential elements. The first is tradition - we are not used to making good use of the objects of others, and it is still socially prestigious to still create something of our own. The example of a handbook for writing a diploma thesis is convenient because the structure is known in advance. There is no need to read anything new, to rely on your own experience and examples. The result is your publication, which can be better accepted socially. 

Finally, there are also legal and technical limits. The current legislation does not support remixing, so the effort to integrate content can often fail on copyright aspects. Compared to the bill in the USA, the EU environment is also rigorous for educational institutions and educational use. The technical level can also be problematic, where the integration of various services and content can be complex or, as a result, difficult to use, so it seems faster and more efficient to create something new. 

Beth Kanter in 2011 proposed a kind of analogy to Bloom's taxonomy - the taxonomy of educational objectives, which are applied in an open creative online environment. There are four elements: openness, instruction, involvement, and co-creation. All four are necessary prerequisites for it to be possible to talk about remixing content at all.  

It is necessary to ensure its openness so that it is possible to use individual artifacts or services in new contexts. Openness must have a technical component but also a legislative branch. Openness is often also placed in the social context, as it reduces the exclusivity of (somewhat) the preferred groups. Although reducing differences alone will not prevent it, it is a prerequisite for any activity in this area.

Instruction is a concept that we have already reflected on in the part that dealt with working out loud. It is not enough to open data, services, or objects, rather, it is necessary to look for ways to share individuals' procedures or thought concepts with each other. Guidance is an attempt to abandon isolated solipsism in favor of sharing. 

Involvement is the third stage of taxonomy and refers to the basic ideas of connectivism and practical pedagogy. At this stage, man ceases to act as an isolated being but seeks connection and builds his personal, educational environment. It is the reversal of perspective from individual to society that is the fundamental point of this goal.   

Kanter considers co-creation to be the highest layer. It explicitly includes both social interaction and the connection and use of the work of others. An increasingly complex world necessarily requires that people be able to co-create intensively together. In this context, Teilhard de Chardin writes about the noosphere, in which human consciousness is interconnected, and something new and perfect is created. The world is not finished, but it is constantly happening (in fieri).

In the section dealing with the organization of information, we touched on digital information curation. Now we would like to explore this phenomenon from the perspective of content integration because that's what curation is all about - we need to be able to find digital objects that we effectively integrate into a whole that will be meaningful and usable for users.  

We want to illustrate this connection on the Model The 5 Models Of Content Curation, which is based on the environment of museums and galleries. They try to emphasize that their purpose is not only the archiving of objects but also their social responsibility, which is reflected in the need to present and promote collections of artefacts. The dimension of the curator as someone close to the artistic environment is emphasized - he makes a selection, extracts information, thinks about which line of the story is interesting for the consumer and in what form to pass on to him the information he wants to communicate. This model assumes five steps to work with content, but some of the steps can, of course, be modified to meet other industry requirements.

The aggregation of information artifacts presupposes their systematic acquisition, collection, retrieval, and organization. It can be assumed (which is essential for real curatorial applications) that we collect more resources than we can use in the application. However, this does not mean that we should not store and process them in information structures that can be further worked with. Of course, various social networks or participatory information gathering can also be used at this stage.   

Distillation and selection of interesting information for a given context already presuppose a clear distinction of the topic. This is based on some broader logical intent but also the knowledge of aggregated data. By having a general idea of ​​what we have, we can better identify the collection's final shape and thematic profile. 

Highlighting and identifying what is interesting about the artifacts is one of the most challenging phases of curation. It assumes that the curator will extract from the sources what is exciting and important, work with exciting quotations, condense the content, and paraphrase well. It thus prepares an  “informationally dense" object from a large amount of information. There are several ways to proceed in this phase, but you can meet with a model where we create extracts from a book or longer text and with texts that are filled with links to further reading.      

Mashup and mixing consist of working with different forms of content. One of the things we probably tend to do is a preference for one form of media, which we promote at the expense of others. In this step, they can be linked, but also objects created by someone else can be used. The curator's task is not to create something that already exists insufficient quality elsewhere but to connect, supplement, and properly combine. 

The connection of context, the creation of timelines, and individuals' integration is the last phase, which consists of incorporating individual new digital artifacts into a logical framework. A collection is not a disordered set without context, but something thoughtfully structured, analytical, supplemented by a link. The curator should think about the existence of individual objects and their quality and the whole, its sound, consistency, and comprehensibility. 

Such a procedure is vital if we generally try to think about how to integrate content. It's not just curation, which is probably the broadest and most adequate theoretical framework, but generally a thought structure. If we want to connect content, we must have some, identify and highlight the key elements, and then integrate them into new units. In this regard, one can also see how close remixing is to contextually sensitive art and creative activity in general. That novelty is not given by creating particulars but by the product of context,  the network of relationships, and to produce a path to work with those relationships.

It is possible to integrate not only the content but also the services a user uses. Currently, a person that has a phone with the Android operating system downloads an average of about 80 applications. Many of them work with similar data, which are not easily permeable to each other. If we analyze our work processes and procedures, we can easily find that we are doing many things that would be more efficient to solve otherwise, namely algorithmically.     

It will be useful to use some illustrative examples :

1) When staying in the city, we have turned off WiFi on the phone because most networks are not open and safe, and a turned-on network adapter draws power from the battery. But at home, we want to have WiFi turned on.

2) I store articles that interest me in my Pocket, but I would like my students to be able to read them easily as well.

3) When I write an article on a blog, I want it to be automatically shared with a group on Facebook and Twitter. 

These examples are, of course, relatively easy to solve by user intervention. Still, at the same time, it turns out that there may be a way to integrate individual services and automate the process. All three situations described above can be easily handled with services such as IFTTT or Zapier. These are tools that allow you to integrate services or other tools and connect them based on some action - when the GPS shows the coordinates of the home, then WiFi in the phone turns on. If different, it is deactivated. Or, when a post is published on a blog, its title and annotation are obtained and published on Facebook.    

Integrating services and tools is beautiful at first glance because it allows one to get rid of some routine tasks that only burden and delay a person. The better one can use such tools, the more energy can be devoted to where it is needed. For example, the basic idea of ​​the GTD method is that the brain's most significant burden is that it has to deal with unnecessary surgical problems, which prevents it from doing “big things". 

The integration of services is also undoubtedly crucial in terms of competition and diversity. Large corporations such as Facebook or Alphabet try to spend as much time as possible on them, i.e. not to have the motivation to go anywhere. The competition can never offer such a comprehensive system of tools, so the possibility of interconnection is one of the ways to solve this problem. On the one hand, fragmentation of services is one of the current trends which is almost essential for the Internet, but at the same time probably not practical for users due to ergonomics, UX, and data inconsistencies. Developers have to strive for great complexity. Tools such as IFTTT make it possible to promote the openness of services (openness to cooperation and data exchange), which is also an undeniably positive and significant effect.       

From the user's point of view, there is another interesting problem. Few people can sufficiently analyze structures in their behavior that could be captured algorithmically. This ability of specific reflection proves to be very demanding and is one of the positive effects of the development of computational thinking. The second area to think about is finding out what such things can be good for. Technology should serve a person and support his work or other procedures, not the other way around. At the same time, however, this interaction process is never one-way.