DYNAMIC INTELLIGENCE IN THE NETWORKED WORLD

Honors Lecture     Middle Tennessee State University     November 1999

By Richard L. Hannah, Professor of Economics, MTSU
rlhannah@frank.mtsu.edu

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INTRODUCTION

One of the benefits of the Honors Lecture Series is that students can
collectively experience the eclectic thoughts of MTSU's faculty. Thanks to
John Paul's thematics, this experience also pushes the speakers to step
outside our routine of thought and to consider a bigger picture.  While
the significance of what we say may not be so immediately obvious, I do
hope there is something of a haunting curiosity awakened in you for the
prospects and process of discovery conveyed in these honors lectures.  In
this context, today I shall strive to contribute to this tradition.  I
also add that in keeping with my tradition these comments with resource
links are uploaded to my homepage.

There are three points of this lecture.  One is to impress upon you that
reliance on the electronic network is already inescapable as an
information source.  Second is to suggest to you that the network is now
essential in expanding your intellectual capital.  Third is to provide few
elementary examples of a constructive learning network within the
technology framework.

Teaching and learning probably began in some systematic way when the first
humans observed and copied behaviors from one another, perhaps in the
interest of survival or crude entertainment.  The evolution of spoken
language greatly advanced the dispersion of knowledge though tribal
networks, and later the development of written languages extended the
scope of communication to whole societies and eventually the world.  These
examples of communication are still highly effective methods of teaching
and learning, but they are today only part of a multi-dimensional mosaic
that employs human biology and chemistry, and technology in intelligence
building.  My objective is to focus on the technology, and specifically on
that part of technology that lends itself to electronic networks, and even
more narrowly, to suggest how we can envision our own personal electronic
networks to cultivate intelligent learning in a rapidly changing world.

When we think of advances in the technologies of teaching and learning, we
introduce something different than human senses and gesture.  Referring to
my early human history example again, perhaps the first technology of
learning can be traced to people picking up a rock or parched stick and
etching a thought on a cave wall.  This marked the ability to publish and
record what's inside the mind without further reliance on human mediation
or imitation to carry the message through time and space.  

Actually other than obvious ease and convenience I do not think much has
changed in this technique as presented before the live forum.  As teachers
or presenters we still "etch" our thoughts on the blackboard, whiteboard,
or perhaps with electronic images.  At least from the teaching perspective
this method is still based on an individual projecting the abstraction
from the mind into physical or visual space, often accompanied by spoken
words.  Despite the advances of the past two decades, first with widespread 
use of computers and then with the networking of computers create the
Internet, we still continue to use these simple technologies.of hand
written and spoken symbols.

These observations underscore that the tools of teaching, learning, and
advancement of intelligence seldom become obsolete and that despite the
hype and glitz of the Internet, we need to keep its promise in
perspective.  What I argue is that the networked world is another, but
qualitatively and quantitatively very different layer in the progress of
human intelligence.  In this environment our intellectual advancement is
attached to the ever-expanding capacities of electronically networked
information and communication technologies.  Some of the jargon of the
related literature refers to this as computer mediated learning, but I
think the phenomenon much richer than that description.

Thinking in the Internet box is already too limited.  While I may use the
word euphemistically for convenience of expression, clearly technically
superior socio-economic infrastructures, with their rapid integration of
most telecommunications technologies, have already gone far beyond the
wonder of the Internet's ubiquitous email and the world wide
web.  However, the amount of effort and time going into the net alone does
exemplify the growing reliance of electronic networks.  Recent estimates
are that one million web pages are added per day and that the average
Internet user spends 7.1 hours per week online--more than twice the amount
of time spent reading magazines (Sources: Forrester Research, Inc.,
Jupiter Communications, NCSA, and Scientific American).  By comparison,
consider that 30 years were required for radio use to reach 60 million, 15
years for TV to reach 60 million, but only 4 years for the net to reach 90
million users (from 1995-98, see Business Week, 6/22/98, "The 'Click Here'
Economy.")  

Consider adding to this the proliferation of networking of a different
kind, cell phones.  Recent data indicate the number of U.S. subscribers
stands at approximately 82 million, and the U.S. is not even in the top
five countries in percent of market penetration (Cellular
Telecommunications Industry Association: www.wow-com.com).  Coupled to
this growth, the continuing evolution of wireless personal electronic
devices surely indicates that we are already rounding the corner and
approaching a ubiquitous device that places the power of the network in
your hand.  This emergent device includes not only the Internet as we
currently know it, but also the continuous growing number of cable TV
channels, phone, fax and just about anything else you can imagine in
digits.  I'd say yes, we are pretty well networked.  But are we any
smarter for it?


CLARIFYING THE TOPIC

Having given this introductory backdrop, I'd like to spend a few moments
articulating the descriptors of my topic.  

Dynamic 
Infers that the activities of teaching and learning are changing at a
speed that requires frequent adjustments to our personal learning
infrastructures.  Pre-electronic networks (e.g., postal speed and library
filtering) imposed much less strain on mainstream academics and students
to adjust to the speed of electronic transmission of thought and newly
generated knowledge.  This increased frequency of adjustment must now be
counted as a building block of intelligence, especially in economic
activity and in crucial core sciences such as theoretical physics and
medical science. 

These latter two have been driven to eliminate the delays inherent in
publishing in hard print journals by relying on online publications.  The
speed and spread of knowledge geared to lags in publishing in these fields
are intolerable in today's world.  These changes in these core fields of
science are illustrative of the fact that we still learn much the old
fashioned way--listening and reading--but the media mix in which we
function must change to include the electronic networks of respected
experts, credible sites, and interactive information exchanges.

With respect to dynamics, I also assert that the seemingly exponential
growth of the volume of electronically transmitted information requires
the continuous improvement our personal learning infrastructures in order 
to expand the potential for intellectual growth.  In practice, this means
different ways of organizing, integrating, recalling, producing, and 
applying information, and in the context of this synthesizing process, the
sharing of newly generated knowledge.  In short, the sheer volume of 
accessible information requires a qualitatively different way to exploit
its riches.  Like speed, volume is also a variable to which we must find 
ways to adjust.  A fancy word we might apply here is meta-intelligence,
that is the discovery of ways to know more about more.      

Intelligence
Is defined as the capacity to comprehend the relations of facts or
propositions in a reasoned context.  I'd add to this the power of the mind
to comprehend and rationalize information that is imperfect, incomplete,
or, ironically, excessively abundant.  (Parenthetically, in my humble
opinion this rationalization is one of the greatest applications of a
proficient learning of economics.)  Indeed, we can build upon our powers
of comprehension by simply sitting around and having intelligent
conversation together--that is, when we are really together in real space,
in today's jargon commonly referred to as face time.  However, in contrast
many different factors considered in direct human relations, in the
networked world we strip away the biology and chemistry of human
interactivity and reduce our intelligence building to the mediated meaning
of electronic pulses, often from anonymous or unfamiliar sources.

Networked
In my framework means three possibilities.  First is the network of brain
chemistry and electronic pulses that occur inside our head.  Second is
physically present human interaction.  Third is the electronic network,
such as the Internet, that is device dependent.  Now your generation will
likely see even these lines blurred as science advances to integrate the
three.  The best current metaphor I can think of is the movie,
"Shakespeare in Love"--a movie about a play about real time love.   Of
course the darker side of all this is networked wetwork, the movie
metaphor I have in mind for this one is of course, "Matrix."  Both serve
to highlight the steadfast reality of life that truth lies somewhere
between the human nature of Shakespeare and the imagination of sience
fiction.

But I digress.  My target is the intelligent network.  This admittedly and
conveniently ignores the noise in the data, the spam that now assaults the
senses in almost every medium, and the lure and allure of the majority of
media presentations that are not dedicated to creating a more intelligent
human being.  In short, I am fixed on the business of leveraging the
powers of the mind.  I am keenly aware that this addresses only a small
part of human activity.  Indeed, I think most of us would agree that this
electronic world has more crap than content for mental activity.  

The World
In this context is the global production of and access to
information.  This has changed the old institutional, sometimes glacial,
nature of knowledge transmission.  No longer can faculty or libraries
filter the total network for you.  A formidable challenge in the near term
is to identify for ourselves and for students those networked sources
worthy of academic promotion.   In short, the novelty of the old Internet,
and the more accurate characterization today of the merged-media
multi-synchronous digital context, is that the distributed electronics of
speed, volume, organization, access to and globalization of information is
in a wholly different class by itself compared to technological
predecessors.

EXAMPLES OF INSTITUTIONALIZED NETWORKED RESOURCES

.Gov's, .Edu's, & .Coms
As I'm sure most of you are aware, very credible and stable web sites are
already online.  On this point I can commend the federal government, and
of late I would also add state and local government sites.  For many
disciplines, or majors, this new wealth of electronically accessible
knowledge is quite remarkable.  In short, government is now playing a
direct and meaningful role in the transfer of primary information to
citizens.  This kind of open access is becoming known as the
democratization of information.

Faculty members at universities also offer information pertinent to the
subject matter of their expertise.  But I think the real action is in
library science.  The linking together of these vast storehouses of
already filtered knowledge is only one piece of the evolving
democratization of information, but it is oh so crucial, especially since
library science offers a framework for categorizing and cataloging
ephemeral online resources.    

My least favorite place to look is the .com's.  Too much advertising, too
much teaser information, and too unlikely to be there the next time you
look.  This is a dynamic of the worst kind.

-L's and Speed & Convenience
While speed in the networked world doesn't always equate with the progress
of intelligence, electronic networks are very efficient with respect to
problem solving.  Personally, I've seen this work extremely well with
professionally managed and highly focused Internet discussion
lists.  Imagine being faced with a problem at work that your firm has
never encountered and one that would take considerable time and financial
resources to solve.  You post a message to a professional list focused on
this topic and someone responds with a solution.  This applied
intelligence is not just a matter of speed, but the electronic convenience
of experience sharing, and at its highest end a matter of collaborative
intelligence building.

In order to illustrate the breadth of the above example, consider that the
estimated number of academic and professional lists, news groups, and chat
groups in 1997 was 3,808 (Association of Research Librarians,
1998).  Assuming a modest 200-300 per list yields an estimated magnitude
of expertise and influence of roughly a million professionals
and academics in these electronic pools of intelligence.

As a specific example I'd like to emphasize just how far things have come
in one of the fields in which I teach, employment relations.  This is an
area in which I've done a bit of research, at least enough to conclude
that most academic disciplines do not systematically engage students in
this learning medium.  The following is only a partial list describing the
range of lists for this one field of study.  [For more information see,
http://www.mtsu.edu/~rlhannah/erlists.html.]

Examples of Lists Specific to Employment Relations

AFFAM-L         		Affirmative Action Information 
BENEFITS-L      		Employee Benefits 
COLLBARG        		CB for Librarians
COMPENSATION-L  		Compensation 
DISPUTE-RES     		Alternative Dispute Res. 
FLEXWORK        		Flexible Work Environments 
FUTUREWORK      		Future Work 
H-LABOR         		Labor History 
HRNET           		Human Resources Network 
HRD-L           		Human Resource Planning & Dev. 
HRIS-L          		HRIS/HRMS/PAYROLL 
IRRA            		Ind. Rel. Research Assn. 
IOOB-L          		Industrial Psychology 
JOBANALYSIS     		Job Analysis & Classification 
JOB-TECH        		Job Technologies 
LABOR-EMP       		Labor/Emp. Law Group 
TRDEV-L         		Training and Development 
WORKFAM-L       		Work/Family Newsgroup 
IERN-L          		Intl. Employee Relations Net.
IWW-news        		IWW updates, history 
IWW 				San Francisco based Underground Lists:
PRIR-L          		Pacific Reg. Industrial Rel. 
HRNZ-L          		HR in New Zealand 
RHUMANOS        		Hispanic HR, I/O, & T&D 
UNION-D         		European Trade Unions 


There may be more, fewer, or no comparable lists in your chosen field or
career path, but do you know the answer?  While lists have been an
Internet phenomenon for several years now, we do not understand the
potential power of this medium in the network learning dynamic.  But even
these resources, popular today in the networked world, may be relics in
the short cycle of time in which you obtain a bachelor's degree.  However
elusive and short-lived, we must still try to grasp the significance and
usefulness of these pieces of network evolution in order to exploit the
opportunities that come with the dynamics of change. 


CHANGING RELATIONS

People to people relationships have been so dramatically altered by the
networked world that I need not delve into the already established
folklore of these activities.  But electronic networks have also
qualitatively changed the dynamics of relationships of people to their
government and to commerce, each expansive enough to be subjects other
lectures.  I'd like to focus on a relationship that is a bit more
abstract, and in my estimation, more encompassing for the topic at
hand.  That is the relationship of people to networked information.  This
is changing our intellectual heritage and related behaviors, and the
quality and potential of learning.

The punch line is that the part of our lives that is dedicated to
intellectual development now requires an explicit plan to incorporate the
networked world.  If we really believe in instilling, if not the desire,
at least the recognition of the necessity of lifelong learning as the
objective of higher education, then we must build personal networked
learning infrastructures.  I would be remiss if I did not offer just a few
practical suggestions.    


PERSONAL NETWORK LEARNING INFRASTRUCTURES

The jargon of the network changes rapidly, so what I'm about to say may
seem archaic even within a year or two.  But I hope I can at least
motivate you to think about the need to begin a rudimentary structure to
support your learning experience while you are here at MTSU, and then help
sustain your intellectual curiosity as an alumnus.  To complement this
educational analogy, consider the prospect for survival of businesses that
do not execute a well conceived electronic commerce strategy.  Today's
students who are to flourish in dynamically changing labor markets will
see this comparison and act on it.

(1) Roots
By the time you leave MTSU you will have a pretty good idea of those
faculty members who have enriched your lives most and with whom you'd like
to keep in touch.  I encourage you to include them in your evolving
electronic network.  Maintaining those touchstones of intellectual
interests is extremely important in career deliberations and just plain
old advice on life choices with which you will be faced.  You may not know
it, but I suspect we may have just a bit more learning to offer than what
you were exposed to in the classroom.  

I digress with a recent personal example of an email I received from a
student whom I have not seen for about 5 years and who is now employed in
Los Angeles, California by a large computer firm.  Like many of my former
students, she often contacts me if she thinks I can offer some
expertise.  I quote, 

"I wanted to contact you to keep you updated with respect to my career and
the impact my MTSU education (MBA).  For the past four months I have been
working at Xerox here in Los Angeles, California.  I am working as a
supplies analyst performing many business economics tasks.  I love
applying the tools learned at MTSU in the Managerial Economics class. I am
working with software called Minitab to perform regression analysis. My
experience has been great but I am trying to figure out a method for
"smoothing" the regression line when a product is declining in its life
cycle. Would you be able to recommend any quantitative methods, or
journals on this subject? Also, would you know of a discussion group that
could help me visualize this problem?"

(2) Post-graduate learning plan
Do you know where the best resources are on the Internet to support you
areas of intellectual and career interests?  For better or worse, these
electronic portals will likely be the primary authoritative source for
many professions.  This harks back to my earlier comments on knowing the
credible and stable web sites.  But now I add the requirement of
intelligent utilization of search engine logic, and being schooled in
where the electronic pools of topical intelligence are on the net.  Just
as being proficient in use of modern libraries, this is a crucial set of
skills for coping with the dynamics of knowledge change, absorbing the
expertise of professionals in your fields of interest, and in making your
own contributions.  

(3) Time
We all need our frivolities, such as electronic browsing and
chatting.  But let us not confuse entertainment with intelligent discourse
or information comprehension.  One additional observation based on my
experience of running a professional discussion list on employee
benefitsI've formulated what I vainly call Hannah's Rule.  Useful
Knowledge = cubed root of information volume.  

Also, there are only 24 hours in a day, and we are already seeing a shift
in the allocation of time away from traditional learning activities to
those that are networked based.  This is not tomorrow's, but today's
reality and in fact enjoys the support of educational policy in the
pursuit of networking K-12 schools and higher education institutions.

(4) Challenge to testing and evaluation of learning
On this matter I've frequently raised the ire of my academic
colleagues.  I accept the argument that some subject matter, or class
size, requires standardized testing that prohibits student access to
information sources during examinations, especially for K-12 level
learning.  But I strongly advocate the broadening of alternatives to
evaluate learning in higher education.  One intensified dynamic of
intelligence and learning brought by the networked world is abundance of
information.  How do we make sense of "too much information?"  How should
we test and evaluate students in this environment?  This question goes not
only to the utilization of information during an examination, but to how
students can be tested or evaluated through different electronic media.  

As an example, for several years I have experimented with email
exams.  Now, economics often requires fairly technical questions that are
most easily answered in abstract graphics or mathematical
expressions.  Email exams require students to reduce the reply to words
that explain the meaning of mathematical manipulations or graphics.  At
least for me, this pinpointed a glaring deficiency in the ability
articulate text based answers.  This would not be so bothersome except in
this case the inability to intelligently communicate the economic meaning
of the abstract manipulations was rather insightful, and to some degree
has caused me to reconsider my teaching and testing methods.  As an aside,
I am quite partial to the idea of requiring students to maintain an online
learning portfolio, a sort of public record of the content behind the
grades on the transcript.

(5) Blending
Electronic networks add a convenience factor, that of blending learning
with other life priorities such as work or family.  As contrasted to
sitting in a classroom, this greatly alters how time is allocated to the
learning process.  As with the email exam example I pointed out above, my
students unanimously preferred email to in-class exams because they could
set aside the response time according to their schedule, as contrasted to
a scheduled class meeting time.  Actually, students offered many rather
insightful comments on this topic, which I videotaped for telecast on my
TV program, Inside Academia--also a part of my experimentation of
utilizing networks.  (As a footnote, I add that from my videotaping of
class presentations for public viewing, the differences in presentation
qualities compared to traditional in-class presentations are rather
remarkable.) 

As a society we appear to be allocating time in qualitatively different
ways in the networked world.  In the nomadic or agrarian worlds, seasonal
time defined much of human activity.  In the industrial world clock time
became all-important.  As we close this century, terms like real time,
face time, deep time, and deferred time offer some insights into how we
have begun to prioritize our lives.


IS THE WHOLE GREATER THAN THE SUM OF THE PARTS?

I earlier mentioned my suggestion that knowledge the cubed root of total
information volume.  We might even be more restrictive by asserting that
intelligence is the cubed root of knowledge.  For non-mathematicians this
is roughly equivalent to saying that for every 1000 pages of text, there
are 2-3 pages of real intelligence to be gleaned.  (As a footnote, we
should recognize that the volume of information on the net is expanding
with time.  Information in time period t + 1 is functionally the
equivalent of volume in time period t raised to some power greater than
one: Information at time period t+1 = V at time period 1 to the power of
x, where for computational purposes, x >1.  X can be conceived as the
number of web pages, or some more refined measure of digital expression.) 

Now this is not as discouraging as first appears.  As individuals, we can
greatly alter the nature of these equations by being schooled in terms of
where the useful information resides in the network.  The technical
competence required is minimal.  The real payoff comes because the network
facilitates the growth of social intelligence.  In economic jargon we call
this an outcome of network economics, that is the value of the system
expands as the number of users expand.  As an example, consider how useful
email is to you as an individual if now one else uses it, then consider
the value to you as the number of users expands.  As different media
channels merge, and new ones are developed, the prospects for both
individual and social growth of intelligence are extremely intriguing, and
that is the note of optimism that I'd like to ring.


DOES THIS CHANGE THE NATURE OF TRUTH?

Human interaction via electronic networks has much promise.  I believe the
promise is the new dynamics of access, speed, convenience, intelligent
collaboration, and low costs associated with these attributes.  But
intelligence still has a dear price in time and study and thought.  In
this respect, I don't think electronic networks change the quality of
intelligence.  But the changed the mix of sources relied upon is already
underway.  Today and in the future, much more of our learning will be
network dependent.  The current challenge before faculty and students is
to begin to craft a more comprehensive framework for this new reality.  

Will this change the nature of truth?  No, I think there will just be more
of it.  If truth is state of alignment with intellectual values and
standards, then it is neither the alignment nor the standards or values
about which I've been speaking.  Rather than a state (read static), I
think we have entered an era of dynamic adjustment to achieve our personal
and collective intellectual aspirations.  If the networking of truth can
cause the collapse of communism, imagine what it can do in the
construction of intelligence. 

When I was a young student, so sacred was the book that I honestly thought
that if something was in print, it must be true.  Fortunately, my youth
was not overly misguided by what I read because the material was filtered
by libraries, by teachers, and by a context of values that eventually
allowed me to discern the content and intent of what I read.  Even in the
best cultivated of educational environments, this is much less likely
today.  In the past the learning plan was institutionalized and
stable--that is, more controlled.  In the present the learning plan is a
bridge under construction from the physical to the networked world, at
least as far as access and content are concerned.  In the futurewell, I
must leave that to your imagination.

I always appreciate the opportunity to speak before this group.  The
experience forces me not only to think, but also to declare publicly what
I'm thinking.  Thank you for your time and attention.

References Relied Upon and Suggested Resources

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Forrester Research

GVU's WWW User Surveys

Hannah's Listof Employment Relations Lists

Internet Society

Jupiter Communications

Netcraft Web Survey

NUA Internet Surveys

SiteMetrics Web Content Survey

U.S. Government's Electronic Commerce Policy

Internet Laws
Moore's Law: Semi conductor performance doubles every 18 months
Metcalfe's Law: Value of a network grows by the square of the increase in
	users
Hannah's Law: Knowledge is the cubed root of information (and intelligence
	is the cubed root of knowledge)