Mindtrek 2007 (6)

Lifelong wiki

On Friday morning the Dutch delegation paid a visit to the Tampere School of Media and Arts, a department of the Tampere University of Applied Sciences, where Cai Melakoski was the host. Jarmo Viteli of the Hypermedia Lab paid also a visit and explained how his institute was working. In fact you could only start working in the institute by bringing along a grant from an institute or a company. If the subject is interesting another grant can be requested for further study. Eventually the researcher can end up with a teaching assignment. Many subjects are being covered. On Thursday the Dutch delegation had heard about a study into game development. At the Hypermedia Lab research is performed into the methods of concepting. By describing the methods the researchers and the sponsors of the study, among which is Nokia, the researcher hope to be able to produce a description of effective methods and hope to produce a toolbox for concepting or ideation as the researchers call the first phase of developing a game.

During his talk Jarmo mentioned some research items and hit upon a lifelong wiki or a personal wiki. This created some rumour. He indicated that this could be an item for further research. When people start a wiki early in their life, they can create a personal wiki about their life. Later on they can store their wiki on their stick and present it to a candidate employer.

The idea is interesting. Presently there are already books in which parents can describe the first days of their kids, put in the photographs of the first steps of their child. But with digital media it can be even more interesting with movies and sound. When the kids are in primary school they can keep their own log and integrate the report cards from school. When they are in high school they can integrate their school assignments and reports and the collection they have built up of stamps or songs. But they can also integrate the messages they send to Facebook, Twitter or Jaiku. Of course also the official documents can be integrated, but not be tampered with.

Much of this kind of software is already created by social sites like MySpace and Facebook, but the difference is now that the software stays in the private realm. It will need a search engine, not just text, but preferably also of image searching. Besides this type of software one would need extracting software to create a public file for getting admission to a university or for preparing a job interview. This file could be sent to a potential employer. Or one could take a USB stick along. The USB sticks will have to have a capacity beyond the present 2GB. In a jesting mood, I have suggested that my grandsons of 2 and 4 years would need a USB stick of a Terabyte by the time that they reach the age of 18 years.

I wonder what will happen to the stick at the end of a person’s life. Will the stick be burnt during the cremation like the horse was buried in the grave of a general? Or will the stick be archived in the national archive?

Blog Posting Number: 887

Tags: wikipedia