Dear my readers (if there is even any), those who have subscribed to my RSS or just casually visit this rather quiet blog: I am now migrating to Tumblr, and integrating my portfolio with it. I will keep this Wordpress blog, but will not update it. This domain will eventually redirect to the new blog. For now, please peruse your way to serendipified.tumblr.com until further notice.

Thank you! :)

ThinkQuest has always been my labour of love. It’s not even a labour. It’s been always love. It was love at first sight. Late 2000, I stumbled upon a participant’s entry while searching for information. I hooked up, looked for ways I could find more information before I finally decided to participate. I was so engaged with the concept: a dynamic and challenging way to do something that I loved to do that time (making a website), a fun medium to find friends, and the excitement of feeling involved in an ongoing project of global scale discussing global issues, with people I never met.

The excitement factor was the most that kept me going. Communicating, sharing text and pictures to strangers that were closer to the heart than they seemed to be. Instant gratification of sharing ideas with no preceding judgments. It feels fairly different than doing this with the friends, or teachers, or any adults you’ve dealt or known with before. We are not normally eluded by someone’s backgrounds. We focus, rather than what should be done, or who will make that done, in what could be done. We don’t see the people, we don’t judge the people. Alright, we might see (and must) see the people first, but we skip that fast to see beyond. It’s best done with newly made friends who got recommended by another newly made friends who got recommended by, well, a fairly newly made friend from last year, or a couple of months ago. The more diverse it is, the much more fun.

Then there is the phase where we finalise the team and starts to build relationship and communication through variety of methods. I’ve had forums that lasted throughout and filled with hundreds or even thousands of posts. Then I’ve also had mailing lists which serve as a sole form of interaction, or just one that acted as file sharing device. We also exchanged instant messaging accounts, and in special cases, phone numbers. We got into action right away. Set things up. Then begins the next fun step: defining the topic. Firsthand email or message got broadcasted, asking everyone to enlist topic choices as far as they can go. Democratic process pretty much ensued. Shortlisting, voting, everything. We challenge each other’s ideas, sharpens topic choices as they get coned down to a top three. Everyone of us starts fiddling around with ideas and possibilities. We might make an awesomely insane interactive map showing historic data. Try having a Flash game defended as something that will be a turn-based strategy game letting users decide on an epidemic disease. We’ll likely use an exotic language never been before used in the 75,000+ richness of ThinkQuest Library. Yes, this will be something. We’ll make a legacy!

Planning, planning, more planning before executing. Something that not all will like doing since it involves routines. Setting up deadlines, milestones, meeting points, task divisions. We’ll define each person’s skills and assign that someone with the appropriate tasks. You do the research and writing. The other will do the programming and design, and the rest stays with language translation, art-making or photography. Sometimes one person could traverse another realms, if they like doing so. No problem. When will we consult the coaches? When we have problems—or we have something delicate to do that needs advices. Can we use this specific image from Time magazine? How can we visit the forest reserve that seems to have a difficult bureaucracy? All the difficult questions.

When A starts writing, B would start making site visits. Then C stays in front of his screen tweaking his templates, before uploading to the forum to show his creations to the team and coaches. D assists A in writing, and will continue translating written materials into Spanish. E, the youngest, likes to draw and makes good art. She also wants to help C with some Flash animation. While B does his job observing on-site, he takes notes on his laptop, sends over original pictures and text to A and D. Coaches will take the back seat, observing the forum, attending to IM chats and probably phone calls, to make reviews and recommendations. Oh, did I mention that A and B lives on the same country, but different city; while C is fairly isolated hundreds of kilometres away. D lives in a place in a timezone that is about 8 hours difference. E lives in a different country than D, even, although in the same timezone. Can you even imagine they speak 3 different languages? Or that some of them have never built any website? Or, to complete this, someone must walk 9 kilometres away to find the nearest Internet cafe? Some of this was a real condition that I experienced in ThinkQuest as a student.

What’s next? Personally, I would not be surprised to find myself always wanting to go home after school just to immerse myself in the forum. After finding some surprising facts and done some work, I would really look forward to the weekend for a monthly team meeting. Getting up at 5am for the meeting seems to be a delightful breakfast. I keep daydreaming about what I’d do next, in any condition: during school breaks, or even during study hours! It is so engaging that, to quote one participant’s words in a ThinkQuest promotional video, “we actually made time for it because of enjoyment.” How amazingly, yet pleasantly, true.

Milestones reached, a masterpiece is being crafted. A masterpiece of everyone’s hard labour and pride. Obstacles exist, in a way that is sometimes also harsh. We argued. We missed some milestones set. Idealism vs. reality. We have to dump some dreams in order to realistically make this happen and finish. Not a problem, after all, even though you don’t reach the sky, you’ve aimed for it. Then you fall for the immediate checkpoint: the cloud.

Last minute rush and sleepless nights often concluded things, in a fun, exciting, and sometimes in an emotionally feel-good way. You’ll finish the seven or eight months hardwork by paying tributes to friends and families, letting them to know and visit your freshly-brewed website. You and your teammates savour it to bits, perhaps should also regret something that hasn’t been included because of time or other constraints. But it’s fine, you’ve finally finished a huge project. If you don’t even finish it, you surely had learned something: perhaps there are something that didn’t work. Let’s make it better next time.

This personal outlook that I’ve had is what I believe will be eventually missing from today’s ThinkQuest. I daresay, ThinkQuest competitions have lost the charm of a personal learning experience. It no longer supports the kind of excitement that builds in gradually, and finishes off so memorably. In the competition (now should be with “-s”), every time I see the winners list each passing year, the quality keeps degrading. Moreover, they feel pretty generic. People have focused more on winning. People have also focused more on technical matters than the quality of the topics and information. Same faces keep churning out year after year. Attention to details has vanished somewhere. So many to complain about.

It feels like manufacturing. A robotic process. Year after year.

The latest models of the competition lacks dynamism, the nostalgia of challenge, the excitements. Excitements are limited to winning the awards and going to ThinkQuest awarding ceremony.

The true gem of ThinkQuest is that it starts with serendipity with some predictability. It starts with a question. It never, and will never ever start with predefined curriculums. It should be contained in a model that sparks curiosity, opens the widest doors of participation, and a process throughout that is very dynamic, providing continual challenges of the mind and soul.

What should the next ThinkQuest be like? Whether it is a competition, or a competition with an embedded project learning environment (or vice-versa), it should induce questioning, provide a platform that is less intimidating and more accommodating. Make it less complicated, less cluttered for students (and teachers) to participate. Perhaps, a simpler platform, with less complicated attributes, would be able to spark more participation. Or, the same attributes, the same platform, but with a more personal or community approach. So much about the intangible aspects that will propel this in the future, not rules, nor curriculum demands.

After a while, it’s been my thought that what brought me this far with ThinkQuest is all that I’ve said - not rules, not curriculum demands, not teachers. And yet, my teams and I still did project-based learning. Maybe anyone would care to conclude if I’ve even developed 21st Century Learning skills?

ThinkQuest as a competition is already a star on its own. Don’t kill it just for the sake of any format. Are we killing creativity? Are we killing imagination? With all the tools we have, do we have what it takes to bring it alive? ThinkQuest isn’t owned by any party or institution. It belongs to us all, it has always ever been so.

I was invited to watch a press screening session for Merah Putih, the first in a trilogy on post-1945 struggle for true independence during the Dutch aggression. This film takes perspective from the story of several cadets with origins from different regions and ethnic groups in Indonesia, who bravely applied for army recruitment to help push the invasion away. It begins from each of the private lives of several main characters in their productive ages: Amir (Lukman Sardi), an obedient Muslim, teacher and husband to a very good wife; Tomas (Donny Alamsyah), a straightforward, firm and faithful Christian from north Celebes; Soerono (Zumi Zola), pictured being so close with his sister and living together, overprotecting each others for they lost their parents during Japanese occupation; Marius (Darius Sinathrya), a spoiled, confident ‘priyayi’ who took everything by pride; Dayan (T. Rifnu Wikana), pictured as a down-to-earth, mature individual with Balinese descent. These casts are supported by Melati (Astri Nurdin), a down to earth, obedient wife to Amir who aspires ‘normal’ peaceful life and Senja (Rahayu Saraswati), the beloved sister of Soerono.

The film opens with the massacre of Tomas’ family, making him utterly determined to give all his life for the nation. Like him, the other cadets also have distinct motivations, for example, Amir saw one of his students dying during a raid. The stories then intertwine as from these separate lives, they joined the army. Like multi-charactered stories, conflicts preceded everything as a form of knowing each others, fights involved which slowly dissolved into acts of sacrifices, realization of goals and finally, understanding and tolerance. Differences among them, be it ethnical and social backgrounds are emphasized, perhaps to make the message clear that this is a story about unity, after all.

Story progresses quite in an agreeable speed, although it’s only in a short time that these cadets finally face their real tests on the field. Real tests don’t only mean in the realm of ‘textbook vs. reality’, but to the questioning of their own identities and motivation. The cadets soon face the facts that they must rely on their own, and not the entire army (or ‘textbook’), to fight. It is in this time that they find the challenge to the biggest fear, what it means to fight beyond the uniforms. That being a cadet isn’t all about pride, or about revenge, or personal motivation.

This movie is claimed as “Hollywood-style” war, armed with acclaimed special effects experts, written by New York Times bestselling author Rob Allyn. I took no surprise in that as perhaps this is the first time that an Indonesian action movie has ever really used some cool explosives and rather explicit bloodshot scenes. I see some weaknesses though. I was expecting more suspense or tense, alas, it is relatively light to absorb. Humors aside, which I think is okay, I feel that this film hangs in the middle between either the serious war action feature (with the stunts, explosions and explicit scenes) and family/young generation with the value teachings and crunchy humours. I think the producers must decide whether they aim to educate the younger audience, and omit the blood scenes, or make a full-featured epic with some serious suspense and thrill.

Here’s a trailer.

IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1438496/
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Ever since the bombings in Jakarta luxurious hotels of Ritz-Carlton and JW Marriott in Friday, July 17, 2009, people in Twitter have been gearing up a huge online movement called Indonesia Unite. They show this unity by hashtagging their tweets with #indonesiaunite, appending a “twibbon” or a digital ribbon showing the Indonesian flag, some even overlay their avatar with half-transparent Indonesian flag, showing just 30% or 40% of their original avatars.

At first, I thought this was a good initiative based on solidarity. I started similar thing during 2002 Bali Bombing, and named it Indonesia Unite as well, but since there was no Twitter, I started a web ring and allowed people to copy and paste codes to their blogs (Blogs were very popular that time). It was just a badge, not a movement, and I had no intention in having it everywhere - since blogs were starting to be popular and people loved badges in their blogs. I didn’t take the effort to spread the word everywhere. It’s voluntary.

But I resorted to a second thought.

Back to 2009 event. I originally had no problem with the movement. I love the intention. @barijoe has a good statement on the intention and why we should support it:

Well here’s my thought. Most of us bloggers and twitterers aren’t in the armed forces, so we don’t know anything about physically defending the country. Many of us aren’t politicians, legislators or bureaucrats either, so there is not yet anything concrete we can do to make Indonesia better. Most of us are still in school or are simple employees, so we do not have the capital to fund something significant.

His point is this is what we (he would define “we” as social networkers) can do, at the simplest level, to contribute.

People over at Twitter also argue that this is just a way to show our support to a cause. Others would say an attack in Indonesia is an attack to our economy. Spend our money to local shops. Eat local food. Spread the word in every possible online and offline movements. The mainstream media has now been involved. There have been a couple of print media coverage, some TV and more soon. This movement has also been recognized by international media and fellow “tweeples”, including international celebrities (more and more celebrities are online and we listen them more than anything).

To sum everything up before I continue blabbering, here are what I think so good about this movement:

• It shows the power of social media. Whatever that means, the medium helps the cause to spread quickly, by words. (And images.) Snowball effect. A good example of marketing.
• It gets people a chance to be more participatory and proactive in their environment. Citizen journalism could be included in this point.
• An experimental example for further studies.

But that’s it. Here are the flip sides of it:

• It is not so much of a nationalistic issue. It might be inspiring for a while, but it’s off the moment of being the first. The #iranelection green avatar movement precedes this. And Iranian movement was more of a grand-scale and much more appropriate from a nationalistic perspective.
• People might call it a way to be patriotic, and being a closet nationalist is better than nothing at all. But I argue: what is defined as being a nationalist, a patriotic? Shouting it over and over again? A hype? A jargon? A support for a cause?
• It’s getting spammy. People start to overlay their avatars in an industrious manner that reduces visibility and readibility. People start to append hashtags where the actual tweets aren’t about the movement, or too mundane. Watching Harry Potter #indonesiaunite? How does that sound? They pollute my timeline. I have to unfollow each of them then to get rid of these, but that means I have to lose friends and updates.
• It shows how Indonesians are more reactive than proactive. We could be awaken, but we need a steady, long term plan, not emotional shouts and pointless talks.
• Are we really not afraid? In what sense? It’s better to admit that we’re afraid, and that we increase alert.
• It also shows how we are very overwhelmed by social media. We are being overreactive. People like hype and new things, and to be the first. People compete to be pioneers. There’s a difference between concrete, good and well-planned activism than emotional and spontaneous ones.

Here’s a good write-up (in Indonesian) on the ideas against this movement.

Some recommendations:

• Rather than being excessively talking about it, why not create a specific common denominator actions that people of all walks of life can do, and start from there.
• Don’t be too spontaneous and risk consistency.
• Start from our own families. Protect them and educate our children.
• Be environmentally alert.
• Respect the heightened security measure.
• Start a long-term commitment. This could be back to families, or set, for example, a foundation or movement that helps for example, local economy.

“Onwards” by James Jarvis (via cubicle17)

It was a bland, blue day
When I talked to myself
in a radiance of confidence
That I can not

That I can not feel,
that I can not see
and I can not predict

Immaculate.
That’s how we want
life to be:
Perfect, and pre-manifested.

It simply isn’t.
Life, is serendipity.
It manifests later
when the day ends.

Life wakes up on the past,
lives on the present
and breathes on the future
It is only alive, by then.

Imagine and hope,
Rise and fall.
We think life
isn’t about us.

But then life changes,
In a quick after-hour bliss
And by this moment,
our eternity is true.

for Lintang Ernaningtyas Nugroho

I was researching about folksonomy lately and I thought to collect the thoughts in a concise form I’d write something here.

So what is folksonomy? Literally, it’s a combination between “folk” and “taxonomy”. “Folk” references to the lay, casual people (it is plural). “Taxonomy” refers to a system or convention to classify information. So together, they mean system or convention to classify information that is done by lay people. It’s a term coined by Thomas Vander Wal. Ofcourse that is a rough definition of it. But to my own words, instead of using a professionally or predetermined convention of classification system, we let the masses to classify the streams of information. Sounds difficult? Think tagging on Flickr and Delicious, or Wordpress. Instead of having a systematic hierarchy where users could not influence, tagging allows free flows of characters, words or vocabulary to label an information, thus making it possible for one information to have more than one way to classify it.

One easy comparation is how Yahoo! has always organised information in traditional, systemised, predefined hierarchy. Remember the good old Yahoo! homepage where you had the option to seek for information by the search box or by browsing one of the major categories and narrow down? Compare that to the way Delicious or Flickr organise their own information. Delicious and Flickr do not ask you to follow a fixed trail down the road to find an information. It is still a trail, but is more serendipitous. Surely a different way of finding information than if we were in a public library where we hunt down to the exact fixed place. Information is not stored in a fixed place in folksonomy.

Delicious and Flickr have always been hallmark examples of folksonomy. However, they were not the first. A desktop software from Lotus has apparently used it back in the nineties. A software called Bitzi helped classify digital documents on the Web. In the offline world, we also sometimes tag/label things in our homes randomly. “Clothes” can be tagged “pants” and “shirts” too.

What are the benefits and drawbacks of folksonomy versus taxonomy? Here is a summary:

Benefits

• democracy/freedom to put relevance, primarily personal relevance
• allows for serendipity in information-seeking, providing more possibilities
• bottom-up classification allows for more details
• financially inexpensive to deploy
• cognitively also inexpensive, does not need rocket science
• useful where types and scale of information are grand and random, information organises themselves
• individual and community benefit

Drawbacks

• ambiguity: synonyms, homonyms, plysemies, depth of classification
• can pose threat to efforts in creating a semantic web
• can be very detailed and specific, but is very noisy
• can take a long time to have an established labelling
• possibly hamper search speed in circumstances where speed is important

So that’s all I have for now folks. It’s been a productive read today. I have not implemented tagging myself for this blog, I should start somewhere soon. ;)