Source: vialogues.com
Kevin Hodgson and I have been back and forth regularly discussing YouTube videos over the last two years. Sometimes they are heavily populated with dense conversation, sometimes others join in. Sometimes it is observational, other times it has been analytical. Suffice to say, we have made something together that is very like what Jim Groom speaks so passionately to in this video–a trailing edge technology.
Vialogues is a trailing edge tech. There isn’t anything new here. Sharing video? That’s been around since the beginning. How old IS YouTube? Sharing comments? If you can stand them, YouTube has those as well as annotations. Threaded discussion/Internet Relay Chat? I remember those from bulletin boards in the 90’s. All the tech in Vialogues has the feel of a police officer moseying a crowd along with the traditional, “Move along, nothing to see here.” But we all know there is plenty going on.
Vialogues takes threaded discussion, video sharing, and IM/IRC and makes a new conversational space. It is an integral part of my user innovation kit. Sometimes I just have sweet discourse with myself. Sometimes I try to engage public figures. Often it is just me and Kevin. This is a new discourse space as the rhetoric folk call it. But it is also a very old one as well. It is the water cooler, the pub, the classroom before and after. It is a fallow, asynchronous digital lot that you can call a community garden and then seed like an urban guerilla space. You tend it yourself or you get others to tend it with you as midwives and husbanders of annual and perennials flowers, herbs, and vegetables.
I think it is a feast. You really are the sysadmin of your own digital universe. You really can share that universe. Candide put it best, “That is very well put, but we must cultivate our gardens.” These are our digital gardens. Our students live in them although they often seems to be little monocultures (with all the unsustainability that entails). But they do live in them. I live in Vialogues sometimes just as I work in my own gardens and workspaces. Spaces like Vialogues remind me that the gap between the virtual and the real will be something the next generation will look at in this post and say, “What is he talking about? Digital is real.” Yes and my Vialogue gardens can be yours, too.