The last generation of 20th century students pioneered learning online with desktops, plugged in laptops, and now mobile laptops.GOLDEN SWAMP defined:
The aspect of the internet where what is known by humankind has nestled into the open online network forming a self-vetting ecosystem that allows everyone to learn from the same virtual page.
Lo! gold in our swamp
A recollection by Judy Breck:
My first glimpse of the golden swamp was in 1999. I recall sitting in a small back room on 33rd Street in Manhattan, in the shadow of the Empire State Building. The graduate student editors there whom I oversaw in my contentmaster role at homeworkcentral.com were at their usual task of browsing the internet for quality links for their subjects. When an editor found a website that met her standards for quality, she would select individual web pages from the site and embed each of them into a packet for a small subject within their topic of her expertise, such as literature, history, math, biology, physics. Each editor would embed each page link into every topic for every subject that he saw as related to the subject of the page, including those subjects of other editors.
On the day I remember realizing unexpected nuggets of gold were emerging from the swamp of subjects, I saw a packet of links to pages about William Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. I do not recall the exact links, but they were about a range of subjects related to the famed building: a 15th century England web page, plays performed there by Shakespeare, the building's architecture, the modern reconstruction, plays performed in pits, the Elizabethan Theatre genre. As I looked at this little list of links on my screen, I realized that none of my individual editors had assembled this cluster of topics. The packet was just there. It had emerged on its own. Lo! gold in our swamp.
By the summer of 2000, homeworkcental.com had about 35,000 subject packets containing around 150,000 links to webpages in the open internet. Well over half of the subject packets appeared in at least one other packet. Many packets and links appeared in several other packets. The topic of American Revolutionary Battle of Lexington and Concord showed up in our packets about the American Revolution, British 18th Century Wars, Minutemen, Muskets, Boston History, and the biographies of Samuel Adams and Paul Revere.
Because the packets we made were linked to each other, and not just been organized in a hierarchy like a tree, studying something at homeworkcentral.com could be done by following ideas with related meaning -- in whatever dimension ideas led: up, down, laterally in our swamp of packets and links. In the earth sciences packet, our graduate student expert built a packet about paleoclimatology, which he also put into the packet on paleontology, where a student could choose to click to the packet on paleobotany placed there by our Ph.D botanist who created the plant sciences packets in the biology section -- where the exploring student's curiosity could lead into packets on ethobotany, the plant kingdom, and other packets linking out to online experts in these fields.
In May of 2000, when we took the first metrics to measure how many visits our packets were getting, the number came back at four million for that month. We had never advertised homeworkcentral.com. It had grown virally since 1997. The metrics we were looking at described the natural growth of people looking for study subjects online. At the time, I was surprised at the distribution of visits among topics. Math got a huge part of the traffic, and a few science subjects also had very high percentages. The rest of the visits formed a long descending curve out to several subjects receiving less than ten hits. Years later I realized I was looking at a power law curve -- homeworkcentral.com had a long tail.
One of the efforts that helped spread the word about homeworkcentral.com was the weekly review I wrote from 1997-2000 of five, and later eight, "top" links for learning. Producing the newsletter required me to do a lot of looking and evaluating of learning links. A trend I noticed from the earliest years was that knowledge experts who produced webpages very often listed their favorite links for their topics on those pages. They were doing exactly the same thing the homeworkcentral.com graduate student editors were doing. They were creating the golden swamp effect. The best links for the topic on which they were experts began very early in the internet's growth to form natural packets online, with the links in those packets selected by the people who knew the topics well.
During those early and chaotic dotcom days, the little company that created homeworkcentral.com did not survive the education establishment repositioning into the internet. It seemed clear to me, because I had watch the golden swamp effects emerge on their own, that the internet itself would spontaneously create a network like the editors put together at homeworkckentral.com. Indeed, that has happened, so far roughly. In the next decade, the golden swamp effect will quicken, and you can help. But I am getting ahead of the story.
At the same time we were building our packets, and the experts where linking up their topics online, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had noticed and were harnessing the effect of folks in general and experts in particular flocking to the better links. Lo! Google. As it must have been for Page and Brin, it was obvious to me that the organization of knowledge online was a spontaneous thing. There were laws at work in an entirely new place, the internet.
During this same time network discovery, Bruce Clay and other pioneers of search were inventing the techiques that would become SEO search engine optimization.
In 1998, Steven Strogatz and Duncan Watts were trying to figure out patterns of communication among fireflies at Cornell University's mathematics department. They had a huge "lo!" when they realized they had discovered what would become an entirely new science. Homeworkcentral.com was, without knowing it, organizing links and packets following the network laws discovered by these scientists.
As the internet has multiplied and matured during the first decade of the 21st century, the network laws that rule have wrought both havoc and gold. Tim O'Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 as a name for the effects. O'Reilly and others hold conferences to chew on the impact of Web 2.0 on commerce, media, and other sectors. Within the larger universe of Web 2.0, the golden swamp is smaller ecology, comparable for example to the blogosphere. Both are identifiable venues within the internet universe.
The Map of Science is a visible echo of the golden swamp. As explained below, the golden swamp is virtual: it has no physical existence.
Reflective Gold
Let's give some thought to why the golden swamp is due our collective "lo!" For one thing, it is remarkable that since the last few years of the 20th century a swamp that has no physical existence yet contains most of what humankind knows has come into existence and can be visited by anyone on earth who has an internet browser. Lo! indeed.
Even more awesome is what the golden swamp is morphing into and the certainty that very soon it will be within easy and free access to everyone alive on the planet who is old enough and cares to connect. Much has and is being written and said about commercial, media, social, and other implications of the arriving ubiquity of the internet. Little has been noticed or said regarding the golden swamp.
The golden swamp is the aspect of the of the internet where it deals with the facts and ideas humans expect to acquire in what we call education. The analog era we are now leaving has called this stuff academic knowledge, based on the word academy, meaning school. Schools and the subjects taught in schools are two separate things, but in thinking about the subjects being located online there is often confusion.
The subjects young children go to school for are, as the old saying goes, reading, writing, and arithmetic. Little kid subjects also include colors, animals, safety, some simple science, and the like. All of these abound online. I have an iPhone app with simple pictures of farm animals, each of which makes its natural sound when you touch its picture. At sixteen months the tutorial was inexhaustibly interesting to my grand niece, who touched and growled, touched cluck-clucked, whinnied, and mooed at the photographs, practicing her animal recognition and audible sounds. As she clicked among the animal images, their connections reflected connections she was developing in her mind: learning gold.
Click these lines for more definitions of the golden swamp, including the origin of the phrase from the Dutch Golden Age. Here is some flavor:
