Meeting of the Mind

No question mark after the phrase, because it’s actually a Web page on the Cognitive Neuroscience Arena site.

The CII blog out of UIUC is a little reminiscent of what Alan Shaw was trying to do twenty years ago with MUSIC (Multi-User Sessions In Community). MUSIC didn’t seem to take off—people thought, why log into a computer (pre-Web) when they could just pick up the phone. (Kind of like workers presented with wikis to collaborate on—why fool with that unituitive interface when they could just exchange dozens of e-mail messages, but I digress.) Actually, the “community” of CII refers more to online communities organized around specific goals. To quote their site, “The core of the CII is community inquiry: collaborative action to create knowledge and technology connected to people’s values, history, and lived experiences; the development of models of engagement that are just, democratic, participatory, and open-ended; and the integration of theory and practice in an experimental and critical manner.”