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Vance Stevens

Week 2 Readings - 29 views

Yes, I found it now Jennifer, on the page of the following link http://www.diigo.com/list/jenverschoor/evo2009mlitweek2 There was a webslides button there. I'm sorry, I was looking for it in a ri...

evo2009mlit

Joel Bloch

Debate between Andrew Keen and Kevin Kelley - 13 views

text-based debate between Keen and Kelley, the editor of Wired Magazine.

EVO2009mlit Internet digital culture

started by Joel Bloch on 21 Jan 09 no follow-up yet
Pamela Arraras

Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags? - 0 views

  • A folksonomy is a type of distributed classification system. It is usually created by a group of individuals, typically the resource users. Users add tags to online items, such as images, videos, bookmarks and text. These tags are then shared and sometimes refined.
  • So what exactly are tags? A simple definition would be to say that tags are keywords, category names, or metadata. In essence, a tag is simply a freely chosen set of textual keywords. However, because tags are not created by information specialists, they do not at present follow any ubiquitous formal guidelines. This means that items can be categorised with any word that defines a relationship between the online resource and a concept in the user's mind. Any number of words might be chosen, some of which are obvious representations, others making less sense outside the tag author's context.
  • Improving Tag Literacy Given that there is already a movement towards convergence of tags, how can we foster this trend? At the moment there are two key ways in which the metadata created in folksonomies could be improved to aid searching: Educating users to add "better" tags Improving the systems to allow "better" tags to be added Educating users Currently most users don't give much thought to the way they tag resources, and bad or "sloppy" tags are ten-a-penny in folksonomies. The main casualties are usually enumerated as follows: Misspelt tags (e.g., libary, libray) Badly encoded tags, such as unlikely compound word groupings (e.g.,TimBernersLee) Tags that do not follow convention in issues such as case and number; singular versus plural form (e.g., apple, apples) Personal tags that are without meaning to the wider community (e.g., mydog) Single-use tags that appear only once in the database. (e.g., billybobsdog) In order for folksonomies to offer much more in the way of social value, many feel that tag creation needs to becomes a lot more proficient; but are the problems really those described above?
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  • Methods for improving tags
  • t the moment, although there are no standard guidelines on good tag selection practices, those in the folksonomy community have offered many ideas. Ways in which tags may be improved are presented frequently on blogs and folksonomy discussion sites. In his article on tag literacy, Ulises Ali Mejias suggests a number of tag selection "best practices" [14]. These include: using plurals rather than singulars using lower case, grouping words using an underscore, following tag conventions started by others and adding synonyms.
  • Folksonomies are popularly related to the anthropological study of "folk taxonomies", a favoured study of cognitive anthropologists in the 1960s, but the significance of this snippet of information is often eclipsed by today's perception of folksonomies as a popular mechanism for creating user-populated search databases. Briefly revisiting the origins of the term is useful, if only to situate the discussions presented here with respect to their antecedents. A folk taxonomy is most easily defined by contrast to a scientific taxonomy, a naming system to be applied objectively, independently of social matters. Scientific taxonomies, such as the Linnaean taxonomic system, are to be applied independently of personal feeling on the matter. The emergence of the "folk taxonomy" recognised common names as worthy of mention, serving useful functions within a social and cultural context, and the study of folk taxonomies remained popular for some time. However, few generalisable results were extracted from this work, and the work tended to focus on artificially simplified and often trivial semantic domains [20]. It was eventually re-framed as a stage in the study of knowledge structures, consensus and understanding within groups. Later work from a number of domains provides some insight into the problem domain, but the field is complex, encompassing culture, language and thought. On some details agreement has been reached; people do appear to think in terms of domains [21], and dialect is an indicator of social class, educational level and age. The subset of a language used in a certain setting (the situated nature of vocabulary choice and manner of speech) is both fascinating and confounding. In internet terms, this is most commonly encountered in the form of "speech communities", groups of people who share a certain set of vocabulary or jargon.
    • Pamela Arraras
       
      So this is the origin of the term folksonomies. Interesting!
jennifer verschoor

Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags? - 0 views

    • jennifer verschoor
       
      You can also read more definitions on Tagging in the Help Desk of Multiliteracies Ning
Pamela Arraras

Twitter for Academia - 0 views

  • Ways to use Twitter in Academia: Some of these ideas are general, and some are specifically from a Twittering assignment I did for a class last semester. When I first added it to the syllabus I had no idea what to expect. It was just sort of an experiment that I had planned for the end of the semester (all of the students signed up for twitter and followed each other). After using it I have to say it was one of the better things I did with that class, for reasons I will explain below. Class Chatter: The first thing I noticed when the class started using Twitter was how conversations continued inside and outside of class. Most of these conversations were not directly related to class material, but many were tangentially related. Because the students had the shared classroom experience when something came up outside of class that reminded them of material from class time it often got twittered. This served as a reinforcement/connection between the material and the “real world.”
  • Classroom Community: Once students started twittering I think they developed a sense of each other as people beyond the classroom space, rather than just students they saw twice a week for an hour and a half. This carried with it a range of benefits, from more productive classroom conversations (people were more willing to talk, and more respectful of others), and also helped me to understand what type of students they were. I learned a great deal about students lives, where they work, that one of them had Thanksgiving dinner with 50+ people. Now this type of supplementary material might not be attractive to all educators, I can definitely say that changed the classroom dynamics for the better. I think this is connected to what Clive Thompson calls the sixth sense of Twitter. Having the Sixth Sense can really help the classroom.
  • Get a Sense of the World: You can have students look at the Public Timeline of Twitter. This is the place where all public messages get posted. The “noise” ratio here is pretty high, but one gets a sense of how varied are the things people are doing around the globe. Just a quick look at the timeline shows a range of languages, although English is still the predominate one. Additionally the public timeline serves as a sort of quick measure of what people are paying attention to.
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  • Track a Word: Through Twitter you can “track” a word. This will subscribe you to any post which contains said word. So, for example a student could be interested in how a particular word is used. They can track the word, and see the varied phrases in which people use it. Or, you can track an event, a proper name (I track Derrida for example), a movie title, a store name see how many people a day tweet that they are at or on their way to a Starbucks.
  • Track a Conference:
  • Instant Feedback: Because Twitter is always on, and gets pushed to your cell phone if you set it up this way, it is a good way to get instant feedback. I was prepping for a lecture and wanted to know if students shared a particular movie reference, I asked via Twitter and got instant responses. Students can also use this when doing their classwork, trying to understand the material. Tweet: “I don’t understand what this reading has to do with New Media? any ideas?”
  • Follow a Professional:
  • Grammar: Surprisingly Twitter is actually good for teaching grammar. Why? Because of its short form those who tweet often abbreviate and abuse grammar rules, developing their own unique “twitter rules.” This helps to demonstrate, both how all communication needs rules/structure and how important something like a comma or a period can be. (Some Tweets become really ambiguous because of their lack of punctuation.)
  • ule Based Writing: Related to the above is the idea that when you change the rules (context) around any written communication you necessarily change the content of such an utterance. Rules rather than hindering communication can actually be really productive (for the long version of this argument read about Oulipo). Because Twitter is based on SMS technology it limits communication to 140 characters, it is surprising what develops out of this limit, and how quickly one starts to think in messages of 140 characters
  • Maximizing the Teachable Moment: It is often hard to teach in context, Twitter allows you to do this, but better yet, allows your students to do it for you (a way that others will hear perhaps). Recently someone in my Twitter circle made a marginal comment about a male friend who was dating an older woman. Another person in the same circle called him out this. Perfect, an in-context lesson on gender prejudice. Public NotePad: Twitter is really good for sharing short inspirations, thoughts that just popped into your head. Not only are they recorded, because you can go back and look at them, but you can also get inspiration from others. This is really useful for any “creative” based class. Writing Assignments: Remember that game you used to play where one person would start a story, the next person would continue it, etc. . .Okay try this on Twitter.
Nelba Quintana

Interpretive analysis of an internet-based course constructed using a new courseware to... - 0 views

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    Interpretive analysis of an internet-based course constructed using a new courseware tool called Moodle
doris molero

Bionic Teaching - 0 views

shared by doris molero on 14 Apr 09 - Cached
doris molero

Second Language Acquisition Theories as a Framework for Creating Distance Learning Courses - 0 views

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    Eileen N. Ariza and Sandra Hancock Florida Atlantic University, USA
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