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Ronda Wery

The Genius Index: One Scientist's Crusade to Rewrite Reputation Rules - 0 views

  • After two years of number-crunching in his cluttered office at UC San Diego, Hirsch had it—an invention important enough to warrant publication in the (very prestigious) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In his 2005 article, Hirsch introduced the h-index (named after himself, of course). The key was focusing not on where you published but on how many times other researchers cited your work. In practice, you take all the papers you've published and rank them by how many times each has been cited. Say paper number one has been cited 10,000 times. Paper number two, 8,000 cites. Paper number 32 has 33 citations, but number 33 has received just 28. You've published 32 papers with more than 32 citations—your h-index is 32. Or to put it more technically, the h-index is the number n of a researcher's papers that have been cited by other papers at least n times. High numbers = important science = important scientist.
  • The Web of Knowledge now comprises 700 million cited references from 23,000 journals published since 1804. It's used by 20 million researchers in nearly 100 countries. Anyone—scientist, dean, lab director—can sort the entries and tell someone's fortune. Nothing approaches it for breadth and longevity. Though the Journal Impact Factor has competitors, it remains the gold standard. "You may not like the database, but it has not been replaced," Garfield says.
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    After two years of number-crunching in his cluttered office at UC San Diego, Hirsch had it-an invention important enough to warrant publication in the (very prestigious) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In his 2005 article, Hirsch introduced the h-index (named after himself, of course). The key was focusing not on where you published but on how many times other researchers cited your work. In practice, you take all the papers you've published and rank them by how many times each has been cited. Say paper number one has been cited 10,000 times. Paper number two, 8,000 cites. Paper number 32 has 33 citations, but number 33 has received just 28. You've published 32 papers with more than 32 citations-your h-index is 32. Or to put it more technically, the h-index is the number n of a researcher's papers that have been cited by other papers at least n times. High numbers = important science = important scientist.
Ronda Wery

10 Ways Journalism Schools Are Teaching Social Media - 0 views

  • With news organizations beginning to create special positions to manage the use of social media tools, such as the recently appointed social editor at The New York Times, journalism schools are starting to recognize the need to integrate social media into their curricula. That doesn’t mean having a class on Facebook () or Twitter (), which many college students already know inside and out, but instead means that professors are delving into how these tools can be applied to enrich the craft of reporting and producing the news and ultimately telling the story in the best possible way.
  • 1. Promoting Content Social media tools are bringing readers to news sites and in many cases are increasing their Web-traffic. This isn’t just through the news organizations’ own social media accounts, but those of their writers that tweet, post, share and send links to their organization’s content. Each writer has a social network, and using social media tools to promote and distribute content increases the potential readership of the article being shared. Sree Sreenivasan, dean of student affairs at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, said this is one of the most basic and yet very important social media uses for journalists.
  • 3. News Gathering and Research The power of real-time search is providing journalists with up-to-the-second information on the latest developments of any news, trends and happenings, worldwide. Jeff Jarvis, a professor and director of interactive media at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, said it’s important for students to know how to use real-time searches to gather information and keep up on what is breaking. This includes, but is not limited to, using search on Twitter, FriendFeed (), OneRiot, Tweetmeme, Scoopler, and SearchMerge.
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  • 6. Blog and Website Integration Because so many news sites are incorporating live blogging into their daily dose of content and conversation with readers, Katy Culver, a faculty member in the journalism school at University of Wisconsin at Madison, had her students learn how to use CoveritLive, which can be embedded within a site.
  • 5. Publishing with Social Tools There are many social media tools that journalists can use to publish information, and this variety is something that journalism professors are encouraging students to explore. Publishing via social media tools can be as simple as updating readers or “followers” on Twitter during a breaking news event or building an entire news site focused around Facebook connectivity and conversations about local news – something Northwestern University students created with “NewsMixer” as a project at the Medill School of Journalism last year.
  • 4. Crowdsourcing and Building a Source List It’s amazing how many websites don’t include their staff’s contact information, and the WhitePages really no longer cut it. Luckily, because of the nature of social media in networking, most people post their contact info on their profiles. Social media tools are becoming vital in building source lists. One can track now fairly easily down a source on Facebook or Twitter and send them a message. (Of course, picking up the phone too still can’t hurt.) Students are also being taught the power crowdsourcing using social media. A journalist can tweet a question involving their reporting or announce that they are looking for a source via their FriendFeed and get some remarkable responses.
  • 7. Building Community and Rich Content Sure a journalist can use social media tools to have a conversation with their audience, but what’s the point? The greater goal is to build a community through engagement. Crowdsourcing, live blogging, tweeting — it’s about building a network around issues that matter to the community. In a way, social networks are the new editorial page, rich with opinions and ideas.
  • 8. Personal Brand Students can’t stay in school forever — eventually they need to get jobs. Social networks can be used to build a personal brand that can help students land a reporting gig after college. But Jones emphasized this applies to students only, which is what he teaches.
  • 9. Ethics: Remember, You’re Still a Journalist Sreenivasan from Columbia said there are no hard and fast rules for ethics and social media yet. But told me that what a person posts or shares or produces on social media reflects on the person’s judgment and students should be cautious. He used the example of broadcasting your affiliations on Facebook through notifications on your wall.
  • 10. Experiment, Experiment, Experiment Sreenivasan, Culver, Jarvis and Jones all pointed to the importance of students experimenting with social media tools. For example, if Flickr isn’t meeting your needs, try another tool that suits your use better. Sreenivasan pointed out that we are all still learning the best practices of social media. Journalism students experimenting with these tools can learn how to apply them once they join the workforce. Here are a few tips from Bradshaw for how teachers can encourage social media experimentation: - Use the tools themselves to teach the class. Use them in any setting possible. - Do it publicly and socially. For example, Bradshaw paired students up with “Twentors” to help students that were new to Twitter. - Less talk, more action. Put the students out there and get them using the tools one by one.
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    With news organizations beginning to create special positions to manage the use of social media tools, such as the recently appointed social editor at The New York Times, journalism schools are starting to recognize the need to integrate social media into their curricula. That doesn't mean having a class on Facebook (Facebook) or Twitter (Twitter), which many college students already know inside and out, but instead means that professors are delving into how these tools can be applied to enrich the craft of reporting and producing the news and ultimately telling the story in the best possible way.
Ronda Wery

Digital revolution--India - 0 views

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    CHENNAI: The electronic revolution seems to be setting in at a rather quick pace, and promises to be better than before. The Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Periyar Maniammai University for the launch of a Digital Publishing Course, the first of its kind in the country. The MoU was signed in the presence of K Ponmudi, Minister for Higher Education, Tamil Nadu.
Ronda Wery

Party Animals: Early Human Culture Thrived in Crowds | LiveScience - 0 views

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    Party planners know that scrunching a bunch of people into a small space will result in plenty of mingling and discourse.\n\nA new study suggests this was as true for our ancestors as it is for us today, and that ancient social networking led to a renaissance of new ideas that helped make us human.\n\nThe research, which is published in the June 5 issue of the journal Science, suggests that tens of thousands of years ago, as human population density increased so did the transmission of ideas and skills. The result: the emergence of more and more clever innovations.\n\n
Ronda Wery

Top 10 Vital Social Media Stories of the Week - 0 views

  • Social media was all over the map this week, but there was one theme that ran through many of this week’s stories: security. From Twitter’s meltdown to a gaping vulnerability Firefox 3.5, users saw the importance of security first-hand. Security’s also a huge issue with Internet Explorer 6, which we highlight in this week’s most popular story. There were a lot of useful resources published this week as well. Funny viral videos, social media business models, and iPhone apps that can save lives are just a few of the great things this week’s stories taught us. Here are most popular social media stories of the week.
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    What This Blog is About In one phrase: Building Engaging Learning Experiences through Instructional Design and E-Learning I'm an instructional designer developing online learning, so that's primarily what I write about. * Instructional Design: This is what I do all day, and I'm always trying to learn how to do it better. * Higher Ed: The courses I create are graduate courses, so I'm interested in higher education. * K-12 Education: The participants in those courses are mostly K-12 educators, so I'm interested in what's important to my audience too. * Corporate E-Learning: Even though I'm in education, I know I can learn a lot from corporate e-learning. Besides, I'm employed by a for-profit company. * Lifelong Learning: It didn't start out to be a goal for my blog, but I've discovered that these tools help my own lifelong learning. I write about my discoveries: what works, what doesn't, what I'm thinking. * Technology: I write about technology, especially as it overlaps with any of the above areas. * Bookmarks: The Daily Bookmarks Posts are resources I find interesting or useful. You can view and search the complete list of bookmarks on Diigo or del.icio.us. On my Post Series and Recurring Themes page, I've collected some popular topics. This includes my liveblogged posts from the TCC 2008 conference and my series on instructional design careers. The top posts in the sidebar to the right are another great place to start reading.
Ronda Wery

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Lewis Hyde and The Enclosure of Silence - 0 views

  • We enclose silence - unknown possibility - at our own risk. Jonathan Zittrain demonstrates in his recent work on generativity that the value of systems often comes from unknown uses - the Apple II became succesful when Visicalc, the first spreadsheet, was written for the platform. If you want generative uses for a technology, Zittrain warns that you need to be careful what you lock down. Lewis also cites a case in which cell biologists patented a particular series of amino acids. They had no idea their purpose, but “purifying and describing gives you a right to own.” A later set of researchers speculated that these aminos bloc the growth of cancer cells - on publishing their research, the first researchers sued them for many millions of dollars. This can very effectively prevent exloratory science, he argues. “When we enclose wilderness, we begin to give property rights in areas where we have yet to understand what’s happening.” An enclosure of silence affects the human self and the world we inhabit. How do you become a creative actor in this world? How do you beat the bounds of this commons?
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    Many Americans know about the commons from Garrett Hardin's essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons". Hardin wasn't a historian, but a population biologist, who was concerned with problems of population growth. Lewis argues that Hardin's prediction - that individual economic maximization will destroy collective resources - is based on a fantasy of a commons. In reality, commons had serious limitations on rights. You could only cut wood between Christmas and February, for instance. And commons were local entites - locals could exclude those from outside the region. These customary use rights meant that commons weren't tragic - in fact, they lasted for millenia in Europe. (I interjected here to ask why Hardin's idea has had such currency. Lewis offers two speculative reasons why - it's a great phrase, and it came out at a moment where the Cold War was in full swing, and Hardin's idea was a strong defense of private capital against communism.) Lewis suggests a different way to look at the commons, quoting Carol Rose, who talks about "the comedic commons", one with a happy ending. As such, the commons was a site of action, a space for citizens to act on their own rights.
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