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pavioli

Why does Wikipedia even work? - 1 views

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    Why it "works" Network Effect Wikipedia benefits tremendously from the network effect. The network effect is when a user of a product benefits more from a product if other people also use the product. Telephones are a textbook example. If only a few dozen consumers have telephones, then the telephones aren't very useful. But if millions of consumers have telephones, they become more useful since each telephone owner can contact many people. The large number of Wikipedia users benefits Wikipedia. First, the more editors there are, the the higher the accuracy and quality of the articles. Secondly, it gives an incentive to users to edit. Since editors know the each article will be read by thousands of users, the sheer influence of each article is a strong enough incentive to edit, even though Wikipedia is free. Openness Wikipedia is free and open for any user to edit, even anonymously. This means there is a very large number of editors. This helps Wikipedia ensure accuracy since each mistake and inaccuracy will have to get by hundreds of editors. With so many writers, the scope of Wikipedia articles is very large, minimizing the amount of missing information. Although the openness of Wikipedia provides a powerful self-correcting method, it also makes Wikipedia vulnerable to vandalism. In addition, editors are anonymous and may have a conflict of interest, or might have inadequate knowledge of the article's subject. Yet, because Wikipedia is open to any edits, it is also likely to be corrected. It operates by a system of checks and balances from many editors. However, it has some guidelines to protect it against misinformation and bias: 1. Verifiability principle. To prevent bias and to protect the encyclopedic quality of its articles, all edits on Wikipedia must in theory be a verifiable fact. Moreover, it must have a reliable source to verify each fact. 2. No Original Research. As an encyclopedia, it is mean to be a secondary source of infor
anonymous

Online learning is "the blackboard of the future" - 7 views

This article re-emphasizes the fact that traditional lectures are ineffective ways of conveying new knowledge. This article takes the next step and emphasizes the importance of digital media and on...

MOOC online learning blackboard the independent

rebeccakah

Is Social Media Keeping Science Trustworthy? - 1 views

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    Online discussions and post-publication analyses are catching mistakes that sneak past editorial review. This article describes the pitfalls with editorial review and pre-publication peer review, and advocates for post-publication crowd-sourced reviewing through social media platforms.
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    The Advantage of online-journals is that the comments are next to the articles. In printed Versions corrections may be as far as several issues away and can easily get lost. I would think it would be great to actually correct the article to have it on an actual state. Correctors should be credited in the community same as the authors. That would reduce the production of new and new sensless articles and Reviews.
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    I think having a comments section is a great way to provide feedback on the information provided. Often when I read articles the comments section allows me to understand different perspectives and interpretations of the information.
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    This article, while not necessarily explicitly, managed to hint at what I find to be a source of problematic practices/outcomes in the academy, publishing, etc. That is, it is not necessarily that traditional peer review processes are ineffective at finding errors or misconduct, but rather it is when our processes and practices become so systematized that we can mindlessly or effortlessly engage in and reproduce them without our full, critical attention that they can produce problems. While I think there are good reasons to critique the notion of peer and "expert" culture within traditional peer review processes, an additional and separate critique is the problems that arise with systematization. The article implicitly addressed this when the author commented that current post-publication environments "provide a public space that is not under the control of journal editors and conference organizers." Yet, as White indicates, there exists skepticism of the value of post-publication reviews along with a simultaneous effort to build post-publication systems that have standards that put those questioning it at ease. The National Institutes of Health establishing requirements that potential post-publication reviewers must meet demonstrated this. That is, they are trying to figure out how to systematize post-publication. For me, what this article indicates is that we ought to figure out how to keep our academic and publishing processes "fresh," so to speak. This way we don't become so comfortable with our methods and practices that they allow us to simply go through the motions without fostering innovative and critical inquiry.
melduncan

Article on Wikipedia's credibility - 4 views

I thought this was a good follow-up article to the reading on archives and Wikipedia. The author discusses the credibility of Wikipedia and is worth a few moments of your time.Thomas Chesney, 2006....

Module8

started by melduncan on 10 Nov 14 no follow-up yet
rafopen liked it
anonymous

Open educational resources and the role of university - 0 views

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    This article gives opinion that university is playing an important role that will not be replaced by the open educational opinion, which I also agreed. Instead of considering OER as a threat to university, the article argues that "OER can help institutions provide higher education to rapidly increasing numbers of students and lifelong learners".
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    Thank you for sharing the article Ming Tang. I think you make a great point about OER and the university working together as opposed to a "war of the roses" type scenario where a married couple refuses to work together. As the article mentioned the university is the one that gives the diploma and is the one that deals with accreditation inspections, etc. OER to me would make a nice complement on the arms of any university. Another good article along the same lines can be found at http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/impact-globalization-and-future-university.
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    Thank you Melduncan2!
noveltynotion

Open Access (or, why I love the internet) - 10 views

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    The wonderful blog, Hack Library School, has recently posted a piece on open access publishing. This piece is a great overview, which covers many of the basic concepts covered in Module 6. The article discusses what open access is (and what it isn't) and some of the biggest discussion points on the issue today. It's a great overview and well worth the read if you want an overview or a refresher on the topic!
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    Thanks for sharing this link. It includes a clear breakdown of what gold and green Open Access are and identifies some of the challenges of gold OA.
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    Well, its a worth reading article. We can say about open access that its a peer-reviewed work that's published in full on the internet and available at no cost to readers and that helps the whole society. OA is today's need.
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    Great link you shared, shows very well on the concepts covered in module 6 and shows an overview of assunto.Engloba and greatly enriches our knowledge.
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    Excelent! thanks for the resource!
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    Yes thank you for passing it on. As a librarian I'm happy to know more of us are out there and participating in the conversation.
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    The internet is pretty awesome guys. Privacy attacks and trolls aside, no other tool humans have ever created can match its potential for information transfer. Sure, I often use it to watch cat videos and buy clothing I don't need, but it also supports one of the biggest developments in modern librarianship and one of...
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    This blog covers a lot of relevant concepts related to OA, but a finer point need to be clarified. Regarding Google Scholar, not everything retrieved from GS is OA. GS is a web crowler, it crows wherever it is allowed, including references and citations to articles behind paywalls. On the other hand, many librarians are working to make their paid journals subscriptions available to their faculty and students via Google Scholar. So when faculty/students are on their universities' network, they can search GS, find articles from journals. If their library subscribes to that journal, there is a good chance a link to the full text will be available.
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    I agree with the point that "findability" for green OA articles is a current problem. We need a PubMed or Web of Science for green OA articles!
mbittman

BBC News - BBC to publish 'right to be forgotten' removals list - 0 views

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    The BBC is to publish a continually updated list of its articles removed from Google searches under the controversial right to be forgotten rule. ... editorial policy head David Jordan told a public meeting, hosted by Google, that the BBC felt some of its articles had been wrongly hidden. He said greater care should be given to the public's "right to remember".
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    The BBC is to publish a continually updated list of its articles removed from Google searches under the controversial right to be forgotten rule. ... editorial policy head David Jordan told a public meeting, hosted by Google, that the BBC felt some of its articles had been wrongly hidden. He said greater care should be given to the public's "right to remember".
Pris Laurente

Scholarly vs. popular vs. trade publications - 0 views

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    Criteria that can be used to distinguish between popular magazine articles, articles from trade publications, and scholarly journal articles
Kevin Stranack

Reactionary Rhetoric Against Open Access Publishing | Bivens-Tatum | tripleC: Communica... - 0 views

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    "In 2013, Jeffrey Beall published an attack on the open-access scholarship movement in tripleC: "The Open-Access Movement Is Not Really About Open Access". This article examines the claims and arguments of that contribution. Beall's article makes broad generalizations about open-access advocates with very little supporting evidence, but his rhetoric provides good examples of what Albert O. Hirschman called the "rhetoric of reaction". Specifically, it provides examples of the perversity thesis, the futility thesis, and the jeopardy thesis in action. While the main argument is both unsound and invalid, it does show a rare example of reactionary rhetoric from a librarian."
Kim Baker

Scholarly journal retracts 60 articles, smashes 'peer review ring' - 3 views

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    Every now and then a scholarly journal retracts an article because of errors or outright fraud. In academic circles, and sometimes beyond, each retraction is a big deal. Now comes word of a journal retracting 60 articles at once.
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    Thank you for sharing! The article highlights a problem of Internet where one can create any number of digital identities and use them for various purposes hoping that this will go unnoticed. This time the activity takes place in the settings of a scientific journal peer review.
liyanl

Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? - 1 views

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    I found this article interesting to me as it is some how relevant to digital identity and social media. This is an article from magazine The Atlantic that being published on May 2012, by Stephen Marche. At the beginning of the article Marche represents that over-reliance on social networking has turned people isolated by telling a true story about the Playboy Playmate Vickers's mummified body was found a year after she died and in the months before her death, she had not made any calls to her friends or family but kept in touch with the fans from internet sites. Along with the article, Marche represents that social media such as Facebook have made people networked easier than ever, but at the same time it is also making more and more people lonely. Also, Marche has exemplified a social condition, anomie, which is described as a lack of social norms characterized by breakdown of social bonds. Thus this article has provided relevant resource about anomie which has become part of deterioration to interpersonal relationship with social networking.
Kevin Stranack

A critical review of open access and "citizen science": - 6 views

An important perspective on open access. From the article, "Despite being freely available on the Web, research articles are not by default linguistically or conceptually accessible to the global p...

open access knowledge

natashasana

1 Protecting the right to privacy in Africa in the digital age - 1 views

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    The right to privacy, as guaranteed in Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and many other provisions - including Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), Article 16 of the Convention in the Rights of the Child, and Article 14 of the Convention on the Protection of Migrants - is a core tenet of democratic societies.
anonymous

Ineffective lectures - 8 views

Even though it has now been proven that traditional lectures is one of the most ineffective ways of conveying knowledge, they will not be completely eliminated. This article concludes that being ta...

Module 2

Stephen Dale

Home | SAGE Open - 0 views

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    "SAGE Open is a peer-reviewed, "Gold" open access journal from SAGE that publishes original research and review articles in an interactive, open access format. Articles may span the full spectrum of the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities."
beetsyg

Hundreds of open access journals accept fake science paper | Higher Education Network |... - 5 views

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    This research study was an eye-opener for me. Until this point, I was completely unaware of these journal practices, although I had received several emails from journals I had never heard of wanting to publish papers based on conference presentations.
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    Although it is important to put those predatory journals under the spotlight so researchers don't fall in their trap, I always wince when I read one of those articles because too few take the time to talk about the good sides of open access journals and many readers will leave the article thinking that open access publishing is bad and not trustworthy. Of course, as mentioned in the Nature Mag article linked in the Guardian article, PLOS are excellent and have very high levels of evaluation, but they are not alone. And I have yet to find a paper that would make the same exercise with both open access journals and subscription-based journals so we could see how bad it is in the publishing world in general. That said, we must do everything within our power to stop those malpractices by predatory journals. (by the way, I have also received spam to publish in journals that were not even in my field of practice by BioMed Central. They are good, they are trustworthy. I wrote to them to say that it looks like baits to send spam calling me a Dr and inviting me to publish in fields that I know nothing about. They removed me from their mailing list but I don't know if they changed this practice)
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    A blog, Scholarly Open Access. Critical analysis of scholarly open-access publishing, http://scholarlyoa.com/, systematically lists fake academic journals and predatory publishers, who are taking advantage of a some open access naiveté.
amandakennedy

Nature Communications goes open access (Wired UK) - 0 views

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    Nature Communications has announced it will go open access only from 20 October in a bid to show the world that quality papers do not have to be paid for.
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    I've chosen to link to the article on Wired which discusses the move as the explanation is easier for those who (like me!) have little experience of academic journals to understand. One of the most important points I've taken from reading this article (and the PDF study explaining the reasons for the move to Open Access, which is linked from the article) is that to date, articles which have previously been published to Nature Communications using the OA model have earned more citations than those published under a subscription model. I'm interested to learn more about the mentioned Creative Commons 4.0 license, which I'm not yet familiar with. If anyone with experience using (or publishing to) academic journals would like to add any relevant points to the potential impact of the magazine's choice to go OA, I would really appreciate the insight!
Ad Huikeshoven

Emotions under Discussion: Gender, Status and Communication in Online Collaboration - 6 views

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    Emotional expression and linguistic style in online collaboration differ substantially depending on the contributors' gender and status, and on the communication network. This should be taken into account when analyzing collaborative success, and may prove insightful to communities facing gender gap and stagnation in contributor acquisition and participation levels.
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    Hi Ad, thank you for sharing this. My postdoc research was focused on communication challenges participants face online. It was only in the 90s that people believed that online communication supports a "democratic" style of communication, where people are not being distracted by physical appearance, social class, cultural background or gender. S.C. Herring and others conclusively refuted claims of gender anonymity and equality in online communication and published a lot about this topic (if you are interested). What I found particularly interesting to me in your resource is that we all about collaboration (schools, universities, companies, etc.), but we never take into account that participant's gender and/or status impact his/her willingness and ability to contribute.
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    Thank you for sharing this interesting resource. I think that it is fascinating that this research focuses not only on discrepancies between the proportion of male and female contributors on Wikipedia, but also on differences in the actual communication and relationship styles based on the gender of contributors. I also thought that it was really interesting that the researchers found that while site administrators tended to be neutral, the editors were more emotional and relationship-oriented. I think that this comes from Wikipedia's mandate to remain neutral and objective. However, would argue that with this type of collaboration tool, there cannot be true "neutrality." Even if administrators attempt to maintain objective, impersonal tones, site content will inevitably be influenced by various socio-cultural biases.
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    lubajong and taylor_cole thank you for your comments. From my part I will add a critical evaluation of this resource as well. The talk pages of Wikipedia provide a rich source for researchers to study communication patterns. On Wikipedia talk pages they have found signals for status differences between groups of participants, notably between admins and ordinary contributors. Those findings support in general the theories of the researchers about status differences and communication style differences between managers and employees in firms. They have also found differences in communication style bases on gender, which also support their general theories about gender (which is a social construct). What I - as a Wikipedian insider - finds missing in the article is the selection bias. Wikipedia admins aren't appointed by Jimmy Wales or some other body. Admins are community selected. The exact process differs per language version. On the English Wikipedia admin selection is by a community consensus process. Future admins are selected who show the preferred communication style of admins by other contributors including existing admins. For me, the patterns in communication style do not explain the gender gap on Wikipedia. There is a gender gap in many language versions of Wikipedia, but not in all. The Armenian language version of Wikipedia is a notable exception, showing a gender balance in the conbtributor base. An explanation of that exemption requires further research. What taylor_cole notes about neutrality and bias is a valid point. People volunteer to write for Wikipedia, and volunteer in topic choice. My guess is that in general people will opt to write about something they like, care about, know about. A lack of diversity in contributors will naturally reflect in lack of diversity of topics. For example nerdy males will write about things male nerds like. In general females tend to be interested in other topics than nerdy males. A lack of topics covered in Wikipe
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    Levels of participation influences emotional expression and phrasing? has the function of sex and status of the taxpayer. 4 strands to study and find a result! Interesting!
christofhar

Comparison of Wikipedia and other encyclopedias for accuracy, breadth, and depth in his... - 2 views

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    This paper seeks to provide reference librarians and faculty with evidence regarding the comprehensiveness and accuracy of Wikipedia articles compared with respected reference resources.
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    Actually the article conforms our Wikipedia research field work results.
Kevin Stranack

Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide' - The Chronicle Review - The Chr... - 26 views

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    Text from 2011, still extremely timely, about privacy. The author, professor of Law, deconstructs the "nothing to hide" argument that says that we should not be scared to disclose private activities or information when we do nothing wrong.
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    Excellent, thanks for this. The "nothing to hide" argument also rests on the absurd premise that the authorities all have pure motives and will not abuse their power with this level of access to private information. To assume that all authorities, everywhere, all have noble intentions and pure motives is absurd as assuming that all human being are perfect....
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    Even though it is a few years old, the topic is still relevant--and maybe even more so in the wake of Snowden. Although most of us do truly believe we have 'nothing to hide', we are all naively unaware of just how easily something innocent can be twisted to nefarious means. At the same time, if we are all being watched, are any of us really being watched? Something to ponder.
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    The big problem is the concept of privacy. In Brazilian law we have three kinds of personal information (data): public, private, and restricted. The difference between public and private information is matter of personal choice, in others words, each one may decide what is matter of the public or private information. The restricted informations are those that we are required by law to give the government, but the government cannot disclose without authorization. The privacy issue is respect for this choice between private and public data. When government or anybody disrespects this choice, we have a problem. I think in virtual ambience the users ignore those distinctions and make a big mess. If in one hand government and big players have been stealing our data, in other hand the users don't have necessary care about his own private information.
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    "Nothing to hide as at now" might be correct as a current status but not for the future. Human beings we always behave like we have control of our future. I may have nothing to hide as at now but in 10 years time when I ran for political office my past will surely halt me.
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    True, however our real name / our real identity, if used consistently across the variety of online audiences we engage with, permits Big Data to be aggregated, defining our activity as a distinct entity, giving it greater value in the analytics marketplace -- whether we have anything to hide or not ... What price do you wish to place on your digital self as an online product is the real question.
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    Makes a great point. I used to think that way, if I have nothing to hide I don't have to worry about what others find about me. But is true there is no need for everyone to have access to every single detail about you. And the point Kim and Philip made is really important, with more information available and more companies interested in making profit of it becomes more difficult to maintain control of who access your information and what it is used for.
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    The article raises two important points: (1) the right to know how information is being used and (2) the right to correct incorrect inferences being made from sometimes an incomplete information sets. I begin with the assumption that,despite how I take care to protect information, there are individuals and institutions that will find ways of dong so. So I want the right to appeal and set the record straight.
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    This would be a good addition to the next addition of our core reading list.
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    Thank you for sharing this. I can agree on that even though we have nothing to hide, it is matter of violating our right to keep it to our selves. However, I can say that it people's opinion for public-surveillance cameras in cities and towns may be different. The cameras may have good usage in order to solve or prevent crimes. It depends on how it is used I guess.
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    I like to differentiate 'privacy' which is a right every human should have, from 'privatisation' which is corporate mandates that suggest the right to hide or share information - mostly based in monetization. Technology has given us access to each other in ways never imagined, and until humanity reaches a higher order of compassion toward and consciousness with each other, this issue will eat at the very fabric of our society until our security obsessions destroy us.
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    Thanks for your sharing. The example of the government has installed millions of public-surveillance cameras in cities and towns, which are watched by officials via closed-circuit television in Britain makes me reflect on two aspects. Firstly, in my personal opinion, I think public-surveillance cameras provide citizens a better sense of security especially during nights. Secondly, the key point here is how the officials deal with the documentation of public-surveillance cameras, will citizens' privacy be exposed to public?
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    "With regard to individual rights,.... there exists a private domain in man which should not be regulated or violated. This realm constitutes what is deepest, highest, and most valuable in the individual human being." http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Younkins/Social_Cooperation,_Flourishing,_and_Happiness.shtml
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    Privacy off course matters.It is right that if I have not done anything wrong then why should I hide it. On other hand we can not share our family relationship information with anyone.
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