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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

On my navigation searching for initiatives to see how Open Knowledge are making the difference on the Latin America society I found this... nowadays unfortunately on South America (and in other places as well) open knowledge initiative are not divulgated. Universities seem to be not interested about promoting these initiatives and few people know about them. I was amazed reading the text from Francisco J. García-Peñalvo (Open Knowledge. Challenges and Facts) and seeing that a lot of Universities on Europe and North America are promoting and working with open and free access to texts and online courses. It's incredible how people have the possibility of learning in a world that each day is more competitive. I really hope that this great news about Brazil helps more and more people to understand the impact and the changings on the educational process.

This blog is especially great because it talks about the motivation and mindset behind adopting an ope approach. Open is not simply about making or using open resources but open as a 'way of being'

A good supplement to Module 10's core reading on ACRL's standards for information literacy for higher education, this 5-pager is a short article for middle and high school librarians and parents.

I agree that students need to have some background knowledge about the topic they research on internet. And then they may do qualitative research. I wouldn't speak about positive/negative search results, I would rather speak about true/false results.

As a student, I think I learn to filter out what is valid and invalid. Depending on the source, and the crediblity, and the references it uses, i think will help individuals fitler out what is true or not .

"Just as important as learning these helpful tools, however, is unlearning and avoiding the most common pitfalls of common sense. Reminding us of where society is most vulnerable to those, Sagan writes: In addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to knowledge, any good baloney detection kit must also teach us what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. Many good examples can be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so often obliged to justify two contradictory propositions.He admonishes against the twenty most common and perilous ones - many rooted in our chronic discomfort with ambiguity - with examples of each in action"

The 20 fallacies: "ad hominem - Latin for "to the man," attacking the arguer and not the argument (e.g., The Reverend Dr. Smith is a known Biblical fundamentalist, so her objections to evolution need not be taken seriously) argument from authority (e.g., President Richard Nixon should be re-elected because he has a secret plan to end the war in Southeast Asia - but because it was secret, there was no way for the electorate to evaluate it on its merits; the argument amounted to trusting him because he was President: a mistake, as it turned out) argument from adverse consequences (e.g., A God meting out punishment and reward must exist, because if He didn't, society would be much more lawless and dangerous - perhaps even ungovernable. Or: The defendant in a widely publicized murder trial must be found guilty; otherwise, it will be an encouragement for other men to murder their wives) appeal to ignorance - the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e.g., There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist - and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we're still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. special pleading, often to rescue a proposition in deep rhetorical trouble (e.g., How can a merciful God condemn future generations to torment because, against orders, one woman induced one man to eat an apple? Special plead: you don't understand the subtle Doctrine of Free Will. Or: How can there be an equally godlike Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the same Person? Special plead: You don't understand the Divine Mystery of the Trinity. Or: How could God permit the followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - each in their own way enjoined to

Wonderful post, Kim! These are great guidelines alongside which to test ideas.

Discusses the risks of being tracked through our Internet activity and location tracking devices. Risks include financial fraud, stalking, manipulation by advertisers, tracking our whereabouts, devaluation of privacy as a fundamental right. Read as the opposing viewpoint to Why Online Tracking Isn't Bad - The Great Privacy Debate - WSJ.

In my opinion we should do some extra careful mostly when it comes to financial matter, we should not just type in the confidential information even if it is most respected site, because bad hackers are every when, we do not know if they are just lurking around waiting for us.

Interesting article! I think it´s important to sort out what privacy really means in different Internet contexts. There are many theories and interpretations. Private users, sellers and marketers are examples of groups who have many different agendas and interests. Privacy and how it is used on Internet, must be studied from both local and global perspectives as I see it. What type of information does not the private user know that other actors use for selling and marketing and online services. How can a clearer cooperation be done to not cross the lines for online privacy?

Does anyone know about Global eJournals Library? It seems to be a subscription-based discovery service that indexes all of the open access or post-embargo journal articles it can find. The two private companies that operate this service, from the UK and India, are not very clear. It claims to have indexed many more articles (7 million) and journals than DOAJ (almost 2 million). I'm curious about the whole thing!

Provides a list of important skills and how those skills are embedded within the curriculum.

Thank you Kevin Stranack for sharing. Tony Bates ends with five questions: 1. Have I covered the main skills needed in a knowledge-based society? What have I missed? 2. Do you agree that these are important skills? If so, should universities explicitly try to develop them? 3. What are you or your university doing (if anything) to ensure such skills are taught, and taught well? 4. What roles if any do you think technology, and in particular online learning, can play in helping to develop such skills? 5. Any other comments on this topic - My answers: 1. Frustration tolerance and keeping a balance between work and private life is a necessary skill 2, The skill set mentioned is important, but more likely trained in college than in university 3. I do have a personal coach and a counseler, and I'm enrolled in #OKMOOC 4. The activities required in every module of #OKMOOC ask to reach out, connect, build relationships, Have you answered the feedback questions?

This question is really the elephant in the room in a lot of university programs, especially in the humanities. I myself was a doctoral student in the humanities before leaving because, as I eventually learned, there were essentially no employment opportunities and my skillset in today's economy was sorely lacking. But the old mantra that "we teach critical thinking" is become a worn excuse. Do we really need four years to teach people the skills to survive "out there"? How much of our specialized knowledge will really be useful outside of the academy? These are questions we just don't have the answer to, and I'm not sure there are many people willing to ask them. But more to the point, I didn't see anything in this link about the changing ways that millennials (I promise that I hate the term as much as anyone, but it's a useful one) are engaging with information, and how that is changing how they actually think. There have been arguments made that digital natives (again, a pretty terrible term) think about and process information in very different ways that have serious implications for contextualization and long-term research. I'm not saying that universities don't teach these things in their own ways, but it's an important issue that needs addressing. I know that the link talks about the important of knowledge management, but there's a huge difference between simply knowing how and when to access information and quite another to properly contextualize its place in a larger hierarchy (or web) of knowledge. I would argue *that* skill is the one that universities are best poised to provide, and maybe why we keep hearing talk about how undergraduate degrees are the new highschool diplomas.

"The entrance to GitHub is the most Instagram-able lobby in tech. It's a recreation of the Oval Office , and the mimicry is spot-on---except for the rug. Instead of the arrow-clutching American eagle that graces Obama's office rug, it shows the code-sharing site's Octocat mascot gazing into the digital future, just above the motto: "In Collaboration We Trust."

A neat article outlining the significance of digital literacy within the industrial revolution. "Digital literacy is about learning to use the most powerful tools we've ever built."

This article is not only about open education or open learningm, but about trends in tech that trainee teachers should be aware of. One of them is the MOOC trend. What is missing is the OER trend and its implications.

This is exactly what I need to learn as I develop our home school. I would be grateful for more insights.

The open educational resources model, including textbooks, has emerged as a response to rising text prices, a need for greater access to high-quality learning materials, the proliferation of e-reader devices, and a trend in publishing toward electronic media. Many contend that educational resources should be open and that instructional models increasingly depend on open content.

We - students, graduate students and professors from different universities of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, CIS and non-CIS countries. We believe that the essence of higher education is not in memorizing 30-40 books on the list of disciplines. A good engineer - not the one who knows by heart the formulas, theorems and methods, and the one who knows the ways of solving problems and approaches to the study of various problems.

Note: We ve updated this post multiple times with additional material. Look for the updates below. A story on the German publishing industry web site boersenblatt.net (in German) reports that Netherlands-based Swets (Swets & Zeitlinger Group B.V.) is insolvent and has filed for bankruptcy. We ve reached out the company for comment.

Thanks very much for posting this, did not know about it.

Hi, there I think that we must talk about this issue, is very important to know more about it. Russian hackers have pulled off what is possibly the largest cyber security breach in history, stealing 1.2 billion usernames and passwords and more than 500 million email addresses, security experts say. More than 420,000 websites, including large, well-known sites as well as smaller companies, were targeted by a cybercrime ring dubbed Cybervor.

Interesting video with ideas about Education.

Education is due for a change, beginning with training teachers to teach in new ways. Learning needs also vary, making it important for a teacher to be able to teach in a variety of ways to get knowledge across, e.g., math solutions may be achieved in several ways - one student may get it the first time while another may need a different explanation. Young people need to be encouraged to learn and know that learning will get them somewhere. Finding a teaching model that works for the majority is definitely a challenge - perhaps more than one or a combination of models?

Somos rastreados para armar estrategias de marketing, la gente que lo hace gana dinero con nuestra interacción "gratuita".

A really interesting view about the lack of privacy from the viewpoint of a lawyer in the USA who is concerned about privacy and client confidentiality. This really opened my eyes to a different viewpoint, that lawyers have to maintain privacy to the best of their ability. Knowing that confidential client data could be accessed has a significant effect on whether law practioners can perform their role effectively.

I found this one on Facebook today. It's an impressive project to show how social media can be used to manipulate one's digital identity.

Really nice article showing how easy is to manipulale information on social media.

Loved the article, you can fake in your real life and more in your digital identity.

Seek, sense and share. I have found 'assorted stuff'. A blog by Tim SI tahmer, expert in instructional technology. This guy seems to know stuff about internet and other digital things. I found him on Twitter, https://twitter.com/timstahmer, but haven't spot him here in the Diigo group.