November 23, 2006

OLDaily

Thomas Chesney[Edit][Delete]: An Empirical Examination of Wikipedia, First Monday [Edit][Delete] November 23, 2006
[link: 2 Hits] in short, "the experts found Wikipedia's articles to be more credible than the non-experts. This suggests that the accuracy of Wikipedia is high. However, the results should not be seen as support for Wikipedia as a totally reliable resource as, according to the experts, 13 percent of the articles contain mistakes." [Tags: ] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Various authors[Edit][Delete]: The Webcast Academy, [Edit][Delete] November 23, 2006
[link: 5 Hits] Interesting. "The Academy is a hands on, collaborative training center for people interested in learning how to produce and host live, interactive webcasts. You can learn more about The Webcast Academy here." What's kind of weird is that instead of posting the learning material in some easily accessible format, they have regular meetings (called 'classes') that you have to attend at certain times. Don't know what that's about; it certainly isn't very user-friendly. And why oh why would they make the section headings out of Flash? Don't they know that messes up your scrolling, accessibility and usability? Via Emma Duke-Williams. [Tags: , , , ] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Konrad Glogowski[Edit][Delete]: Students Reflect on Group Work, Blog of Proximal Development [Edit][Delete] November 23, 2006
[link: Hits] His comments on group work, he says, "follow him around." I'm not surprised. Questioning group work is like questioning the Pope. Glogowski reports on some parent and student reactions to group work, including a memo from the principal to all staff pointing out "some students feel that they are 'left out,' 'stuck with,' or 'looked past' during group work. Many of these kids have other social stresses to deal with. Can we all please make every effort to alleviate this stress during class time?" People continue to say group work sometimes benefits students. I don't deny that. But I will argue that its use cannot be justified unless it can be known that it does not produce harm. But there is, sadly, no "do no harm" principle in education. There should be. [Tags: ] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

Boanerges Aleman-Meza and others[Edit][Delete]: Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, WWW 2006 [Edit][Delete] November 23, 2006
[link: Hits] This is a great paper. The discussion is directed toward the use of links within a social network to detect a potential conflict of interest. This would help editors select reviewers for journal articles (OK, so the authors are still rooted in the old world - let it go). Two networks, FOAF and the bibliographic literature in Computer Science research, are used. What we get in this paper is a nice series of steps (and cool diagram) that characterize such semantic analyses:
1. Obtaining high quality data
2. Data preparation
3. Entity disambiguation
4. Metadata and ontology representation
5. Querying and inference techniques
6. Visualization
7. Evaluation
It's interesting to see just how many real and potential conflicts of interest appear among the authors. Via New Scientist. [Tags: , , , , , , ] [Comment] [Edit] [Delete] [Spam]

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I want and visualize and aspire toward a system of society and learning where each person is able to rise to his or her fullest potential without social or financial encumberance, where they may express themselves fully and without reservation through art, writing, athletics, invention, or even through their avocations or lifestyle.

Where they are able to form networks of meaningful and rewarding relationships with their peers, with people who share the same interests or hobbies, the same political or religious affiliations - or different interests or affiliations, as the case may be.

This to me is a society where knowledge and learning are public goods, freely created and shared, not hoarded or withheld in order to extract wealth or influence.

This is what I aspire toward, this is what I work toward. - Stephen Downes