Two completely fascinating presentations on technology and education, from very different points of view.

Dylan William brilliantly advances, step by step, toward concluding that technology has a quite particular role to play in education:

What I’m going to argue is that the role of technology in improving learning is primarily in what I call third generation pedagogies. Where we have automated aggregation technologies, which actually take the responses of different students and do some smart things with those things. And give the teacher advice about what are the sensible next steps. The really brilliant teachers are doing this already. But most teachers can’t do it. And so the challenge of third generation pedagogy is to have the contingencies of teaching—that what you do when you know that the teaching didn’t work quite the way you intended—that is supported by technology.

Google’s Peter Norvig, among other things, adds to the mix the value of having students learning in teams so they can teach one another.

(Many thanks to Seb Schmoller for the pointers.)

[Tags: education teaching dlan_william peter_norvig ]

I just published a new issue of my free newsletter. The main article is, entirely by coincidence, about ebooks and libraries — a coincidence because Amazon just announced Kindle, its ebook hardware.

The main article is a response to Anthony Grafton’s recent article in the New Yorker that tries to de-hype claims about the future of libraries.

By the way, Everything Is Miscellaneous is available for Kindle.

Also by the way, I just got a link from Urs Gasser to a recent conference on the future of books. [Tags: books ebooks kindle amazon libraries everything_is_miscellaneous ]

The estimable Lorcan Dempsey of the OCLC points to a presentation by Michael Panzer (also of the OCLC) about how to “webbify” the Dewey Decimal System.

The question Michael addresses is how to take the Dewey Decimal Classification system to the “networked level,” defined as “Infrastructural improvements to make a KOS [Knowledge Organization System] web-scale accessible, to make sharing, syndicating, leveraging of its data feasible.” He begins by scoping the problem. He then talks about the issues in webbifying the DDC, which he boils down to three: URI design, caption design, and format considerations.

He proposes a scheme for URI’s (which, especially in the condensed form of a PowerPoint presentation I don’t fully understand, but are probably beyond me even if spelled out), with examples such as http://dewey.info/concept/338.4/en/edn/22/. Notice the DDC number after the “concept” designation.

Captions he acknowledges depend on context, and with Web services (Michael points out), one cannot always know the context in which one’s captions are going to be used. He also discusses the importance of maintaining the hierarchy, but the bullet points are too compressed. (Not a criticism. The PowerPoint deck wasn’t intended to be self-standing, and I don’t know enough to be able to fill in all the missing context.)

To the third point, he looks at adopting either the MARC 21 or (and?) SKOS formats.

As Duncan says, “This is part of an ongoing investigation of what it means to release more of the value of ‘classic large-scale vocabularies’ in a web environment.” There’s lots of info packed into Dewey’s system. How can we best liberate that info?

[Tags: dewey_decimal_system libraries kos michael_panzer]

There’s a transcript of a long chat about my book among librarians in a book club, led by Stolvano Barbosa. They give it a good going over, including frequent drubbings. Fascinating, at least to me; I kept wanted to jump in, but that’s sort of hard to do with a transcript :)

Public Library of Science has started yet another open access journal. This one, appropriately enough, is the PLoS Journal of Neglected Tropical Diseases. PLoS is a peer-reviewed journal that limits what it publishes to what it considers to be the best and most important articles. According to A Blog around the Clock, written by the online community manager at PLoSOne, the inaugural issue is fully international, and the site is now using TOPAZ software that enables comments, annotations, ratings and trackbacks. It will also take an interdisciplinary approach because, as WHO’s director general Margaret Chan writes in a guest commentary:

Although these diseases have been overshadowed by better-known conditions, especially the “big three”–HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis–evidence collected in the past few years has revealed some astonishing facts about the NTDs. They are among the most common infections of the poor–an estimated 1.1 billion of the world’s 2.7 billion people living on less than US$2 per day are infected with one or more NTDs. When we combine the global disease burden of the most prevalent NTDs, the disability they cause rivals that of any of the big three. Moreover, the NTDs exert an equally important adverse impact on child development and education, worker productivity, and ultimately economic development. Chronic hookworm infection in childhood dramatically reduces future wage-earning capacity, and lymphatic filariasis erodes a significant component of India’s gross national product. The NTDs may also exacerbate and promote susceptibility to HIV/AIDS and malaria.

PLoS is trying to be a high-quality, recognized journal, and there’s value in that. It therefore limits what it publishes to what pases peer review and is deemed important. PLoS One, on the other hand, publishes anything that passes its peer review process even if the topic is relatively minor. I wonder: Do all articles that pass PLoS’ peer review but that don’t make it into PLoS get sent over to an appropriate PLoS One journal, if there is one, and if the authors agree?

Anyway, neglected tropical diseases is a perfect topic for an open access journal. But, then, I sort of think everything is.

[Tags: science plos ntd tropical_disease medicine open_access a2k ]

Donnacha DeLong argues that “Web 2.0 is rubbish” in an article in The Journalist, the National Union of Journalists’ magazine. The article argues against wiping out traditional media and replacing it with citizen journalism, which is not a position a lot of people hold. He concludes:

There are those who claim that Web 2.0 democratises the media. It would make everyone equal, yes, but should they be? It’s like saying anyone can play for Manchester United. In one of the main examples given to explain Web 2.0, Wikipedia replaces Britannica Online. Is that the kind of democracy we want – where anyone can determine the information that the public can access, regardless of their level of knowledge, expertise or agenda?

Oh sigh. This commits two fallacies.

First, it equivocates on “equal.” No one argues that all blog posts and all bloggers are of equal value. That’s why we have blogrolls. Hell, that’s why we have links. But, we all (well, all with economic means, physical access, etc.) have an equal ability to post. Equal access to post != equal value of posts.

Second, Donnacha ignores the social dynamics, as if Wikipedia (for example) were nothing but a series of posts by random individuals. In fact, Wikipedia results from a complex social dynamic and set of processes designed to move articles towards encyclopedic goodness. We can argue about whether those processes work and whether Wikipedia is reliable, and so forth, but Donnacha ignores those processes altogether. In fact, the processes are designed to keep all entries from being treated as equal.

Donnacha acts as if the Web were as weak as its weakest link because we can’t tell the difference between weak and strong links. In fact, the Web at its best is stronger than its strongest links, because those links get tempered through the exposure to multiple points of view. Of course the Web isn’t always at its best, and Donnacha is right to remind us of that. But perhaps this is Donnacha’s third fallacy: Citizen journalism is not “everybody writes what they want and we have to read it all as if it were all of equal value,” just as Wikipedia isn’t just a big blank scratch pad with publicly available pencils. Citizen journalism is founded on the idea that while many people can contribute, we need ways to surface what is of value. Everyone working in the field of citizen journalism understands Donnacha’s objection. Donnacha’s complaint isn’t a criticism of citizen journalism. It is citizen journalism’s starting point.

The fact that Donnacha’s credit at the end of the article reports that “He represents new media journalists on the union’s National Executive Council” is a bit scary. Indeed, veteran journalist Roy Greenslade resigned from the National Union of Journalists because of its attitude toward new media. Laura Oliver has an article about Roy’s resignation here. (Thanks to Richard Sambrook for the link.) [Tags: web2.0 donnacha_delong national_union_of_journalists citizen_journalism citizen_media wikipedia roy_greenslade ]

If you’re interested in the future of books and libraries, and if you’re in Cambridge MA on Tuesday, you should come to the Berkman Center at 12:30 to hear Aaron Swartz talk about the Open Library project, which is gathering a global, open and free list of every book it can find out about. It’s also attempting to help with the problem that books exist at multiple levels of abstraction: There’s Hamlet, editions of Hamlet, Hamlet in anthologies, Hamlet in translation, books based on Hamlet, etc. This is an important and fascinating project.

We serve lunch. Please RSVP. See you there…or on the webcast. (Details) [Tags: open_library aaron_swartz libraries ]

John Sutherland writes in The Guardian about William Gibson’s latest book being absorbed into the cloud of links, annotation and commentary. It’s a great example of both the enriching of ideas through their miscellanizing and how reading is becoming a social act. Fascinating. (Thanks to Terry Martin for the link.)

Patrick Leary had a terrific article in Journal of Victorian Culture in 2005 that Alexander Macgillivray just pointed out to me. It’s called “Googling the Victorians,” and the premise is: “Fortuitous electronic connections, and the information that circulates through them, are emerging as hallmarks of humanities scholarship in the digital age. ” He’s got some great examples — tracking down the meaning of an 1858 cartoon’s “Remember the grotto!” caption — to make the point that “What is most striking, and often quite useful, about this sort of fishing expedition is how often the sources in which one finds a ‘hit’ are utterly unexpected.” Here’s another:

…when searching for additional instances, beyond those I had found in print sources, in which the Saturday Review had
been referred to by its critics’ nickname, the Saturday Reviler. Google instantly
located the phrase in the following: a biographical account of Charles Haddon
Spurgeon, as a favourite epithet of his associates; the short-lived 1872 periodical,
The Ladies; an 1864 book about the contemporary stage magicians the Brothers
Davenport; an appendix, by Richard Burton, to his 1885 edition of Arabian Nights;
and a magazine account of a conversation with Frank Harris about his tenure as
editor in the 1890s.

Leahy goes on:

Such experiences reinforce the
conviction that the very randomness with which much online material has been
placed there, and the undiscriminating quality of the search procedure itself,
gives it an advantage denied to more focused research. It has been often and
rather piously proclaimed (by myself, among others) that googling around the
internet cannot possibly substitute for good old-fashioned library research, and
this is certainly true. But we are perhaps reaching a point in our relationship to
the online world at which it is important to recognize that the reverse is equally
true. No amount of time spent in the library stacks would have suggested to me
that any of those sources would be an especially good place to look for instances
of that particular phrase, and if it had, the likelihood of actually discovering
the phrase in a printed edition of any of them would have been virtually nil.

This is an excellent argument for reversing the current momentum of copyright law. Our culture benefits from having as much of this stuff searchable and available as possible. Since 19th century stuff is generally out of copyright, the Victorian scholars are in good shape, as Leahy notes. But why should our ability to research, learn and understand suddenly come to a galloping halt towards the beginning of the 20th century?

I don’t want to miss another of Leahy’s points: “…the vast reach of online
searching is connecting people, not merely with information, but with one
another, often in the most unexpected and fruitful ways.” [Tags: copyright scholarship google everything_is_miscellaneous ]

I’ve posted a long piece at Huffington Post that tries to put together the strongest, most coherent version of Andew “Cult of the Amateur” Keen’s argument against the Web…and then critiques it. Tags: andrew_keen web_2.0]