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Muddiest Point:
I understand that cloud computing is supposed to save costs for users, but in a service such as Google Docs, for example, what costs are there for the provider, and how are they defrayed?
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Week 13 Readings
No Place to Hide / "Terrorism" Information Awareness
Wow. I've read about and been aware of what's going on in our 'surveillance state' (at least what I am allowed to know), but it never ceases to give me a shiver. Unfortunately, what Justice Louis Brandeis called our 'right to be let alone' will turn out to be indefensible when it comes down to it. In the name of security, anything seems to be fair game.
I appreciated the variety of relevant links encompassed in the TIA article- from what happens with the phone numbers that cashiers ask for to how private credit reports actually are to the details of Poindexter's ideal world. What is most shocking about this whole business is not reading alarmist, paranoid conspiracy-theorist articles on these propositions and actions, but reading the various pieces of legislation themselves. They need no exaggeration or hype to be frightening. More surprising yet is how quickly we've accepted (generally) these practices as a society.
Wow. I've read about and been aware of what's going on in our 'surveillance state' (at least what I am allowed to know), but it never ceases to give me a shiver. Unfortunately, what Justice Louis Brandeis called our 'right to be let alone' will turn out to be indefensible when it comes down to it. In the name of security, anything seems to be fair game.
I appreciated the variety of relevant links encompassed in the TIA article- from what happens with the phone numbers that cashiers ask for to how private credit reports actually are to the details of Poindexter's ideal world. What is most shocking about this whole business is not reading alarmist, paranoid conspiracy-theorist articles on these propositions and actions, but reading the various pieces of legislation themselves. They need no exaggeration or hype to be frightening. More surprising yet is how quickly we've accepted (generally) these practices as a society.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Muddiest Point 12
After reading all about institutional repositories, I am confused about what they actually are. Is it a tool like our courseweb that we use everyday, or is it a combination of all the information on a school's intranet, or is it something we don't have yet at Pitt? It is described in the readings as something very revolutionary, but sounds commonplace to me.
Week 12 Readings
Using a Wiki to Manage a Library Instruction Program
The library focused on in this article lists a few specific uses of their library instruction wiki: "...the specifics of the classes' needs, unforeseen directions of the assignment, preferences of the professor that were not necessarily communicated previous to class time, and housekeeping issues..." None of these communication needs are new or extraordinary, but using the wiki to communicate does seem to offer several advantages. The simple concept of being able to report technical issues for a website, for example, would save time, and much hassle for the upkeeper of the site, who might otherwise be inundated with emails reporting the same broken link or typo. Having a location to share feedback for a class gives the instructors a great advantage and means to improve their teaching skills. The wiki would also serve as a wonderful reference for new instructors of the class. In future classes, problems can be predicted or avoided altogether if their is a record of the problems and how they were resolved.
Creating the Academic Library Folksonomy
This sounds like it could be a big part of the solution for the problem of having to mine through endless pages of digital garbage when researching or just surfing online. It would be very helpful to know what others have found to be helpful or relevant to a topic, especially in the example from the article of classmates researching a common topic. The article also mentions how this tool could be used to bring some of the gems hidden in the deep web to the surface; if specialized scholars access and tag these sites, then it could be discovered more easily by students.
We've already been introduced to this concept with the citeulike assignment, but I hadn't really considered at the time the possibilities for a tool like this. It seems to me that social bookmarking sites need to cater only to a specific population, like a university, or to a specific research area, because it seems to me that having tons of generic sites with limited popularity and content will diminish their usefulness.
How a Ragtag Band Created Wikipedia
Given the concept alone, I am skeptical about the accuracy of Wikipedia, but in reality, I haven't been able to find to much fault with it so far. Wales said that "it isn't perfect, but it's much better than you would expect"
I was particularly interested in the portion about controversial issues. Wales said that it wasn't actually a big problem, because he believes that most people see the need for neutrality. So "vandalism" is very quickly corrected. I didn't realize that there are so many measures in place to get rid of bogus or poor contributions, using seemingly fair, democratic methods.
The vast majority of content that is added and edited is done by a relatively very small group. It makes sense that people who would dedicate so many hours to writing an encyclopedia just for fun tend to be reliable.
It has been said that, basically, academics hate Wikipedia. My experience, even in my first semester of studies at Pitt, has been very mixed. I wonder exactly how many teachers and professors at the various levels of education are 'for' and 'against' Wikipedia, and why. Wales also touched briefly on what may be the next big thing in education: open-licensed textbooks. Would these really be less biased?
The library focused on in this article lists a few specific uses of their library instruction wiki: "...the specifics of the classes' needs, unforeseen directions of the assignment, preferences of the professor that were not necessarily communicated previous to class time, and housekeeping issues..." None of these communication needs are new or extraordinary, but using the wiki to communicate does seem to offer several advantages. The simple concept of being able to report technical issues for a website, for example, would save time, and much hassle for the upkeeper of the site, who might otherwise be inundated with emails reporting the same broken link or typo. Having a location to share feedback for a class gives the instructors a great advantage and means to improve their teaching skills. The wiki would also serve as a wonderful reference for new instructors of the class. In future classes, problems can be predicted or avoided altogether if their is a record of the problems and how they were resolved.
Creating the Academic Library Folksonomy
This sounds like it could be a big part of the solution for the problem of having to mine through endless pages of digital garbage when researching or just surfing online. It would be very helpful to know what others have found to be helpful or relevant to a topic, especially in the example from the article of classmates researching a common topic. The article also mentions how this tool could be used to bring some of the gems hidden in the deep web to the surface; if specialized scholars access and tag these sites, then it could be discovered more easily by students.
We've already been introduced to this concept with the citeulike assignment, but I hadn't really considered at the time the possibilities for a tool like this. It seems to me that social bookmarking sites need to cater only to a specific population, like a university, or to a specific research area, because it seems to me that having tons of generic sites with limited popularity and content will diminish their usefulness.
How a Ragtag Band Created Wikipedia
Given the concept alone, I am skeptical about the accuracy of Wikipedia, but in reality, I haven't been able to find to much fault with it so far. Wales said that "it isn't perfect, but it's much better than you would expect"
I was particularly interested in the portion about controversial issues. Wales said that it wasn't actually a big problem, because he believes that most people see the need for neutrality. So "vandalism" is very quickly corrected. I didn't realize that there are so many measures in place to get rid of bogus or poor contributions, using seemingly fair, democratic methods.
The vast majority of content that is added and edited is done by a relatively very small group. It makes sense that people who would dedicate so many hours to writing an encyclopedia just for fun tend to be reliable.
It has been said that, basically, academics hate Wikipedia. My experience, even in my first semester of studies at Pitt, has been very mixed. I wonder exactly how many teachers and professors at the various levels of education are 'for' and 'against' Wikipedia, and why. Wales also touched briefly on what may be the next big thing in education: open-licensed textbooks. Would these really be less biased?
Monday, November 17, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Week 11 Readings
Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influential Work
This article mentions what seems to me to be an overarching theme in my classes and discussions: For a digital library, the ability provide access to digital collections is vastly different than the ability to provide access to this information in a way that is useful and productive for users. Ideally, digital libraries seek to achieve a continuity across the various information resources. These various resources: databases of journals, books, etc. are all self-governing, so it is no easy task to provide the "seamless federation" of these resources that is sought after. The article discusses several projects in this field, and the tremendous progress that has been made towards this still-distant goal.
Dewey Meets Turing
This is a discussion about how the relationship between computer scientists and librarians has developed since the National Science Foundation's Digital Libraries Initiative (1994). While we have extensively studied the impact and benefits of computerization and digitization of libraries, the article interestingly begins by mentioning some of the DL Initiative's benefits on the computer science field. Specifically, it bridged a sort of gap between the scientists' responsibility as researchers and the funders' pressure on them to impact society.
The combining of libraries and computer technology alone would surely have been a huge task, but nothing compared to what a problem it is when we throw the World Wide Web into the equation.
I greatly enjoyed the metaphors in this article :)
Institutional Repositories
Another run-in with our friend Clifford. This time he talks about the development of institutional repositories, which immediately became a very important means of scholarly communication. He views these repositories as a "strategy for supporting the use of networked information to advance scholarship."
Basically, institutional repositories provide a university (usually) with means to manage and disseminate digital materials produced by the university and its community, for use by the same. Today, these capabilities are a few years old, but their impact has already been significant. I'm not sure exactly where we are in the development today, but Lynch predicted 5 years ago that mature repositories "will contain the intellectual works of faculty and students - both research and teaching materials - and also documentation of the activities of the institution itself in the form of records of events and performance and of the ongoing intellectual life of the institution. It will also house experimental and observational data captured by members of the institution that support their scholarly activities."
This article mentions what seems to me to be an overarching theme in my classes and discussions: For a digital library, the ability provide access to digital collections is vastly different than the ability to provide access to this information in a way that is useful and productive for users. Ideally, digital libraries seek to achieve a continuity across the various information resources. These various resources: databases of journals, books, etc. are all self-governing, so it is no easy task to provide the "seamless federation" of these resources that is sought after. The article discusses several projects in this field, and the tremendous progress that has been made towards this still-distant goal.
Dewey Meets Turing
This is a discussion about how the relationship between computer scientists and librarians has developed since the National Science Foundation's Digital Libraries Initiative (1994). While we have extensively studied the impact and benefits of computerization and digitization of libraries, the article interestingly begins by mentioning some of the DL Initiative's benefits on the computer science field. Specifically, it bridged a sort of gap between the scientists' responsibility as researchers and the funders' pressure on them to impact society.
The combining of libraries and computer technology alone would surely have been a huge task, but nothing compared to what a problem it is when we throw the World Wide Web into the equation.
I greatly enjoyed the metaphors in this article :)
Institutional Repositories
Another run-in with our friend Clifford. This time he talks about the development of institutional repositories, which immediately became a very important means of scholarly communication. He views these repositories as a "strategy for supporting the use of networked information to advance scholarship."
Basically, institutional repositories provide a university (usually) with means to manage and disseminate digital materials produced by the university and its community, for use by the same. Today, these capabilities are a few years old, but their impact has already been significant. I'm not sure exactly where we are in the development today, but Lynch predicted 5 years ago that mature repositories "will contain the intellectual works of faculty and students - both research and teaching materials - and also documentation of the activities of the institution itself in the form of records of events and performance and of the ongoing intellectual life of the institution. It will also house experimental and observational data captured by members of the institution that support their scholarly activities."
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