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?