As part of my research into knowledge sharing practices, I'm conducting an online survey on two Web tools that can be used for sharing knowledge, namely, weblogs and wikis.
You would do me an immense favour if you could go and fill in the short multiple-choice questionnaires that I have prepared. Here's the weblog survey, and here's the wiki survey. Answer them in either order. If you know nothing about one of the tools, go ahead anyway - you'll be done quite early on in the corresponding questionnaire.
Note that I'm not going to hoard that data - I will publish it online when I'm done collecting.
A heartfelt thanks to VeerChand Bothra for setting up and hosting this survey on the BlogStreet weblog neighborhood analyzer and search engine site.
And if you're even more in the spirit of giving, you could help spread the word, for instance by posting the following line to your own weblog:
Update:Ross advises me to push the survey in other places to get a less biased sample. He suggests the software product marketing community. Anyone have any more hints? (I've posted on a few wikis as well)
"Google, the most popular search engine among Web users, has built its success on a tool borrowed from the scholarly community: citation analysis. Google treats links as citations, and ranks search results on the basis of the number of links to Web pages. Citebase is a new citation-ranked search and impact discovery service that returns Web-based citation analysis to its roots by measuring citations of scholarly research papers. Citebase can be used to rank papers by impact, and like Google it does this for pages that are openly available on the Web, that is, papers that are freely accessible and assessable continuously online by anyone who is interested, any time. Other services, such as ResearchIndex, have emerged to offer citation indexing of Web research papers. In the first detailed investigation of the impact of an open access Web citation indexing service with users, Citebase has been evaluated by nearly 200 users from different backgrounds. This report analyses and discusses the results of this study, which took place between June and October 2002. It was found that within the scope of its primary components, the search interface and services available from its rich bibliographic records, Citebase can be used simply and reliably for the purpose intended, and that it compares favourably with other bibliographic services. Coverage is seen as a limiting factor, and better explanations and guidance are required for first-time users." [FOS News]
I was one of the 200 evaluators and I must say I was pretty impressed. Of course, coverage is the key issue for this technology to come into widespread use. I believe physics is the only area that is well-covered at present.
Comments from Sebastien Paquet. I was pleased to see that Sebastien Paquet referred to EduResources in one of his recent blogs. Seb comments, "I'm concerned that many good resources are underused, not for lack of quality, but because they are for all practical purposes 'unfindable.' I suspect resource authors will each have to take up the responsibility of providing and maintaining part of a shared overall map of what is out there, if they want their resources to be used."
It seems to me that each of the numerous research projects underway to create new online instructional repositories should include, as part of their grant specifications, a requirement to demonstrate how potential users can efficiently locate their new online site and also a provision to include user guidelines that will show site visitors how they can best use the site for instruction. [EduResources]
Actually, it would not be a bad idea for researchers as well to reflect on, and demonstrate, how the people who could use their work will be able to find it. Too many worthy articles remain obscure, especially in interdisciplinary areas.
[...] The booster or multiplier that occurs when a person writes about what she or he thinks, observes, and reads, and then receives comments from others within a few hours or days makes an incalculable difference--the difference between private and public writing. This difference multiplies what can be learned and also multiplies the responsibility for thinking through what is said. If a writer's greatest tool is a large wastebasket (as, I believe, Hemingway remarked); the next greatest tool is a real audience.
Intermedia here in Bergen are running a project using blogs in education and research, and they have a blog for the project (as one should) called Collogatories. [Jill/txt]
1. No eye contact. His eyes will look away. If the room has a means of egress - that's where they'll look.
2. Crossing of arms and/or legs (a protective instinct).
3. The pupils of the eyes will narrow. Lying is stressful.
4. Hands on the face, especially the mouth. They are "covering" the lie.
5. Talking fast. A liar wants to get it over with.
6. Sometimes the head will nod a "no" when answering a "yes" question or visa versa. This is a subconcious movement.
7. Mispronouncing the words or mumbling. A liar kinda thinks he is not lying when he pronounces words incorrectly or mumbles.
8. Overstated friendliness/laughing. He wants you to believe and he wants you to like him so you will believe him.
And I'd say those are correct. The way I see it, you'd be looking for whether there is congruency between what the words say and what the person's body says. The body is typically much more truthful than the words. None of those signs will say for sure, as there might be many other reasons for being nervous or not meaning what one says. And it only works on people who aren't trained in being good liars. Politicians being a good example. So, it works for O.J. Simpson, but not for George W. Bush.
I think you can judge more reliably when you're already familiar with how the person behaves when he/she is being truthful. Of course you have to be mindful of the possibility that you could be lied to in the first place. Too often we are willingly deceived. (This reminds me of that Malcolm Gladwell piece "The Naked Face" about face reading.)
Weeno is another interesting advice exchange, with goals quite similar to Know-how wiki but a different modus operandi. As I understand it, Weeno is easier to understand but its structure is more rigid. (Of course, anything is more rigid than a Wiki...)
Information Technologies and International Development will be the premier journal in its field, focusing on the intersection of information and communication technologies (ICT) with international development. We aim to create a networked community of leading thinkers and strategists to discuss the critical issues of ICT and development, an epistemic community that crosses disciplines (especially technologists and social scientists), national boundaries, and the North and South hemispheres. The audience for Information Technologies and International Development will come from academia, the private sector, NGOs, and government. It will attract readers interested in the "other four billion" – the share of the world population whose countries are not yet widely connected to the Internet nor widely considered in the design of new information technologies. The journal will be informative, lively, and provocative. The MIT Press will publish this exciting new quarterly periodical from July 2003.
Each of us bases our decisions and actions on observations of the outside world that are filtered through mental models that orient us to the opportunities and threats posed by these observations. As Konrad Lonrenz and others have shown, these mental models, which the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn called paradigms, shape and are shaped by the evolving relationship between the individual organism and its external environment.
In conflict, each participant, from the individual soldier trying to survive to the commander trying to shape strategy, must make decisions based on his orientation to reality — his appreciation of the external circumstances which he must act on. Boyd argued that one's orientation to the external world changes and evolves, because it is formed by a continuous interaction between his observations of unfolding external circumstances and his interior orientation processes that make sense of these circumstances. These interior process take two forms activity: analysis (understanding the observations in the context of pre-existing patterns of knowledge) and synthesis (creating new patterns of knowledge when existing patterns do not permit the understanding needed to cope with novel circumstances).
The synthetic side of the dialectic is crucially important to one's orientation, because it is the process by which the individual (or group) evolves a new world view, if and when one is needed to cope with novel circumstances. But as Kuhn and others have shown, the synthetic process can be extremely painful, because its nature is to build a new paradigm by destroying the existing one. Boyd strove to use multiple, quick-changing destructive thrusts to isolate his adversary from reality by destroying his existing paradigm, and at the same time, deny his adversary the opportunity to synthesize a new paradigm. The combination of menacing pressure and an inability to cope with external circumstances cause the adversary to experience various combinations of uncertainty, doubt, confusion, self-deception, indecision, fear, panic, discouragement, and despair — which, in turn, overload his capacity to adapt or endure. [...] [Robert Paterson]
This is perhaps the best concise description of the process of paradigm shift through synthesis that I have seen. But I really don't like the application presented in the end.
Because participation in the consumption-based economy is unavoidable, the general public looks to markets to provide "deep support" in their quest for individualization, but "are routinely punished for being complex psychological individuals in a world still fitted out for the old mass order."
The good old times where corporations could artificially define groups and urge us to join them are almost over. "Cool People" do not drink Coke anymore, "True Men" do not shave with Gilette. We are more and more aware that everybody out there is an independent complex individual. If you blame me for being one, I won't buy your product. [frontierless]
Many markets are fragmenting, which is bad news for businesses that benefit from the uniformity of tastes. I heard somewhere that the music industry was struck with that problem, finding it more and more difficult to find stars that everyone likes. That's a Good Thing if you ask me. We can learn more from one another if we cultivate different tastes.
Of course there is a danger that, following our individuality to the extreme, we all fly into separate bubbles that don't connect together. But when you look closely you almost invariably find deep interconnections between things that initially appear different.
I found this via Cynthia Typaldos on the onlinefacilitation group. While you're there, also worth checking out is Nancy White et al.analyzing recent behavior on the list. Facilitators gone meta. Yummy.
