Week 12 Reading Notes

Prior to reading Blossom's article I never thought much about social media. It is interesting that collaborative projects via the World Wide Web aid in learning and human progress. Hopefully I can find a way to become part of this movement and receive feedback for any work I produce. The fact that I could use my Facebook account as a means to promote learning or research is fascinating and something I may look into doing in the future. As for the remark about using blogs to turn a profit, I nor any of my friends who post blogs do that. I still am unsure of how to look into gaining a profit from a blog though I'm sure more about this will be revealed as people keep collaborating on the World Wide Web.

Allan's article shows the roles wikis could play in an academic environment. As an undergraduate I took a course on the history of Central Asia in which one of the collective learning projects we could do was create and manage a Wikipedia page that focused on some aspect of Central Asian history. This is a good way to promote the spread of discussion toward any academic topic. The only problem I see is dealing with the people who may troll the entries and change them to whatever they want. If the entries are restricted only to scholars, though, then they are not serving their purpose. It will be interesting to see the direction collaborative learning and research via wikis goes over the next few years.

The idea of social tagging looks like an excellent one for people doing research. If people look up one source online, they can see several complimentary sources tagged to the one they looked up. More than just promoting sharing, library patrons now have the ability to see similar sources to the ones they looked up, thus strengthening whatever research they did. Arch also acknowledges the problem that spam tagging presents to those doing research and potential methods to deal with people TROLLing the wiki entry. I thought that her explanation of what when problems arise makes social tagging a key element of scholarly research in the digital world.

The video of Jimmy Wales' presentation shows how active Wikipedia is and how different it is from traditional encyclopedias. While Wikipedia is free for everyone to use people can easily change the information presented in an entry to whatever they want it to say regardless of the facts. It was good to see Wales acknowledge the weaknesses Wikipedia has and how to circumvent them in addition to the benefits Wikipedia gives the scholarly community. I also liked the explanation of how Wikipedia leads to communitity involvement and how peers, whether scholars or not, play a role in moderating entries and keeping them at least quasi-accurate. I had no idea that the changes to entries could be tracked so well. While I wouldn't use Wikipedia for scholarly research I would turn to it if I had a generalized question about a topic. Wales' explanation for future use of Wikipedia as a collaborative means of scholarship sounds like it holds more academic potential than experts claim, though it will take much further development and collaboration to make it a reality.