Google scholar

Google are always looking for ways of developing new products. Their latest which is still in beta testing is Google Scholar.

"Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."

This is really useful in that it enables you to search specifically for academic sources and references. This deals, at least partly, with the perennial problem of sorting out poor quality websites from good ones. At least with peer reviewed articles you know that a certain standard must have been obtained

Global Learn Day and Blogging

Sunday 21st November is "Global Learn Day VII" (presumably that is "global learning day" in UK English). Worth having a look at, but particularly interesting is their blogging page...

"For more information on why we feel that blogging is "The Next Killer App", please see these articles:
RSS: The Next Killer App For Education
Weblogs at Harvard
Blogging as a Course Management Tool
Finally, for more information about blogging, we encourage you to read what Stephen Downes has to say: Content Syndication and Online Learning"

Also interesting is the following statement at the top of their page:

"Blogging is temporarily suspended until we find ways to keep the spammers out." Seems to be a growing problem. If you want interaction and feedback you have to have a comment facility (which only one person on the course has tried using!) but if you have that then the link might be picked up by the spammers

Access to Sage Journals

You might remember I mentioned that Sage journals were providing free access to their online journals (which are particularly good for social science) until the end of October. I know that some of you made good use of them

Well SAGE Journals (http://online.sagepub.com/ ) are still available online for MMU staff and students, at least until the 5th of January 2005. This means that you can search and locate full-text articles in more than 350 journals. You must use the Athens login option to take advantage of this offer.

Article about Wikipedia

Last Monday I talked about the free software/open source movement in software and mentioned Wikipedia as an example. There is a good article about Wikipedia at Tech Central Station "The Faith based encyclopedia" which describes what it has achieved but also provide a critque of its limitations:

"As of November 2004, according to the project's own counts, nearly 30,000 contributors had written about 1.1 million articles in 109 different languages...."

"One person's "knowledge," unfortunately, may be another's ignorance. To put the Wikipedia method in its simplest terms:

1. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can submit an article and it will be published.
2. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can edit that article, and the modifications will stand until further modified.

Then comes the crucial and entirely faith-based step:

3. Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy..."

"...Take the statements of faith in the efficacy of collaborative editing, replace the shibboleth "community" with the banal "committee," and the surprise dissolves before your eyes. Or, if you are of a statistical turn of mind, think a little about regression to the mean and the shape of the normal distribution curve. However closely a Wikipedia article may at some point in its life attain to reliability, it is forever open to the uninformed or semiliterate meddler..."

class presentations

The class presentations based on the progress you have made so far on your community project will be held as follows:

Monday Nov 22nd

9.00 am Gemma Twigg
9.30 am Julie Pennington
10.00 am Daniel Kierczuk
10.15 am Victoria Barton
10.30 am Luke Pearson

Monday Nov 29th

9.00 am Rahim Katawi
9.30 am Joanne Redding
10.00 am Shahena Jalil
10.15 am Chris Leighton
10.30 am Amanda Blume
10.45 am Marc Fennel

I have still not got presentation times for John Clarke, Philip Jackson and Gavin Owens - please contact me ASAP to arrange times.

Remember, the presentations should last no more than 10 minutes. You should either use powerpoint or paper on the projector. They should give some indication of:

- how you chose your groups to study (and any problems with this)
- your progress so for in researching these groups
- what you intend to go on to do

If possible, think of some way of having interactivity in the session (eg: asking questions of your audience, getting them to discuss some issue that arises out of studying an online community)

The presentation will count 10% of the overall mark for the online community assignment

dissertations on Ebay!

email from Bill Johnston to all staff...

The JISC Plagiarism Detection Service has recently alerted all colleagues to the increasing practice of selling dissertations on eBay.

One nice example currently being bid for is a dissertation on 'The Internet and Cyber-Plagiarism'! (It's carrying a grade of 72% and is on offer at £6.50. A bargain)

Well, I suppose it's one way to earn money from your old essays

Want Community? Go Online

Interesting article on online communities and social networking which reports a survey done for eBay - "Want Community? Go Online" by Pamela Parker (8/11/04):

"Nearly 40 percent of Americans say they participate in online communities, with sites around hobbies, shared personal interests, and health-related issues among the most popular. That's according to a survey conducted by ACNielsen and commissioned by eBay.

The survey was conducted in late September. Of 1,007 respondents, 87 percent say they are part of a community. Of those, 66 percent say they participate in shared personal interest sites. Next comes hobby sites (62 percent), health community sites (55 percent), public issues sites (49 percents), and commerce sites (47 percent). Others participate in social or business networking sites (42 percent), sports sites (42 percent), alumni sites (39 percent), or dating sites (23 percent).
"We are finding that affinity is quickly replacing proximity as the key driver in forming communities," said Bruce Paul, vice president of ACNielsen. "...

"Researchers note that among offline communities, only membership in religious congregations (59 percent), social groups (54 percent), and neighborhood groups (52 percent) are more common than participation in online communities (39 percent)

The study also shows that though 30 percent of online community members interact on a daily basis, only 7 percent of offline community members interacted that often. It also reveals that 47 percent of offline communities have an online component, such as e-mailing or chatting online."

Web of Influence

I really must stop posting about Blogs, as I have bombarded you with articles and references over the last few weeks. However this article, "Web of Influence" by Daniel W. Drezner and Henry Farrell is really good and if your were to read just one article about blogs, this should be it. Here are some extracts:

The blogging revolution is making its mark on the media, to be sure. But a real revolution does normally require people to get out of the house...

The Perseus Development Corporation, a consulting firm that studies Internet trends, estimates that by 2005 more than 10 million blogs will have been created...

The top five political blogs together attract over half a million visitors per day...

The Iranian blogosphere has exploded. According to the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education’s Blog Census, Farsi is the fourth most widely used language among blogs worldwide. One service provider alone (“Persian Blog”) hosts some 60,000 active blogs. The weblogs allow young secular and religious Iranians to interact, partially taking the place of reformist newspapers that have been censored or shut down. Government efforts to impose filters on the Internet have been sporadic and only partially successful...

An international protest campaign also secured the freedom of Chinese blogger Liu Di, a 23-year-old psychology student who offended authorities with her satirical comments about the Communist Party. Yet, even as Di was released, two individuals who had circulated online petitions on her behalf were arrested. Such is life in China, where an estimated 300,000 bloggers (out of 80 million regular Internet users) uneasily coexist with the government...

One should also bear in mind that the blogosphere, mirroring global civil society as a whole, remains dominated by the developed world—a fact only heightened by claims of a digital divide. And though elite bloggers are ideologically diverse, they’re demographically similar. Middle-class white males are overrepresented in the upper echelons of the blogosphere...

review of "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People For the People

From the Guardian, November 6, 2004

Good review of "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People For the People "by Dan Gillmor O'Reilly,

Gilmour is living what he talks about by makig the full book available online. Tio access it click here

Quotes from the review:

"When this book was in its earliest stages, the author, a respected Silicon Valley journalist, posted an initial outline on his weblog, asking for comments. He was besieged with emails offering suggestions and advice. More, in fact, than he could handle. Later, he posted draft chapters as they were finished. One reader, the publisher of a small newspaper in upstate New York, whom he had never met, sent back a draft chapter dripping with digital red ink, commenting: "The time is right; the subject is right. But your book deserves to be better than this."

For most journalists or authors the idea of putting yourself through this process, while trying to get a book out, seems about as smart as standing on a street corner with a sign round your neck saying: "Please poke me in the eye."

For Gillmor, however, it is a proof of his underlying thesis. Throughout this book, he argues that the growth of internet and related technologies is changing the balance of power between journalists and their readers; you can succeed in the coming decades only by acknowledging that shift in power and changing your behaviour accordingly. "Big media ... treated the news as a lecture. We told you what the news was. You bought it, or you didn't. You might write us a letter; we might print it ... it was a world that bred complacency and arrogance on our part. It was a gravy train while it lasted, but it was unsustainable

"Tomorrow's news reporting and production will be more of a conversation or a seminar. The lines will blur between producers and consumers, changing the role of both in ways we're only beginning to grasp. The communication network itself will be a medium for everyone's voice, not just the few who can afford to buy multimillion-dollar printing presses, launch satellites, or win the government's permission to squat on the public airways."

..............

"Gillmor's ultimate hope is that the result is going to be better for everyone. Journalism, politics and major corporations will all engage with this former audience in new ways to become more transparent and therefore trusted. The result will be better media and better democracy.
His fear, however, is that this won't happen, and based on a number of examples he gives, the future is more likely to live up to his fears than his hopes. "If today's Big Media is a dinosaur," he writes, "it won't die off quietly. It will, with the government's help, try to control new media, rather than see its business models eroded by it."

Read more here

Blog glossary

There is a very good Blog glossary at Samizdata.net. Seemingly endless lists of definitions of everything from Blogistan ("The totality of blogs; blogs as a community") to Blogorrhea ("An unusually high volume output of articles on a blog"), through to Blogroll ("A list of links in the sidebar of a blog, often linking to other blogs")... and that is just the 'B's' !

Bookmarklets

I don't know if you have ever heard of bookmarklets, but they are useful little javascripts that you attach to your favourites on Internet Explorer. They are simple, safe and free. Take a look at the Bookmarkets homepage. Of particular use is the page freshness bookmark which gives you the date that a webpage was last modified in a little pop-up window. This is useful in that when you are referencing a webpage, they frequently do not state when they were written. So when you are referencing such pages it is good practice to add the 'date last modified' to your reference

A good description of bookmarklets is available on the about.com webpage Bookmarklets for Power Users

critique of claim that the internet is reinvigorating civil society

"Progress doesn't just 'emerge', by championing spontaneous collectivism, internet geeks and gurus are giving up on human agency"


This is a good article in Spiked Online (22/10/04) by the prolific and controversial sociologist, Frank Furedi, which is a critique of the claim that the internet is reinvigorating civil society and a critique of two recent book articles:

'Prospects for a new public sphere', Peter Day and Douglas Schuler, in Shaping the Network Society: The New Role of Civil Society in Cyberspace, ed Peter Day and Douglas Schuler, MIT Press, 2004,

"Day and Schuler admit in Shaping the Network Society that 'it is too early to state with certainty that the initiatives we introduce here are representative of a transnational civil society movement', but they still claim that these initiatives are 'indicators of an emerging grassroots potential and openness to social change in the network society'. They also declare proudly that 'our goals are diffuse, impossible to specify precisely, and possibly contradictory' "

'We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People', Dan Gillmor, O'Reilly, 2004,

"Gillmor disparages the idea of the journalist as an authority on their subject, insisting that journalists should be self-deprecating by nature: 'I take it for granted...that my readers know more than I do - and this is a liberating, not threatening, fact of journalistic life. Every reporter on the beat should embrace this.' He goes on to explain that he welcomes corrections and feedback from his readers, and that 'being the least knowledgeable person in the room has its advantages; I always learn something'

While it's important for journalists to be open to criticism, Gillmor's suggestion that they should profess ignorance goes further than this. Conveniently for him, it absolves journalists from having any responsibility for getting their facts straight in the first place. But hard facts are not Gillmor's principal concern - instead, he revels in the unreflective immediacy of online reportage."


"....it is the same rhetoric used by the new anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation and anti-war movements to argue that their diffuse character and lack of clear principles are strengths rather than weaknesses - or, to use the technological argot, features rather than bugs. The term 'grassroots', used to convey the democratic credentials of these new social movements, fulfils a similar purpose to the term 'emergence'. It comes across as granting power to the multitudes, but is actually about relinquishing responsibility for ideas and actions and submitting to the spontaneous."

Ad agencies get on blogging bandwagon

From Agenda.Inc (Nov 1st)

"Web logs have had an astonishing season this year, enough to freckle the faces of bloggers who do not, as a rule, get much time outdoors. Although political blogs have received the most attention, advertising agencies and communications professionals are using blogs to create discussion.

"Blogs are in fashion, and it is easy to hop on the bandwagon and say that every company should have one. The questions any smart marketer should be asking are, 'Does this provide a platform to connect with their most relevant audiences and how will this address business objectives?"