Geographies of the World's Knowledge

Want to see some visualisations of internet penetration worldwide with total numbers together with % of population? Or the world's largest newspapers, mapping Flickr, distribution of articles on Wikipedia? The Convoco Foundation and Oxford Internet Institute have given us a fascinating collecxtion of data and visualisations here.

What is Information Literacy?

Mike Eisenberg answers some key questions in this excellent vodcast.He still sees IL at the centre of the literacies in the 21st century, with technology and digital literacies fitting in as part of the IL process. He refers extensively to his Big6 framework. It's a really useful vodcast for those wanting answers to the basic questions of what IL might be and how to start putting it into the curriculum.

Is Wikipedia a valid source?

University of Wolverhampton held a poll about this question. See here

With 1108 votes cast, the results were:

• Yes: 45%
• No: 55%

Interesting! And there's a good post from Chris Lambert, Helen Curtis, and Tom Hicks the Academic Liaison Team, from Learning and Information Services.

Times are a changin' at Wikipedia

According to a post today on ReadWriteWeb some major changes are on the way at Wikipedia.The aim will be to make editing simpler. Will this encourage more to participate? Just about every student group I see I ask how many of them have done or edited a Wikipedia site and the result is always only 1 or 2. Wikipedia is often quoted as the example of the wisdom of the crowd, etc. The truth is that 50% of the edits are done by 1% of the users.
The new design can be expected 5 April with further changes later.
The article in ReadWriteWeb asks : is it too late? Have people given upon it?

I think not, but it is up to all of us involved in eduction (and especially libraries) to encourage everyone to edit. We all know something unique : it's just that we lack the confidence and initiative to go online to share it! Also it's a telling experience to write a Wikipedia site : where will you get your information? Where will you check it? It's a pity that some of the academics critical of Wikipedia had not got their students to write a Wikipedia site as a learning exercise!

Wikipedia : two viewpoints

Alison Head and Micahel Eisenberg have written an interesting paper in First Monday. It is part of the Project Information Literacy (PIL) at University of Washington's Information School. They undertook 11 student focus groups on 7 US campuses in late 2008 and a survey at 6 US college campuses in spring 2009.


Major findings from the study are as follows:

1.Far more students, than not, used Wikipedia. Wikipedia was used in addition to a small set of other commonly used information resources at the beginning of the research process.
2.Reasons for using Wikipedia were diverse: Wikipedia provided students with a summary about a topic, the meaning of related terms, and also got students started on their research and offered a usable interface.
3.Respondents who were majoring in architecture, engineering, or the sciences were more likely to use Wikipedia than respondents in other majors.

The article is a good reply to academics who decry the overuse of Wikipedia. The findings indicate that students see it as a starting point and many expect to have to verify information against other sources.

Then I cam across an article by Mike Melenson on ReadWriteWeb "Why Wikipedia should be trusted as a breaking news source." How much less trustworthy is the site for breaking news than the plethora of blogs and other online news sources? He refers to various papers given at the recent South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin. The line taken is that Wikipedia is a place for students to begin.
Furthermore "if we are willing to take crowd-sourced content - whether tweets, Facebook updates, blogs, videos or whatever else - as valid sources for information about our world, then a collection of these same media as carefully poured over and curated as found in a Wikipedia article should be even more trusted, not less, than those bits on their own."

Another useful angle on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia YouTube and Information Literacy

Been meaning to blog about this presentation on Slideshare by Esther Grassian for some time. It's from Sept. 2008 and I even notice that the Powerpoint background and some of the images are some of the same that I have used! So we have a lot in common. The message that Wikipedia YouTube and Google are not enough is of course a common one for us all to be giving out.There are some ideas on how to leverage Wikipedia so that students realise how it is created and the effort involved in doing this. There are examples of other Tubes and titles for use.
I look forward to "speaking" with Esther if all goes according to plan in the Second Life event on Friday that Sheila Webber blooged about earlier this week.

Wikipedia YouTube & Information Literacy

View more presentations from Esther Grassian.

Use of Wikipedia : and how students procrastinate

Just reading Sheila Webber's latest post about new short videos made by the Project Information Literacy I cannot resist drawing attention to them too. The debate about use of Wikipedia is a non-debate to me, (they will use it anyway and why not - its often a good starting place, but NOT the end place)and the video does make a number of good points which could be useful to show to groups of your students.
The procrastination video could be a good warning to groups of students - information overload, time management, waiting for guidance from academics etc.
Here is the link to these videos.

More about what students say about researching

Further to my post on 8 April about Head and Eisenbeg's report (University of Washington) about how students study derived from focus groups on 7 US campuses : there are also two YouTube videos called the InfoLit Dialogs :
No 1 is about Presearch and attitudes to Wikipedia (part of this could be used to preface a session on Wikipedia.

No. 2 is about Procrastination and how most students leave everything to the last minute (again could be useful as a discussion prompt)


Thanks to Facebook I spotted a reference to these videos by Susan Ariew, one of the book's contributors - so thank you Susan!

Wikipedia is winning!

John Naughton's article in the Observer on 5th April traced Encyclopedia Britannica's problems over the years. Around 1995 Microsoft's Encarta nearly killed it off (remember Encarta?seems so long ago now!) . Now we have the news that Microsoft is shutting down the Encarta sites at the end of 2009. This is largely because Wikipedia has effectively killed Encarta off. Naughton then maintains that the arguments over accuracy of content should be set aside. Instead of complaining about it, academics should be adding to it! As Professor Peter Murray-Rust (University of Cambridge) said recently at a conference in Oxford: "The bit of Wikipedia that I wrote is correct."
I think John Naughton is correct : Wikipedia is "one of the greatest inventions we have.Isn't it time we accepted it? Microsoft has."
Therefore in our IL interventions we should be recommending it as a first port of call for basic information, teaching how to recognise and use a good Wikipedia site and encourage everyone to write and edit sites, thereby learning the perils of information creation.

Today's college students and conducting research in a digital age

In case you haven't come across this excellent report before, Alison Head and Michael Eisenberg of University of Washington are looking into how students do their research. The first progress report is available and details their findings derived from 90 minute discussion with groups of students at various levels from 7 different US Universities or colleges, Oct.-Dec. 2008. From this they are building up a view of students being like inexperienced sailors heading into a high wind, sails flapping and being unable to go where they want.

For this blog there is an interesting list of why students use Wikipedia.

For those who think research is so easy now with Google, they are finding that paradoxically "research seems to be far more difficult to conduct in the digital age than it did in previous times".

Pic is of Cardiff Central Public Library again

Pupils to study Twitter and blogs in primary schools shake-up

In yesterday's Guardian there was a leaked report on what may be in Sir Jim Rose's proposals for the revised primary curriculum in our schools. The draft plans suggest that children should master Twitter and Wikipedia and teachers will have more freedom to decide what pupils should concentrate on in class.
Children should leave primary school familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication. They must gain "fluency" in handwriting and keyboard skills, and learn how to use a spellchecker alongside how to spell.
Looks like there may be some interesting discussions yet to come.

Wikipedia Tutorial - a guide for students

Wikipedia Tutorial - a guide for students
Without the music this just wouldn't be the same : 3 mins 11 seconds of the William Tell Overture (the noisy bit at the end) underneath a slide show about the dangers of using Wikipedia produced by the Paul Robeson Library of Rutgers University. It concludes "If not Wikipedia, what should you use? ...ask your instructor or a librarian. There's a world of information beyond Wikipedia / Go forth and find it" May be a bit negative for some, but I think I shall give it a try so thank you Rutgers!

By the way
"What's the definition of an intellectual?"
"Someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger!"
I fail every time!

More historical photos on flickr and Wikipedia

An article in New York Times "Historical photos in Web archives gain vivid new lives" by Noam Cohen 18/1/2009 tells of the Commons facility on flickr and most recently the huge donation of about 100,000 photos from the German archive to Wikimedias Commons the vitual archive for images on Wikipedia. In both cases the sharing of these resources is leading to improved cataloguing information about the images, as members of the public assist in recognising the content of the images.

Using Wikipedia for IL

There's a great post on Burning Windows by a young librarian in the Tennessee Valley, who was enthused by Anne-Marie Deitering's article about use of Wikipedia.(see chapter 7 of our book).In particular the author enthuses about browsing, collaboration and discovery and likes to get away from the "wretched demo comes to mind here in which the instructor stands like a statue at the front of the classroom while students sleep or talk to their friends". Bravo!

Knol, Google's answer to Wikipedia?

Google have announced Knol, a collection of authoritative articles, written by a community of experts. After having a quick look at it, and reading comments from other bloggers, it is a site to watch in future, but not of immediate interest. The content is naturally very limited and much of this is medical. Despite the naming of authors, sometimes with credentials, it is hard to see the articles having sufficient authority to be recommendable. Maybe a student class could be given an assignment to compare an article between Knol, Wikipedia and Britannica in due course.

For more comment see ReadWrite Web.

Disruptive Scholarship ; an idea whose time has come

Gerry McKiernan's presentation last month at the International Plagiarism Conference in Newcastle (UK) can be viewed. As he says "In this presentation, we will review the Read/Write Traditions of the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences; analyze key Past / Present / Future Participatory Technologies; and explore the potential of Web 2.0 for creating/fostering Disruptive Learning / Scholarship / Teaching in the 21st century." The 152 slides contain some interesting connections between the way material has and may be re-used in the future across a variety of disciplines. Just as the stones of Hadrian's Wall have been re-used (just like our Roman buildings in the tower St Albans Abbey!) so will words and ideas be re-used. The slides about wikis and wikipedia are to me the most useful, and wikis could become "highly appropriate for sholarly communication if scholars trust one another and are collaborating onthe text...,and security and rollback mechanisms are in place."(David Mattison).There are examples of Wikipedia school and University projects. Finally there are lots of mock tag clouds at the end of the presentation to reinforce the message.

Ways to search Wikipedia

With over 10,000,000 articles in 253 different languages, users naturally want to get the best out of their own online encyclopedia. ReadWrite Web featured the 10 top ways to search Wikipedia. I liked Wikiwix because it also searched for images (not faultlessly but still useful),
Qwika for the large coverage of other wikis and comprehensiveness, and WikiMindMap for suggested subheadings and exploration.

Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica

Just in case you don't know Encyclopeia Britannica have anounced that they are going to open their doors to user content. It will be limited to scholars and experts, who will be named, and have to provide a profile. How far this wil be open to abuse is unclear so far. There will be "a reward system and a rich online home for them to showcase and publish..."(acc. Britannica blog). Content will be separate from the main Britannica material. Guess this is a good thing, but how far this will affect Citizendium or Knol is hard to predict. Wikipedia will keep steaming on I suspect.

Wikipedia again and again

There are several items on Wikipedia which I must highlight : Andreas Brockhaus and Martha Groom (University of Washington Bothell) gave a presentation at an EDUCAUSE Conference last year "Using Wikipedia to reenvision the term paper" Find out how students became more motivated through publishing their term papers on Wikipedia and learnt to deal with issues of voice, knowledge, and community.

Tara Brabazon (University of Brighton) wrote a critical piece in the Times Higher, 20/3/08 "Where fans put Franz before the Archduke". She lampoons the objectivity of Wikipedia by comparing lengths of articles on topics like Franz Ferdinand (the group) versus the Archduke who caused the Great War! A point well made but there's more to Wikipdia than this. She made similar points at the LILAC Conference, but when questioned is well aware of the possibilities of using Wikipedia in a positive way to teach students about how "information" is created.

Wikipedia : the missing manual, by John Broughton was referred to in Lauren's Library blog recently, and she relates some very telling points about how it shows Wikipedia could be used in an Information Literacy class.

There are some "guidance" pages on School and University projects on Wikipedia itself which may prove interesting.

Finally, if you want some basic sources for reliable online information you might try When Wikipedia Won't Cut It: 25 Online Sources for Reliable, Researched Facts, some standard alternatives.

Using Wikipedia

Will Richardson in his Weblogg-ed makes telling points in his post Yet Another Reason We Should be Teaching, Not Blocking, Wikipedia. We can't stop kids from using it and we should be encouraging a generation of reader/editors. He quotes a dodgy Physics textbook from Oxford University Press, which he hopes is no longer being used. Some of the ensuing 32 comments give useful evidence of how spoof entries will not be accepted on Wikipedia.