Posts from — October 2006

Participation Inequality: Lurkers vs. Contributors in Internet Communities (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox):
All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don’t participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background.

In contrast, a tiny minority of users usually accounts for a disproportionately large amount of the content and other system activity. This phenomenon of participation inequality was first studied in depth by Will Hill in the early ’90s, when he worked down the hall from me at Bell Communications Research (see references below).
—–

it is important to realize that when we are talking about user participation and contribution, we are in fact talking about a very small number of people who have the time and motivation to contribute to our projects. frequently… system creators assume that their users will be just as enthusiastic as they are in creating things in their system their system, this is rarely true, but Nielsen points out some ways you might increase the number.

Why Wiki? free online video course:

Car loans help the poor get to work – Yahoo! News:
Advocates say Ways to Work, which has underwritten $36 million in loans to 24,000 families since it began as a small program in Minnesota in 1984, is part of a new model for social service programs, one that delivers human services aimed at economic self-sufficiency. Borrowers in the program, which is in place at about 50 human services organizations in 25 states, are low-wage workers who either have poor credit or no credit. The program is targeted at getting them not just a car, but also a decent credit score and a bank account.

——-

This is a great program. I don’t really like the automobile infrastructure, because it is often overpromoted and overused but as a way to escape poverty, if it helps, that’s great.

One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated form the workplace as another closed site, but both disappear and giving way to frightful continual training, to continual monitoring of worker-schoolkids or bureaucrat-students. They try to present this as a reform of the school system, but it’s really its dismantling. negotiations 174

The world is most often presented, in academic text, popular media, and fiction, as a world of places. We are animate beings in a world of objects arranged in a locale. Our geographies have mountains and rivers and landmarks; our civilizations have capitals and governing offices and schools marked on maps; our businesses have boundings with addresses on named streets.

Place is not given, but made. People make place for various reasons: of belonging; of politics; of power and control; of meaning. But people move, thoughts progress, goods flow: we live in a world of refined movement. In studying war, and espeically in studying the shadows, I direct my research not at a set space, but at fluid targets. The shadows as I define them in this book are, at core, about movement, not merely place. They comprise in Auge’s words, non-places. This is part of the way in which they are rendered invisible. It is place that is given meaning and substance, it is locale that is populated, it is site that is “seen.”

(36-37)

Nordstrom, C. (2004). Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century. University of California Press.

——

The shadows are lines of flight.

School web sites fail accessibility test:
Eighty-six percent of the nation’s top universities have web sites that do not comply with standards designed to make the internet more accessible to persons with disabilities, according to a recent survey.

Conducted…
——
i bet it is a higher percentage for local libraries.

The Literacy Project:
A resource for teachers, literacy organisations and anyone interested in reading and education, created in collaboration with LitCam, Google, and UNESCO’s Institute for Lifelong Learning.

——-

Google’s literacy push.

Print:
British sociologist Harry Collins asked a scientist who specializes in gravitational waves to answer seven questions about the physics of these waves. Collins, who has made an amateur study of this field for more than 30 years but has never actually practiced it, also answered the questions himself. Then he submitted both sets of answers to a panel of judges who are themselves gravitational-wave researchers. The judges couldn’t tell the impostor from one of their own. Collins argues that he is therefore as qualified as anyone to discuss this field, even though he can’t conduct experiments in it.

—–

Harry Collins, noted sociologist, learns physics as well as or better than some physicists, is able to discuss and describe physics similarly. This experiment shows, to some extent, that one does not have to be inside of a scientific field in order to study and understand a scientific field. That is to say, one can know science without being a scientist. (Which we all knew to some extent) However, more importantly what it seems to indicate is that Science and Technology in Society researchers in their understandings of science and scientific practice could be, and likely are, just as correct as scientists in their observations of science. Now, as a justificatory act, this is important, but it is also important because external observation,outsider research, ethnographic, is generally thought poorly of in the sciences as a result of the ’science wars’ . However, everyone had a sneaking suspicion that the science wars were not about science as much as policing the boundaries of a culture of expertise. What this paper then says in that light… is that the boundary, unless well policed, is a fiction, and knowledge of a science or discipline can be had without specific participation in that discipline.

Article: Google print outshines the European Digital Library:
In talking about the long road to creating the European Digital Library, this stood out to me:
In 2010, the European Digital Library should have 6 million e-books available, a much lower figure than that given by Google for the same year: 15 million.
Both numbers are hard to get your head around. As one local businessman in Upstate NY would say, these projects are H-U-G-E.
——

15 million ebooks… wow. That is no footnote to universal information. I’ve been using google books for some time and I have to say sometimes it is handy, but most of the time the publishers restrictions just ruins any capacity to do research. However, the likelihood of actually having the books that I want in the local library, even the esteemed NYPL is not really happening. Of course, then again I’ve never really had a library with the books that I want in it, other than my own library.

Article: Google print outshines the European Digital Library:
In talking about the long road to creating the European Digital Library, this stood out to me:
In 2010, the European Digital Library should have 6 million e-books available, a much lower figure than that given by Google for the same year: 15 million.
Both numbers are hard to get your head around. As one local businessman in Upstate NY would say, these projects are H-U-G-E.
——

15 million ebooks… wow. That is no footnote to universal information. I’ve been using google books for some time and I have to say sometimes it is handy, but most of the time the publishers restrictions just ruins any capacity to do research. However, the likelihood of actually having the books that I want in the local library, even the esteemed NYPL is not really happening. Of course, then again I’ve never really had a library with the books that I want in it, other than my own library.