Tag Archives: locating information and resources

Where do we strike the balance between engaging directly with an unprecedented number of information sources and resisting being overwhelmed by the abundance of information?

L
Knowledge is Out, Focus is In, and People are Everywhere →

David Dal­rym­ple thinks that in the net age, fil­ter­ing, not remem­ber­ing is the most impor­tant skill. In his response to Edge’s annual ques­tion for 2010, How is the Inter­net chang­ing the way you think?, he says that those who are able to resist the dis­trac­tions posed by a del­uge of unre­lated infor­ma­tion and focus on what is impor­tant are bet­ter equipped than those who are knowl­edge­able. “Knowl­edge was once an inter­nal prop­erty of a per­son, and focus on the task at hand could be imposed exter­nally, but with the Inter­net, knowl­edge can be sup­plied exter­nally, but focus must be forced inter­nally.” The idea that an exter­nal infor­ma­tion repos­i­tory can replace human mem­ory is inter­est­ing, but the dichotomy strikes me as a lit­tle extreme. We can’t turn off our mem­o­ries, and there is value in serendip­i­tous find­ings. Focus and dis­trac­tion work in con­cert in any under­tak­ing. We’ll just have to be more mind­ful of which one is lead­ing the quest for knowl­edge. via Idea of the Day

♦ ♦ ♦

L
The maturing human network →

This oth­er­wise unin­spir­ing white paper from Deloitte Con­sult­ing on the inter­est­ing topic of social net­work­ing in the enter­prise makes the sig­nif­i­cant point that orga­ni­za­tions are increas­ingly invest­ing in Web 2.0 tech­nolo­gies as a way to retain knowl­edge and solve problems:

A big part of knowl­edge is under­stand­ing where to find the answers. In today’s world, global organ­i­sa­tions are con­stantly chal­lenged with dis­parate pock­ets of infor­ma­tion cre­ated within dif­fer­ent func­tional silos and busi­ness units. They find it increas­ingly dif­fi­cult to locate spe­cific sub­ject mat­ter experts quickly and effi­ciently. Social net­work­ing tools with pow­er­ful search capa­bil­i­ties pro­vide a plat­form to expe­dite these con­nec­tions. If organ­i­sa­tions can­not effec­tively con­nect peo­ple and resources across regions, func­tions and net­works, they can­not increase ser­vice capabilities.

♦ ♦ ♦

L
Ocean View →

Jesse Smith’s review of the recently ren­o­vated US National Museum of Nat­ural His­tory points out the meta­mor­pho­sis from stuffy sci­ence insti­tu­tion to mod­ern entity that must “edu­cate with­out bor­ing, elu­ci­date with­out offend­ing, and advo­cate with­out annoy­ing.” For exam­ple, the museum offers no lin­ear pro­gres­sion through the exhibit, but rather any num­ber of nat­ural courses that reflect the chaos of the ocean itself:

Earth’s oceans, we are reminded, form a sin­gle inter­con­nected body of water. Its species and cur­rents are not con­strained by labels such as Atlantic and Pacific, so why should their inter­pre­ta­tion? Sec­tions meld seam­lessly into one another, but infor­ma­tion in each is pre­sented in a con­strained man­ner so that if you do, say, jump from a stuffed pen­guin in Poles to a pre­served Coela­canth (the giant fish con­sid­ered extinct until a fish­er­man found one off the coast of South African in 1938), a vis­i­tor can still learn or expe­ri­ence at each. With the excep­tion of the Jour­ney Through Time exhibit — which explores the slow march of evo­lu­tion that began under­wa­ter — there is never a pro­gres­sion to fol­low, no order by which a vis­i­tor must read or look. In this way, tour­ing the hall feels a lot like surf­ing the Web.

♦ ♦ ♦

L
Shortening the Tail of Scientific Expertise? →

Is the web nar­row­ing sci­en­tists’ exper­tise? Soci­ol­o­gist James Evans’ work iden­ti­fies that as more jour­nals become avail­able online, dra­mat­i­cally fewer arti­cles are being cited in the research papers within them. “Rather than mea­sur­ing the length of the tail, it seems that mod­ern sci­ence is actu­ally focus­ing on a tiny bit of it.” The rea­sons for this phe­nom­e­non are unclear, but he does sug­gest that online data­bases make it less likely now than in the past for researchers to inte­grate serendip­i­tous gems of dis­cov­er­ies into their research. Per­haps prov­ing the old adage that, an “expert is some­one who knows more and more about less and less until, even­tu­ally, he knows every­thing about nothing.”

♦ ♦ ♦

L
Start Pages as Environments for Self-Organized Learners →

Start pages like Netvibes and Page­flakes are not specif­i­cally designed for edu­ca­tional pur­poses, but as Malinka Ivanova points out, they are flex­i­ble enough to poten­tially sup­port self-organized learn­ing and research envi­ron­ments. In this pre­sen­ta­tion, she com­pares var­i­ous start pages in terms of a model of mul­ti­chan­nel learn­ing in which learn­ers may play a a wide range of roles: authors, con­trib­u­tors, dis­trib­u­tors, searchers, mod­er­a­tors, review­ers, edi­tors, researchers, or evaluators.

♦ ♦ ♦

L
Q-Tools: An Approach for Discovery and Knowledge Work →

Not­ing that Google rec­og­nizes that the inter­net does not need to orga­nized until you have a ques­tion in search of an answer, Dave Gray points out that ques­tions may be the most basic tools for gain­ing knowl­edge and work­ing with infor­ma­tion. His stan­dard set of ques­tions offers an inter­est­ing way for infor­ma­tions man­age­ment sys­tems like feed read­ers and email clients eto orga­nize and manip­u­late infor­ma­tion. Exam­ples of Q-tools include the Prism (one input, mul­ti­ple out­puts), the Razor (binary sort­ing), the Gen­er­a­tor (cre­ates new infor­ma­tion), the Peeler (dri­ves atten­tion to deeper lev­els), and more.

♦ ♦ ♦

L
Voices Carry →

Is it a prob­lem, asks Lawrence Hill, that many of the most famous and endur­ing fic­tional accounts of African Amer­i­cans have been penned by whites? A solu­tion to this trend of ignor­ing African-American writ­ers is to incor­po­rate mem­oirs into the body of Civil War lit­er­a­ture into the curriculum:

What’s strik­ing about such nar­ra­tives is the imme­di­acy of expres­sion. These authors have a fun­da­men­tal point to make, one of such per­sonal urgency that the reader can hardly turn away. Between each line breathes a voice that seems to whis­per: This is my name, this is when I was born, this is who I am and how I have lived, and I am going to assert my own human­ity by set­ting my story down on paper. If we are to per­suade book­stores, review­ers, librar­i­ans, and cur­ricu­lum writ­ers to look for fresh lit­er­a­ture touch­ing on the African-American expe­ri­ence, and pre­vail on teach­ers to exer­cise more imag­i­na­tion than merely shov­ing the old pile of school edi­tions of To Kill a Mock­ing­bird at yet another class of yawn­ing stu­dents, it may be mem­oir that does the trick.

♦ ♦ ♦

L
Death of the Guidebook: Lost in a Cutthroat World →

Chris Tay­lor calls “desk updates” the travel guide­book industry’s “dirty secret.” “In times past, the only way to research a guide­book was to actu­ally go there — the alter­na­tive, pla­gia­ris­ing another guide­book, was, and still is, dif­fi­cult to cover up. Today, you can sit at home and Google the town you might oth­er­wise be explor­ing on foot, and hope­fully some ran­dom blog­ger has done the leg­work for you.” But the dirty part is not the fact that they stayed at home, it is the mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the source of their exper­tise and the betrayal of their read­ers’ trust. They should learn from the best blog­gers: write every­where (includ­ing from home), bor­row from every­one, give credit where it’s due, and add value to the con­ver­sa­tion from your own gen­uine experiences.

♦ ♦ ♦

L
Online Libraries Are Not Libraries At All →

David Wein­berger on why online libraries are not libraries at all: “So, even if the dis­trib­uted online library we’re build­ing at first seems sort of like a library, it will quickly invent itself into some­thing new, some­thing unpre­dictable and quite pos­si­bly, some­thing that will change us deeply.”

♦ ♦ ♦

L
Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search? →

Lots of inter­est­ing con­clu­sions in this study about social bookmarking’s role in web search: Tags are present in the page­text of 50% of the pages they anno­tate and in the titles of 16% of the pages they anno­tate. Tags are in con­text and many tagged pages would be dis­cov­ered by a search engine (p.8).

♦ ♦ ♦