betajames

The patterns of collaboration between Wikipedia contributors have a direct effect on the data quality of an article, according to a new paper co-authored by a University of Arizona professor and graduate student.

With that said, 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.

“Who owns the words?” Mr. Shields asks in a passage that is itself an unacknowledged reworking of remarks by the cyberpunk author William Gibson. “Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do — all of us — though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.”

Mr. Shields’s pasted-together book and defense of appropriation underscore the contentious issues of copyright, intellectual property and plagiarism that have become prominent in a world in which the Internet makes copying and recycling as simple as pressing a couple of buttons. In fact, the dynamics of the Web, as the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier observes in another new book, are encouraging “authors, journalists, musicians and artists” to “treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.”

As the public grows more desperate, scholars are working to randomly italicize different sections of the text, hoping the italics will land on the important parts and allow everyone to go on with their day. For now, though, millions of panicked and exhausted Americans continue to repetitively search the single column of print from top to bottom and right to left, looking for even the slightest semblance of meaning or perhaps a blurb.

Some have speculated that the never-ending flood of sentences may be a news article, medical study, urgent product recall notice, letter, user agreement, or even a binding contract of some kind. But until the news does a segment in which they take sections of the text and read them aloud in a slow, calm voice while highlighting those same words on the screen, no one can say for sure.

Faculty have a total right to control what happens in the classroom. If a faculty member says "lids closed", then her students should close their laptops. The minute faculty lose the ability to control the behavior in the classroom is the point at which teaching and learning effectiveness stops. With this authority, however, comes the responsibility to use it wisely.

A total ban on laptops is a bad idea because laptops can be a marvelous learning tool within the classroom. There are many instances where having your students utilize their laptops will accomplish the active learning that faculty would like to promote. Students want to use their laptops, and you can turn this desire into opportunities for learning.

When the mouse worked, hand motions followed a mathematical form known as “one over frequency,” or pink noise. It’s a pattern that pops up repeatedly in the natural world, from universal electromagnetic wave fluctuations to tidal flows to DNA sequences. Scientists don’t fully understand pink noise, but there’s evidence that our cognitive processes are naturally attuned to it.

But when the researchers’ mouse malfunctioned, the pink noise vanished. Computer malfunction made test subjects aware of it — what Heidegger called “unreadiness-at-hand” — and the computer was no longer part of their cognition. Only when the mouse started working again did cognition return to normal. (One assumes, though the researchers didn’t test the proposition, that cognition would also have returned to normal had test subjects stood up and stopped using the computer.)

People need a really good reason to click on your link. Remember, at any given time (and in almost any Twitter client) the reader is faced with a number of choices to make – there might be as many as a dozen different tweets on their screen, and a lot more if they’re using columns or groups.

And things move fast – one or two refreshes later, and you could be long gone.

Furthermore, having access to a ready network of peers means you have the ability to run ideas by people, get them peer-reviewed, so to speak. And if producing, for instance, a scheme of work, or an observed lesson, you can ask for and get immediate feedback as to where the best research has been done on this subject. All it takes is a cry for help, and such is the all-pervasive sense of fraternity on Twitter that you get a guiding hand on your shoulder within seconds of asking for it.

As a time commitment, getting something out of Twitter comes with negligible cost, and its potential benefits in terms of intellectual grazing away from the normal specific fenced enclave are manifold.

Dorsey, who attended the University of Missouri at Rolla (now the Missouri University of Science and Technology) and New York University (and left both without degrees to move to the business world), said that Twitter fills educational needs he felt when he was a student. "What mattered in school was the relationships I had with other students and professors," he said, and out-of-class sharing was more powerful than anything else. Twitter, by allowing anyone to say anything (within the space constraints) and allowing anyone to decide what to read, replicates that user-dominated experience, he said.

Facebook and Twitter, and not the blog, are now “the glue that holds online communities together,” says Dylan Wilbanks, a Web producer in Seattle. Gone are the days when Mr. Wilbanks would take to his blog to describe quotidian events or record passing fancies. “Sharing small pieces of data like links over blogs was like owning a heavy-duty pickup that you only used to pick up bread and milk at the grocery store,” he says. “Blogs are meant for people for whom being a writer, being a creator, is a passion, or perhaps a requirement of life. They’re meant for people for whom Facebook’s ‘What’s on your mind?’ question can’t always be answered in 500 characters or less.” As Wilbanks is quick to point out, not everyone has that passion, which is why blogging is losing its luster.