Category: ‘puters

subversive gardening, or why wikis?

Posted on by jessamyn

A metaphor for wiki understanding: the community garden. If you’vbe got a little time to do some reading today, I’d dive into Luke’s article about Ranganathan, gardening and Wikipedia.

…there is no monolithic point of view, there is no monopoly on truth. From a critical perspective, if the object lesson centers around a Wikipedia article as the participants negotiate and carefully choose language to approximate NPOV (the Wikipedian “neutral point of view”), it’s going to be a pretty effective lesson, which will teach above all that no source — not even Wikipedia — should be taken on its own in constructing meaning. If, on the other hand, the questioning student is handed a Britannica article — equally anonymous but somehow anointed with some magical pixie-dust librarians call “authority” but fail to satisfactorily explain to anyone outside the profession — the lesson will fail (again, from a critical pedagogical perspective, at least).

delightful wikipedia timewaster/tool

Posted on by jessamyn

Steven points me to the live recent changes feed for Wikipedia. This is sort of a neat way to look at how dynamic the project it [good news and bad news to librarians, I know] but also to get a ton of examples, an overview if you will, of what a good update looks like, or what all these updates are doing. You see logged in users, annotated changes, links to more information, and nonsense pages deleted so fast it can make your head spin. Fascinating.

how people find health information online

Posted on by jessamyn

Librarians know this, Pew confirms it: people look for health information online in ways that are somewhat irrational [link updated]. Special bonus for those that read to the end of this report: Medical Library Association: A User’s Guide to Finding and Evaluating Health Information on the Web. Note the difference, as highlighted on Crooked Timber of information seeking behavior between people who have broadband and people who have dial-up.

Experts say that Internet users should check a health site’s sponsor, check the date of the information, set aside ample time for a health search, and visit four to six sites. In reality, most health seekers go online without a definite research plan. The typical health seeker starts at a search site, not a medical site, and visits two to five sites during an average visit. She spends at least thirty minutes on a search. She feels reassured by advice that matches what she already knew about a condition and by statements that are repeated at more than one site.