Roundtable 3 (part one)

by: Pablo Colapinto

For part two see RoundTable 3 - by KKnight

Please feel free to edit your comments ...

NANCY of UC Berkeley - The Complexity of Available Tools

    [Quotes by Lucy Suchman and Kathy Marshall]

    Graduate Students in archeology resisting new technologies

    -we are asking them to master to become ordinary users

    -for them to understand capabilities

    -for them to make good choices

    -privacy issues, to be able to edit, forget, etc.

    -complex to have detailed understanding

    -new tools, constant complexity

    -Time spent teaching about technology

    -Developing tools to be used by people in different knowledge domains

    -Expertise is needed in tech use in the field

Scholars often resist sharing data

Support what people are already doing, Create innovative tools,

LARRY SANGER

    -bluesky answer: by 2020 to 2030, depending on domain of media,

will be enormous amounts of free content.

    -paucity of credible information will be solved

    -how is this plausible?

        1 - access all knowledge from anywhere

        -every book you will possibly want to look at (with specific exceptions) will be available online from everywhere (maybe with fee).

        -open access movement will win the day (hopefully)

        -academic journals will be free to read

        -encyclopedias (citizendium, etc.)

        - full complement of wonderfully written, exhaustive review articles about every area of research available. 

        -archives

        -fantastic entre into world of information

    -What does content have to do with social computing?

        -everything

        -have to educate huge huge numbers of people how to do social computing.

        -the output of the best of social computing will be massive

        -aggressive calls for funding for digitization of all archives: people will ask "why can't I access?" = eventual universal access

    -The other side

        -the internet is media delivery system (texts pictures and other stuff)

        -take it in and interact with it -- depends on taste (can't force them to take in anything)

        -most media will be crap

        -same as what happend to TV: newton minnow in 1961 "tv is vast wasteland"

        -social computing is not a broadcast medium, so the crappiness is not as much of an issue . . .

ALAN

    -michael jensen, "new metrics of scholarly authority" talks directly to thesis larry gave us.

        -"information plenty"

        -information based on scarcity economics

        -what will need to be reinvented in information economy of plenty?

        -we're going to need algorthmically very smart searching mechanisms

        -take into consideration: prestige of the publisher, prestige of peer reviews, commentators, percentage of document quoted, raw links, recursive feedback of other links, advertisements on your site, values of disciplinary community, reference network (significant weighting of all documents author has read or touched in there liftetime)

    Tremendous research set amount of near-realtime measurement

    -In terms of Nancy's talk: list of complicated technologies required to be fully literate user and producer of web mash-up.

    -Anecdote: Amerela Alibati (sp?) seminar on computing: came back shocked: computers meant processing.  students thought of computers as media experience

    -How will it be possible to teach enough about that literacy, to seduce user into learning more.  Even non-experts know enough about what is at stake.

Nancy: add a note: knowing what resources are available

Andrew: Topic of credibility, share some observations -> question becomes what are people attending to?  Good stuff or crap?  How are people assessing information.  There is good news and bad news.  Algorithmically derived filtering is called "Google".  Not as nuanced or valuable as they could be.  Going to Google first, and then going elsewhere.  Going to Wikipedia (mixed assessment of usefullness of it).

    People are aware of things on that assessment list - know how to weigh things in a certain way.  Attentive, careful.

Miriam: a different problem: how do you discern quality of information?  we did one comparison of college students to older people.  college students go to more vetted sources than older folk (many explanations for that).  points out possible research agenda. with info abundance, how to people make judgements, how to point people to more credible sources.

Alan: one might say "who are you to tell me what's crap?"

Tad: I get nervous when I hear about good and bad information.  This notion that we have neutrally determinable heuristic of info quality.  More important to envelop information intelligently, so that we know the context, rather than automatically assess its legitimacy.

Alan: you are suggesting adaptive framework . . .

Tad: not so much concerned with making people happy.  wikipedia is great for undisputed info.  we have problems with contested info.  we have problem when information is systematically kept out of bodies of knowledge.  how are we going to enforce a particular  . . .  we should focus more on interpretive frameworks.

Carol: possibility of searching without context.  nothing is a fact.  everything is an argument within context.  try to find other ways of thinking.  brain can do other kinds of things.

[incomplete -- see RoundTable 3 - by KKnight for continued notes]