The Wales-Wide Web

The idea that the filtering is after the publishing is incredibly foreign:

Sebastion Fiedler quotes Clay Shirky as saying

"There's an analogy here with every journalist who has ever looked at the Web and said "Well, it needs an editor." The Web has an editor, it's everybody. In a world where publishing is expensive, the act of publishing is also a statement of quality -- the filter comes before the publication. In a world where publishing is cheap, putting something out there says nothing about its quality. It's what happens after it gets published that matters. If people don't point to it, other people won't read it. But the idea that the filtering is after the publishing is incredibly foreign to journalists..."

Seb goes on to say "Not to speak about academics!"

Thats a bit of a long winded introduction to this post. Most of my time is spent working in the interface between educational technology and users - mostly in education and training - both research and practice.

Technorati Tags: social software

Extended text for this entry:

The researchers are the most difficult. Much of it comes down to a culture of individual research. It is not that they don't want to share - it's that they don't know how to.

And the culture still persists that something must be of acceptable academic standard - whatever that is - before it can be published anywhere - including on the web.

Furthermore, ICT skills amongst educational researchers tend to be limited to Word and Powerpoint.

For years I banged my head against a brick wall trying to get them to use groupware. I had limited success in limited periods of time. The problem with groupware is that people use it when they need it - and not when they do not. They will user it if it makes their job easier (not unreasonably). The reality is that even on international projects there is only limited need for groupware applications. Email is just as effective. And teaching people how to use groupware programmes in a twenty minute slot in a workshop is almost impossible.

Now I am switching tactics. I am going to try to use social software for the new projects starting in October. Instead of trying to show them the complete suite of tools, I will select one or two applications at a time which relate to the immediate work the project partners are doing. The first piece of work they are doing is a literature review so I will set up an account on one of the tagging serves - citeulike, Mike recommends, and get them sharing citations and bookmarks. I will also try to get them using newsreaders. Perhaps we can build up towards using blogs and wikis in the next meeting.