Watson’s win heavily human reliant

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Posted on 17th February 2011 by Judy Breck in Crowd review | Findability | Next

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I think my sister put it best, writing to me in an email: “I’ve watched the 1st 2 and am unimpressed by Watson…  AND I wonder if they gave “him” a 1/6 th of a second disadvantage to compensate for the humans.  :)    looks like an ibm ad to me… “

It was clear that Ken and Brad both knew more answers than Watson did, but could not ring in as fast. I knew several of the answers Watson “won” before Alex finished reading them. And I am no Ken or Brad! I think my sister is right, that Watson had a way to ring in faster. More important: Without the time factor on ringing in, Watson would have been left in the dust!

Perhaps Watson-like technology will become a useful way to save the tedium for humans of scanning vast data, but that data is initially created, and kept up-to-date, by humans. Even the dustiest regions of the deep web are storehouses of human data. Whatever resources Watson drew upon in the contest were assembled by humans. If something in the knowledge Watson uses changes — Chicago might rename an airport — a human-reliant device is going to have to fix Watson’s resources or he is going to give the wrong answer.

Probably artificial intelligence will one day be created, but the keys still elude us. In the meantime, I wish IBM would take on a Grand Challenge based on network science.

Digital natives have a greater understanding of Wikipedia

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Posted on 11th February 2011 by Judy Breck in Crowd review | Findability | Next

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There is good reason students trust how Wikipedia is edited: two levels of crowd review.

Did pre-digital students dig into heuristics-related issues before quoting encyclopedias Britannica? or Americana? or Newsweek? or Life? or their textbook? I was there. I know they did not. As a student at Northwestern University in the 1950s, I was expected to trust mainstream media, my textbooks assigned by a professor, and the books in Deering Library. Checking into how these sources were edited never came up.

Against that background, assumptions need to be questioned in a Wired Campus story today titled Wikipedia’s Editing Process Is Still a Mystery to Students. The Wired story is about the work of a Ph.D candidate now active at Northwestern University. A section from the Wired story follows:

Ms. Menchen-Trevino found it surprising that members of the “digital native” generation—defined by Wikipedia itself as “a young person, who — through interacting with digital technology from an early age, has a greater understanding of its concepts” — remain unaware of the way in which the online encyclopedia functions.

“People need to update their heuristics,” she says.

Wikipedia remains a valuable resource for students, she acknowledges, but they need to be aware of who is editing content and of the conversations surrounding certain topics, especially those that may be controversial or are ever-changing.

Of the students in the study, 77 percent had used Wikipedia at some point in their research, 47 percent went through a search engine to reach Wikipedia, 19 percent went to the site directly, and 36 percent used both direct access and a search engine to reach the site.

Many students increasingly “approach Wikipedia as a search engine,” says Ms. Hargittai.

Digital natives are relying on crowd review. Wikipedia contents they access have been reviewed in ways unimaginable in the 1950s: Anyone can jump into Wikipedia content to fix errors and add knowledge. Those who have assumed the crowd reviewers would corrupt knowledge have been proven largely wrong by the experience of Wikipedia. Back in the 1950s we had more reasons to have questioned our sources — which often had limited input from biased authors. For sure, digital natives are getting far more diverse sources of knowledge and opinion than we ever did.

By using Wikipedia as a search engine, the students — who are digital natives — demonstrate their greater understanding of Wikipedia than researchers quoted in the Wired story seem to have. When a student jumps into a Wikipedia article from a search engine results page, the ranking of that page by the search engine has provided a first level of crowd review from the open internet. If that same student then uses Wikipedia as a search engine, she is taking advantage of the review of her subject by the crowd of Wikipedians. Nothing close to this broad and multiple review ever happened at Deering Library in the 1950s.

Virtually any student anywhere can (soon) read virtually all books

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Posted on 9th February 2011 by Judy Breck in Findability | Mobiles | Next

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The iPhone pictures above are from a video by Lexcycle, the makers of the iPhone reader called Stanza. Anyone who cares about doing right by students should watch this video — or in some other way get a real idea of the ease and power with which books can be placed in the hands of learners by letting them read books on their handheld devices. Mashable described Stanza and four similar readers in an article last April titled 5 Fantastic Free iPhone E-book Reader Apps.

Reading on phones is not all that new. As far back as four years ago, reading novels on phones was making headlines: Big Books Hit Japan’s Tiny Phones.

In recent months, digital publishing has been maturing. It is revolutionizing the publishing industry.

Availability of books is proliferating. Venerable, wonderful Project Gutenberg remains true to its original philosophy by now offering free ebooks:

Project Gutenberg is the place where you can download over 33,000 free ebooks to read on your PC, iPad, Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone, Android or other portable device…. Over 100,000 free ebooks are available through our Partners, Affiliates and Resources.

Today the Chronicle of Higher Education describes how ebooks are reconfiguring citations. The conclusion of the article quotes an expert who “. . . looks forward to a time when most reading is done digitally, and electronic links replace long descriptions of how to find each reference.”

If someone had predicted in that past that all students anywhere could hold virtually any book in their hands and read it there, that person would have been dismissed as a cockeyed optimist.

Yet we now know that virtually any student anywhere can read virtually all books on his/her phone — as soon as we get it done. What are we waiting for?

“Academically Adrift” book reveals college realities

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Posted on 18th January 2011 by Judy Breck in Findability | Mobiles | Schools we now have

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Appalling academic inadequacies revealed in the new book Academically Adrift are buzzing across the education world and into pubic awareness. From today’s headlines:

USA Today: “Report: First two years of college show small gains”

Chronicle of Higher Education: “New Book Lays Failure to Learn on Colleges’ Doorsteps”

At Amazon.com, even though only the hardcover (for $66) is offered, Academically Adrift, released three days ago, is already selling in the site’s top 5,000 books. The publisher, Chicago University Press also offers a $25 paperback.

Why the big interest? The pie chart from the book (and USA Today) breaks down how students spend their time. The USA Today story begins with this summary of the results of what kids are actually accomplishing academically on campus:

Nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates show almost no gains in learning in their first two years of college, in large part because colleges don’t make academics a priority, a new report shows.

Instructors tend to be more focused on their own faculty research than teaching younger students, who in turn are more tuned in to their social lives, according to the report, based on a book titled Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Findings are based on transcripts and surveys of more than 3,000 full-time traditional-age students on 29 campuses nationwide, along with their results on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test that gauges students’ critical thinking, analytic reasoning and writing skills.

How long could it be before colleges could address this situation and truly change it? Who knows? And can we really expect education as served up at colleges to get better?

Yet an individual student’s mobile web browser — smartphone, iPad, laptop — offers immediate access to anything he or she would want to learn. Shall we fix the colleges? Sure — but what about the current generation of students?

While the colleges are figuring out 21st century education, current students can go ahead and learn using the new great source of knowledge that they already have in their hands.

And if you are thinking: Gosh, will the kids really do that? My answer is individually many, many of them will. Handschooling is the great future port for academic knowledge, and it is reachable now for today’s students who want to go there. We can be certain students will stay academically adrift if we perpetuate the myth that the way colleges are doing academics now will somehow deliver to them the knowledge they want to learn.

UPDATE: I posted the above text at 10AM. By 5PM, as I add this update, Academically Adrift is #34 on the Amazon list of best-selling books. Amazon is now selling the paperback version for $18.

Education has much to learn about online optimization

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Posted on 13th December 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | Next

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Everything a student needs to learn to be highly educated is now online for free. BUT almost none of that knowledge is optimized.

What does optimized online mean?

If you will spend a few minutes clicking through the OMS schedule, you will get the idea of:

1) what is being done to make stuff findable to buy online
2) what is NOT being done to make stuff findable to learn online.

The online commerce world has developed a major search engine optimization (SEO) industry. SEO has spawned search engine marketing (SEM). The explosion of social networking is being harnessed by the experts and minions from these fields which connect customers with webpages that have products.

A student who wants to find out something about physics, or biology, or history, or literature, or any other “school” subject has no experts or minions organizing those topics online. Again, clicking through the OMS schedule will show you a lot about how this new industry connects people and products.

How to stimulate education quickly and globally? Knowledge needs to be treated like running shoes, books, cosmetics, plumbing fixtures, shampoo and thousands of other things you can find in a click or two online.

The dozens of topics in the OMS schedule suggest dozens of ways educators could approach making knowledge to learn more findable. That will not fix everything about education, but it makes a big start by optimizing  the ability of students to find what they need to learn.

One Web and academic token toes

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Posted on 7th December 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | Next

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The cartoon above is from a Dublin Core Metadata Initiative tutorial by Professor Jane Greenberg (the first one under Basic tutorials on the linked page).

There is a troubling twist that comes to mind in looking at the cartoon. While there is a far-seeing global cohort who are refining the World Wide Web into the most excellent knowledge resource ever imagined, too many colleges and libraries have only a token toe into the WWW waters.

Will libraries like the one in the cartoon that mystifies the boy endure on campuses? Will the new generation put up with that? For those who want to dive into the WWW waters, the W3C One Web Mission and Dublin Core are good places to take the plunge.

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