Morning Sat 27th
Rounding up blogs to add to my blogfeed and came across a great phrase from Tony Karrer writing for The Learning Circuits Blog, “information snacking” to characterise information gathering habits: 'People seem to be spending less time going through information in depth and less willing to spend time on information' and 'I've also noticed a trend towards more twitter mentions of blog posts, but less deep commenting behavior much less thoughtful blog responses'. How to move from grazing to absorption, evaluation and reflection? As suggested by Meredith Farkas chapter on 'Blogs in Libraries' in her 2007 book Social Software in Libraries evaluation is happening on the run as multiple filtered sources are scanned for convergent thinking and trends noted. This thinking identifies evaluation as integral to the gathering process and no longer a discrete step in the information literacy process. The information search model may still have relevance for student assignments, but for professional and everday information gathering active reception is overtaking active research.
Wikipedia is a highly filtered source, although Mike Melenson of Rea
dWriteWeb defends Wikipedia as a starting point for research; perhaps more reliable than a news service, certainly no less reliable: 'In this crowd-sourced news environment we've entered, blindly consuming news and content, from any source, is an ill-advised path to follow.
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.'
I am trying to move from passive to active reception and have started the information management process, but useful links are still dispersed across work PC favourites, my laptop bookmarks, Google Reader, Delicious, fb and twitter. Aggregation and organisation, source management has become critical to any productive use of the vast array of social media. Exploring ‘transliteracy’ is uncovering new requisite skills or perhaps simply highlighting different stages of the information literacy process. Organisation, like correction, is u
p to the end user, not the editor. As the collective can edit, so software can organise. However, the user must still intervene to define parameters, taking responsibility for source management to avoid overload yet maintain divergent thinking.
As an aside, I have now accessed sl twice and spent a total of 2-3 hours playing. I would like to be able to justify the time. I remain to be convinced of the efficacy of sl conferencing and consultation, but it could be a creative use of visual and other research to explore a lifestyle, either imaginary or historic. Is it another chance to publish without the publisher? Bring on the romany character and lifestyle I so fancied as a child! Be warned, ‘be careful what you wish for’ … I am a traveller now … just of a different kind.
Locals in the Library forecourt:
1 sleeping huddle, nice gold blanket
2 curious pigeons, stock-still, watching
3 youths awake, delousing
Quiet start to the city day!
No comments:
Post a Comment