A Tale of Two Blogospheres Discursive Practices on…

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A Tale of Two Blogospheres : Discursive Practices on the Left and Right :

“In this article, the authors compare the practices of discursive production among top U.S. political blogs on the left and right during summer 2008. An examination of the top 155 political blogs reveals significant cross-ideological variations along several dimensions. Notably, the authors find evidence of an association between ideological affiliation and the technologies, institutions, and practices of participation. Blogs on the left adopt different, and more participatory, technical platforms, comprise significantly fewer sole-authored sites, include user blogs, maintain more fluid boundaries between secondary and primary content, include longer narrative and discussion posts, and (among the top half of the blogs in the sample) more often use blogs as platforms for mobilization. The findings suggest that the attenuation of the news producer-consumer dichotomy is more pronounced on the left wing of the political blogosphere than on the right. The practices of the left are more consistent with the prediction that the networked public sphere offers new pathways for discursive participation by a wider array of individuals, whereas the practices of the right suggest that a small group of elites may retain more exclusive agenda-setting authority online. The cross-ideological divergence in the findings illustrates that the Internet can be adopted equally to undermine or to replicate the traditional distinction between the production and consumption of political information. The authors conclude that these findings have significant implications for the study of prosumption and for the mechanisms by which the networked public sphere may or may not alter democratic participation relative to the mass mediated public sphere.”

URL : http://abs.sagepub.com/content/56/4/459.abstract
doi: 10.1177/0002764211433793

Implementing Web 2.0 Design Patterns in an Institutional Repository May Increase Community Participation

Objective: To investigate whether Web 2.0 can enhance participation in institutional repositories (IRs) and whether its widespread use can lead to success in this context. Another purpose was to emphasize how an IR with a Web 2.0 approach can connect individuals in their creative and intellectual outputs, no matter what form of shared material is contributed.

Design: Comparative study.

Setting: Two IRs at Teachers College, Columbia University, which is a graduate and professional school of education in New York City.

Subjects: Students, faculty, and staff using the PocketKnowledge and CPC IRs.

Methods: Cocciolo compared two different IRs called PocketKnowledge and Community Program Collections (CPC). PocketKnowledge had the following Web 2.0 design patterns: users control their own data; users should be trusted; flexible tags are preferred over hierarchical taxonomies; the attitude should be playful; software gets better the more people use it. The PocketKnowledge IR design patterns were compared with the traditional design of the CPC IR. The CRC IR organized information based on taxonomy (e.g., programs and departments), lack of user control of their own content, and centrality of authority. Data were collected during a 22-month period. The PocketKnowledge IR was studied from September 2006 to July 2008, compiling information on both contributions and contributors. Contributions made by library staff to aid availability in archival collections were excluded from the data sets, because the study was focused on community participation in the learning environment. The CPC was studied between November 2004 and July 2006. Data collected included the contributions made to the system and information on the role of the contributor (e.g., student, faculty, or staff).

Main Results: Participation was much greater in the Web 2.0 system (PocketKnowledge) than in the non-Web 2.0 system (CPC). Involvement in the latter, the CPC, was noted primarily for faculty (59%), with a smaller proportion of students (11%) contributing. This trend was reversed with the Web 2.0 system, in which 79% of the contributions came from students. However, as a group, faculty were better represented than the student body as contributors to the Web 2.0 system (23% and 8% respectively). Faculty members who created an account (without contributing) represented 30% of the population. These observations suggest that Web 2.0 is attractive to students as a space to share their intellectual creations, and at the same time it does not alienate the faculty. Notwithstanding, although 31% of the student body had created a user account for PocketKnowledge, the Web 2.0 system, only 8% of the students actually contributed to this IR. The study examined only the participation rates and was not concerned with what motivated contributions to PocketKnowledge. Accordingly, the results can be extrapolated by observing that the limitation of previous IRs is that they focused primarily on the library goals of collecting and preserving scholarly work, and did not consider what prompted faculty to contribute. Despite the satisfactory participation in the two IRs of interest, the author argued that the incentive is associated more extensively with the role as teacher than with the role as researcher. This is related to the ambition of faculty to improve classroom-based experience by ensuring that their students are as engaged as possible in the teachers’ areas of expertise. In other words, a faculty contribution is motivated by knowing that students will become familiar with what is contributed.

Conclusion: This study suggests that IRs can achieve greater participation by shifting the focus from the library goals to the objective of building localized teaching and learning communities by connecting individuals through their respective intellectual outputs. Creation of a system like the CPC that supports such exchange will advance library goals by storing faculty’s scholarly work, whereas Web 2.0 offers a set of approaches and design patterns for establishing systems that help promote community participation. Greater student participation in an IR may prompt increased faculty participation, because the IR will be more extensively focused on the teaching and learning community than on the research community. Thus, the major finding of the study is that greater community participation resulted from a Web 2.0 design pattern approach.

URL : http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/9932

Innovative Web 2.0 technologies for integrating the learning…

Innovative Web 2.0 technologies for integrating the learning process :

“The innovative technologies of Web 2.0 have created a lot of opportunities for learning in the present web environment. Although these are largely experimental, some of them are very popular and useful. Some popular tools of Web2.0 are wikis, blogs, video sharing, podcasting, RSS, social bookmarking, and many more. Web2.0 is more than a set of ‘tools’, new technologies and services. The general internet users as well as the teachers and learners have been well adapting to these emerging technologies to integrate the learning process. The paper introduces major Web 2.0 tools and discusses their applications in learning.”

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/15432

MePrints: Building User Centred Reposito…

MePrints: Building User Centred Repositories :

“Over the last few years we have been working to reinvent Teaching and Learning Repositories learning from the best practices of Web 2.0. Over this time we have successfully deployed a number of innovative repositories, including Southampton University EdShare, The Language Box, The HumBox, Open University’s LORO and Worcester Learning Box. A key part of this work has been the development of an extension for the EPrints repository platform, called MePrints, that enables configurable profile pages, and works alongside existing extensions such as IRStats and SNEEP in order to give users live feeds about repository events that matter to them. Through these deployments we have discovered that more sophisticated profile pages give users a home within a repository, act as a focus for their work, and help them feel more ownership of the work that they deposit. This increases the visibility of the repository and encourages more deposits.”

URL : http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21716/

Use and relevance of web 2.0 for researc…

Use and relevance of web 2.0 for researchers :
“The project enquires into the factors that influence researchers to adopt and use Web 2.0 tools, and conversely the factors that prevent, constrain or discourage usage.
The study also explores whether and how web 2.0 tools are changing researchers’ behaviour in significant ways, and what implications this might have for researchers, institutions, librarians, information professionals and funders. We sought evidence on whether web 2.0 tools are:
* making data easier to share, verify and re-use, or otherwise facilitating more open scientific practices
* changing discovery techniques or enhancing the accessibility of research information
* changing researchers publication and dissemination behaviour, (for example, due to the ease of publishing work-in-progress and grey literature), and
* changing practices around communicating research findings (for example through opportunities for iterative processes of feedback, pre-publishing, or post-publication peer review).”
URL : http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/communicating-and-disseminating-research/use-and-relevance-web-20-researchers

Scientometrics 2.0: Toward new metrics o…

Scientometrics 2.0: Toward new metrics of scholarly impact on the social Web :
“The growing flood of scholarly literature is exposing the weaknesses of current, citation–based methods of evaluating and filtering articles. A novel and promising approach is to examine the use and citation of articles in a new forum: Web 2.0 services like social bookmarking and microblogging. Metrics based on this data could build a “Scientometics 2.0,” supporting richer and more timely pictures of articles’ impact. This paper develops the most comprehensive list of these services to date, assessing the potential value and availability of data from each. We also suggest the next steps toward building and validating metrics drawn from the social Web.”
URL : http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2874/2570