December 2005 Archives

This is very interesting and, I think, important. The news reports surrounding the Wikipedia article that John Seigenthaler, a former assistant to Bobby Kennedy, may have been involved in RFK's assassination put a lot of talking head journalists in front of cameras and every one that I watched just didn't understand what a wiki is or how the Wikipedia works.

My colleague Jenny Franklin emailed me about an article in Nature "Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head," by Jim Giles. The sub-title sums it up: "Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds." Among the highlights are:

Yet Nature's investigation suggests that Britannica's advantage may not be great, at least when it comes to science entries. In the study, entries were chosen from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica on a broad range of scientific disciplines and sent to a relevant expert for peer review. Each reviewer examined the entry on a single subject from the two encyclopaedias; they were not told which article came from which encyclopaedia. A total of 42 usable reviews were returned out of 50 sent out, and were then examined by Nature's news team.

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.

This would be a great assignment for information resoucres students. Their instructor provides topics from several disciplines and the students compare the Wikipedia entries against the highly regarded, presumably authoritative encyclopedias. I recommend comparing the Wikipedia to the electronic versions of the encyclopedias to keep the comparison in the same orchard -- apples and apples. It seems likely that the print versions are cranked out from digital versions from which the print versions (if they still exist) are made.

Other Web'erized news sites, such as CNN are carrying stories like this one in CNN: " Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica Nature study covered side-by-side comparison of scientific topics." As accurate? Maybe they need to read it a little closer. Why does everything get reduced to a soundbite? If Fox carries the story, will the headline be "Wikipedia bests Britannica: Traditional encyclopedia with links to foreign organizations found soft on terrorism." At least we still have the BBC -- the BBC got it right. "Wikipedia survives research test: The free online resource Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopedia Britannica, a study shows.

I am in the process of creating Flash movies that step people through how to use their blogs. I have two short ones up now for:

• An overview of a blog's homepage [5:11]
• Changing your password [2:12]

The next one will be on creating blog entries and I'll follow that with movies showing how to upload images and other types of files, manage comments and notifications, and setting up categories. The idea is to complement the illustrated guides with another learning tool. I am using Camtasia Studio.

"Wordsmiths Hail Podcast Success, BBC News Online, 7 December 2005. The term 'podcast' has been declared as Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary. According to the story, it was considered last year but not selected because not enough people used it.

And in a sort of related story, BBC News Online carries an article posted today that Apple Faces iPod Patent Dispute related to a US patent that Creative owns on a system used to navigate music on digital players. I read just yesterday about Creative's Zen Vision MP3 players. Looks like they are going to try to challenge the market share that Apple holds with its iPods.

Take a look at a recent article from Duke University's News and Communications, "Duke Sees Growth in Classroom iPod Use." Duke distributed iPods to students as an experiment and last summer published a summary of the experience to-date. In fact, they have framed it within an overall Duke Digital Initiative that is designed to focus on:

... experimentation, development, and implementation of digital technology in an academic environment. Over a three-year cycle, the DDI will incorporate digital audio, images and video, collaboration tools and tablet and hand-held computing. This Web site serves as a central clearinghouse of information on the DDI for members of the Duke community and the general public.

Duke learned a lot of useful information from its review of the first year of introducting iPods [read report], and CIO Terry Futhey is quoted now as saying:

“There is always a risk associated with introducing a program nobody had ever tried before,” said Tracy Futhey, Duke’s vice president for Information Technology and CIO. “The increased use we’ve seen has been a direct result of faculty and student innovation. We expected we’d have this kind of interest, and it’s exactly the success we thought, but couldn’t be certain, it would be.”

The Duke experience highlights that there are many uses for iPods in instruction. In addition, it has shown that students at Duke have been innovative in their uses of the device. I would be happy to discuss one aspect of this, podcasting, with anyone at the UA. See our LTC Podcasting website for more information.