Jacapo47

A note on the strange terminology being bandied about regarding cuts to public libraries. The Government seems to be deliberately conflating two separate concepts: “volunteer-led” libraries and "community-led" libraries. I have an issue with the idea that taking something out of local authority control means you can give it to the community - after all public libraries are by their very nature community-led, by democratically elected local representatives. 

In a bid to promote our extensive range of e-books to our students, I developed these fake books using some old DVD cases we had inherited from our now defunct Multimedia Team. The idea was that these fake books would sit amongst the print books on the shelves in Dewey order to encourage their discovery by students. 

I was inspired by an Update article about a similar scheme which signposted users to e-books using laminated cards when all print copies of popular books had been borrowed. Combining this with the spare DVD cases was really appealing to me as it allowed students to pick them off the shelf like a book and gain access straight to the actual e-book they wanted, rather than negotiating the Resources Catalogue or our two e-book platform search function.

Originally I had wanted to use QR codes as the original project I read about in Update did. However, on testing a prototype I realised that the wireless connection would not allow students straight onto the platforms and would divert them through a number of sign ons before dumping them at the platform homepage. This was exactly what I didn't want to happen. It also meant that students would need to have a Smartphone or tablet with a functioning camera plus a QR reader already installed. They would also be limited to reading the e-book on this device. 

From this I realised QR code technology was the wrong tool in this case and that a shortened URL would be more accessible. Particularly as this could be used at one of the many PC stations we have in the LRC without any additional sign on required. For students on the go, the shortened URL could quickly be noted down on paper or in a memo on their phone, or photographed by their phone for use at a later point. 

So with the tools in place I began designing a template. My manager was pleased with the overall idea but was keen on encouraging students to build on accessing a promoted e-book to browsing our whole collection or searching for an e-book independently using our Resources Catalogue. Working with this Vygotskian principle, I decided that the front of each e-book cover would promote a single specific e-book and that the back of each cover would explain how the Resources Catalogue worked and how to search for more e-book titles. 

The front for me had to be visually appealing and it was important to include an image of the book cover we were promoting. We have many students who come to ask us if we have a book based on its colour or the photograph on the front rather than its title, author or even subject. "It's the orange one with a little boy on a blue slide" was a request made just last week. 

Not being a brilliant designer, I used the fairly straight forward Avery template for a DVD box case. My initial design for the front cover included the title, author, year, jacket photograph, e-book platform logo and the instructions to follow the shortened URL. The spine section included the title, author, year and Dewey number for ease of shelving. After consultation with colleagues, it was suggested that the spine and front cover should also include the word "e-book" as many times as possible in a different colour to the rest of the text to emphasize what it was. I incorporated this suggestion and spent a few weeks producing the  e-book promotional DVD cases for each of our three campuses.

The only problem I had was that the URL shortening process took ages. I would also recommend keeping all the URLs and shortened URLs listed in a table together somewhere so you can periodically check for dead or broken links. 

  I cannot help but wonder if this Government is starting to do stupid things on purpose. They seem to have abandoned the art of carefully crafted spin and opted for the maxim that all publicity is good publicity. Grant Schapps' beer and bingo moment was ridiculous enough but as the Manics can testify, "we only want to get drunk" (MSP Design for Life).

Now Chris Grayling, the man least informed about the law and criminal justice matters, is doing his bit for idiocy by making the gift of books subject to a new system of reward and sanction in prisons. So if prisoners behave they can have books. Birthday cards are also banned by the way. This isn't just nonsensical and counter-productive; it is heartless and cruel.

It gets to a point when you have to question what a system is supposed to achieve. And more importantly what do we, the people who pay for it, want it to achieve? Do we want it to solve the problem or make it worse? Is it about individuals who have been convicted of doing the wrong thing turning their lives around, sorting their problems out and escaping the cycle of poverty, ignorance, illiteracy, joblessness, offending, prison, re-offending, prison and so on? Or is it simply as Jock Young argues simply  "a gulag to maintain a winner-takes-all society" (Young in the Exclusive Society 1999). 

We know literacy is a fundamental building brick of active citizenry, educational achievement and gainful employment. Books on prescription schemes are being launched up and down the country to support positive mental health through the enjoyment of books. There are now also suggestions that reading for pleasure has some kind of positive relationship with empathy. 

For all these reasons and lots more, prisoners need to read more, not less! Books are not the same as video gaming consoles or chocolate. Books change lives, they broaden the mind and feed the soul. They challenge our assumptions and they extend our knowledge. They change who we are and the way we see the world. They also provide us with psychological space outside of our physical and time bound contexts. They often make the unbearable situations of life, a little more bearable. If all our prisoners were readers, then our prisons would be better places, as would the communities they return home to. 

Family and work are two key factors in supporting former prisoners to not take up re-offending as soon they are released. Education is a massive factor in preventing offending in the first place. So let's take away their jobs, their books and their birthday cards from loved ones, and condemn them to a life of recidivism and ourselves to its effects. 

As I won this book in a raffle at the M25 Information Literacy Conference held at the British Library in January, I feel it appropriate to reflect on it from an information literacy perspective.

  Sometimes a book has a profound book on you. Sometimes you simply can’t put a book down. This is one of those books. And yes, it is about higher education and the literacies involved in delivering it and taught within it. I approached this book with some caution, concerned that it would simply be a badly considered rehash of the old moral panic arguments about the condition of young people, displacing Mod culture for technological omnipresence.

  Yet Brabazon is far more intelligent and progressive than that. Her passion for her students, academic study and knowledge creation shines through. This is a book written from the heart by the head. Her style is warm, funny and engaging. The audience is treated as an equal and colleague; it is not a lecture but a discussion. She is direct and to the point. At times abrasive, Brabazon is unafraid of saying it how she sees it, without caveat or mitigation.

  Digital Dieting completes her trilogy of works, following up from Digital Hemlock which focused on the dangers of managerialism in higher education and the University of Google which took aim at the growing culture of searching rather than researching. She summarises both neatly as processes which are affecting the quality of education in the HE sector. Core to her concerns is the way in which librarians and the skills they offer are being pushed aside by cost cutting managers using technology as a proxy for genuine teaching and learning.

  But Brabazon is no technophobe. This is not the analysis of a teacher running scared of overwhelming technological change they can’t work out how to manage. Indeed, Brabazon appears to be an early adopter of technological innovation and keen to harness the benefits of it for her students. She states that “Digital or analogue materials is not the problem. Quality is the concern” (Brabazon 2013: 47).

  This feeds into the titular extended metaphor around food: Brabazon does not really push the argument that we need to consume less information as much as she argues that what we need to consume is more of the good stuff. Fewer YouTube videos about cats, more peer reviewed journals. Fewer cheeseburgers, more carrots so to speak. So it is far more a case of quality over quantity. She describes us as suffering from “binge searching, media gluttony and information obesity” where cheap poor quality information is widely available, just as cheap poor quality food is (ibid: 51). And of course the number of information choices we make each day has skyrocketed, in a similar way to our food choices. I promise to drop the extended metaphor now; it becomes tired very quickly. I do wish Brabazon hadn’t laboured it quite so much in the early chapters of the book: thankfully it disappears for much of the middle and end.

  Brabazon’s plea for information literacy is framed in this context of information overload. Google is a tool for seeking information; without the skills to know how to use the tool, it is as good as useless. After all “we cannot put a word into Google that we do not know” (ibid: 47) even if it does have a “friendly box” (ibid: 54). This is illustrated nicely by searching Google for simply “post colonialism” which returns generic non-academic results. Alternatively searching for “post colonialism” and “Etienne Balibar” produces much better results for academic study. This requires skills however, skills we are not “born” with (ibid: 55).

  This connects neatly to the Digital Natives concept crystallised by Marc Prensky and later in the book, Brabazon demolishes the argument that those born in a digital era behave differently in terms of information seeking and research than others or possess different skills. To Brabazon the digital natives vs digital immigrants distinction uses the metaphor of migration to denigrate those not “born digital” but as she notes, immigrants have knowledge of two cultures.

  This point aside, my reading of Prensky was slightly different if not equally critical. The broader issue implied by Prensky’s metaphor, if not identified by Prensky himself, is that immigrants learn discretely what natives supposedly learn tacitly (Prensky 2001). The UK Citizenship test is a wonderful example of this. Immigrants must learn the mores, to borrow from de Tocqueville, of life in the UK. This will include laws, customs and if we were talking about the UK as a company, the ethos. Most British natives wouldn’t know some of the core content. Skills, knowledge and understanding are not absorbed via osmosis. They have to be taught and learnt in some fashion. Grammar is a great example.

  I do agree with Brabazon though that there is not some yawning generational divide and that competencies do not align with age. It is also dangerous to assume young people naturally know how to use technology effectively. In my experience, they are not as skilled as they think they are. Especially not in terms of using technology for educational purposes. Playing Angry Birds on your Smartphone is not the same as creating a portfolio or finding peer reviewed journals. It is important to remember that “Digital literacies and information literacies do not go hand in hand” (Brabazon 2013: 195). Moreover, the digital skills young people are learning can be very basic. As Mark Bauerlein argues “their technology skills fall well short of the common claim, too, especially when they must apply them to research and workplace tasks” (Bauerlein 2014: 9).

  Digital literacy is not a substitute for information literacy. Especially as digital technology both proliferates the information available and in many cases increases access to it. The increasingly prevalent assumption that libraries are no longer needed because everything is online and that “access is synonymous with literacy” is patently incorrect (Brabazon 2013: 312). Vincent Tito’s maxim that “Access without support is not opportunity” looms large (Tito 2008). Even in the social world, the app market is burgeoning with apps designed to control and mediate information about leisure time through reviews, spatial data and personalised content. This is information literacy for planning your spare time rather than your studies (ibid).

  So who does Brabazon hold responsible? The answer (I think) is supposed to be social media but she takes aim at so many different contributors to the decline of scholarly standards that it becomes hard to fully categorise the threads of her argument. Administrators from non-academic backgrounds making academic decisions based on cost cutting and what’s new, rather than what’s useful. Greedy corporations tempting us with new, purposely useless products that are obsolescent from the moment they are launched. Sloppy teaching which depends on PowerPoint, teaches to the textbook and sets weak assignments that do not help students build higher level skills. So far so predictable.

  But there are some surprises. Student-centred learning takes a direct hit for devaluing teaching as the progressive educationalist aligns with the neo-liberal cost cutter. The idea that trying to use different media and appeal to different learning styles is flawed according to Brabazon. She eloquently and enthusiastically discusses the value of sonic media in education but advocates a one-size-fits-all or all-should-fit-into-one-size approach to learning which I find difficult to agree with. Her mantra that “fewer media creates more meaning” needs to be questioned as closely as the assumption that more media creates more meaning (ibid: 68). Content is key, as Brabazon argues throughout, but form can make the content wholly inaccessible, regardless of how amazing the content is. Brabazon’s argument becomes a little tangled here as she does regularly acknowledge the importance of form, whilst at the same time decrying any focus on form. Yet she also discusses the importance of scaffolding students to enable their learning.

  For Brabazon, learning occurs when students “miss, stumble” and then succeed (ibid: 275) because they are forced by barriers to slow down the “encounter between concept and interpretation” and construct “new pathways of thinking (ibid: 206). The problem I have with this is that I work with largely vocational FE and my students regularly miss, stumble and ultimately fall. They have a whole life narrative which they often categorise as fails. My students have one shot at getting the qualifications they need to secure some kind of future for themselves and failure makes them quit. They never get to taste success. The “lads” depicted in Willis’ Learning to Labour, which Brabazon discusses at length in one chapter, did not respond well to failure and the same goes for my students today (Willis 1997). Indeed, I wonder if Brabazon realised the irony of discussing working lads getting working class jobs in a book which at times feels it is advocating exactly the type of teaching and attitudes which provoked their symbolic resistance and virtual exclusion from education.

  Of course we all want to “move learners beyond their personal experience” (Brabazon 2013: 203) and share concerns around the infiltration of every aspect of our students’ lives by social media. We all know the horror stories and how Twitter, Facebook and Ask.fm have been implicated in various controversies. As tools and platforms they have the potential to be misused. They can be put to good use for educational purposes: Brabazon sets tasks such as explain an academic principle in 140 characters. But Brabazon does have a habit of conflating symptoms with cause. The massive non-stop demands being placed on academics through student contact on social media was not caused by the advent of Facebook. It is the result of the commercialisation of higher education. When I went to university in an era of modest fees compared to today, I remember camping out in a specific library (we had many) because I knew it was frequented by a supervisor of mine from whom I needed support. I almost jumped on her when she did arrive, much to her chagrin. The immortal lines “I don’t sit around watching Trisha all day you know” were hastily snapped at me, all without the use of Facebook or email.

  And speaking of Trisha, Brabazon attacks a culture of oversharing that she blames social media for. Again, I don’t think Twitter or Facebook encourage a new culture of oversharing. We have been oversharing for decades. Ever since the 1960s, the sexual revolution and the decline of 1950s nostalgia for a Victorian England of stiff upper lips that never existed, sharing and oversharing has become the norm. Indeed, the sexual abuse controversies of the past highlight the need for what some would have termed oversharing. Schools and workplaces have always been hotbeds of gossip, rumour and intrigue. Twitter just broadcasts it further afield and preserves it for antiquity. Trisha, Jeremy Kyle, Oprah, Ricki Lake, Esther and Kilroy all pre-date Facebook. Radio phone ins, agony aunt columns and reality television all pre-date Facebook. Again, Facebook is a tool of and some of its features probably a consequence of this culture, not its originator.

  Brabazon argues that “reducing the dependency on the crack pipe of social networking, higher quality information becomes the foundation of the intellectual diet” (ibid: 65). Does it? Really? I’m not convinced and Brabazon seems to expect us to take her word for it on this one. I accept the logical causality of Google contributing to information illiterate young people. The link between increased usage of social media and a decline in information literacy I’m less sure about.

  Whilst at one point prescribing the correct cure (that assessment needs to embed information literacy and assignments needs to be set in a way that prevents plagiarism) Brabazon misses the point about why we reach this impasse. Brabazon believes that students use Goole because it is easy. That Google stops them “becoming frozen and overwhelmed” (ibid: 62). This is the very effect I see Google searches having on my students every day. They don’t pick Google because it’s easy, they pick Google because they think it is easy. In reality, Google is much harder work. It requires more skills to navigate and find quality content, not fewer. I rigidly swerved using internet search engines as a student because it was much simpler to go to the library or use a repository like Jstor than work out if random internet sources were academically sound or not. I want my students to work smarter, not harder. In an “ideas-thick” not ideas rich environment (ibid: 117), inculcating a respect for quality sources is critical, as is developing the tools for seeking them.

  As someone working in FE with learning resources, with a keen interest in promoting information literacy, I can agree with much of what Brabazon argues. Despite my misgivings about some of her causal links and her patrician-teacher air, Brabazon provides a deep resource in thinking about the appropriate use of digital tools in education and provides some compelling arguments for re-thinking our approach.

Reference list:

Bauerlein, M. (2014) The Dumbest Generation: How the digital age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardises our future. London: Penguin.

Brabazon, T. (2013) Digital Dieting: from Information Obesity to Intellectual Fitness. Ashgate.

Willis, P. (1977) Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Columbia University Press.

Prensky, M. (2001) “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” in On the Horizon, vol 9 no. 5.

Warning: this is going to be another one of those posts that starts from a point of moderate easy-going bewilderment and ends up in a place of complete bewilderment and rage. Again, this debate seems to be highly artificial with all sorts of people making all sorts of claims and counter claims and setting up all manner of straw man arguments all over the place. With the amount of straw men being made and destroyed on this course, things are going to get messy!

Big data in itself seems to mean a heck of lot of different things to different people. I'm going to work from the idea that it is any kind of data that is problematic because of either its volume, its variety or its velocity in being produced, or any given combination of these three things. For me then, to put it into terms I can actually understand, "Big Data" is an adjective, not a noun. Big data is not an object; it is a way of describing an object. And it is not immovable or permanent or unchangeable. Data described as "big" today will not be described as "big" in ten years time when clever techies have developed a solution to it which is then in-built in the production of the data.

And that seems to be what the sensible, non-straw men, are arguing. That "big data" refers to data that does not have an in-built mechanism in the way it is produced to make it easy to analyse and process. 

However, this is not to say that "big data" will disappear as we develop solutions because our development of technology will not stand still. The volume and speed of some data will probably continue to outpace us. Moreover the type of data we are trying to analyse will continue to diversify. 

Of course Big Data is pretty much analytics and business intelligence. It just requires a different methodology because the analysis is not as straight forward. To say though that it is meaningless and can be ignored, is as silly as saying it holds the answer to all our problems.

These things are always hyped up to be panaceas and there follows the disillusionment after the perpetual naysayers trash them as nonsense, until they are quietly accepted and assimilated to achieve a significant but small fraction of what they were originally hyped up to do. Look at DNA: its structure was discovered in the 1950s and yet scientists are still trying to work out how to use that knowledge to change medical science.

Merging different types of data to make up a complete picture is hugely appealing, especially in consideration of how we understand medical and social problems. Indeed if we can map a mass of different factors around what we are investigating, we may be able to pinpoint what are genuine correlations and what are incidental because of other factors. 

Make no mistake, like Web 2.0 et al, it will be used for good intentions and bad intentions. The data will sometimes be manipulated, just like any other form of statistics. Remember lies, damn lies and statistics. But we aren't going to ditch statistics as a way of measuring stuff simply because some people use statistics corruptly. Big data is just another tool in the technological arsenal that people can choose to use in whatever way they see a benefit to.

Again I'm finding it very frustrating to engage with arguments that reify the web into something beyond a tool, or a set of tools. It isn't a force in itself. It isn't an actor or a participant. It has no agency or potency of its own. It is what we make of it. After its inception it provided a space beyond the conventional media where independent journalism could find a platform. It still does this. Those spaces still exist. The only difference is that the audience is a heck of a lot bigger. And let's face it, web space is hardly in short supply. There is no competition for space or readership in reality.

Apologies for harping back to the printing press (see earlier posts) but I do feel it is probably the only technology which can be intelligently compared to the web in terms of its impact on society. If we consider the dissemination of Martin Luther's 95 Theses as being a genuinely revolutionary act enabled by the printing press, we can see that the technological advancement gave him the space to share his dispute with the Catholic Church over the practice of indulgences with a far wider audience than if he had stood in the town square and ranted. The printing press also provided the possibility of anonymity for the first time in much the same way the web did. However it wasn't always used for subversion, the printing press went on to become a tool of state in much the same way the web is used by governments today. This didn't stop Karl Marx from printing Das Kapital or the Communist Manifesto and take advantage of the technology available to reach potential converts to the cause, using the most pervasive and effective medium possible.

If anyone assumed the web would be immune to commercial interests or the security forces, they were incredibly naive. Surely the fact these companies and agencies have bothered to invest huge amounts of time, money and energy into colonising the web, demonstrates how significant a medium of communication it is. The amount of money pouring into online advertising, promotion via social media and web analytics, show how powerful the web is in getting your message across.

It would be ridiculous for political activists to abandon the web because it is popular and mainstream - that should be the very reason you embrace it! Otherwise you are just barking at the moon, shouting into space, talking among yourselves, preaching to the converted etc, and what could possibly be the point of that if you are trying to influence the opinions of people who aren't already followers of your cause? 

And let's not forget that democracy is about ordinary people. It is about the masses, the multitude and the 99%. Abandoning a pluralist multi-dimensional tool like the web suddenly because it is no longer niche and edgy, but now enjoyed by the many rather than the few, is simply a kind of philosophical snobbery and elitism that has no place in genuinely emancipatory politics. It displays a deep distrust of the people and their ability to make decisions rather than reflect misgivings about the way the state and corporations use selective parts of the web.

Of course if you are a political activist planning something the state in which you live will persecute you for or attempt to disrupt, I can fully appreciate a decision to go offline in terms of plans. I cannot believe though that there aren't spaces on the web where activists can still plan their activities and share their ideas without the NSA tracking them down - the carding forums facilitating both online and offline crime discussed last week are a prime example of spaces states simply cannot control. The web is not a uniformly "smooth space" in Hardt and Negri's terms (Hardt and Negri 2001), it is simply too large and diverse to police. There are pockets where resistance to global capitalism, neo-liberalism and environmental destruction will continue to exist. 

References:

My response to the extended reading for 4.11: BURNS, A AND ELTHAM, B (2009) TWITTER FREE IRAN: AN EVALUATION OF TWITTER'S ROLE IN PUBLIC DIPLOMACY AND INFORMATION OPERATIONS IN IRAN'S 2009 ELECTION CRISIS. IN: COMMUNICATIONS POLICY & RESEARCH FORUM 2009, UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, SYDNEY.

This was a really interesting piece about the role Twitter played in the Iranian election of 2009. Incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of a disputed poll and protests in favour of the more moderate opposition leader, Mir Hossein Mousavi, followed. For the first time the power of social media platforms for activism really became apparent. Not only could physical forms of protest be better co-ordinated but they could be live-blogged so to speak. 

Of course it is ridiculous to argue that Twitter caused the protests or prompted political or social change in Iran. I can't help feeling Burns and Eltham are setting up a bit of a straw man argument here. However, it is clear that it enabled the world to see internal Iranian politics and society in a completely new light. It also opened up spaces for a plurality of voices about the situation in Iran to filter through to the Iranian people. Like web 1.0 in the Seattle protests in 1999, CNN during the Gulf War 1991 and the printing press during the Reformation, Web 2.0 and social media is simply another tool to facilitate, organise and express dissent. It is just very much more effective because of its immediacy, its instantaneous nature, its ubiquity, its global reach and its low cost.

The other side of the coin of course is that any tool can be used for a variety of different purposes, not usually its intended ones (Gray 2005: 103). As I commented in a previous post, the web as created by Tim Berners-Lee, was not intended to facilitate repression or porn or spying or bombarding us with advertising. But with each new tool or technology it will be adapted and co-opted by a range of people for their own ends. I'm sure those inventing the printing press had higher aspirations than ensuring thousands of people could read Fifty Shades of Grey.

It is one thing to argue that any tool can be subverted but quite another to argue that Twitter, or any other such relatively neutral tool, causes repression and state sponsored murder as Burns and Eltham seem to wish to do. Yes people in Iran died because they used Twitter and could be tracked down so much more easily. But in reality a regime that resorts to such methods will use any manner of methods to repress their citizens. The Eidelweiss Pirates were a group of anti-Nazi German teenagers and students who disseminated anti-Nazi information through printed leaflets.  They were found out by the Nazi state and hung. I'm not sure that means we can implicate the printing press in the Holocaust... I do agree with Burns and Eltham that Twitter is not some sort of saviour of the oppressed but since no one would be silly enough to argue that, it seems equally silly to try and disprove it.

And in terms of the political dimension to their argument, Burns and Eltham seem to miss a massive point about what the US State Department was up to. Highly visible and well-reported state sponsored deaths lead to protest and demonstration. It is what finally drags Barnett's "sullen majority" out onto the streets to demand change (Thomas P.M. Barnett 2004: 289). It may be awfully cynical of me to think this, but I suspect the US knows there will be no change in Iran through peaceful protest. It will take innocent teenage girls being shot for simply expressing their opinion that will overwhelm the state and bring change about, but only if it is highly visible and easily communicable to a wider audience, something platforms like Twitter do make a lot easier. 

References:

Barnett, T. 2004. The Pentagon’s New Map: War And Peace In The Twenty-First Century. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

For me there is always risks with the web. In terms of medicinal information there is a wide array of information sources. In some ways this is positive and liberating for patients, who can seek second opinions, further information and the lived experiences of others with their condition.

I found a website dedicated to developmental dysplasia of the hip incredibly useful when my daughter was diagnosed with the condition at 8 weeks old. It gave me a way of asking silly questions that medical professionals just can't answer because emotions aren't a science and can't be learnt through textbooks or demonstrations. I also found out a huge amount of information about clinical research which gave me a better appreciation of what the doctors were trying to achieve and managed my expectations in a rather blunt fashion when the doctors were trying to be nice.

On the other hand, when my son suffered from neo-natal jaundice and underwent photo-therapy during the first two weeks of his life, I was shocked at the lack of information and support on the web. It actually made me feel even more isolated than I already felt, even though I was sat in a hospital surrounded by experts and parents experiencing the same thing. When the midwives and doctors discussed his condition with me I just couldn't take in all the information and felt bad asking them the same questions repeatedly. They also failed to explain the condition correctly and fully to me, not understanding I needed all of the facts and that I needed to understand the condition properly. Bland platitudes that it will be all right didn't cut it for me and felt like the conversational equivalent of a pat on the head.

So for me the plethora of factsheets, patient forums and advice groups has always been a positive experience. However, looking at this through an information literacy lens, many users of the web simply do not have the skills to assess and evaluate the information and the sources they are consuming. Typing random search terms into Google and going with the first hit seems to be most people's search strategy. Indeed, we regularly have students citing information from Australia because they do not understand have to use search engines effectively or about domain names. People need the tools to be web citizens. Otherwise the lack of gatekeepers and peer review (one of the great aspects about the web) becomes dangerous. Particularly in conjunction with the ability to buy medicines online.

I've dealt with the information side of health on the net, now a few words about buying prescription drugs. Bottom line: just don't do it. It really isn't worth the risk. Personally I wouldn't even buy condoms off the web unless it was from a reputable company I recognised and knew had real-world stores. 

So here I go on the how well do I know my friends task:

On Facebook I have 85 1st degree friends which is apparently more than a busload (hurrah for me); I have 13,889 2nd degree friends therefore according to the Guardian's analysis of Facebook; and I have 2,269,462 3rd degree friends which equals more than the population of Houston, Texas. The point of this by the way is that the NSA is allowed to monitor the communications of people three "hops" from their suspected terror target. So the monitoring of one suspect with only 85 Facebook friends could drag  millions of other individuals into NSA surveillance. 

My privacy settings on Facebook are set to maximum and I only add people I know in "real" life. Periodically I cull my friend list if I haven't seen the people in a while. This does lead to embarrassment on occasion however: I recently went to a university reunion and struck up an old friendship with someone who said "you are on my Facebook" to which I had to admit I had culled them three weeks earlier!

The link for the Guardian article is:

Wow! The network science module is blowing my mind! Nodes and edges and social science all in one - what a treat!

I loved the fantastic video by Manuel Lima with the awesome graphic. It did make me wonder a little about the idea of how our brains function. Lima argues that our brains do not organise information in little compartments as we previously thought but work more like a musical symphony of lots and lots of different instruments. It is more "organised complexity" (Warren Weaver 1948) than simply travelling from a to b. The description of our brains as being essentially a bit messy with connections between different pieces of information being made all over the place, reminded me of the web and what we sometimes find difficult about the web.

Sometimes it can seem like chaos. Information and digital literacy is our response to this, to try and equip students with the ability to cut through the seemingly arbitrary nature if the web and find paths through the information they need. 

What we like as human beings tends to be order, simplicity, hierarchy, symmetry, unity and balance, as Lima argues. We have always mapped information into trees because tree diagrams contain these properties. Perhaps this is why the web is so scary for some people? Because they can't take it and make order out of it. Because it is harder to think of these networks of networks, than something more logical and succinct. 

But then as people created the web, perhaps we created it in our own image? Perhaps the messiness of the web is a reflection of the messiness of the brain and its functions? And whilst we try and button hole the web into something more tree-like to help us understand it, maybe we are misunderstanding ourselves.

For Manuel Lima's thoughts and cool animation follow this link:

Interesting point raised in our web science MOOC discussion by a Lebanese academic regarding privacy and information sharing being largely a Western concern. He argued that in countries like Lebanon a person's name can say much more about them and their profile, than using the internet would. For him, the internet provided a space to be an individual, not tied to a name weighed down with cultural and social baggage. Interesting way to think about sharing information online. 

For our Web Science MOOC we were set a task to look at the different factors that contributed to the development of the web. The task required us to look at different factors and put them into some kind of timeline. I decided to do something different (chronology seemed a little dull) so I looked at all the factors and divided them into themes:

1. Technological innovation

2. Social and economic change

3. The politics of defence

4. The academic world

5. Commerce

6. Managing human knowledge

7. Regulating, researching and renewing the web