Del.icio.us for Academics

From the Chronicle of Higher Education

Jan. 31

Keeping Citations Straight, and Finding New Ones
At first glance, it seems like a nerdier version of Facebook. There’s the profile picture, the list of interests, the space for your Web site. Most of the members have Ph.D.’s, though, and instead of posting party invites or YouTube videos, their “Recent Activity” is full of academic papers and scholarly treatises.

Welcome to CiteULike, a social bookmarking tool that allows users to post, share and comment on each other’s links — in this case, citations to journal articles with titles like “Trend detection through temporal link analysis” and “The Social Psychology of Inter- and Intragroup Conflict in Governmental Politics.” It’s a sort of “del.icio.us for academics,” said Kevin Emamy, a representative for the site’s London-based holding company, Oversity Ltd. It started out as a personal Web project in 2004 and grew organically by word of mouth. Today, it has some 70,000 registered users and a million page views a month, he said.

Like other similar sites, CiteULike allows users to register, create profiles and submit links that others can read, comment on, tag with relevant keywords and in turn share again. Continue reading Del.icio.us for Academics…

Wikipedia Joins Academe to Evaluate Itself

Good News with exciting results ahead I’d guess..

From the Chronicle Of Higher Education

Wikipedia is famous for its philosophy that ordinary people, not just scholars, have expertise to offer the public. But when it comes to evaluating the online encyclopedia itself, Wikipedia officials have apparently concluded that academe is best suited for the task.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, announced today that it will work with a research center — UNU-Merit — run by the United Nations University and the Netherlands’ Maastricht University to conduct its first Wikepedia survey. It will collect data over the next several months on who Wikipedia’s readers and contributors are, why they visit the site, and what they do there. The results are expected to be released this year at the Wikimania conference in Alexandria, Egypt.

“This will help us figure out how to persuade new people to start contributing, and how to keep contributors engaged,” Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, said in a written statement.

Luc L. Soete, director of the research center, said the project fit well with his organization’s mission. He said Wikipedia helped people in developing countries gain access to knowledge. UNU-Merit, based in Tokyo, examines the social and political environments surrounding technological change.

Lovely Inspirational Posters

The University College Falmouth has had the outgoing graduates make inspirational posters for the incoming freshmen. This is a terrific idea–who better to give advice to newbies than the people who just went through it? The graphics are varied, interesting and beautiful.

Some of my favorites? “Be Adventurous. Don’t Use Helvetica For Absolutely Everything” and “Don’t F*#K Your Flatmate”. Which isn’t to say the sweet ones don’t slay me just as easily. They’re for sale and available for viewing at their Flickr site.

Via Kitsune Noir

New January LOEX Currents Is Out

You can read it here.

Beware Of Facebook?

There is a very interesting thread going on on ili-L around this article that came out on January 20th… I’ll let you judge for yourself, but would love to hear what others think about this!

December LOEX Currents

Find it here..as always, interesting articles, job listings and conference details.

Computer Literacy Doesn’t Mean Information Literacy, Report Says

In order to continue the constant debate about whether milennials are information savvy or not, I bring you this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, detailing a report from the Joint Information Systems Committee, a British higher-education research institute, which says in a nutshell, that students may be computer literate, but they certainly aren’t informationally literate.. Although this is a British study, I think it still has applications to us here in the states, especially the Challenges sections of the report.