a thaumaturgical compendium

I have to admit, I haven’t really been tracking on Wikinews since it went live. I visited recently, and I remain ambivalent. In many ways, by surviving as long as it has, it may have made it through the shakiest part of its gestation. But it still doesn’t stand well on its own.

The Wired News quote gets at the heart of what I see as its major problem. It’s not trying to do what blogs often do, and act as a colored news filter. But it also isn’t a news organization, as it stands. It’s a bit like a (relatively) clear news filter—the human version of Google News. Many of the stories are derived directly from the mainstream media. It is certainly not plagiarized—all of the news is clearly sourced—but it does have the feeling of a clipping service.

That’s not to say that there are no indications of the radical possibilities. There are stories that are not part of the mainstream, and there is some original reporting, but there needs to be much, much more of this. I understand that at this stage they need to rely on existing news stories in order to “bootstrap” a useful resource, but it needs to get to that tipping point where they use other news sources to fill in where original reporting hasn’t quite made it.

Indeed, ideally, Wikinews would serve as a kind of wire service itself, supplying news to other news services; a kind of grassroots Interpress news service. So, I think some of the ethic that brought Wikinews into being still holds promise, and the site is “not dead yet!” which really is important.

Three notes:

First, notice how many people turned to Wikipedia for news about the new pope. There is some space there between the depth of Wikipedia and the place of Wikinews. I’m not sure what that space is, but clearly people saw value in Wikipedia at that moment, perhaps more than they saw value in Wikinews. Where is the articulation between these two.

Second, right now multimedia (and esp. photos) is pulled only from the commons—I wonder whether is there is a way to articulate with Flickr to provide possible edited images of events. Someone needs to provide a very clean way of using cameraphone images in a newsy way, and Wikinews has the potential to fulfill this.

Finally, where are the j-schools in this? Are they worried that by participating in a collaborative project they will somehow hurt their own reputation? I would suggest this is a mistake. If I were teaching journalism courses (I’m not), I would absolutely have students uploading their articles. Even a small journalism class, with weekly assignments, would be a windfall for the site.

Chheng-Hong has decided to turn the multiple choice exam on its head. I am probably one of the teachers he’s looking toward there, since I recall not making as many comments on student work last semester as might have liked. In any case, it’s symptomatic of the difficulties of teaching at a research school.

When I was a grad student I often thought professors’ complacency in teaching was astounding, and that was in a program where they actually cared about teaching. One of the things I’ve been working on is trying to spend less time on teaching (hopefully without it having disastrous effects), but I know I haven’t been able to crank out research like others have because I care about students’ experience. Sometimes it feels like I care more than they do.

A couple of weeks ago a group of students complained that a colleague of mine (also pre-tenure) started out a class by telling the students that he “got paid to do research” and that teaching was just something he had to get through. That seems like an odd thing to think, let alone to say, but it’s part of the mantra here, and I suspect at many top research universities. I also got into this because I like research, but why would you become a professor if you weren’t going to work at becoming a good one?

I’m not sure if this is strictly public, but Google thinks it is, so… Trebor Sholz asked me to talk a little about blogs and education as part of the Share, Share Widely conference I blogged about earlier. Looks like some interesting people are going, I’m really sorry I can’t attend. As if I weren’t busy enough, I just found out I need to teach a course in the summer session (instructor bailed at the last minute). But it sure looks like an interesting crowd. Hopefully, there will be a repeat next year when my home is a bit closer.

Though as a Democrat (yes, I got fed up with the local Greens and besides, I was hoping I could have an impact on the primary process), I should be scandalized by this, my inner Neal Stephenson and my inner Monty Python are both loving the idea of a H1B cruise ship, hovering (possibly) in international waters off the coast of California.

The frustration of a shutdown of H1B visas, coupled with foreign labor that is often better trained, cheaper, and harder working, has proven to be a continuing issue for tech companies. But the problem with India (or Ireland or whatever) is that they are just so darn far away. Wounldn’t it be nice if they delivered?

Sure, there is the inevitable comparison with slave (labor) ships, but overall, I love this idea, if only for the strangeness of it.

For those of you in New York City this Friday, you might be interested in attending the Share, Share Widely workshop and after-party, organized by my colleague here at UB, Trebor Sholz:

Join us for an intensive one day conference about new media education. Connect with new media researchers and educators, present and discuss, and exchange syllabi or other public domain materials in a temporary gift economy zone. Bring your USB memory key and laptop.

This is the concluding bit from a short essay I just wrote. I’m demoralized lately about academia in general, but I hope it doesn’t show here…

If social informatics is a gathering storm, if there are a large number of people who do work within the area and are willing to build the field, we should be uniquely able to do so. As information professionals, we should be at the leading edge of scholarly communication. This seems to be the case with “other” informatics. The benefits accrued in sharing data among bioinformaticists led to a clamoring for open exchange of ideas and for access to data. Clearly, if social informatics is to be a success, it requires a knowledge ecology that fosters such exchanges, and allows easy access to the most recent and continuing research.

The Journal of Computer Mediated Communication provides us with an example of how an electronically accessible, widely-read journal can act as a catalyst for a field of study. Likewise, FirstMonday, though perhaps not as widely esteemed as JCMC, remains an organ for distribution of research within the field of social informatics, and a crossroads for exchanging information between disciplines. Neither of these journals directly identifies with social informatics. While there are several journals that are more closely attuned to the social informatics perspective, because they are only open to subscribers, they tend not to be as widely read. If the aim is to present social informatics as a viable and growing field, there is a need for journals that evangelize the work done in this field, and that provide a point of contact for scholars.

Perhaps equally striking is that so few researchers who self-identify as scholars of social informatics participate heavily in either open or closed systems of interaction online. How is it that we study computer-supported collective work without using such systems to further our own research? Outside of a few graduate students and an even smaller number of faculty, researchers in the area do not maintain weblogs or even home-pages where their work can be easily accessed.

While there is certainly a danger in becoming insular or self-centered, this is not a problem the field faces right now. We need to be drawing together the wide range of ideas and approaches to research. We need to be sharing our work, finding common themes, as well as areas of disagreement. We need the kind of discursive community that we study. We need, to borrow a phrase from the dot-com boom, to start eating our own dog food.

Bringing designers and researchers of every stripe under the same roof is the greatest challenge to the field of social informatics, but it is also its greatest strength. The division between designers and researchers is an artificial one, tied largely to existing institutional structures. We, perhaps better than anyone, recognize how entrenched such structures can be. Nonetheless, by crafting our own knowledge ecology, by presenting examples of how scholarly communication can be improved, we provide both infrastructure for the emerging field, and an object for shared research.

Derek Mueller has a podcast up of a recent conference presentation on weblogs and emergence, in which he explains why graduate students should blog.

And while we are on the subject, Kevin Lim has been blogging for a while now, but lately he has really kicked into overdrive, and with good effect. His is now one of my favorite blogs to read. Sure he’s a UB student (and my advisee), but I don’t think I’m betraying any favoritiesm there. If you are interested in social technologies and a bunch of other stuff, subscribe to his blog for a week or two and take it for a spin.