2 short research papers: Social Media as Information Source, and; Developing an IL game

Kim, K., Yoo-Lee, E. and Sin, S. (2011) Social Media as Information Source: Undergraduates’ Use and Evaluation Behavior. In: Proceedings of the 74rd ASIST Annual Meeting Retrieved 18 September 2012 from http://asist.org/asist2011/proceedings/submissions/283_FINAL_SUBMISSION.pdf
An interesting short paper that reports on a survey of what sources students used, what they used them for and what evaluative strategies they used. For example Wikipedia was used for initially scoping a topic, and evaluated through looking at the links and sources, whereas Youtube was used for recreation and for instructions on how to do things, and was evaluated through the video quality and people's opinions.

Markey, K. and Leeder, C. (2011) The Effect of Scoring and Feedback Mechanisms
in an Online Educational Game. In: Proceedings of the 74rd ASIST Annual Meeting. Retrieved 18 September 2012 from http://asist.org/asist2011/proceedings/submissions/38_FINAL_SUBMISSION.docx

This describes the stages of piloting this information literacy game, and the changes that needed to be made as a result.

I discovered these 2 papers (and further interesting ones) as part of the October 2011 ASIST annual conference proceedings; http://asist.org/asist2011/proceedings/openpage.html.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Blackheath Farmers' Market, September 2012

Planet Wikimedia & Wikilit: review of wiki literature

Whilst googling to see whether I could find an open access version of the article I blogged yesterday, I came across a couple of interesting sites. Firstly, Planet Wikimedia. http://en.planet.wikimedia.org/ "The Planet Wikimedia is a weblog aggregator operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, to bring together on-topic posts about Wikimedia projects, other wiki sites, the free culture movement, the "wisdom of crowds", etc." Since it aggregates a lot of blogs, there is some duplication and some slightly baffling (to me) content, but also a lot of useful news, views and links.
One of the links I found was to WikiLit: A literature review of scholarly research on Wikipedia, http://wikilit.referata.com/wiki/Main_Page. There is a draft paper ("The People’s Encyclopedia Under the Gaze of the Sages: A Systematic Review of Scholarly Research on Wikipedia") which outlines the methodology and starts to summarise selected papers. On the Wikilit home page you can expand some fairly broad categories (e.g. Quality of Wikipedia) to reveal titles of identified articles and then you click through to see the extraction sheet with the details of the article.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Cherry blossom in Botanic Gardens, March 2012.

Wikipedia and the University, a case study

Thanks to Lyn Parker for alerting me to this new article (priced):
Knight, C. and Pryke, S. (2012)"Wikipedia and the University, a case study."
Teaching in Higher Education. (Currently listed as a "forthcoming article, available online DOI:10.1080/13562517.2012.666734)
I was interested to see that "use of Wikipedia is highest amongst trainee teachers, a finding that corresponds to our perception based on anecdotal observation that use of the encyclopaedia is widespread; possibly even a predominant resource, for teachers and children within British schools" since this has some relevance to the research into school children's information behaviour being carried out here in the iSchool. Another interesting finding was that a good number of lecturers who forbid their students to use Wikipedia, use it themselves, feeling that they are able to discriminate when to use Wikipedia, whereas their students aren't.
The abstract reads "This article discusses the use of Wikipedia by academics and students for learning and teaching activities at Liverpool Hope University. [...] Based upon a sample of 133 academics and 1222 students, our principal findings were: (1) 75% of academics and students use Wikipedia; (2) student use is typically confined to the initial stages of assessments; (3) a quarter of academics provide guidance on how to use Wikipedia and (4) 70% of academics use Wikipedia for background information for teaching purposes, something that it is not influenced by whether student use is tolerated or not. Our conclusion is that whilst Wikipedia is now unofficially integrated into universities, it is not ‘the’ information resource as feared by many and that an enlightened minority of academics have attempted to assimilate it into their teaching."
Photo by Sheila Webber: Spring in the park, Sheffield, March 2012