The Search Principle blog

I’m reading Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (2004). I’m embarrassed to say that Lawrence Lessig‘s book has somehow eluded me for a full three years. How did that happen? For those librarians (and educators) who believe that proprietary control of information is detrimental to knowledge-creation, collaboration and civil, progressive societies, this is essential reading.

Lessig (see website), a Stanford University law professor, is a prominent figure in the free software movement, a segment of a larger global movement whose goals are to make information, knowledge and educational tools openly-accessible and free for everyone. Here’s a quote from Lessig’s website:

“Lawrence Lessig shows us that while new technologies always lead to new laws, never before have the big cultural monopolists used the fear created by new technologies, specifically the Internet, to shrink the public domain of ideas, even as the same corporations use the same technologies to control more and more what we can and can’t do with culture.”

Proponents of free culture argue that overly restrictive copyright laws (essentially barriers) hinder the flow of information and knowledge, and even innovation. The free culturists (see website) also repudiate the notions of pay-for-access, and the control of intellectual capital by publishers. Hey, can you say open access? (Will Stanford professors Lessig and Willinsky collaborate, one wonders?)

In addition to the above links, you may find it useful to read the Anti-Lessig Wiki, which is an open area for the critical analysis of Lessig’s writings and presentations. For those of you with a sense of history, isn’t the notion of free software, information and culture simply a version – a digital one – of what public libraries have stood for, for thousands of years?

At the outset of today’s post, let me say that perpetual beta is a pointless Web 2.0 notion (a cop-out) and decidely unhelpful to academics and librarians. Beta-testing. In beta. Not quite finished yet. To be released in full soon. At times, the race that Google scholar seems to be running is against itself – both tortoise and hare. GS has few real competitors, and is cavalier about how it is developing. Why does it do this? you ask…Because it can.

I’m reminded of this as I read Barbara Quint’s brief interview of Anurag Acharya in “Changes at Google scholar: A Conversation with Anurag Acharya. This is classic Acharya and Google scholar – is there any search tool and/ or chief engineer more withholding of information? He takes secrecy to whole new levels, pretending on the one hand to be upfront with librarians and information specialists about his search tool and yet stops short of details. Don’t ask Acharya how big GS is, or how many searches it gets per month – he won’t tell you. For some reason, he can’t. Or won’t.

This blog was originally envisioned, in 2005, as an outreach and liaison space for librarians interested in tracking Google scholar as it went from beta into post-beta development. It is still in beta, nearly three years later. I now use the blog for academic musings on everything from globalization, trends in medicine and education and the evils of the multinationals – yes, Google too. I raise concerns, where possible, about Google scholar, why we can’t ignore it and try to be fair so that users can learn about its considerable limitations.

However, Acharya has made our work as librarians difficult and doesn’t seem to get it. As we try to teach Google and Google scholar, carefully measuring similarities and differences with other tools, and try to explain why – after almost three years – we still have to guess at its coverage of the literature, its size and how it compares to our expensive, proprietary tools, our users just tune out. Maybe librarians are tuning out, too. Meanwhile, when users ask, we can’t explain why certain documents are not findable in Scholar but pop up in our Google searches. Google scholar may be the fastest means to search across the Web for academic literature – but its outreach, openness and transparency is a painfully slow and insulting process to librarians.

Have librarians been duped into promoting Google scholar, a potentially powerful search tool for users while Acharya drags his heels about revealing the details of the project? My answer, given the point of this blog and my work on it since 2005, is a speedy yes.

“The extraordinary power, speed, and ubiquity of online searching has brought with it a serendipity of unexpected connections to both information and people…”

from Patrick Leary’s insightful piece entitled “Googling the Victorians” in the Journal of Victorian Culture.

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Read Leary’s piece – although two years old already, it nails a few things about Google right on the head: its impact on scholarship (not just education and medicine) and librarianship, how people find things (of course) and how we think because of it. Read it for the pure pleasure of thinking outside of education, medicine or your work as librarians.

Another notable section:

“‘When found, make a note of ’ – Poring through books and periodicals in search of particular words and phrases has always been part of a researcher’s job. In his recent memoir, A Little Bit of Luck, Richard D. Altick writes of having developed the ability to scan thousands of pages of text—thirty years of Hansard for one project, 5,000 pages of Punch for another—hour after hour, day after day, while thinking of other things. Books like The Presence of the Present and his history of the first ten years of Punch, which are essentially brilliant exercises in annotation, stand as a testament to the extraordinary results that such a technique, in tandem with a uniquely wellstocked mind, can achieve. Yet just as electronic indices have undermined the importance for lawyers of possessing a vast and precise memory for case law, so also have the new digital tools and sources available to literary and historical scholars rendered this particular set of skills increasingly obsolete. Of course, we will always make connections among the many texts that we read, and take and use notes of them, but the deliberate ferreting out of allusions from disparate kinds of texts is rapidly coming to rely almost entirely upon electronic searching.”

Ah, could librarians and information retrievalists find more sweeter words than this? 🙂 Dean

While many other faculties are busily finishing up summer projects, I’ve already begun another course online entitled ADHE 544 – Global and Local Learning which explores the impact of globalization and its processes on social, economic, cultural and environmental spheres. One of our first tasks is to explore the common elements in learning locally and globally.

Here’s my post:

“I am enjoying our discussions and exploration of the global and local.

I tend to return often to the notion of social spaces in this discussion. It’s a concept I’d like to explore as representing the duality of the global and local in our identities. In a digital sense, the social aspect of our work space is very much alive and well here in our group. We are shaped by this, and in turn shape it (ie. Fenwick’s enactivism), every time we post. This Blackboard space is a digital meeting ground for our international cohort, and yet retains an important local element throughout our discussions.

That said, one of the things I’d like to explore a moment is about globalization and how laden it seems to be with pejorative connotations. Has anyone else been bothered by that? Why is the local, indigenous, culture favoured by the majority? As students of the world-space why does the global carry such negative weight, and baggage? Is it because of multinational corporations (MNCs) (and what they represent), their drive to make money and drive out local businesses?

I think we all have a need and desire to share in the global, while retaining our local cultures and integrity of our communities; MNCs threaten that. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we welcome the benefits of globalization, such as increased prosperity, but are disinclined to give up what defines us locally. I believe this colours most of what we learn in the global/local context.

Our local and even national cultures define us, help us to feel anchored in an uncertain world, and put us on the map – we want people to know us as we are. I think that’s a human thing and very much a common element in global/local learning – we want to reach out, experience other cultures, meet other people, and even absorb some of the best of other places and ways of thinking and being. But somehow, we also want to retain a sense (and a love really – it’s always about that) of the social spaces in our communities, of how important they are to us, and how linked they are to our identities in a global world.”

Ask yourself a simple question: what are your views of learning in the global and local contexts?

Did you know? This eight (8) minute video is worth a close look, and builds on a similar youtube.com post from 2006. As in evidence-based practice, the video triggers thought by posing a number of interesting questions – about globalization, education and information technology. What follows is a number of interesting answers (mostly factual) that demonstrate the world is getting smaller, more connected and (it seems, obviously) more complicated.

Welcome to globalization, education and technology 2.0.

I hear that Wikipedia will be testing a new color-coding tool to mark questionable content on its articles. The tool – tested within Wikia first before scaling up to Wikipedia entries – is not the first time advanced statistical analysis has been used to assess the reliability of articles within Wikipedia.

This new color-coding scheme will give Wikipedians a sense of how many times sections of articles have been revised as a way to monitor the most disputed and controversial sections on Wikipedia; by extension, entries virtually unchanged over longer periods of time will be an indication of some consensus of the crowd.

Will color-coding be a way for Wikipedia to address concerns regarding content reliability? With tools for marking questionable content, the reputation of Wikipedia needs to improve. Presumably, articles with the least amount of revisions will have a higher trust or reliability factor, or will they? What do you think readers?

Other relevant information:

Wiki-related developments include Search Wikia and Similpedia. See: The Wiki Toolbox: 30+ Wiki Tools and Resources

In a Chronicle podcast, Virgil Griffith, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, talks about WikiScanner – used to spot deletions of potentially unflattering information about groups, or people trying to hype themselves, organizations or bash their enemies.

Check out the Canadian Council on Learning’s The Learning Link:

Profiles in Learning: Peter Mansbridge

The sixth in our series of articles about the personal learning experiences of leading Canadians, the latest Profile in Learning looks at broadcasting icon Peter Mansbridge. This time we explore the role informal learning played in vaulting Mansbridge from a job as a late-night radio deejay in remote Manitoba to his current role as anchor and chief correspondent on CBC Television’s The National.

Several youngsters I spoke to this weekend at a friend’s party – ranging in ages 8 to 12 – said, after they were asked how they find things on the Internet, “I use Google“. How do you use it, I asked curiously. “I type in some words and then look for an answer on the page of links”. Anything else? I asked. “No” said one young teen “except I use Yahoo too.”

Ah, the innocence of the Google kids made me smile.

My sabbatical has given me my first systematic exposure to learning theories as they apply to academia and higher “tertiary” education. But I am equally interested in how young kids learn, and how they learn using information technologies. As a qualified Level II National Gymnastics coach, I am aware of the need to develop cognition in my students at the gym, especially when learning new, difficult tricks.

But, now, a disconnect! How do the same kids from the gym fare in front of their computers, using search engines and websites? What kinds of information skills – and the equivalent of the acrobatic trick – can they perform?

Clearly, Google has had an enormous impact in education, across all spheres, and even in how children locate information. Over the past three years, I have been so concentrated on Google’s impact in medicine that I rarely ventured outside of my tiny little box; but now I’ll turn my sights and analysis to Google’s impact in primary and secondary education.

As a starting point, I was pleased to find a special section entitled Google for educators. There is even a Google Discussion Group for Educators and a blog entitled “The Infinite Thinking Machine“. Did I mention I love kids?

Interviewing Terri Thompson, Assistant Research Scientist, Team Leader,
Canadian Council on Learning

(Note from Dean: I am currently doing a fascinating work placement/contract at the CCL, and Terri Thompson has graciously agreed to an interview about her work. I would also like to interview some of the other PhD researchers about knowledge transfer and systematic reviews. My sense is, given my coursework in education at UBC during my sabbatical, that CCL’s work needs to be more widely discussed. Stay tuned for more information, and interviews. – Dean).

1) GS: Could you tell my readers a little bit about your work at the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL), and how it fits into the goals of the organization?

TERRI:

“CCL is a not-for-profit organization that promotes and supports the use of research evidence in decision-making about issues related to life-long learning. My primary role as Team Leader is to work with a very talented group of individuals who work collaboratively to conduct Systematic Reviews and Question Scans. The Review Team includes Information Retrieval Specialists, Research Reviewers and student interns. We come from a variety of academic backgrounds such as Psychology, Literature, Education, Social Policy, Economics, History and Political Science. As Team Leader, I am responsible for training new team members in the protocols and procedures of systematic reviewing and, on a day-to-day level, to coordinate and manage team projects among other things.

I work very closely with our Information Retrieval Specialist, Will Durland, who is a qualified librarian. Will builds and runs all of our searches and performs Document Control for the team. He tracks every article at every stage of every review – which is extremely helpful for me as I try to keep track of all the reviews and who is doing what. Most of our Systematic Reviews and Question Scans come about at the request of various levels of governments and governing bodies and I find it extremely interesting and often quite challenging.”

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2) You are currently doing some graduate work, and research. Can you tell us about that work, and its connection to your interests in evidence-based decision-making?

TERRI:

“Well, as you know, “traditional” systematic reviews can take years to complete and are derived from the medical field where results can have life and limb consequences. Social science and education are, by comparison, fairly new to the world of systematic reviews -sometimes the medical model doesn’t exactly fit. For instance, it is very difficult to find RCTs in social research. Still rigorous research is ample, and as social scientists began advocating for the use of evidence-based research to inform decision-making, policy and decision-makers began to say “great, but we can’t wait 2 or 3 year for the results of your review.”

As a student of education policy and an advocate for the use of evidence-based decision-making, I recognize the realities of public policy decision-making. Public policy is pragmatic: decisions have to and will be made, regardless of the desire to wait for more exhaustive or comprehensive research results. Researchers, on the other hand, need to be committed to the quality, rigour and integrity of their work. The challenge, then, is to bridge reality and integrity to produce both a rigorous and useful end product. The short answer to your question is; my goal is to help find the middle-ground — to test the rigour, comprehensiveness and timeliness of “rapid evidence assessments“.

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3) What are some of the obstacles, in your view, in doing Canadian-specific research on learning? Talk about the challenges in searching, using search tools and the Web, if you can. What do you find the most interesting aspect of doing this work?

TERRI:

“Hmmm, obstacles in doing Canadian-specific research on learning. My initial response is “what isn’t an obstacle?” But, I should really retract that. Certain domains of learning are more amenable to locating Canadian research than others. In the area of language and literacy, for instance, Canadian research is abundant and more easily located in the existing databases. In my opinion, and I’m not a trained Information Retrieval person, part of the issue is that major education databases catalogue Canadian research under the Descriptor term “Foreign countries” rather than something more meaningful (for Canadians, anyway) such as “Canada”. If the major databases would include country names as Descriptor terms, that would be great. Another solution may be to have authors identify the “Canadianess” of their research in the abstract so researchers can do an Abstract search for the keyword Canada. Some authors do this already, but it certainly isn’t consistent.

There are certain fuctions in Google Advance Search that we use quite a bit when searching for Grey Literature. I particularly like using the Domain function which allows you to restrict the results to only certain types of websites, such as ‘only’ .ca or ‘not’ .com. The other advanced function we use is the “Page Specific Search” Find pages similar to the page … We will often use this function to locate additional Grey Lit sites. It works quite well.

As for the most interesting aspect of my work, I’d have to say it is the constant opportunity to learn. The IT world is always changing, updating, improving etc. and working within it means I have to remain on top of all those changes. Sometimes, more often then I’d care to admit probably, it’s like playing a game of catch-up. But since my time at CCL I think I’ve learned not to fear technology as much as I used to. I find learning to use new programs and tools exciting and I especially enjoy passing that knowledge along to colleagues or workshop participants. Of course working with so many intelligent people who are so knowledgeable in such a variety areas makes learning fun and easy.”

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4) I’ve noticed in working with you that you have some excellent skills in searching. How did you learn those skills? I see you also teach sessions in searching, especially grey literature. Any comments about that work?

TERRI:

“Thanks Dean, that means a lot coming from you. I think part of it is my innate desire to learn. I’m a genuine information-junky. I try different strategies, test different theories I come up with (sort of like what I’m doing for my thesis) and see what I can learn. It started with a workshop run by Joanne Naslund in the UBC Education Library. Joanne introduced me to searching databases effectively and from there…and if you read the Help files in the databases, you can learn a lot!

I enjoy teaching. I used to teach high school so I don’t fear standing up in front of a group of people. The workshops Will and I run are geared towards showing participants how to systematically locate research, and in doing so we inevitably end up teaching people basic searching techniques. It never ceases to amaze me how few students or researchers actually enrol in the workshops put on by libraries. Librarians are the greatest untapped resource at universities and those government organizations that still have them. I always make a point, at different times throughout the workshop, to say “talk to your librarians; they are a wealth of knowledge just waiting to be tapped into”.

The thing I love most about teaching those workshops is the look on peoples’ faces when you show them a new tool. It’s that look of “Oh, my gosh I had no idea you could this!” Or, my favourite: the expressions I see after I demonstrate the Create Bibliography function in RefWorks; “That’s fantastic!” followed quickly by the expression: “I don’t even want to think about all the painful bibliography experiences I had when I was in university.”

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5) Do you think that Canada needs its own database on learning? You and I have discussed the possibility of cumulating the evidence in a database of grey literature. Do you think this is a worthwhile pursuit?

TERRI:

I definitely think it is valuable and important to have access to Canadian research about learning, particularly when a social or historical context is fundamental to the research question. Examples might include rural education; Indigenous education topics or ESL and bilingualism studies. American research (most of the research we access is American) in those areas is often not generalizable to the Canadian context or experience, so that is definitely a problem. In other cases, it may not be as important to have strictly Canadian research. Regardless, I think the idea itself is most worthwhile and I’d be very interested in pursuing it further.