Online Social Question & Answer Sites & Traditional Learning in Schools

This week’s blog will discuss ways in which the forms of social and traditional knowledge production can inform each other. I will compare and contrast online social question and answer sites and information presented traditionally in brick and mortar schools. Three different aspects of information sharing will be discussed. First, I will talk about the tools that are utilized for information sharing, second, individuals who share information and third, the style of learning.

Tools for Learning:
The tools typically used for information sharing in K-12 schools include textbooks, fiction or non-fiction literature books, teacher made or purchased worksheets, and/or other hard copy documents chosen by and provided by the teacher. Students are encouraged to decode, comprehend, analyze and evaluate the written material, then are typically asked to demonstrate their understanding through output requirements such as tests, completing worksheets, writing papers, etc. One characteristic of the use of hard copy documents is that they are fixed at the point of publishing. Social media sites, such as question and answer sites are dynamic and constantly changing. Because this both a strength and a weakness for both types of learning tools, the use of traditional documents and online resources such as those is social media or question and answer sites can be utilized in tandem to better educate students.
How can these two types of learning tools inform each other?
According to Daguid (2006,) there is, at times, a need for information to remain static

He provides the example of the Constitution of the United States, making the point that it would not improve if it was changed at the whim of each citizen’s changing view of truth. Hard copy documents, like the U.S. Constitution, have significant built–in inertia maintaining the document’s integrity and the original intent of the author(s). Opportunities to look at original documents, like the U. S. Constitution can be facilitated through the use of social media sites, like Wikipedia. After only seconds, the learner can see a picture of the original document. Here’s a screenshot of the US Constitution fro Wikipedia. For a K-12 student, immediate access to the original document can be a powerful learning opportunity. Access through Wikipedia provides differentiated learning for students with various types of learning styles and it provides the visual representation for students with learning disabilities or limited English langauge proficiency. The use of social media tools such as Wikipedia can provide the teacher with more resources than are available through the school.

Should schools shift totally to online texts? Daguid (2006) discussed Project Gutenberg, one of the best known examples of networked peer production. Founded in 1971 by Michael Hart, volunteers have used this project to make “e-texts” available online for out–of–copyright works. With a “principal of minimal regulation,” the Project is predominantly self–organizing. If the Project accepts that a submitted text is free of copyright restrictions, volunteers do the rest, preparing the edition for the database, usually by scanning it in. Since 2000, the Distributed

Proofreading Project has provided quality assurance, distributing proofreading tasks among yet more volunteers. By 2006 Project Gutenberg had some 17,000 titles and two million monthly downloads. Though it has been described as a “large, well–organized” and “comprehensive scholarly” initiative (according to Roberts, 1999, quoted in Daguid, 2006), Hart insists that the Project is not only minimally regulated, but also minimally interested in the punctilios of scholarship. “We do not write,” Hart claims, “for the reader who cares whether a certain phrase in Shakespeare has a ‘:’ or a ‘;’ between its clauses. We put our sights on a goal to release e-texts that are 99.9% accurate in the eyes of the general reader.” The screenshot to the right shows the search mechanism of Project Gutenberg. This option can provide the teacher or the students with easy access to publications that would enhance the students' learning. Because the books on this site are so easily accessible, the teacher and students could access the resources with very little technical difficulties.

On the surface, the use of these online books seems perfect for school systems that are currently experiencing budget restrictions. The texts can be retrieved by students or teachers anywhere there is an internet connection, so they are easily accessible. They are free, so there is no initial or replacement costs to the district. Students can’t lose them – dogs can’t eat them! Teachers would no longer need to count them, check them out, check them in, look through for damage and run down the students who lost them. With all the advantages of free, easily accessible resources, educators may well turn to online resources such as Project Gutenberg to find a free and reliable copy of books.
However, according to Daguid (2006) texts on sites like Project Guternberg are more useful for the scholar, whose practiced eyes can discount the problems, than for the ordinary reader. He provides the example of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. In this case, when the volunteer scanned the text, the English words worked just fine, but there are some phrases in Greek, which the code did not compile. To solve the problem, the volunteer editor submitting the text decided to route around the problem by inserting a quick patch, a parentheses to indicate a change. That is a reasonable decision, but also a problematic one because other Gutenberg editors later used parentheses to route around different kinds of problems. As a result, the computer code makes adjustments according to the new patch code. The result can be changes in the text which cause challenging passages which the ordinary reader would consider incomprehensible. To use online resources like texts from Project Gutenberg, teachers and students would need to be aware of irregularities that may arise during the inputting process and be ready to analyze any changes this makes to the original material.

What about online information systems like Question and Answer sites as opportunities to provide information to students? Online Question and Answer sites are dynamic. The information is always changing and anyone can add information. Is this bad or good? According to Duguid (2006) Open Source software has shown that networked communication can build individual contributions into collective, synergistic projects without intervention from formal institutions or dependence on conventional expertise.

On the other side of this issue, Leibenluft cautions that one social question and answer site, Answers, “looks like a complete disaster as a traditional reference tool. It encourages bad research habits, rewards people who post things that aren't true, and frequently labels factual errors as correct information. It's every middle-school teacher's worst nightmare about the Web.”

Regarding information tools used in education, the best option could be for school staff to become aware that there are options of resources available online. There are advantages to continuing to use hard copies of some documents that by their nature need to remain static. There are other situations in which online resources would better keep the learner updated as to the newest developments in fast-growing fields. A decision that educators should make is whether the subject matter that they are teaching is best shared by the use of hard copy documents or if the information of the field is changing rapidly to require online resources. One advantage and disadvantage of peer production projects is that they constantly change. Duguid (2006) said, “what is flawed today may be flawless tomorrow”.

If the educator chooses to use online resources, how could the educator make the determination if the information presented online is valid and reliable? It is basically the same question Duguid (2006) asks, “What is it about peer production processes that assure quality?” He outlines two laws of quality that back up quality claims for peer production. The first is “Linus’s Law” which holds that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” This is the same idea as one of the common sayings associated with outrigger canoe paddling here in Hawaii: Many hands make the canoe light. The idea is that any problem is ultimately trivial when there is a large number of people contributing to a project. The more people involved increases the likelihood that someone will see the solution to a problem or catch an error. The second implied law of quality Duguid discussed comes from Paul Graham who claims that “The method of ensuring quality” in peer production is “Darwinian ... People just produce whatever they want; the good stuff spreads, and the bad gets ignored”. Together these “laws of quality” argue that more people making more changes only make things better. Larger numbers of contributors and time spent on the project work in favor of quality In some — even many — cases they may. In some they appear not to. Rather than taking the laws on faith, we need to ask in which cases the laws work, in which they do not, and if they do not, why not. As educators choose to access online resources as information tools for their students, they could look at the number of contributors to a topic

Another way to evaluate the quality of material found online is to assess the social annotations associated with the entries. According to Gazan (2008) just like notes in the margins of a hard copy textbook, social computing can operate in much the same way. Options such as links, tags, social bookmarks, comments or ratings provide users with the means to create, share and interact around content. Most instances operate from what Gazan calls “a model of aggregate peer authority.” He provides the example that no single expert categorizes photographs on a site like flickr.com (called tagging), but on this site tags are made by many users who, collectively, make a photograph accessible. Geisler and Burns (2008) appear to agree with Gazan and add that the potential value of social tagging is particularly strong for digital video resources because while the amount of online video content available to people is rapidly increasing, the visual and temporal nature of video raises well-known problems of classification and description (what he calls the "semantic gap"), making the capability to effectively catalog the growing stores of video resources a critical open problem. If educators, students, researchers and the public interact online around a digital item via social annotations all users would benefit from this critical analysis. Gazan states that an unobtrusive list of social annotations associated with digital library collection items would allow alternative views of digital content, and create a sense of collaborative endeavor. By utilizing this advantage of the web’s infrastructure and embracing a philosophy of releasing control of collection items would open the conversation to an even wider audience.

INDIVIDUALS PROVIDING THE INFORMATION:
In schools, the individual providing the information to the students is typically the classroom teacher. Teachers have expertise in the area of teaching which includes classroom management, communication with parents, and knowledge of the curriculum guidelines. The requirements of No Child Left Behind required that teachers become highly qualified in the subject matter they teach, mandating that the teachers have a baseline knowledge of the field.

Not too long ago I walked into a general education high school classroom to do an observation of a specific student. There were approximately 25 students in the classroom who were “listening” to the teacher do a stand-up-and-deliver type lecture on an area of science. Luckily, it appeared that only about 5 of the students appeared to be listening to the teacher and the other 20 or so were clearly doing something else. I say luckily because I knew for a fact that the information presented by the teacher was basically wrong. She had a rudimentary grasp of the topic, so there was some truth to the information she was presenting but there was more wrong information being put forth than there was right. I was glad that most of the students were not learning what the teacher was trying to convey on that day. What if they were all paying attention and were taking the misinformation as gospel truth. Shudder, shudder!!

While the example I gave above is certainly a rarity – certainly most of the instruction provided to our students is accurate – however, the amount of information needed to be conveyed to students is astonishing. In the area of science, a classroom teacher could not be expected to be an expert in all areas of the strands in the content and performance standards. Even scientists aren’t experts in all of these different fields, just in their own. For this reason, social question and answer sites can provide reliable information if the learner has some skills to help differentiate what is correct and what is not.

So who provides the information on social media sites? I imagine a group of scholarly old men, resembling ....Gandolf, maybe. To check my assumption with reality, I checked out the featured contributor on the Answer.com site. Hmmm....

According to Lerman (2007) social question and answer sites are a participatory medium in which users are actively creating, evaluating and distributing information. Rather than relying on the opinion of a few editors, like traditional textbooks, social media sites such as Wikipedia, Flickr and Digg, aggregate opinions of thousands of users. Answers found online in question and answer sites may range from those provided experts in field to the average Joe with an uninformed opinion. Content varies by expertise of person answering question. According to Gazan (2008) knowledge discovery and transfer is no longer restricted to a model of one expert creator to many consumers (as in the case of traditional teaching methods). Consumers are creators, who can add their voices to both expert and non-expert claims. This is an advantage to hard copy textbooks because users get the benefit of multiple perspectives. This provides the opportunity for learners to evaluate information in what Gazan calls “the best tradition of participative, critical inquiry”.

In onsite school situations and online, the student must access and learn to assess the qualifications of the individual providing information. Duguid (2006) quoted Benkler’s argument that peer production will lead to a “more critical and self–reflective culture”. To evaluate the information presented in either format, we must first become more reflective and able to analyze, evaluate and critically examine information provided. We need a better understanding of the connection between the means of production and the quality of the outcome, to be aware of the likely strengths and possible weaknesses of different approaches, to consider why a method works when it does, and to become constructively critical of systemic weaknesses when it does not.

STYLE OF LEARNING:
In schools the primarily method of instruction is still the lecture model, with the teacher talking and attempting to impart knowledge, assigning reading from a text book, possibly mixed in with some project learning. The model typically involves large group instruction from an “expert” at imparting the knowledge.

Online learning is typically achieved 1:1 with computer or other personal data device so that there is full engagement of the student throughout the learning process. Dempsey (2009) discusses how diffuse networking changes how we coordinate our resources to achieve goals, and in this situation, how learning in schools can become more individualized. Dempsey points out that with online resources our use of time and space changes. Time-shifting is routine as students may listen to or watch lectures in the gym or on the train. The use of space to support ad hoc rendezvous and social learning is becoming more important. As networking spreads, the use of web sites as the primary delivery mechanism of instruction could be expected to increase. As network infrastructure becomes more widespread, communications and computational capacity diffuses through more of our research, learning and consumer behaviors. We are not only looking at increasingly permanent connectivity, but connectivity through devices that have rapidly improving storage and processing capability.

School based learning can become informed about students’ need to be fully engaged in their own learning at a time they choose to access it, away from the constraints of space and time. Rather than searching for and passively consuming information users are not creating, evaluating and distributing information.

REFERENCES:
Duguid, Paul (2006). Limits of Self-Organization: Peer Production and "Laws of Quality”. First Monday 11(10). http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1405/1323

Haythornthwaite, Caroline (2009). Crowds and Communities: Light and Heavyweight Models of Peer Production. Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, HI, 5-8 January 2009.

Geisler, Gary and Sam Burns (2008). Tagging Video: Conventions and Strategies of the YouTube Community. TCDL Bulletin 4(1). http://www.ieee-tcdl.org/Bulletin/v4n1/geisler/geisler.html

Lerman, Kristina (2007). Social Networks and Social Information Filtering on Digg. Proceedings of Int. Conf. on Weblogs and Social Media, Boulder, CO. http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0612046v1

Leibenluft, Jacob (2007). A Librarian's Worst Nightmare: Yahoo! Answers, where 120 million users can be wrong. Slate, 7 December 2007. http://www.slate.com/id/2179393/fr/rss/

Gazan, Rich (2008). Social Annotations in Digital Library Collections. D-Lib 14(11/12). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november08/gazan/11gazan.html

Dempsey, Lorcan (2009). Always On: Libraries in a World of Permanent Connectivity. First Monday 14(1). http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2291/2070