March 2012
71 posts
February 2012
204 posts
Google-Trained Minds Can't Deal with Terrible Research Database UI →
theatlantic.com
College and university librarians are concerned about students’ search skills, and no wonder:
At Illinois Wesleyan University, “The majority of students — of all levels — exhibited significant difficulties that ranged across nearly every aspect of the search process,” according to researchers there. They tended to overuse Google and misuse scholarly databases. They preferred simple database searches to other methods of discovery, but generally exhibited “a lack of understanding of search logic” that often foiled their attempts to find good sources.
The librarians quoted here understand most of the key problems, and are especially sharp about “the myth of the digital native” — about which see also this deeply sobering Metafilter thread — but there’s one vital issue they’re neglecting: research databases have the worst user interfaces in the whole world.
» via The Atlantic
“Every time society advances, it faces challenges from those people economically and emotionally invested in the past. Undoubtedly stone age flint knappers were less than happy about bronze-age technology disturbing their business model. The medieval church was none too pleased about printing technology breaking their hegemony over knowledge, but we’d never have had the Enlightenment without it. Today the media-conglomerates, governments and educational institutions that profit from gatekeeping knowledge of all kinds are pushing the Stop Online Piracy Act, and even more draconian legislation to try and hold back the flood of free knowledge that threatens their power. Unless we want to stay in the knowledge equivalent of the stone age, and miss the next enlightenment the knowledge revolution promises to bring with it, we should all redouble our efforts to make sure they lose. For centuries the book has been the highest symbol of knowledge. The object that has enshrined and preserved knowledge through history. The book is so inextricably linked with our concept of knowledge that for many people it is hard to separate one from the other. But for human knowledge to reach its full potential, we may have to let go of the book-as-object first, or open our thinking to a radically different definition of what a book is.”
—Are books and the internet about to merge? | Books | guardian.co.uk (via wildcat2030)
MindMixer & The Future of Urban Democracy
I don’t generally discuss my personal or professional life here at Secret Republic, but I happen to work with a startup that I sincerely believe could radically change the way we interact with our cities. You should know about it.
In April of 2011 I attended the American Planning Association’s annual conference in Boston. Tucked into the far end of a trade show floor was a booth labelled “MindMixer”. I’d heard the name before, but couldn’t recall where.
Turned out they were based in Omaha, Nebraska (the hometown of my better half), and had launched a very successful project there called “Pass the Potatoes” some months earlier. The project was a website that acted as a virtual town hall, where issues are raised by the city and citizens are given the opportunity to propose their ideas in a neutral and constructive format. It was such a simple concept addressing such a major breakdown in communication between government and citizenry that my first reaction was, “Wait, this doesn’t exist already?”
It didn’t. Now it does, and it’s been expanded and refined into a powerful civic engagement tool. Here’s a cheerfully whimsical video to explain a rather immense idea:
