Excerpts from an interview with Micheal Wesch

Thanks to Robert Scoble for pointing us to an interview John Battelle did with Micheal Wesch.
I want to take note of some parts of that interview; italics are mine.

So if there is a global village, it is not a very equitable one, and if there is a tragedy of our times, it may be that we are all interconnected but we fail to see it and take care of our relationships with others. For me, the ultimate promise of digital technology is that it might enable us to truly see one another once again and all the ways we are interconnected. It might help us create a truly global view that can spark the kind of empathy we need to create a better world for all of humankind. I’m not being overly utopian and naively saying that the Web will make this happen. In fact, if we don’t understand our digital technology and its effects, it can actually make humans and human needs even more invisible than ever before. But the technology also creates a remarkable opportunity for us to make a profound difference in the world.

I did not know it would reach so many people, but I had hoped that for those it did reach it would spark some reflection on the power of the technology they were using. Because without proper understanding and reflection, “the machine” is using us – all of us – even those that don’t have access to the machine at all.

I like to learn these technologies on my own through trial and error, because sometimes the errors turn out to be new uses for the tool that I might not have discovered through formal training.

Students are already frequently visiting Facebook, so we can bring our class discussions to them in a place where they have already invested significant effort in building up their identity, rather than asking them to login to Blackboard or some other course management system where they feel “faceless” and out of place.

photo by Feltbug

Google Scholar released as beta

Official Google Blog: Scholarly pursuits:

Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article’s author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature.

photo by grytr

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Scientific Literature Search: Related Articles on Google Scholar

Official Google Blog: Exploring the scholarly neighborhood:

Searching for scientific articles on Google Scholar works especially well when I can find the search terms that are specific enough to narrow down to the subject I’m interested in and yet general enough to not miss relevant articles. When authors use different terminology to refer to the same thing — which often happens when a field is very young — this can be less effective.

Now there’s an additional way to find related work in Google Scholar, which should be helpful in such situations. For every Google Scholar search result, we try to automatically determine which articles in our repository are most closely related to it. You can see a list of these articles by clicking the “Related Articles” link that appears next to each result. The list of related articles is ranked primarily by how similar these articles are to the original result, but also takes into account the relevance of each paper.

Finding sets of related papers and books is often a great way for novices to get acquainted with a topic. However, we’ve found that even experts can sometimes be surprised to discover related work in their area of expertise.

No additional information about the similarity measure is given.

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