tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post939735954910931883..comments2023-10-09T00:15:08.640+11:00Comments on Stuff, geeky stuff: MOOCs are not the only disruptorsdgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-78105155467174310842012-11-20T10:46:54.117+11:002012-11-20T10:46:54.117+11:00The world's imperfect, and we still need a rep...The world's imperfect, and we still need a reputation based model - which is why I go for citation counts by analogy with software development - good and/or useful code is reused, code which is not re used is either obscure or poorly structured.<br /><br />But yes - reputation is a peer based thing - you need to be enough of an expert in order to assess worth properly - otherwise the peseudo academic von Danikens of the world would overwhelm us with plausible sounding rubbish dgmhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-30901394689345141262012-11-20T10:35:45.691+11:002012-11-20T10:35:45.691+11:00Over at In the Medieval Middle, where open access ...Over at <i>In the Medieval Middle</i>, where open access is warmly greeted, there has been occasional talk of a kind of digital commons model for publishing, whereby something one writes goes to the cloud/server and searches pull it out, and what ranking there is is based on popularity. I like some aspects of this--and with sites like academia.edu where works that probably shouldn't be are still shared anyway, without any distinction between unpublished, pre-published or published necessary, we start to see this I think--but there are problems. One is what happens to the guy with poor grasp of search terms; but maybe, to be fair, a badly-written piece is less actually useful. A secondary implication of the relation to searchability: things that no-one knows about yet will suffer a timelag before being picked up and understood, because relevant phrases are unlikely to occur. I mean, if someone learns how to synthesize a new material called Wellineverdidium, obviously no-one will search for that, though its unique and useful properties might still bring it hits I suppose. Tagging and such gets round this to an extent on academia.edu, so maybe could here too. Thirdly, though, is expertise: can what's popular necessarily provide a clue to what's valid, in fields where significant background knowledge would be needed to make a judgement? Academia already has this problem, of course, and it largely gets round it by reputation; that's something web fora have been doing for a long time too, so again the models already exist. (Academia.edu doesn't do this, except by number-of-followers metrics, and just as well, as I hate using it as an a successful paradigm example when it really robbed most of its functionality from Facebook.) I guess that perhaps it's all surmountable, but still, I can't get rid of the memory of this XKCD cartoon: <a href="http://xkcd.com/937/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/937/</a>. Sometimes it really does matter whether anyone has the right basis to evaluate something...Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com