MiT5: Creativity, Ownership, and Collaboration in the Digital Age
Today, my buddy Adam and I presented at a roundtable at MiT5 about Adam’s project, Edtags.org. Here’s the abstract from the presentation:
Identifying Online Experts, Paul Ham, Adam Seldow
Our research involves building a community of experts at the Harvard Graduate School of Education around a socio-semantic networking web site, Edtags.org. Through our work with the web-site, we have come across a recent set of questions regarding the make-up of the community and culture. How do we ensure that populations of participants are “experts” in a field? Is it a matter of “numbers” or must there be a screening process to verify the users for participation? Should we screen the content for our specific field, and if so how? What is the critical mass of endorsed sites on a socio-semantic network that changes it from a place where educators save bookmarks to a place where educators save bookmarks and discover new ones? Lastly, how can search engines best distinguish “credible” sites from “socio-spites” (socio-semantic networking spam sites)?
We presented alongside sam smiley, a professor at Lesley College, and ended up having a great discussion about ownership, copyright, content management, as well as identifying experts in an online community site. We also got to show off the latest version of Edtags.org, which just keeps on getting better and better.
Our biggest questions were regarding how to identify experts: are they self-identified (I’m a professor or through self-tagging), community-identified (through votes or friends), or moderated (by Adam)? Though we didn’t end up with concrete answers, we did receive a lot of feedback on how to think about expertise on-line and safe ways of developing community.
One thing that I’m definitely going to keep track of is avoiding “forcing” people to have friends. You can suggest friends and explain why: these are users who are similar to you based upon their tags or their bookmarks; these are bookmarks recommended to you based upon your bookmarks; etc. But don’t force people into communities.
Also, it sounds like right now that self-selection and organic-selection of experts seems to work and won’t inhibit our user growth.
Adam also announced our new project, through Seth, to open source and distribute the Edtags code hopefully by the end of the summer.