Most any journalism professor, upon mention of Wikipedia, will immediately launch into a rant about how the massively collaborative online encyclopedia can't be trusted. It can, you see, be edited and altered by absolutely anyone at any moment.
But how much less trustworthy is the site for breaking news than the plethora of blogs and other online news sources?
"Ajax" stands for "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML." It is interesting to know that the term was coined just five years ago, on Feb 18, 2005 by user interface expert Jesse James Garrett. The elements of Ajax were already in use, but Garrett's 2005 blog entry gave a name to a powerful computing movement. In recognition of Ajax' birthday, SearchSOA.com reached out to Ajax thought leaders who, via email, formed a virtual roundtable discussion on where Ajax has come and how it is expected to evolve.
Social bookmarking has been around for several years, and it is finally beginning to gain in popularity because it is a powerful way to organize and share information. Harvey Raybould from OfficialWire.com gives an overview of the use of social bookmarking systems in business promotion.
Taking a page out of Facebook’s open strategy, Twitter has launched a new page which highlights the open source projects that the company has released or contributed to.
Without much surprise there has been significant movement within some of the social networks over the course of the last year. Brian Chappell from Ignite Social Media has put together a comprehensive report based on data from all major social networks existing on the web.
Providing fair assessment with timely feedback for students is a difficult task with science laboratory classes containing large numbers of students. Such classes are usually assessed by short-answer questions (SAQs) centred on principles encountered in the laboratory. It has been shown recently that computer-assisted assessment (CAA) has several advantages and is well received by students. However, student evaluation has shown that this system does not provide suitable feedback. Thus, the authors introduced peer assessment (PA) as a complementary procedure. In October 2006, 457 students registered for a first-year practical unit in the Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester. This unit consists of ten compulsory biology practical classes. The first four practicals were assessed using PA; the remaining six practicals were assessed by CAA and marked by staff or postgraduate student demonstrators. The reliability and validity of PA were determined by comparing duplicate scripts and by staff moderation of selected scripts. Student opinions were sought via questionnaires.
The authors show that both assessments are valid, reliable, easy to administer and are accepted by students. PA increases direct feedback to students, although the initial concerns of student groups such as mature and EU/International students need to be addressed using pre-PA training.
In this post from the blog "The Innovation Diaries", the author tries to categorize people's tweets into a hierarchy resembling Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs for human beings. Each category is well explained and then illustrated by a few examples.
Denise Pires, a student from University of Amsterdam, wrote in the blog "Masters of Media" about why we, as human beings, tend to use the well-known microblogging service.