David Weinberger’s Everthing is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder was suggested here by an ALSC Blog reader. Thanks, afewsocks!

These Professional Reading posts aren’t book reviews, but rather my response to something that I read from the book. The following is an excerpt from pages 142-143:

The trust we place in the Britannica enables us to be passive knowers: You merely have to look a topic up to find out about it. But Wikipedia provides the metadata surrounding an article–edits, discussions, warnings, links to other edits by the contributors–because it expects the reader to be actively involved, alert to the signs. This burden comes straight from the nature of the miscellaneous itself. Give us a Britannica article, written by experts who filter and weigh the evidence for us, and we can absorb it passively. But set us loose in a pile of leaves so large that we can’t see its boundaries and we’ll need more and more metadata to play in to find our way. Deciding what to believe is now our burden. It always was, but in the paper-order world where publishing was so expensive that we needed people to be filterers, it was easier to think our passivity was an inevitable part of learning; we thought knowledge just worked that way.

First of all, this excerpt has made me rethink my contributions to the ALSC Wiki. Most of my contributions to the Wiki are fairly passive, pointing out links and stating a few things that are happening within my committee’s work. Weinberger mentions arXiv which allows for articles to be shared before being peer-reviewed. I’m still rethinking, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

Secondly, this excerpt makes me think of ALSC Blogger Roxanne Hsu Feldman’s post about her 4th graders and their wiki. What a powerful example of students actively learning.

Thirdly, I was reminded of ALSC Guest Blogger, Bradley Debrick’s post about tagging. Children developing meaningful tags for themselves would allow them to play within that metadata “pile of leaves.”

Finally, the book inspired me to revisit the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab web site where I learned of their work with Tangible Flags which “are designed to support and encourage children to concurrently explore, collaborate and construct digital artifacts while they are immersed within mobile, hands-on environments, such as field trips.”

If you would like to share any thoughts or comments about the book or about what I have written, please do. The book I will respond to for the May post will be A Place at the Table: Participating in Community Building by Kathleen de la Peña McCook. Please join in!

Posted by Teresa Walls

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 11:01 pm and is filed under Blogger Teresa Walls, Digital World, Information Literacy, Professional Development. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.