Links to related nodes:
Executive summary:
Free culture is the cultural milieux available for anyone in society to both consume and build upon. In specific, free knowledge culture is the component of free culture which is factual and objective (or at least, strives to be). Free knowledge culture is am important foundation for education in society; when people say that a "free press is the foundation of a healthy democracy", they are referring to precisely this element of the social information environment.
Digital libraries are emerging as engines of an important new type of free knowledge culture. As the internet becomes cheaper, more accessible, and therefore used increasingly by all segments of society, more of society is able to learn via educational digital libraries. There are numerous examples of such digital libraries, from the 100+ members of the National Science Digital Libraries to the Library of Congress American Memory site to Wikipedia. Clearly, there has been widespread grassroots as well as official notice of the importance of digital libraries in education.
Educational digital libraries tend to be fragmented into two broad families: relatively amorphous, collaboratively-built knowledge resources (like Wikipedia), and rigid, top-down constructed "information silos" (like the Library of Congress). The former type is newest on the stage — the stunning growth, uptake, and recognition of Wikipedia within the past year has been breathtaking. The same commons-based peer production (CBPP) benefits that allow the open source world to exist and thrive turn out to apply to knowledge resources as well, and Wikipedia is perhaps the best known example of this. In essence, the world has discovered that CBPP is an excellent foundation for collaborative digital libraries.
Just as important as the economic advantages of CBPP for producing educational content are the ramifications for free knowledge culture. "Free culture" does not just mean "zero cost"; it also means freely modifiable, extensible, improvable, and re-distributable. As Lawrence Lessig has pointed out in Free Culture (and numerous other places), this dynamic is the source of a tremendous amount of social benefit. Key is the new ability of the lay learner to take part in shaping the shared knowledge of society, or at least, view themselves as agents with the ability and right to do so. This has the potential to make free knowledge culture a more significant and meaningful component of free culture in general (and again, Wikipedia is demonstrating this already).
However, while free knowledge cultural content is being rapidly created by collaborative knowledge systems like Wikipedia, much potential in this area is not being met. These resources have the same problems as the web in general; they are disorganized, their quality is uneven, the identities and credibility of those involved is often hard to discover, and they have weak notions of "placeness" which are necessary to sustain communities. The underlying problem is that these collaborative systems need to be more completely married with digital library concepts to produce true collaborative educational digital libraries. It is this we intended to do with this project.
Noosphere has the special status of having been designed to be a collaborative digital library. From the outset, it was built to support an an academic style of community interaction, rather than a free-for-all, and advanced organization, rather than only being an "organic" web of facts. The notion of ownership of knowledge artifacts in Noosphere encourages individual stewardship of content, responsibility, correctness, and a pedagogical spirit. We think this makes it an excellent platform for building communities of education centered around knowledge resources, and perhaps the closest candidate to being a true collaborative educational digital library. We think Noosphere is well-positioned to play an even greater educational role in the near future, through technical improvements and extensions meant to extend its pedagogical effect, much of which come from making it more fully an educational digital library system.
With this project, we aim to achieve these goals through the addition of direct pedagogy features, quality control features, and content-sharing features. In addition, we would like to undertake studies of the user community to find out precisely which sub-communities are best-served and under-served, and which features are needed to better serve them.
We explain these four categories of work in more detail below.
It easy to simply make assumptions about the needs of user communities and produce systems to meet these assumed needs. It is much more difficult to actually "go out" and find out what user communities need, and determine what kind of shape a community support system needs to take. This is a process that involves asking the right questions, and then determining how to proceed based on the inevitable trade-offs created by conflicting needs, interests, and values. The difference in the impact of the final system can be dramatic.
Much of PlanetMath's success thus far can be ascribed to its origins as a grassroots effort. That is, members of the user community took a part in most formative discussions about how to build PlanetMath (and Noosphere), as well as took a strong role in testing it through real-world use. However, this participatory design and development was naturally limited to a "colloquial" style, and could not extend much further than the circle of users the lead developers directly knew. Today, PlanetMath has over 10,000 registered users, and countless tens of thousands of anonymous readers. To get a good reading of the needs of this vast user community, and even more importantly, who it is, real resources are needed and an explicit, formal study must be conducted.
While we intend all of the work on this grant to ultimately improve the pedagogy of PlanetMath, part of this process consists of direct pedagogy features. Roughly speaking, these are features which make PlanetMath's content more educational and better resemble learning objects. In other words, they are constructed with facilitation of learning in mind. In addition, pedagogy can be fostered by making PlanetMath/Noosphere as a whole better support curricula, programs of learning, and methodical, long-term, topic-driven learning in general. These things need not be formal, but they do require more organization be provided than a simple "bag of encyclopedia entries" architecture.
Quality control features are improvements which raise the quality of the collection content in general. This indirectly fosters pedagogy, because higher-quality intellectual resources are more comprehensible and more useful. It also plays a role in building community, as people will come back to high-quality resources. Content of high quality builds name recognition and makes a digital library a "first stop" and even "one-stop" location for meeting information, and educational, needs.
The ability to share content created on a Noosphere system makes that content more widely available, extending the educational impact farther than if users had to visit the originating site to view it. In addition, backlinks to the originating site draws interested parties into that community.
In essence, content should be "syndicated" as far as is appropriate and economical. Due to the digital and networked nature of the internet, this is generally a very cheap continuing operation. Technologies like Open Archives and RSS have demonstrated this.
The prospect of multiple Noosphere-based "Planets" that have at least some content overlap also raises some questions. Can these planets more meaningfully share content than generic systems can (as with RSS and OAI)? What can be done to address the changing nature of the collection at either end of every content-sharing dyad? In general, the question of addressing content sharing and syndication between productive digital libraries has been completely unaddressed. However, it is a challenge we cannot ignore.
PlanetMath is a virtual community which has as its core activity the collaborative production of a mathematics knowledge base (generically called the "encyclopedia"). In a little over three and a half years, over four thousand entries have been developed in this knowledge base, by hundreds of volunteers. The project is currently a completely un-funded grassroots effort (though some facilities support has been donated).
Free culture (or perhaps more appropriately, "un-free culture") issues go back to the very genesis of PlanetMath. The idea for having an online mathematics reference resource was not the original concept of the founders of PlanetMath (Aaron Krowne and Nathan Egge); the idea came from a then (ca. 1999) extant resource called "MathWorld?", a web-based reference site create by UVA professor Eric Weisstein. MathWorld? later moved later moved to Wolfram Research, Inc. (and Weisstein along with it).
Weisstein had struck a deal with CRC press to have MathWorld? published in book form, as the "CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics". It sold well. But amazingly, in 2000, CRC sued Weisstein because it had decided that the web version of the information was a threat to sales of the book. All Eric had was a "verbal agreement" that the web version would be allowed to stand. So the web site went down, and learners lost a valuable, free educational resource.
This is when we decided to create a replacement for it. To rapidly and inexpensively build up content, we needed to make the replacement site collaborative. We also wanted to ensure no one could co-opt the work as CRC did to MathWorld?, so we required that all contributed content be licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. We named the site "PlanetMath", as an homage to MathWorld? and Weisstein.
PlanetMath is essentially the free culture version of MathWorld?. While MathWorld? has long since returned to the web, PlanetMath's different nature has resulted in a vibrant community of learning growing up around the web site. Not only only have people benefited from PlanetMath as passive consumers of the knowledge to be found there, but hundreds if not thousands have grown by helping to actually shape the knowledge base of PlanetMath. This is the value that free culture resources uniquely add.
Soon after the creation of PlanetMath, the software supporting the system was given its own identity as "Noosphere", made into a separate project, and released as free software. Not only did this create the possibility of the underlying software system of PlanetMath improving through the same CBPP dynamics that were generating the mathematical content, but it opened the door to the re-deployment of Noosphere over and over again for other mathematical sciences subject domains, allowing others to create their own collaborative knowledge communities.
PlanetMath has been a part of the NSF NSDL programme since 2002 as a contributing member collection. To this day the NSDL carries PlanetMath content, and regularly refreshes its PlanetMath "holdings" (http://www.nsdl.org/).
Also since 2002, PlanetMath has been sharing its Computer Science-related entries with CITIDEL, the Computing and Information Technology Interactive Digital Educational Library (http://www.citidel.org/). This effort, supported by the CITIDEL NSDL grant, was done by utilizing the Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and extending extant Open Archives software to support selection of collection portions by subject classification.
Emory University (including Halbert and Krowne) has been working on an NSF and Digital Library Federation (DFL)-funded project called OCKHAM for the past year (http://www.ockham.org/). The project, led by Oregon State University, has as its mission to create a peer-to-peer network of digital library services using generic web services interfaces and re-using application-specific protocols layered on top of these (for example, OAI-PMH). In essence, the goal is to do for all present and future digital library services what OAI-PMH has done for harvesting, with a capstone service integration layer to facilitate coordination and actual end use. The activities of this project are closely related to portions of the present proposal, in particular, those that have to do with wider dissemination of records and coordination of productive activities between separate sites and communities.
(anything else?)
Emory is currently in the final quarter of a two-year, Mellon Foundation-funded project called MetaCombine? (http://www.metacombine.org/). The broad goal of this project is to develop methods and systems to more meaningfully integrate digital library resources and services. Similar to OCKHAM, a third of this project is to develop semantic clustering services for a federated digital library services framework. In accordance with this, MetaCombine? semantic clustering services (such as classification and text record clustering) are being created for the OCKHAM framework.
Emory, in partnership with Virginia Tech is also beginning an IMLS-funded effort called "Study of User Quality Metrics for Metasearch Retrieval Ranking". This effort is investigating how users need, and intuitively expect, digital library retrieval results to be organized. An emphasis will be on how various latent and explicit attributes of metadata bear on notions of quality, which in turn effect the presentation of information. Also as part of the project, we will be developing a theoretical model for retrieval results presentation (including ranking), and developing a prototype retrieval system that implements the model. This study will be very valuable in determining what attributes of digital library resources communicate notions of quality to end users, as well as determining how to organize the resources based on these notions.
In this section we discuss specific work items for this grant, which address the four categories of improvements mentioned previously. We give some ideas for starting points of technical directions, which will have to be further investigated once the project activities begin.
It would be nice to have some way to integrate feedback (for example, through ratings) to help assist in controlling the quality of entries. Aggregated, derived, or inferred metadata about quality can be used not only for filtering, but to put pressure on content creators and other contributors to improve where quality is lacking and direct their attention where it is most needed.
Candidates for solutions here:
(cite some things on CF)
Binding of creative activities to reputations creates an incentive to meet higher quality standards and act with a greater sense of social responsibility. While PlanetMath currently has scores and user identities (full anonymity is not allowed), the reputation architecture could be improved.
A few things could be done for this:
(cite some things on reputation systems, incl. kelly/sung/farnham paper)
I.e. editorial discussion areas, the ability for owners to move messages to more appropriate areas, change them from one type to another (i.e. message to correction, message to request). More fully distribute the requests management system.
(point out how other collaborative systems, such as mediawiki or scoop do some of this)
the crux is that Noosphere can spread much further than just one site and one subject domain (mathematics) if it is made easy for others to deploy.
talk about packaging it for easy installation, making it easy to configure and customize, cleaning up the code and organization to foster this.
We should test the improved deployability on PlanetPhysics and PlanetComputing as part of the grant.
support of standard learning object metadata fields, such as educational level, difficulty, time to learn, and intended audience (teacher, student, practitioner) would help a lot. if these fields were connected up to the browsing system and searching system with filtering, a lot of time could be saved for learners. profiles could be saved for each user which automate the filtering.
in addition, while the MSC-based subject organization is comprehensive and great for researchers, it is too advanced and daunting for students and not quite what is needed for teachers. other subject based organizations should be produced and mapped in, if possible (cite akrowne work on multischeming).
content-based filtering should be attached to notification, to create "filtering and routing" services that forward new content and activity in particular subject areas to interested parties.
describe current system: OAI, one-way
maybe talk about WP/PM exchange effort, which is being manually coordinated, and is one-way
talk about problem of synchronizing overlapping portions of "planet" sites
talk about potential bi-di framework
Much could be done to strengthen the community supported by Noosphere. Some examples are:
Below are examples of some questions we expect to try to answer with the user study efforts, phrased as direct questions to users:
This is by no means a comprehensive list.
The user study may have many components, for example, a survey-style study, an in-person (or other synchronous, such as telephone-based) one-on-one interview study, and perhaps a focus-group style study.
Certainly, a survey should be a component of any user study programme, as it has the potential to reach the greatest fraction of the user community. However, serious planning will have to be done to determine how to execute the study. The PlanetMath web site is of course a natural point of entry to interact with the user community, so it is likely that doing an online, web-based, asynchronous version of the survey will make the most sense. However, it will have to be determined how to get users to do the work of going through the study, without essentially having to pay them all for their time. Some incentive will need to be given. There is also the issue of notifying the user of the survey and describing it to them without being too overbearing and damaging use of the web site.
Here we should list institutions and the individuals at them who will be involved in managing the project (leaving out ad hoc hires for actual implementation).
We'll need money for
Need estimates for the cost of each of these!
Research papers and articles describing methods we may draw on in the course of this grant:
(huge list under development… but please post candidates here)
Papers which support the proposal, especially those that refer directly to the project:
Letters of support from qualified/prominent/influential/famous people who advocate the proposed activities but aren't participants:
Mainly, see this page.
See also Comments on free culture version of NSF ALT proposal.
Question: Is this page still current in any way? What is the structure of the final document? If this page is still current, then I think it will be essential to make changes in the Discussion of Need section as I already mentioned. (This effort seems to be a case where the way of the asteroid or something like it could be used to advantage - I don't know who is doing what anymore, and this makes it harder for me to usefully contribute.) --jcorneli Mon May 23 01:58:45 2005 UTC
Its mostly me and DTatar, with eaf weighing in as he has a chance to (he's mostly working on getting letters of support). This page of course still captures the spirit of the grant, and many portions of it have gone into the next stage of drafting. However, the most current draft is still in a Word doc and not yet on the Wiki. We'll let you know when and if we can handle (minor) commentary, as there probably won't be time for major revisions. --akrowne Mon May 23 03:33:17 UTC 2005
I don't think I'm the best person to ask for minor comments, I'm more of a gouache person myself. I can try. I guess I'll leave deconstructing and reconstructing to anyone who wished to do it at a later date for for fun or edification. --jcorneli Mon May 23 04:33:15 2005 UTC