The link for Module 13 can be found here. I hope everyone is well and your writing is progressing. We are in the home stretch! Please contact me if you need anything or have questions.
Housekeeping:
- The Research Paper is right around the corner! This assignment is to be your most polished, scholarly, and effective writing of the semester.
- Be sure to review Action Items for the Paper and Blogging.
Blog Reports:
- Blog Post #7: Report on your community’s use of emerging technologies. DUE THIS WEEK: 11/21(Submit your URL for grading)
- Blog Post #8: Personal reflection on information communities. (Participation) DUE: 12/06
Upcoming Assignments:
I actually had an interesting experience with some emerging tech while I was looking up some information I wanted to use for my blog post #5. I went on a quest to find out when the first medical library was established, which seemed a little intense for a King database search, so I used Google. Google, of course, has that nifty top area for facts, which is often solid but sometimes not. This time around, it was not. It was quite certain that the National Library of Medicine was the correct library to consider the first medical library, and informed me in large bold numbers of when it was founded. I (correctly) suspected that the NLM was not the first medical library ever and kept digging, to find an article about the first library of medicine established in the U.S., which was established (at what is now the University of Pennsylvania) a little under a century earlier. After redoing the search upon reading that article, I found that Google had a less certain answer from the article I read stating in smaller bold numbers about when the University of Pennsylvania medical library was established. I did more digging and found the (peer-reviewed) article with what I really wanted, which, depending on how you define a medical library, suggests that medical libraries have either been with us since the beginning of recorded history, or were first established in ancient Greece, or were absolutely, at the latest, established in the thirteenth century. I decided to try redoing the Google search one more time for the sake of this post, and it’s still claiming 1765, but this time in the very certain bold numbers again, and using a more authoritative, probably peer-reviewed article from the NLM about medical libraries in the U.S.
It was kind of interesting watching that play out, since it clearly read the one article with me and revised its answer accordingly. However, I also read the second one via Chrome, and it didn’t update itself with the new information, so I’m not sure exactly how it works still, or how to help it know that medical libraries were established way earlier than that. I feel like this little Google AI could use a librarian to help it; it’s often pretty good at finding facts, and I find it a helpful tool (when it gets it right). I imagine that bold area is where its official answers to questions asked of its personal assistant (Alexa is Google’s, I think?) come from, and the ease of using Alexa could be good for society as long as Alexa gets it right.
@oxymoon This is so interesting! I have no idea how the browsers and google work together to subtly change results etc. I am glad you shared this.