This assignment was at once easy and difficult. At this time, we create almost as much content as we consume. The resulting webscape is one where the act of creating information might be less important than that of organizing it.
How does one organize information in a way that facilitates learning and teaching?
First of all, the information has to be in a place where it can be readily found.
- First web society: Wikipedia
Because it is the second place almost all high school students go to (after Google, which wouldn't let me mess with its algorithm), I picked
Wikipedia as a social web I would join as part of this course.
As an example page, I altered the
page for the starfish Mediaster aequalis. In order to do this, I uploaded a
photograph of the species onto Wikimedia Commons, and added a few lines of information on the species. In order to help make the web more accountable, and to help turn Wikipedia into a tool for the high school student, I linked the photograph to its place on Google Maps via the
Geohack tool, and inserted two references. While the page is still a long ways away from incredibly well-researched, detailed, and funded pages on the same species such as that of
E-Fauna BC, those pages are almost invisible on Google's search engine. I only know of them through my oceanography professor.
- Second web society: Tlingit language and Culture Discussion Group
Another social media I joined is at the opposite end of the scale and specialization spectrum. It is an e-mail list organized by Roby Koolyeikh Littlefield, and I have been subscribing to it since September of 2009. Here is a message I contributed just today, hours before writing this post. It is called
The color gray:
This is in reference to a discussion of a particular color in Tlingit, that evoques the young seabird known as "lawúx."
As is plainly seen in the Sealaska poster, the color of a young seagull is not gray
However, young ground-nesting and cliff-nesting chicks of the Alcid family are usually dark gray. Most closely matched to the color is a storm-petrel's chick. Coincidentally, in 1982 there were about 500,000 storm-petrels nesting in burrows on St Lazaria, as opposed to about 100 seagulls and 20,000 alcids - reference here (JSTOR access needed).
- Picture of a storm-petrel chick:
http://www.pixdatabase.com/bigphoto/2058/
- Pictures of three species of young tunnel-nesting alcids that are common on Saint Lazaria Island:
http://www.cooperbiological.com/images/937395-sty.jpg
http://www.avianweb.com/images/birds/auks/CassinsAukletchick.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Rhino_auklet_chick.jpg
- Chick of the dominant cliff-nesting bird on Saint Lazaria (for those harvesters unafraid of heights):
http://alaska.usgs.gov/science/biology/seabirds_foragefish/seabirds/images/Comu_chick_tiny_edited.jpg
- Picture of a glaucous-winged gull chick:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3119/2741098522_1c8def6cac.jpg
From this social media participation, I started to re-think the way information should be placed on the internet. For example, I may be uploading source material in the context of the
Sitka Sound Science Center, or
sitkanature.org - but how can those pages be made to be less redundant and more easily accessed? "Offline" dialogue for day-to-day ponderings and a more hierarchical structure for durable information may be two important dimensions of the answer.
