Kate Wittenberg: Shifting from Publisher Authority to Participation
Filed at 9:02 am on November 24, 2006 in Credibility • Leave a comment
The vast amount of information now available can be either a benefit or an obstacle to effective learning. Already, online social networks use a different system for credibility than the academic world.
While students clearly demonstrate a desire to explore freely the vast array of content and tools available through the Web, it is becoming equally clear that in many cases they do need some level of guidance concerning how to select and evaluate the information that they find.
In their web-based social environments, young people use sophisticated mechanisms for determining the credibility of an individual who wishes to gain access to a community. The community decides whether to allow a new participant the status that permits certain levels of access and its associated privileges (the ability to read and exchange profiles and messages, participate in conversations, etc.). Many students in high school and college are comfortable with this method of evaluating credibility, but the question of whether this model will translate to the assessment of educational content has yet to be answered.
This system for establishing credibility in a social networked environment exists in sharp contrast to the top-down peer review system used for years by the academic world. This traditional system leaves the end user out of the quality assessment process, as it is handled before content appears in a final form. Here, the authority to establish credibility rests with the publisher of the content rather than with the community of users, and increasingly may be in opposition to the community-based model.
As students continue to use and develop networked environments, it may become the case that the status of being admitted into a community by its members exceeds the credibility gained through “outside” peer review. As this process evolves, we may see a broader transformation in which learning becomes a process of participation in a community rather than of receiving knowledge from an “expert”. If this is the case, then we will have to confront the issue of how to allow participation, interaction, and credibility assessment built on peer-to-peer networks of trust to take on increasing value without lowering standards or disseminating erroneous information.
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