Decentralized Expertise

This chapter discusses the authority structures found within the community support forums of open and closed source operating systems (Linux, Windows, and OS X), demonstrating how, because of these forums, technical expertise is shifting away from the organizations responsible for creating these systems and into the community using them. One might expect this kind of migration within Linux communities, where in theory anyone can contribute to the code of the project, but it is also being seen in closed source projects, where only certain people, usually employees, have access to the underlying code that controls the operating system. In these situations, expertise is becoming decentralized despite the fact that members of the support community sometimes lack access to the code behind these operating systems.

Professional ICT Knowledge, Epistemic Standards, and Social Epistemology

Several co-evolving trends have impacted expectations of professional workers’ quality of knowledge. The abundance of information shared through the Internet, the ever-increasing specialization of tasks, the possibility of immediately accessible information through social networks, the participation of stakeholders in the social web, and the increased requirements for separation of duty in a corporate context have contributed to a situation where the current ‘knowledge worker’ is not expected to have the same level of readily available knowledge as before. This chapter describes this phenomenon in detail with a case study from ICT-expert jobs. It shows that an ICT manager can no longer overlook the work of collaborators, just by virtue of being the smartest employee around. He/she will increasingly rely on organizational procedures and professional standards to assess whether the right people - with the right competencies for the job – are at his/her disposal. After describing the specifics of professional knowledge for ICT experts and the role of social software plays in this, the chapter focuses on the epistemological aspects of ICT expertise. The authors discuss current strands of reliabilistic accounts for knowledge in relation to expertise. They show that besides reliability, it is accuracy that is needed in order to perform as an expert.

Understanding and Evaluating Source Expertise in an Evolving Media Environment

Recent technological changes have created a radically different information environment from the one that existed even a few decades ago. Rather than coming from a small number of sources, each with a substantial investment in the information production and delivery processes, information is increasingly provided by a wide range of sources, many of which can readily provide and deliver information to large audiences worldwide. One consequence of this evolution in information production is an almost incomprehensibly vast information repository in the form of the Web and other online resources. A variety of social media have extended this information and source fecundity even further by connecting individuals to one another and by providing significant opportunities to share myriad types of information generated by users themselves. This shift in information dissemination challenges longstanding models of the provision of credible information by suggesting circumstances under which sources that are not understood as “experts” in the traditional sense are in fact in the best position to provide the most credible information.

Rethinking Expertise in the Web 2.0 Era

Social software facilitates the linking of people in unprecedented ways and leads to new knowledge creation and application practices. Even though expertise remains an important constituent of these practices, there is a knowledge gap in the literature regarding its role. This chapter was written with the aim of filling this gap by using Project Durian as a case study. Project Durian presented a unique opportunity to study expertise as mediated by social software because it involved both social software and various layers, forms, and configurations of expertise. In this chapter, data from Project Durian are used to examine the outsourcing of tasks and the role that social software played in that outsourcing. Data analysis indicated that, in the hybrid practice that was established, expertise was spatio-temporally distributed, involved individuals with a broad range of skills, facilitated the crossing of disciplinary boundaries, and was renegotiated. The implications of these findings for expertise in the Web 2.0 era are discussed.

Textperts

Text messaging has many similarities to poetry or short prose writing. Instructors typically discount text messaging as a distraction in the classroom, but this chapter includes a review of the positive aspects of implementing the genre of text messaging in the composition classroom as a means of teaching writing. Using a community of practice approach, this chapter looks at the technologically savvy generation of college students in today’s classrooms and attempts to capitalize, educationally, on the writing skills that students already possess. Next, it explores both the theoretical and practical implementations of this genre into the composition classroom with careful consideration of the positive and negative impacts of this, before examining the transition from student text messaging to the writing of other, longer genres. Although this chapter’s focus is on the teaching of writing, the information can be considered to be interdisciplinary.

Teaching Political Science Students to Find and Evaluate Information in the Social Media Flow

The advent of social media necessitates new pedagogical approaches in the field of political science, specifically in relation to undergraduate students’ critical thinking and information evaluation skills. Instead of seeking out traditional static pools of knowledge, researchers and researchers-in-training now interact with information in an amorphous stream of production and consumption. Socially created information is now firmly integrated in the basic subject matter of political science, as manifested in primary sources in the field, scholars’ communication practices, and the emergence of collective and distributed expertise. Existing models of information evaluation competencies do not address these realities of participatory authorship and decentralized distribution of information. Thus, in order to educate “information-literate” students in political science, educators must foster an understanding of how information is produced and how to critically evaluate individual information sources in the context of academic tasks.

Between Tradition and Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is characterized by values of openness of participation (unrestricted by traditional markers of expertise), collaboration across and beyond institutions, increased value of resources through distributed participation, dynamic content and context, and self-organization and scalability. These values seem to offer new possibilities for knowledge creation. They also contrast in important ways with traditional forms of knowledge creation, where expertise, institutional affiliation, and restrictions on access and circulation have been important. Yet, rather than seeing a dichotomy between Web 2.0 and non-Web 2.0 modes of working in digital humanities, the authors observe the rise of hybrid forms that combine elements of these two modes. In this chapter, the authors reflect on the reasons for such hybrids, specifically through an exploration of eLaborate. As a virtual research environment, eLaborate targets both professional scholars and volunteers working with textual resources. The environment offers tools to transcribe textual sources, to annotate these transcriptions, and to publish them as digital scholarly editions. The majority of content currently comprises texts from the cultural heritage of Dutch history and literary history, although eLaborate does not put limits on the kind of text or language. Nor does the system impose limits on the openness of contribution to any edition project. Levels of openness and access are solely determined by the groups of users working on specific texts or editions. This Web 2.0 technology-based software is now used by several groups of teachers and students, and by scholarly, educated, and interested volunteers. We conducted interviews with coordinators of and participants in different editorial groups, and we evaluate their experiences from the point of view of the described values of Web 2.0. We investigate changes in digital humanities resulting from intermediate forms between traditional academic practices and Web 2.0 modes. Rather than claim a revolution, we show how hybrid forms can actually be very powerful sites for change, through their inclusive rather than oppositional setup in relation to traditional practices.

The University in Transition

Discussion of changing notions of faculty expertise and the role of technology within the educational enterprise is nothing new. However, the current demand for change in teaching and learning practices is particularly strong, in part due to the pressures arising from emerging technologies and the shifting nature of faculty expertise. Web 2.0 technologies enable social connectivity, academic interactivity, and content co-creation. Thus, they change the ways of interacting with information and can support collaborative and constructivist approaches in higher education. This both inspires and requires a corresponding expansion in faculty’s role: from imparter of knowledge to orchestrator of learning experiences. Within the general metaphor of orchestration, other specific roles and functions will also be required; for example, scripting, translating, introducing, and co-exploring. As educators attempt to reimagine an educational paradigm in this context, the integration of new technologies must be grounded in how they can support educational experiences and outcomes that are focused on learning.

Should we Take Disintermediation in Higher Education Seriously?

Disintermediation based on digital technology has transformed different environments, including banking, commerce, media, education, and knowledge management. The spread of social software applications and digital media in general has given rise to new models of knowledge production and distribution in higher education. This chapter redefines higher education institutions and academic experts based on these changes. The chapter discusses the diffusion of disintermediation practices in higher education and proposes new categories, such as knowledge brokering, knowledge networking, and knowledge translation, to map a new environment that promotes disintermediation, innovation, and openness. Beyond the prophecies announcing the “death of the university,” the authors suggest new agents, actions, and transactions that are useful for envisaging the higher education institutions of the new century.

Collective Narrative Expertise and the Narbs of Social Media

A fundamental epistemological question that has been the focus of much deliberation over time is: how do we know what we know? One of the answers to this question has been found in the theories of narrative asserting that humans learn through stories, ranging from religious epics to personal anecdotes. The social media phenomenon offers a unique form of narration that utilizes “narbs,” narrative bits that tell the stories of specific individuals who may be, but often are not, traditional experts. Yet, as a collection, these narbs could become the authoritative narrative about a particular issue where expertise is located in the collective. This chapter examines the theoretical basis of knowledge creation through narrative, and how the narbs of social media users are creating dynamic bodies of information. The chapter offers a lexicon for categorizing narbs and provides an analytical frame for examining them. The overall aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that interaction and new modes of gathering and disseminating information and knowledge in the digital environment require different and emergent expertise in narrative construction and interpretation.