Knowledge Management

 I enjoyed learning about knowledge management this week. Within my institution and daily work, I have to do a lot of fact checking to ensure information entered on paperwork is correct and current. It is tricky at times to fully understand what is required of each person in the process, and trainings often come few and far between. Often, I learn the most by doing, and with trial and error learn what works and what doesn’t. Mainly, a large part of my job is completing the appropriate paperwork for two different organizations – the Tampa VA here in Florida, and the Open University in the United Kingdom. Both have their own unique sets of various paperwork that takes time to fully understand. Lately, I have been developing SOPs for the OU examination process for our PhD students. It is a helpful reminder to me to remember each step in the process, as there can be long stretches of time between the steps. So far it has been a big help, as I have been using it as a checklist, and I plan to continue developing additional SOPs so that they can be more easily be referred to for the OU for future students.

EME 6414 Review of Week 5

Wow! I agree with a few of the other classmates that this has been a hectic week! I didn’t have as much going on as some others, but I did have a very hectic work schedule that left me exhausted when I came home (as I’ve been working in an office since the pandemic began, I never left!) but determined as I worked to complete the first course assignment, review the readings and other students blog posts.

Looking forward to interacting more with everyone through the various course tools!

Exploring Tools - Goodreads

 This week, I got into reviewing the EME 6414 Goodreads group, and looking into interacting more with the various tools I’ve joined but not yet taken the plunge – twitter, reddit, and now the Goodreads group. I’m more of a lurker at heart, but I’m slowly trying to come out of my shell and interact more throughout the week with the variety of tools for the course. I’m a bookworm at heart too (based on the image at the bottom of my blog), and looking forward to using that tool more!

Looking into IP

 I was really interested this week in IP (as part of my job I frequently see efforts to actively protect IP through scientific publications that are being worked on and get closer to publishing and reviews), and I found Lauren C’s post about the article she posted about Disney preventing Mickey Mouse from becoming public domain after Walt Disney’s death very fascinating. It’s something I want to look into further based on what I am familiar with already, and what there still is to learn for the future!

Review of EME 6414 Week 4

This week has been an interesting one. There was a lot to learn and take in. One of the things I was most intrigued by was Crowdsourcing. I looked into the badges, but have been extra busy this week with a lot of personal things going on, so I reviewed some things but did not push any more this week, instead spending my energy on reviewing sources and articles for the concept paper. I wanted to dig into more of the “meat” of the readings, and wanted to research more about both Crowdsourcing and folksonomies. I feel each week I’m progressing further and learning more with each reading, whether its an article or a classmate’s blog or discussion post. I’m becoming more familiar with the various tools set out for us, and I’m hoping next week will continue the trend! Hoping everyone else’s week goes well too! Best of luck to everyone with our assignment!

Crowdsourcing Research

 From the work of Zhao and Zhu, one of the readings this week touched on crowdsourcing research, where it was currently and future directions. Crowdsourcing in one of the emerging Web 2.0 based phenomena, which can facilitate the connectivity and collaboration of people, organizations, and societies. I liked the emphasis they included for Crowdsourcing seeking to mobilize competence and expertise, which are distributed among the crowd and have various forms. The process of crowdsourcing works in the following way: 1) An organization identifies tasks and releases them online to a crowd of outsiders who are interested in performing these tasks on the organization’s behalf, for a stipulated fee or any other incentives. 2) A large number of individuals then offer to undertake the tasks individually or in a collaborative way. I also liked the mention that some crowdsourcing projects provide a clear format for compensating valuable contributors; while in other cases, such as Wikipedia or Dell’s Ideastorm, contributors are not compensated.

Reference

1)    Zhao, Y., & Zhu, Q. (2014). Evaluation on crowdsourcing research: Current status and future direction. Information Systems Frontiers, 16(3), 417-434.

Behavioral Research on Amazon Mechanical Turk

One of the readings this week that caught my attention, using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website to conduct behavioral research. To those that are not aware of what Amazon Mechanical Turk is, it was designed by Amazon originally for human computation tasks. The idea was to build a platform for humans to do tasks that are very difficult or impossible for computers, such as extracting data from images, audio transcription, and filtering adult content. Additionally (shameless nerd moment here!), I loved the mention of the origins of the name. Mason and Suri discuss that the name “Mechanical Turk” came from a mechanical chess-playing automaton from the turn of the 18^th century, designed to look like a Turkish “sorcerer,” which was able to move pieces and beat many opponents.

            A valuable question then is, why Mechanical Turk? There are several benefits for using Mechanical Turk as a platform for running online experiments: 1) subject pool access; 2) subject pool diversity; and 3) low cost for running the platform itself. For the Turker community, much of it focuses on the reputation of requesters. Additionally, there are online forums such as Turker Nation and others that can allow people to monitor worker’s reactions to a study, which can provide insight into the individual’s methods or the overall focus of the research itself. The Mechanical Turk user interface allows workers to send the requester of a HIT a message (i.e. workers could contact requesters if part of their HIT is unclear or confusing). I found the article fascinating and am looking to learn more.

Reference

1)    Mason, W., & Suri, S. (2012). Conducting behavioral research on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Behavior Research Methods, 44 (1), 1-23. doi: 10.3758/s13428-011-0124-6