Quality Assuring Knowledge

Alan Cann, University of Leicester bit.ly/AJCann

Quality Assuring Knowledge

I keep six honest serving-men(They taught me all I knew);

Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who.

Kipling

What is “quality” ?

Subjective feeling or objective fact?

Endless attempts to measure (REF, RQF, etc)

Size? Depth? Relevance?

Why does it matter?

Effectiveness, efficiency

Respect, reputation

Authority?

www.rin.ac.uk/social-media-guide

How should we measure “quality”?

Funding?Ethical approvalPublication - peer reviewCitation“Impact”Social:Crowdsourcing – serendipitous discovery, tagging (Everything is Miscellaneous)

It’s not information overload,it’s filter failure

When?

Pre or post publication?

Filter on the way out –

conventional peer review

is based on a scarcity model

The Digital Scholar

Where?

Journals (online, eToCs, RSS) – filtered content

Tools – many examples:

• Social networks – Twitter as Librarian?

• Wikis – collaborative knowledge building

• Social bookmarking, citation & annotation

Who?

Your Personal Learning Network (PLN)

- the people who filter for you.

- you’re only as smart as your network?

Loss of authority?

Workshop Questions

1. What tools do you currently use?

2. Authority – good or evil? How can you tell?

3. How do you find the unknown unknowns?

Talk to me