A Medical Emergency

Yesterday a good friend called to let me know about an emergency situation and a request for help.

He asked me to help search for medical information. His wife had undergone an injection in her spine as part of ongoing treatment for pain. A bubble formed in the spinal column and resulted in partial paralysis affecting her upper body. She's in the hospital and receiving good care, however my friend indicated that the doctors were unfamiliar with this situation and not sure about treatment(s). A hyperbaric  chamber was used to dissolve the bubble, and this seems to have helped, but some paralysis persists.

My friend forwarded an article he had found describing a similar, although less severe case.  He indicated there were some good keywords in the article and for me to apply my search skills to see if I could locate additional cases or treatments that might inform his interaction with her doctors. Here's the article.

I did find some additional information in medical journals, but don't know how helpful they will be.

So I thought I'd involve the readers of this blog with the problem. This isn't a search challenge exactly like any others I've written. It involves suffering. There are serious consequences.

My intention in writing about this is not so much about engaging additional searchers looking for medical information (Web 1.0 style) but to spread the request over social networks. Someone may know someone who has experience with this or a similar condition. That was the case with the Perennial Challenge a couple of blogs back. The plant was growing in a person's yard in New Zealand. No databases had to be searched. But it did require the use of technology Web 2.0 style.

Information Fluency involves knowing multiple ways to find information. One of those ways is to use digital tools to involve many people in addressing an issue.

I hope you can help.

Santa Challenge

If you are looking for a quick challenge to involve middle schoolers or high schoolers in a keyword search with browsing and evaluation, have them identify:

1. The name of the airline that did this
2. Whether this information is accurate (is it real or photoshopped?)

Don't necessarily take the url as the answer (I chose this location of the photo on purpose).

This activity will likely lead to a Web 2.0 search (blogs), where clues can be found. You will find that people disagree about the credibility of the photo; whether the information is trustworthy is debatable. I'd have the students discuss why or why not they think the photo is real or fake. What do they use as the basis for their decision?

Staying in Touch with Information

Web 2.0 tools may be good for social networking and participation, but they are also helpful for sampling a broad range of sources, as opposed to skimming just the top results.

A few months ago I created two blog alerts in Google that provide me with daily updates on information fluency OR literacy and lunar OR space exploration. These updates are delivered to my email account and I can see the information that Google indexed for these queries during the previous 24 hours. This helps me see past the top few results because keyword matching and currency are the ranking factors, not keyword matching, number of sites linking to a page and a host of other SEO factors.

As I indicated in the previous two blogs, the challenge of frequent information doubling is how to become informed about more than just a tiny fraction of the information produced. Creating automatic searches as described can solve this dilemma for topics of interest. For me, I want to stay abreast of developments in the field of Information Literacy OR Fluency for obvious reasons. If I were to query the normal way, I wouldn't be able to collect such variety on the topic in one place. It works much the same to search blogs in Google, but by subscribing to a custom search, I don't have to remember to do the search; it comes to me.

I don't do this for everything I'm interested in or want to find. That decision is mandated by how much time I have and how important it is to have a broader array of information on a topic. Information Fluency is a business; Lunar exploration is related to an assessment playground I created and maintain. In this case, I need a steady stream of information on latest developments so I can keep the content on which Investigative Searching 20/10 is based as relevant as possible.

That's one solution for sorting through vast oceans (or should I say expanses) of information. I'd like to hear your solutions to the challenge.

At the Intersection of Web 2.0 and Information Fluency

I've had the opportunity to lead a number of workshops this year entitled, "Power Searching in a Web 2.0 World." Sometimes the sessions are 45 minutes long; other times I've had 6 hours. No matter the length of time, it's difficult to wrap one's arms around Web 2.0.

There are a host of new tools that debut weekly in the Web 2.0 world. Just staying current takes hours. And while people are generally interested in what's new, they also want to know how information fluency intersects with this world. That takes a chunk of time by itself.

I usually start by comparing two worlds: Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. There are some simple comparisons. For example, in Web 1.0 you can only lurk. You can't leave your mark. In Web 2.0 you may lurk, but that's not really the way to discover the value that's there. Leaving your mark creates value. That's typically accomplished by blogging, contributing to a wiki, saving a bookmark, uploading an image or a video or commenting on someone's else efforts to do so.

Here are a few more global insights about Web 2.0 from an information fluency perspective:

• As much as Web 2.0 is all about contributing, equally important is networking. These two words sum up most of what there is to know about Web 2.0. At the intersection of Web 2.0 and Information Fluency, the purpose of the environment cannot be overlooked. Finding the 'right' bit of information may require participation and networking; and that takes time.
• You may get to know an author by joining his or her network, you may build trust by being a participant. The investment of time may result in the formation of your own personal learning network--which could be very powerful and long-lasting. Some of the people who benefit most from Web 2.0 have built large networks of colleagues who provide help on demand. For example, I've seen Will Richardson use Twitter during a workshop to harvest responses from his network. The larger your network, the more powerful it becomes (also know as the network effect). Applying Information Fluency skills in this environment can consume a great deal of time. But you may end up with much more than the piece of information you set out to find.
• You have to limit your choices. How many networks can you realistically join? I have memberships in Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Diigo, Delicious, Flickr, Wikipedia and Linked In. I rarely post in most of them. You have to choose where you want to spend your time. Linked In is a good investment if you're trying to build professional (business) relationships. I see a lot of Ed Tech folks in Twitter. I connect mainly with members of my family in Facebook.
  
• Web 2.0 is a public place. The information you contribute tells something about you. The more you share, they more others will know, if they're interested. You may try to hide your identity, but your readers will discover a lot about you even if they never learn your real name. You have limited control over who is able to access your information.
  
• Speculative searching doesn't work as well in Web 2.0 as it does in Web 1.0. Part of the reason for this is that search engines return the most recent information first. For example, if you are looking for a post that's more than a month old in Technorati, you have to page down and down (Google Blog Search makes it possible to search by date range). Another reason is that searching based on tags is less likely to return predictable results than keywords drawn from the context of a whole page. Tags are keywords, of course, but they are chosen by the author to characterize the information as a whole. You aren't searching the whole information. Search for a specific photo in flickr sometime. It's hard to do. You may find pictures with similar qualities but not an exact match. Try it (here's the challenge in this post).
  
• A better use of speculative searching is not to start with ideas that are too specific. Use Web 2.0 to open your eyes to new information. Exploring tagclouds is a brainstorming activity.
  
• Finally--and by no means is this the last word!--the wisdom of crowds is active in Web 2.0. The more people and perspectives that weigh in on a topic makes the information more reliable. This is the principle of collective intelligence behind the genius of Wikipedia. This is the phenomenon behind what becomes a popular item in DIGG. This may even be why Fake Steve Jobs has over 52,000 followers in Twitter, while other Steve Jobs have only a fraction of that. Has the crowd found the Real Steve Jobs? See for yourself.
  

Link To Evaluation

Knowing who links to a site can be very revealing.

If trustworthy people link to a site and say positive things about it, does that site gain in credibility? I think most people would say yes.

What if they just link to the site and say nothing about it? That's harder to evaluate.

Using the link: command by itself is not an evaluation shortcut. For example, pages that link to http://golfcross.com/ present ambiguous results. Google returns 4 pages: two of them are about hoax sites, another is an account of someone playing golfcross and the fourth is the 21cif website. Since three fourths of the pages seem to indicate there is some suspicious about golfcross, one might be tempted to conclude the sport is really a hoax. But that's not an accurate conclusion.

One of the problems is that Google no longer returns all the pages that link to a page. Within the last year, only a sample of the pages is returned. Try the link: search in Yahoo and you get
lots more (over 400), if you select the option for picking pages from the entire site, not just the home page. That's a good reason to try more than one database when searching.

Hoax-related pages still show up in Yahoo results, but now there are others: travel sites, blogs, wikipedia, and so on. Now it isn't so easy to conclude that the sport is a hoax.

It still requires reading and interpreting the pages that have a link to golfcross to figure out why there's a link there. Always ask: why did this author include the link?

Among the Yahoo results is a blog by Bernie DeKoven. The context of the page is all about fun and games, including wallyball, slamball and this game played with egg-shaped balls. A link to Bernie DeKoven leaves the impression that he is educated, was a teacher, is an author and has pursued game-playing as a serious pastime for years. He seems to be an expert in games. So does his testimony convince you that golfcross is real?

Maybe you know Bernie and maybe you don't. If you do, does his testimony persuade you that golfcross is legitimate? Does he say strong enough things about the sport?

If you could get to know Bernie and ask him why he thinks golfcross is legitimate, that might help. That's where Web 2.0 becomes very valuable. You can ask questions, join personal networks and get a lot more information than if you were just observing from a distance. Of course this takes a little more time than lurking, but it yields better information.

So, what do you think about golfcross?

An opportunity to learn more about Web 2.0 tools and evaluate will start on Feb 9. Consider joining our 4 week course on Power Searching in a Web 2.0 World. Here's a link to look at the course.

Coolhunting Web 2.0

I've been busy preparing for and facilitating an intersession course here at IMSA called "coolhunting." Essentially, this is a trendy term for "trend prediction." The basis of coolhunting is that you can use Web 2.0 tools to locate creative swarms of individuals who are developing new ideas before they reach a tipping point. Web 2.0 forums, chat, bulletin boards, etc. (even emails) afford a window into the communication patterns of people who are engaged in creative swarms.

My purpose in blogging about this is related to searching and evaluation. There are two ways to search for coolfarmers (those creative swarms). You can do what everyone on Web 1.0 does: lurk. I suppose browse is a better term for this, but lurking is really what the majority is doing when they are searching a Web 2.0 world. A fraction of the people who view blogs, conversations and other posts actually participate--something less than 1 in 5 get involved.

That means when searching Web 2.0 for information, at least 80% of people are at a distinct disadvantage. Without being involved in a conversation, they don't earn the trust of the individuals who are involved. The opposite is also true: you don't know if you can trust the people you are reading. That's the main obstacle to determining credibility in Web 2.0 circles.

Here's an example I used in the workshop this week. In Twitter, at present, I am following only 2 people. One of them is Scott Swanson, a colleague at IMSA who has leadership responsibilities for Second Life and One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). Let's say I wanted to find out about new developments in the OLPC movement. If I didn't know Scott, I could search Twitter for OLPC and I would find Scott along with a host of other people I didn't know. How can I tell if what they are talking about is worth following? Besides from reading their posts and becoming really familiar with OLPC, as a lurker, I am at a real disadvantage.

With my own Twitter account (it's free) I can see who Scott is following and who is following Scott. But I can't tell who in this crowd knows anything about OLPC without lurking for hours, reading posts from hundreds of individuals. I can see from posts that Scott is attending an OLPC conference in MA with students from IMSA. If I didn't already know him, this would make him appear somewhat trustworthy--the institution let him take students on a cross-country field trip to learn more about this subject.

I think it would save a lot of time to take a chance on writing to Scott and ask him about OLPC, explain my interest and see what happens. If he responds and it seems like a trust relationship develops, I have made a huge leap forward. Scott can introduce me to people with high opinion leadership in OLPC that he's already vetted. Now I'm using Web 2.0 as it was intended: to build networks, in this case, my own personal learning network in OLPC.

Try it yourself. The next time you have to use Web 2.0 for searching--a really good place to find creative projects, by the way--find a 'prospective expert' and get to know him or her. Then use this relationship as a springboard into their networks that you can trust.

I highly recommend reading the book Coolhunting by Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper if you want to know more about social network analysis, swarm creativity, collaborative innovation networks and so on. There are some very powerful search tools in this field that are like Google on steroids. I'll blog about that later.