Wikipedia U


Book Description

Explores the battle between the top-down authority traditionally ascribed to experts and scholars and the bottom-up authority exemplified by Wikipedia. Since its launch in 2001, Wikipedia has been a lightning rod for debates about knowledge and traditional authority. It has come under particular scrutiny from publishers of print encyclopedias and college professors, who are skeptical about whether a crowd-sourced encyclopedia—in which most entries are subject to potentially endless reviewing and editing by anonymous collaborators whose credentials cannot be established—can ever truly be accurate or authoritative. In Wikipedia U, Thomas Leitch argues that the assumptions these critics make about accuracy and authority are themselves open to debate. After all, academics are expected both to consult the latest research and to return to the earliest sources in their field, each of which has its own authority. And when teachers encourage students to master information so that they can question it independently, their ultimate goal is to create a new generation of thinkers and makers whose authority will ultimately supplant their own. Wikipedia U offers vital new lessons about the nature of authority and the opportunities and challenges of Web 2.0. Leitch regards Wikipedia as an ideal instrument for probing the central assumptions behind liberal education, making it more than merely, as one of its severest critics has charged, “the encyclopedia game, played online.”




The Big U


Book Description

The New York Times Book Review called Neal Stephenson's most recent novel "electrifying" and "hilarious". but if you want to know Stephenson was doing twenty years before he wrote the epic Cryptonomicon, it's back-to-school time. Back to The Big U, that is, a hilarious send-up of American college life starring after years our of print, The Big U is required reading for anyone interested in the early work of this singular writer.




Theory U


Book Description

Shows how leaders can access the deepest source of inspiration and vision • Includes dozens of tested exercises, practices, and real-world examples We live in a time of massive institutional failure, one that requires a new consciousness and a new collective leadership capacity. In this groundbreaking book, Otto Scharmer invites us to see the world in new ways and in so doing discover a revolutionary approach to leadership. What we pay attention to and how we pay attention is key to what we create. What prevents us from attending to situations more effectively is that we aren’t fully aware of and in touch with the inner place from which attention and intention originate. This is what Scharmer calls our blind spot. By moving through Scharmer’s U process, we consciously access the blind spot and learn to connect to our authentic Self—the deepest source of knowledge and inspiration—in the realm of “presencing,” a term coined by Scharmer that combines the concepts of presence and sensing. Based on ten years of research and action learning and interviews with over 150 practitioners and thought leaders, Theory U offers a rich diversity of compelling stories and examples and includes dozens of exercises and practices that allow leaders, and entire organizations, to shift awareness, connect with the best future possibility, and gain the ability to realize it.




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Book Description




Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education


Book Description

Giving higher education professionals the language and tools they need to seize new opportunities in digital learning. A quiet revolution is sweeping across US colleges and universities. As schools rethink how students learn - both inside and outside the classroom - technology is changing not only what should be taught but how best to teach it. From active learning and inclusive pedagogy to online and hybrid courses, traditional institutions are leveraging their fundamental strengths while challenging long-standing assumptions about how teaching and learning happen. At this intersection of learning, technology, design, and organizational change lies the foundation of a new academic discipline of digital learning. Coalescing around this new field of study is a common critical language, along with a set of theoretical frameworks, methodological practices, and shared challenges and goals. In Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education, Joshua Kim and Edward Maloney explore the context of this new discipline, show how it exists within a larger body of scholarship, and give examples of how this scholarship is being used on campuses. What Kim and Maloney demonstrate in this foundational text is an understanding that change is a complex dynamic between what happens in the classroom and the larger institutional structures and traditions at play. Ultimately, the authors make a compelling case not only for this turn to learning but also for creating new pathways for nonfaculty learning careers, understanding the limits of professional organizations and social media, and the need to establish this new interdisciplinary field of learning innovation.




The Information Behavior of Wikipedia Fan Editors


Book Description

Situated at the intersection of library and information science (LIS), Wikipedia studies, and fandom studies, this book is a digital (auto)ethnography that documents the information behavior of Wikipedia “fan editors”—that is, individuals who edit articles about pop culture media. Given Wikipedia’s prominence in LIS and fan studies scholarship, both as one of the world’s most heavily used reference sources and as an important archive for fan communities, fan editors are a crucial component of this ecosystem as some of Wikipedia’s most active contributors. Through a combination of fieldwork observations, insight from key informants, and the author’s own experiences as a Wikipedia editor, this monograph provides a rich articulation of fan editor information behavior and offers a significant contribution to scholarship in a number of fields. Scholars of library and information science, media studies, fandom studies, and popular culture will find this book of particular interest.




Machine Learning for the Web


Book Description

Explore the web and make smarter predictions using Python About This Book Targets two big and prominent markets where sophisticated web apps are of need and importance. Practical examples of building machine learning web application, which are easy to follow and replicate. A comprehensive tutorial on Python libraries and frameworks to get you up and started. Who This Book Is For The book is aimed at upcoming and new data scientists who have little experience with machine learning or users who are interested in and are working on developing smart (predictive) web applications. Knowledge of Django would be beneficial. The reader is expected to have a background in Python programming and good knowledge of statistics. What You Will Learn Get familiar with the fundamental concepts and some of the jargons used in the machine learning community Use tools and techniques to mine data from websites Grasp the core concepts of Django framework Get to know the most useful clustering and classification techniques and implement them in Python Acquire all the necessary knowledge to build a web application with Django Successfully build and deploy a movie recommendation system application using the Django framework in Python In Detail Python is a general purpose and also a comparatively easy to learn programming language. Hence it is the language of choice for data scientists to prototype, visualize, and run data analyses on small and medium-sized data sets. This is a unique book that helps bridge the gap between machine learning and web development. It focuses on the difficulties of implementing predictive analytics in web applications. We focus on the Python language, frameworks, tools, and libraries, showing you how to build a machine learning system. You will explore the core machine learning concepts and then develop and deploy the data into a web application using the Django framework. You will also learn to carry out web, document, and server mining tasks, and build recommendation engines. Later, you will explore Python's impressive Django framework and will find out how to build a modern simple web app with machine learning features. Style and approach Instead of being overwhelmed with multiple concepts at once, this book provides a step-by-step approach that will guide you through one topic at a time. An intuitive step-by step guide that will focus on one key topic at a time. Building upon the acquired knowledge in each chapter, we will connect the fundamental theory and practical tips by illustrative visualizations and hands-on code examples.




University X: How to rescue a college brand from bland.


Book Description

Higher education is one of the most intimidating industries in marketing today. Decreasing enrollments, spiking tuitions, and soft job markets have made it more challenging than ever to promote the value of a college education. And while there’s no shortage of fat, expensive books on the subject, there doesn’t seem to be many answers to the questions people tasked with promoting their schools are faced with every day. Until now. University X offers real, actionable advice for marketers in higher ed to create stronger brands, develop smarter strategies, and get the most out of their budgets. Free of boring theory and vague advice, the book provides a lively, accessible, and straight forward look at the things marketers can do today to improve their school’s marketing campaign tomorrow.




Me Before You


Book Description

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Giver of Stars and the forthcoming Someone Else's Shoes, discover the love story that captured over 20 million hearts in Me Before You, After You, and Still Me. They had nothing in common until love gave them everything to lose . . . Louisa Clark is an ordinary girl living an exceedingly ordinary life—steady boyfriend, close family—who has barely been farther afield than their tiny village. She takes a badly needed job working for ex–Master of the Universe Will Traynor, who is wheelchair bound after an accident. Will has always lived a huge life—big deals, extreme sports, worldwide travel—and now he’s pretty sure he cannot live the way he is. Will is acerbic, moody, bossy—but Lou refuses to treat him with kid gloves, and soon his happiness means more to her than she expected. When she learns that Will has shocking plans of his own, she sets out to show him that life is still worth living. A Love Story for this generation and perfect for fans of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, Me Before You brings to life two people who couldn’t have less in common—a heartbreakingly romantic novel that asks, What do you do when making the person you love happy also means breaking your own heart?




Digital Methods


Book Description

A proposal to repurpose Web-native techniques for use in social and cultural scholarly research. In Digital Methods, Richard Rogers proposes a methodological outlook for social and cultural scholarly research on the Web that seeks to move Internet research beyond the study of online culture. It is not a toolkit for Internet research, or operating instructions for a software package; it deals with broader questions. How can we study social media to learn something about society rather than about social media use? Rogers proposes repurposing Web-native techniques for research into cultural change and societal conditions. We can learn to reapply such “methods of the medium” as crawling and crowd sourcing, PageRank and similar algorithms, tag clouds and other visualizations; we can learn how they handle hits, likes, tags, date stamps, and other Web-native objects. By “thinking along” with devices and the objects they handle, digital research methods can follow the evolving methods of the medium. Rogers uses this new methodological outlook to examine such topics as the findings of inquiries into 9/11 search results, the recognition of climate change skeptics by climate-change-related Web sites, and the censorship of the Iranian Web. With Digital Methods, Rogers introduces a new vision and method for Internet research and at the same time applies them to the Web's objects of study, from tiny particles (hyperlinks) to large masses (social media).