SNS 是教師的幫手嗎？

一份由FacultyFocus 所做的調查報告中說，接受調查的1,900大學教授約有半數從來沒用過 Twitter，這些不使用 Twitter 的受訪者表示他們認為這個社群工具對於他們的教育工作沒有幫助。少部份目前沒有使用推特的受訪者，說有一半的機會，他們會試著把推特當作一個學習工具。

The Chronicle 在報導這個問題的時候，問讀者中的教育工作者，有多少人和學生間使用推特溝通？從 FacultyFocus 的調查看來，已經這麼做的師生應該是少數，而推特 140 個字元的限制(或說特色)，使得教育工作者對於溝通的成效不是那麼放心。

筆者好奇的是，不管是那一種型態的社群網路，當師生同在一個 SNS 裡，而且 connected 的情況下，究竟對於授課、解惑的互動，究竟會產生怎樣的影響？已經有不少教育工作者，使用 blog 和 wiki 來輔助教學，社群網路服務對於教育從業人員有什麼幫助呢？

不同的社群網路服務有其不同的特色， Twitter 以訊息的傳播與複製見長，Facebook 則從人脈網路的連結出發，不同的連結方式，會有什麼影響？

As a teaching tool, PowerPoint can be awful. Is Twitter any better? One promotes passivity; the other, connectedness and interactivity (unless you follow people like us, who are about as responsive as a dining room table). The Chronicle of Higher Education raises an interesting question: should professors be tweeting with their students? Or is it a poor substitute for face-to-face interaction? Of course, some say brevity is the soul of wit, and 140 characters is very, very brief.

—

via freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com

Posted via web from imrchen's posterous

心情

via Kol's Soup

The Evolution of Retweeting

Twitter 在本質上是個發佈與訂閱（publish and subscribe）模式的訊息傳播渠道與社群，隨著社群的擴大與用戶的互相影響與學習，傳播的方式與影響益發豐富多彩，ReTweet 就是一個非常有趣的題目。

若對 Rwtweet 這個現象有興趣，Technology Review 的這篇 The Evolution of Retweeting 是個很好的起點，Dan Zarrella 做了許多和 ReTweet 現象有關的有趣分析，也值得看看(花了許久時間寫的東西在存檔時竟然格式和資料都掉了，大為掃興，所以草草寫幾句，重新發過，剛剛丟掉的東就算了，唉)。

Twitter has incorporated other user-generated linguistic tools, such as using a hash symbol in front of a word to make it easily searchable (like "#conference09"). Another common technique is typing @ in front of a username to reply directly (but publically) to the user, which Twitter also formalized after users adopted it. These linguistic tools have even trickled into other social media environments, including YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and blogs. ......Currently, there is no set format for retweeting, which loosely consists of reposting someone's tweet and giving due credit. .............

But the retweeting format is much more inconsistent and complex than the targeted reply and hashtag conventions, according to Microsoft Research social media scientistDanah Boyd, who recently posted a paper on the behavior of retweeting. Variations include typing the attribution at the end and using "via," "by," or "retweet" instead of "RT." What's more, people often add their own comments before or after a retweet. This becomes a problem with Twitter's 140-character limit, explains Boyd. Typing "RT @username" takes up characters, and so does adding a comment. To deal with this, users will paraphrase or omit part of the original text, sometimes leading to incorrect quotes.

........

Users often employ retweets to provide context in conversation, says Susan Herring, a professor of information science and linguistics at Indiana University and editor in chief of the Language@Internet journal. "I can't imagine that [the new Twitter tool] will be very satisfactory to Twitter retweeters," says Herring. "A retweet plus a comment is a conversation. A retweet alone could be an endorsement, but it's a stretch to view an exchange of endorsements as a conversation." Herring does agree that it will increase retweeting and broaden the range of users who retweet.

.....

......

"People will continue to repurpose Twitter to meet their needs," predicts Herring. "I can't imagine that those who are passionate retweeters will discontinue their practices."

豆辦解決圖書版本問題的方法

不論是實體的零售店面，或是電子商務網站，都會遇到一個很複雜也很惱人的產品管理問題：item authority。

這個現象解釋起來很簡單，很多產品有不同的包裝版本（想像一下書籍的普及版、精裝本、典藏版, 等等），甚至同樣的版本，也可能在資料庫裡有兩筆以上資料（仍然以書籍做例子，想像一下同一本書的一刷、二刷），我們如何知道這些不同的商品其實都是同一個產品？Greg Linden 也曾經以 YouTube 為例，撰文 YouTube cries out for item authority 說明 item authority問題對服務提供者造成的困擾以及挑戰。

這對推薦系統的設計者，是個很「有趣」，也很艱鉅的挑戰！海峽兩岸間最大的書籍收藏網站-豆辦，當然也遇到這個問題，豆辦日誌昨日(2009/08/24)宣佈《豆瓣读书即将解决版本问题》，他們的解決方案，可以稱為用戶「自己動手，豐衣足食」吧：

豆瓣图书会将同一作品的不同版本归纳起来，展示在一个单独页面里。这个页面可以由书虫们来添加和编辑。如果你确切地知道06年上海译文出版社的《在路上》是01年漓江出版社的《在路上》的另一个版本，你可以添加；如果发现某个版本是指鹿为马，你可以报错。贡献者的信息会在版本页面被永久标记。

随着豆瓣数据库里的版本数据的完善，豆瓣猜的智商也将大大提高，再也不会推荐同一作品不同版本的书给你了；有些已经绝版不再出售的图书页面（比如 86年版的《傲慢与偏见》），会有最近新版的价格帮助购买（比如06年的《傲慢与偏见》有售）；对于多达十几种版本的图书，版本页面还会显示各自的收藏人数和评分，帮助大家比较版本的好坏。

前路茫茫，點根蠟燭...

推薦系統不是只能賣書

網友 xlvector (他是 Netflix Prize 中達成 10% 的兩個團隊之一 Ensemble 成員) 在 Resys 討論群組 提到一篇微軟研究院發表的研究報告 DebugAdvisor: A Recommender System for Debug，這篇報告的主題是如何使用推薦系統技術幫助程式設計師執行除錯工作，DebugAdviser 則是他們的成果。

因為我找到的 PDF 連結是壞的，還沒有機會看到全文，所以只能從摘要想像大概。不過，這的確是個有趣的想法，推薦系統不僅在 attention economy 大環境裡協助企業主攫取客戶注意力，還能協助程式設計師更好的完成他的工作(assignment)，看來 "We're limited only by our imagination" 這句話真是一點都沒錯。

DebugAdvisor: A Recommender System for Debugging

In large software development projects, when a programmer is assigned a bug to fix, she typically spends a lot of time searching (in an ad-hoc manner) for instances from the past where similar bugs have been debugged, analyzed and resolved. Systematic search tools that allow the programmer to express the context of the current bug, and search through diverse data repositories associated with large projects can greatly improve the productivity of debugging. This paper presents the design, implementation and experience from such a search tool called DebugAdvisor.

The context of a bug includes all the information a programmer has about the bug, including natural language text, textual rendering of core dumps, debugger output etc.

Our key insight is to allow the programmer to collate this entire context as a query to search for related information. Thus, DebugAdvisor allows the programmer to search using a fat query, which could be kilobytes of structured and unstructured data describing the contextual information for the current bug. Information retrieval in the presence of fat queries and variegated data repositories, all of which contain a mix of structured and unstructured data is a challenging problem. We present novel ideas to solve this problem.

We have deployed DebugAdvisor to over 100 users inside Microsoft. In addition to standard metrics such as precision and recall, we present extensive qualitative and quantitative feedback from our users.