An Epistemic Evaluation of Goodreads

Goodreads is a social networking website created for readers with the intention of creating a user-generated database that allows readers to find quality information on books and valuable recommendations. The institution is a growing network that, since it’s launch in 2007, already boasts 50 million users and 1.5 billion books within their database. Goodreads allows users to register a profile which they can use to create an individual library of books they’ve read, want to read, and are currently reading. Users can then further organize their “bookshelves” to reflect their interests, rate and review books and view the input of other users, view recommendations and suggestions based on books they’ve read and rated, and grow a social network of friends to see what others are reading. The website also offers quizzes, trivia, quotes, book lists, giveaways, news and event updates, author interviews and Q&As, social networking groups similar to book clubs, and community creative writing.

But is Goodreads more epistemically valuable than the alternatives? In this case, individuals would generally make use of their public library’s services and the knowledge of librarians to access knowledge similar to what Goodreads offers.

I offer an epistemic analysis of the digital information institution Goodreads over four dimensions of epistemic value: power, reliability, speed, and fecundity.

Power - the ability of an information institution to assist an individual in gaining justified true beliefs, or knowledge	More than a single librarian’s knowledge Greater number of resources than one public library
Goodreads gives users a robust tool to facilitate the acquisition of knowledge.
Reliability - the ability of an information institution to offer the development of actual justified true beliefs more often than it may perpetuate false beliefs	Accurate recommendation program Accurate database of books and metadata
The ability for Goodreads to provide knowledge of books and recommendations is as accurate, if not more accurate, than a librarian’s capability to do the same.
Speed - the ability of an information institution to aid in the development of knowledge in a timely manner	Online access to the book database Quick search tools Immediate recommendations
Overall, the digital aspect of Goodreads library services provides a much quicker alternative.
Fecundity - the ability of an information institution to reach a large number of people and assist in creating a large number of justified true beliefs	Internet access available to a large number of people Individuals may be underserved by community’s public library Individuals may not have access to a public library
Goodreads has the ability to reach a far greater number of people than any individual public library and can allow users to acquire knowledge they could not otherwise obtain.

As a digital information institution, Goodreads seems to provide users with a fair and accurate representation of the knowledge available on books and book recommendations. This means that individuals are well served by Goodreads in terms of power, reliability, speed, and fecundity in the realm of acquiring knowledge that is relevant to their needs and interests. Overall, Goodreads is an epistemically beneficial institution.

Closing The Gender Gap

The gender gap is an abiding phenomenon that affects our society along many dimensions, including a lack of equality in wages and salaries and unequal representation in jobs and education. It is a global reality that women experience inequality in many aspects of their daily lives in both developing and developed countries. Inequality in the workplace affects women socially and economically and one way to begin to narrow the gender gap may lie in technology and digital culture.

A recent study done by the World Economic Forum (WEF) on the future of jobs around the globe looks at industry gender gap profiles and discusses the effects that the so called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” will have on women in the workplace. The WEF found that although the expected overall global loss of jobs will affect men and women relatively equally (52% for men and 48% for women), due to the fact that the number of women in the workplace is much smaller than men, this loss of global jobs will disproportionately affect women and widen the gender gap. Additionally, this Fourth Industrial Revolution will see the end of the types of jobs that have proportionally higher numbers of women workers, and the addition of new jobs in fields where women are traditionally underrepresented.







Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math-- or STEM-- are the fields in which women are woefully underrepresented. Whether you agree with the argument of technology as culture or that of gendered technology, the fact remains that our current digital culture is seeing a growing gender gap that needs to be closed. Women globally earn less than men for doing equal work and are a disproportionately small percentage of the global workforce. One way that we can work to change this is by finding ways to use the same digital culture and technology to close the gender gap. Research by companies such as Accenture has found that increasing digital skills and literacy in girls and women can help to narrow the gender gap. Increases in digital and technological fluency allow women workers to gain skills to prepare them for work and advance them in their careers, especially in STEM fields. Accenture proposes that governments, institutions, and businesses work to encourage and support the digital fluency of women and girls globally in order to close the gender gap more quickly.







Giving women and girls the opportunities to develop these skills on a global scale is a massive undertaking. The status quo of male-dominated STEM fields will cause many problems along the way, which is why it is important that the effort garner support from as many organizations as possible from national to local governments, from elementary to university education institutions, and from the business sector.

• How can we encourage women to get more involved in STEM fields? 
• How can we change the status quo to embrace gender equality in STEM? 
• Why is it important that we work to close the gender gap? 
• Do you see other areas where involving women and girls in the digital and technological culture can work to close a gender gap?

Getting to Equal: How Digital is Helping Close the Gender Gap at Work- Accenture research. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.accenture.com/us-en/gender-equality-research-2016.aspx?c=glb_intwdfy16accn_10000005


Jones, S., & Veto, J. (2016, March 3). Digital Skills Help Narrow the Workplace Gender Gap, Accenture Research Finds. Retrieved from https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/digital-skills-help-narrow-the-workplace-gender-gap-accenture-research-finds.htm


Leopold, T. A., Ratcheva, V., & Zahidi, S. (2016, January 18). The Future of Jobs. Retrieved from http://reports.weforum.org/future-of-jobs-2016/


Turk, V. (2016, February 26). ​The Silicon Divide: Pitch Us Your Stories on Tech and Gender Equality. Retrieved from http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-silicon-divide-pitch-us-your-stories-on-tech-and-gender-equality


Zillman, C. (2016, January 19). For Women, The Future of Work Is Looking Bleak. Retrieved from http://fortune.com/2016/01/19/world-economic-forum-women/

Crowdsourcing Applications

Crowdsourcing is the phenomenon of obtaining information from a large group for the purpose of answering a question or providing a service. The use of crowdsourcing has popped up in a wide range of circumstances and is currently being used in a vast number of ways.

Although this is a trend that has grown spectacularly with the increasing technological ability to source large groups of people online, it is by no means only a recent occurrence. When the Oxford English Dictionary was first published, it was through the work of thousands and thousands of contributions from individuals around the globe who sent in slips of paper containing words, definitions, and quotations from texts. (For those interested in further reading on the chronicles of this endeavor, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester is an entertaining read.)

More recently, crowdsourcing has moved into the realm of smartphone applications. With the prevalence of smartphones around the world, a shift is occurring in the ways that individuals can interact and communicate. Smartphones have allowed for a greater connectivity among individuals and a larger pool from which information can be sourced. In the instance of crowdsource-based apps, the purpose of crowdsourcing is to provide a service to it’s users.

There’s a difference, it seems, between a crowd working together collectively to come up with an answer, and the members of the crowd working individually to come up with answers that can then be taken collectively and averaged. The “wisdom of crowds”, according to Surowiecki, only works when diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and aggregation are all present conditions within the crowd. Smartphone applications allow independent users to provide information, reach users on a global scale, and collate the data into a service that the users can then benefit from.

For example, the Waze application is a crowdsourced traffic app that allows users to “share real-time traffic and road info” which is then overlaid onto a map. Users can then see where along their commute traffic has slowed, if there have been accidents, and even the prices of gas at nearby gas stations.

Crowdsource-based applications can also help with more serious real-world problems. In a recent article in Newsweek, Eric Smillie discusses the uses of a recently developed smartphone app called MyShake. 

The purpose of the app is to provide an early warning system for earthquakes. MyShake runs in the background of a smartphone, gleaning information off of the accelerometer already present in the device. The application uses an algorithm that can separate the usual movement of the device from the vibrations of an earthquake. Once the device detects the presence of earthquake vibrations, it sends a signal to a main server which then collates all the data. If enough devices send the signal to the server, then the earthquake is confirmed and a warning can be sent to every smartphone user who has the application. Depending on their distance from the epicenter of the earthquake, this application can give users a few fractions of a second to minutes warning allowing them to find shelter. Additionally, an early warning system can provide notification to physical entities that can be disrupted by an earthquake such as trains and elevators.

Although similar services can be accessed through resources that are based on expert knowledge rather than community gathered data, it is often the case that those services cannot reach every user who could benefit or do not reflect the most current and up to date information. Applications like MyShake rely on the widespread use of smartphones globally and the input from the millions of users which grants applications the necessary data to make certain services available or to provide answers to questions. Without the ability to collect such large amounts of data from a diverse and substantial cross section of users-- crowdsourcing at its most basic-- the knowledge and services would not exist on such a scale or with any reliability.

For more examples of crowdsource-based applications, look here.



Discussion:

What other day to day activities can crowdsource-based applications be applied to?

Do you think that crowdsourced applications are particularly reliable? Why or why not?

Do you tend to use any crowdsourced applications such as Waze? What do you like or dislike about them?





References:

"MyShake." 2015. <http://myshake.berkeley.edu/>


Shadbolt, Peter. "The 11 most amazing crowdsourcing apps - CNN.com." 2014. <http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/13/tech/mobile/tomorrow-transformed-crowdsourcing-apps/>


Smillie, Eric. "Crowdsourcing Earthquake Detection With an App Could Save Lives in Developing Countries" 2016. <http://www.newsweek.com/2016/03/04/myshake-android-app-earthquake-detection-earthquake-warning-system-426052.html>


Surowiecki, James. 2004. The Wisdom of Crowds. <http://wisdomofcrowds.blogspot.com/>


"Waze." 2009. <https://www.waze.com/>

Textbook Conundrum

Textbooks are a staple of our current educational system. They contain the standards of subject material and curriculum and are relied upon by teachers and students alike to provide relevant and factual information. They are regarded as the containers of the essential knowledge that students are expected to know. But what happens when we can't trust what we read? 

In a recent news story [3], a mother in Texas took to social media when her son showed her an excerpt from his ninth grade World Geography textbook that put a unique spin on the history of slavery in America. The textbook, in a chapter titled "Patterns of Immigration," described the slave trade as bringing "workers" to southern plantations. 

INSTAGRAM

Her story quickly went viral and many saw this choice of wording to be not just inaccurate but also belittling towards those who were, and still are, affected by slavery and racism. The popularity of this story has caused the textbook's publishers McGraw-Hill to issue a statement saying that the wording is indeed inadequate and have promised to update the section in future editions. 

But what do we do in the mean time? Can we trust that what we are read in textbooks is the unvarnished truth? Is accurate? Is unbiased? This story is only the most recent of many arguments that textbooks are not the purveyors of quality information that we would like to think they are. 

Perhaps one of the most famous examples of bias in textbooks is the depiction of World War II in classrooms around the world. In 2008, Keith Crawford and Stuart Foster published a book entitled War, Nation, Memory: International Perspectives on World War II in School History Textbooks. Research in Curriculum and Instruction [2] which sought to analyze the differences in how WWII and its related events are presented to students in different countries. It is probably not surprising to hear that textbooks in Britain, Germany, the United States and Japan contain vastly different narratives of the War and in and of itself, this may not be harrowing news. WWII affected countries in different ways and trying to teach students everything there is to know about the War would be an impossible task. Focusing on country-relevant history doesn't necessarily make the information in the textbook invalid. However, Crawford and Foster argue that textbooks influence what is known as the "common memory" of those who are learning from them. The way in which the information is presented influences the reality that individuals live in and therefore the type of information contained in textbooks is exceedingly important.  

Information quality relies upon a range of measures including relevance, accuracy, timeliness, completeness and validity. However, the information presented in textbooks often relies on the whims of educational reforms and curriculum which are always in flux and are influenced by any number of competing interests [4]. Textbooks can be full of inaccuracies and biases [1][5] and just as easily, they can be out of date or incomplete, and yet they remain the largest resource for foundational knowledge in schools. 

Should textbooks be the main source of information in classrooms? 
Is it up to the publishers of textbooks to ensure they are providing quality information?
Should some other institution have an influence in what is published in textbooks?
Is there a way to improve the rate of quality information in textbooks?
In the case of textbooks, are some dimensions of information quality more important than  others? Why?

References

[1]

Blanchard, B. (2014, September 10). Social Studies Textbooks Under Fire for Political Bias, Inaccuracies. Retrieved October 6, 2015, from http://www.texastribune.org/2014/09/10/history-scholars-criticize-social-studies-textbook/

[2]

Crawford, K., & Foster, S. (2008). War, nation, memory international perspectives on World War II in school history textbooks. Charlotte, NC: Information Age.

[3]

Finley, T. (2015, October 5). Mom Slams Textbook's Incredibly Offensive Definition Of 'Slavery' In Viral Facebook Post. Retrieved October 6, 2015, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mom-slams-textbooks-incredibly-offensive-definition-of-slavery-in-viral-facebook-post_56127df6e4b0768127028358

[4]
Garner, D. (2015, February 9). ACTION ALERT: PROTECT YOUR CHILDREN FROM SOCIAL STUDIES TEXTBOOKS. Retrieved October 6, 2015, from http://www.teapartynation.com/profiles/blogs/action-alert-protect-your-children-from-social-studies-textbooks

[5]
Tribpedia: Social Studies Standards Debate. (n.d.). Retrieved October 6, 2015, from http://www.texastribune.org/tribpedia/social-studies-standards-debate/about/