Participation Inequality: Lurkers vs. Contributors in Internet Communities (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox): All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don’t participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background. In contrast, a tiny minority of users usually accounts for […]

Why Wiki? free online video course: The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries has made a free online video course available called Why Wiki?. Save this post to any one of these social bookmarking services: — Why wiki… indeed.

Car loans help the poor get to work – Yahoo! News: Advocates say Ways to Work, which has underwritten $36 million in loans to 24,000 families since it began as a small program in Minnesota in 1984, is part of a new model for social service programs, one that delivers human services aimed at economic […]

One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated form the workplace as another closed site, but both disappear and giving way to frightful continual training, to continual monitoring of worker-schoolkids or bureaucrat-students. They try to present this as a reform of the school system, but it’s really its dismantling. negotiations 174

School web sites fail accessibility test: Eighty-six percent of the nation’s top universities have web sites that do not comply with standards designed to make the internet more accessible to persons with disabilities, according to a recent survey. Conducted… —— i bet it is a higher percentage for local libraries.

The Literacy Project: A resource for teachers, literacy organisations and anyone interested in reading and education, created in collaboration with LitCam, Google, and UNESCO’s Institute for Lifelong Learning. ——- Google’s literacy push.

Article: Google print outshines the European Digital Library: In talking about the long road to creating the European Digital Library, this stood out to me: In 2010, the European Digital Library should have 6 million e-books available, a much lower figure than that given by Google for the same year: 15 million. Both numbers are […]

There is a current issue with Badische Landesbibliothek of Karlsruhe selling off 3000+ medieval manuscripts. Apparently, they are contentiously held by the Counts of Baden, but may actually be state-owned. In any case, they are selling them for reasons unrelated to the preservation of the collection and archive. More info at: http://www.cronaca.com/archives/004613.html English version of […]