Rise of the Net-Native Class

Welcome back to a new school year. We are now resuming regular meetings and corresponding blog reports on each conversation.

The “Net Native”

Bob presented preliminary work on the rise of the “Digital Native” or “Net Native” and their impact on the workplace. There is a new class of employees on the rise. They have particular characteristics that are different from employees before and are conflicting with existing work practices and other structures. These people are the “Digital Natives” or “Net Natives”.

Bob’s group has begun to investigate the characteristics of these people and to model their impact on knowledge management in the company structure.

During this research conversation, a majority of the audience’s questions challenged Bob on the scope of his generalizations and relevance of his focus on “Net Native”. This summary will briefly summarize Bob’s findings and then summarize the discussion. I encourage you to chime in via comments.

Wayfinder: A tool for tagging to equalize opportunities for sense-making

Meghan Dougherty, PhD Candidate, Communication

(guest blog by Shaun Kane)

Wayfinder: A tool for tagging to equalize opportunities for sense-making in a collection of archived objects

This week Meghan presented her work on the Wayfinder project (http://www.wayfinder.webarchivist.org). This project is part of Meghan’s dissertation work, and is part of the larger Web Archivist project presented previously.

The Wayfinder project continues the exploration of representing digital scholarship digitally. By moving beyond traditional paper- based formats, we may explore alternate representations for scholarly information. Different media present different affordances, and may expose different social and epistemological issues. Wayfinder leverages the affordances of the web to enable new interactions with scholarly information. On the web, readers are able to act as content producers themselves, and can engage in a recursive dialogue with authors. The project also enables new modes of accessing and understanding scholarly information by allowing users to navigate and annotate data, and to create their own paths through a data set.

Representing Digital Scholarship Digitally: Creating the Web Campaigning Digital Supplement

Kirsten discusses the affordances and trade-offs associated with her research group’s decision to share their research (on impact of the Web on elections) through the Web. (They use a modified Wiki that exposes both 60% of the book text and all the data archives, field notes, memos, and notes).