David Noble published 5 or 6 articles under the title "Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education" 3 or 4 years ago. Most of them were available on the Internet a couple of years ago and probably still are. Here's a summary: http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_1/noble/ And here's all of Chapter 1: http://communication.ucsd.edu/dl/ddm1.html ........Alex Kuskis ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Jones" <sjones@uic.edu> To: <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Sent: Friday, January 14, 2005 12:20 PM Subject: Re: [Air-l] Disadvantage of the Internet

Cliff Stoll had a book some years ago...Silicon Snake Oil was the title I think?...that as along these lines. There is also a Pew Internet Project report from September 2000 titled "Who's Not Online" that provides information about those who haven't gone online and those who have but opted out of using the Internet that may be of interest to you.

Sj

On Jan 13, 2005, at 10:13 PM, Kyun-Soo Kim wrote:

...

Dear Air'ers,

I am looking for the literatures dealt with "disadvantage" of using the Internet, computer technology, webpages, or blogs. I know it might be a sort of embarrasing topic.

I prefer the micro-level or psychological aspects (annoyance, time sink, harm, and the like) to the macro-level or social aspects such as privacy, anonymity, and participation.

I'd appreciate any help here.

Kyun-Soo Kim

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To further this discussion, I will bring up something that I presented 2 years ago at 4S: I'm much more interested in the notion of cognitive dissonance - that the way that the internet is organized does not aid cognitive processes (ways of thinking) already established in human beings. Human cognition takes certain very well known pathways - in particular, in regard to decision-making and also verification of facts. Then using the Internet - in this case - a search engine - which returns millions of results does not necessarily match generally ways that people have evolved to recognize truth (or process data). However I think truth claims are only one aspect of this cognitive dissonance. I would like to see more work or perhaps it is there from the psychologists on large data-set returns from search engines and how that helps or hinders people who are learning. Last year, Jeremy also brought up extreme multi-tasking across a variety of media inputs, and how these fit with the ability that humans have to make sense of their environment (not trying ot mis-quote him here) that is another problem. Bottom line: Do I make sense of a million returns on a hit? No, I don't. I scroll through about 5-10 pages (at most) or I refine my search. Or I ask this list or etc. I never deal with even a fraction of what is returned, maybe with a bot I could do better than that. Usually I seek out hubs or authorities (Scientific American, 1999) and those answer my questions rather than millions of hits.

From this perspective, I then presented a notion of super-salience of search results (from the psychological notion of salience) in order to make web searching more closely match other types of cognitive processing.

My paper on the aspect that deals with truth claims is unfortunately still in preparation, "Testing hypothesis-testing: Taking Sir Karl Popper for a spin on the World Wide Web" Here's the abstract follows for those who are interested: Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994) was the preeminent philosopher of science in the 20th century, and most serious scholars in the philosophy of science have responded in some way to his theories: his attacks on inductivism, his constructivist stance, and his integral role in the development of evolutionary epistemology. In this century, Popper�s explications of learning are increasingly claimed by educational theorists (Bailey, 2000). Educationalists can learn from Popper, who insisted that �all life is problem solving� -and that learners proceed by building tentative hypotheses to explain their world and use error elimination to refine those hypotheses (Popper, 1999). This author takes Popper's words, "[we] understate the importance of . . . the erroneous trial" (Popper, 1991:101) and applies them to searcher�s results on the WWW. The available logic (Boolean) may limit the number of results but not increase validity (Lawrence, 1999). Particularly, tradition scientific null-hypothesis tests do not work well on the Web. Either two many results are returned for sensible testing; contrarily, when no results are returned, this scarcely proves the condition as true(!). Null hypothesis methods are particularly suspect because cognitive research shows that we do not learn much from our behaviors when results are nil (Allison & Messick, 1988). Therefore, this author turns to human information processing to locate better techniques for searchers, especially searching for salience rather than eliminating error. Salience will assist WWW searchers in two cognitive processes: environmental scanning of cyberspace, and the cognitive structuring of their impressions based on 'goodness of fit' (Fiske & Taylor, 1991: 251). The author concludes that while Popper correctly recognized error as the crux of substantiating truth claims, he required more sophisticated feedback loops to bolster his theories. For one example, Norbert Weiner�s (1954) cybernetics could have provided a better mechanics for the cognitive processing of errors. Finally, better search methods (Clever project, 1999) and especially the recognition of super-salient �hits� will yield better results for searchers than error elimination methods. Cheers, Denise ===== Denise N. Rall, PhD candidate, School of Environ. Science, Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 - Mobile 0438 233 344 Sustainable Forestry Mentoring Coordinator & Internet Researcher Presented! 2004 Conf. Association of Internet Researchers: www.aoir.org http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/index.html