Reddit - a portmanteau of read and it

While I am doing my first assignment, I found a well-written article about Reddit. It's easy to understand! You will learn what Reddit is, how Reddit works, and how Reddit makes money!

OK. I will post the first part here...So, what is Reddit?

What is Reddit?

Reddit is a social discussion forum, a news aggregation site, and an online content rating platform which gained popularity in 2008. The company was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005 who were roommates from the University of Virginia with majors in Computer science and commerce respectively. Reddit became a subsidiary of Advance Publications; a US-based Media Company, in September 2011. A year later, Reddit became an independent organization, with Advance as its largest shareholder.

According to the founders, Reddit is a source of everything that’s new and popular on the web. It’s a community of millions of other category specific communities where people post, discuss and vote on basically everything that’s interesting in the world.

The name Reddit is a portmanteau of read and it which was chosen to signify the phrase ‘I already read it on Reddit’, which is actually the truth as Reddit acts as the gateway of interesting stuff to the internet.

Source:  How Does Reddit Make Money? Reddit Business Model  (VISHNU ROSHAN · POSTED ON OCT 7, 2017, Freedough.com)

Amazon MT (Mechanical Turk) and crowdsourcing

Although I heard about online recruiting a lot, I have not heard about MT before. So, Amazon really does everything! Which company will be out of business after ToysRus? Well, this is not a point here…

As described by Mason and Suri (2012), researchers can use this HR pool for their studies. We are always hungry for subjects! We want a cheap and large sample size. Plus, quality! Hmm…Yes, quality matters...So, who came to MT for money? Do we have the statistics? Will they be really honest and sincere in conducting a survey or participating in the experiments if they get more incentives? There are a lot of reliability and validity issues. If researchers recruit people for interview transcripts, privacy also matters as Vanessa commented in our discussion. Do we have to include this item in the consent form?

I just talked about some limitations on researchers’ side. However, the most controversial issue around MK is whether it is exploiting low-income workers. Researchers are also ones to blame for this matter. Mason and Suri (2011) highlighted the low cost as one of the benefits, but this is one of the reasons why Jeff Bezos is criticized.   

“Workers tend to receive extremely low pay for their cognitive piecework, on the order of pennies per task. They usually earn no benefits and enjoy no job security.” (Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has Reinvented Research)

Diigo - Social bookmarking tool

I got to know Diigo first in 2016 when one of the doctoral students in our program presented on her research. She used  Diigo annotation function in her language class for reading. I was very curious about how it would work and went to the site but did not try it right away.

Then, last year I encountered Diigo again in my Internet Inquiry class. We posted some links and comments for a trial and I thought it was the advanced version of a bookmark which is embedded in every browser. Now that I meet this tool again on my web 2.0 class, I can see more utilities. It would be a great tool for my research and for collaborative knowledge sharing and discussion.

As my classmates are concerned, we have many issues to solve before we actively utilize this type of social media in our K-12 class. Parents do not want their children to have social media account and to access such websites because children can be easily distracted and deviated from what they are supposed to do in the class. Furthermore, it is too difficult for a teacher to monitor all the students. With all those possible issues, I believe we need to incorporate web 2.0 tools more actively for our classroom activities. Instead, we need more literacy education in our school including privacy, netizenship, intellectual property, and so on.

There's an old Korean proverb "We can't make soybean paste if we are afraid of worms.".
It means if we are afraid of something, we can't make anything out of it. The human being is smart. We've always found a good solution to any problem. :-)

IP, OER, Copyright, and Copyleft

I’ve heard about Intellectual property (IP) and copyright a lot. Then, recently, copyleft and OER became an issue in IP world. So, what are they? How are they defined and distinguished each other? Well…Wikipedia provided the definitions as below…But, it is still not so clear what the differences among these terms are. I think the relationship may be like this. Other thoughts? I need to study more about OER and copyright.

Intellectual property > Copyright (license) > Copyleft (license) ≃ OER > Permissive license

l  Intellectual property: Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect, and primarily encompasses copyrights, patents, and trademarks. It also includes other types of rights, such as trade secrets, publicity rights, moral rights, and rights against unfair competition. Artistic works like music and literature, as well as some discoveries, inventions, words, phrases, symbols, and designs, can all be protected as intellectual property. It was not until the 19th century that the term "intellectual property" began to be used, and not until the late 20th century that it became commonplace in the majority of the world (Wikipedia).

l  OER: Open educational resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes (Wikipedia).

l  Copyright: Copyright is a legal right, existing globally in many countries, that basically grants the creator of an original work exclusive right to determine and decide whether, and under what conditions, this original work may be used by others (Wikipedia).

l  Copyleft: Copyleft (a play on the word copyright) is the practice of offering people the right to freely distribute copies and modified versions of a work with the stipulation that the same rights be preserved in derivative works down the line. Copyleft software licenses are considered protective or reciprocal, as contrasted with permissive free software licenses (Wikipedia).

l  Permissive license: Permissive licenses provide the maximum freedom to the immediate downstream developers (including the ability to use the open source code in a closed source project), whereas copyright licenses provide the maximum freedom to the end users. (What is copyleft? By Ben Cotton (2016), https://opensource.com/resources/what-is-copyleft)