Just a minute

The sheer volume of content being created and posted to the web is overwhelming. In a post  brought to my attention today, Kelly Hodgkins claims that if we paused the web for 60 seconds we would miss the birth of more than 1500 new blog posts, almost 100,000 new tweets, 20,000 posts on Tumblr, 600 new videos (more than 24 hours) uploaded to YouTube and at least 12,000 new ads on Craigslist. Such a claim must also take into account that much of this content will be quite worthless to anyone but the person uploading it, of which more later. These statistics also fail to take into account all the other content that is being generated on, for example Flickr (more than 3000 images each minute), Wikipedia, Facebook (3 billion photos and 20 million videos uploaded every month), Myspace, Wiktionary, Vimeo, Picasa and innumerable other user generated content repositories. Many similar web user statistics can be found on the Royal Pingdom website. Be warned though that all web statistics, particularly those related to social media, go quickly out of date because what we are talking about here is exponential. We are overwhelmed by a tsunami of content on the web, and just trying to find what we need, even with the most intelligent search engines, can be compared to trying to take a drink from the nozzle of a pressure hose.

Volume of content is not the only issue. We are (and should be) increasingly concerned about the quality of content we find on the web. No teacher worth their salt would play young children a video they hadn't previously screened and vetted for suitability. That would be courting disaster. One wag at the foot of Hodgkins's web stats blogpost left a comment that in 60 seconds there would also be 800 hours of porn downloaded and at least 35,000 Twitter and Facebook posts about Justin Bieber. There is however, no indication if he was speaking as one of the main contributors to these statistics. Yes, we are all aware of the large amount of dross that sits on the web, but the most insidious and potentially the most dangerous, is content that is almost accurate, or blatantly wrong but believable. How do we filter out content that is good from content that is bad? More importantly, how do we educate students into being prudent about what sites they obtain their content from? How can we know that content is safe, appropriate, accurate and up to date?

Those and associated questions will be the focus for the Concede User Generated Conference that takes place on 14th September in Oiera, Portugal as a part of the EFQUEL Innovation  Forum (September 14-16). The Concede Project, which has concerned itself with investigating the quality of user generated content in higher education over the last 2 years, will host the event, and is giving away a number of all expenses paid delegate places to those who wish to present a paper at the event. For full details on how to apply for free all expense paid place, visit the Concede Website and follow application instructions.

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Just a minute by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.