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The epistemic impact of the web
Knowledge acquisition on the Web
The following anecdote shows the growing importance of the Web in Knowledge acquisition. In his personal homepage, the sociologist Howard Gardner devotes a page to the numerous students that e-mail him in the hope to get some help for writing their dissertations. Howard Gardner writes:
Many of you tell me that you have to 'write a paper' about […] my 'theory of labeling'. You […] tell me that you have not been able 'to find anything about it' on the Internet and I think that's correct, there isn't anything on the Internet about it. I said everything I have to say about labeling theory in my book, Outsiders. This book is available in most university and college libraries and is almost certainly in your library if your teacher has told you to write about it. http://home.earhlink.net/~hsbecker/students.htm∞
The behaviour of these American students may seem ridiculous to some of us: Without thinking about going to the library in order to have a look at the referenced books, these students directly mail the author of the theory on which bears their dissertation. In fact, what is revealing is that these students do not understand that an important scientific notion could have no documents explaining it on the Web. Finding no information on the Web, they then turn to another strategy for knowledge acquisition: the mail, which is yet another side of the Internet. The classical strategy that goes without saying for most of us - going to the library - is far from obvious for them. In addition, the fact that the importance of a notion is not reflected on the structure of the Web is not easily conceivable and may be destabilising. It is doubtless that even if their research strategies become more fine-grained, the Web will remain at the centre of it. Thus, the importance provided to a scientific development or any theoretical development will depend more and more on its accessibility on the Web.
Teaching through the Internet
Teaching through the Internet is now more and more used. Universties wich provide distant learning develop strategies and techniques for using the full pedagogical power that the Internet can provide.
The Internet, and the Web in particular, now set new challenges for pedagogy and education theories.
Democratisation of Knowledge
It is widely assumed that the Web contributes to the democratisation of knowledge. Yet, the extent to which it is actually the case still need to be measured. The Web can allow democratising scientific knowledge in two ways:
Decentralising scientific resources
Scientific resources are expensive. This renders scientific research highly dependent of the distribution of richness. As a consequence, scientific knowledge is centralised in very few research institutions, mostly prestigious western universities and research centres. One of the fortunate consequences of the Web is that it significantly lowers the cost of some major kinds of scientific resource: publications, scientific software, organised data, ...
Research question: To what extent does the Web actually allow a redistribution of scientific resources within the research community?
Bridging the divide between Science and Society
While the access to scientific knowledge is, in the traditional system, given to only a small class of selected people, the Internet a priori allows laymen to access online scientific resources.
Research question:To what extent does the Web contribute to lessen the divide between Science and Society?
Feminist Epistemology has argued that the democratisation of knowledge is valuable both per se and for the development of scientific knowledge. If so, then one should wonder which is the policy concerning the Web that will actually favour the democratisation of knowledge.
Economic and political stakes of the digitalisation and accessibility of scientific written resources;
Free-access theory.