I have to be honest and say that I didn't really learn a lot from the whole program, mostly because I had a fair amount of experience with many of the Things anyway. The frustration I experienced when things didn't work properly, or how I expected them to, was probably educational with relation to our patrons who claim to be "computer illiterate".
I did, however, get an alarmingly good sense of just how faddish the whole "2.0" phenomenon is becoming. The NSLA's discussion paper is another example of the infiltration. As someone who instinctively distrusts fads, I think that libraries should be cautious about jumping into these buzzword-oriented activities without thinking about a few things.
"Go where your users are" is an admirable sentiment, but what if our users don't want us there? Sorry, but people use things like MySpace and Facebook to connect with people, not with institutions. I've said it before and I'll say it again: corporate attempts to co-opt social networking technologies are doomed to fail. No one believes telemarketers are really concerned for your financial stability or the plight of the starving children in whatever third world country. They're out for your business, and are treated as such. Similarly, corporate newsletters and annual reports are about as interesting to read as the list of artificial colours and flavourings on a packet of lollies. Corporate or institutional blogs are just about as fascinating.
As far as I can work out, 2.0 is all about the individual and groups of individuals forming a community. If we really want to take advantage of this, we need to stop thinking of ourselves as employees of a library and think of ourselves as contractors for hire who get a retainer from a larger organisation. We need to connect with individuals as individuals, play to our strengths. Mind you, I am all in favour of being part of a larger organisation with its reputation and weight behind me. I don't particularly want all of our patrons to be able to email me personally or chat with me 24/7, to look at photos of my cat or holiday, to read what I read and know what books I own. Nor do I want to engage with them that way. I like the boundary between my professional life and my personal life, really—and I like to be able to choose when to cross that boundary and how far to go.
I think that we can use these tools to learn from each other as professionals, and the groups and individuals that have done so are great examples. I've mentioned a lot of them before, so won't go into it again. But that's what we should be concentrating on.
As far as the program goes, I have to say that I generally spent more than an hour a week doing the Things. Maybe I explored a little too much, maybe I spent too long writing up rants in my blog. But some weeks it really felt like a lot of pressure to get it all done. A more relaxed pace—say, one Thing a week except where some of the Things were really just different steps in a process (eg Things 2-4)—would have been better.
I also think that more guidance would be helpful. Everyone has different learning styles, so some might find it helpful to have more written instructions/screenshots. Others would probably benefit from a more workshoppy type thing, say an hour a week where a group of people get together and go through the Thing for that week; learning from each other and in a more social environment rather than following a set of instructions. I personally found the podcasts odious and didn't use them beyond the first exercise; if you've read my blog you'll probably understand why. I also found the patronising tone of "don't forget to give yourself a big pat on the back!" to be particularly annoying. What am I, six?
Finally, although I am all in favour of learning being fun, telling someone to go out and explore, play and generally have a good time does not necessarily mean they will. An undertone of "this is all amazingly fun and if you don't enjoy it or get it then you're just not hip enough/forward-thinking enough/participating in your own obsolescence" really doesn't help. And this tone is coming through pretty loud and clear through all the 2.0 propaganda, from the pundits in Thing 15 to the NSLA paper I linked to above. You will like this! You will have fun now! You are not good enough so you will now change! And above all, you will not be critical!
I never was very good at following instructions.
26 August 2007
22 August 2007
#22 ebooks
I've already ranted about my dislike of listening to people talk at me. I have now discovered a whole new circle of my private idea of hell: listening to a computer "read" a book to me. As horrible as the toffy English guy reading Conan Doyle was (I lasted about 20 seconds), he was way better than the American-inflected monotone of the computer attempting to read Middlemarch.
And what is it with the dead white men? I can understand the dead part, what with copyright law and all that kind of thing, but a bit more diversity would be nice.Three four women on their full list of computer-generated atrocities. Under-representation in artistic butchery! I shall launch a protest at once!
The whole exercise has made me feel extremely sympathetic towards blind and sight-impaired people, who must have to put up with a lot more Hal-speak. I think I'll have to have some carrots for dinner tonight.
Obligatory foray into library usefulness: in principle, useful, especially as an alternative to audiobooks, but until the quality improves to the point where one could listen without wanting to surgically remove one's eardrums, I can't see there being a lot of traffic.
As for the kids' books, which I can't see in detail without paying $8.95 for a month, a quick perusal of the title list leaves me thinking that maybe, just maybe, this would be slightly more popular if the most recent title wasn't published in 1929. No wonder Amazon gets more hits, with their evil, copyright-flouting "search inside this book" ways.
And what is it with the dead white men? I can understand the dead part, what with copyright law and all that kind of thing, but a bit more diversity would be nice.
The whole exercise has made me feel extremely sympathetic towards blind and sight-impaired people, who must have to put up with a lot more Hal-speak. I think I'll have to have some carrots for dinner tonight.
Obligatory foray into library usefulness: in principle, useful, especially as an alternative to audiobooks, but until the quality improves to the point where one could listen without wanting to surgically remove one's eardrums, I can't see there being a lot of traffic.
As for the kids' books, which I can't see in detail without paying $8.95 for a month, a quick perusal of the title list leaves me thinking that maybe, just maybe, this would be slightly more popular if the most recent title wasn't published in 1929. No wonder Amazon gets more hits, with their evil, copyright-flouting "search inside this book" ways.
21 August 2007
#20 In which I tube
I'm going to out myself.
This is not the first time I have used YouTube.
Yeah, I know you're all shocked. But I just couldn't stay in the closet any longer.
I have whiled away a lunch half hour by watching an old Twilight Zone episode. I have looked at quite a bit of footage of cats playing with printers, chasing bears up trees, that sort of thing. And don't get me started on the whole Mentos-Coke bottle symphony.
Yep. Good leisure activity, particularly if the clips are short and thus a lot less of a pain to download. Like this one, for example, which I've seen before but cropped up again when searching for "librarians". It always makes me laugh.
Educational? Erm, yes. I suppose it could be. But let's face it, this kind of thing is always going to be mostly about the entertainment value of it all.
[edit]
Just had to note that the "related" links work really well; they are responsible for me discovering the following gem, called "Night of the Living Dead Librarian", which had me laughing through my tea break. But it's serious, too! It predicts a possible future of libraries!
Okay...no, it's just stupidly funny, like most stuff on YouTube.
This is not the first time I have used YouTube.
Yeah, I know you're all shocked. But I just couldn't stay in the closet any longer.
I have whiled away a lunch half hour by watching an old Twilight Zone episode. I have looked at quite a bit of footage of cats playing with printers, chasing bears up trees, that sort of thing. And don't get me started on the whole Mentos-Coke bottle symphony.
Yep. Good leisure activity, particularly if the clips are short and thus a lot less of a pain to download. Like this one, for example, which I've seen before but cropped up again when searching for "librarians". It always makes me laugh.
Educational? Erm, yes. I suppose it could be. But let's face it, this kind of thing is always going to be mostly about the entertainment value of it all.
[edit]
Just had to note that the "related" links work really well; they are responsible for me discovering the following gem, called "Night of the Living Dead Librarian", which had me laughing through my tea break. But it's serious, too! It predicts a possible future of libraries!
Okay...no, it's just stupidly funny, like most stuff on YouTube.
18 August 2007
#21 invasion of the podcasts
I'm going out of order because I am STILL on the desk (I really hate weekend shifts sometimes, they just seem interminable) and it's pretty hard to look at YouTube videos on the desk. Will have to come back to that one later.
You might think podcasts are pretty hard to listen to on the desk. You would be right. Fortunately, I have no intention of actually listening to any podcasts. Here's the thing: there are few things I find more annoying than just sitting and listening to somebody talk at me. It's tolerable if there's something else I'm doing, like the dishes or possibly walking or a jigsaw puzzle or something. But I utterly detest being lectured at, and I am extremely unlikely to actually listen to something on a voluntary basis. Even a podcast of one of my favourite authors reading excerpts from his new book—nope, would rather wait till it comes out in print and read it myself. Even really interesting radio programs, like those on All In The Mind, will not inspire me to listen—either on the radio or as the podcast. Fortunately, they do have transcripts of the shows on All In The Mind, so I have duly added it to my Bloglines so at least I can get the reminder (if I remember to login to Bloglines) that there's been another show. However, Bloglines won't let me open up the link to the page, for some weird reason, so it's pretty frustrating.
Anyway, I did have a look at the various podcast search engines. Was not impressed with Podcast.net, looks very amateur. I liked both Podcast Alley and Yahoo Podcasts, both seem a bit slicker and have more features. I like the way you can find out a bit more about the podcast within the search results. Yahoo is good the way it automatically shows you the difference between a series about, say, libraries vs particular episodes that are about libraries. And both give you a link to the original website, which Podcast.net doesn't. So yes, if I ever need to find podcasts on behalf of a user, I now know my tools of choice.
As for how it could be used in the library setting, well, searching for libraries provides the clue that some libraries already are. Uncontrolled Vocabulary covers library issues, various other libraries have started up regular podcasts covering everything from information literacy to what's on to introductions to Second Life. It's one of those things that is obviously more useful for and interesting to people who either like to get information in an aural way or people with sight disabilities. But I think it really takes someone who enjoys that kind of thing to see all the possibilities, so I will leave it for someone else to develop.
You might think podcasts are pretty hard to listen to on the desk. You would be right. Fortunately, I have no intention of actually listening to any podcasts. Here's the thing: there are few things I find more annoying than just sitting and listening to somebody talk at me. It's tolerable if there's something else I'm doing, like the dishes or possibly walking or a jigsaw puzzle or something. But I utterly detest being lectured at, and I am extremely unlikely to actually listen to something on a voluntary basis. Even a podcast of one of my favourite authors reading excerpts from his new book—nope, would rather wait till it comes out in print and read it myself. Even really interesting radio programs, like those on All In The Mind, will not inspire me to listen—either on the radio or as the podcast. Fortunately, they do have transcripts of the shows on All In The Mind, so I have duly added it to my Bloglines so at least I can get the reminder (if I remember to login to Bloglines) that there's been another show. However, Bloglines won't let me open up the link to the page, for some weird reason, so it's pretty frustrating.
Anyway, I did have a look at the various podcast search engines. Was not impressed with Podcast.net, looks very amateur. I liked both Podcast Alley and Yahoo Podcasts, both seem a bit slicker and have more features. I like the way you can find out a bit more about the podcast within the search results. Yahoo is good the way it automatically shows you the difference between a series about, say, libraries vs particular episodes that are about libraries. And both give you a link to the original website, which Podcast.net doesn't. So yes, if I ever need to find podcasts on behalf of a user, I now know my tools of choice.
As for how it could be used in the library setting, well, searching for libraries provides the clue that some libraries already are. Uncontrolled Vocabulary covers library issues, various other libraries have started up regular podcasts covering everything from information literacy to what's on to introductions to Second Life. It's one of those things that is obviously more useful for and interesting to people who either like to get information in an aural way or people with sight disabilities. But I think it really takes someone who enjoys that kind of thing to see all the possibilities, so I will leave it for someone else to develop.
#19 Other applications
It's just as well that it's reasonably quiet today, or that I've had sufficient time between referring people to the book desk and telling them how to use the internet to experiment with some of the award-winning apps.
The first one I looked at was ColorBlender, which I think is really neat. It gives you an adjustable slider to control levels of red, blue and green so you can blend your own colours onscreen. It also generates a complementary palette. The nifty thing is the way it supplies the html code for each colour underneath, constantly changing as you adjust your sliders. Simple, elegant and useful—well, if you're a web designer, anyway, and are trying to come up with a colour scheme for your website that moves beyond the 216-colour palette (and can't remember all those pesky hex codes). You can also save your scheme (useful for sharing between multiple designers) and browse those that other people have created. Library usefulness? Not so much, unless you're a web designer.
Looked at a couple of other sites; felt that on the whole I missed the point of things like widgets and creating lists online, and that I've had enough of photo-sharing and retail type things already. I notice that Google Maps is in there, which I've used before and think is reasonably useful, though I vastly prefer Street Directory for Australian locations. This is really good, much better than the linked maps in the online White Pages. Street Directory is not only based on Melways and thus has really clear, easy-to-read maps, there's optional layers you can turn on and off to show houses for rent or sale and they've recently added in panoramas and photos, mostly of parks and such so far, but clearly they're working on lots of developments. It's a very nifty site, and incredibly useful perhaps not so much for the library itself, but certainly for a lot of library users.
I did like the looks of Last FM, but am discouraged from using it personally because I no longer have internet access at home and TSD are understandably not keen on us employees downloading lots of stuff. It would be neat if we ever had our music collection digitised, even if it was just the out-of-copyright stuff, to use a similar application to let people listen to our music and then find other things that were similar (all from within our collection). I think we're a ways off from that kind of thing, though.
Finally, à propos of nothing, one of my friends invited me to join Goodreads, a social book recommendation/review site which cosmetically looks like it must be related to LibraryThing. I haven't had a thorough explore, which I would want to do before signing up, but it looks like it could definitely be useful for accommodating user-generated comments on books—something we've talked about doing here. Sort of like a hybrid between Amazon and the book review wiki, with the whole social side of things enabling users to connect with each other as well.
The first one I looked at was ColorBlender, which I think is really neat. It gives you an adjustable slider to control levels of red, blue and green so you can blend your own colours onscreen. It also generates a complementary palette. The nifty thing is the way it supplies the html code for each colour underneath, constantly changing as you adjust your sliders. Simple, elegant and useful—well, if you're a web designer, anyway, and are trying to come up with a colour scheme for your website that moves beyond the 216-colour palette (and can't remember all those pesky hex codes). You can also save your scheme (useful for sharing between multiple designers) and browse those that other people have created. Library usefulness? Not so much, unless you're a web designer.
Looked at a couple of other sites; felt that on the whole I missed the point of things like widgets and creating lists online, and that I've had enough of photo-sharing and retail type things already. I notice that Google Maps is in there, which I've used before and think is reasonably useful, though I vastly prefer Street Directory for Australian locations. This is really good, much better than the linked maps in the online White Pages. Street Directory is not only based on Melways and thus has really clear, easy-to-read maps, there's optional layers you can turn on and off to show houses for rent or sale and they've recently added in panoramas and photos, mostly of parks and such so far, but clearly they're working on lots of developments. It's a very nifty site, and incredibly useful perhaps not so much for the library itself, but certainly for a lot of library users.
I did like the looks of Last FM, but am discouraged from using it personally because I no longer have internet access at home and TSD are understandably not keen on us employees downloading lots of stuff. It would be neat if we ever had our music collection digitised, even if it was just the out-of-copyright stuff, to use a similar application to let people listen to our music and then find other things that were similar (all from within our collection). I think we're a ways off from that kind of thing, though.
Finally, à propos of nothing, one of my friends invited me to join Goodreads, a social book recommendation/review site which cosmetically looks like it must be related to LibraryThing. I haven't had a thorough explore, which I would want to do before signing up, but it looks like it could definitely be useful for accommodating user-generated comments on books—something we've talked about doing here. Sort of like a hybrid between Amazon and the book review wiki, with the whole social side of things enabling users to connect with each other as well.
#18 Zoho
It didn't. It refused to recognise my username and password, even when I opened up another tab and logged into my journal using the selfsame rejected username and password.
Oh well.
Even more impressive is the fact that I have found Web 2.0 technology that seems incredibly useful! Mind you, I actually found out about Zoho and some of the other gadgets last year or the year before as a way around the perennial complaint from our users that they can't word-process because we don't have Word installed on our computers. I think I found Zoho because I felt sorry for one of them. I have found that I don't really broadcast its existence to all and sundry, however, for fear that our already chronic problem with people spending far too long glued to the computer screen would become even worse.
Anyway, this is a Web 2.0 application that seems really useful. It offers the online collaboration that I thought was nifty with a Wiki, while also offering much simpler and more intuitive formatting, etc. Document sharing would be really easy, and if you don't want to share, it's just a good way of keeping stuff you need to use all the time in a place that you can access from anywhere with an internet connection. Kind of like a remote backup server for your essential documents. Not sure you'd want to put up something terribly private or personal.
I will probably use it a bit more (now that I've got round to signing up) for creating documents that I can port between my desk and the reference desks. I've already used it to compose an email that I'll be sending out later - its interface is a lot nicer than that of the web-based Lotus, which is way clunky.
And just because I could, I also created my own wiki. I have no plans to really develop it, but I wanted to play around with it and see how easy it was. I reckon it's way easier than the software the PBMLCLCBCL (or whatever the acronym is) used. Though I suppose I already know enough html to be able to put in links, if I didn't it might be more of a challenge.
About my only gripe (come on, you know I had to have one) is that occasionally the cursor seems to do odd things. But it's a very minor gripe. I'm very impressed, and that's hard to do!
Still impressed, but couldn't get that whole blog feature to work. Honestly though, I can't see that it will matter much as if I want to keep posting to a blog, I'm perfectly happy to log into the blog and compose it on that software.
17 August 2007
Wikis and accuracy
Just thought this was rather timely news in Wiki Week of Learning 2.0 and thus would share.
Virgil Griffith, an almost-grad student at CalTech, has developed a tool that tracks down the IP addresses of people who edit Wikipedia entries. Apparently the tool has already shown up some unsurprising biases, such as Wal-Mart editing entries on Wal-Mart, someone from Diebold (manufacturer of allegedly faulty voting machines in the US) editing the entry about their allegedly faulty machines, the CIA edited entries about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. PCWorld has a reasonably comprehensive report here. And according to the prestigious blog The Huffington Post, Fox News have been doing the same thing.
This doesn't really change my overall opinion of Wikipedia as an information source: it can be a useful place to start getting an overview of things, but you can't necessarily trust it, particularly on political issues or anything controversial, because you don't know who's edited what or what their biases are.
The thing is, this isn't that much different from traditional forms of publishing. Publishers of newspapers, books, encyclopedias and journals may all have their biases, from an organisational level down to particular columnists or contributors. Part of becoming a good researcher is learning how to evaluate the accuracy and bias of information, how to read between the lines and detect an agenda or predisposition, to evaluate based on whether authors attempt to present both sides of an argument or admit conflicts of interest. In some ways, Wikipedia may actually be an improvement because at least tools like Griffith's offer a modicum of transparency, for those who care to pursue it.
And that has always been the case—that misinformation propagates because people don't consider the source, they don't consider issues of bias or accuracy, they don't always question what they read or are told. From Shakespeare's slandering of Richard III to the Tonypandy Riot of 1910 to one of my personal favourites, the urban legend about people swallowing eight spiders in their sleep every year (there's a great story about the origin of that particular myth), the spread of false information shows that a convincing untruth, especially if it captures the imagination, will survive longer than the truth.
Question everything. Assume nothing. Use Wikipedia for what it's worth. But boycott Fox News.
Virgil Griffith, an almost-grad student at CalTech, has developed a tool that tracks down the IP addresses of people who edit Wikipedia entries. Apparently the tool has already shown up some unsurprising biases, such as Wal-Mart editing entries on Wal-Mart, someone from Diebold (manufacturer of allegedly faulty voting machines in the US) editing the entry about their allegedly faulty machines, the CIA edited entries about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. PCWorld has a reasonably comprehensive report here. And according to the prestigious blog The Huffington Post, Fox News have been doing the same thing.
This doesn't really change my overall opinion of Wikipedia as an information source: it can be a useful place to start getting an overview of things, but you can't necessarily trust it, particularly on political issues or anything controversial, because you don't know who's edited what or what their biases are.
The thing is, this isn't that much different from traditional forms of publishing. Publishers of newspapers, books, encyclopedias and journals may all have their biases, from an organisational level down to particular columnists or contributors. Part of becoming a good researcher is learning how to evaluate the accuracy and bias of information, how to read between the lines and detect an agenda or predisposition, to evaluate based on whether authors attempt to present both sides of an argument or admit conflicts of interest. In some ways, Wikipedia may actually be an improvement because at least tools like Griffith's offer a modicum of transparency, for those who care to pursue it.
And that has always been the case—that misinformation propagates because people don't consider the source, they don't consider issues of bias or accuracy, they don't always question what they read or are told. From Shakespeare's slandering of Richard III to the Tonypandy Riot of 1910 to one of my personal favourites, the urban legend about people swallowing eight spiders in their sleep every year (there's a great story about the origin of that particular myth), the spread of false information shows that a convincing untruth, especially if it captures the imagination, will survive longer than the truth.
Question everything. Assume nothing. Use Wikipedia for what it's worth. But boycott Fox News.
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