I would like to take this time to announce the creation of my sister’s blog, which has been created because she has just started library school at FIS, and one of her instructors is using blogs for class. So mark down one more student-librarian blogger; I can’t wait to see what she has to say.
Also, apparently in conjunction with the creation of my sister’s blog, my nephew has a blog now too. This one has nothing to do with FIS, but is entertaining nonetheless.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about faculty status and librarians. I learned that academic librarians sometimes had faculty status (and, of course, tenure) while I was in library school, when I took a course on academic libraries. Until that moment it never once occurred to me that this might be the case. While librarians are employed by universities much like instructors with doctorates are, as far as I understood it the similarity ended there.
I had mixed feelings about this at first, all entirely personal. I had left the academic life when I went to library school, having very painfully dropped out of a phd program. I thought I was leaving those issues behind me. I didn’t think I would ever have to come before the scrutiny of something like a tenure review committee, or be expected to do research and publish for my dinner. When I decided to go to library school I thought I was making a determined step away from including these elements in my professional life. (Whether they were part of my personal life was another story, of course.) So I had two somewhat contradictory feelings upon learning that academic librarians often have faculty status; the first was whooohoooo fast track, baby, I’m right back where I thought I would be! and the second was oh dear god the stress and pressure is following me everywhere. Now that I understand and accept the nature of faculty status for librarians, I’m more or less at peace with it. But I find myself constantly re-encountering the debate in my daily work.
Much as I had no real sense of what kind of education librarians had before I decided to become one, my experience is that most faculty (including friends of mine) are in much the same boat. Gloria Leckie and Anne Fullerton beautifully illustrate the stark differences between what librarians think they’re doing in their work and what faculty think they’re accomplishing in theirs in their co-written article The roles of academic librarians in fostering a pedagogy for Information Literacy. The teaching faculty are here for the pain/joy of their discipline; librarians are here with a strong service ethic and a big dose of 19th century information organizational principles. We’re all in the same big happy union. So what does that mean? Do we want to be more like the teaching faculty? Do we want them to see us on the same footing as they see their colleagues?
And that’s the crux of it, always. We want the teaching faculty (and by this I mean anyone from the rank of associate professor on up) to see us as their equals, as comrades-in-arms in the daily battle to produce good scholarship, excellent graduates, and better the general welfare of our shared institution and Knowledge in general. We want a standing invitation to the faculty club. We don’t want to be seen as the help.
So how do we accomplish this?
I have no good answers for this question yet. I just got here, I’m still removing the packing material from my office. But what I have noticed is this: no faculty expect a librarian to be as well-educated as she is. Case in point: when a faculty member came to visit me for some help, she expected us to have one degree apiece. Of course, we have three piece. It was a friendly conversation with lots of personal curiosity and sharing of experiences, but we all felt it in that moment; librarians are extremely well-educated people, and people, even faculty, tend to not expect that. Not over-educated, I would say, but far more knowledgeable about subject-specific academic life than most people give us credit for. And I’m getting used to that look, too, the one that says, oh, wow, you’re a real academic too!
What I’ve noticed most of all is how my interactions with people at the university generally change once we get around to personal histories. Partly I think this is true in the same way it would be true with anyone you meet; the more detail you give about yourself in context, the better the conversation tends to go. You get to know each other. But when people find out that I am a Harvard graduate and a former PhD student at the self-same institution at which we find ourselves so happily employed, the conversation changes. I am at least nominally part of the pack. I know how it feels to be confronted with those long reading lists, gruelling seminars, the struggle of academic administration from the other side. I speak the language.
My friend Elizabeth saw it coming long before I did. She invited me to have coffee with her and a new faculty member one day last year, for a first time meet-and-greet with someone from the history department. She said she saw the moment the conversation turned; the language changed, the playing field became distinctly disciplinary, we had recognized each other as comrades. Comrades-in-arms, on the same side, coming from the same general place.
I’ve been conflicted about this, too. I have never been keen on flashing degrees around. I want to be respected for the way I present myself and what I have to say, not the pedigree of my degrees. And yet, this is the kind of connection and respect we’re looking for as librarians. Don’t we want to be seen as one of the pack with these people? Don’t we want them to understand that we get where they’re coming from, we know what sorts of obstacles tend to get in their way, and we understand that sometimes academic work gets really really boring? Who else can you admit that to but one of your own?
When I debrief myself on my meetings with faculty I find I have a lot to consider about what it is I’ve said. As I say, I’m still so new I still have that new-car smell floating around me, and to date all of my interactions with faculty have been unerringly positive. But I notice a pattern in the conversations. We’re never just talking about the matter at hand; it seems impossible to stay entirely on point. The conversations I’ve had with faculty range over the events of the day and their implications in theological, political, racial, feminist, or nationalist terms; the technology I’m recommending and its natural history in the earliest forms of education (generally lead by the faculty member him/herself), and so forth. Sometimes I feel like this might all seem like a waste of our time, just a happy chat, but something deep inside me insists that it’s not.
I’ve spoken before about the problems librarians face when they focus on the tools and only the tools; when people consider us only capable of parsing Boolean and giving instructions on how to use the library catalogue, we project a very surface level of our understanding. If we don’t talk concepts, we don’t get respected as people who get concepts. So when I’m talking to faculty, I get meta really fast. We talk about end goals and possibility; marginality and public notebooks; academia writ large and moving toward a lofty goal. The fact that I can get us to point A to point B in technical terms is the smallest part of the conversation. I don’t do this on purpose, with the express goal of gaining a particular kind of respect, but I do it all the same. I can only imagine it has something to do with the long hours I’ve spent contemplating not just the lot of librarians, but also what it is I want to spend my time doing and talking about. Since I’ve gained all my technological knowledge in a humanities environment, maybe I’ve just been trained to think about it concepts-first, pedantic details later. But I’m drawn to thinking about this approach within the profession as well. Does this serve me well? So far so good.
I realize I’m at a huge advantage, given my background and my position. A librarian interested in subject-specific metadata knows a lot, and I have nothing but respect for these people. But I can easily imagine how a sociology metadata expert would be seen by a sociologist; what, you think you know more about my field than I do? When I think about the relationship in these terms it seems impossibly antagonistic. But as an Instructional Technology librarian, I’m generally going in to these meetings as the person bringing knowledge on something sociologists don’t know anything about and know they’re not expected to be experts on; I bring them expertise they aren’t expected to have. My entry into the departments is possibly the least threatening around. The more threatened people feel by technology, the more pleased they are to see someone who can help them out with it.
So what’s most important in creating a good working relationship with departments and individual faculty members? The degrees on our business cards? Our attitudes toward them and their work? Our attitude toward our own work and its value? What we bring to the table in the most practical of terms? I suppose it’s got to be a combination of all of these things, but I’m still working on the fine-tuning.
Via my friend June, Women don’t do tech:
Would you rip files at a high or low bit-rate? Do you prefer AAC, WMA or MP3? If you are completely baffled by these questions, you are probably a woman.
You wanna come here and say that, buster?
I find this kind of reportage odd and appalling, since this is completely not my experience of the internet. Many of the most technology-forward people I know are women. Granted, I tend to move in woman-positive spaces, but even so; there’s a tone to this article that rubs me the wrong way. There’s been lots of stats about how more and more women are using the internet, and how they use it differently than men; framing women as tech-idiots is really insulting.
Xfm DJ Lauren Laverne thinks it’s a shame that women aren’t getting stuck in. “I think a lot of girls are nervous that downloading will be too complicated for them,” she says.
Well, you know, math is hard.
Michael Brook, acting editor of Stuff, a gadget magazine that has a 95 per cent male readership, says that, like Marshall, most women are attracted only to new bits of kit that look nice and serve a purpose.
“Traditionally, technology is a male environment,” he says. “Women are less patient than men: they haven’t got the time or the inclination to read a 90-page manual and work out how to operate a camera or DVD player. They want instant gratification – simple, user-friendly, intuitive technology that they can take out of the box and use immediately. They lose interest if it doesn’t work immediately, whereas men view sussing out a new gadget as a challenge. It’s that whole toolshed tradition of taking something apart to see how it works.”
Don’t you love it when editors of magazine spouts essentialist claptrap to make up for the fact that they have yet to attract a key demographic to their product? Good times, good times.
I love Google. First and foremost, the best search engine the internet has yet seen (regardless of what Yahoo says), innovative email, and now, a Jabber engine. (Thanks to Catspaw for getting me online before the actual release (only a few minutes before, but still.)
It works with ichat, if you’re a mac user. See you on Google talk! (I’m rmazar@gmail, FYI.)
To me, the power of blogging is obvious. It was obvious the first time I started a blog back in the old days, back before comments and tracebacks and technorati. The simple act of public reflection seemed so revolutionary then, and the surprising thing to me is that it keeps being revolutionary now, six years later.
I thought all the people who were going to be got on the bandwagon back when the first blogathon kept us posting through the night. It felt then like we had hit market saturation, but clearly I had no idea. Because today I feel like we’re in a totally new blogworld.
There are lots of things that should have clued me in to this along the way. Podcasting, for instance. The sheer rise in the numbers of blogs. The fact that the word gets mentioned in the mainstream media so often you’d think we’re in their employ. But what really drove it home for me was the explosion of weblogs around the CBC lock out.
The background: The CBC is Canada’s national broadcaster. It is, essentially, a government service, with a mandate to provide news and programming to every region in the country. In spite of the government funding (and perhaps because of it), the CBC provides famously good, critical news and commentary. The CBC is our insurance that we won’t be swamped with American programming and news, which, if you look at the film industry, is perilously close to being a reality otherwise.
So the CBC management has locked out the union. The staff is all on the picket lines. In other times, what we would know would be only what the official CBC brass want us to know. But the time is now, and the CBC staff understands the power that the internet represents.
CBC Unplugged is another voice on the whole experience, and tonight (on my nice long walk out along the credit river), I listened to their first long podcast, created out of Vancouver. (I highly recommend it: you can download it here, or subscribe to the feed via itunes. I recommend it if you’re Canadian, or if you’re interested in labour politics in any way.) This is amazing; I’m learning things about this dispute I don’t think I would ever have had access to otherwise. Management has shut down staff email addresses. They talk about a “labour disruption” when it’s actually a lock out, they barred their employees from entering the building. They forced them out on strike. I got to think about this experience from their point of view; Bill Richardson talks about what it’s like to hear his own voice from the archives filling air time, as if he himself (his former self, the part already paid for by the CBC) is a scab. This is amazing.
They can bar access to one means of production, but the world is a slightly different shape these days. People can’t be silenced anymore.
Partly I feel like the right audience for these stories and rants and political outpourings, and partly I feel like a spectator. Part of what these blogs and these podcasts are doing is tying together a diverse and disparate staff. One of the podcasters says that it’s nice to see what’s going on in other cities through the photo blogs; she gets tired of walking around the same block over and over in Vancouver, but she can see that they’re doing that very same thing in Toronto. This is a new kind of solidarity, and I can only applaud the CBC staff’s thoughtful and conscious use of technology. The blogs give them up to the minute communication (audio, visual, text, emotion, politics, ideas, words, slogans) with each other as well as with their audience. The podcasts allow them to derail the “official” line on what’s going on, to put their voices back out there after they’ve been forcibly removed. They are speaking directly to us through every means they can, and they are showcasing not only their own resourcefulness, but also the power of the technologies their using to change the nature of every form of communication, including the managerial one. They even suggest that the blogs are even one way of communicating across the sides of this lock out: staff are reading the blogs of managers, managers are reading the blogs of staff. I don’t know that there’s any kind of precedent for something like this.
All of this has made at least one thing very clear to me; we’re not talking about information technology. We’re talking about communication technology. And that can make all the difference in the world.
I was watching CBC television some weeks ago now when I was visiting my parents, and they were talking briefly about how some cities in the US had been getting some CBC programs, but that some changes and management decisions meant they wouldn’t see them anymore. So the CBC played a bunch of video letters from American viewers sorry to see the CBC go. It was actually quite heart-wrenching, the way these pleas were framed; not in terms of “but I love that show!” but more like, “this is the only news source I feel I can trust, please don’t take it away.” And as the piece on the American viewers ended, the voiceover noted,
“We’re working on ways to keep bringing that programming to our American viewers.”
That struck me. Here we have this well-paid staff of broadcasters who do their work (mostly) regardless of how many viewers or listeners they have. They have a national mandate to broadcast. Does it matter if Americans are listening to it? Not hardly. This is like the definition of art; you do it for the sake of it, because it’s beautiful, because it brings you joy, not because it’s the popular thing to do. I know it’s idealistic, but it’s so amazing to watch it happen. This isn’t about money, this is about doing something great, and truly worthwhile, about connecting Canadians, and it’s a service that’s truly loved.
How political it is, radio. How political podcasts are, the internet is as a whole. Getting the message out in whatever way you can, that’s power.
So I’m not even surprised that CBC employees are still broadcasting while on the picket line. Talk about taking back the means of production!
From Ida takes Tea: why not to use blogs as e-portfolios:
The persistence of blogs (via permalinks, trackbacks etc, to say nothing of the recently-sued Wayback Machine) is at odds with the desire to create a personal repository that can be selectively shared and edited, over time.
Catherine has more to say that this snippet, but this snippet sums up an important piece of her issueswith the idea of blogs as portfolios. Put it out there and it’s out there for good. All data is ahistorical, existing right now even though it may have been created 6 years before. Students are not ahistorical; we need a system that respects the chronological growth of the student’s learning.
I actually found this argument really hard to wrap my brain around. I don’t know why the internet would seem more ahistorical than any other document. Manuscripts from the 14th century still exist, and I’ve even seen and held a few of them. The fact that they exist in the now, that I can pull them out and flip through them, does not convince me that they are of the now. Serial literature is the same way; sure, it might have just come into my hands, but I still look at the date on it. It makes a difference to me if the paper is today’s or one from last week. I see absolutely no difference between that and online publication.
This critcism feels as if it comes from a place without any online information literacy. The internet is full of documents, some of them old and some of the new. There are ways to date an online document, from clues as hazy as the design and layout of the page to as concrete as how many dead links a page contains, or the copyright or ‘last edited’ date. The same skills we teach students about information literacy apply here; does the content tell us anything about the age of the document? Is it full of references to something terrible that happened to the World Trade Center yesterday? “Yesterday” is a subjective term, and in a world where every post is written in the now, maybe this is just something you get used to over time. Diaries tend not to be retrospective of themselves; they are forever reflecting on now as if, well, it’s going on right now.
And actually, the fact that this criticism is being leveled at blogs in particular strikes me as odd. If anything goes out of its way to historicize web documents, blogs do. They are archived by day month and year, they are signed and timestamped. Most blogging software allows for some context for blogs, showing you a calendar and links to the post that came before and after the post you’re reading. Additionally, posts on blogs that are a part of a larger community also come with comments affixed, also time- and date-stamped. So, were I to pull up some posts from 1999, I would see, constantly, that it’s 1999. The comments may give me a sense even of how long that particular conversation went on. The post may be written with a sense of immediacy, but I have every chance to witness its context, its datedness. No document exists in a vacuum, and that’s just as true of online documents as of any other.
To turn this debate around a bit: were it possible for students to submit work to a journal and have it published, should we discourage that as well? After all:
persistence creates the illusion of fixed identity, whereas higher education explicitly conceptualises its mission as formative and processual: we believe that students are shaped, and we want them to be so shaped, by their experience of participating in a learning community.
If persistence disrupts that important process, should we disallow publication altogether? Does the requirement of faculty to publish diminish their ability to be formed by their work, to engage in a process of learning? Does hard paper publication prevent us from being shaped by the experience of participating in any learning community?
Or does publication (in any context) allow students the opportunity to engage in participatory learning? Doesn’t putting something out there allow us to grow while at the same time reflecting the benchmarks of our learning process? Why would a persistent record of that process necessarily be bad? To drag this out to an illogical conclusion, should we suggest that students not speak in class, for fear that they would express an idea that, in a few weeks time, they might think better of? Does student participation in any context limit who a student is by putting unformed pieces of them before the eyes of others?
The key to all of this is context. Something a bit newer in the blog world is the possibility of tagging and categories, and I think that this simple classification method bears mentioning in this debate. While Catherine sees no value in the persistence of blogs to education, doesn’t one old blogged idea now sit within a category of similar ideas, organized chronologically, so that the history of that idea can now be easily traced, with the emphasis placed on the most recent addition? Isn’t that even a better and easier historicity than, say, a paper publication? Or a conference contibution?
All that aside, I get the general argument. At its heart it’s an ethical question: should we be asking students to create a web presence that will be with them for life? This may not be their finest hour. Perhaps at some point later on in life they will want to create a new web presence, and they will have to be dodging the one we forced them to create.
Of course, this is a purely intellectual debate, based entirely on one assumption: blogs must be public. Blogs must be googled, tracebacked, ranked on Technorati, traded on blogshares, and tracked on the way back machine.
There is nothing about the structure or features of blogs that require them to be public. In fact, many of livejournal‘s 8 million blogs are entirely locked to the public. The posts are never found on the wayback machine, Google never peeks in; the posts exist only to the people allowed to see it.
As far as I’m concerned, educational blogs should follow Livejournal’s lead. I know there are educational blogging projects in the UK following that precise route. For an educational blog mandated by schoolwork, there should be multiple options: visible only to you; visible only to your instructor/TAs; visible only to your instructor, guest lecturers, librarians, and your classmates; visible to your friends at the school as you choose them, but to no one else; visible to anyone at the school; and visible to the whole world.
There is absolutely no technical reason why a student shouldn’t have complete control over how their e-presence is created. None of this precludes the use of blogs as educational tools or as e-portfolios. Google and the way back machine should not be figuring into the use of blogs in the classroom anymore than Old Navy and the Gap should. They exist, they’re out there, they’re ubiquitous; but we don’t need to invite them in.
The argument is often made that the public nature of blogs is an educational bonus. Putting your ideas out there for the wild internet to see means you may attract the interest of just about anyone, and you may benefit from their comments and questions. I know lots of people who will make the argument that class work should be available to all and sundry for pedagogical reasons. Since students own the copyright to their own work (including everything they create at the request of the professor and hand in), I think they shouldn’t be asked to put that work in the public eye, but that’s a conversation to have in class #1. There’s no reason why we can’t moderate the degree of “public” that students have to deal with, let them decide what they want to add to the public record and what they want to keep ephemeral.
I get frustrated by criticisms that are hinged on the limitations of one particular version of a technology. One of the best things that can happen to anyone is to learn enough about technology to realize that no interface is unchangeable. Everything can be changed, fixed, transmuted. If something is getting in your way, well just change it.
That’s what I love about the internet. Infinite possibility.
I’ve been reading a tiny bit recently about something called the ignorance premium, being the price you pay for not knowing better. When you slap down an extra 200 bucks for one product when a cheaper one would have worked just as well, but you didn’t know about it. The general idea here is that we’re prisoners to the people who have the cash to flood the world with slick marketing, because we don’t bother to learn about all our options before opening our wallets. While you can pay more to get somewhere faster by buying a car rather than using public transit, we can also pay more to stay ignorant.
This criticism has been pulled out in response to those of us who own ipods. Because ipods aren’t cheap, and there are cheaper mp3 players out there.
Now, no one has ever questioned my reasons for owning an ipod over any other mp3 player. Nor has anyone ever called me a sheep for buying one. As far as I’m concerned, there are two kinds of people in the world; people who want an mp3 player, and people who don’t. (I’m in the former category, and my sister is in the latter.) But among the people who want an mp3 player, there are gradations and variations. There are the runners, who have specific needs. There are the people who are completely satisfied with the idea of basically listening to one cd at a time, and only need 20 or 30 songs. And then there’s the people like me, who will really only be happy if they can have a complete mirror image of their computer’s mp3 archive in their pocket. And for those people, only a true ipod will do. When you’re looking at that much storage, you need an expensive machine. And if you’re like me, having something attractive, something you can just fall down and love, is value in and of itself. As I say, I’ve never been asked to justify my ipod, but I’m ready to do it. I know there are other players out there, but my decision is purposeful.
What the “ignorance premium” people tend to assume is that design is meaningless. Design is just pretty, not function. If something is ugly and clunky but is capable of the same thing as something pretty and sleek, they’re technically equal. But this simply isn’t true. All this shows is that there’s a segment of people in the world who don’t think that design, look & feel, has a place in the world. But those design elements are actually information bearing, like a form of scaffolding. Let’s presume that we have X amount of time in our lives to spend understanding a concept, or completing a task. With bad design, where we spend significant time learning how to do something, we are essentially wasting time with bad design. Good design, that is pretty, information bearing, and helps us to move on to more intellectual pursuits than figuring out how to play one stupid song, actually lets us reach greater heights.
That said, I have argued the ignorance premium thesis before. Mostly when it comes to non-computer people buying computers. What, you say all you’re going to do is send email and look at the internet from time to time? Well, heck, you’d better get the BEST computer possible, better get, for instance, a powerbook.* We all know that computing technology changes to fast, you’d better get the best one first, not something middling. Middling computers will be out of date and useless in a matter of weeks, right? I know people, good people, smart people, who buy (very very expensive!) powerbooks on this presumption. When what they really need is the powerful, flexible, and extremely wonderful ibook. Sure, it’s less expensive. But it’s so much more than you’ll ever need.
I often get frustrated by what happens to people who are afraid of computers. When they deal with computer people, they can get so screwed over, all because of that ignorance premium.
We’ve spent a good deal of time at work lately talking about “technological literacy” and what that means. If we’ve got a grip on “information literacy”, surely “technological literacy” would be easier to define. More and more I feel myself leaning toward defining technological literacy as breaking down those fear barriers that people have, and turning computers into just another tool we use, like pens and radios and walkmans. We’re not afraid of these things; we’re not afraid to look at the specs and talk about what we really need from them, and be able to distinguish between “what I think I need” and “what I happen to want”. Information literacy has broken away from its tool-based roots (how to use X database, how to use a library catalogue) and into the more broader, conceptual level (what makes a good source for this paper? who can I trust?), and technological literacy needs to make that leap too. Maybe a technologically literate person can distinguish between the design that is functional and design that provides information, knows how to get help within a program, understands the basic principles that underlie all software, and can get to work using a piece of software between 15 and 20 minutes after first opening it. It’s not about the software itself, it’s about getting to know how software tends to work. Right?
So that way, if we’re all technologically literate, we can just buy our ipods without people calling us sheep.
* I ‘m using Mac examples here because that’s what I know best. I know powerbooks are great computers, but they’re more high end than most people would ever even think about needing, is all I’m saying.
One to grow on from Educause:
Once while delivering a paper at a conference of online educators, I was challenged by a participant who thought my online course (being projected onto a screen) was “heavy on the text.” Upon learning that the questioner’s field was American literature, I asked him if he thought Moby-Dick was “heavy on the text.” If the work is compelling, the medium disappears and the experience becomes actual.
While we often get mired in talking about how to get the flashiest interface, the most audio/video, the fanciest graphics, we seem to forget this one very simple point. So we should be focusing on making the work compelling rather than making the interface exciting. Which makes online instruction absolutely no different from face-to-face instruction.
Today I believe that the internet was created specifically to enable this guy. A description of this link’s content:
The complete soundtrack to Super Mario World, covered by one man using dozens of instruments. Roughly in game order, faithful to the originals, with some bizarre artistic license thrown around. A private hobby made public.
All hail. The man is a genius.
You can now post to a Blogger blog from Word.
Seriously, I think this is the single coolest thing I’ve seen all week. (I see a lot of cool things in the course of a week, see.) Having spent a wee bit of time helping people who are afraid of computers move into the world of the internet, there are two things I’ve discovered that people feel most readily comfortable with; Word and email. WordPress lets you post to your blog by emailing it; Blogger lets you post to your blog from Word. I know it seems lame to the more technologically engaged, but it sounds like a godsend to me. Now you can get people blogging by telling them to just write up their thoughts in Word. Now, if we could get a hack of that plugin and get it working with a few other (open source) platforms, we’d be good to go. And as I spent the morning thinking about enterprise level content management systems, the idea of Word-to-database content creation makes my toes tingle.
What’s on my ipod this week: Radio Open Source with the wonderful Chris Lydon. I used to listen to this guy every morning when I was living in Boston, and I missed his witty repartee once I got home. And now he’s podcasting these amazing hour-long shows. Personal favourites (so far): Fan Fiction, a truly genius interpretation of this truly postmodern art form; Hyperlocal Journalism, which inspires me to think about getting some hyperlocalness going on in Mississauga, a town that needs it like no other. Next on the playlist for me: Literature 2.0.
Disappointment of the week: the total lack of This American Life podcasts. Shame, that.
In the news: you can now run Mac OS X on a PC. I realize as a mac devotee I should be sad (or at least upset in some way) about this. But I’m not. It’s wrong to use pirated software, yes I know, but I actually feel badly for all those Windows users in the world. They really should have access to such a whitehot operating system. I mean, have you SEEN dashboard? If only Tiger had a built-in camtasia feature, I would upload you a .mov of a dashboard application entering the fray; the whole screen looks like a gentle pool of water. The app sort of surfs on to the screen. Sweet. And as for hardware, I like my mac hardware. It was worth the $$. The advantage I’m seeing to PCs running OS X is that there will be more and more fun software that’s cross-platform. Whee!
And one last goodie: context is everything. This link shows you how the context you see around you had more impact on what you actually perceive than you can possibly imagine. Check it out. (Via June. Thanks, June!)
Okay, CBC. It’s been long enough. Really. The first fifteen minutes of suspended programming was enough for me, and now on day two it’s starting to cause me physical pain.
GIVE ME BACK MY CBC!
I saw the Cites and Insight thing this morning and laughed a little nervously. It’s sort of amusing to watch people get all wrapped up about blog popularity (in this case called ‘reach’), but sort of depressing at the same time. Since it’s at least marginally possibly to quantify it, I know that it’s tempting to do it. I even understand that looked like a good idea at the time.
I’ve been involved in a variety of online communities, and at some point this sort of ranking always comes up. And it universally causes hurt feelings, conflict, and disappointment, and even results in some undue criticism being levelled at the chosen ones. While blogs really exist for the good of their authors more than for their readers, lots of people start up blogs in the hope of getting some limelight thrown their way, and it’s decidedly dark and dim to be among the unwashed in these things if that’s your goal. Is this a sign that no one really cares about what you have to say? Should you just stop now, since no one’s reading you? Have you failed in some way?
And then the chosen few get this moment in the sun, which is nice. But it also means that they get scrutinized a little more than they used to, because everyone’s trying to see what they’re doing that the rest of us aren’t. Nine times out of ten, people come away from such a search shrugging, saying “not such hot stuff, really”. And once those tokens of popularity are handed out, some people, the outer fringe types, the ones who are too cool to be mainstream, too edgy to be with the popular crowd, will start avoiding the big names to underscore their radical otherness. Divisions are made, cliques etched out, lines drawn. And over what? A few numbers that don’t give the whole picture? A snapshot in time that, over a few days, weeks, months, will look entirely different?
Ranking people cheapens the whole process. It creates and fortifies the depths of anonymity and creates the perch from which the chosen will fall.
Popularity is like the little girl with the little curl right in the middle of her forehead. When it’s good, it’s very good indeed. But when it’s bad, oh yes, it’s horrid.
I can say without reservation that I’m certain Walt did not intend to belittle anyone by doing this research. And yet, I can also say without reservation that someone somewhere felt hurt by being left off his ranking, and some librarian somewhere is looking at her blog tonight with a little less delight than she did yesterday. Is the value of this inevitably ephermeral research worth that loss of delight?
For me, the point of blogging, and the joy of blogging, is in having a place to write things down. For me writing is thinking, and I love to be able to share my thoughts with anyone who’s interested. Rankings therefore don’t bother me much, because my goal has never been to please other people. The only way for me to do something like this for as long as I have is to do it for myself. But still, I’m more than honoured that Meredith has called me “the Dorothy Parker of the biblioblogosphere”.
The best thing that can come of Walt’s research, as far as I’m concerned, is that we remember how many of us there are and support each other, reach out more often and engage each other in communication. And the next time someone goes to look at the statistics of the library blog world, he will see a large, interconnected web of full of people, opinions, stories, and delight. Not an exclusive A-list.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a thorough expose on my search strings. Things have changed a bit since a) I had catastrophic data loss about three months ago, and b) I’ve moved from Movable Type to WordPress (a move that happened along with a switch from one webhost to another). I’ve partially alleviated these problems by wholesale copying my MT archives into my new public_html directory, but the fact remains. Those links still work, but those pages aren’t going to be updated. All the urls are different now.
The reason why my search string collection is so interesting is because I have a text-heavy website. I use a lot of words, and words are the key to Google’s algorithms. I put words together, and Google looks for sets of words, so I get all kinds of hits from people who may or may not be looking just for me, or someone like me. While I started collecting and analyzing these strings as a bit of a joke to entertain my friends, it turns out that this examination is quite enlightening. I find myself mentioning this ongoing research at work, to illustrate a point. It turns out that looking at these strings has twigged me in to some elements of web searching I think I would otherwise have breezed right by. While I often find these strings funny, I respect user searches more now than I used to. It feels as though this work has worked to my advantage in ways I could never have imagined. The fact that people find me when they’re not looking for me is a great gift.
That said, sometimes people are looking for me.
mazar
rochelle
diary of a subversive librarian
rochelle mazar
mazar.ca
random access mazar
utm mazar
It doesn’t disturb me in the slightest that people are using search engines to look for me directly. In spite of all the articles about how problematic it can be for people to discover your blog, I, stats-obsessed as I am, am more aware than most how absolutely public this writing is. And I don’t feel particularly flattered by these searches either. It’s not as if there are hundreds of them. I’m not famous, or anything.
But what’s interesting about these strings is how much a person needs to know about you in order to find you. I have a rather unusual name. As far as I can find out, I’m the only Rochelle Mazar in North America. A French place name paired with a quasi-Ukrainian surname is, I suppose, a bit unusual. You also have the fact that “Mazar” is not a proper surname at all; it was mangled at the border, making it even less likely that there would be a doppleganger out there for me to cope with. So typing in my last name or my first name does, apparently, eventually get to me. My full name gets you there even faster. These people know who I am, and are looking especially for me. Someone even knows where I work and is searching for me that way.
Others don’t appear to have met me personally, but seem to have heard of my blog. They search for it by title (“random access mazar”, and “diary of a subversive librarian”). They’re not looking for me per se, but for my blog. Real person search, virtual identity search. Both end up in the same place. This was a conscious decision I made; I linked up my real self with my virtual self by naming them the same thing.
Since I spent most of my time these days talking about issues relevant to librarianship, it makes sense that search engine algorithms would send some library queries my way.
librarian behind desk
academic libraries future 3 years
radical reference
radical reference librarians
proactive reference public libraries
reader’s advisor* alice walker
trillian library academic use
academic monograph
casual librarian
library anxiety
My suspicion is that these sorts of queries are the product of librarians making their way online. Note the use of a wildcard in the reader’s advisory string. There’s no direct Boolean involved, but a lot of it is presumed; trillian ? library ? academic use might as well be a subject heading. You can see the careful thinking behind these queries; most of them are keywords strung together.
The only one of these strings I think is not the product of a librarian’s search is the first one; that’s clearly a user looking for an image, but using the wrong feature.
I’m still most interested in search strings that show very little processed thought. I’ve recently had discussions about just this; is this the dumbing down of academia, turning to algorithms to parse our search strategies? Or is this another form of scaffolding, letting people think less about creating the perfect search string and more about the topic at hand?
teenagers 2005 what’s important to them?
evaluate about since the invention of internet libraries and textbooks have become obsolete
turn the handle and the couch becomes a bed ikea sofa
xanga can hurt people
What I love best about these strings is how spontaneous they are; can’t you just see an internet user staring at that search box, thinking about their question, adding useless words into the string. No, I take that back; what I love best is that those searches work. That second string, evaluating the idea that textbooks are obsolete in the face of the internet; I have written about that, and this awkward, clumsy search lead them to me. There are enough keywords nestled in that unprocessed thought to get somewhere useful. That’s a powerful search engine at work. This is cyborg searching, an algorithm so responsive it accepts the unprocessed nature of human thought. Tapped right in, plugged into your brain.
I’m writing about search strings; in the tradition of metacritique, of course I get searches from people interested in, well, search strings.
search string apostrophe
search strings
funny search strings in google failure
my favourite search words
weird search strings
string search narrow algorithm
Though, that first string is probably someone hitting the same mySQL problem I had, where apostrophe’s bork the database command, and looking for the script to remove them. I’ve got it. I can hand it off. Just email me.
The rest: I think it’s interesting that someone is looking at how search strings show the obvious failure of the system. We distrust it, we librarians in particular; a machine can never be so smart as to not have a panapoly of errors to giggle about. In some ways I think we want it to fail, again, librarians in particular. If Google fails, we will still feel we have a legitimate place in the world. It must fail, it must be laughable.
Does someone out there have a set of favourite search words? What would make a search a favourite? I think that’s a search doomed to failure. My (somewhat educated) guess is that most people don’t think about their search strings at all. I suspect that getting back a list of their own search strings would be a foreign and off-putting experience for most people. It would be like getting an itemized list of what they had thought about in the last three hours; recognizable, but not nearly as linear as a list would make them seem. Putting stuch things in a list would make the process unrecognizable.
new jersey bar exam and july 2005 and opinions
However, some people really do think hard about their search strategies. Interestingly, while this search is perfectly constructed, as opposed to most of the other strings I’m displaying, the results were obviously poor if this person was led to me.
One of my other favourite things about looking at search strings is seeing the ones that are more statements of belief or feeling rather than actual searches.
i hate reading
wow can’t express by words you look beautiful
start revolution
The total randomness of these strings delights me.
Often my musings about search strings leads me in the direction of thinking that Boolean is dead, that real searching these days is more about throwing out lines of thought and seeing if anything bites; I spend my time illustrating how thoughtless searching is for most users, how they don’t metaconceputalize before turning to Google (or Yahoo or any other search engine). But then I get strings like this:
powered by wordpress inurl:ca
This is a brilliant bit of Google-Fu. Someone wanted to see all wordpress blogs with Canadian domain names. So they typed in the tag line of all wordpress blogs (“powered by wordpress”) and limited the search to domains ending in .ca. This is simply genius. This user got exactly what she was looking for; I bet it’s an interesting list, too.
And then we have the strings which are direct or indirect questions; they are turning to the internet because they have a specific activity or plan in mind. I’ve been thinking of these as the true reference questions of the web. These users are approaching a search engine not as a database but as an answerer or questions.
writing a narrative essay letter to my boss
how to fill out a reference letter for school
why does my computer random boot?
how can i clear my search strings
hide phone number from bots
post a comment blog
I am looking to do a particular thing; the instructions will surely be on the internet.
I’m still keeping an eye on the strings, obviously. I feel that there’s something for me to learn in them. I’ll keep you posted on precisely what that might be.
I just finished listening to one of my favourite NPR programs, This American Life. I got hook on it when I was living in the states, and thankfully for me they’ve been available over the internet for years, so I still get my Sunday fill by tuning in digitally.
On tap today: Image Makers. This episode got me twice: first, it has a segment on how the Michigan public library was trying to change its image among teenagers…by bringing in rock bands.
Hey, if librarians could do this, making a library not very much a library, making it loud, then anyone can do anything.
Genius. Every single thing about that story is inspiring; doing something totally different, tapping into the interests of the patrons, and the idea of changing the general perception of what the library is, what words to use to describe it, by pairing two apparently contrasting ideas; the library (quiet) and rock bands (very loud). Two constrasting things in the same place at the same time. If anything can be a crucible for change, that’s probably it.
Then the second part of this episode tells the story of a mother trying to recreate the image of her extremely ill husband for her 10 year old son, and that part made me cry. Not that that’s a terribly difficult thing to do, but still. So, a success from start to finish.
So my recommendation if you have an hour of time you can fill with some interesting sound: Image Makers, from This American Life. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. If you’re a librarian, you’ll be inspired.
Some time ago, I read an article called Undercover Freshman. It told the story of a faculty member from the anthropology department taking a year off and applying to live in the student dorms for a year.
Nathan had been worrying that students were starting to seem “like people from a different culture,†and it upset her that she didn’t understand this culture with which she interacted every day. The experience in the course she audited only added to her frustration. She saw that once students removed the title “professor†from her persona, they were more than willing to open up. She just couldn’t get them to do that the same way in the classroom.
So we she went undercover. She let students believe that she was recently divorced and living in the dorm while taking undergrduate courses. She experienced the undergraduate student life by sneaking in, listening through the walls, and watching. She’s using an assumed name to publish the results, because her subjects still don’t know about the ruse.
That study made me bristle for all kinds of reasons. First, I’m not all that keen on those sorts of colonialist observational methods. I realize anthropology has been through the ringer about this already, and I’m hardly qualified to add to the pile, but I’m squeamish about observing and writing other people’s reality as truth (at least as non-fiction).
And when it comes down to it, I don’t like the divisions that are being erected here; undergrads are not actually in a separate culture than faculty are. The institution (and society) itself may foster walls between the two groups, but undergrads are adults living in the same town as the faculty members, probably going to the same restaurants and the same bookstores. They are not aliens. There are other ways to meet and communicate with undergraduates than lying to them about your job and eavesdropping on their conversations. Even the article about this woman’s research indicates that students were perfectly willing to talk to her when she was auditing a class, even when they knew she was also faculty. The bridge she’s trying to build is between an instructor and an instructee, not between the high reaches of the faculty and the seething scum of the undergraduate residences. An iota of respect, please! Surely there is a better way to cope with power differentials than this.
What also put my back up was the presumption that undergraduate life is this hidden frontier, that such a study was required in the first place. There are lots of staff and faculty members at any university for whom interacting with undergraduates in a non-class room setting is their mandate. There are staff living in the residences. There are student staff living next door to first year students, helping them with the adjustment to university life and getting to know them as people. When I read this article about Dr. “Nathan” and her research project, I felt as though she had opted to shut down everyone else, she was going to go experience it for herself rather than examine some “secondary” source material first. In the end, from the sounds of the article, the research was more about professional development on the part of this one nameless faculty member rather than ground-breaking research. She didn’t uncover anything those of us who have been working with undergraduates didn’t already know.
Now there’s a similar but entirely different project underway at the University of Rochester. But this time, they’re being upfront about it. The research is being conducted by an anthropologist in conjunction with the library, in order to help tailor services to the specific needs of undergrads.
To get the data, the researchers did such things as interview students about all the various steps they took from the time they got an assignment to the time it was turned in and give students disposable cameras with which to shoot everything from where they do their research to the contents of their backpacks.
The library’s research team — among them, librarians, a graphics designer and a software engineer — then brainstorm over the findings.
I’m interested in the results of both of these studies, but I’m quite certain the former will not hold a candle to the latter. What a great way to re-invent library services! How much more respectful!
Hot from my feedreader, this: the internet makes students stupid.
Although campus computing is often touted as aiding education, many professors say the Internet has actually hampered students’ academic performance. When asked whether the Internet has changed the quality of student work, 42 percent of professors in a recent survey said they had seen a decline, while only 22 percent said they had seen improvement.
Normally when I read about research I’m open to the idea that its conclusions might be true. I start from a positive place with an article, shall we say. But not this time. This may be a study of some kind, but it’s not measuring student output since the internet appeared. It’s measuring faculty’s perceptions of the quality of student work since they started listening to ipods and posting to livejournal. Don’t people always pine for the old days?
“The thing that I hear from faculty colleagues is that there’s plagiarism and cheating going on over the Internet and that there’s a worsening in the quality of students’ writing,” he said. “I hear complaints more often than I hear any kind of positive comments about how the Internet has affected students’ work.”
What’s missing from this study are things like measurables: have grades gone down since the internet appeared? Have fewer students been graduating? Are there fewer graduate students? Has there been a marked decrease in the level of published works by faculty members who spent time on the internet prior to finishing their phds? None of these sorts of markers were examined. All we have here is some nostalgia by some fairly aged faculty members (given that the internet has been in active and wide use for the last 10 years). But the key reason why I’m not all that convinced by this article is it’s secondary findings: while students are stupider because of the internet, faculty report that they are actually better because of it. They are in better contact with their students and their teaching has improved, faculty say.
Most of the professors surveyed, 83 percent, said they spent less time in the library now than they did before they had Internet access. But professors said that online journals, e-mail lists, and other Internet tools had become critical for keeping up with news and research in their disciplines.
Whether this is a change that makes their connection to their own disciplines better, or that makes their own research easier if not better than it was prior to the internet, doesn’t appear to have factored into this survey. The hint in it is that it might, though. Here we have faculty connecting with each other, keyword searching journals, keeping up with the professional literature from their desks or from home. Faculty claim to be in better contact with their (increasingly stupid) students, and also with their colleagues around the world. It would seem to follow that their research might have also improved. They are coming into the library less, but they are using library resources possibly even more than they used to.
I’m just not ready to trust contradictory hearsay research like this yet. This sounds more like nostalgia than hard evidence.
It’s been an interesting week. It started with a full-fledged return to MOO.
MOO is very close to being a dead technology. Back in the day when monochrome screens ruled and we did everything from the command line and the tab key, MOO was not that much of an imaginative or skill-level leap. Text-based environments made sense to us then. But now that the GUI is God, MOOs are faltering. While there are some efforts to force a GUI onto a MOO, none of these have been particularly successful. Users just don’t get it anymore.
But those of us old school enough to remember MOOs still tread backward from time to time to play with them. So I joined Jason‘s class on a MOO Jason threw together at the last possible second for their edification. The scramble to get it together, to put something into it to show off, was exciting. It felt like the old days. I found myself back in the verb editor again, making things happen, staring at long lines of code I could barely remember ever looking at and cheering when something compiled. I got to watch Catspaw in action again, which was just as thrilling this time as it was years ago when I first met her.
Building on a MOO again, and explaining to a group of students what it is that MOO affords, reminded me of why I still have a soft spot for it. While David Weinberger argues that the internet is conceived of as a place, there is very little remaining online that has the sense of space/place that a MOO gives. You don’t exist online through IE in the same way that you exist online on a MOO; in IRC you may have a registered nickname, but you don’t exist there. You can take over a mouthpiece and communicate, but you don’t exist as a unique creature. There’s too much that’s transient about the internet; your IP address varies, your terminal changes. A decision was made in MOOs long ago to create a physical presence for people on the internet; while you’re offline, your MOOself sleeps.
It’s not a small thing. These kinds of concepts have reverberations, and I think they’re just the kinds of reverberations we need. As we’re looking at elearning, at creating communities on the web for distance learners and even for undergrads on campus, a physical metaphor could mean the difference between a student who feels isolated and invisible and a student who actually feels that they can walk into a classroom full of fellow students, regardless of the distance between them in the physical world. Metaphor is at the heart of the internet. Metaphor is the key to good interface design, good connection with users, and the core element of a successful application. MOO has a watertight metaphor. But how to translate into a GUI world is a challenge.
So today I called a meeting. I enlisted Jason and Catspaw in the tea-filled afternoon of discussion. I even moderated; when the conversation went off in different directions, I tapped their shoulders and reminded them of the whole point. Interface. How can we build a good MOO GUI?
MOO is a dead/dying technology, but it doesn’t have to be. And I have decided to make it my personal mission to bring it back.
MOO metaphor is built around objects. You enter a MOO, you are a physical being within that world. You can be touched, you can pick up objects and carry them around, you can enter and exit rooms. You can smell the flowers. If it rains, you get wet. In the right places, you can get sick. You are a creature with a gender and a name, and the world around you treats you accordingly. The original interface is text only; the first metaphor was the novel. But no ordinary novel. A novel in second person present tense, heavy on the dialogue, written line-by-line by you and the people around you.
Is there a conflict between a book metaphor and a place metaphor? This might be part of the conceptual problem that we’re wrestling with. We understand MOO as a place that you go to, but it’s a place buried within a book. Do you actually “go” places when you read? In a sense you do. It’s a tenuous metaphor, but it’s a powerful one. When you read, you really do experience another place, a place that often feels incredibly real. You conjure it up with the help of the author and then navigate through it. For people who use MOOs, the people who really get it, the sense of place is perfect. It’s a novel about you.
I remember when I first started using instant messaging systems (late to the party in 2000) my friend and I felt frozen, cut off. We could speak to each other, but the rest of the language we used on MOOs was excised. We had no bodies, and thus no body language. We couldn’t emote. It felt flat.
Is there a place for body language in elearning? In ecommuniations generally? I can’t imagine an argument that would say no. In fact, the need for body language is apparent in the way people use IM systems. The proliferation of the language of smileys. The way people try to mime out their actions with a language never designed to allow for that (LOL, ROTFL). People using the internet as a form of communication still wrestle with this 2-D environment that IM systems create, even without having experienced a richer one. Even if most body language is unconscious, a lot more about a person’s meaning is communicated when we allow them easy access to body language. Giving people MOO bodies allows for nodding, smiling, eyebrow-raising, chuckling, the kinds of reactions that encourage communication and give a speaker some instant feedback. Just like the kind you get in real life. Body language is full of meaning. A smile and a nod can convey a lot, even digitally.
So we spent the afternoon talking about MOOs and GUI interfaces. In a perfect world, what would a make a good GUI? How can we translate this rich, novelesque environment into something current web users can easily understand? Just how graphical do we need to go to give people a sense of space?
Another thing that’s driving my return to MOO is (finally) reading Snow Crash. Jason has been trying to get me to read it for years, and I finally gave in. I see why he was pushing it. Snow Crash contains a vision of the internet that never materialized; one in which we actually go there, see and are seen, interact, communicate, and exist. We have homes if we can afford them, we traverse digital space. We work within the faux-laws of gravity and space only inasmuch as we don’t know how to hack them (yet). There are scenes in this book where people are in two places at once; they are in the Metaverse talking to people in difference time zones, and they are in a car, driving from one dingy California location to another. The internet as a second world where we can recreate ourselves never entirely manifested itself.
So in our long conversation about how to translate MOO to a new generation of internet users, we started in one direction and ended going a completely other way. What do we cut out; the idea that everything is built and communicated in text, or shall we create a world where everything is communicated visually? Which is richer? Which is the viable option?
The best part of getting involved in software development is the realization that it’s not the code that makes something work, or that makes something good. It’s getting the concept clear, and getting the metaphor right. If we get it right, the rest will follow.
While mere weeks ago we were being told by the academic powers that be that having a blog would prevent us from getting the job we want, apparently having a blog will help us get tenure. I suppose the discrepancy goes to show that no one is quite sure what to make of this form of online publication just yet.
Along with a bout of insomnia, serendipity strikes! Scanning through ourmedia.org reminds me of how much I love the internet. I love the way technology allows us to respond to the world in so many creative, interesting ways. With the right amount of patience, skill, and source files, you can get world leaders to see the world your way. And there’s something truly beautiful about that.
“I’ve been a librarian for ten years and I have to tell you, I feel like a fraud. I don’t really know where to start when it comes to figuring out whether a site is believeable or not.”
Wikipedia. The word that makes many librarians (and teachers and academics) tremble, or snort, or turn up their noses. I’ve been reading a fair bit recently about wikipedia and how we’re supposed to react to it, to think about it: there’s the Wikipedia Lesson Plan for grade school classrooms, which, while interesting, seems designed to underscore that the Wikipedia is essentially untrustable and of poor quality as a source of information; there’s the sad mewling at the Chronicle of Higher Education forums, where one academic says,
Having found a fairly serious problem on Wikipedia, I contacted the owners of the site. They were less interested in the problem than I was (they were violating copyright) and one of them argued with me about it. I don’t know what they did about it, but their attitude convinced me that these sites are not vetted carefully and while they might provide some useful information, they are not academic and should not be given even the slightest nod by academics. We could be sending our students into some dangerous waters.
The basic principle I glean from my library school education and from all of the discussions around Wikipedia is this: for a source to be creditable, we want it to pass through the hands of a third party, for-profit company. That is, essentially, the mark of success according to the old rules. Sure, we say we’re looking for peer-review, and most of the time that’s true, but it’s not always true. Do reference works pass through peer review? Not really. They are collected by an editor, but they don’t need to be peer reviewed the way an article does. Or the way a monograph does. I’m fairly sure the Oxford English Dictionary didn’t go out to 3 un-named reviewers before it releases updates. Many of these sources are simply prepared or written by people of some repute, people that other educated people respect. Sources that have been published by one of the Old Boys are waters free from danger, right?
Not to say that there isn’t some validity to the old rules. Having to pass through to a third-party publisher means that at least one other person has read over this work of yours and find it worthy. That vetting process is very important to academics; while so many seem to prize the ancient practice of thinking and writing alone and uninterrupted, they prefer the results of that work to pass through the hands of others. Communal acceptance is one way to divine truth, and since communal acceptance finds its hallmark in publication by one of the Old Boys, that’s one way to provide validation. That’s one way to sort out the truth without engaging with the subject matter.
I understand the fear a lot of people have around Wikipedia, I do; in principle, it’s chaos. Everyone can edit these webpages, and no one is entirely sure who did what. Anonymously imparted information sits there on the page alongside information provided by a known quantity. We can’t tell who has a phd and who doesn’t. We can’t tell who has published books on this subject and who is a construction worker by day and a Pliny fan by night. In the traditional world we want to draw big lines between those people and be able to have a mental picture of the author before we read the work. We want to know if the University of Smart Folks has endorsed this person or not. We want to see the Mensa membership cards before we decide whether or not what you say has value.
Because here’s the problem: while people are upset that Wikipedia isn’t authoritative enough and is likely to contain errors, we largely ignore the fact that the sources we hold so dear, the ones published by the Old Boys , vetted by all the right people, are filled with errors too. Encyclopedia Britannica was proved wrong by a 12-year old boy. There are reportedly numerous errors in the new Dictionary of National Biography. We don’t trust Wikipedia because there might be errors in it, but we have no problem referring patrons to these stalwart pillars of the community, errors and all.
There is a growing disconnect between the traditional conceptions of knowledge we inherited from the Enlightenment and our current understanding of valuable information. As David Weinberger so gracefully points out in his talk to the Library of Congress, Everything is Miscellaneous, the difference between the Encyclopedia Britanica and the Wikipedia is that that one is theirs and this one is ours. And librarians don’t trust ours. There are too many of the unwashed among us. We can’t account for them all.
The ironic thing is that the Wikipedia is the best example we have of pure peer review. There is nothing posted on the Wikipedia that is not vetted by a cast of thousands, including lots of accredited Smart Peopleâ„¢. Writing in the Wikipedia is like writing an article at a conference, with the document itself open and projected on the wall, and everyone in the room shouting out responses as you type, grabbing the keyboard from you, arguing about your facts and interpretations. The errors found in the DNC and Britannica would have been corrected rather than reported had they been wikis rather than paper publications. The problem with Wikipedia is that we don’t trust everyone.
The advantage of the traditional, print reference materials we work with is that we’re used to working with them. We know that they were produced by intelligent, qualified people who may sometimes make mistakes or overlook something or may not be able to remember every single little factoid. They are few and human, after all. But they are humans who have passed through the refining process of graduate school, of the interview and hiring process, the tenure system, and then, finally, through the final sieve of the peer-reviewed print publication process. We rely on all of those steps to create authority for us. We don’t want to look at a source and see if what its saying is reasonable, we don’t want to have to judge a source on what it actually contains. We want to judge this book by its cover. That’s our comfort zone.
But we need to move beyond that. We’re not living in a positivist state anymore. We can’t be objective, we can’t efface ourselves from the catalogues we produce or the reference advice we dispense. We can’t be the 19th century matrons who tell people what’s good for them and keep the stuff that will rot their brains out of the library. We just have to give people the tools to think critically, to ask questions of the sources we help them find. And if we do it right, we help produce the paradigm shifters, the ones who question even the people with millions of publications, with a research chair at Big Whoop Dee Doo University, and a sizzling article in Very Expensive Quarterly. And in spite of all our fetishes around academic publications and citations, that’s’ exactly what we want.
I spent today in Toronto, getting in some quality time with my favourite Torontonians in an outrageously overpriced tea house. The price tag, however, was justified by the fact that we were permitted to spend a ridiculous amount of time hanging out in the comfort of their establishment, hashing out everything from grad school to the future of instructional technology. I was able to show off my incredibly ability to drink two entire pots of tea in one sitting to boot.
I walked back to the bus station through a stunningly beautiful Toronto summer day. And on the way there I saw a policeman on horseback.
I’m used to seeing police on horses. They clop around Queen’s Park all the time, and Queen’s Park is right in the middle of the U of T campus. I used to walk through Queen’s park every day. And nearly every day I saw police on horseback.
Since he was right in front of Union Station at the time, this particular policeman on horseback was getting a lot of attention. All the tourist eyes were on him and his noble steed; the tourists pulled out their cameras, they pointed, their children trotted along beside the horse. No one said anything, but you could very nearly hear them thinking it: wow, look at that! A horse! On a city street! How quaint!
As I say, I’ve seen policemen on horses before, but this time, after an afternoon spent throwing around many and varied ideas about technology, teaching, and learning, I looked at this fellow and his horse a little differently. Here we have a society with a preferred mode of transportation: the automobile. We have built out cities to accommodate them. We build houses with a special added room our automobile can drive right into for the night. There are painted parking spaces on the streets, sized just so, because automobiles are expected to be a certain size, and that size can be predicted. The size of the car is one of the standard measurements of our lives, built into our consciousness at this point.
This is where we can so clearly see how good technology works, how good thinking about technology can lead to impressive results. While one technology may take over, become the standard, the obvious and the unthinkably necessary, the validity and usefulness of older technologies remains. Because there is a standard size for automobiles and because a congested city spawns traffic jams, a horse, which is not the standard size, can evade traffic. The problem presented to the standard technology is no problem at all to a older technology. The fact that one standard took over the transportation business means using a older standard gives police an edge.
In an environment where the latest thing is usually considered the best and only thing, sometimes an older technology can add something we didn’t think possible. Just a nugget of thought on a Saturday.
Via my curmudgeony friend Jeremy: Bloggers need not apply: how job seekers with blogs eliminate themselves from contention by keeping a weblog.
Job seekers who are also bloggers may have a tough road ahead, if our committee’s experience is any indication.
You may think your blog is a harmless outlet. You may use the faulty logic of the blogger, “Oh, no one will see it anyway.” Don’t count on it. Even if you take your blog offline while job applications are active, Google and other search engines store cached data of their prior contents. So that cranky rant might still turn up.
The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.
I have two opinions about this article. On one hand, I am cringing at the behaviour of some of the blogging candidates the author mentions. These people appear to be keeping named, public blogs wherein they talk about things as if the search committee (or their students, parents, and exes) will never see it. This is one of the issues I wish bloggers would be more conscious about; there is no hiding on the internet, there is no difference between a formal conversation and kitchen table banter on the internet. This isn’t a matter of “dance as if nobody was watching”. Dance as if the world’s eyes are on you.
However, the author of this opinion piece is expressing more about the toxic environment of his own department than he is about any of the bloggers he interviewed. One of the bloggers he nixed has a phd in the humanities, but also has a passion for computer hardware and software. Rather than be pleased about this well-rounded candidate who would be a valuable addition and support in the areas of personal computing and instructional technology, this department chose to see his technological hobby as threatening. The “technogeek” is not a true academic, because he has other interests beyond his (apparently solid) research. The ideal candidate for this department is one who will not even potentially share interests with any other department in the university. Note to applicants: while you may have other interests, it’s best to keep those a secret. While interdisciplinarity is interesting in principle, in general it’s best not to rock the boat and do anything vaguely different. Additionally, while universities are heading in a technological direction for teaching and learning, those who abhor computers and prefer a pencil and paper for communication are preferred.
The author of this article is also seriously concerned that the bloggers are using this self-publishing platform to air opinions about current events. This, also, is apparently a bad idea. While every academic search committee must know that people with phds are prone to thinking, arguing, and expressing their views, this committee apparently prefers to imagine that each candidate has no opinions; at least, none that anyone will ever find out about. A blank slate candidate is better than a known quantity, apparently. This part of the article begs the question: what’s the point of academics in society? In the grand scheme of things, aren’t the learned supposed to be guiding society, presenting views, correcting misinformation in the mass media and in our culture in general, and adding to the collective knowledge and understanding of a society? Apparently, when it comes to getting a job, it would be best if candidates appear meek, mild, and without opinions, ready to be inoffensive to everyone she meets. Again, I realize full well that there are inappropriate rants that get published on blogs, and I’m the first to cringe at them and work on writing up the blogging policy, but doesn’t it seems odd to disqualify a candidate because s/he is prepared to express opinions in any forum? It would be nice if the concept of academic freedom actually meant that academics generally respected and supported the idea of free thought and expression for everyone, but apparently this doesn’t work everywhere.
Finally, the author notes that merely having a blog is a negative for a candidate, because his department is concerned that such a public individual would air dirty laundry. If anything is revealing about the author’s department, this is. Rather than be afraid of an outspoken new hire, wouldn’t it be best to actually clean that dirty laundry? Make the department one that no one would want to air dirty laundry about? Re-invent it as a positive, non-toxic place to work?
I’m glad these blogging candidates didn’t get the job in the department described in this article. It seems to me that they (any of them) could do better.
Moments like the ones we endured this morning, watching the tragedy of the London transit bombings, remind me over and over of the power of the internet. These moments of crisis act as a kind of case in point in the argument between the mainstream media and the forms of media developing online. I remember in the days following September 11th, 2001 that articles were appearing announcing that the internet failed us in the crisis; major news sites were bombarded and being dragged down into uselessly slow loading; while the internet was supposed to be rapid-fire, it wasn’t providing the news fast enough for its hungry audience. Live television, with it’s ability to quickly interrupt itself with the latest news, was faster at getting the news out. There was an air of “I told you so” about the articles, a sort of finger-waggling, reminding us that we still need the wire stories and our tvs. I read these articles and shook my head in disbelief. These people accusing the internet of failure were not looking for information in the right places. The internet did not fail us on 9/11, and it didn’t fail us this time, either.
The mainstream media cannot do what the internet does; it can’t connect us to each other. On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I was getting my reports from a friend of mine living in Manhattan, feverishly taking pictures from her rooftop and sending them to me, and waiting for her daughter appear on the street below, her shoes covered in ash. I called her friends in Toronto for her to let them know that she was okay, because the phone lines were down, but her broadband internet connection was still working. She could talk to me, and a whole slew of us who had gathered together in a multi-user synchronous space, but not anyone who was offline. While the anchors on my tv were scanning the latest news release, I was hearing the same information from my earphones, as live streaming radio from the US and from the people in the same virtual room as me, living the events as they occured. I was following this thread (warning: slow loading, as it is a huge, fascinating page) on metafilter, which is a moment by moment group blog detailing each excruciating detail, partly by people at the site itself, in and around New York City, and partly by those around the world watching and listening to the news. Mainstream media can show me the official video and hand me the official stories, but they can’t be hundreds of people on the scene, reporting directly back to me. They can’t be my friends, and I don’t feel for the mainstream media what I felt about the people there that I knew and loved.
Today was a bit different, but not that much; I started my day by hearing the story on the radio and being completely without an internet connection. I felt helpless, my hands tied. I didn’t know what was going on, I was blind and deaf because I didn’t have my contacts at my fingertips. I got into work early and checked on my friends. Someone created a group blogdedicated to check-ins from Londoners; people were desperately logging on, trying to find out if their friends were okay. The phone lines might have been down, but if you were online and had a blog, you could contact your friends and family and fill them in on what’s going on. The comments to these blog posts are filled with comfort, concern, and offers of help.
I talked to a couple of Londoners over YM and AIM; they told me about their empty offices, the long walk home, the eerie calm. We listened to radio streams together, and a friend of mine corrected some misinformation in the cbc radio broadcast. (“It’s not a tourist bus, it’s just a regular one.”) As was the case four years ago, a metafilter thread stands as a historical record of information as it appeared.
When it comes to big events, big tragedies, the internet has not failed us. Expecting the internet to act as if it’s just another version of the mainstream media is setting it up for failure. When it comes to connecting us to each other in ways we were never able to connect before, the internet has provided us with a whole new view of world events. By connecting us with each other, the internet brings the news so close to our hearts it hurts.
I’ve written previously about rethinking traditional reference in academic librarianship, and I suggested it was time for a complete radicalization of our notions of reference. We can’t stand behind the desk anymore; increasingly, no one is turning to us there. Reference stats at university libraries are universally down. This is one of the hardest things for reference librarians to swallow; there is so much knowledge and experience sitting there behind those desks, and no one is stopping to appreciate it. Reference librarians are like those last few literate monks watching the barbarians sack Rome and proceed to build up a culture that didn’t have a place about all those manuscripts, all that learning, the medicine, the theory, the literature. I imagine them in their little libraries, clutching the books and gazing over the hoards, all naked and dancing in the firelight, none of them literate, none of them encouraging their children to read. Nothing I can do will make you care about these things, they must have thought, with that sinking feeling that no one would care for a long, long time.
But it doesn’t need to be this way, of course. In fact, there hasn’t really been a golden age for librarians yet. Our stronghold as keepers of information has been built entirely on the complexity of the thing; we were the only ones who knew how to find anything, of course everyone was reliant on us. But we don’t live in a world where someone types your memos for you, answers your phone, does your photocopying. What we’re facing is an increasingly information literate world; or at least, one that believes itself more information literate. People have empowering tools at their disposal and our libraries are rarely closed-stack anymore. We are no longer the gatekeepers of knowledge; the world may freely wander in and pick and choose from our wares.
So what are some alternatives? There is something very safe and important about the reference desk itself; when you walk into the Gap, you want to know that if you need something, you can go and find someone who will help you. You want to know not just that people are there, but where you’re likely to find them. Unless we’re going to start littering the stacks with staff wearing happy “I work here” buttons, we’re probably going to need one central place where people can go for help.
But that’s at the peak of frustration. Our system is set up so that you can get help after you’ve basically gone through dozens of research steps on your own and found nothing helpful. You need to completely frustrate yourself into a frenzy before you turn for help. We have set up a system where students need to reach a boiling point before we know the water’s on.
So how do we fix this? There are some practical and creative ideas floating around, not all of them tried and tested. But breaking out of the box of both reference and library instruction is difficult, so all new ideas add more fuel to this fire.
Wandering reference. Wireless, handheld devices are getting more and more ubiquitous; what if we send reference librarians out in the wilds (so to speak), equipped with digital equipment to connect them with the resources they need to properly answer questions. I’ve never been entirely sold on this idea. As I said, how are students going to find one of these people if they needed help? But let’s assume that we have limitless staff and someone is already camped out on the reference desk to take the triage. I’ve wandered around libraries enough to have seen that look in students’ eyes, that look that says, I think maybe you can help me, but I’m not sure I want to interrupt you right now and my question is probably too lowly and dumb for you to waste your time on. This kind of service takes a particular kind of personality; wander around and see who appears to need you, and make sure they understand that you’re approachable and no question is a stupid question. This method catches students who are trying to get work done, but are starting to move toward the boiling point. There’s a question there just lurking under the surface, not quite daring to pop out.
But I think this idea has potential not actually because of the mobility of the reference librarian, but because of the concept of connecting a single reference librarian digitally to her resources. What are the #1 top resources in an academic library? Why, the staff, of course. Ages ago, Ann Althouse hit the nail on the head about the possibilities of putting real life people in direct connection with things digital while out in public. If one person is asked a question, why shouldn’t the answer come from a chorus?
What’s wrong with students pooling their expertise on the fly? The student doing the speaking is not rendered passive. He or she will still have to read the messages quickly and integrate them with existing knowledge. It could be lively and energizing. The students who aren’t chosen to speak will have some way to express themselves, which might help them listen to the student who is speaking, and a spirit of community and collaboration might take hold.
Here Prof. Althouse is talking about allowing students to help each other when there is a single speaker asked to engage in Socratic dialogue; why shouldn’t we pool our resources for librarians the same way? Imagine the power of that reference librarian; wandering in the wilds of the stacks, the student lounges, the residences, various study spaces. Seeking out the information needy and providing for them in computer labs. Cafeterias. And all along a crack team of expert subject librarians is at her beck and call, prepared to find an answer, make a suggestion, point out new resources. Print out an article to the nearest network printer on campus to spread the joy around even outside the walls of the library.
Is that radical? Well, it’s mobile, at least.
Virtual Reference is both out there in a new location, but also very traditional. Have a question? Ask us. The problem with virtual reference (well, one of the problems) is that the idea that the reference desk is in the library is translated onto the web; virtual reference links are always sitting exclusively on the library website, and often buried a few links in. Why not offer virtual reference links as a service to other units in the university? Put them on course pages. Attach the link to assignments and tutorials. Fight for a link on residence web pages. Pick an IM client and install it on the lab computers. Sink the link within the catalogue itself; rather than just getting a “no records found” message, why not also link to v-ref as a life raft?
Course Management Software is sneaking into more and more classrooms at universities. These systems are all different and contain many different modules, but most of them contain something like message boards and live chats. Eventually they will doubtless also contain blogging systems and wikis. If students are discussing their essay topics or doing collaborative coursework online, why not provide immediate assistance where it’s needed, where it’s going on? Librarians are used to waltzing into the classroom to bring resources to students; why not start waltzing into the courseware? Answer those questions as they’re forming rather than as they’re exploding.
Since courseware is still in its infancy, lobby the big boys of CMS to write librarians into the system as administrators. Give us our own usernames, let us scan through the messageboards, wikis, blogs, and assignments and offer help where we can. Let us connect directly with students where they need us, not just when they hit the wall of despair. Let subject librarians provide the same level of assistance to undergrads as they do to grad students and faculty. Let librarians sit in the corner of the CMS, ready to speak up when someone needs something and doesn’t know where to find it, or that it exists at all. Where students express their concerns, their hopes, their topics, let the librarians in to comment and help. Link to databases, talk up print resources. Be a resource, a named face, another helpful hand in the great big faceless university.
Librarians have so much more to offer the academic community than most people seem to realize. The more we get out from behind the desk, the more radical reference service we provide, the more people will come to realize it.
To start, the reason I have not been updating as much lately has nothing to do with the issues I’m about to peruse; I currently have no internet connection at home, and writing lengthy blog posts while at work seems inappropriate.
But my questions have changed now that I’m seriously on the job and completely open abou the existence of my blog while at work; how do you manage the line between being honest, tackling the issues, and not ruffling the feathers of the people you work with? Not just your boss, not just the chief librarian or the head of your department, but your colleagues, the faculty you work with, and the people you argue with in meetings? A blog should not be a ranty response to these people. A blog should not be the place where you post the things you wish you could say, but might have gotten lynched for. The last thing I want is for someone to return from a meeting, check out my blog, and see that I’ve responded negatively in public to an idea she presented in private.
Maybe this is why some people think there are no academic librarians with blogs. Is that what they’re waiting for? For us to dish about the dark corners of our institutions, to pillory those among us who are standing in our way? To reply in a forum like this against the vendors who want our budget dollars, the faculty members who don’t want to replace their overhead projectors with document cameras, the librarians who can’t move past the practices established twenty or thirty years ago? The hotshot new IT folks who think they have a clue and start pushing for changes that will not solve a thing?
I still intend to keep my blog, and to keep it in the same fashion I have been. But I am very aware of the changes to my own perspective on it. I embrace those changes in many ways; being careful about other people is never something I’m going to back away from. But I need to underscore that this blog does not reflect the inner workings of the library where I am employed; it does not uncover the dark sides of meetings I attend, and it does not even cast too much light on the directions my own library will take. How do you distill what is entirely of yourself when you spend most of your day in the midst of the issues you also want to talk about, among incredibly knowledgable, thoughtful, and optimistic people? Take everyone else out, let your voice only be your own? Let your opinions on issues be only yours? Not easy. Is it even possible?
My new struggle with this blog is to remain as honest as ever, as optimistic as ever, and to speak with a voice that stands a step away from my job. Not that my job won’t affect what I think or what I say, but I want my voice to remain purely mine, and with an audience that is not only external and not only internal. This may be more of a struggle about retaining a sense of independence than one of toeing the party line.
I can understand why lots of professionals feel unable to keep a blog. No one wants to keep a journal that’s so institutionally correct that they can’t express what they think; but no one wants to make enemies because of their hobbies, either.
Tricky.
If you distill it down to its essentials, what is it that an academic librarian does? The whole thing, wrapped up in one simple concept? It’s certainly a mission that plays out in all kinds of different ways, but essentially, academic librarians provide tools that allow rest of the academic community can get on with the business of learning, teaching, and creating knowledge. We stand at the ready to provide faculty with the journals they need to keep up with their discipline; we collect the books that are the backbone of scholarship. We assist in the day-to-day questions that come up when students and faculty engage in academic work. We allow them to have reliable access to proprietary databases; we also make sure everyone is aware of those databases and how to use them. That’s it: academic support. We provide the infrastructure so that the learning can happen, voices can be heard, paradigms can be shifted.
The future of reference service is not behind a desk. Truly radical reference is coming out from behind that desk and bringing that crucial resource of answers into real life, into that space between having a question and the topic shifting over to something else, into the space between half-way done and handed in. Radical reference is not about waiting for the question. It’s not about simply being as good as we are and being the only ones who know it. It’s about handing out those answers where they’re needed. It’s about being there with help at the point of need, not under the “info” sign. It’s about being a part of the process rather than an appendage that might be useful if it occurred to you to put it to use.
Librarians always do their best work when they have a chance to understand the information needs of the person they’re trying to help. You can’t very well give the best answer to someone who hasn’t figured out her questions yet. Entering a classroom to explain how best to use JSTOR isn’t giving anyone the best of anything; the librarian isn’t certain she’s giving the sort of instructions that are going to be useful, and the student never gets a chance to vocalize what it is he actually wants. We end up looking boring and they end up bored. This is not the best display of our skills.
So what is? What does radical reference look like? In an ideal world, every university instructor teaches with a librarian in the room. When a student proposes an essay topic, a librarian looks over the instructor’s shoulder and says, “Actually, we can support that topic. We’ve recently acquired a great new database that covers African history very well.” Or “Yes, we can get access to those sources, but only through interlibrary loan. Do you have that kind of time for this assignment?” When students hit a wall because they can’t find something they need, or they think something doesn’t exist at all and considers changing topics because of it, that’s where librarians need to be. Radical reference is providing answers well before the question arrives at the desk, being part and parcel of the learning process and providing real assistance, not just to the people with phds or the people who have learned how to walk up to the reference desk. To everyone. Radical reference is about answering questions as they emerge, where they emerge.
How can we accomplish this? Instructors are unlikely to want us sitting in on all of their classes, looking over the assignments and offering advice regularly. And what librarian has the time to do all this, not just for one class, but for all of the classes in her subject area(s)?
This is where technology can help us. So many of the tools we have to offer are becoming digital; there’s a sense that we are becoming increasingly cut off from each other and from the idea of a permanent, stable (paper) collection. But internet technology is not a thing unto itself. The idea of “web” technology is to connect us to information and to each other. We need to build ourselves into a system that allows us to physically enter a classroom to speak, and also to digitally enter a classroom through the learning management software, through virtual reference, through audio and video. To provide the kind of support we offer when someone they wander into our offices with a stack of questions to fire at us, we need alternative ways of entering into the discussion. We can’t keep replicating traditional reference service; we need to radicalize it.
The U.S. Department of Justice is quietly shopping around the explosive idea of requiring Internet service providers to retain records of their customers’ online activities.
Data retention rules could permit police to obtain records of e-mail chatter, Web browsing or chat-room activity months after Internet providers ordinarily would have deleted the logs–that is, if logs were ever kept in the first place.
One of the greatest ethical challenges involved with the internet is so simple; now that it’s relatively easy, and completely possible, to record everthing that happens in the digital realm, it’s so tempting to just do it. It seems too clear to us that it’s not a great idea when it’s legislated for ISPs to do it, but libraries? We, like Google, have sworn to not be evil, But is that enough to keep us in ethically clear waters? Libraries are keen not to keep detailed records of specific patron’s library use, we avoid some of the advantages of using portal technology to do things like amazon.com’s recommended reading pages, but we seem to have no issues with things like recording virtual reference transactions. We need some clarity on these privacy issues. Ethics shouldn’t come down to “I know it when I see it” gut reactions.
In other news, what sort of damage is P2P filesharing doing to the television industry?
How much of the potential audience is making the effort to actually download? Downloaders tend to be dedicated fans, not casual viewers of a show, because while downloading’s become fairly simple, it’s not as easy as turning on the television and plopping onto the couch. But networks and advertisers aren’t very interested in dedicated fans; they want casual viewers, because the casual viewers on any given evening far outnumber the dedicated fans. If that holds true, then what’s the real damage done as a result of downloading?
It’s even more complicated than that, I’d wager. If there’s anything major industry doesn’t have a grip on, it’s the amazing good downloaders can do for their financially. Case in point: vidders.
Vidders are folks who download episodes of tv shows (or movies, whatever) and splice up scenes or shots into a montage that often relates a narrative about the show or the characters, and then set it to (usually illegally downloaded) music. So they create music videos from clips of copyrighted material.
Why this is good: if you can imagine a better commercial for your tv show, I’d be impressed. Here we have fans of the show, creating often beautiful videos, showcasing their favourite character, posting these vids on mailing lists or archives, so that other fans can see them. And often those fans are not yet fans of the show. But soon are, after seeing enough vids. I didn’t start watching Smallville until I saw too many of my friend’s fanvids and opted to tune in. Personally, I think the studios should be shooting extra footage and releasing it, just for vidders. Extra audio-free video every week. Challenge people to work with it. Post the week’s best vid. People would eat it up. And then you’d get even more people making vids, and broadcasting them even wider. Hello, free publicity. Underground publicity. Cool, fan-generated publicity. I’m surprised no one’s grabbed on to this yet.
And in completely unrelated news, baking soda doesn’t do a darn thing if you put it in your fridge. Apparently that’s a big marketing hoax. How about that!
Michael Jackson is acquited. I won’t call him innocent though. Hey, I wasn’t there, what do I know.
Some tidbits from my newsreader this morning:
Hollywood IMs. This is an article about how movie types uses the status message in ichat to inform potential employers that they’re available. Beautiful. I occasionally endure funny looks when I suggest that IM might be a route to better connectivity between staff, so I appreciate any words that describe useful IMing.
Some extremely interesting discussion here about grading blogs.
I think it should be graded in a portfolio format where students choose their “best” posts. It seems obvious that the student who writes more would have more to choose from and would, therefore, be likely to produce a better portfolio. That would seem to cover the question of frequency and content and, to a large degree, subject matter, as well.
I think this is a brilliant idea. Now, if the portfolio also included comments on other blogs, or ideas that sprung out of conversations or were inspired by other blogs in the class, then we’d really be cooking. I’m reminded that the author of this blog and I are at the same institution and I really should look him up one of these days. Weblogg-ed also appreciates these ideas, and notes the (fantastic) pedagogical distinction between “class participation” and “knowledge construction participation”. How best to grade it, and to make it easy for instructors, remains to be seen.
Some great news on faculty feeling positive about online teaching and learning.
Faculty who have undergone the “conversion experience” are also more than happy to reassure their colleagues that the journey is well worth it. As Hooper puts it, “I am still intimidated by technology, and I only use it because there is no better way to teach English than online or through blended learning.”
What changed Redfield’s attitude about online teaching was “the experience of actually doing it. I’ve found that the students who persist actually learn better, have better command of the subject material and they enjoy their experience with me.”
Blogs as communication and marketing tool. This is sort of an adminblog case study; how a blog can help internal communications within one (large) company.
Blogs, by the nature of the medium, encourage casual banter and informal language. Unlike Web sites, which are crafted and branded and carefully planned out to be “on message,” the daily journal format of a blog produces more vulnerability from its authors. In marketing terms, a blog can bring a human personality to a faceless company, which can create a connection between the corporation and the client. This can lead to deeper loyalty and richer feedback.
And it’s those things that make blogs so useful in library contexts, and in education contexts. A human face, a casual discussion, the ability to add comments, more (and better) feedback.