Two Pills, Three Days, Four Nights

Two Pills, Three Days, Four Nights

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The next step in my cancer journey is radiation. For many, this involves a machine and doesn’t sound like a terribly pleasant experience. For me, it will (they tell me) involve two pills, three days, and four nights in isolation. The two pills are radioactive iodine, which is absorbed by thyroid tissue. If you have a healthy thyroid, this would be very bad news, which is why they put me behind the lead walls for a time. For me, radioactive iodine should attack and kill whatever remains of thyroid in my body, including the tissue that remains in the wake of the surgery and any potential seedlings the original tumour planted in other parts of my body (most vulnerable being lungs and bones).

I imagine it like those flesh-eating fish, little tiny ones, who are only interested in a particular kind of flesh (dead stuff). And somewhere in the world (I can’t remember where), it’s de rigeur to put your feet in this special little ponds and these flesh-eating fish surround you, pulling off dead flesh and leaving the living stuff. They clean you off, let you start fresh. They say it tickles, having flesh-eating fish clean off your feet. This is exactly what I imagine when I think of the radioactive iodine treatment. They tell me it won’t hurt at all.

But I will be in isolation for three days, four nights. Once I have that dose, they leave me in a room of my own, with a bathroom of my own, and no one, not even nurses or doctors, come in or out. They will call me to check on me, and my dad is convinced they will have me on closed-circuit tv, but for all intents and purposes I will be alone.

I don’t think they have an internet connection in there. (If ever an internet connection was needed, I would think it would be there.) Apparently people find the isolation the hardest part. My endocrinologist’s office recommends getting the tv hook up. Strongly.

I’ve decided to think of it like a spa retreat. Three days, four nights of mud masks and salt scrubs. The paperwork recommends bathing daily while in isolation, because the radioactivity is excreted through your pores throughout the day. Some patients, they say, bathe several times a day. So I’ve decided this three days, four nights will be a celebration of body washes and exfoliants and smelly shampoos.

I’ll get the tv hook up. But I also need books. Right now the only thing I can really wrap my brain around is young adult fantasy fiction. I’ve read pretty much all of Brian Jacques Redwall books, I read Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart and Inkspell (so relentless! So German!), and I’m just finishing Angie Sage’s Septimus Heap series (Magik, Flyte and Physik), which I absolutely loved. Sure it’s a bit Harry Potter, but it’s sweet and funny and the people are inherently good. Any recommendations? I was considering A Series of Unfortunate Events, but it might not have that general feelgoodness that I’m somehow searching for. I want to love the main characters desperately. I want to admire them while still feeling that they’re human. I hate it when I hate most of the characters in a book. I find it disheartening. I should take Spiderwick, that’s a given; I spent one sickly new year’s eve at Holly Black’s house, and I’ve been meaning to read all the chronicles for ages. Any others? There must be a million Harry Potter spinoffs, right? Please feel free to recommend something. I’m going to need to purchase enough to last me three days, four nights, because somehow I can’t imagine any public library would be too pleased about me taking their books with me into radioactive isolation.

The Angry 1.5cm

The Angry 1.5cm

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A week ago last Thursday, I stepped rather gingerly into Mississauga’s Trillium hospital, not entirely free from the denial of what was going to go on once I got there. I took off my own clothes and put on their little gown-smock and little robe; I even put their puffy “slippers” on. I gave the last of my belongings to my mother, with only the elastics tying up my braids to my name. And I waited until they came to get me. A person undergoing this procedure does not get wheeled into the operating room. One simply walks in, surely a very empowering process.

As my surgeon says, “you were fine until we closed the door.”

I sat down on the thin little bed, with a pillow under my back to expose my throat, and hyperventilated. The last thing I remember was the IV going into my hand, the smell of rubber from the mask over my face, and wonderful, sympathetic surgical team telling me they would take good care of me.

The next thing I knew, I was lying in a darkened recovery room (at least, it seemed darkened at the time), feeling like I was sitting by the pool in the sun at a 5 star resort with a margarita in my hand. I had no idea how much time had passed. I went in at 2pm, and by the time I was fully conscious again it was 8pm. Surgery lasted 2.5 hours, and I was in recovery for 4. They kept asking me if I wanted painkillers, and I couldn’t imagine why I would. I knew what they’d done, my throat felt a little rough, but when asked, I told them my pain was a .2 on a scale of 1 to 10. I felt fine. I was told talking would be a strain (and, if mistakes had been made, impossible), but I could talk pretty well. I didn’t want to be shouting or singing, but the voice made it through okay.

I asked the recovery room nurse if we had been formally introduced, and she said no, we had not, and her name is Mary. I introduced myself and thanked her. She was very kind to me. There was someone else in the recovery room crying and asking for help. Mary told me that some surgeries take a bigger toll than others. I spent most of my time in recovery feeling extraordinarily grateful and blessed.

They transferred me to my room that evening, and I met the night nurse, who helped me move from the very comfortable 5-star bed I was in to the even MORE comfortable bed I would spend the night in. She told me I wouldn’t sleep too well that night, because she needed to check my vitals every couple of hours. I didn’t sleep more than 30 or 40 minutes at a time anyway; I was starting to feel anxious about the thing they had done to me. There was a thick dressing over my throat. It didn’t hurt, but I kept waiting for it to. I kept my head as still as possible to avoid hurting myself.

Checking my vitals included: tapping my cheekbones and cheeks, checking my blood pressure, starting at my open palm, and asking if my lips or fingertips felt tingly. Along they way I learned that these are ways to determine whether my calcium levels have dropped radically. The regulation of calcium in your body is control by glands that sit behind a healthy thyroid (called parathyroid glands), and in fear that they had been damaged somehow in surgery, they were monitoring me carefully. At each of these visits my neck was measured; I had a measuring tape draped around my shoulders for just this purpose. The numbers seemed to be going progressively down. Again there were frequent questions about whether I wanted any pain killers. The night nurse, Carolyn, was also extraordinarily kind to me, and finally, at about 2am, brought me codeine and told me, “it’s okay, it’s FREE!”

By about 11am the next morning I was getting pretty bored. They took the top dressing off the incision because it was useless and totally dry. Underneath was a large, oval sticker covering seri-strips (surgical adhesives) underneath. My drain was emptied and apparently there was very little fluid removed by it. The IV was stuck into my wrist, icily reminding me of its presence each time I moved my (left) hand. (Did I mention that I’m left-handed?) I was starving but I hadn’t been cleared for food yet.

At 2:30 the surgeon dropped by and said, “you’re fine, go home.” Though he told me in pre-op that he would know instantly if my thyroid was cancerous or not as soon as he took it out, he was much more circumspect. He wouldn’t say what he thought, except that my lymph nodes were fine. “Call my office on Monday,” he said, “and make an appointment for Friday.”

The nurses, fantastic people that they are, supported me in my terror of having another panic attack by recruiting a team of three to tell me stories and jokes while a fourth took off the oval sticker on my incision, removed the drain tubes, and finally rid me of the much-hated IV. They all deserve medals of valour.

I went home and slept, and discovered that, while I was in no pain from the incision, I had strained every muscle in the back of my neck/upper back in fear of causing myself pain. For the first time, I gave myself permission to roll over on to my side.

On Friday I went to see the surgeon again. He took the seri-strips off and told me to wash the incision twice a day, and put cream on it. “Any kind of cream. Polysporin, vitamin E, whatever you want.” The idea of looking at the incision gave me the creeps, let alone touching it.

The word: they found a 1.5cm malignant tumour, deep inside a larger calcified nodule on my thryoid gland. No indication that it had spread itself around, and as he had indicated, my lymph nodes (removed at the same time) had all come back negative.

“You’re probably cured,” he said, apologetically. “But we like to do the radiation anyway.”

“Sure,” I said. “Why wouldn’t you.” I’ve looked it up. They call that radiation “the magic bullet”. Because thyroid tissue is unique, they can tie the poison to iodine and destroy only remaining thyroid tissue, leaving the rest of you unharmed. Even if, by some miracle, some cancerous material had moved through my lymph nodes undetected and found new home in my lungs, this radiation would cure me.

It was hard news to hear, though it’s good news, all in all. You don’t get better cancer news than this. But of all these months, it was only the possibility of having cancer that I was contending with. Then suddenly I had the certainty.

When I went home I finally looked at the incision. It’s huge. I knew it would be, but my mother didn’t. She couldn’t get over the size of it. 6, maybe 7 inches across. My father calls me “Nearly-Headless Nick”. It looks like evidence of violence. But it’s healing remarkably well; it’s sealed and unbloody, just a long unforgiving new smile across the bottom of my neck. It feels weird and foreign and I don’t like to touch it; it’s as if I’ve just gained a new body part, when in reality I just lost one.

They had no actual evidence of that 1.5cm. They had a well-educated hunch, and some very deft fingers on the part of the surgeon. This incision will heal into a barely noticeable line, and I will have escaped without having experienced and serious physical discomfort at all. For now I’m waiting, a little chilly and a lot sleepy, for the thyroid hormone to seep out of me in preparation for the radiation. Most of the time, I feel pretty lucky.

Inspiration

Inspiration

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All humans are the limbs of the same body, created
from one essence.
If the calamity of time afflicts one limb
the others cannot stay at rest.
You, who remain indifferent to the suffering of others
do no deserve to be called human.

–Saadi Shirazi (as translated by my dear Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, heard on TVO’s Big Ideas podcast)

dis/information

dis/information

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I suppose the more information you have the more power you have, but at points I feel like the more I know the weaker I feel. This isn’t something I remember learning about when we talked about information gathering and health informatics in library school, though admitedly these were not areas I pursued. I don’t remember anything about people trying to avoid getting more information about themselves; only about alternative routes toward more of it. It might be what they call “information overload”, but I’ve always sworn up and down that I don’t believe in that. It’s not quite that.

It’s as if I have constructed this very careful house of cards, where each card is a piece of information I would like to believe about myself and my own body. I suppose we all have one, more or less; we accept some failings of our bodies, and rely on other non-failings as part of our self-image. We couldn’t walk if we didn’t believe our feet would hold our weight, of that our joints would cease to swing in mid-motion. Each time a health professional comes at me with something that pulls out one of my supports in this house of cards, my careful construction collapses on one side. But I regroup, I rationalize, I see the bright side. He didn’t really mean that, or that’s just a worse case scenario. She doesn’t really know, or she’s just blinded by her specialty and sees what she wants to see. And people help me in my disinformation reconstruction too: It’s the money, they want to see it this way so that they can get more money from your case, or doctors always overreact in fear of getting sued. So then this phantom card sets up where the old one was. The phantom card that I need so desperately to be real. (It might be real, who knows?) And my house of cards stays up, as long as I don’t think about it too much.

So I luxuriate in my disinformation, or my not-quite-what-she-said information, my hopeful information. Google is a wonderful thing; it can go either way, support what anyone, everyone says.

And then I go back to see the people with the charts and the certainties, and they take another swipe at my house of cards. You’d think the farther along you get the less likely these little offhand comments (things like make her an urgent appointment with the surgeon and you’re lucky, this is one of the curable ones or if you have to pick, this is the one to choose!) completely destroy me. I want to be surrounded by my disinformation. Is that so much to ask? I’m not fighting the recommendations, I’m being a good girl and I’m following all the instructions to the letter. I suppose there’s only so far you can go down that path, pretending to humour your doctors. It’s hard to be that pompous. What do I know? There comes a point where you have to believe them. They’re the experts. They sound ever so certain about what it is, and they’re so reassuring about how everything will be okay.

My surgeon says: You’re going to die of old age.

He points out the part of me with the alien cells in it, the little terrorists, and from that point on I can feel it all the time. A constant, dull ache in my throat. Lying in wait. I’d tear it out with my own hands if I could.

But I still suspect that they’re wrong about it. Or, I suspect they’re wrong a great deal of the time, and a portion of the time I feel the utter terror in the belief that they are entirely right. But they have no real proof. Only an educated hunch. Hunches are wrong all the time. In a matter of days they will slice me open, take it out, and know for sure. And then we’ll see who gets the last laugh.

Robert Pickton

Robert Pickton

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Guilty on six counts of second degree murder, with two more murder charges on the way. I don’t really understand why he gets second degree rather than first (I mean, after you did it once, doesn’t it become a kind of plan the next twenty-five times?)

What would be a nice result from this trial?

1. Make sex work legal in Canada.
2. Make sure sex workers can be easily located for their safety, and go find them when they go missing.
3. Provide them with a safe place to practice their trade.
4. Give them a living wage.
5. Ensure that they have access to clean, comfortable living accommodations.
6. Develop a regular medical exam regimen to help them stay healthy.
7. Give them a pension plan, dental and eye care, and drug coverage.
8. Provide them with a free college education.
9. Provide support to sex workers with drug problems.

Keeping sex work illegal is dangerous for sex workers, and I don’t know how much clearer that can be. Most of those 26 women would still be alive today of sex workers had be considered regular people like everyone else, people whose disappearance needed to be taken seriously and investigated.

This is isn’t just the work of a mass-murdering swine herder. This is institutional violence against women.

Henry Jenkins and Fan Culture

Henry Jenkins and Fan Culture

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The keynote at AoIR‘s Internet Research conference yesterday was given by Henry Jenkins. I’ve read Henry Jenkins, I’m very familiar with his work and his impact, but I’d never seen him speak before. I suppose it’s true of any outsider/insider community politics that it feels incredibly weird and empowering to hear an academic speaking, in a public and respectable forum, about something so secretive and taboo as online slash fandoms. His primary gift to fandom, I’d say, is that he legitimizes fandom by talking about fandom activities in a non-judgemental way. He doesn’t shroud it in shame. He talks about it like it’s a cool thing to do. That’s a wonderful, wonderful thing to do for fandom.

What he said: fandom is good PR. Media owners give mixed signals. Fandom as collective intelligence, etc. It felt good to hear it in that forum. Definitely.

But when I walked away something else hit me. Sour grapes, probably, or a natural response to the insider/outsider online ethnography: Henry Jenkins didn’t tell us anything fandom didn’t already know. He didn’t say anything that fandom hasn’t already analysed ad nausem. I’m glad he gets it, I’m glad he understands how things work, someone has to be the one to tell the rest of the world how fandom concieves of itself and gets meta on itself, but I didn’t hear him say anything that wasn’t just direct reportage of what’s happening in fandom. I didn’t hear him express something that wasn’t just as well expressed, if not better, within fandom itself. And that made me a bit sad. He objects to media companies taking advantage of fans, but how is this really all that different?

I’m not sure what I really expect from him. But that was the sad feeling I had walking away from that keynote. It’s great that he gets it, it’s great that he talks about it in such positive terms, it’s great that he doesn’t shy away from talking about slash (and in fact, he seems way more interested in slash fandom than gen or het fandom, which is interesting). I wonder if all ethnographized people feel this way; why do you get to be famous for just looking at me and describing what I say to someone else? I suppose that’s the way it works.

He mentioned that he would like fans to get some kickback (money) from the media companies, and someone in the audience objected, saying that their fandom research subjects weren’t in favour of that. He said there was a minority that were in favour, and that it would be a good thing. I immediately disagreed, quietly; getting money for fandom activities is anathema, my gut said no, and my immediate reaction at the time was to say, “since you don’t own the characters to start with, getting money for it is considered inappropriate and dangerous, and would bring negative attention from the media companies that would have a terrible impact on the rest of fandom.” It’s also considered insanely wanky to ask for money for fannish activities. But that only makes so much sense as a criticism; what if it’s the media company handing out the money, and no bad press is involved?

In retrospect, there’s another reason why taking money is problematic, and I think, deep down, it’s this that fandom is reacting too when the money question rears its head. Fandom is not a money economy, but it is an ecomony nevertheless. It’s a complex gift economy, where creative production, feedback, and critical reflection are the products and name recognition, attention and feedback are the currency.

Fandoms are extremely hierarchical, in spite of all attempts to deny that hierarchy and others to subvert it; it’s a hierarchy based on subtle differences in reception, feedback, and attention. A person with high value in a fandom economy (a Big Name Fan, or BNF) writes a blog post about how she doesn’t like a particular kind of narrative, or particular characters, and her opinion echoes out throughout fandom, marginalizing some elements and making it more difficult to get positive attention and organization around those particular characters or narratives. People with high economic value in fandom dictate the nature of fandom, even without intending to. Fandom itself decides who those people are. Each indiividual within fandom is a part of creating that economy and providing the currency that enables that power. If the media companies start entering into the fray and give money to some fans, that utterly changes the way fandom economy works. Now people who get money will be immediately elevated in the fandom economy, but they will probably be seen as corporate shills. They will be seen, I would guess, as fakes; the company arbitrarily blessed them, in spite of them not understanding X or Y, or because they wrote a bad X character, etc. etc. Company blessing is like a parent chosing a favourite child and making a bit fuss about it; it’s unhealthy and builds resentment.

If media companies really wanted to do something nice for fans, there are a variety of creative ways to do it. First: hire them. Hire them to do stuff with them. Fandom liaisons, etc. Create insider/outsiders who can still at least peripherally participate in fandom while communicating to both sides at the same time. This will still cause ripples in the fandom economy, but the media company would be providing one person with information that they can share with the rest of fandom; that works into the natural fandom economy. Don’t pay them for fannish activity in the past, pay them to communicate in the future. The best things media can do is provide more raw material to fans; media companies, particularly tv and film, could release additional footage via their websites, without audio would be fine, for fans to use in their vids (video mashups that create alternative visual narratives). It could be outtakes, but if they really wanted to do fans a favour they could stage footage specifically for use by fans, pairing unusual characters in a scene or creating short scenes that would spur on particular kinds of stories and vids. Teaser video, essentially. That would have the added bonus of fueling the creation of free ads for shows that will, inevitably, pull in more viewers. Another idea, for book fandoms, is to arrange to publish an edited collection of stories written in a particular year; have fans submit work, be transparent about the criteria, and celebrate the writers with the publication. Allow them to maintain their anonimity should they wish to.

Money is not always the best way to reward fandom. Best to look at the internal structure of fandoms and reward them in ways that don’t destroy the economy and culture that already exists.

Ritual and Virtual Worlds

Ritual and Virtual Worlds

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I went to an interesting set of presentations this morning about ritual as performed in virtual worlds. The first thing that stuck out for me is that everyone has a different working definition of the word ‘ritual’. For some, everything is a ritual, everything we do, from sitting in a room listening to an instructor or presenter to accepting the eucharist. Because of that wide definition, all kinds of things got crammed into a session about “ritual” and I’m not sure I’m completely in favour of that. For instance, one of the “rituals” presented was online gaming activities, like trying to kill a dragon in online Dungeons and Dragons. Gathering together and attempting to complete a task communally is ritualistic (hiding behind a rock, everyone with their task to accomplish, the order in which people stand in the virtual world, etc.). I can understand how there are traditions and customary activities in that context, but I seriously hesitate to call them rituals. That’s like calling everything that has any impact an icon, which I’m also not delighted about.

But the key piece that I’m going to take away from the presentations and the discussion is the sense I got that in moving ritual and religious experience online, we’ve in a sense brought it back to an earlier form. Religious authorities are not the only ones with rituals to preside over and religious knowledge to impart, and much as christian leaders needed to fight with local ritual and knowledge to be heard in a medieval and early modern European context, so modern religious leaders need to cope with the influx of religious information and authority that’s available online. And one of the points of discussion was this: can you have a legitimate ritual without a body? Apparently there is some debate around this. Can you? My goodness, how can you not? If Julian of Norwich or Teresa of Avila were given the opportunity to worship God in a ritual that did not include their physical bodies in any way, they would have jumped at it, I’m sure. Christianity has traditionally had such disdain for the physical body, I don’t understand how anyone could suggest that there’s even a question about whether the virtual ritual is possible. The virtual ritual has been the most desireable kind since medieval christians climbed up on pillars and stood on one foot for 10 years. Remove the impact of the body, remove it from your consciousness, and then you are free to approach the divine with your lustful, sinful flesh tamed and left behind. In many ways, Second Life ritual could be seen as the consumate religious experience.

Can the same be said for jewish ritual, however? Jewish traditions isn’t nearly as flesh-hating, and jewish ritual respects the physicality of the performing the ritual itself, often above the intellectual understanding of it. Perhaps jewish ritual cannot move into a virtual context, but I’d suggest that christian ritual absolutely can.

An interesting morning! I never though my Master of Theological Studies degree would could in handy at an internet researchers’ conference, fancy that!

Hacking Say

Hacking Say

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Jason already blogged it, so I suppose I should too. In order to qualify for the Second Life all-day workshop at AoIR‘s Internet Research Conference (“Let’s Play“), Jason Nolan (Assistant Professor at the school of Early Childhood Education at Ryerson University) and I wrote a paper called Hacking Say, Chat Fatigue, Generics and Davy Jones’ Locker: Is there a Second Life in MOO?” Essentially, it’s a retrospective of the work we did in MOO, primarily based around the problems we faced using a virtual environment in an educational context and the solutions we devised to account for them. The entire paper is written in light of work we’re presently doing in Second Life; a sort of compare and contrast of the two worlds and some musing on whether or not what we learned and what we created in MOO has application in Second Life.

Conference Blogging and Twitter

Conference Blogging and Twitter

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Normally at conferences I can’t find enough time to blog all the things I want to blog about; there’s never a blogging break at these things, though this conference (AoIR Internet Research conference) would be the one to do it if anyone did. At this conference I decided to give Twitter a try instead, since that was about what my brain could handle trying yesterday; short ideas, 140 characters in length. I figured I could go back later and glean from it what I wanted in order to write a more processed, thoughtful blog post or 5. I have to say, I think i found Twitter’s calling doing that. What a great way to capture those fly-away ideas that come to you while listening to a presentation or participating in a group discussion. (My tweets are on the side of my blog, for reference.)

In perusing Twitter, I discovered that Howard Rheingold tried to use Twitter with his class during class, as a way to get observations and questions up on the screen while he was teaching. It didn’t work so well. He says: Multitasking to the point of paralysis. Maybe having tweets projected on screen not as coolly manageable as private chat channel? Too bad, eh? I thought that was a pretty stellar idea.

Lessons in How to Live: Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture”

Lessons in How to Live: Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture”

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It’s an hour and 44 minutes of the distilled wisdom of Randy Pausch: make time for it today. Seriously. Check out the teaser first if you’re not ready yet to commit the time; that will ensure that you want to. I can’t think of anything better to watch on Thanksgiving. In his own words:

Almost all of us have childhood dreams: for example, being an astronaut, or making movies or video games for a living. Sadly, most people don’t achieve theirs, and I think that’s a shame. I had several specific childhood dreams, and I’ve actually achieved most of them. More importantly, I have found ways, in particular the creation (with Don Marinelli), of CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center (etc.cmu.edu), of helping many young people actually *achieve* their childhood dreams. This talk will discuss how I achieved my childhood dreams (being in zero gravity, designing theme park rides for Disney, and a few others), and will contain realistic advice on how *you* can live your life so that you can make your childhood dreams come true, too.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-5700431505846055184&hl=en

Thanks to Stephanie Booth for the link.

Quechup Quandry: Today, we’re all Spammers

Quechup Quandry: Today, we’re all Spammers

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I like to think that the blogosphere in general has a certain amount of power. One blog out of milions may not, but when something happens that runs counter to expectations and a good chunk of bloggers complain publicly, the results seem to be pretty dramatic.

Case in point: social networking site Quechup created a splash in the last few days by asking users to enter their email addresses and passwords so that the system could check to see if any of their friends were already members. (Personally, I don’t see why anyone would do this in the first place. While I guess there’s some email from my closest friends and family in my inbox somewhere, I don’t really use email to communicate with the people I see on, say, Facebook, or in Second Life or on IRC. Email is too formal for that, and I’d rather search for my friends some other way. I’d rather look up one and see who they have friended already, etc. I found a lot of people I know on Facebook through the groups. Anyway.) So the system does what one would expect; it looks up the email addresses in your contacts lists and checks to see if those people have accounts yet. Then it shows you the ones it found. Do you want to add these people are friends? Sure! Who wouldn’t push that button? Why not. Add them. What Quechup does next: it emails out an invitation, from you, to everyone you’ve ever corresponded with, personally inviting them to join this rockin’ new site you found. Without warning you that it was going to do it.

This is really not what email is for, and it’s a real abuse to use it that way.

In what universe is this okay? In what universe, seriously, is it okay for a system to prompt you to send out mass email to people who have not signed up for it? It’s one thing to send a message to people in a facebook group; they’re there on purpose. People in your contacts in email? Didn’t sign up for squat.

It’s a trust issue, certainly. You see an invite from someone you know (heck, there are a handful of people whose mere name in email would get me to click a button somewhere, sure!), follow through, and suddenly…you’re in the same boat! You’ve just spammed every living soul you know! So Quechup was certainly taking advantage of that trust, but is in return eroding people’s trust not only in social networking systems, but also in us. (Will people think twice when you ask them to have a look at something? Sure they will.)

So now if you run a google search on “quetchup” (like this one) you see a zillion posts by angry bloggers who are incredibly sorry to those they accidentally emailed, and incredibly angry at Quetchup. I’d love to see what happens. Will that mistake, and the widespread reaction to it, destroy Quetchup? Or is any publicity good publicity, and will this be the making of them?

Moral of the story: don’t give anyone or any website your email password. Ever!

Education == National Defence

Education == National Defence

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Education is not a routine activity which is divorced from national defense. It is, in the most fundamental and important sense, the first line of national defense.

A quote from the former mayor of Chicago, snapped inside a display at the Chicago Public Library. Jeremy recommended that I take a picture of it for Jason. It’s a bit disturbing to think about education being a branch of national defence, but I suppose a good education could be a defence against just about anything. Right?

Networked Imagination and Persistence

Networked Imagination and Persistence

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The education keynote at the SLCC conference this morning was by Connie Yowell of the MacArthur Foundation. She brought up a range of interesting things, but one of the key ideas she presented relates to the idea of connectivism as key to teaching and learning. In this context, she called it networked imagination. Her general premise is that virtual worlds can be the result of a single person’s imagination, but it supports the possibility of people building upon the imagination of others.

This is true on a variety of levels in Second Life; you can copy, collect, and often modify objects originally created by others, but true sharing of builds is difficult. I had lunch with Ali Andrews from the University of Northern Illinois, who pointed out that co-construction is fraught with practical difficulties; each prim in the build needs to have its permissions switched by its original creator to allow co-editing, a process which is tedious and easy to forget on a single prim. In a build that shared, if a single prim isn’t jointly editable, and the collection of objects (making up, say, a single building, or other larger item made up of a collection of individual prims) is placed into someone’s inventory, the next time it comes out into the open, the entirety of it becomes uneditable by both builders. It’s easier to build alone and share your creation, but actually allowing multiple builders, actually doing what Connie suggested, is more complicated. Co-ownership is a difficult proposition.

But more seriously (in my mind) is the problem of ongoing shared space. There’s a wonderful video of a build from start to finish that replicates Van Gogh’s “A Starry Night”; the point of the build was to make the video, the point of the video is to demonstrate the build. In the build, you could stand in one particular spot and see the world exactly the way you see it in the painting. I think it’s amazing, and it saddens me deeply that I can’t go in world and see it. It’s gone. I don’t know how long it stuck around, but I’m told that the point of these videos (machinima) is not to create the builds for posterity, or even in order for others to experiences it in person (so to speak), but only to create the video. I used to bring everyone I knew onto Info Island to show them an audio art exhibit where you could run through sounds and make your own little a capella music, but one day it just vanished. It was a temporary build, and no one seemed to have offered to keep it around. So it’s just gone.

You can build on the creation of someone else’s imagination only as long as that construct exists in world; so much is so incredibly temporary. If you wanted to house something long term, you’d need to pay for the space to put it somewhere. And you’d need to pay regularly. If someone builds something marvelous and useful to the world, but then moves on to other worlds or other projects, you lose that build. Even if the creator of the build is supportive of others taking on custodial ownership of their build, there’s very little structure in place to hook up those creators with people who are prepared to house their creations; in fact, there are no resources around for long-term build storage. Small items, say, a dress or a shirt, are unlikely to disappear, but large builds (like, say, the recreation of the sistine chapel), most certainly will.

I’m a fan of ephemeria. I’m a very big advocate of it, in fact; I don’t feel great about generic blog archiving, for instance, because I believe strongly in the space between permanent record published material (like books), and unrecoraded/ephermal material (like ideas or dinner conversation). This is something I love about the internet, how it takes “publish” and makes it more fluid and flexible. I think there’s a huge place for public, “published”, ephemeral material whose existance depends entirely on the will of the author. But I have the luxury of feeling that way about blogs. There are tons of services that provide long-term storage for blogs, so its not as if the world of the blogosphere is likely to disappear any time soon. Holding on to a blog, or letting your blog just stay up dormant, costs little to nothing. What bothers me so much about the disappearing Second Life builds is that there really is no way to hold on to them. An abandoned blog (so very common) is still a blog, and is still readable; an abandoned build in Second Life just doesn’t exist at all. In fact, the system encourages you to destroy your builds if you lose interest in them; the land you built it on is valuable, and you can sell it for serious amounts of money. Second Life is the most ephemeral space I’ve ever seen.

Rather than set up more reference desks in Second Life, I wish the librarians in-world could instead start collecting builds. Lots of builders would love to either have their build on permanent (or semi-permanent?) display in a central location, or have it sunk into a catalogue where it can be recreated by others for short times. Borrow the sistine chapel or van gogh for a couple of weeks for a class, say. Networked imagination is a great idea, but Second Life without some means of archiving and sharing is not going to allow for that in the long term. The MacArthur folks seem interested in philanthropy in digital worlds;I have a hard time imagining much that’s more important than that.

But you Didn’t

But you Didn’t

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My sister is an artist, and I remember her telling me the standard line they use in reaction to the ultimately least helpful criticism a piece of art can get: “Well, I could have done that!” Yeah, but you didn’t.

I remember the first time I heard her say it; I was 18, she had just finished her first year of her BFA program at Queen’s University in Kingston, and I was visiting her in her summer digs. (Incidentally, that was also the summer I read Maus. There’s really nothing quite like those hours you spend completely sucked into a great piece of literature, is there!) Yeah, but you didn’t. I got her point at the time, on some level, but I think now I get it quite a bit more.

Art isn’t about skill. And that’s what those people are expecting when they say that; art should be something that the average guy on the street can’t concieve of producing on his own. He want to look at a piece of art and be awed. The easiest way to be awed by something is to look behind the curtain and see who’s pulling the strings. If you can’t see the strings, and can’t even get a look behind the curtain, there’s a level of the magic that remains. You can be in awe of someone’s technical skill. That’s easy. And i guess it’s easy to stop there and let the definition of art rest.

But what my sister said is that it’s not about that. The skill isn’t the point. The ideas are the point. The creativity. Saying something, doing something, producing something so surprising and unique that it hasn’t been done before, ideas that haven’t been thought before. I don’t know my artists all that well, but that fellow who put a toilet in a room as an installation: he was the first one to think of doing that. He’s expressing that every day objects are art as well, he’s taking something ordinary and humble out of its context and forcing you to think about it in a new way. Those are the things that can only be art once; the first time someone thinks to do it. After that it’s just derivitive. “But I could have done that.” Yeah, but you didn’t. And you can stand there and be scornful, thinking, what skill was involved here that’s so special, what skill is being demonstrated that make this piece of art worth untold millions of dollars? But that would be missing the point. That’s the tyranny of skillfulness. The point is the newness, and once it’s done it can’t be new again.

And then I think of artists like Van Gogh, who created things that his peers had nothing by criticism for. Paradigm shifters. The rest of us stand on the shoulders of giants; as a culture, we need to move incrementally from one idea to the next. We don’t manage radical change of ideas well. We need to be introduced to things slowly. For the vast majority of us, truly unique, paradigm-shifting ideas cannot even be birthed in our brains; we are too stuck in the hegemony of the status quo, too utterly born into the water of this culture that we can’t even imagine what lies beyond it. We can’t even consider that there is a “beyond” in the first place. That’s survival, that’s living in the real world. Is it physiological? Can we only progress so far in a lifetime? It you picked up a medieval man and dropped him in Times Square, could he learn to make sense of it, or is he shackled to the Great Chain of Being so much that his brain can’t make the necessary leaps? It seems fairly clear that, in general, people don’t like change. When we first look at a thing, or think a brand new thought, it seems ugly. Once we feel around the edges of it and understand what it is, why it’s wonderful, what it brings us, then we can see the beauty of it.

Once in a while, when I’m looking around at the world, I think about the fact that the very concept of seeing is flawed. We like this idea that we see things as they are, that there is real truth in what we see. But we don’t “see” objects and things, do we? We only see how light reflects off them. We see the particular way that light moves, and we wring information from it. No different, really, from echo-location; just using different senses. In medieval medicine, it was believed that you could get sick if someone looked at you, because looking at a thing meant that invisible tenacles reached out from your eyes and touched the thing you had your eyes locked on. Looking at a person, in that context, is a profoundly intimate and possibly dangerous experience. And in many ways they were right; looking at a thing isn’t nearly as clear cut as it seems to be. It could have been our noses that came to dominate, and we would “see” the colours of things based on how they smell.

And I guess we should feel awe about that too.

I can’t stop coughing, and this is what I came up with to occupy my head.

Power, Control, and Instruction

Power, Control, and Instruction

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I’ve been working on a paper for AoIR‘s Second Life Workshop in October, revisiting the issues and challenges we faced in a text-based virtual world and the solutions we developed to wrestle with them. One of the things that’s been so surprising abotu Second Life is how familiar it felt when I first walked in; no matter how shiny the technology seems to become, it remains fairly similiar to the old text-based worlds in terms of useability and structure. And we seem to still be addressing the exact same issues. But looking at our challenges and solutions (former and current) brings home to me one of the central elements of education: power and control.

Power is one of those perennial issues; you can try to weed it out of your classroom, but its shoots are hardy and wiggle their way into all kinds of unexpected nooks and crannies. Power is written into the layout of the furniture, the structure of assessment and evaluation, the lecture style of instruction, and deep into the minds of students who have had a lifetime of being drilled in its norms and expectations. Even in a perfectly Marxist, radical classroom, where the instructor wears only jeans and a ratty t-shirt and regularly challenges his own authority, where every other privilege and dominant hierarchy has been unpacked and tossed out the window, the simple student/instructor power structure remains. Teachers have more power than they often seem to recognize. Maybe you get used to it after a while, and it becomes something you only notice in its absence.

There are two perspectives you can take on power and control in education, as far as I can tell; you can vow to dismantle it (which, it seems to me, primarily results in instructors dismantling the elements of power they don’t like/can recognize while retaining the parts that they do like/can’t recognize), or accept it and use it thoughtfully, purposefully, and as ethically as possible. The former seems like the right idea, but more and more I’m starting to wonder if the latter isn’t the more successful approach. More pragmatic and less idealized, I suppose, but if your end goal is create an ideal instructional environment where real learning can actually take place (far be it from me to suggest that a teacher can create learning in students, isn’t that yet another form of power and control that’s just assumed?), then maybe the ends justify the means.

In reviewing our old attempts to create classroom environments in a pure-text universe, it seems we spent a lot of time trying to control the speech and movement of students. (Unethical fascist! Micromanaging control freak! shouts the peanut gallery, yes, I can hear you from here, thanks for your input.) A lot of the overwhelm problems we had with students was based in the complete democracy of the space. The democracy of the space is what we love about it, honestly, but it has its upsides and its downsides. When a person speaks in a virtual world, they are no more or less important than any other person in the room; if the instructor gives a series of instructions, but fifteen students pipe up at the same time with playful exclamations, the instructor’s serious words are no more or less noticable, no more or less likely to be read by the rest of the class. When students come into a classroom, sit down and start chatting with each other, they hush when the instructor makes the typical motions that indicate that he is ready to speak. There is a culture of highlighting and adding weight to the words of some over others in a classroom. No matter how communal the instructor feels his classroom is, there is an element of power in his mere presence. There are no such traditions in virtual worlds. This is a good thing; this is also a painful roadblock.

Confronted with students who can’t make out what’s important and not when entering a virtual world (why, it’s all important, and up to you to determine which parts are important to you, says the peanut gallery, yes yes, I know, bear with me for a moment), we developed some tools to give us a hand. The web interface we were using gave all exits from a given room as links in a web window. Students would click on them, not knowing they were moving in and out of the classroom space, and missing half of the conversation. They didn’t mean to do it, they just didn’t know how to manoevre yet. They would get lost, or get confused, or get exasperated. So we built a very simple little tool.

Before we learn that classrooms are spaces with clear power distinctions and rules we have to follow, getting us in a group to do something together is like herding cats. So when we’re small, and out on a field trip to see the dinosaurs in the museum, they have us all hold on to a piece of rope. It shows us the relationships we have to the other students in a very concrete and physical way, and also makes very clear who’s got power and control over us in this situation. (Can we unpack the concept of “control” for a moment to see it’s upsides as well? The person leading us at the front end of the rope knows where she’s going, she’s serving a useful purpose. When we hold on to the rope, we’re doing it because we were told to, but also because we want to; we’re complicit in this power relationship. We want to go see the dinosaurs. We don’t want to get lost. The control is not in the person herself, but in what they have to offer right here and now.) With the rope, we can be safely brought to one place to experience something together; we can avoid the confusion of learning all the steps to a particular place in order to get there. That piece of rope is a particular bit of scaffolding to get us all literally and figuratively from one place to another. It’s a ramp to get us over the big procedural learning curve it would take to get there on our own.

We wrote virtual rope. (Well, by “we” I mean Catspaw.) We needed to get students over that hurdle so that they could see the point of learning how to do it on their own. We took control in order to help students come to grips with the meaning of a space, and then gave it back.

I’m still conflicted about power and control in an instruction/learning situation. I don’t want to restrict what students can and can’t do; I want them to explore and build their own knowledge. I’m conflicted by the fact that sometimes taking power and control by the horns and using it deliberately to show students where the tools are, how to use them, how to get comfortable with them and then dismantling it afterwards has good effects.

I just finished writing about a space within a virtual world where I hacked the script on a room that allows students to talk. I actually removed their ability to speak. I knew there were ethical issues with it when I did it, and remember how cautiously I trod with it, but strangely it was shockingly successful, and didn’t put people off at all. Can we be forgiven for these deliberate grabs for power in an instructional situation if it results in a more engaged and motivated student? (NO! shouts the peanut gallery. Okay, okay, mea culpa.)

Hipster Librarians

Hipster Librarians

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The New York Times has just discovered that librarians are hip and cool. This is hardly news! But they included a few pictures of hot, hip, young librarians, so I thought I’d take a page from their style guide and get a shot of myself in a similar pose. Their image on the left, mine on the right.

hipsters

There! I too am a hipster librarian! Seeee?

A Walk down to the Lake

A Walk down to the Lake

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Today I walked down to the Lake. I moved to Clarkson last August and yet I still had not taken the relatively short walk to see the view of lake Ontario. Mostly this place is a great big burb, and for the most part the lakefront is full of a) old cottages turned into multi-million dollar houses, or b) the petro plant. But I found a nice little spot; perfect for a picnic!

In this picture, you can actually see Toronto across the water, and with the naked eye you can see the CN tower in the top right:

A view of downtown Toronto from my neck of the woods, with the help of a lot fo zoom:

En route to the water (note the lack of sidewalks…do people in these chichi neighbourhoods not walk?):

Voice in Second Life

Voice in Second Life

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Second Life is moving toward integrated voice capability. This isn’t news at this point; it’s moved onto the main grid now, and it’s only a matter of time (less rather than more) before it becomes an everyday, standard feature. There has been much discussion about what voice will do to interactions within SL; some people believe it will be so revolutionary that it will fundamentally change the way this particular virtual environment functions, and some others believe that voice is the path toward ultimate destruction.

Personally, I don’t think it’s that big a deal.

I mean, technically, it is a big deal; it’s an amazing thing. If you try it out, you’ll see what I mean. It’s not internet audio like I remember it back when I used AIM to talk to people overseas. Press the button, talk, release, listen: it’s like talking on CB radios. Second Life voice is not like that. It’s not tinny and distant like skype can be, either. Voice in Second Life is more like voice in real life than anything else I’ve ever seen. Everyone can talk at once; you get overlapping voices when many people are talking to each other, not cancelling each other out, but competing with each other. The people who are closer to you are louder, while people who are walking away from you get progressively quieter. I had the interesting experience of standing in a valley by a river with a friend on the beta grid and hearing conversations floating past as others walking near our location; it’s an amazingly rich way to process information, giving Second Life a depth that’s difficult to fully quantify. It has always had its three dimensions in terms of movement, but the flexibility of the voice features highlights them in ways that are incredibly powerful. The idea of this was already buried in the system; people’s text greys out as they’e farther away from you. But the audio factor is so much clearer in defining and describing distance and space. I’ve always found audio cues particularly powerful, so the voice features appeal to me.

But I don’t think voice chat is going to destroy anything. Not really.

There are a variety of arguments for why voice is destructive. The obvious: people whose avatars don’t reflect their physical realities are on their way to becoming exposed. Female avatars belonging to real-life men, for instance; possibly age will be reabable though voice (unlikely, in my opinion). Those with hearing challenges will be left out, as will people who are shy or don’t have a mic, who will disappear into the wallpaper. Wired noted that voice destroys the kind of level playing field that the text-based world provides by hiding age/culture distinctions that might otherwise keep users in their respective silos. It brings in a level of the real world that, in the case of World of Warcraft in particular, apparently isn’t very welcome. Having our preconceptions about others challenged is uncomfortable. Going along with other people preconceptions of us can sometimes be useful, and voice might endanger that.

You could make the same arguments for text, in many ways. Lots of us are pretty good at working out who’s probably male and who’s probably female in text anyway. (And I’m not talking about the gender genie, but that’s a post for another time.) And it’s not as if we can really hide our age and experience from people with whom we spend significant time. Educational level, etc. becomes clear fairly quickly in text. Pure text conversation excludes a significant number of people as well; it’s not as if text is more pure and predjudice-free than voice.

But I’m primarily convinced that voice won’t alter much because I don’t think voice is going to supplant text in Second Life.

I was talking to Catspaw last night about voice in WoW, and the way she described it pretty much matched up with what I expect we’ll see; voice takes its place as one element in the mix, an authoritative feature used in very specific circumstances with requirements that can make use of its advantages. In her case, she said the voice channel is what you use when the leader of a group needs to get information to everyone else really fast. In the case of Second Life, it might be a short bit of instruction or a story that everyone in a place wants to hear. I will likely be immediate, intimate, ephemeral, and short. In the case of Second Life, it’s not private by any means (your “ears” in Second Life are attached to your camera, not your avatar; you can zoom in on people and listen to a conversation even if you’re not that close to them). You can’t walk away from a voice chat (though, Catspaw says you can, you just need to crank the volume, but that crack aside). Voice chat ties you to a window in ways that text doesn’t. If someone hears you talking in response, you can’t very well be multi-tasking and catching up at intervals (which, I suspect, is how many people manage text chats…at least, that’s how I manage them). Voice chat is more like a real life conversation; if you don’t answer immediately, people will think you’re not paying attention (which you aren’t) and will be offended. For spurts of information, I think voice will be very useful, but I don’t think it will really push out those who doesn’t want to use it. Most people will use text for chatter because it requires less effort and allows for the ability to read up. (Even if they added a “listen to the last 5 minutes you missed” feature, you’d still get dragged out of the immediacy of the voice chat moment.)

And some people don’t have mics, that’s just reality. They can still listen in, though, and respond. If someone really didn’t want to use their voices, they could just say that they don’t have a mic and don’t really like talking into one anyway. I can’t imagine too many people would find that odd. Even I found it a bit daunting to experiment with the voice feature on the beta grid, and it’s hard to find someone more gregarious than I am. Voice is sort of like stepping up on stage in middle school to give your speech in front of all your peers; even for the pathologically un-shy, it’s a bit unnerving.

I expect the full introduction of voice in Second Life will go something like this: voice comes in, there’s a flurry of activity around it for a while, people talking to old friends for the first time, listening to people’s accents and luxuriating in the quality of their voices, feeling, possibly, distance because the tenor of the voices is different than expected, and then eventually things settling down and returning to normal, and returning, primarily, to text. Voice will probably get used, but only in specific circumstances that call for it. I think this is very literally about the addition of a feature rather than the replacement of another.

From an Ed Tech perspective, I think the introduction of voice is going to be amazing; it means we don’t need to set up live streaming to bring talks into Second Life. Audio chat comes with a certain amount of built-in authority; we used to run into problems with getting a message out to everyone in a class through text, because the set up of text is democratic in nature and doesn’t specially highlight the teacher’s words over everyone else’s. I’m in favour of that breakdown of authority on most levels and in most circumstances, but providing an authoritative channel like voice means we can acknowledge that the authority that exists, alows us to use it thoughtfully and meaningfully when we need it, and let us deliberately distribute it among the students when it’s required. For instance, we could have students take turns presenting via voice chat, and allow others to type their reactions and questions and feedback as text. It allows for a kind of visible backchannel that doesn’t need to take away from the presentation itself. It means many people can “talk” at once without interrupting each other; that was always been the beauty of text. (Me and Jason sometimes tell each other stories at the same time in text, stories that get twisted together but both get across at the same time.) Personally, I can’t sit through presentations anymore without talking back; at the moment I’m restricted to the number of questions I can ask before I feel like I’m dominating the group, and my various text-based backchannel options (which drag me out of the immediate room rather than keeping me in it). Voice brings to Second Life the function that conferencing software already has; text from the peanut gallery and voice from the presenter, and then the option of voice for the peanut gallery, who generally prefer to stick to text. If anything, the introduction of voice to Second Life is a challenge to conference software packages; there’s no sense of presence in those as it stands. Second Life would be a much more fun place to hold a conference once it gets easy voice chat.

But I guess we’ll soon see.

xkcd and the shhing librarians

xkcd and the shhing librarians

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This morning I saw today’s xkcd strip, “Librarians“. My reaction went like this: oooo yay some librarian love, yippeee….oh, it’s the “librarians love books more than anything” meme again…boo. He’s clearly never dated an actual librarian, because this is so clearly the perspective of a person who doesn’t know what librarians actually do, and man, now I’m all disappointed. I was going to write something about it this morning, but the words kind of trickled out of my head and pooled together into nonsense, so I didn’t bother.

But Kathleen Houlihan hit the nail squarely on the head (link via Steven):

Images/stereotypes are viral. There’s very little we can do to change the way the public views us. Badgering publishers or authors into printing retractions for their portrayal of librarians is defensive and not particularly productive or flattering, as it goes a long way towards perpetuating the myth that we’re a bunch of control-freak biddies running around in packs trying to maintain order. The only way to change the perception of librarians (and I’d guess that the Shh! variety of librarian stereotype will be around for a long time because of movies, cartoons and books) is to get people to come into the library. See that we have more than books. See that many of us don’t care how you treat our books as long as you use them. See that we can help you tame the torrent of information that’s available on the web and find real and useful sources of information for you. That many libraries have “quiet floors” instead of the whole library being off-limits for chatter. That we even encourage noisiness with some of our programming. Get people in the door and their perception of us might change.

This is something we’ve been wrestling with at my place of work, as well; there is a stereotype of librarians out there in the world, for good and/or for ill. While Kathleen thinks it’s okay either way, from my perspective as an academic librarian, it’s not okay and we really do need to change perceptions, at least locally. That strip demonstrates the idea that a librarian is so closely tied to the collection that hurting a book is torture to her; libraries are primarily understood as houses for their collections. The distinction between the library as a structure and the librarian as a thinking person and a professional is getting blurry. Librarians are far more than merely their collections, and we need to challenge that perception if we’re going to be taken seriously.

As I’ve heard it expressed at a couple of different institutions now, librarians need to better express the business that we’re in. The number of times we encounter people who don’t know the difference between a public library and an academic library is staggering enough; why don’t we better express what it is we do? What sort of resource we are to the universities in which we’re ensconced? We need to better articulate our expertise, as well. We are not a little-league version of an academic; we are the people who watch the flow of publication and information distribution, keep tabs on the different entry ways into a discipline. We are the people who know how to find sources of information when you know nothing about a discipline, because we know how to read its tea leaves. We fight to make sure information is available to the people who need it; we haven’t done very well so far at expressing that battle to the faculty who’s work is the fodder for it.

I’m not saying we should ask for a retraction; it’s not xkcd’s fault that we have a shhh-ing reputation. It’s ours. And it’s our job to get out there and make a new reputation for ourselves, not as bespeckled, cardigan-wearing biddies, but as loud-mouthed, politically-savvy, compassionate brainacs with a pendant for the rare and obscure. With a talent for divination, of course.

B612 in Second Life

B612 in Second Life

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“I am a fox,” said the fox.

“Come and play with me,” proposed the little prince.

“I am so unhappy.” “I cannot play with you,” the fox said. “I am not tamed.”

“Ah! Please excuse me,” said the little prince. But, after some thought, he added: “What does that mean, ‘tame’?”

“You do not live here,” said the fox. “What is it that you are looking for?”

“I am looking for men,” said the little prince. “What does that mean, ‘tame’?”

“Men,” said the fox. “They have guns, and they hunt. It is very disturbing. They also raise chickens. These are their only interests. Are you looking for chickens?”

“No,” said the little prince. “I am looking for friends. What does that mean, ‘tame’?”

“It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. It means to establish ties.”

“‘To establish ties’?”

“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…”

My attempt to build my own B612. (Click the image to see it bigger.)

b612

Welcome to the World

Welcome to the World

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My sister (Melissa) was due with her second child last Friday. Last Friday was also the fifth birthday of her first child (Max). Now, Max himself was a week overdue when he made his entrance into the world, so no one was entirely expecting the sequel to arrive when expected. And so he didn’t! Last night when I spoke to my brother-in-law (Peter), he said they weren’t planning to induce Melissa today, but maybe next Monday or Tuesday.

This morning at 6:30am my phone rang, and I was so dead asleep at the time I didn’t quite register what it was until it had stopped. Got up, checked the messages…it was my dad, sounding very pleased. My new nephew was born at 1:50pm this morning. Yay!

So now I’m trying desperately to get back to Guelph to hang out with the family, but I gotta tell you: for a city that is a lean hour drive from my condo in Clarkson, getting to Guelph is hard. There is no transit link between Mississauga and Guelph at all, so the only way to manage it is to get into Toronto (due east) in order to turn around and go to Guelph (due west). And then, of course, the arrival/departure times don’t match up at all; I took a commuter train into Toronto, and then walked twenty minutes up to the greyhound station, and now I’m parked there waiting for the next bus (2pm). For a 6:30am wake up, you’d think I’d be able to do this a little faster, but there you have it.

Apparently Max has already been in to meet his brother, held him, and sang to him. I’m sure this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship. My mother, minus a great deal of sleep because of the 1am phone call, is currently out sleeping on her patio in the sunshine. My sister, apparently, went into labour so fast there wasn’t time for painkillers. I can’t wait to see her, but word on the street is that she’s doing really well.

I haven’t been officially told the new one’s name yet, but last I heard the frontrunner was Leo. My mom says he’s a very beautiful baby, and that he already looks just like his brother. My mom said, over and over on the phone, “he’s so sweet, so sweet,” which I’m sure makes him a very unique and special less-than-a-day old! He’s nursing already and everything.

On the travel upside: I got on the Toronto wireless network. If only Guelph had one. Hopefully I’ll have some pictures to post, once I get an internet connection again after the big auntie-nephew introductions.

Anniversary

Anniversary

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If one becomes a librarian the day one starts one’s first professional library job (debatable: possibly one becomes a librarian the moment one completes a library school degree, or the day one graduates from library school, or some other key date I’m not considering), then today is my two year anniversary of being a librarian.

It doesn’t feel like it’s been two years. It’s really zipped by.

I feel like the luckest person in the world.

Ping Me

Ping Me

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My friend June figured this one out first, and it’s so rad I had to follow suit: meebo, the wonder tool that allows anyone to log into their AIM, Yahoo, MSN or Jabber accounts from any browser anywhere, came out with a widget you can stick on your site. And it does what I’ve always dreamed of such an app doing; it’s connected to a client, so I can launch the client and get IMs from guests who visit my website. And they don’t need to log in to do it.

You can test it out on me here.

You could do something like this with those floating chat windows (very cool, all of them), but this one really bridges the gap between proper IM and web-based chat. You don’t even need a meebo account (or any other) to talk to me!

One of the big advantages to the meebo widget is that it’s entirely private, only two-way communication. If two people land on the page at the same time, you just get two IM windows in your client, they aren’t aware of each other. There are other apps to allow people who are visiting the same site to natter at each other anyway. I’ve been wanting something like this.

I think this widget is a really nice step to move into v.ref. No accounts, no special software; and you coud stick it all over the place, including, say, in a course-specific web resource or pathfinder. And the thing tells you if the person on the other end isn’t available right now. Sweet!

I woke up this morning and discovered that it’s the 50s again!

I woke up this morning and discovered that it’s the 50s again!

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A UCLA faculty member recieves a big (4.07 million) award in response to her sexual harrassment suit against her former department, and the appeal request was rejected. Open and shut; the case was heard, and clearly there was ample evidence and the harrassment was agregious enough to support such a big award. The suit itself is pretty much what you’d expect; they didn’t give her opportunities that were granted to men of her rank, they were disparaging, they made suggestive comments, etc. But the killer is this:

In addition to the original complains Conney had against the school, it was discovered during court proceedings that her UCLA department had a secret reserve of money that they used to supplement the salaries of male faculty members only.

“You start to realize that these obstacles loom very large for women – there is a glass ceiling,” Conney said. “Women still bump into a lot of resistance when we try to truly become equal at higher levels.”

A secret reserve of money? Where does that come from? How does that work into their departmental budget line? That’s truly appalling. No wonder they have such a tetchy department, they have a passive-aggressive budget. Sheesh. I feel a little ill about this story. They kept a reserve of funds around to secretly reward the people they really liked, thereby creating a little secret cohort (an old boys club even minus the old boys!). This department deserves the public shaming its about to get.

For the first time, I’m feeling a little warmth for FIPPA. There’s something to be said for fiduciary transparency. [Via feminist, via Bitch PhD.]

Ephemera, Dignity, and Control: Should Libraries collect Blogs?

Ephemera, Dignity, and Control: Should Libraries collect Blogs?

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This morning my friend Jeremy blessed us with a post about a project at the library school at UNC Chapel Hill entitled Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation. Not only is my comment on Jeremy’s post 5 times longer than everything he had to say about it, I still have more rant left in me that’s going to have to spill out here. (One can only abuse other people’s blogs so much.)

From their project website:

This research study grew out of calls in the literature of information and library science to regard these new vehicles for communication and information dissemination as valuable additions to the human record. The purpose of this research is to survey bloggers’ own perceptions on digital preservation. It is hoped that the results of this study will inform development of recommendations for impacting stewardship of weblogs at the level of creation, and the development of strategies for capturing the content of blogs for perpetuity.

I’ve heard about this kind of thing before. There are many librarians who think collecting blogs is the right thing to do. These are usually the pro-internet ones, the one who like blogs, use the term “web 2.0” with some fluency, know what a wiki is, have a profile on facebook, and maybe even use an RSS reader. They think it would be progressive for libraries to archive blogs in the same way they archive academic journals and Time Magazine. There’s a cultural currency at play there; as librarians, we underscore the value of one form of publishing when we opt to collect one variety of publication and exclude others. In selecting the American Historical Review and not The Inquirer for our permanent collection, we privilege one form of expression over the other; we say, this is worthy of your attention and a portion of our funds; this other thing is not. So I understand why so many digitally hip librarians are trying to widen the net and start scooping up blog posts as well as academic serial publications. It would be a act of friendliness toward us, of certain kind of regard; it would be, on one level, an act offering us a level of dignity that we so often fail to engender among the general population.

The first time I heard a librarian suggest that libraries start collecting blogs, it was like a punch in the stomach. I had a very irrational, visceral reaction to it that went like this: absolutely not, no, no way, stop now, please leave me alone. It was only later I stopped to think about it and tried to deconstruct why I had such a strong reaction to the idea.

The first issue is control. My blog is mine, and I can go back at any time and edit bits and pieces of it as I see fit. I’m particularly sensitive to the control issues around blogging, because I’ve been a blogger for many years and have been through many life-changing experiences throughout my time as a blogger. Not only have I dropped out of one graduate program and completed another, I’ve completely changed careers, moved many times, picked up and dropped hobbies, and thus I’ve changed the based focus of my blog multiple times. I’ve also grown up a lot since the beginning, and I learned through trial and error what is and is not appropriate to put on line. Actually, no, that’s not entirely a fair way to phrase that: it’s not nearly that simple. The things that were appropriate for me to put online in 2001 when I started blogging are no longer appropriate for me now that I’m a professional with a professional online presence. There are things I used to talk about on my blog back in 2001 and 2002 that I wouldn’t dream of posting now; it’s less a matter of cut-and-dried internet privacy and more a matter of direction. I’ve changed my direction, I’ve changed the purpose of my blogging, and so I’ve edited and pruned my blog as I went along. What if my blog had been archived back in 2001, and at intervals thereafter? What if someone had felt that I was part of creating a permanent public record?

I did say it in public, after all. Do we give up our rights to edit our work once it’s in the public sphere? Historically, yes; hard copies would be distributed, and the sheer logistics of it make that editing impossible. But we aren’t talking about a hard copy world, here. Why are we suggesting that the hard copy rules need to follow us into the digital sphere?

When I merged the first iteration of my blog (blogspot) into this one (wordpress), I brought it all over, the picked through it and locked a whole ton of posts. It wasn’t entirely a matter of being ashamed or having something to hide; they just weren’t in keeping with my current perspective on this blog. They didn’t fit into the open portfolio I’m keeping here. At some point, should those posts become relevant, I may re-release them minus the lock and refer to them. I deleted a bunch of stuff that just struck me as trite and boring, too. This is my archive, built and maintained primarily for myself and my friends, but others are welcome to visit and have a look through it as well. Does this openness strip me of my right to tweak my work?

There’s part of my objection: I felt that, should libraries collect my blog, keep a permanent archive for the public record, I would be losing something that’s important to me. I would be losing some ability to control my own work.

Most of the issue here seems based on a difference between old and new media, or old and new publication methods. We have ideas about works in progress, and we have a definite idea about what it means to be “finished”. We freeze things when they’re finished. We take a picture and say, there it is, it’s done now, and we mass produce the result. Novelists write and write, edit and edit, and finally finish their novels and hand them over. They’re published and, for the most part, that’s the end of the story. There are rarely revisions to published work; it’s gone out into the wild, it’s over now. There are millions of copies out there and there’s no taking them back. I know many writers who cringe when they look at their own published books, because they can still see errors that they can’t edit anymore. We take these fixed iterations of their work and put it in the library, because they’re done now. The stone tablet has been carved. This version of archiving is based entirely on the idea that the master copy is finite and complete, it’s the movable type all set in order, it’s the means of production rather than the product. The end user doesn’t have access to the master copy; once they have their version, they don’t look back at the master. But in the world of blogs, the master copy is the product. Sure, everyone takes their own copy; technically, every time you look at a website, you take a copy of it. In theory it’s the same master copy/copy world. But in practice, that copy is so ephemeral people often fail to understand that it even exists. They can fish a copy out of their browser caches, they can save copies down to their hard drives, but the vast majority of people believe that there is a single version of, say, a website, and in order to view it, they need to go to it and look. And when they do, their old copy is replaced by the new copy.

So why are we talking about taking still versions of blogs and sticking them in archives? Why are we taking a living document, killing it, and taking a picture? Where putting novels in libriaries provides the author with a distribution network, putting archived copies of blogs in repositories doesn’t increase distribution for the blogger. It merely creates a new master copy that the blogger has no control over. It takes away from the blogger.

However: libraries could always respect the rights of the blogger to constantly change their master copy simply by collecting their RSS feeds rather than the blog proper. If their parser checks back with the original document and syncs it, much like a browser does when a user goes back to a website and sees that something has changed, I could accept that. We could filter what goes to the library, and be very clear that some things are okay from that perspective and some things we keep just for us. That requires librarians to accept that we don’t have a complete or permanent record, however. We only have access to that information the blogger allows us to see, when they allow us to see it. And there’s no guarantee it will be the same the next time we go to look at it.

And that raises the question of the historical record. As a former historian-in-training I suppose I should be more sympathetic to this argument; someday some poor graduate student will do a dissertation about phd dropouts who become librarians and will want access to my blog. Well, that’s too bad for him, I’m afraid. He’ll have to hope that people like me will put something into the permanent historical record and not hope that someone someday will see the joy in archiving my digital voice, because I have no intention of ensuring that my blog stays around for centuries after my death. I’m not writing this for that future graduate student; I’m writing it as part of the dialogue that exists right now, a sort of extended public square conversation. It doesn’t exist in a vaccum, and is so dependent on the digital swirls of dialogue around it that I’m not sure it would make sense on its own. In fact, I’m not sure we should understand blogs as singular, decontextualized entities in the first place. (Though: can we even consider books as singular decontextualized entities, and am I inching toward complete nihilism here?)

I recently had a drink with a faculty member at my place of work who told me that his father destroyed all of his personal correspondence prior to his death. What right did he have to do this? Every right in the world, I have to say. Every right. There’s dignity in radio silence. Those letters weren’t written with the understanding of permanence. When we ask students to write something that won’t be seen by others and won’t be attached to their names, we can’t change streams weeks later and decide to make them public. We should have some respect for the boundaries in which a work was created.

When I was an undergrad I did some work in the National Archives of Canada on a project using letters written to the Prime Minister during the depression. As it turns out, if you really want to get into the permanent public record, send it to the Prime Minister’s office; they microfilm everything. EVERYTHING. The letters were private pleas from the desperately poor to the millionaire businessman prime minister at the time, R. B. Bennett. There were letters from children asking for skates, or for shoes so they could walk to school, or for pencils and paper. There were letters from men who couldn’t get jobs, and from women who were so distraught about their husbands’ financial emasculation that they sent secret letters to the PM asking for help. One of these letters had a note at the bottom: please destroy this letter once you’ve read it. That was from a woman so ashamed of the details she was writing about, so scared for her family, that she didn’t want a permanent record of it. And there I was, sitting in the archives in front of the microfilm reader, sixty years later, reading it. I felt sick. They should have destroyed that letter, and I couldn’t stomach the idea of taking notes on it and using it in my paper. I scrolled past it instead. Why did they film it? Did the person who took the shot of it cringe the way I did? But she did send it, didn’t she. She put it into the public record, with a postage stamp attached. It wasn’t intended for my eyes. At the time I knew I’d rather preserve her dignity than get one more source for a paper with hundreds and hundreds of sources already. There were other letters I could draw from to write that paper, there are other ways to get at that information without breaking a sort of historical trust. She had been wronged.

Some things were created to be, and should remain, ephemeral.

Wikipedia as Community Service

Wikipedia as Community Service

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If I were “You”: How Academics Can Stop Worrying and Learn to Love “the Encyclopedia that Anyone Can Edit”. I’ve spouted off about this a million times before, and I’m glad to see someone else finally saying it too:

This recognition of the extent to which the Wikipedia has engaged the imagination of the general public and turned it to the amateur practice of scholarship suggests what I think may prove to be the best way of incorporating it into the lives of professional academics: since the Wikipedia appears unable to serve as a route to professional advancement for intrinsic reasons, perhaps we should begin to see contributions to it by professional scholars as a different type of activity altogether—as a form of community service to be performed by academics in much the same way lawyers are often expected to give back to the public through their pro bono work. A glance at almost any discussion page on the Wikipedia will show that the Wikipedians themselves are aware of the dangers posed to the enterprise by the inclusion of fringe theories, poor research, and contributions by people with insufficient disciplinary expertise. As certified experts who work daily with the secondary and primary research required to construct good Wikipedia entries, we are in a position to contribute to the construction of individual articles in a uniquely positive way by taking the time to help clean up and provide balance to entries in our professional areas of interest. In doing so, we can both materially improve the quality of the Wikipedia and demonstrate the importance of professional scholars to a public whose hobby touches very closely on the work we are paid to do—and whose taxes, by and large, support us.

I’d like to insert a little more concern about access to information by the general public, and perhaps add just a glimmer of the serials crisis into this article, but I guess that’s for librarians to do, not academics. Though it will never cease to amaze me that academics don’t seem to realize that they give away their intellectual labour all the time to support a third party distribution system that takes money away from the universities, thus making academics the number one threat to library budgets and the number one reason why those with access to the internet but no access to university libraries can’t get a hold of scholarly works, but hey. It’s Monday morning, and this article is a start.

Via Jason.

Stop being so damn nice

Stop being so damn nice

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Steven Bell suggests that we librarians are too nice for our own good.

As one explores and delves into the world of library blogs it soon becomes apparent that the rules of disengagement dominate the landscape. There one is likely to see a repetitious flood of posts exclaiming “What a great post by so-and-so” or “She’s got a must read post today”. Rarely does one see a post that starts with “I have to disagree” or “Boy, does he have it wrong.” Most commenting is no better. It’s mostly gratuitous back patting. But why bother anyway? Comments are secondary to actual posts and they reach a much smaller audience. One exception might be ACRLog, a blog for which I write. Geared specifically to academic librarians it still allows fairly unrestrictive commenting, and on occasion comments may offer brilliant opposing views. But these are few and far between; the overall dearth of comments, even for posts that make controversial statements, is shockingly surprising for this profession.

I’ve got two reactions to this; the sympathetic one, and the raised eyebrow one.

One one hand: yes, librarianship is not the world’s more ‘rigorous’ when it comes to scholarship. I would be very happy to be challenged a little more often, particularly as a relatively new librarian who still has a heck of a lot to learn. And when I find an article in the literature dealing with my precise struggles and challenges at work, it’s pretty disheartening to see trite, sophmoric and downright pathetic options listed as best practices in some of the supposedly sterling journals of the profession. I’ll be among the first to jump up and agree that we tend not to think deeply enough or research long enough. We’ve got a million other things to do, unfortunately, and I don’t know a single librarian who isn’t flailing a little under all the work. So yes; it would be nice to dig a little deeper.

But let’s move on to the raised eyebrow. (Steven, you know you asked for it!) The basic accusations here centre around us being “too nice”. We don’t stir up debate enough. We don’t disagree enough. We don’t show our selves off as true (aggressive) social scientists, clinging to the stats as ultimate truth and displaying our hard-won research to the world. We don’t fight amongst each other, in an academic kind of way. We are, as he says, “the nice guys of higher education.” But you know what? No we’re not. We’re the nice women of higher education. Librarianship is, for the most part, filled to the brim with women. Women, who were attracted to librarianship in the first place based on its positive, affirming and stress-reduced traits. It’s not generally acceptable in western cultures for a woman to be aggressive, and certainly not aggressive in the workplace; what’s considered confidence in a man would label a woman strident at best or a bitch at worst. Why would we go out of our way to do a bellyflop into someone’s work and say, “I completely disagree with this ridiculous argument” in blatant, argumentative terms? We have way more powerful tools in our arsenal. We have agreement to play with. And silence to lay on thick.

Rather than an absence of debate in the profession, I submit to you that we have lots of it, but you need to be more subtle in your interpretations to understand it. Librarians use a more cautious, conciliatory approach to debate. Let’s take Steven’s examples: he mentions contentious posts that recieve no comment. Well, isn’t “no comment” a comment as well? Sure, you could call it passive aggressive, but I prefer to think of it as using praise to reinforce the good, and silence to discourage the bad. The best thing you can do in a situation where someone has said something clearly offensive is ignore it, and spend your time instead of speaking only of the things you do agree with. That way, we take up more bandwidth with the things we think are worth it. This is otherwise known as “don’t feed the troll.” It’s generally good advice.

First: we don’t blog for pay (well, most of us don’t, at least), so why should we waste our time thinking and writing about things we don’t find useful? (It’s true that critical reactions to things are learning experiences too, but no less so than responding to things that are challenging in a more positive and reinforcing way.) Silence is powerful; librarianship has opted to eshew open hostility in favour of positive discussion and praise. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Librarians will certainly tell me when they disgree with me, but why must they be aggressive about it in order to be seen as rigorous or thoughtful? Most librarians would rather pick the one thing about my argument that they liked or that resonated with them, and ignore the rest. They are not just patting my head when they do this; they’re pointing out their disagreement in a most polite and subtle way. In a sophisticated way.

Why must we be aggressive in order to be seen as rigorous? There is no natural relationship between those things, unless the purpose is to denigrate cooperative and collaborative knowledge construction in favour of a more war-like, negative debating style of learning. It’s not really fair of me to suggest that one is the way of women and one is the way of men, but there are gender distinctions in western communications, and and this is one way to describe them. Roughly speaking. Why should librarianship model themselves after male-dominated, aggressively negative disciplines? Why is that seen as a better means to an end? Is their output really so much better?

We all work in the same tiny pools, and we need each other in many ways throughout the our (usually long) careers. I think it says a lot about us that we don’t want to make enemies of each other; a person who says something you disagree with today might be your best ally tomorrow, and I think we all know that. It is more functionally productive for us to try and see the positives in each other’s thought rather than focus on the negatives in a space where collaboration is the best way forward (and I believe quite strongly that it is).

Sure, it’s easy to read through the literature and roll your eyes (as I expressed quite clearly above that I have done). But I’m not going to name names. It would be more useful for me to instead take my criticisms, bolster them with bigger, better, more creative and sustainable ideas, and write a whole new article, citing the useless ones with grace. I am far more likely to enact positive change by rising above petty debate. Denigrating the ideas of others is far more likely to make it look like I’m feathering my own nest and trying to look super smrt in front of my peers than actively trying to make the world a better place. And maybe that’s the distinction here; librarians are not defined by their scholarship. Librarians are defined by their work, which is, writ large, an attempt to make the world a better place. We put our efforts toward that rather than toward showing off.

Let’s not stop the nice. Nice isn’t weak. Nice is a form of power.

Or, as Margaret Atwood wrote in her story “Gertrude Talks Back” in Good Bones and Simple Murders: “I’m not wringing my hands. I’m drying my nails.”