Tag: web 2.0

One Step at a Time: Taking the Library Website from reference source to communication tool

July 24, 2009 Rochelle Mazar Comments 0 Comment

Have I mentioned lately how much I love my job? My head has been in a bit of a fog with it the last few months. The only thing on my horizon currently is my current task: rethinking, restructuring, and recreating the library’s website.

When I explain what the project is, it seems like such a small thing, really. We have a website: surely we’re just making it prettier and adding a few extra pages of text, right? This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Our original goal with the project was to create a local hub for our community; we wanted our website to be not only for our community but by our community. We wanted it to have a lot of interaction, where students could contribute in a variety of ways. We wanted it to belong to them as much as to us. This is, of course, a very lofty goal. Few websites manage to do this; why would a library website be one of them? There were a wide variety of things we really wanted to implement so that we could assist students in communicating not only with us but with each other. We took a look around at what happens in the building and decided that the same kind of activity should also be happening on the website; see and be seen, chat with friends, find classmates who are studying at the same time as you are. We could be antagonistic to the fact that we are apparently the facebook of our campus, given all the various problems that come with that (noise in particular) but instead we’re seeing it as a valid use of the space. Our overall goals including helping students to learn better. You can’t learn with people you don’t trust. How do you build trust? You chat, you share, you relate to each other in friendly ways. Are libraries places to meet people, chat with friends, build community? Why shouldn’t they be? We can encourage it, preserve the traditional “library quiet” in the places where it’s expected, and infuse our social and academic spaces with resources and services to help.

Our goals for the website were lofty. A little too lofty for our first iteration, as it turns out. Not just because of time (though that’s a huge factor) and not just because of money (also a huge factor). It’s also got a lot to do with cultural change in an institution, getting various groups of people on the same page, getting resources you don’t necessarily have any history of requesting, and generally changing expectations on every level. Slow change is sometimes the best we can accomplish. I’m not a patient person, but I think what we’re trying to accomplish needs patience. So a few technical hurdles are probably just what was required to slow me down a bit.

So what we’re going to present in a few weeks is different than what our original goals suggested. It’s going to look like 180 degree turn to some, I realize. But the more I got into the project, the more I realized that we’re not yet entirely qualified to start building digital community. We don’t live digitally yet as a library. How can we responsibly foster such a community, encourage interaction, when we’re not doing it ourselves? So in our steps toward creating a community website, the first thing we need to do is focus on us.

This is totally counter-intuitive. I know this is one of the battles I’m going to need to fight: in order to be a part of a community, you need talk as much as you need to listen. The received wisdom on this point is that to be a trusted source, you listen to your audience and give them what they want. I shall now turn that on its ear: to be valuable and trusted, you need to demonstrate who you are and what you do. Not just once, but constantly. It’s not enough to listen; we’re listening, and no one knows who we are. We are faceless. We can be an echo chamber for our patrons, or we can show them who we actually are and what we actually do. We can share our passion with them. We can tell them about all the really interesting things that we encounter on a regular basis. We can talk about the things that slow us down. Talking doesn’t stop us from listening. In order to be part of a community we hope to provide resources for, we need to open up and share.

So the first iteration of our website will be about us sharing. It will be about us telling you what’s going on and what we’re thinking about. This is going to be a challenge on all sides. As I said, we are not a digital culture here. Other than me, no one is used to musing aloud in public. We are currently a closed circle, looking at each other and filling the space between us with papers and words. Now, we will face outward, and you will get to see those words. They will be for you as much as for us.

What this means: regular updates on things like construction in the library. It won’t just be a little sign for you to read on the way in; you can see the plans, the ideas, the fundraising goals. You will know that we are having some of our soft furnishing replaced, that we’re rearranging the fourth floor because the original plan didn’t make as much sense as we thought, and that we have big plans for the structure of the library in the future. There are so many really exciting things going on related to the physical space; there’s no good reason not to share it with our community. We can talk about ideas we have about replacing our loaner laptops with hardy netbooks. (Just ideas, but good ones!) When something explodes in the library world, we can be upfront and clear with our community about how it effects them, and hear about what we’re doing about it ourselves. We can track the progress of all the new initiatives that are starting up in the library, including my own position, Emerging Technologies.

So our first go with our new website is going to be about a change in practice and in metaphor. Our website is not just a big book full of how-tos that you can pull down when you need it, though we’re going to make sure it’s easy to find out how to do everything we know students are going to need to know how to do. The book metaphor is gone. We’re not just trying to serve all known needs. We’re also trying to engage with our community on the issues we are passionate about. We are trying to inform everyone about what’s going on here, what the plans are, how we’re considering an issue or a problem. We will not be faceless. We will not be without our particular interests and specialties. We will not be perfect PR. We will be human beings who happen to love the work that we do.

You can give someone a blank piece of paper and tell them to write. Or you can give them a book full of ideas and comments and ask them to jot down their response. The first one seems easier, but is actually harder. So we’ll start. We’ll start the process of creating an institutional space that changes all the time, that reflects the people in the building, and responds to the community in every way that they talk back. As time goes on, we’ll expand the voices that populate our website. We want to hear more from students and faculty. We want to provide them with tools to communicate with each other.

One step at a time.

The Speed of Adoption

April 19, 2008 Rochelle Mazar Comments 0 Comment

Last night I was waiting for Stargate SG1 to come on and watched an entertainment news program (or parts of it). On it, they described the internet phenomenon that is the YouTube Divorce, wherein some famous person’s wife recorded a video of complaints about her soon-to-be ex-husband and uploaded it to youtube. The entertainment news host indicated that everyone had seen it. I had not seen it, and had not ever heard of either of the two players involved. What struck me about it was this; there was a time that I heard about internet memes on the internet exclusively, and suddenly I learn about them on tv.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxfhInhkvtM&hl=en]

I didn’t catch this broadcast (October 8th, 1993), but didn’t hear much else about “internet” in popular media until much later. I remember the first time I heard someone talk about the internet on tv on a local news program. It wasn’t cable, just basic free tv from a pair of bunny ears, and the year was 1999. It was a mention of some businesses web site, which you could visit for more information, with a url given. I had been spending lots of quality time on the internets in the 90s, and hearing the web talked about so openly on tv made me think: well, that was a fun ride. Now everyone and their dog is about to appear. This is it: it’s over. It’s not ours anymore.

The lag time between hearing about something online, seeing it/using it/adopting it, and then hearing about it in the mainstream media seems to be getting shorter and shorter. I used to be able to count on hearing about something via friends or Metafilter or some other random web browsing months if not years before mainstream media would “discover” it. Watching blogging come into the mainstream has been fascinating; I thought it hit the mainstream in 2001 when I finally decided to get on board, but it seems that every year thereafter blogging was a new relevation and just got bigger and bigger. Now, no one even blinks in the mainstream media when they reference someone’s blog. They all have blogs of their own, and no one need to define the term anymore. Everyone’s heard of wikipedia. The basic level of internet literacy is going up.

So that’s why yesterday seemed to be such a turning point for me; the internet now has a few killer apps that have finally taken such hold of mainstream North America that I am hearing about internet memes on tv before they reach me on the internet. In fact, perhaps there’s only one killer app that brings the rest of the culture online: it’s YouTube. As with any growing community, there are no more universal “big internet memes”; what’s big in your world isn’t so big in mine, and I may never hear about your internet celebrities until something strange or radical puts them in the media spotlight. The internet has long been fractured into interest groups, but there will be fewer and fewer “all your base” moments as the user group grows, things that everyone on the internet hears about at one time or another. In my internet universe, the youtube divorce didn’t merit a mention; it was clearly huge for the mainstream entertainment media’s audience.

Next up: Entertainment Tonight finds cool social software/web 2.0 apps and reports on them before I hear about them from my networks. Scary!

CBC Search Engine

April 10, 2008 Rochelle Mazar Comments 0 Comment

I heard a great episode of Search Engine on CBC radio this morning; it started with the idea of an internet bill of rights (to be continued), and then goes on into the details of an outstanding story about how an internet community caught a car thief (using bulletin boards, photo sharing, youtube, and even ebay). While people often see the virtual world and the real world as starkly separate (one being for losers and one being legitimate), this story shows the intersections of the two both in healthy, positive ways and also in quite disturbing ways. The show then goes on to an equally fascinating story about the main editor and protector of Hillary Clinton’s wikipedia page. Wikipedia is often demonized among librarians, educators, and the general public, and this story, the story of one editor with one particular interest, is timely and interesting. He explains how he does and doesn’t control the fate of what’s on that page, how people constantly try to vandalize the page, and he and his fellow committed editors keep that page accurate, and how their edits are vetted by others. Anyone can edit wikipedia pages, but it also follows that anyone can keep them fair and accurate, too. The show then ends with a short bit about net neutrality by Cory Doctorow.

The CBC has gone all interwebs lately!

You can hear this episode of Search Engine here:

http://odeo.com/flash/audio_player_tiny_gray.swf Click to listen.
To subscribe to the podcast using Itunes click here.

Microcelebrity

April 6, 2008 Rochelle Mazar Comments 0 Comment

I heard a bit on the radio about the internet and microcelebrity, but I only caught the tail end of it. I found an article about the idea here, written by Clive Thompson of Wired, and found that it really resonated with me as a tip-of-the-iceberg kind of idea. I wish this concept were more widespread in online discussion, and it’s implications more carefully considered. Even for those who know about it, few really take it seriously. I mean, Tay Zonday doesn’t really need serious deconstruction, does he? We watch him, we talk about him. So what?

I’m disturbed by our tendency to create and worship at the altar of alternative authority figures in online communities, and then to scoff about the whole thing because it doesn’t matter.

This is primarily why I hestitate over studies like Walt’s which seek to quantify popularity in the world of librarian blogs; I fear the creation of a hierarchy within this online community. Creating a list of popular bloggers creates more visible, more defined, and authoritative list of our community’s microcelebrities, encouraging others to vie for the top spot and pay closer attention to these community leaders. In reality this happens anyway, regardless of whether you quantify it, so I suppose I shouldn’t be so skittish about lists. But I feel like we don’t consider the implications of this microcelebrity enough, that we don’t stop to deconstruct the process enough and see what kinds of behaviours we unthinkingly adopt in its presence.

I’m interested in what it means to be a microcelebrity in any community, because I’ve seen in turn destructive and counterproductive so many times online. Why does this happen? Most people start doing what they do, putting themselves online, for a set of self-defined and often unique purposes: they enjoy writing out loud, they enjoy participating in a community of like-minded people with similar interests, they enjoy the challenge of alternative perspectives, they want a place to react and respond to the things that go on in their daily lives. They like to record their own growth and be urged on in that growth by people they do and don’t know. They want to get some feedback on something they’re doing, get some reaction and attention, perhaps. They want to create an online presence. Most people (I imagine) don’t enter into an online community with the goal of becoming one of that community’s celebrities; most people don’t realize that all online communities have their own homegrown celebrities. We don’t conceive of celebrity that way, and we don’t, as a rule, know the internet and it communities well enough to know that this is what happens. But I have never seen an online community that didn’t have them. It’s rarely a positive experience for anyone, even though “it’s not real” and “it doesn’t matter” and “who is it really hurting”. It hurts us. It reflects the way we build our communities, and being conscious of it will hopefully create a richer, more diverse environment.

What does it mean to be a microcelebrity, known in other circles as a BNF? It means that everything the microcelebrity writes about or focuses on gains more attention than it would otherwise; microcelebrities set the topics for discussion within the community, because everyone is reading what they say and wants in on the conversation. If the microcelebrity develops an interest in something relatively ignored to that point, that interest becomes a new fad. The microcelebrity coins terms that have currency in the community. The ideas, rough drafts, or work of the microcelebrity gets lots of feedback and response in the form of comments, forum posts, tweets, or blog posts; the work of the microcelebrity is more often cited and built upon than that of others. The ideas or work of microcelebrities become goalposts of the community, and everyone else is often compared against them. It’s a powerful position, but that power is often invisible to the microcelebrity, who is often just trying to do what everyone else is doing without recognizing the influence they’re having on the community at large. This definition of celebrity is so absurd to people that the power that comes with it is difficult for them to comprehend. It often feels like microcelebrities “run” the community, when in reality they do not and cannot. Their interests and activities just consistently receive more attention than that of others in the community.

It all sounds pretty positive, but there are downsides, and I think those downsides are dangerous for a healthy online community. Being under a microscope constantly by one’s own community of peers means that the microcelebrity is required to be increasingly careful about what kinds of ideas they espouse lest they inadvertently quash someone else’s project or cause drama. Clive Thompson writes: “Some pundits fret that microcelebrity will soon force everyone to write blog posts and even talk in the bland, focus-grouped cadences of Hillary Clinton (minus the cackle).” He doesn’t believe this is likely, but I’ve never been involved in a community where I haven’t seen it happen. As soon as everyone is staring at you all the time, and the slightest negative opinion sends some part of your community into a tailspin and your inbox to fill up with hate mail, things do get pretty bland. We talk about celebrities (micro or otherwise) as if they are not flesh and blood people; we can talk about them negatively without imagining that they would ever find and read our words about them. We curtail the people we read the most, in the end. The microcelebrity’s views and interests become more mainstream because mainstream is what we want from them; we want them to pet our egos, support our projects, and not stomp on any emerging subcultures or fledgling ideas, and we want to be able to eviscerate them for everything they say and do, as well. Why do we do this to each other? Why is this necessary? (Ask Jessamyn if she gets any hatemail. I bet she does. Do you?)

People approach microcelebrities to pimp their project or their posts, because the approval of a microcelebrity has such great weight; people post comments on these people’s posts just to get their names out there and visible within the community. People put microcelebrities in their feedreaders just to keep track of what they’re paying attention to, either to repost and respond to it, or possibly just to mock it. People get scornful of microcelebrities and everything they say and do, just because there is always a group of people who want to define themselves against what’s popular and shaping public discussion. Microcelebrities will always be judged as not as smart, interesting, or up-to-date as whoever is trying to build themselves up in their shadows. (“Why does she get all that attention? She doesn’t deserve it.“) They become heroes and an anti-heroes at the same time. It’s junior high all over again, and what disturbs me the most is that we don’t ruminate often on the nature of our interaction with microcelebrity at all. We don’t get metacritical about the way we build people up and use them as community signposts. We don’t question the way we adopt authority even when such authority is entirely fictional. We naturally shape our online communities that way and then chafe under them without investigating what underpins the construction of a community.

Being careful about what you post online is no great tragedy, but deliberately creating a hierarchy as a collective where a small subset of a community are expected to control topics and opinions, set trends, and give blessing to emerging subcultures, is self-limiting on all sides.

And this is why I object to creating “top 10 lists” of librarian bloggers; I know what ends up happening. People troll these lists for the ones to watch rather than exclusively following the people they would naturally gravitate toward or find interesting. We create a canon. Without the top 10 list, at least the people getting attention at any one time would shift and change a bit more; as soon as we publicly acknowledge those who get most of our attention, we’re starting to build up those hierarchies and cement them.

Microcelebrity is a real thing, and it can have a negative impact on an online community. I’d love to see a community structured to allow everyone to get the feedback and attention they want without any small subset becoming the de facto class presidents. Maybe we’re just not wired that way.

Edit: Seems I’m not the only one feeling uncomfortable with blogs and their communities today.

Networked Imagination and Persistence

August 25, 2007 Rochelle Mazar Comments 0 Comment

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.

Sometimes, Web 2.0 Hurts

December 2, 2006 Rochelle Mazar Comments 0 Comment

Oh boy. I didn’t see this one coming, though I suppose I should have: Students Used for Cheap Labour. This is a link to our student newspaper, and possibly it loads better in your browser than it does in mine, but I had to view its source to get at the content, so I will explain. Steve Joordens, a psychology prof at UTSC, has been working on a piece of software that has students engaging in not just reading and responding to articles, but actually grading each other’s work:

The program PeerScholar is currently being used to mark two written assignments, which are worth 5 percent each. After writing their own answers in the program, students are asked to log in later during the week to read over other students’ answers. Students are then asked to grade each answer based on criterion available on the website. All student work is graded by five students, to provide fairness in the marking, Joordans [sic]claims.

I’ve met Steve. I went over to UTSC a few months ago to talk with him about what he’s doing and get a demo. He’s a very nice guy, very smart guy, and while he’s taken a very different approach to instructional technology than I have, his work is very interesting. I found myself very challenged by what he’s doing because it’s so radically different and yet so similar to the work I’m doing myself. The pool of data he’s gathered means that he can do some serious statistical analysis on how students grade, the numbers of students who will try to game the system, how to account for gaming the system, etc. It hit my like a brick wall; stats. Instructional technology as a thing that gathers stats, from which we can extrapolate and learn something about the user group. It’s just not in my repetoire of goals, what can I say, that’s what a background in english, history and theological studies gets you. Seeing a demo of PeerScholar showed me my biases very, very clearly. It was like looking into a mirror for the first time. Revealing and a little unsettling.

My focus has always been more touchy-feely, more humanities than social sciences, in that I’m more interested in using “web 2.0” to create a culture of feedback inside a class, to use comment features as a way to train students to work up a response to everything they read, to make reading scholarly work simply another form of dialogue rather than monologue. As a way to help build a sense of community, because community always needs to be built and strengthened. I generally steer clear of grading per se; assessment is a grey area for me in a lot of ways, and while I have ideas about it, I still feel that the instructor is the best judge when it comes to assessing student work. When it comes to interactive work, it seems to me that grading less rather than more (grading the whole experience, the whole process, rather than a single instance) is the way to go. So it wouldn’t have occurred to me to include students grading each other as a feature. Reacting to each other? Yes. Leaving feedback, starting a discussion, quoting each other, definitely. But grading seems so…formal. Final. Mercenary, somehow. But Professor Joordens is a working instructor, with a huge class to teach, so I can easily see how he would stop to consider how technology could help automate the process. If they don’t automate it, students in those classes will only be able to express themselves through scantron sheets. I appreciate what he’s trying to do. I can absolutely understand and respect the desire to get those students getting more engaged and doing more writing about what they’re reading. I can’t think of a more passive and limiting educational experience than nothing but multiple choice exams for assessment. So I see where he’s coming from.

I didn’t see this coming, though:

However, according CUPE 3902, since marking and grading of student work is a paid position at U of T, the students are subsequently covered by the Collective Agreement for Teaching Assistants, which also makes them members of the union. As a result of this, CUPE 3902 is arguing that students are being made to work for free, which CUPE 3902 Chair Anil Varughese claims is to “compensate for the failure to hire enough trained and qualified teaching assistants to evaluate them.”

Ack! Slippery slope, isn’t it. Reading an article and responding to it is coursework, but reading another student’s response and assigning it a grade is paid labour. I absolutely see CUPE’s point, though, and so does Professor Joordens:

On the UTSC’s PSYA01 website, Joordans [sic] goes on to say, “I will be completely honest. The original reason for seriously considering a peer-to-peer evaluation process was financial. We cannot afford to pay a large team of TAs to mark written answers for large classes. Moreover, it would take them so long to do the marking that it also just wouldn’t be practical. Peer-to-peer evaluation, when combined with great internet programming, is fast and cheap.”

Oops.

The Star has weighed in on this issue as well: Peer Marking Gets a Negative Grade:

Jemy Joseph, 20, “absolutely loved the idea” when she found out her course at the University of Toronto Scarborough also featured short, written assignments that would be returned with assessments of ability to write and think critically.
Her problem was that the marking â€” worth 10 per cent of her final grade â€” was done by her 1,500 classmates, as part of peerScholar, an online evaluation program in limited use at the school.

“The idea behind it is great because you’re not just getting graded but you’re also getting some sort of feedback,” said Joseph, who took the course in 2004. “But I’m not comfortable with getting marks from random students who have no experience in grading and may not put a lot of work into it.”

If I recall correctly, the statistics indicate that students are getting roughly the same grade from each other than they would get from a graduate TA. Though possibly that’s an aggregate statistic, I’m not sure. (Stats: really not my territory.) I don’t think this student is actually complaining about the grade she got, but more about the relative emptiness behind it. She feels cheated out of not getting that feedback from the person teaching the course, or someone who is part of the authority of the course staff. There’s a piece missing there that we need to define. I think it’s easy to see the value that faculty bring to courses, but often the shift into using more technology in the classroom makes people forget about that value, or think it can be replaced by something automated. But students clearly still value the experience and knowledge of instructors themselves. You can give them the grades they want, give them a relatively easy and quick way to get those grades, but they still want more of the faculty member’s time and thoughts. This is a good thing; students aren’t necessarily just here to pick up a grade.

Agency

December 1, 2006 Rochelle Mazar Comments 0 Comment

I’m at a workshop today, and so far all my notes on the first presentation revolve around various concepts of ownership. This something I’ve been chewing over for some time, and trying to find ways to express. My experience thus far in educational technology (and education in general, honestly) is that when the learner is granted a measure of owernship over the site of their learning, they are dramatically more engaged in the material. Owernship seems to be one of the important elements that bridges the gap between working toward a grade and working toward a greater, more personal goal. (And, inevitably, the grades sky-rocket when student engagement is that much higher.)

This is the argument I’ve tried to use in describing the difference between a discussion board and a blog; you get a different kind of content on a blog, at least in part because a blog belongs to the student, while a discussion board belongs to the instructor. On a discussion board, a single person can dominate the dicussion, because while the space is not finite, there is a single, shared location for input; on a blog, you naturally dominate it, because it’s yours. And everyone has their own space to dominate. The sense of space is completely different.

I keep trying to make this argument, but I always feel on shaky ground. It’s just my gut talking. Ownership: why is that so significant? My experience is that it’s true, but I feel like I’m not expressing it well or describing it completely enough. I feel as though I don’t entirely understand it myself.

But other words are coming out of this presentation that address the same issue: the presenter (Clare Brett) talks about the importance of student agency, of student control. Is this all part and parcel of the same niggling thing I’ve been feeing?

I’m also pushed toward thinking about what agency and ownership means very personally, in my own work; since I know that applications can be (and should be!) routinely improved and expanded, I feel very empowered by the introduction of systems like Blackboard to our world. Sure, it has its problems, but we can edit this thing, we can add to it, we can make it what we need. I feel my own agency in relation to it. So I can see what it means to feel your own agency, primarily because when I look around me I see a lot of people feeling oppressed by it, feeling boxed in, constrained by a piece of technology.

Radical Trust

May 11, 2006 Rochelle Mazar Comments 0 Comment

An idea came up at the UTL staff conference on Monday that has stuck with me; it was from Stephen Abram‘s keynote, and it reverberated throughout the day (and the week): radical trust. Stephen was evoking amazon.com and suggesting (as many people do), that we need to radically trust our users and let them add to our catalogues, add to our resources. Talking about this in terms of radical trust changes the dynamic of the conversation; rather than talking about keeping the catalogue “objective”, we’re talking about how we perceive students, what we expect from them. And I think the issue of trust is a completely relevant one. We tend not to trust students.

And it’s not just us, not by a long shot. This is the real challenge of the so-called “web 2.0”. We can’t control everything. The whole point of interactive technologies is that you can’t control them. The only way we can use web 2.0 applications is by trusting our users. We can anticipate the worst, and even have some policies in place to deal with the worst case scenario, but we have to have a general belief that students have a capacity to engage with each other, to offer something to an academic community, and that they will actually do that if we give them the chance.

The other piece of radical trust is one that shoots straight to the heart of librarianship; we need to let users radically trust us. This is the more dangerous option. In order to serve students well, the best thing we can do is let the students tell us who they are. We need to remember them, tailor our resources to their needs and interests, build on what they’ve done before. This is what amazon.com does, this is what Google does. It profiles a user and delivers customized information back to them. It profiles a user. We hate this idea, I know we do. It’s tinged with commerciality, it screams violation of privacy. I don’t even know what I think of this one, frankly. We do need real portals. We do need to customize our resources; our information landscape is so turbulent and confusing, we need to offer some support. But do we want students to let us know these things about them? Do we want to keep records on them? We don’t want them to trust us that much. We don’t want the responsibility of that trust, because we can see how easy it would be for that trust to be betrayed. Should they trust us? Can we be trusted? Can we protect them once they do?

Collaborative Software Podcast

May 8, 2006 Rochelle Mazar Comments 0 Comment

This morning I gave a short presentation at the UTL Staff Conference about collaborative software. I recorded myself with my ipod and have reduced the original 40 meg file into a 13 meg podcast.

Now, during this presentation I was demonstrating software, so maybe you had to be there to get it. But you can download the file here.

A rough outline of what I was talking about:

1. Our UTM blog. I can’t show you that interface because it’s behind a lock, but it’s a general blog platform (written by UTM computing services) with an upload facility and comments.

2. Our UTM Library wiki. It’s a standard mediawiki like Wikipedia.

3. Writely.

4. Writeboard.

5. The jewel in the collaborative software crown: Subethaedit. This is one you really have to see to believe, I think. But if you have a mac, check it out. (If you have a mac and you want to experiment with subethaedit, ping me on IM or drop me an email! I’m more than happy to demo it with you!)

The podcast is about 38 minutes long.

rochelle.mazar.ca

Librarianship, leadership, and culture change

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