Janelle’s 768 Blog

I enjoyed the class; I liked how we all got to use multiple tools in class, and appreciated the insight others had into how the tools had worked for them and could potentially work in libraries.

What will I keep up on? Well, I already was using Google Reader every day; I’ve added several feeds to my aggregator, and I’ve better organized my iGoogle page to take advantage of pre-set widgets. I may migrate it over to Pageflakes, though. I love the portals; it makes it so much easier to keep track of everything. I no longer have to log in to Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Delicious – even my Yahoo e-mail account is available at a glance in my iGoogle page.

I was also already using Delicious, but the class helped me better use it, to become a better tagger, and even to use it to search for things I might otherwise have missed, both when working on the group project and my final paper.

Because of the Ning group, I started a Ning for my family (I actually did that last Sunday, when I should have been working on my paper – oops!). I think it’s a really cool way for a far-flung family to keep in touch, even if we only end up using it to post photos for each other. (It’s private, which makes us all more comfortable; sorry we’re not totally 2.0). I even got my Dad to sign up for it and he’s posted some discussion thread topics. I think Ning would be a good thing for public libraries with a genealogy focus to keep in mind – families can scan in and post old photos on line and see if far-flung relatives can help identify people in the photos. I’m thinking about joining the Law Librarian Ning, too.

As for the blog, I do enjoy blogging. I don’t know if I will keep up this blog, though, or return to my personal blog and give this one up. I’m torn between liking the idea of a “professional” blog kept separate, but a (admittedly larger) part of me doubts I’ll be able to keep both of them up. Perhaps I will migrate these entries over to my other blog, since I have not updated it in ages.

Now that this class is over, I can go back to updating my Flickr account. I’m putting all my photos on there, so that I have a backup in case something terrible happens to my computer (and my external hard drive).

And Twitter? That seems to be the big question for everybody. I really do like it as a current awareness tool. And it was fun while we were all working on papers to see where people were, and to receive and get encouragement. I guess we’ll see.

I will continue to explore the ideas set out in The Cult of the Amateur and Against the Machine. I think that some of these tools are so fun that they may blind us to the unintended consequences of their wide-spread use. As we discussed in class, tools are neutral, but they may nonetheless affect how our culture speaks, reads, and thinks about many concepts that we may take for granted and yet miss greatly when they are gone.

I will miss you guys; especially since I won’t be taking a class next term! I wish you all the best (especially those of you graduating!). I hope we can continue to interact with each other electronically.

And Michael, thanks again!

So, I changed my topic.  It’s all about purposeful change, right?  I was working on expanding on my context book report of Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur.  I wanted to explore some of the tensions between wanting (and needing) to employ 2.0 tools and distrusting the way they are used/the way they may be negatively influencing our society; wisdom of the crowds vs. angry mobs of uniformed, anonymous people; the desire for instant results vs. the need for nuanced reflection, etc. 

But I decided to go with a less theoretical approach towards one that would be more practical for my current situation.  Starting from Casey & Savastinuk’s (p.5) three main ingredients for Library 2.0: purposeful change, empowerment of users, and improving resources for current patrons & reaching out to new ones, what are some ways 2.0 tools can be effectively and appropriately used in academic libraries (using academic law libraries as sort of a microcosm)?  

I see three (or four) main user groups of academic law libraries: faculty, students, and public patrons (with library staff being the potential fourth).  What are the needs of these different groups?  How can librarians introduce 2.0 tools to these different users to better meet these needs?  What are the challenges encountered when trying to implement these tools?  What are the limitations of the tools, and how do librarians educate users about the limitations without sounding like fuddy duddies?

I’m hoping that this will help me to grapple with some of the issues surrounding these tools that have come up in my library, so in addition to the recent literature out there (and there is quite a lot of it specifically directed at law libraries), I am drawing from my own personal experiences at the library where I work.

A Vision of Students Today (& What Teachers Must Do) by Michael Wesch

Last spring I asked my students how many of them did not like school. Over half of them rose their hands. When I asked how many of them did not like learning, no hands were raised. I have tried this with faculty and get similar results. Last year’s U.S. Professor of the Year, Chris Sorensen, began his acceptance speech by announcing, “I hate school.” The crowd, made up largely of other outstanding faculty, overwhelmingly agreed. And yet he went on to speak with passionate conviction about his love of learning and the desire to spread that love. And there’s the rub. We love learning. We hate school. What’s worse is that many of us hate school because we love learning.

. . .

Texting, web-surfing, and iPods are just new versions of passing notes in class, reading novels under the desk, and surreptitiously listening to Walkmans. They are not the problem. They are just the new forms in which we see it. Fortunately, they allow us to see the problem in a new way, and more clearly than ever, if we are willing to pay attention to what they are really saying.

 

Encyclopedia Brittanica has a blog devoted to Classroom 2.0 which may be of interest to some of us (it seems like most of the participants are professors at university-level institutions, though).  I will probably be referencing some of these posts in my paper.

Our pageflakes page

Wordpress won’t let me upload the powerpoint; it says that the file type does not meet security guidelines. So I turned the powerpoint into a PDF, so you won’t be able to click on the links to the other sites. Here it is: Academic 2.0 Presentation. (Note – the power point was much prettier when we gave the presentation; to get the PDF to a size that I could upload on my blog, I had to get rid of all the graphics and template backgrounds).

Acting as library liaisons, Trisha and I created a portal to library (and other) resources for an economics department of a fictional university.  We used Pageflakes as our platform (we’ll be unveiling it tomorrow in class!) and included participatory tools such as Twitter, RSS feeds, and discussion boards in it.

In creating our portal, I set up a wiki with PB wiki that included ideas about what we wanted to have in the portal.  This was also where we stored our power point presentation; Trisha started it and posted it to the wiki, I made changes and saved it as a different version, then she made changes, etc.  I prefer wikis to Google Docs for collaborating on documents and power points because I think wikis better maintain the format of the document/presentation/whatever.

We also set up tags in our delicious accounts specifically for the project, so that when we came across articles or other examples of library portals that we wanted to emulate, we would add them to our delicious accounts with a specific “LIS768group” (or something like that) tag.  We each had links to these tags on our 768 blog, so that I could go to Trisha’s blog and look at resources she’d tagged, and she could look at my blog to see things I’d tagged.  

We also Twittered with each other a little bit about the project, although we used Twitter’s “e-mail” feature more than Twittering to the general public about it, so I’m not sure that counts as a 2.0 tool.

Finally, we met in person about the project.  We live fairly close to each other, and for much of what we were doing, it was much easier to talk about it than try to explain our ideas/reservations/suggestions electronically.  I have no doubt that we could have done all of our collaboration via the internet, and probably would have done so if we lived farther apart from each other, but meeting in person served us well.

As for which parts we did individually vs. together, I’m afraid we didn’t track that very well.  Basically, we both felt very free to make suggestions and add things to our portal and then have the other person look at it and make changes.  I’m not really sure where my contributions ended and Trisha’s started!

There is a fascinating article in the Atlantic from earlier this summer entitled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”  Many of you have probably already run across it (I think Rebecca mentioned it in a post), but don’t think I had seen it before.  In it, the author wonders whether the internet, with its interconnected links and possibilities for immediate gratification, is actually re-wiring how his brain circuitry works – especially with regards to how quickly he scans reading materials now, and how he balks at reading longer articles or doing any “deep reading” (title aside, the article doesn’t necessarily suggest this is making him more stupid, exactly).

The author traces some other instances of then-new technology, some of the fears they raised, and some of their unexpected consequences.  For instance, Nietzsche’s use of a typewriter may have changed his writing style, the clock may have changed our relationship with time, the invention of the printing press completely changed – well, lots of things. 

The author is clearly no Luddite, and he readily acknowledges that efficiencies provided/created by the internet (and by Google) can be awesome.  Still, he cautions that we do not want to lose our ability to engage in “deep reading.”  In a paragraph I found particularly thoughtful, he states:

Still, [Google's creators'] easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

(emphasis mine).  

I am particularly struck by the bolded part, and this is what I was talking about several blog posts ago when I mentioned that legal research often requires nuance and sophistication, while today’s law students seem to be impatiently wanting to find “the right answer” as quickly as possible.  Part of what they’re supposed to be learning in law school, however, is that there often isn’t ”a” right answer, and that they need to see all the possible, similar answers out there, and learn to distinguish or analogize their client’s situation to the answers.  In this environment, ambiguity is EXACTLY an “opening for insight.”

In true Web 2.0 form, there is an accompanying blog to the article.

(For those of us who do still like to read longer articles, I want to share another link from the Chronicle of Higher Ed.  It’s called Arts & Letters Daily, and the Chronicle describes it as “a guide to some of the best writing on the web.”  While most of the articles linked from ALD are literary, rather than technological, I always find really interesting reading there.)

I think this is kind of distantly related to the other posts today about netiquette: via the Chronicle of Higher Education, I was directed today to a study at Cambridge University indicating that 1 in 2 students admit to plagiarizing. 

Those of us in school and academic libraries really have to do our part at educating students about what plagiarism is and how to avoid it.  Some students may be doing it unintentionally.  Of course, that won’t account for those that purchase papers from online paper banks (and I really wonder if this student was able to say this with a straight face: “Of course I use other people’s ideas without acknowledging them, but I didn’t think that this made me a plagiarist”).

Also somewhat related to the netiquette thing is teaching students to create appropriately professional e-mail addresses for their formal correspondence with professors and potential employers (or at least, to avoid using blatantly unprofessional handles in such situations).

(Okay, not a terribly original topic.)

I have a ton of wikis created with pbwiki. For all my group projects in school, we create a wiki to keep track of what we’re all doing. I talked my husband into creating a wiki for the work he and several other volunteers do every summer to run the Great River Energy bikfest.  I created a wiki to be an evaluative tool for the website that I created in the HTML class.  I have a personal wiki to keep track of my personal sites and some passwords (for non-essential, non-financial sites).  Some of my classes have used wikis as a part of the class.  I created a wiki as a repository for useful sites for a presentation another librarian and I gave to an international patent law class.

It was this last one that had the greatest potential in living up to all the 2.0 promises we’ve discussed in class.  The wikis for group school projects may fall under this rubric as well, but the utility of those is pretty much limited to the members of the group.  My personal wiki is completely private.  The wiki I set up for my “website” was really more  of a dummy wiki to show its potential use.  For the IP wiki, however, I set up the wiki with the intention that I would hand it over to the professor of the class, invite the other students in the class to be contributors, and they would take it from there, by adding websites that they found useful (since they know more than I about international IP law, after all) and tagging and commenting about sites they liked/didn’t like. 

Unfortunately, that didn’t work out quite as planned.  The professor seemed really excited about it at the beginning, and agreed that the students should have the ability to add to it, but when it came down to getting together with me and going over how that would work, he didn’t really have time to meet with me (since it was for their class, I didn’t want to make it completely open to the public; I was just going to give class members editor access to it – and give the professor administrator access, of course).  I don’t think anybody’s looked at it since we went over it in the presentation I gave.  

Sigh.  You can lead them to water . . .

(As an additional aside, like my experience with law students and RSS feeds (in general, they don’t use them), the students in the class had never edited or contributed to a wiki.  They all had used Wikipedia, but had not commented, tagged, or changed an article therein.)

See the original here.

Both for my group project and for my own edification, I’ve been looking for articles and resources on 2.0 tools in academic libraries.  I can easily see uses for the tools we’ve been discussing in public libraries, but have been a bit more circumspect about their uses in academic libraries (with the exception of IM for refernce purposes).

Here are some links others like me may find useful.

ACRL wiki on Library 2.0 Initiatives in Academic Libraries.  It’s a companion piece to this book.  I was initially really excited about this wiki (it was both pertinent to my interest while being a 2.0 tool itself!), but it hasn’t been updated for a while, and some of the chapters contain no material.  

2007 Academic Library 2.0 Keynote Speaker, Meredith Farkas, on Building Academic Library 2.0:    Note -- it’s over an hour long.

Here are Farkas’ slides on the same topic (but newer than the video)

ACRL blog post on LibraryThing for Academic Libraries.

Library 2.0: an Academic’s Perspective.  Blog by Laura B. Cohen, Web Support Librarian, University at Albany, SUNY.  Unfortunately, the librarian ceased publication of her blog earlier this year.  I particularly like her post on “A Cautious Person’s Guide to the Social Web.”

Uses for Twitter in Academic Libraries.  I was particularly interested in this, since I’ve been mulling over Twitter for a while now.  I like it, again, because I’m a nosy Nellie.  But practical uses for it have been evading me.  I like the suggestion that professors create multiple accounts, separating their personal accounts from their class accounts.