Fun with Words

I’ve been encountering some terms lately that I’ve found intriguing – not necessarily groundbreaking, but interesting. The first term is informavore. I came across this in a post on BoingBoing, which lead me to an article on the Edge. I would like to consider myself an informavore, and I suspect most librarians would. What intrigued me in the article was the parallel of information to Darwin selection – in a world filled with information, how do we choose which information is important, what can be left out and what might this mean for culture, history and the future? I’m sure I can not do the article justice, so I will simply recommend that you go read the article.

I came across the other term in a Spark podcast. In this episode (episode 90), we learn of the term continuous partial attention (it also talks about email apnea – an interesting concept in itself). I think this explains a lot of what I do, certainly better than the term multitasking. I also think that many of the students I work with also fall prey to continuous partial attention. If this is the case, what does this mean for educating these students? Does it change they way we think they work – or should it? I think I will be spending some more time considering what the implications for this might mean for the students I teach. I’m becoming more and more interested in how technology affects our students and their learning and I think continuous partial attention is certainly one side effect of technology.

A New Age

Today I watched my first inauguration ever. I may not be an American but I understand the importance of this event and was excited to be part of this momentous event, to be part of history. It was amazing to see him recognize the challenges and problems that lay ahead of him and to recognize the diversity in peoples and religion. Obama has a huge battle before him and I wish him all the luck and intelligence to see his country through it.

Obama represents change on a number of fronts. While I intend to follow what he does, I must admit I’m intrigued by this president’s ability to embrace science and technology and am excited to see what he does with it and what impact this has elsewhere. Obama already does weekly YouTube addresses, whitehouse.gov now has a blog, he tweets, he’s addicted to his blackberry and he promotes participation, transparency and accountability (I keep wishing Canada would follow his lead). Hopefully he will continue to embrace these technologies when he becomes overwhelmed with actual work. Libraries have been actively moving towards such technologies and Obama’s use may have a direct impact on these services we provide as others begin to use the technologies to follow and participate in their government. I watched the inauguration on CNN’s live facebook feed. This is an amazing collaboration – people changed their status as they watched history unfold – over 1 million status changes were made during the inauguration – over 4000 a minute. It became a truly social, global event and I bet that Obama’s use of technology had some part to play. I think CNN and Facebook were a great collaboration and would love to see that continue – especially during breaking news, etc. I know Twitter was also going strong but decided to save my connection for the feed itself.

Exciting times are ahead and it’s great to be part of it!

Tweeting Away

It’s been a while since I posted anything on government, so I thought I’d share some interesting twitter news (which is also posted on the AGIIG blog, so apologies for those who follow both). As some of you may know, I’ve become quiet addicted to Twitter and FriendFeed. Librarians aren’t the only ones twittering – the US government has started tweeting too. Here’s a link to a directory that has been started that notes tweeting agencies.

Pegasus Librarian had a great post a while back on the changing nature of the biblioblogoshpere. I think she’s right in her observations that for many, blog posting have droppped off and part of this has been the increase in the use of microblogging. Blog posts have moved from the informal medium to act as a more formal medium and the informal conversations have moved to Twitter – it’s faster and resembles more of a dialogue. I know that I have been moving that way myself.

Twitter has had quite an impact on communication, for good or bad depending on your viewpoint. It’s really too bad that Canada’s technological infrastructure is preventing Twitter usage from cell phones. CBC’s Search Engine has an interesting podcast and blog on Canada as a digital ghetto – be sure to check it out and share whether you agree or disagree.

Technoblindness

I just came back from catching a presentation done by a multimedia class. I’m sorry I missed the beginning and the rest of the presentations as this was quite enlightening. In a project called Lifecasting, students filmed a number of reactions to situations. I was most enthralled by two scenarios which filmed people staging things left behind/being stolen and invasions of personal space in a public atmosphere. In the cases where people left items behind or staged a theft, the people around them were generally oblivious to the action happening. Why? Because they were on their cell phones or staring at their computers. The same occurred when people invaded personal space – computer screens seemed to act as a barrier to the actions and conversations around them. I find it fascinating that we’ve used social technology such as cell phones and computers and use them in such anti-social ways, blocking out the world outside our small personal world.

This has implications for work on a reference desk. I know I am tied to my computer and while I try to look up and keep an eye out for people needing assistance, I wonder how many I’ve missed because I’m using technology as a barrier. I will certainly try to be more aware of my surroundings while I’m using technology.

Warning Sounds for Librarians

First of all, apologies for the extended silence. Between IFLA, First Year Experience activities and a slew of beginning of term instruction, I have had little time to think let alone blog. Now that things are quieting down, I hope to be more on the ball.

I decided to title this post after an article I read on BBC News a while back, Warning Sounded on Web’s Future (speaking of which, I’m trying to read the Future of the Web and How to Stop It – may have more on it later). The line that caught my attention is in bold at the very beginning of the article “The internet needs a way to help people separate rumour from real science, says the creator of the World Wide Web.” Sir Tim Berners-Lee is worried about disinformation on the web. This is where I hear trumpets – duh duh da na! Enter Librarians! This is us! We should be and are doing this! One of the main tenants of information literacy is the evaluation of information in any form. Many of us have been teaching this for years – the skills to evaluate and examine information. So why doesn’t Sit Tim Berners-Lee know this? Why doesn’t anyone seem to know this? How do we get out and teach everyone how to evaluate information? This is a fundamental problem for us. We’re great at what we do but no one knows. It’s partly a marketing issue. It’s partly an outreach issue. It’s also the fact that many people think they are doing alright on the info front and don’t attend a library session to improve their skills. I teach basic library searching skills and web evaluation classes. While I hope the students take something away from both sessions, I hear time and again from faculty that the students felt the web session was more valuable – they learned they didn’t know everything about the web and how to tell good from bad info and it speaks more to the way they tend to search. So how do we let people know that we can help them wade through information swamp that is the Internet? I’m certainly open to suggestions. Does your library offer web or info evaluation sessions?

On a complete aside, it’s conference time. I just helped plan and attended my first Access conference – a very good time and I highly recommend it. A very techy conference, which at times could be intimidating for a tech wannabe like me, but a lot of great content for those with less than stellar tech skills. Up next is Internet Librarian – maybe I’ll see you there!

Horizon 2008

The Horizon 2008 report is out. I haven’t taken a good read through yet, just wanted to get the heads-up out there. I will certainly have more to say once I’m finished with it. A quick glance seems to note that some of the predications from last year have fallen off, in particular virtual worlds. I’ll post on this soon, so stay posted!

McMaster Youth Media Study

Interesting post from Geoffrey Rockwell, who shares a summary from the McMaster Youth Media Study of what a typical McMaster undergraduate might be like when it comes to new media. I must confess, it wasn’t too terribly surprising. Of course, I do see undergraduates wandering around the library and campus every day with cell phones and mp3 players and facebook on nearly every other computer. I was a little more surprised to see that the typical undergraduate did recognize that technology was starting to interfere with actual personal connections.

Microsoft Live Search Books

Microsoft’s competition to Google Book Search, Live Search Books, is scheduled to release tomorrow (Dec. 7). The British Library, University of California, and University of Toronto have offered out of copyright books and more contributors will be added in Jan. 2007.  Guess what I’m playing with tomorrow?

Google News

Here’s an article from the BBC that discusses a new Google project, a literacy portal. “The Literacy Project enables teachers, organisations, and those interested in literacy to use the internet to search for and share literacy information.” Could have some interesting implications or applications for libraries.

Update:  An interesting literacy side issue. Literacy groups in Canada are pushing to get the 17.7  million cut from their budget back. Read more from the CBC.

On the Tech Front

I’m very interested in technology but I must admit I’m a tech geek wannabe. I’m great at reading about new technology and software and maybe even playing at a very basic level. I don’t have the full grasp though, something I hope to gain in the future. Nonetheless, here are a couple of  tech announcements lately that could eventually have an impact on libraries. Computers may get even faster in the near future thanks to a sticky silicon. A projector the size of a sugar cube has been created for use with mobile phones, PDAs, laptops, etc. Stephen Abram raises some considerations for libraries.