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After a truly fabulous “continental” breakfast which included an egg & bacon sandwich and a breakfast burrito (thanks, LITA!!), I went back to my room to pack. Now that all that is done, I’m in the ballroom, waiting for the closing keynote by Liz Lawley,of the RIT Lab for Social Computing. I’ve seen her give this talk before, at Internet Librarian, but I’ve heard this is an updated version, so I’m all ears!
The session title is Technical/Tangible/Social. She’ll be talking about a city-wide game (in conjunction with her local newspaper) as well as her traditional tech/tang/social presentation. She started with a quote that starts: “One day we will look back with embarrassment on this era when all of our virtual experiences are locked behind a screen”. She mentioned a USB doll that stands up when an IM buddy logs on, then falls down when they log off and the botanicalls product, which tweets when your plants need to be watered. She then showed pics of Make: and Craft: – I’d not seen the Craft: magazine… – both are put out by O’Reilly, the programming books publisher.
She mentioned Ravelry!!!! So cool – “object-oriented sociality”, you can do some amazing pivot searches – look up the yarn that you just bought on sale, limit to just knitting projects, limit to just type of garment… etc.
Next was Moo cards – nice because they are quality – they feel good to hold.
Go to where they are – not a good idea; make a place where they want to be. (not sure I agree with this, I still think it’s a good idea to get out there and be accessible)
Next she goes to the talk “Picture the Impossible: A technical, tangible, social game”. An alternate reality game – but calling it a city-based adventure game. “It’s non-trivial to come up with a plan for a game of this magnitude.”
Missions: learn the history of the city; explore the city itself; give something back to the community; socialize
“What are the verbs associated with your game?” -excellent question and a good way to combat scope creep.
Looked at places to go (public market in Rochester), looked at (and tied into) events that were happening during the game, included a big party at the end.
They did this with a $0 budget; created a narrative involving a secret society that was splintered into 3 factions (game players choose a faction; their points go toward that faction) and at the end of the game, that society would throw a party for those who completed the game (needed to get an invite to this exclusive party). They picked 3 local charities to involve in the game as well.
Making players choose the faction immediately makes them more invested in the game (WoW’s character/faction choice, etc.). They created a theme per week (7 weeks, with the celebration on the 31st of Oct.).
She did get some small amounts from newspaper and college with a bit more from MS to use Bing’s mapping features during the Bing launch.
Lesson learned: really clarify authority & responsibility before heading off to work on this kind of thing.
Picture The Impossible launch trailer – YouTube
Launched on Sept. 12 with 800 pre-registered.
She’s been spending the last 10 minutes or so showing us the games and such and it’s completely fascinating…
2000+ fully registered players (valid phone or facebook connect account). Many of the most active players are women and mothers.
She hopes that the model will be replicated elsewhere – especially in public libraries.
At that point, she finished and I have to run to check out of my room.
So, today I presented my “Collaborating In The Cloud” session at LITA. It went well – lots of questions about a number of different things, but, as always it seems, a lot of the discussion was happening on Twitter. One of the things that came up, both as an in-person question and as a Twitter topic, was the separation of work and personal in social networks. I mentioned in my presentation that I got a lot of pushback when I asked, back in my researching for the LTR days, about people using Facebook for work purposes. Many respondents said that Facebook was for fun and that they weren’t going to use it for work. Period.
That started a discussion about separating the work part of what you do on Facebook from the personal stuff. Groups are always an option, but one of the Tweeters, Maureen Kearny (mosylu) expressed a concern about leakage from your professional groups to your personal groups. I have to agree that it is something to be concerned about.
Creating groups in Facebook is pretty easy, but not particularly intuitive. The steps are:
This requires some thought, perhaps a bit of pre-planning (who goes into what list?) and some time to do right, but it is not too complicated to make it happen. It is also the only really legal way to do it – Facebook frowns on people who create personal and professional accounts… Of course, now that LinkedIn offers applications such as the Huddle Workspace app, maybe using that instead of Facebook would be better for you.
While Facebook is huge, and everyone (it seems) has an account, it’s not the only game out there. It may be the easiest in terms of learning curves (as in, people have already climbed that particular curve, not that it doesn’t exist) and passwords (oh no – not ANOTHER site that I have to maintain a user/pass combination for…), but if you are concerned about mingling your personal and your professional, learning a new application and keeping track of yet another password may be worth it to you. This is one of the benefits of choosing cloud collaboration – you have options!!
David Weinberger, of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, provided our Saturday morning keynote address. He’s the author, by the way, of the Cluetrain Manifesto, which I posted about on the 10th anniversary of that publication on this very blog.
He’s going to discuss what happens with knowledge in this age of abundance. The abundance (1 trillion pages on the web) would have required a mobilization on the order of several world wars – but we did it in our spare time. The age of information (which we are leaving) was about reducing info so that we could control it. Now, the age of the web (?) is about LOTS of information and abundance.
What knowledge was: grew up in a time of scarcity 1) only one knowldege 2) same for everyone 3) binary – at most one can be right 4) it’s simple 5) doesn’t matter who says it – if it’s true, it’s true 6) it’s scarce (most things are opinions) 7) knowledge is settled 8) ordered and orderly.
“our view of what knowledge is is influenced by the media we use to contain it”
Everything going digital changes our tools and changes the way we think.
The authority of knowledge
We create experts who are “expert” in their small chunk of the world – we can ask the expert and then *stop* looking for info – you’ve got the knowledge. Paper (books) is also a stopping point (even footnotes are difficult to follow) and non-transparent.
From disconnected media – to hyperlinks which are transparent and definitely not stopping places.
The new knowledge – a network of differences. The smartest person in the room is not the “sage on the stage”, but rather the room in total. The network of people is smarter than any one.
How networked knowledge can make us stupider
The architecture of morality and the architecture of a hyperlinked world are exactly the same. Hyperlinks allow us to link to others and discover their views of the world.
Compassion and curiosity are our bulwarks
Questions
A general theory of love was recommended as a book that would complement this keynote well.
another questioner asked if we should be pushing students to go farther than the “good enough” Google search; as librarians, we are instructing them in what is “good enough” for their discipline & needs as well as expanding their view to consider what they otherwise wouldn’t have.
Maurice York from NCSU started us off with Ther I Fix’d It – the ILS undone in 3 easy steps. He’s going through a rather amusing history of the ILS from card catalog to automation. Now he’s packing in journals and links and ejournals and discovering that it’s hard to manage. He’s adding bits and pieces and secondary (and tertiary) systems until they are out of control. Step 1 – campus is buying stuff, get rid of acquisitions module (more academic library stuff..) Step 2 – get serials out Step 3 – get rid of all the other electronic stuff, too. There. He fixed it.
Next is Jacquelyn Erdman talking about design as strategy, not decoration. Be able to come up with something crisp, clean and that will communicate 4 tips:
Note: looks like the guy who was going to do Google Squared didn’t show – I’m sad…
Marilyn Billings talked about ESENCe – an example of partnering with Faculty to pull in large grants. Lots of academic library stuff that really doesn’t apply to me yet. I’ll let you know when she says something I find useful as a public library type.
Next up was Tate Nunely of Ex Libris talking about Digital Perils and Preservation. He began with stats – the growth of digital content – up to 988 exabytes by Jan 2010. He did a case study for digital preservation – the NASA Mars data, by the time they went back to look at it, the digital info was degraded – only 10% was usable. Challenges:
Preservation should not be what we “should do”, but what we “should be doing right now”. Take a look at what you are preserving occasionally – make sure you have what you think you have in a format you can still access.
Finally, Mark Beatty spoke about creating your own sandbox with Bitami. www.bitnami.org try out an open source system (drupal, linux, wordpress, etc) in an easy way with a Bitnami stack (everything installs in a protected way). You can do it locally or in the cloud using Amazon’s Ec2 – they already have Bitnami stacks ready to go. Ohhh – they have a RubyStack. I’m going to have to play with that… Advice – pay attention to where it’s being installed so that you can add modules and themes and such.
Oh – there is a surprise talk by Cody from the University of Minnesota. lib.umn.edu/mobile – their mobile site. We’re gonna get a tour!! 2 search boxes – search Primo installation or classic version or search scholarly databases. Records indicate book, availability, location and then “get it” (paging and delivery service) only – very pared down for mobile users.
Now for questions & answers. I’m getting nervous about my battery life, though, so I’ll hit publish…
Viking Village-online learning commons (western’s online forum). Andy Peterson started off with a tour of Viking Village. Lots of personalization stuff, profiles, links to student blogs, galleries of media, creative writing, etc. I may not be able to do a great job of this, though, because she is occasionally talking so fast that I can’t quite follow.. Oh! She’s discussing Drupal and how to use it to create communities online. Very useful for me!!!
Quick discussion of LL2.0 programs. If you don’t know what this is 1)why the hell are you reading my blog? and 2) check the April 07 issue of Library Journal for my article on our LL2.0 program.
Now for their Drupal experience – I’m all ears!!! She suggests using the WYSIWIG editor, which makes installing whatever editor you want easier. She explained taxonomy menu very well, too, as well as taxonomy filter. Sort of odd for a “creating communities that people will come to” session, but useful, nonetheless.
14 days to have your say: ideas posted online for voting and discussion at Andy’s institution. Ok – now I get why she’s spending so much time on Drupal – she has done amazing things to create community with Drupal – it wasn’t as obvious with the staff web, but this 14 days project makes it crystal clear – Drupal has some excellent community features!
Community – Viking Village – used students; gave assignments to “seed” the forums and such with content to give people how to use the site; collaboration is critical
Advice:
Yes, it is odd to have the opening keynote after the first session, but that first session was only offered to LITA’s speakers, so it was scheduled oddly… Anyway, Joan Lippencott is going to speak on the topic of mobile tech in libraries.
First, though Andrew Pace pointed out the Twitter hashtag (#litaforum) and the Flickr pics at Pix4Lita. Then he introduced all the amazing folks who had something to do with the conference, finishing with an introduction of Joan.
Joan introduced the CNI (Coalition for Networked Information), where she works, then went into stats on just how mobile our world is… 80.5% of college students own laptops, 66% of college students own an Internet-capable cell phone. She followed up with info for e-book readers – Kindle sales of Dan Brown’s Lost Symbol topped print sales for a short time. She mentioned Twitter taking off (note – I’m tweeting while live blogging, so if I make no sense, cut me some slack) and mainstream press moving to mobile applications (saw somewhere that CNN is #1 paid app for iPhone?).
Will libraries meet the challenges of mobile world? Mobile-enabled content, mobile-enabled services, promotion of content are all important.
Understanding Users
“Smartphones moving from communication devices to information devices”. Kid’s consider mobile phones to be their “best friend” – they would keep those over desktop computers, game consoles and MP3 players. 67% of students in 9-12 grades maintain a personal website – and they want to use their own devices (phones, laptops, etc) in learning. Don’t make assumptions about what your users have/want – find “Informing Innovation” includes survey to get info from your users
Mobile Libraries
Typical – hours/catalog/etc. or SMS reference
Could be:
University of Virginia – Library Mobile site; brings a bunch of mobile services together.
arXiv for the iPhone – preprint site in high energy physics (freely available on the web – we should be linking to this if it fits our audience)
Mobile-accessible resources
QR codes – some smart phones contain QR code reader in them.
Uses: on books to go to online discussion about that book, on reference desk (after hours) linking to common reference questions, etc.
Services via Twitter
Arizona State U. Library Channel – good promotion of services. Also showed a paper poster explaining (graphically) what services the library offers (tech loaning services, etc) both in and outside the library.
Now is the time to create a full-fledged strategy for “mobile revolution”.
Point made during Q&A – if you participate in World Cat, you have mobile access to your catalog (and someone else mentioned that you can create your own interface to World Cat). Nifty – I hadn’t thought of it that way!
Regan Harper is presenting on converting face-to-face training into a web-based environment. The idea is to take face2face training that we give for LITA and adapt it for online environments.
