From the blogs, looks like a bunch of us were caught by the flu bug going around. Hope everyone's feeling better this week!
Interesting push for bloggers to use icons such as these for identifying posts about peer-reviewed research. Sounds like a great idea. One of the researchers that I saw while at ASIS&T in Milwaukee, danah boyd, has an interesting update on research about users of Facebook ; Raquel Recuero also presented in the same session on research into social networking via Fotolog.
With the arrival of Week 11, we're into the race to finish projects and prepare for class presentations, and naturally everyone wants to present on the same presentation days (Nov 28 and Dec 5). I'm working on the scheduling. In the meantime, don't give away any points on participation, keep up with your blogging - there's been some great activity on the discussion board, and any participation like this on blog, discussion board and wiki can only help your participation points. See you in class!
Sunday, November 4, 2007
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Home, and Recovering
Back to back conferences with just days back home in Tallahassee between travel to Library Research Seminar IV (London, Ontario) and ASIS&T (Milwaukee, WI), and my travel luck which had been holding up pretty well finally ran out; I caught some sort of flu/cold on the last day as I headed for the airport in Milwaukee. Still, I managed to teach class from a hotel room in Milwaukee on Wednesday night, flew all day then drove home from the airport to teach class in Tallahassee on Thursday night before the real collapse hit; dragged myself through my appointments Friday, spent a long hour afterward struggling through Homecoming parade traffic jams; pretty much collapsed into the worst of the illness at that point, but fought back to vertical again and managed to join Convocation on Saturday morning (aha! so that's what the display near virtual Shores Building was all about, I noticed it earlier and wondered; cheers to Dr. Paul Marty & Dr. Michelle Kazmer on bringing Second Life into the Commencement ceremony, and fun to see Dr. Peter Jorgensen sitting there too.)
I'm feeling slightly better today, and about ready to start the process of posting up grades. I enjoyed reading all the student papers, as always! Getting to hear all the interesting things that FSU students are doing and exploring is one of the joys of teaching. Will be back to talk a little more later, but for now had better stick to using the energy that I have for getting grades and feedback posted. Great to be home for a while (or at least until Thanksgiving week!)
I'm feeling slightly better today, and about ready to start the process of posting up grades. I enjoyed reading all the student papers, as always! Getting to hear all the interesting things that FSU students are doing and exploring is one of the joys of teaching. Will be back to talk a little more later, but for now had better stick to using the energy that I have for getting grades and feedback posted. Great to be home for a while (or at least until Thanksgiving week!)
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Almost Home
Sitting in the airport in Charlotte, NC, which gets my vote as one of the world's Civilized Airports because it has free wireless (Tallahassee, FL and Richmond, VA are two other Civilized Airports.) Airports without free wireless are useless, bleak, forsaken places.
It's been a long week at the Library Research Seminar IV conference in London, Ontario, Canada. Both on the way out and coming back I had to be up at 3am to start a long day of travel. I packed wearily and in a hurry at midnight...never do that. At the conference on Thursday 10/11, my presentation was on the geography of virtual questioning - GIS mapping of chat questions asked of Florida's statewide Ask a Question service.
Classwise - the wiki paper is due 10/15 and links are up for posting; if any links go south, you can put in your own by clicking the 'chainlink' button and using NameInfoev as your wikipage link text (e.g. MonicaInfoenv) and then the clickable text itself can be your name. I think I accidentally deleted a couple of students' names at some point when I was making a correction to the list, but they should be back now.
Connectivity was iffy at the LRS-IV conference so I thought it best to cancel the live class for Week 7 (since we've put up with enough tech hassles already); actually this was a big problem at the conference hotel that so many LIS educators were needing to get access to their class web sites and couldn't because of some glitch with the hotel's wireless. Which is why I tend to avoid staying in conference hotels - pick some cheaper place nearby and you'll likely have better and free or cheap Internet rather than paying an arm and leg for little or no Internet access. You can have your mint on the pillow, I'll take the free wireless.
We'll pick it all back up in next week's class, discussing more about why Karen Schneider says that "the user is not broken" as well as issues of anonymity, privacy, roles and move into teaching and learning in the virtual reference interaction; and then I fly right out again to ASIS&T Conference in Milwaukee. My plane will arrive too late for my favorite SIG's session on Saturday, but I'll participate in Internet Public Library meetings and I also have two posters in the conference (morning and afternoon poster sessions). One poster is on the GIS mapping of virtual questions, the other on a study of how LIS graduate students and informatics undergraduate students perceived the role of librarians in handling questions about Web 2.0. After ASIS&T, hoping to be able to stay in Tallahassee and avoid all further travel until the Xmas holiday. Since all of Xmas and New Year 2006/2007 was spent in the hospital and dealing with crisis, really hoping in 2007/2008 for the happy time we didn't get last year.
It's been a long week at the Library Research Seminar IV conference in London, Ontario, Canada. Both on the way out and coming back I had to be up at 3am to start a long day of travel. I packed wearily and in a hurry at midnight...never do that. At the conference on Thursday 10/11, my presentation was on the geography of virtual questioning - GIS mapping of chat questions asked of Florida's statewide Ask a Question service.
Classwise - the wiki paper is due 10/15 and links are up for posting; if any links go south, you can put in your own by clicking the 'chainlink' button and using NameInfoev as your wikipage link text (e.g. MonicaInfoenv) and then the clickable text itself can be your name. I think I accidentally deleted a couple of students' names at some point when I was making a correction to the list, but they should be back now.
Connectivity was iffy at the LRS-IV conference so I thought it best to cancel the live class for Week 7 (since we've put up with enough tech hassles already); actually this was a big problem at the conference hotel that so many LIS educators were needing to get access to their class web sites and couldn't because of some glitch with the hotel's wireless. Which is why I tend to avoid staying in conference hotels - pick some cheaper place nearby and you'll likely have better and free or cheap Internet rather than paying an arm and leg for little or no Internet access. You can have your mint on the pillow, I'll take the free wireless.
We'll pick it all back up in next week's class, discussing more about why Karen Schneider says that "the user is not broken" as well as issues of anonymity, privacy, roles and move into teaching and learning in the virtual reference interaction; and then I fly right out again to ASIS&T Conference in Milwaukee. My plane will arrive too late for my favorite SIG's session on Saturday, but I'll participate in Internet Public Library meetings and I also have two posters in the conference (morning and afternoon poster sessions). One poster is on the GIS mapping of virtual questions, the other on a study of how LIS graduate students and informatics undergraduate students perceived the role of librarians in handling questions about Web 2.0. After ASIS&T, hoping to be able to stay in Tallahassee and avoid all further travel until the Xmas holiday. Since all of Xmas and New Year 2006/2007 was spent in the hospital and dealing with crisis, really hoping in 2007/2008 for the happy time we didn't get last year.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Week 6: Projects
A long time ago, a wise man once said to me, "The IPL is what you make of it." (His name was Joe Janes.) I remember seeing that myself as a student at the time; some of us made a lot of the opportunity, contributing our efforts and gaining experience, building our skills and our resume. On graduation, we walked into job interviews with completed projects that we could point to that showed we had a lot to offer our employers.
During grad school, we were always pushed by our professors to be leaders and to take the initiative. Common phrase heard in the IPL in the old days: "What a good idea...why don't you do that?" Common response from professors when any LIS student asked a question: "You're a librarian - why don't you look it up?" This was really annoying, at the time...but ultimately, learning is not about what a professor does. Learning is about the effort that a student puts in.
We've been finalizing projects and tackling some of the specific details, getting people what they need; I've met with some students for individual training outside of class hours and Mike Galloway came in and met with a group; many offers of help, training, resources have been made to all and things are moving forward. I've been bragging a bit about my students and all the great things they're doing. There's a great discussion going on now too about technology and the future of libraries, and I had a big grin on reading the line, "The time will come when we are in charge of the libraries..." Yes, and I'm looking forward to it!
I'm leaving Tuesday for Canada and the LRS-IV conference so that will be a full day of travel (Tally to Charlotte--Charlotte to Detroit--Detroit to London, Ontario); will post up about Internet access and class as soon as possible Tuesday evening. "Exploring the Virtual Environment" papers will be due Oct. 15 on the wiki site. There are a lot of individual details being handled right now and if I didn't get to yours, ping me again. A few things are still in various stages of being checked on. And - onward into Week 7!
During grad school, we were always pushed by our professors to be leaders and to take the initiative. Common phrase heard in the IPL in the old days: "What a good idea...why don't you do that?" Common response from professors when any LIS student asked a question: "You're a librarian - why don't you look it up?" This was really annoying, at the time...but ultimately, learning is not about what a professor does. Learning is about the effort that a student puts in.
We've been finalizing projects and tackling some of the specific details, getting people what they need; I've met with some students for individual training outside of class hours and Mike Galloway came in and met with a group; many offers of help, training, resources have been made to all and things are moving forward. I've been bragging a bit about my students and all the great things they're doing. There's a great discussion going on now too about technology and the future of libraries, and I had a big grin on reading the line, "The time will come when we are in charge of the libraries..." Yes, and I'm looking forward to it!
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Week 5: End of Tour
In our first five weeks, we've had a very fast introduction to a wide variety of different sorts of information environments - from email and chat to threaded messaging, wikis, blogs, other Web 2.0 apps such as del.icio.us, Flickr, LibraryThing, audio/visual such as Elluminate, and virtual worlds via Second Life (though there are many others: Active Worlds, HiPiHi, There.com, etc.) This was designed to give students a wide exposure to various possibilities for choosing and designing projects. I've been hearing back now from students with proposals and there's a range from virtual reference question-answering and administration in the Internet Public Library, through various projects involving social networking projects in MySpace and Facebook, web-based digital library collection-building and pathfinders in the IPL, and virtual worlds projects in Second Life.
This week, we had a wonderful class tour of Rachelville on Imagination Island which was created by Rocky Vallejo and Cindy Elkhart, in honor of the memory of their daughter Rachel.
There are many different and innovative ways in which information is presented there in experiential ways, and Rocky showed us how to wander and touch, explore, discover, and imagine information services and resources in this new type of environment. Rocky and Cindy talked about how volunteers have helped in building resources and exhibits, and the need for volunteers with children's literature, youth services or school media expertise. We ran out of time before getting to the library at Mythica, which has collections of fairytales, fables and mythology, but the direction would be to walk from the plaza area down toward the graystone-thatched cottages, and take the flagstone path that goes off toward the right (east). You come to an area where there are cottages around a pond, and the library is there by the rental board.
We now get to halt our frenetic pace of discovery and spend more time on reflection. What are the implications of all these different technologies for information services and resources in virtual reference environments? What have we learned from our explorations? We'll consider and reflect in our upcoming class sessions, and in the “Exploring the Information Environment” wiki short paper due by midnight on Monday, Oct. 15, in which students can take a particular information service or Web 2.0 resource and explore it in more depth.
Class photos are now up from our Second Life sessions (see link in Course Menu or in the Course Library.) We talked a little in the Secret Garden about our thoughts and reactions to Second Life as an information environment, and about communication in this environment, and I demonstrated a bit about sound and animations; I'm no expert there at all, but tried to give a sense of what this could be like if someone with actual talent at this really worked at stringing together gestures, sounds and animations. (I waved, said, "Buh-bye," then did a backflip, a forward handstand into an arch and back again on my feet, then did the kata forms. I cannot do this in real life - well, maybe the "Buh-bye" part.)
Two more 'interface' areas where I find that I have teaching difficulties using Second Life: the Communicate 'improvement' introduced recently has been awful, since now all instant messages to me from individuals and groups appear only on tabs on a gigantic, long box thing. If I try to watch them all, it takes up my whole screen so it blocks out the entire virtual world; even then I still can't see all of the tabs that are blinking at me for attention and apparently at least once, I missed a student's IM plea for help because of this. So in my opinion, this "improvement" is a step backward in usability.
Also I can't figure out the right setting for "names." With 20 students, if I have names showing "Always" for everyone, there's just a vast swirling sea of names obscuring the screen which I can't really fit to the right avatars in the crowd anyway. If I set to 'Show Once' or 'Never,' then I can't see someone's name and group affiliation when I need to know it; clicking on someone to view their profile doesn't tell me their role/title within a group (this problem came up because a student team approached me with a question while I had names switched off; I couldn't tell which team was approaching me and when I tried clicking a person, it gave name and group - the group we are all in - but not role/team; I had difficulty trying to get names switched back on; finally I just gave up asked, "sorry, which team are you?" which I'm sure was a tad disconcerting.) I think in retrospect that names off for a tour works fine to keep your vision clear (you can click on a person to get their name as needed), but later for individuals/groups coming up with questions, switch General Preferences back to 'show names always.' Clunky, though.
I do have to give SL some performance points though. Turns out that in another class which was supposed to be meeting online in Blackboard at the same time as ours, Blackboard chat wasn't working ... but Second Life was up and running just fine and our class tour went forward as scheduled. So, chalk one up for SL this time.
This week, we had a wonderful class tour of Rachelville on Imagination Island which was created by Rocky Vallejo and Cindy Elkhart, in honor of the memory of their daughter Rachel.
There are many different and innovative ways in which information is presented there in experiential ways, and Rocky showed us how to wander and touch, explore, discover, and imagine information services and resources in this new type of environment. Rocky and Cindy talked about how volunteers have helped in building resources and exhibits, and the need for volunteers with children's literature, youth services or school media expertise. We ran out of time before getting to the library at Mythica, which has collections of fairytales, fables and mythology, but the direction would be to walk from the plaza area down toward the graystone-thatched cottages, and take the flagstone path that goes off toward the right (east). You come to an area where there are cottages around a pond, and the library is there by the rental board.We now get to halt our frenetic pace of discovery and spend more time on reflection. What are the implications of all these different technologies for information services and resources in virtual reference environments? What have we learned from our explorations? We'll consider and reflect in our upcoming class sessions, and in the “Exploring the Information Environment” wiki short paper due by midnight on Monday, Oct. 15, in which students can take a particular information service or Web 2.0 resource and explore it in more depth.
Class photos are now up from our Second Life sessions (see link in Course Menu or in the Course Library.) We talked a little in the Secret Garden about our thoughts and reactions to Second Life as an information environment, and about communication in this environment, and I demonstrated a bit about sound and animations; I'm no expert there at all, but tried to give a sense of what this could be like if someone with actual talent at this really worked at stringing together gestures, sounds and animations. (I waved, said, "Buh-bye," then did a backflip, a forward handstand into an arch and back again on my feet, then did the kata forms. I cannot do this in real life - well, maybe the "Buh-bye" part.)
Two more 'interface' areas where I find that I have teaching difficulties using Second Life: the Communicate 'improvement' introduced recently has been awful, since now all instant messages to me from individuals and groups appear only on tabs on a gigantic, long box thing. If I try to watch them all, it takes up my whole screen so it blocks out the entire virtual world; even then I still can't see all of the tabs that are blinking at me for attention and apparently at least once, I missed a student's IM plea for help because of this. So in my opinion, this "improvement" is a step backward in usability.
Also I can't figure out the right setting for "names." With 20 students, if I have names showing "Always" for everyone, there's just a vast swirling sea of names obscuring the screen which I can't really fit to the right avatars in the crowd anyway. If I set to 'Show Once' or 'Never,' then I can't see someone's name and group affiliation when I need to know it; clicking on someone to view their profile doesn't tell me their role/title within a group (this problem came up because a student team approached me with a question while I had names switched off; I couldn't tell which team was approaching me and when I tried clicking a person, it gave name and group - the group we are all in - but not role/team; I had difficulty trying to get names switched back on; finally I just gave up asked, "sorry, which team are you?" which I'm sure was a tad disconcerting.) I think in retrospect that names off for a tour works fine to keep your vision clear (you can click on a person to get their name as needed), but later for individuals/groups coming up with questions, switch General Preferences back to 'show names always.' Clunky, though.
I do have to give SL some performance points though. Turns out that in another class which was supposed to be meeting online in Blackboard at the same time as ours, Blackboard chat wasn't working ... but Second Life was up and running just fine and our class tour went forward as scheduled. So, chalk one up for SL this time.
Friday, September 21, 2007
Week Four: Class in Second Life
At SLCC 2007, Philip Linden (RL: Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Labs) got a big laugh from the crowd by whipping open his jacket to reveal a T-shirt emblazoned with "missing image." He also commented about how the real world is not shut down for repairs on Wednesdays.
So naturally my class was assigned to Wednesdays 6-8pm (3-5 pm SLT), as this is just the way my luck has been running this semester; and on our first day of class in Second Life which had been scheduled a month in advance on our calendar and which the students (some of them anyway) had started preparing for in advance, Linden Labs took the grid offline for a major upgrade/fix which caused everyone to have lots of difficulty and delay in logging in. In fact, our main guest speaker from Clearwater Public Library did not arrive until after our class had already left for our next destination. [BTW, looks like something about 'rotation' broke in this upgrade, causing problems with 'sit' scripts.]
Some students also had not been reading emails or class discussion board postings or paying attention to the information given out in class - as expected - and so had failed to post up or email me with their SL names, which meant that I could not add them to our class group or give them landmarks in advance for our SL destinations; this inattention, however, backfired on them when they found themselves unprepared, lost, and not receiving instant messages that everyone in the class group was receiving. I spent a fair amount of my time in the first part of class teleporting in students as they fought their way through the upgrade and into SL, which probably looked to the rest of the class like the professor gazing off into space or putting hands on hips and staring at the ground, followed by strange avatars dropping from the sky, sometimes even landing on top of another avatar's head. Then when we all teleported via landmarks to the next destination, the students who had not emailed or posted their SL names were left behind and had to be individually teleported.
So one problem I note about SL for educational uses: everything in Second Life is built around the idea of consent; you choose to give out your SL name or not, and if you don't give your name, I can't "find" you to offer friendship or group membership; if you give your name, you still must choose to login and accept a 'friend' request or 'group' membership offered to you or not; likewise I can offer you a teleport, but you have to accept it when I offer; so everything requires active participation, and my observation was that inattentive students who didn't actively participate and pay attention to class ultimately had a more difficult experience with SL than those who did. Now you can argue that's a choice that they made for themselves - and I agree - but it still impacts the rest of the class as it means the professor has to be spending extra time solving problems that should not exist, which detracts from teaching the other students. You could get around this by having a "stationary" class - have all students go to one place and stay there for the duration. The tradeoff though is that you're not taking advantage of one of the main affordances of SL ... to move, to travel, to see more than just one 20m space.
So that was one of my observations about teaching in SL this week; the other was that it's much like teaching in live text chat (which I already had much practice in as it's one of the things I was interested in learning upon arriving here; FSU's College of Information professors are very skilled at teaching live online in text chat.) I had it all prepared just as I would for a text chat class session, except with the added functionalities in SL of being able to throw a Powerpoint (texture) up on a giant whiteboard for everyone to see, and being able to also demo it myself live. We did a building exercise, walked over to see a gadget for building, lined up together to take a class picture (and how cool is that, distance students scattered all over the world being able to 'meet' and take a class picture together), and then everyone also got to meet in their groups. Meanwhile I walked around paying all the students $20 in Lindens, since they have free basic accounts and it takes $10L for project work they might need to do such as upload a texture. Amy got in my favorite line of the day, as I walked by and paid her: "Finally, a class that pays off!" I had to laugh. $20L is not quite as exciting as it may sound though, since the exchange rate is about $260L to $1 US dollar. But, $10L to upload sounds, animations, and images, and a lot of stuff can either be found for free or bought for $1L; the students received plenty of free stuff in class as well, along with landmarks to freebie places.
Next class: Rachelville, and we're very lucky to be able to hear from a guest speaker. Also, Mike Galloway from IPL came in today and did a training in collections for the Banned Books group (Collections team), which was recorded in Elluminate so everyone can replay it. (At the moment I am posting this, there is a marker for the place where the recording will appear, but not a working link yet.) The training has Hypatia and collections info; when it becomes available, see the Ellu-Archives link.
So naturally my class was assigned to Wednesdays 6-8pm (3-5 pm SLT), as this is just the way my luck has been running this semester; and on our first day of class in Second Life which had been scheduled a month in advance on our calendar and which the students (some of them anyway) had started preparing for in advance, Linden Labs took the grid offline for a major upgrade/fix which caused everyone to have lots of difficulty and delay in logging in. In fact, our main guest speaker from Clearwater Public Library did not arrive until after our class had already left for our next destination. [BTW, looks like something about 'rotation' broke in this upgrade, causing problems with 'sit' scripts.]
Some students also had not been reading emails or class discussion board postings or paying attention to the information given out in class - as expected - and so had failed to post up or email me with their SL names, which meant that I could not add them to our class group or give them landmarks in advance for our SL destinations; this inattention, however, backfired on them when they found themselves unprepared, lost, and not receiving instant messages that everyone in the class group was receiving. I spent a fair amount of my time in the first part of class teleporting in students as they fought their way through the upgrade and into SL, which probably looked to the rest of the class like the professor gazing off into space or putting hands on hips and staring at the ground, followed by strange avatars dropping from the sky, sometimes even landing on top of another avatar's head. Then when we all teleported via landmarks to the next destination, the students who had not emailed or posted their SL names were left behind and had to be individually teleported.
So one problem I note about SL for educational uses: everything in Second Life is built around the idea of consent; you choose to give out your SL name or not, and if you don't give your name, I can't "find" you to offer friendship or group membership; if you give your name, you still must choose to login and accept a 'friend' request or 'group' membership offered to you or not; likewise I can offer you a teleport, but you have to accept it when I offer; so everything requires active participation, and my observation was that inattentive students who didn't actively participate and pay attention to class ultimately had a more difficult experience with SL than those who did. Now you can argue that's a choice that they made for themselves - and I agree - but it still impacts the rest of the class as it means the professor has to be spending extra time solving problems that should not exist, which detracts from teaching the other students. You could get around this by having a "stationary" class - have all students go to one place and stay there for the duration. The tradeoff though is that you're not taking advantage of one of the main affordances of SL ... to move, to travel, to see more than just one 20m space.
So that was one of my observations about teaching in SL this week; the other was that it's much like teaching in live text chat (which I already had much practice in as it's one of the things I was interested in learning upon arriving here; FSU's College of Information professors are very skilled at teaching live online in text chat.) I had it all prepared just as I would for a text chat class session, except with the added functionalities in SL of being able to throw a Powerpoint (texture) up on a giant whiteboard for everyone to see, and being able to also demo it myself live. We did a building exercise, walked over to see a gadget for building, lined up together to take a class picture (and how cool is that, distance students scattered all over the world being able to 'meet' and take a class picture together), and then everyone also got to meet in their groups. Meanwhile I walked around paying all the students $20 in Lindens, since they have free basic accounts and it takes $10L for project work they might need to do such as upload a texture. Amy got in my favorite line of the day, as I walked by and paid her: "Finally, a class that pays off!" I had to laugh. $20L is not quite as exciting as it may sound though, since the exchange rate is about $260L to $1 US dollar. But, $10L to upload sounds, animations, and images, and a lot of stuff can either be found for free or bought for $1L; the students received plenty of free stuff in class as well, along with landmarks to freebie places.
Next class: Rachelville, and we're very lucky to be able to hear from a guest speaker. Also, Mike Galloway from IPL came in today and did a training in collections for the Banned Books group (Collections team), which was recorded in Elluminate so everyone can replay it. (At the moment I am posting this, there is a marker for the place where the recording will appear, but not a working link yet.) The training has Hypatia and collections info; when it becomes available, see the Ellu-Archives link.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
SL Update
By this point (6:30 pm EST, 3:30pm SLT, Saturday, Sept 15, 2007), I think I've now 'friended,' added to IPL SL group membership, and dropped 'Second Life Libraries' landmarks on 14 students from the LIS 5916 class (or else directly teleported them out of Orientation Island to the great wide world beyond.) Probably about half that number need to log back in to Second Life to accept their IPL memberships and SL Library landmarks, which can be used to teleport to Info Island.
I put up a Powerpoint on "SL Basics" in the class site that should be useful for students, also a discussion board thread on SL basics (read it all, it's good for you) and another thread on events in SL that may be of interest. I figured students might be active in SL today but as I'm on deadline for getting a research proposal written and submitted today, I'm jumping in and out of SL every couple or few hours. Right, and so back to this research proposal. Let's just hope they interpret deadlines the way I do, midnight on the day of. :)
I put up a Powerpoint on "SL Basics" in the class site that should be useful for students, also a discussion board thread on SL basics (read it all, it's good for you) and another thread on events in SL that may be of interest. I figured students might be active in SL today but as I'm on deadline for getting a research proposal written and submitted today, I'm jumping in and out of SL every couple or few hours. Right, and so back to this research proposal. Let's just hope they interpret deadlines the way I do, midnight on the day of. :)
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