Thing #14: Tagging in General

I actually had an epiphany about tagging when I was updating (yet again) my lecture for ART 100W. One of my standard learning objectives is the attempt to explain the difference between keywords and controlled-vocabulary subject headings. I realized that tags fit right in between, and I've actually incorporated them into my presentation--on the assumption that many of the students are probably more familiar with tags than with subject headings. Here's the continuum:

Keywords
–not consistent, not neccesarily a desciption of what it's about
Tags (Flickr, Del.icio.us)
–not consistent, but does describe what it's about, since creator assigns it
Subject Headings
–consistent & does describe what it's about

It'll be interesting to see if this helps anybody "get it." Another thing that occured to me as I've rooting around all these sites that have to do with tagging--it's a good background for students to have when you try to teach the above. If they've done tagging themselves, or search these kinds of sites, they'll understand the challenge of calling something what it is, and how different people may describe the same thing using very different words. If "learning by doing" is a good technique--and it is--they might understand some elements of information literacy better than anyone who hasn't done this DIY version of classification.

Thing #14: Technorati

Ah, so that's what it is. You know, back in the days of my youth--I'm talking about 40 years ago, here, folks--I would have been crazy about blogging, as would my best friends. Hard as it is for most of the students to whom I attempt to introduce to the joys of information literacy to believe, we used to write for fun. Pages and pages of the stuff--fiction, nonfiction, self-consciously clever letters, plays...we used to challenge each other to diagram long sentences for the hell of it, just to show we could. (I think the record was a 47-word sentence.) Being able to share that writing with the world at large, and have total strangers respond to it, would have been a heady experience.

Curmudgeonly old incident of flatulence that I am now, I care less about what the world at large thinks. I still write for fun but nowhere near as much--just don't have the time. Some of my best creative writing gets done at work...but I digress.

Did I get different results searching "Learning 2.0" in blogs vs, tags vs. directory? Well, duh. Like a lot of these sites that allow only keyword seaching, phrase searching is a problem. I tried using “Learning 2.0” (including the quotes). It took forever and I still got some dubious results. Then I discovered the "Advanced Search" which lets you look for "exact phrase" and specify only "in blogs about" X. I used "libraries" and got much better results. Either way it takes a lot longer than the basic search.

Looking at the "most popular" was depressing--Brack Obama #13 but Paris Hilton #3. Egad.

Thing #13: De.licio.us

Well, I tried to look at the tutorial--four times. The first three I got a message that the image couldn't display. The fourth time it actually showed up and I assumed you could just click on the image to start it. Nothing happened. I was nervous about clicking "download," what with our IT paranoia (although it isn't really paranoia if they are out to get you). I finally clicked, which seemed to work. It started fine, but kept stopping for no apparent reason, then eventually starting again--multiple times. I got tired of listening to dead air so I gave up. The other tutorials were fine. I took a look at the San Mateo PL site, since they're in my neighborhood, sorta. I liked their idea to organize their tags by the Dewey Decimal system--clever.

I'd be the first to agree that the bookmarking features of Internet Explorer suck hugely. I have a lot of bookmarks on my office computer, and if I wasn't paying attention to the title when I added one I find I often have no clue what it is when I look at it later. Being able to add tags at that point would be nice. The advantages of the status quo are (1) the ability to organize in a hierarchy--that's not a bad thing; (2) speed of access. If I'm answering a question on the phone in my office--from a patron or colleague--in most cases I could put my virtual hands on a bookmark faster without going to a web site where I had to sign in first.

On the other hand, I can really see the value of it when you have a lot of different people adding and wanting access to the same set of bookmarks. One application that immediately leaps to mind is the desktop computers at the Reference Desk. I'm always finding that several different people have made links to the exact same page, but each has put it in a different place. You end up with a mess. With something like De.licio.us everybody could call it whatever they wanted and all could find it under what made sense to them. (This is assuming that De.licio.us either doesn't let you make duplicate links or makes it easy to spot and eliminate them.)

The other big deal is being able to access all your bookmarks from one place, no matter what computer (or mobile device) you were using. I'm not a big traveler, and generally I prefer not to think about this place during my precious time at home. But there have been occasions when I've been home and wanted to access a site that I knew I had bookmarked at work--but couldn't.

Overall, tough call for me whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. I might explore this further after I retire. Which, 11 months from today, I will have already done. Excuse me, I need to go meditate upon the wonderfulness of that phrase.

Thing #12: Rollyo

OK, now this started as one of those "where have you been all my life?" moments. What a great idea--I can see immediately a great application for any subject specialist. As a matter of fact I was so jazzed I added my first searchroll (http://rollyo.com/ecrowe/islamic_art/) to my art history web page. Go to the section on "Middle East & Islamic"--I used that because it had a decent number of sites listed, and a lot of art students take classes in this topic.

The biggest downside is those [expletive deleted] "sponsored links." That kind of trashes the whole concept of "trusted links," doesn't it? I tried a search on Hagia Sophia and what shows up as the very first link? A site called 1MillionPapers.com that offers to sell you a term paper on Hagia Sophia! I hope the students do the plagiarism tutorial first. Might be useful as a way to discuss evaluation & ethical use of information, however.

If not for that very serious downside, this would be a perfect service. I'm so irritated at them I might write a letter...

Thing #11: Web 2.0 Sites

"Collecting material for a bibliography is something which appeared to require an amazing amount of drudgery."
Richard Cameron, creator of CiteULike

This exercise was harder than I thought it would be--I really didn't want to register for yet another web site, and a lot of the categories didn't seem of interest to me. Then I discoverd CiteULike--which looked vaguely familiar. I think I've stumbled across it in the past while surfing.

What did you like about the tool?
What were the site’s useful features?
It's a service to help academics to share, store, and organise articles & papers found on the web. "When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser...you can export your library to either BibTeX or Endnote to build it in to your bibliography...links to the papers...papers themselves stay in archives like CiteSeer or PubMed."

"CiteULike is a free service, and will remain that way. You will always be able to manage your own personal library, and view other libraries on the site at no charge. The central database is backed up every fifteen minutes, and the information in your library is safe and secure."

Looks like tagging is going on--not sure how much is official descriptors imported from the original source and how much the user can add on his/her own. Cool feature--on the right is a list of "most active tags" with relative importance indicated by size & weight of type.

The downside:
"At the moment the database is dominated by biological and medical papers, but there is no reason why, say, history or philosophy bibliographies should not be equally prevalent." The other downside--it's a labor of love by one person. If he gets hit by a bus, you're screwed. Also, there are some problems linking to full text content not on the free web, but there's a discussion on the lengthy FAQ page (from which the material above is quoted) of possible ways to get it to work if one's institution uses a proxy server.

Could you see any applications for its use in a library setting?
Certainly might be something individual librarians and others might use, and something to tell our students and faculty about. I confess I haven't had time to test it out in detail (nor will I) but it looks promising.

Thing #10: Image Generators

Oooo, fun! I hope one of your learning objectives wasn't "improve productivity," cause this is gonna have the opposite effect! I had way too much fun with this, to wit: At http://www.imagegenerator.org/ I tried the 1st 3--
Dummies Book Cover Maker (easiest)
Comic Strip Generators (couldn't find what I wanted in a quick search--their keyword searching doesn't work very well--chose amine and got a lot of pix of animals. Excuse me?)
Tarot Card Name Generator (mostly easy, except adjusting placement of the text took many tries).

Want to see what I did? One is included in this post; the other is on my office door.

Thing #9: Library Feeds

Look over to the left there--I found a few. Unshelved is the most important to my mental health at work (which is hanging by a thread). If I have a moment to spare I may look for more but hold not thy breath.

Thing #8: She Has Bloglines!

Not only have I figured out the URL to my public bloglines account (to wit, http://www.bloglines.com/public/oldcrowe) but I figured out how to add the list to my blog. It involves generating then cutting & pasting some HTML, but it's all pretty automatic, although it took some rooting around in Help files to figure it out. Plus ye olde "trial & error" method.

Didn't think a lot of Feedster--keyword searching is not too effective for finding anything useful in these sites unless you have a lot more time to wander around than I'm willing to spend. Topix.net was better. Too tired to look at the other two. Besides, the Vitual Learning Team already pointed me to the really important one, Unshelved! It took me three tries to sign up for that one, using slightly different methods--but I perservered. Humor is essential. The others were fairly easy. Still 1 feed short of the 10 required, but I'm sure I'll be able to find one. Next week; my brain is fried now.

Thing #8: RSS Feeds--the Beginning

A little nervous about this, but here goes:

1. Cnet video was a washout--I tried 3x and it kept stopping for apparent reason. Screw it.
2. "Feed Me" tutorial from PALINET was nice--simple but effective.
3. SUCCESS! I have actually registered and been validated! And besides, I just cleared a misfeed in the big copier my own self. Is this a red-letter day, or what?
4. Subscribed to some feeds the easy way, via Bloglines Directory. That's enough fot now--time to go off to a meeting.

Thing #6 Redux: Librarian Trading Cards

Thing #7: Digital Images

Being an art librarian and all--and that (among other things) for most of my lengthy career--I'm truly amazed at the impact of digital imagery on both the study of art history and the practice of art and design. I could go on for days about this (fear not, I won't) but just to hit some of the high points:

1. Studying art history. When I was an art history major, I had to walk six miles in the snow...OK, I lie. It was more than six miles but I drove; I only had to walk around campus. But it was SUNY at Buffalo, so you can bet that sometimes it was in the snow. Studying for those frequent and infamous "slide identification" tests meant coming to the reserves collection of the library and spending hours studying the pictures (usually in books) that were likely to be on the test. Nowadays students do it on their computers--no driving, no snow. Wearing their jammies, cat on their lap. Young whippersnappers!

2. Photography as documentation. For years the photograph was viewed as a record of something real--a place or event. It's certainly possible to mess with pre-digital photography, either to hoax (such as the famous fairy photographs that fooled Arthur Conan Doyle) or for artistic purposes (see the work of Jerry Uelsmann, for example). But digital imagery makes it so easy--not to mention scarily convincing if done well. Think about the progress of CGI in movies, or the journalists who've gotten into hot water (or the unemployment office) for doctoring suposedly "documentary" photographs.

3. Images in libraries. When I was a baby art librarian, color images were very expensive. It meant buying a book that cost hundreds of dollars (stop laughing, you STM people) because of the cost of high-quality color printing . Then I started to see inexpensive books coming with a CD (or just a CD by itself) with hundreds of color images--making large collections of images available to a wide audience--images that would have been impossibly expensive to disseminate in printed books. Now there's a vast amount of digital imagery on the web. Some of it is still expensive, because it's in a subscription database, but a lot is free to look at--many museums and galleries throughout the world have stunning collections available to anyone with an internet connection. (The Fine Arts Musuems of San Francisco's "ImageBase" being one of the best--see (http://www.famsf.org/). I'm not even getting into the impact of historical and scientific/medical imagery. I'm just getting amazed all over again as I look at the vast change just over the last 30-40 years. Maybe not as spectacular a change as during my grandmother's life...she was born before the Wright Brothers flew and was with me when we watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. But cool nonetheless.

Thing #5 -- Blogger Photo Upload

Oops, getting carried away and not doing all the bits of the exercise as stated...do I get extra credit for doing stuff that wasn't part of the exercise?

Let's try including a pic in the post (not related to a pig in a poke). How about a wolf on a desk? Wish this could be cropped after the fact...

Note to self: learn Photoshop once retired. Hey--is that lifelong learning or what? I don't need no stinking contract...

Thing #5-6: Flickr Rocks!

Oooooo, a person shouldn't be allowed to have so much fun at work! What I've done so far:

1. Created a Flickr account (easy since I already had a Yahoo account)
2. Uploaded some pictures of myself I had on my computer
3. Created a "buddy icon"
4. Used one of those 3rd party sites to create a badge for Captain Bullshit. [Problem--I was supposed to be able to save it on my computer but couldn't--some of these exercises might be problematic due to our high level of security.] Tried emailing it to myself but nothing's shown up yet.
5. Searched for cat pictures (of which there are bazillions); pictures of SJSU and King Library (people seem fascinated by the staircase); pictures of art students available w/Creative Commons license. (Great idea, BTW--you can find these on advanced search & know they're OK to use w/attribution.) I might use some in my PowerPoint for Art 100W.
6. Created a Flickr URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oldcrowe [but nothing shows up...is that because I didn't mark the photos public, but only for "friends"?] Back to the FAQ, I think...
7. Invited Pam Jackson to be a contact/friend. I think we finally have this worked out. She already had a Flickr account (I knew she would) but of course these were both different email addresses than the ones we have at work.

I gotta get a digital camera now!

Learning Contract

I gotta tell ya, I have my doubts about this. I can see the logic behind it--writing stuff down often helps when it's something you don't really want to do or have trouble accomplishing successfully. Example: writing down everything you eat often helps you stick to a diet. With me, it's just another irritating obstacle (see previous post for how well I do with those). My philosophy of lifelong learning is the same as those Nike folks--"Just Do It!" I see some people getting so wrapped up in doing the contract they never get around to beginning the learning...using the thing as a mechanism for avoidance. Maybe it's because most of the things I've had to learn--especially for work--have been things I needed to figure out in a hurry. I wouldn't have time for a contact even if I wanted to do one.

Those 7 1/2 Habits

Which of those "7 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners" is easiest for me and which is hardest? Habit #4 is probably the easiest (Have confidence in yourself as a competent, effective learner). After 2 Master's degrees and almost 36 years in a field that forces you to learn new things all the time, if I weren't "a competent, effective learner" I'd have gone down in flames by now.

Of course, there's that problem of my constitutional inability to learn how to knit. A couple of truly excellent needlewomen tried to teach me and threw up their hands. It's like my depressing career as an art student--no matter how good a learner you are, and how hard you work, for some things you just need talent or ability (like physical coordination) that no amount of learning can make up for. That's why I'm an art librarian with a degree in art history today, instead of an artist.

What skill is hardest? Hnads down, "View problems as challenges." (#3) At this stage of my life it's hard to view problems as anything but a pain in the kiester and an irritation. (Speaking of learning, I'm studying to be a curmudgeon when I grow up.)

First Blog Post

My first blog post ever. Someday this will be in the Smithsonian. This year I may answer the burning question--what can a blog do that plain old email can't--and is it anything I want to do? Stay tuned.

Your friendly neighborhood librarian, learning about all this stuff in her very last year of being a librarian (last of 36, can you believe it?).