OK, I actually did this last week but this is the first chance I've had to blog about it. Added my favorite TV show (currently Bones), my favorite book (The Lord of the Rings, of course--read it 20x before anybody ever heard of that Jackson guy), and got the Crowe's Nest to show up on the "Favorite Blogs" list. Hooray.
How I might I use a wiki in my work at the library? I think I pretty much answered that in the last post.
However, it might have some interesting applications otherwise. Last Saturday the Council of Stewards (= Executive Board) of the Mythopoeic Society had one of our quarterly meetings, which we do by conference call most of the time. We agreed we all need to document our procedures since we serve 3-year terms (no term limits, though). On occasion people have had to leave without a lot of notice...somehow it's hard to get people to work for nothing. A passworded wiki would be a great way to do a manual in bits and pieces for a small nonprofit Board with jobs and real lives and such. Hmm, I may have to go back and read that stuff about free wikis--or dump the job on our Webmaster.
The Old Crowe is feeling very tired and stressed out right now. Sometimes she just wants to go back to her nest and take a nap; sometimes she wishes she could find some carrion to rip apart just for the hell of it. To cheer herself up she will remind herself that most of her relatives are freezing their butts off right now.
Monday, February 5, 2007
Thursday, February 1, 2007
Thing #16: Wiki Widi Winci
Egad--it's been awhile. I've been discovering yet another corollary of Murphy's Law, library division, to wit: "The classes that need the most prep are the ones the teacher wants to schedule the earliest." Being up to my ears in the infolit prep thing right now, and viewing all these wikis, it's not surprising that the first thing that suggests itself to me is their potential as a tool for instruction/reference. (The line between the two is becoming increasingly hard to draw these days.) Wide-open wikis make me nervous. Like a yummy bag of cookies you might find on a park bench--you don't know what might be in them or who might have had their grubby hands on them. Not a good idea to eat out of that bag. The kind of wikis that are created by a group, but a limited group, are more promising. Since we've been talking a lot about moving more towards subject teams, having wiki-style subject pages created by the Science Team or the Humanities & Arts Team might make a lot of sense--or even open to all the subject librarians. Many of us have wide-ranging interests that don't necessarily match the subjects we're assigned to at the time, but any of us might run across content that might be of interest to someone else. If I do this now I have to send X an email saying, "Hey, look at this cool resource; you might want to add it." With a wiki I could just add it myself. If X looked at it later and thought it sucked, X could always remove it. There weren't a lot of academic library subject pages in the examples, and the ones I saw didn't look that attractive visually--but the idea is a good one. Wikipedia itself has a very attractive and user-friendly design, so it can be done.
I was intrigued by Albany County PL's idea for a wiki of procedures. That's another good library application. Unlike policies, which ought to be relatively stable over time, procedures change all the time, and the best people to write or edit them are the people actually doing the procedure in question. As long as you have some guidelines about structure and what needs to be included, having the folks actually doing the tasks able to edit procedures is eminently sensible. That way, you could easily adapt to new software, hardware and/or wetware without having to go through a rewrite & approval process every time something changed. There should some kind of PP guru/editor who took a look now and then to make sure things didn't get way off track, but otherwise a great idea.
The biggest problem even with limited-group wikis--as with any group effort--is the "let George do it phenomenon." To put it another way, if everybody's responsible, no one's responsible. Same reason some students (usually the better ones) don't like group projects--a small group of competent and conscientious schmucks do most of the work. So again, any team or group should have a wiki-master (does that word exist? it does now...) or some such person, to make sure everyone is contributing, keep an eye out for redundancies and inaccurate or outdated info.
The "event wiki" is another good application--a conference one is good. Also, a class is like an event--it goes on for a limited time period. It would be cool to collaborate with a discipline faculty member on a class wiki. I wish wikis had been around back in 1998 when I co-taught an art history class. It would have been a lot easier than WebCT was back then!
I was intrigued by Albany County PL's idea for a wiki of procedures. That's another good library application. Unlike policies, which ought to be relatively stable over time, procedures change all the time, and the best people to write or edit them are the people actually doing the procedure in question. As long as you have some guidelines about structure and what needs to be included, having the folks actually doing the tasks able to edit procedures is eminently sensible. That way, you could easily adapt to new software, hardware and/or wetware without having to go through a rewrite & approval process every time something changed. There should some kind of PP guru/editor who took a look now and then to make sure things didn't get way off track, but otherwise a great idea.
The biggest problem even with limited-group wikis--as with any group effort--is the "let George do it phenomenon." To put it another way, if everybody's responsible, no one's responsible. Same reason some students (usually the better ones) don't like group projects--a small group of competent and conscientious schmucks do most of the work. So again, any team or group should have a wiki-master (does that word exist? it does now...) or some such person, to make sure everyone is contributing, keep an eye out for redundancies and inaccurate or outdated info.
The "event wiki" is another good application--a conference one is good. Also, a class is like an event--it goes on for a limited time period. It would be cool to collaborate with a discipline faculty member on a class wiki. I wish wikis had been around back in 1998 when I co-taught an art history class. It would have been a lot easier than WebCT was back then!
Thursday, January 25, 2007
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
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...
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.
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.
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