Sunday, May 31, 2009

Wikipedia is a great place to START, not stop.


I suspect that Wikipedia is really taking off as a ready reference source in the business world for one main reason--it's (nominally) free. We used it extensively at American International Assistance Services (AIAS) in Houston, Texas. Before that AIAS had a subscription to Microsoft Encarta but let it expire. Wikipedia became the default reference resource by default, and in the main, for the kinds of articles we consulted in it, mainly foreign country info, it was pretty darn reliable. It was also good for information about diseases and injuries to give our assistance coordinators a lay understanding of what our clients needs were, when coordinating between the AIG Medical staff and our contracted Travel agent. I don't know if contributions to the Wikipedia Foundation non-profit are tax deductible, but they should be, and it is in the best interest of businesses to contribute to it, not only for the potential tax break, but also to support a valuable resource for all users.

Wikipedia is a fun way to pass the time on a slow, boring night shift. I used to look up obscure articles on British militaria, aviation, etc, and general articles on Eastern Bloc small arms, etc. It may not be as good as a subscription to Britannica Online, but it's nice for the Middlebrow person interested in self-improvement and self-edification; Though it may seem these values sound a bit dated, I still actively put them into practice, and Wikipedia is an excellent starting point, but by no means should people stop there (as younger generation is often tempted to do). Editorial control has improved over the years, but sometimes gets over-dominated by editors whom I call "Notability Nazis" who delete a lot of rich content about local info because they deem it "not notable enough". I tend to be more "Inclusivist" in my views. Wikipedia's "Talk" pages can also give one a feel for the status of the current debate on controversial issues, especially articles flagged for lacking NPOV (Neutral Point of View). Wikipedia is always a "permanent beta", always under constant revision. I only once tried to submit a complete article to Wikipedia, and it was quickly flagged for multiple failings. Luckily more capable editors stepped in and re-wrote it properly and now it exists in usable form (it was a frivolous article about the third person shooter game Syphon Filter 2 on the Playstation console). I mostly make small edits; a sentence there, a grammar correction there, a link here, a paragraph revision there. But I'm proud when these stand the test of time.

I also play with other Wikis out there, but Wikipedia is the ground breaking original. We also have a restricted departmental Wiki in the library (for Technical Services) that I only just recently joined early in the week last week. It is connected to the library-wide Staff Wiki, and it will all be integrated with the new Sharepoint system in the near future, which is still in the process of doing a "soft" roll out on the TWU campus. I've no doubt the NT23 probably has some upcoming things on Wikis; I don't expect to see much new, but I'll give it a try.

Ideally, Wikipedia should lead users back to the library, to continue their research started on Wikipedia, as the graphic above, featuring Wikipe-tan, the Wikipedia official (anime-style) mascot, seeks to demonstrate.

Thing 7: RSS readers (in plain English)

Good explanatory video on how RSS works and truly is the more efficient way of keeping updated with new content on the web. As I stated, I already use the Firefox add-on that lets you subscribe to pages and keep updated with the feed. I only subscribe to a very limited number of blogs that I follow very regularly. I also subscribe to a lot of LIS-related blogs, but in truth, I only actively follow a fraction of those. I'm subscribed more out of a sense of duty, that I *should* consult them, more than actually being interested in really consulting them all that often. I probably should just shift these to Google Reader and free up some space on my Firefox toolbar.

I would think you'd have to be a serious news/net junkie to actually NEED something as sophisticated as Google Reader to manage all that content, though. For me, really, Firefox does the job adequately, most of the time. Some blogs have links to other blogs, and that's how I get there, i.e. the "old" way. I follow one gun rights blog, Say Uncle, because he has a huge blogroll that serves as a gateway to other gun rights activism blogs that I follow less regularly. "Uncle" is plenty entertaining himself, and makes for a good "gateway" to the rest of the gun rights blogosphere.

So really, I use a combination of "old" and "new" to keep up with "what's new" in the world of news and blogs. Remember that a "feed" URL is not always synonymous with the "main page" URL; this is a common mistake that I've made myself numerous times. You sometimes have to dig around to find the "feed" URL, as sometimes the Firefox add-on won't be able to find it automatically (though in most cases it can). Now that I have an active Google reader account, I may start using it where I find the click-button newsreader options on certain pages.

For the time being, I'm sticking with the Firefox add-on for my top-ten blogs, but may use Google Reader to aggregate my lesser-consulted blogs and keep that content updated and ready to view should I chose to consult it. One option I positively hate is using the RSS reader option in MS Outlook. I did that once by accident and it really overwhelms MS Outlook pretty easily. I do NOT recommend the RSS reader featured in MS Outlook.

North Texas 23 Things; Thing 6, Blog Readers

I guess this works pretty well; I'm already "following" other blogs on my own blog here (see sidebar), and Google Reader imported these subs immediately. I also added the North Texas 23 blog, and my own, per the instructions given for Thing 6. My own preference in Blog Readers, though, is to use the live subscription links in Firefox, which I can consult on the fly as 'drop down' menu items. I will probably continue to use this option in Firefox instead of switching over to Google Reader anytime soon.

The Library is the Heart of a University.


The Phoenix Training at Southern Methodist University on this past Friday was pretty good, and I'm glad I went. Aside from the Keynote address, however, it was all pretty free-form and largely unstructured, basically a morning and afternoon "rap" session of all the attendees. The morning rap session was a general discussion about the keynote address and its implications for all of us. The groups were distributed at random, by attendee last name, so we had a mix of Reference, ILL, Tech Services, and Administrators. The afternoon talks were self-selected "Special Interest Groups", and I attended the session on Original Cataloging and Metadata, which was a session attended by fellow catalogers and metadata librarians. We talked some about ContentDM and MARC and other topics of current interest. I thought about bringing up RDA, but couldn't find an opportunity to slip it into the conversation. We were just getting on a roll when it was time to conclude and join an afternoon tour group.

There were actually two tours that we took, one before lunch and one in the afternoon. I opted to tour the Fondren Library (the main campus library) in the morning and the Art Library in the afternoon.

It was a little amusing to me as a Rice University alumnus to find another Fondren Library in Texas. I had done my SLIS student practicum in the Tech Services department of Rice U's Fondren Library way back in Fall 2004.

The Southern Methodist University campus was very beautiful, but my camera died early on in the day (I had rechargeable batteries in it, but had forgotten to recharge them the night before). Anymore I've pretty much decided that if you're serious about digital photography, you have to buy your batteries FRESH, the very day you plan a photo shoot. Too much time elapses between the time you put in new batteries and the time you pick up the camera to do a photo shoot to do it any other way, I'm discovering. You should also always bring a cheap, disposable analogue camera as a back up. Even in an age of digital photography, I still love to shoot with Black and White film with a disposable camera. Sure, you can always do ersatz "B&W" photography with a greyscale filter in digital editing, but it's just not the same; not to me anyway.

Now that I know better how to get to and from the SMU campus, I have resolved to go back one Saturday in the summer and plan to spend an entire Saturday exploring the place (and its surrounding neighborhoods). I will be one happy shutterbug that day. There's even a La Madeline restaurant right next to campus where I can get a hearty "French Country Breakfast", my favorite of their menu items. It really is a very nice looking, exclusive part of Dallas that reminds me a lot of the Rice U. and Museum District parts of Houston. Too bad it's a nominally religious institution, while Rice U. is unabashedly secular in nature.

Attended (sort of) A-Kon 20


I attended, well, more like, gate-crashed, A-Kon 20, in Dallas, Texas yesterday. I've had a rough week with not getting very much sleep at night, and after an exhausting day at SMU for library training on Friday, I stayed up later than I prudently should have watching the rest of Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid including the bonus OVA found on Volume 4. By the time I was done it was past 1am, the Convention was to kick off at 9am sharp (i.e. less than 8 hours), plus it takes awhile to drive from Denton to Dallas. This year's A-Kon just kind of slipped up on me unexpectedly. I had meant to pre-register for it but forgot. I was exhausted and decided I didn't need to spend all day down there, so I slept in. I even returned my rental copies of Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid to Hastings Books & Records, had a leisurely lunch, etc, before heading down to Dallas. I had missed the Q&As with voice actors Chris Patton and Vic M, which were the morning highlights, and the only thing that was of major interest to me was the talk on "Anime and Education" (being the Higher Ed geek that I am) late in the day (like around 5:45pm). I had gone fully intending to pay the $35 entrance fee, but when I saw the huge, snaking line for site registration, I had second thoughts. I should back up a little, though. Before I finally reached the on-site registration area, I had made it to Dallas, parked in West End, and rode the DART train over to St. Paul Station, which by my calculation, was the closest DART station to the convention. I was a little fuzzy on where to go once I got there, but upon spotting a girl in a nurse's outfit with pink hair, and her friend in an all-black ninja costume, I figured I'd just follow them, which I did, and they led me to the right place. I had fun taking pictures of the Cosplayers gathered outside, and eventually followed some of them up an outside staircase and into one of the Sky Bridges, where I found surging crowds of Cosplay people and just sort of mixed in with the crowd. I consulted maps and found my way over and down to the registration area. But I realized there was actually a lot to take in and enjoy in the "free" areas of the hotel as well. I wandered around the artists and comic book vendor tables and booths, enjoying the sights and sounds of the event, not to mention the ever changing crowds of people in beautiful, eye-catching costumes, especially the fan-girls. I would say as a rough guesstimate that I recognized maybe 1 in 20 costumes as characters from Anime I had either seen personally or was at least familiar with. One fellow had a Desert Punk costume that was spot-on, and I liked the Trigun cosplayers (pictured above). I saw more than one Seras Victoria a.k.a. "Police Girl", Alucard's sidekick from the Hellsing series. Lots of Full Metal Alchemist Cosplayers, as well as Naruto Cosplay. There were even a few Star Trek Next Gen people and Jedi wandering around. There were some Japanese people in attendance, but not as many as I had expected. Some were in traditional dress, others in t-shirts and jeans.

This one girl (of several) was conducting a fighting demonstration with a bo stick and striking these lighted poles that made a sound when they came on, and another sound when she successfully struck the lighted part of the pole. Very impressive. I did manage to see voice actors Chris Patton and Mike McFarland (of ADV and FUNimation fame) at the autographs table, but the line for autographs was fairly long; If I'd thought of it, I would've brought my boxed set of FUMOFFU for Chris Patton to sign, but alas, I didn't have it on my person. I bought an Anime-themed mousepad for my laptop (which I'm looking at right now), as a souvenir to show I'd actually been to A-Kon. My digital camera was also acting wiggy during the conference, and I swapped out batteries, but this didn't help. I got some okay shots but missed others because I'd line up the shot, push the button, and the camera would just inexplicably die on me, just shut down without warning. I'd take out the batteries, put them back in, jiggle the on switch, and it would be fine...though sometimes it would wig out x3 in a row before going back to normal. Very disappointing. Makes me wish I'd brought along an analog camera as a back-up.

So no, I didn't attend the "Anime in Education" talk, didn't feel like spending $35 just for that. I had plenty of fun without spending more than the cost of parking ($5), a day pass on DART($3), and the mousepad ($10). And of course the cost of gas and car wear-and-tear driving from Denton to Dallas and back to Denton yet again.

I also saw that if I'd decided to wear my kilt I would have fit in just fine with the Cosplay crowd (I saw a number of men in Highland gear). I am looking forward to A-Kon 21, and next year I will be pre-registering. I was glad that Chris Patton and Mike McFarland came up from Houston for this event, but kind of disappointed that Chris Sabat and Carrie Savage or Colleen Clinkenbeard (all local voice & directing talents from the DFW Metro area) did not put in an appearance as far as I know; this thing was practically in their back yards.

There's also an upcoming Anime Fest in Dallas around September that I will be looking into. I always love Film Fests, and an Anime Film fest sounds kick ass.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Just started a new Delicious account.

I attended a College of DuPage rebroadcast of their Library 2.0 presentation featuring Steven Bell & Aaron Schmidt.

It was a good presentation, though it's showing its age a bit (2006).

Still, it did inspire me to go ahead and create an account on Delicious, and I came up with the clever Username of "Aggiememenon". Get it? Play on words with Agamemnon and Aggie and Meme (or "mind virus", as hypothesized by Richard Dawkins) and 'non', as in nonbeliever, nontheist, non-stamp-collecting, etc.

I also re-created this username on the Library Success: Best Practices Wiki and also good ol' Wikipedia itself. I used to have an account on the LIS Wiki but I've long ago forgotten what it is. I may go with Aggiememenon there, too.

Anyway, that name just tickles me, wish I'd thought of it sooner.

Sunday, May 24, 2009

an html test

This text is scratched out!



Wow, it worked.

Just finished Irreligion by J.A. Paulos

Just finished reading John Allen Paulos's Irreligion last night. It was a good, fast read. Paulos is the mathematician turned popular writer known for his earlier works such as Innumeracy and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper. He bemoans the state of mathematical knowledge among the public at large.

In Irreligion, Paulos sets his sights on the arguments for the existence of God, and what he views as their shortcomings, from his perspective as a mathematician. He also destroys creationist twaddle over complexity and probability.

I obtained this book through ILL and read it in roughly 2 days. I am now turning my attention back to Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason.

It's a long Memorial Day Weekend, but I have zip all planned, I'm mostly kicking back and being lazy, and using my leisure time to read. I'm also planning on installing a USB hub at work, and a digital webcam on my work PC. I'm debating whether to install the newest equipment at work, or install the newest at home and take the older equipment from my apartment and set it up on my work PC instead. I haven't made up my mind yet.

I also finished the Anime series Gungrave, which is a bizarre mix of sci-fi, horror, and a mafia gangland story and a tragic love story of star-crossed lovers all rolled into one. It was pretty good, though the cover art is misleading...the sci-fi elements don't enter into the story until the last few volumes, the mafia backstory takes up the bulk of the series. It's described as the kind of Anime director John Woo would do, if he were an Anime creator instead of an action film director. I can sort of see that, yeah.

More later, perhaps.

Friday, May 22, 2009

Wordle interprets the Aggie Librarian

Here is what a word-count "tag cloud" of this blog would look like, via Wordle.

Kinda cool, I guess.

Wordle: AgLibBlogCapture

This is how Wordle interprets the Library Juice Blog put out by Rory L.

Wordle: LibJuice5_22_09

Bitter clinger...

To borrow a phrase out of the 2008 campaign rhetoric, from the Obama side, I am a "bitter clinger"; not to guns and religion (in my case, um, it's guns and irreligion ) but BOOKS.

A colleague passed along this bit of wisdom from a "Green Libraries" blog; Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of having libraries meet LEED standards and all that good noise, avoid using toxic carpeting, etc, that's all good.

but I do have to question this bit of advice:

“Consider the Kindle 2: It’s expensive and may upset some reading purists, but the Kindle 2 is an eco-friendly reading tool. Purchase one for the library to spread awareness to readers.”


Um, yeah, until it breaks and ends up as highly toxic e-waste in a landfill, whereas a regular old hardback or paperback book is much more “biodegradable”. *roll eyes*

Not to mention the pollution created in generating the electricity necessary to keep this device's batteries charged and operational. That's not environment neutral either.

Reading purists = library "innovation" change-agent parlance for those pesky “normal people.” – “bitter clingers” to their "outdated, organically based bibliographic storage and retrieval technology..."

question: is it possible to do strikethrough text on Blogger?

I have a question; Is it possible to do "strikethrough" text on Blogger? I see that on other blogs and I think it's a pretty cool blogging convention; it basically says, yeah, I wrote this, but then I found out I was wrong, or my info was incomplete, and I'm posting a correction. Literally says "scratch that, here's the real dope". I looked through blogger help and there's no easy button to do it, as you CAN do with Bold or Italics. (which would be a nice widget, Blogger.com!!--hint, hint!), but I think you just have to code it in raw HTML, which I don't know how to do. Would appreciate it if I could find out how.

Jingle-jangle jingle, and following other blogs.

I just added some other folk's blogs that I am now officially "following", i.e. read regularly. Some are LIS-related, others not. I don't know if ya'll can see them on the public side or not, or just me, on my "dashboard". Still trying to figure this stuff out, bear with me.

I also had to give a brief oral presentation on what I saw & did at TLA 2009, on behalf of the assembled library staff. I was really nervous and waited until I was the last one; I think I managed to pull off an acceptable oral presentation, despite not having as many (read: any) visual aids, unlike my reference colleagues.

I did learn about a neat new software application called "Jing", which is quick and easy screen capture program that can be downloaded here. It's pretty darn cool, and I can already think of how I can use it as a cataloger, either to come up with a tutorial on how to do database cleanup, especially fixing holdings data, or a way to ask complicated questions about the LC tables in Classification Web which confuse the heck out of me. So many times I'll come up with a potential call number for an item and then hit a funky table in ClassWeb that I really don't know how to cope with, and no one I can readily turn to here and ask about. Now I can screen capture that, send it to some experienced catalogers I know at other institutions, or to AUTOCAT at large, and get a response. Sometimes it's just easier to show rather than explain in writing, y'know? You can also upload these screen capture videos to YouTube, and narrate them, which is cool. I may also get a webcam for my work PC so that I can show elder catalogers the book in hand that I am considering and they can see why I am considering the call number in question, etc. Not a perfect solution, but something I think is worth giving a go, especially as I'm still learning the cataloging ropes myself. If/when RDA ever rolls out, I will probably need the help of others bigtime then as well.

With enough knowledge and experience, one day I'll be able to "give back" to the community in turn.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Thing 5 - Image Generators



I've played with Typogenerator before, on long boring night shifts while working for that big international insurance company everyone loves to hate these days.

It's fun, but again, nothing new to me. This North Texas 23 really is for überN00bs...where do they think we've been, in a cave for the past 9 years or something?

Oh, and, just because I can, let me say, RDA SUX!

Thing 2, part 2, item 2

The last item on the thing 2 list is:

2) John Blyberg blog post here.

Meh; strikes me as more Lib/Web 2.0 boosterism; lots of sizzle and not a lot of steak. Yes, I've seen cool things at the Texas Library Association that are Web 2.0-ish and have potential for libraries. Neat little collaborative projects in the local community, etc, etc. Good things to take note of, be aware of, stay abreast of.

I've said before myself that I'm really excited about Open Source for ILSes, and eager to see what effect Koha and Evergreen will have on the marketplace. Putting control over ILS development back in the hands of librarians(catalogers) is a good sign and a good thing I can see coming out of Web 2.0 as translated into Libr 2.0; True dat.

I know some libraries have successfully hosted "gaming in libraries"; I still view it as a questionable use of resources and not convinced it's something we should necessarily be behind.

You can also do Libr 2.0 horribly, horribly wrong. At a nearby institution of Higher Ed, it is standing policy that if a book is available as an ebook, it will be collected *only* in ebook format; End result? The shelves look increasingly unappealing, filled only with "old" books. Some administrators claim this is mere "misperception" on the part of our users but I disagree. This is the WRONG way to do Libr 2.0, and I'll tell you why.

Ebooks have their place in academic library settings, especially in weighty reference materials never meant to be read straight through, or for items that are high demand, high circulation, or to expand your collection to cover subject areas you otherwise would not collect in based on your curriculum. It's like a value added bonus. It does not give you an excuse to stop collecting the latest monographs in print in your core content areas. If your shelves are perceived as only containing "old/outdated" information, your clients will judge your whole library on that basis and your support will fall off. You can have the most amazing ebook collection in the state, but if your physical collection looks like it hasn't been updated since the late 1980s...you're in trouble. In politics, perception is everything. Keeping support for libraries and library funding is very much an exercise in political economy. Out of sight, out of mind. You HAVE to keep bringing in SHINY NEW MONOGRAPHS to put in your patron's faces. Despite what the techno-boosters would have you believe, people DO still LOVE books, still associate BOOKS *strongly* with LIBRARIES, and we fail to serve them when we don't live up to their expectations. Yes, print journals are increasingly online only, for good reason, and I have no serious objection to that. But monographs, that is, sustained discursive prose in a bound codex, remains to my mind the backbone of a real and genuine education.

There are some that claim this view is out of date, the millennials won't accept it, blah blah blah. Hogwash. I've got a colleague who is a History scholar, with an emphasis in "Conflict studies" (a bit more nuanced than "Military History"), and he can tell you first hand about so-called "New Scholars" who clearly have relied only on internet and online resources and seem never to have lifted a book from a library shelf in their lives; The result? Scholarship that is shallow, facile, superficial, and keeps annoyingly "re-inventing the wheel", which makes the real experts alternately groan, laugh, and want to cry out in despair. I've encouraged my friend to publish on this topic in article or book form, but he ruefully observed that the people who most need to read his debunking would never get exposed to it unless it was available in electronic format. "It's like they discover fire anew, everyday", my friend observed, with a quiet *facepalm*.

Yes, I've seen the budgetary figures, I know now that libraries spend much much more on electronic journal subscriptions than on monograph collections, but this doesn't tell the whole story of what libraries are and what they are (or ought to be) about.
If you don't weed or keep your physical collection up the date, not even the latest technoglitz will give people enough reason to darken your doorstep. They'll just head on down to the Apple Store instead. Web 2.0 can surely deliver us great "value added" products and services to enhance our core mission, but if we ever turn our back on said core mission, with idiotic policies like "Let them Eat E-Books, Whether They Like It Or Not, One Size Fits All", then we're sunk and beyond hope.

Part of the reason I got let go from my first library job was because I cared to much about the state of the physical collection and ordered a lot of new books. My then director was mostly miffed at the cataloging backlog this created and only saw it as a problem and added headache; She didn't see any positive benefit at all, but the students did, as well as some faculty, who remarked on the high quality and "interestingness" (to borrow a Flickr buzzword) of all the new titles coming in.
Needless to say, my Director won out and I was shown the door. Again, this is the wrong way to do Libr 2.0!

Luckily, the physical collection where I presently work is in much better shape, and it helps my morale that the building I work in actually looks like a library is supposed to look like. The Reference staff are much more friendly and approachable here than in my first job, and they genuinely care about our physical as well as electronic resources.

Anyway, I look forward to finishing the North Texas 23 Things, even though a lot of these things I've already explored on my own for a few years already, pre-dating my career as a librarian. This post concludes my discussion of Thing 2. Apologies again for getting a little out of order. I knew I would have more to say on this Thing than on the others, so I appreciate your indulgence of my detour.

In support of the Campus Personal Protection Act

The following video presentation is my creation and my own personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of my employer or the State of Texas.



I also did a "Read" poster on Flickr once, holding a hardcover copy of Kates & Kleck's book ARMED in one hand, and my Ruger Mk II in the other. I'd like to re-do it with a more practical carry piece (I didn't own anything but that target pistol when I first made that image), and maybe a different book.

I'm a Librarian who supports the entire Bill of Rights, including the 2nd Amendment.
I'm in the ACLU and the NRA and TSRA, as well as the Texas Freedom Network.

A slightly vulgar Haiku....

Fuck I have to pee;
So quickly fills my bladder.
Goddamn Diet Coke.

(Describes a commonplace workday situation more than I'd like to admit)

Thing 2, Part One

Ok, ok, some brief thoughts on the articles and video content for Thing 2 of the North Texas 23 Things....

1) Video, Stephen Abram, who is Vice-President of Innovation at Sirsi-Dynix.

Lots of glittering generalities; does some name dropping, but unless you know what he's talking about re: the dropped names, and are "in the know", you are left asking yourself, whiskey tango foxtrot, over? Guess I have to google that stuff to learn more of the context.

3) Read this webpage about Web 2.0 (link)
Good overview of Web 2.0, though no specific mention of the use of Web 2.0 in Libraries; this you have to infer, using your own imagination. I dunno, I guess you could "tweet" overdue notices and "your book is now in", hold-for-pick up notices; If you used an open-source ILS like Koha, I bet you could customize it to do these tweets automatically rather than make a circ clerk do it manually. There, how's that for Lib 2.0 thinking and innovation? But I'm just a dumb Aggie, what do I know...

4) Watch the video on this page (link)


Yeah, it was pretty good, but at the end I found myself asking, in German, "Na, und?" (Yes, and...?); Tried to "think about Lib 2.0" as I watched, as the frame for the link suggests, but came up kinda blank. I also dispute its characterization of text vs. digital text just a little bit. "Regular Text is linear"; uh, no, it doesn't have to be. I was doing "hypertext" linking with my World Book Encyclopedia set as a young lad in the early 1980s, jumping from article to article as this and that caught my fleeting interest. I was reading "Which Way?" Books long before Hypertext started; Back in graduate school I laughed at "hypertextuality" in a PoMo course and even bought my professor a cheap paperback copy of a YA "Which way?" book and plopped it on his desk and said "there---Hypertextuality. Direct your own narrative. Not new."

Since I've already read 3 outta 4, I'll go ahead and read the essay @ #2, and comment on it in a separate post a bit later on.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Flickr's internal "Net Nanny"


I posted this photo to my Flickr account. The original title I gave it was Yomiko, Cataloger Bad Ass. Evidently this cheeky title was enough to get the image tagged as "unsafe", and irony of ironies, I cannot add the image to ANY of my librarian-related photo pools, and only ONE of my anime groups. That is ironic beyond words.

I've renamed it Yomiko, Cataloger?, but that did not appease the Flickr gods. None of my tags are remotely offensive, but this is now a marked image, it is "dangerous" and "subversive" and not ready for prime time. The skirt of this statuette is actually removable, but I don't intend to ever confirm this personally. I know I'm sliding from mere Anime fan towards Otaku with this acquisition, but I promise it's my one and only statuette, and I think she's perfect for a librarian to own, wouldn't you agree?

UPDATE: I tried re-uploading the raw source file with an innocuous name and minimal tagging, but Flickr still flagged it as "not safe". Go figure. Yomiko is just too hot to handle, I guess...more woman than Flickr knows what to do with.

Thing 4 : Flickr Mashup 3

Still goofing around...

ImageChef.com - Custom comment codes for MySpace, Hi5, Friendster and more

Yo soy un atheo. No creo en Dios. Pienso que no hay dioses/as. Las religiones del mundo estan mentiras fabulosas.

Thing 4: Flickr Mashup 2



Ok, let's give this another shot, hope it works.

That's one of my High School NJROTC self-portraits, "Warholized". Cool.

Thing 4: Flickr Mashup?

J J Letter R

I bet I didn't do this right...

Actually, Holy crap, that looks cool!!

Thing 3: Flickr

Posting for that North Texas 23 Things.

I know, I know, I'm jumping around. Thing 2 was on Web 2.0, and I don't feel like ranting about that just yet.

Basically, Thing 3 asks you to either poke around Flickr and blog about your impressions, or go crazy and start your own Flickr account.

Yeah, again, been there, done that.

I even have a paid account, so I can have more photos online and no restrictions on uploads. Totally worth it.


NEXT!

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Howdy fellow NT 23 participants.

I've decided to go ahead and participate in the North Texas 23 Web 2.0 learning workshop doo-hickey.

Details here:

First thing of the 23 things was...guess what...set up a BLOG!

Yeah, been there, done that, NEXT!!

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Taking a few potshots @ a couple of Educause articles.

I felt the need to post a few off-the-cuff responses to a couple of recent articles published in Educause, relating to Higher Education.

The first one is called A Seismic shift in epistemology by Chris Dede.

The second is Business cards for the future by Joshua Kim and Barbara Knauff, both Learning Technologists aspiring to become "Educational Change Agents".

Picking a few nits of my own; Dede first:

>>In this Classical perspective, experts with substantial credentials in academic fields and disciplines seek new knowledge through formal, evidence-based argumentation, using elaborate methodologies to generate findings and interpretations. Premier reference sources, such as the Encyclopedia Britannica, and curricular materials, such as textbooks, embody “authenticated” knowledge as compiled by experts and transmitted to learners. Epistemologically, a single-right-answer is believed to underlie each phenomenon, even though experts may not yet have developed a full understanding of the systemic causes that provide an accurate interpretation of some situations.<<

No, No, No, Wrong. What a simplistic caricature of “classical” knowledge. Can you say “Strawman”?

“Single-right-answer” epistemology is what underlies standardized tests
& the like and has been the bane of educators for some time, rightly pointed out & sharply criticized by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, et. al. since the late 1960s.

More nits:

>>In contrast, the Web 2.0 definition of “knowledge” is collective agreement about a description that may combine facts with other dimensions of human experience, such as opinions, values, and spiritual beliefs<<

So Web 2.0 = fuck Occam’s razor?

Really??!

And as if moral/social values never colored research before the advent of the web.

What a parody.

Even the selection (or non selection) of certain facts to weave into a narrative betrays a value judgment. It’s inescapable.
And doesn’t require Web 2.0, either.

Dede quote:
>>Advocates for a Web 2.0 view of knowledge, expertise, and learning would challenge each of these three precepts of formal education. Many have documented politically motivated inaccuracies in textbooks, including biases against minorities and women, interpretations that privilege the perspective of the dominant subculture, and omissions of material about the contributions and interpretations of diverse groups, such as people of color. Experts may sometimes “speak truth to power,” but too often “experts” are anointed, funded, and rewarded to provide rationales for politically expedient actions. <<

Many who are not “Web 2.0 Advocates” (whatever that means) have been doing the same for years with old fashioned BOOKS and primary sources, too. Howard Zinn, James Lowen come readily to mind.

Web 2.0 doesn’t have a corner on the market for revisionist corrective.

As for the last point about Experts being anointed, funded….yeah, again, nothing new here. Well noted problem, didn’t require Web 2.0 to see it.

Geeze, Chomsky & Hermann’s Manufacturing Consent has been in print…how long now??

Neil Postman was attacking the same deficiencies in the “Classical Model” since before ARPANET really kicked off.

I admit, I’ve got mixed feelings about Postman’s proposals in Teaching as a subversive activity and, for all its shortcomings, I can’t say I haven’t gotten some mileage out of “traditional” learning, at least at the Post-secondary level (i.e. lecture courses, etc), as I’ve already discussed. I think Postman's revolutionary proposals were correctly aimed at Primary and Secondary Education. It's just that there isn't the political will to implement them.

Quote:

>> the response of most educators is to ignore or dismiss this epistemological clash. Many faculty force students to turn off electronic devices in classrooms; instead, students could be using search tools to bring in current information and events related to the class discussion<<

They could indeed, but in point of fact they’re often SCREWING AROUND AND NOT PAYING ATTENTION/NOR DOING WHAT THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO DO.

Reasonable people can agree/disagree over how much this (student’s inattention) is the fault of the teacher/professor. It often is, especially in a secondary ed setting. I have more sympathy towards Secondary ed students rammed through our school system, especially with the greater number of standardized tests they get hit with these days. One Left critic of the No Child Left Behind Act that I know derides it mockingly as the “No Child Left Alone” act. I get where Postman is coming from in Teaching as a subversive activity, or at least I think I do.

College students I have much less sympathy for; In college, you submit to lectures from people who are much smarter and better read than you. You have to pay attention this time because the final isn’t going to be multiple guess like in High School, it will be essay-based. You have to express yourself, support your arguments factually, etc, and can’t expect to be able to BS your way through it. Those are the rules, you’re paying to be here, nobody put a gun to your head, and if you don’t like it, get the hell out. The rest of us don’t have time for your whiny, self-important b*llshit.

It’s too bad Postman passed away in 2003, I would’ve loved to have gotten his take on Web 2.0 advocates promoting his ideas/criticism as their own but adding the high tech “Twist” to everything. Building a Bridge to the 18th Century was good, don’t get me wrong…I guess Neil would’ve ultimately said something like “everything you criticize about real, existing US secondary and post-secondary ed has merit, but it isn’t high technology alone that will get you out of this mess. Sometimes unplugging is the right move; slowing down, listening & talking is the right move.”

Why do I sometimes feel like I was the only one who actually enjoyed my traditional upper-level history lecture courses?

I really liked the way Dr. C.D. put together a lecture on Early Modern Europe, it was engaging and interesting to listen to. I also took his Russian history to 1890 class, and had had him for World Civ I (ancient civilizations like the Hittites, etc). Dr. C.D. is one awesome lecturer and I hope he's still going strong at TAMU. He made me refined history buff that I became.

Even the token TAMU hardcore Marxist Dr. R. got more and more interesting the closer we got to the 20th century (his lectures on Medieval and Renaissance culture were bloody awful to sit through, though). He started making more sense and becoming irresistible to listen to from about the French Revolution onward; We had to read excerpts of the Marx-Engels Reader from that class and after years of knee-jerk badmouthing Marxism that I learned from being a militant, clueless young Reaganite, when confronted with Marx face to face, I found I had no serious objections to what he was writing/saying by in large, and that was deeply unsettling back then.

It was my getting a "C" in my Senior History seminar that convinced me more than anything that I wasn't cut out for grad school in history, though. Though I soon found out I really wasn't cut out for literary studies after my first few seminars at Rice U, either (I wrote too much like a historian and had to re-train to write/think like a lit-crit person, which was painful. I've since gone back to writing in "Historical" mode, since that's the way I'm most comfortable with).

I admit, I can see in hindsight why my senior seminar professor thought my final paper sucked, but I really couldn't piece together how to make it better, either.

I like lecture courses because I like to sit and listen to what smart people who have read a hell of a lot more than me actually have to say, to give ME more things to think about than I would otherwise come up with on my own.
That's not passive--it's still interactive!

Higher Ed works, or at least worked well enough for me, and I don't want to see it f*cked with.

On to Knauff and Kim, quote:

>>We understand that in pushing for a new model of postsecondary educational
delivery, we are taking a stand against the old model of faculty-centric, lecture based courses. We are challenging a system that has worked very well for many
stakeholders and institutions for many years.<<

Including yours truly.

>>We firmly believe, however, that change is inevitable, primarily because
new cohorts of students steeped in the norms of knowledge creation, information
abundance, and constant communication and collaboration will no longer
accept the traditional lecture model,<<

There's an old fashioned word for people who come to college and refuse to accept the traditional lecture model...what is it now...um...oh yes, we called them

College dropouts.

Anyway, do continue...


>>in which they are passive receptacles of scarce knowledge.<<

It isn't PASSIVE, as I clarified above.

>>Learning/instructional technologists will have an essential role to
play in the transition to a more participatory model of higher education.<<

Go work your magic at the Primary and Secondary levels and leave Higher Ed alone, please.

Secondary and Primary Ed in the United States are deeply flawed, especially the culture of standardized testing, but I don't know that a techno-fix is necessarily the answer.

The main problem with Higher Ed is so many students coming to college woefully unprepared and underprepared for college level work, plus the cultural ethic that everyone who is successful must go to college; the biggest pervasive mythology is that you can study whatever you like in college and still come out and do whatever you want so long as you set your mind to it. True enough for trust fund babies attending Ivy League schools perhaps, but not for your average middle and working class student attending the nearest State U.

If I had grown up under the German system of Higher Education, where my education was state funded rather than on the backs of my parents, who knows what I might have become. As a 5th year senior, I took my last advanced math class, a pre-cal class. For the first time in my life, I scored a 100%, on my final exam no less. For the first time in my life, I actually felt like I had a grasp of mathematics, and was no longer terrified of the subject. But that was the end of my math requirement, and it was not financially feasible for me to press forward in mathematics, even though I was developing a desire to do so. I later took a research methods class in Library school that was very statistics oriented and it darn near killed me, having to resurrect those long forgotten math skills, but I did finally "bootstrap" my way to an A- (after first having to take an incomplete to have more time to work on the class). Many of the problems of Higher Ed are structural like this, not because of a lack of technology in Higher Ed.

Open inquiry models, where the teacher is facilitator and guide and lets the students pursue their own interests and mostly asks Socratic questions...that sort of experimentation belongs at the Secondary level and below. Neil Postman offers a challenge to all teachers who think they know something to please write a book about it. Well, many college level instructors have done just that. They've earned the right to be a talking head, the sage on the stage, and some of us want to hear what they have to say.

No actual lecture course I've ever enjoyed sitting through was ever as passive as these newer theorists would have you believe. It may not work at the secondary and primary levels, fair enough. But it does work in Higher Ed, along with reading books and articles (yes, sometimes online) and writing and basing arguments on evidence and research, subjected to relentless peer review and criticism. A pursuit of Truth does not mean "looking for the one Right Answer" as Dede mistakenly conflates it, and which would make Neil Postman do a proverbial "facepalm".