Bravo Learning 2.0

I think I have done my 18 things....so bravo to Lynette, Leneve, Leanne and all those involved with Learning 2.0. Good chance to try things practically, and to think about the modern world and the modern way.

Web/ Library 2.0 observations

Here's a list of things that occured to me during Learning 2.0

Hard information vs random conversation

Library as social hub - community meeting places with books.
'Library 2.0 is a logical extension of the changing role of libraries in communities, ever since sshhing went out of fashion.

Control vs contribution

Owned vs shared

intellectual property vs intellectual piracy

Reliable information vs shared self expression

Every individual becomes their own quality filter, effective or ineffective? efficient or inefficent?

The end of privacy

Anonymous intimacy

The internet's main strength was, is, and will be as a communication tool

Data vs information
More is not necessarily better, often less is more, but also sometimes less is less and more is more.

Democracy of ideas vs quality and integrity of expression of ideas

Stream of conciousness has become the mainstream, but we are not all James Joyce

It is valid for everyone to have a view but every view is not valid

Librarians are experts in their field, just as other specialists are.
Because there is more information available now than ever before doesn't make librarians less important it should make us more important. Information has never been easier to access. Good quality information has never been harder to locate. There is wheat on the internet, but is there a lot of chaff!!!!

Expertise is still important
If you come to me and say you have a pain in the stomach, I might tell you it is appendicitis....but go and see a qualified doctor before going under the knife!!!

A lot of Web 2.0 tools are about organisation...which is very useful

Wikipedia is an exceptional example of co-operative information. We shouldn't focus on its' faults or compare it to Brittanica, it is not a print encyclopedia. Judge it for what it is. In those terms it is astonishingly successful.

Now stand up, turn off the computer and go and sit in the garden. Virtual life is just that. As Bob said

Meantime life outside goes on
All around you.....

Podcast - Adrian Mitchell

Radical poet Adrian Mitchell performing some of his idiosyncratic verse at the Lakeside Arts Centre Nottingham as part of the East Midlands Literature Program. The reading is from 19 September 2007 and features some of Adrian's warm and witty humanist verse as well as his 1960s antiwar tour de force To Whom It May Concern
Hear him speak....

Or maybe watch him performing from way back in the 1960s, when the poem had such powerful resonance.... Although recent perfomances are equally resonant having substituted Iraq for Vietnam.



These are struggling to load completely, but that is probably just my wimpy laptop, shouldn't be a problem on a big, butch PC.

On Zoho

Hi
I am on Zoho and it seems really easy to use, in fact Mr Gates may be in some strife.


And it was easy to post straight to my blog.

You tube - What a wonderful world!!!!

Annoyed of Mount Waverley

I have had enough of flickr. How do I actually view any of these 300 million images!!!!

I have searched without logging in, I have after logging in.....nothing. Nothing under cats, dogs, pets, trees just a helpful message

We couldn't find any photos matching tree. Would you like to try a search for photos about sky, nature, trees, green or blue instead?

and what do you know nothing under any of those suggestions. Just what are the subject of these 300m photos!!!!

Anyway, I have given up. If it is not easy then it is not internet.

Ahh, (I haven't really given up) when I go into Advanced search I find my safe search is automatically on. When I turn it off I get 750,000 images of everything, and none of them look unsafe too me. Flickr ought to check the intsructions on delicious and realise what is and is not intuitive. May I quote another user comment

safe search filter !!
mandy091969 says:
How can I switch that f****** safe search filter off for good ? It is extremely annoying to be compelled to confirm that f***** thing each damn time I do a search.

Amen to that Mandy, whoever you are.

And this from their FAQs

Note: If your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Hong Kong or Korea you will only be able to view safe content based on your local Terms of Service so won’t be able to turn SafeSearch off. If your Yahoo! ID is based in Germany you are not able to view restricted content due to your local Terms of Service.

Not going to have much joy searching in those countries!!!

Admirable for flikr to try online censorship and can see why they do it, problem is it just really annoys anyone trying to use it, and if you find nothing under cats or dogs from a database of 300m images with safe search on, then something is broke.

Okay, I have over ridden the default I hope.

flickr and delicious

Firstly, I am a fan of delicious, very simple idea, useful way to organise bookmarks and most importantly access them from anywhere....and the best constructed instructions I have seen on the web.

I signed in to flickr but I almost immediately realised that I have no interest in having me up there on the web, and I am not that interested in posting my photos on the web.

I see what it does and how it might is useful for organising and sharing photos. But really people, do we absolutely want to share every little insignificant thing we have ever done. It probably suffers from the same fate as most of the internet - too much, too much, too much. There are a number of interesting blogs, and there are 100 million that are self indulgent, disjointed, of no interest.

Flickr has 300 million plus photos. Many are great, most are as interesting as the last photo album you looked at that wasn't yours, except there are 300m pictures in this album.... Is that the slide night from hell or what.

Anyway delicious and flickr are both very useful tools to organise and share information or data. With flickr its public face is subject to the same lack of discernment that troubles all the internet. Everything is equal, there is no distinction based on quality, reliability or need. So we all become our own quality controllers, or referees, which is actually very inefficient.

Another issue is privacy. It is something that people are placing far less value on. This may be a good or bad thing. Perhaps the inner life is becoming the internet life. But please, we don't have to share everything, most people are not that interesting....

delicious

Oooops, I have been neglectful, my blog has been ignored for some weeks (and he's not happy)

Anyway ... on to delicious...or is that d..e..l!@#$ic./.,io)(*&^us....

Good idea, silly name. Firstly may I say I really, really hate sites that require a registration and then insist on both a unique user name and password. What's the problem if two or ten people have the same user name if their passwords are different?? So after running through half a dozen names that made some sense - and had all been used - I settled on a random and incomprehensible series of letters that I haven't got a hope in hell of ever rememebering.

First Lesson: If this wasn't part of training I would have been like all Internet users and not perservered. The rule of most internet users including me (and Homer Simpson) is that if it is difficult don't bother.

Then Firefox tells me it is protecting me by not installing delicious, while delicious tells me its fine just bypass Firefox's advice. I did, but the man from Nigeria who wants to give me all that money tells me to trust him too. Again, if I had just randomly come upon delicious I would have moved on by now. The internet breeds impatience, scepticism and distrust, and I subscribe to all three.

But enough of that cumudgeonity (not a real word you say? I beg to differ, here it is on the Internet.... ergo - real!). Delicious, despite all the stupid full stops in the name (yeah I know it's a url) does give excellent foolproof advice ( I am currently proving that). I think despite my impatience with registering, I am going to like this....more later.

RSS Feeds

I can see the use of RSS feeds for specific areas of information that are frequently updated or for alerts on new pieces of relevant information. The problem I have always had with them is that they slow down the log on process for my PC and usually I have subscribed to broad feeds (ie news of the day) which tends to remind me of lots of important stuff that I am actually not really interested in.

Of the feeds I subscribed to on Google Reader most of them I would prefer just to periodically check the relevant site (for instance BBC for world news) rather than be advised of everything happening everywhere, all day, every day. The same goes for most individual sites.

Far more useful, I think, are feeds from the subscription databases where I can, in effect, get updated search results. So if I search Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 I will be alerted each time a new article fitting my search is added to Master file and Academic in Ebsco.

Mr Wibbel, in his online tute, suggested there was an option to add my feeds to my blog but I couldn't find that on reader. I could put in a link and see if it works but the url looks too simple and general?....No that link only works for me when I'm logged in, not for anyone else.

Anyone got any ideas?

Wikipedia Watch #2 - The mysterious case of Floyd Landis

The Floyd Landis entry on Wikipedia was an interesting case study. Many will remember that cyclist Floyd looked gone after Stage 16 of the 2006 Tour de France. But the next day he made an astonishing recovery to blitz the field and to go on to win the yellow jersey. Tests indicated his Stage 17 was fuelled by more than blood, sweat and tears, and soon after the Tour, news of a positive drug test emerged. Landis furiously protested his innocence (surprise, surprise) and it has taken until this week for second place getter Oscar Pereiro to be awarded the yellow jersey.

Part of Landis's strategy to fight the drug charges was to use the 'wiki' defence. He posted documents online to get contributions from as wide a range of people as possible, in the hope that some of them would be able to provide concrete support for his defence. He blogged and forumed, there was a web site and a wiki, and he and his supporters engaged fiercely and frequently online.

Here was an opportunity for a bad, biased, doctored Wikipedia entry. But in fact the Floyd Landis Wikipedia entry is an example of a good Wikipedia entry. People from both sides have ensured it is reasonably balanced. Initially I thought it was a bit pro Floyd, but that is the nature of Wikipedia in that the articles are always works in progress.

After seeing fellow Tour de France cyclist and all round super man, Stuart O'Grady, make some damning comments on Australian 60 Minutes I thought I would enter the fray.

I added to the entry quoting Stuies view. I thought it would be interesting to see how long it would take the internet savvy Landis camp to remove my edit. But several months later it is still there. This to me indicates a great victory for Wikipedia as a reasonably balanced encyclopedia, and as an excellent example of creative and positive use of the internet as a broad introduction to a vast range of subjects.

The Floyd Landis Wikipedia entry works well from other points of view too. It is very well footnoted for instance.

Anyway Wikipedia 1 Floyd Landis 0

Wikipedia Watch

Despite wanting to be cynical and wanting to find fault, I love Wikipedia and use it a lot for introductory info on a range of subjects. Despite appearing ripe for abuse, Wikipedia is remarkably reliable. There are faults, and mischievous entries, as would be expected, but given the size of Wikipedia, I reckon it is pretty good, and offers a breadth of information not available in traditional encyclopedias. It is in fact a triumph of breadth over depth, allows us to get quick information, survives on a global co-operative contribution model, and therefore does what the internet is equipped to do best.

Because Google searches so badly - if you get a million or so hits, or even 100,000, or 10,000, and if 90% of those hits are useless, how can that be efficient searching - for many questions about people, places, or events I use Google to search Wikipedia. At least then I can quickly get a bit of fairly reliable information.

#4 Wikis part 2

Had a further look at Book Lovers Wiki. One review did catch my eye, a fairly accurate summation of Dan Brown's execrable dross The DV Code :

I finally got around to reading The Da Vinci Code and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite characters that are beyond flat and a writing style that is almost comically bad. What carries the book is its fascinating premise;

. The 'fascinating ' premise appears to have been totally lifted from Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, regardless what the British courts say.

Anyway, this wiki seems more like a blog. Opinions on books don't build a single entry, but are each separate entries, bit like a forum for posts on different topics.

Speaking of blogs, it seems to me they generally tend to be a particularly clumsy way of having a conversation with anyone willing to listen - typing is a fair bit less efficient than talking - and given that conversations are ephemeral, disappearing into the ether as soon as spoken, and given that humans have committed ideas to paper generally when they have been discussed, thought out, edited, rewritten and generally polished until fit to be published, it seems to me that generally, but not always, blogs diminish the fairly low quality of most 'information' on the internet. They usually tend to be conversations, therefore ephemeral, therefore only worthy of recording after much thought etc, not worth recording merely because those thoughts have existed and have been expressed.

Booklovers wiki seems to fit the above in that the entries are conversational, a bit like asking someone what they are reading on the train, they might say something like

The Cinderella Rules by Donna Kauffman
Cinderella Rules takes a modern day woman and makes her over with the help of three “fairy godmothers.” The relationship dispute of the two men for Darby didn’t seem that tense, but the end had a lovely twist where everyone turned out for the better

. That's a brief conversation on the train or in the lift, hardly worthy of recording and making available to the entire world, yet bookloverswiki does.

Most entries on bookloverswiki are brief, lacking in depth, another hallmark of most (not all) 'information'/data on the internet. This is another by-product of the online'conversation'. Like real conversations they are often off the cuff, not really thought out, worthwhile as ephemeral conversations but not worth recording....yet they are recorded

The subtext of blogs, and some wikis, probably tell us a bit about bloggers and wikiers, and by extension about the society they/ we live in, but the content often doesn't tell us much about the subject....just like casual conversations, except we are recording the conversations and putting them into a global repository of information.

#4 Wikis

Checked this one Book Lovers Wiki. I've got to say, I love getting recommendations on reading but this didn't help much. Not well organised, very brief reviews that don't give me much to hang on to, no links to other reviews. Anyway, I'll have a closer look when I get the chance.

Good acts from USA

Here's some interesting legislative activity from the United States.The Librarian's Act, or more correctly, the Librarian Incentive to Boost Recruitment and Retention in Areas of Need Act of 2007, was introduced into the US Senate in April.

The proposed Act aims to provide student loan forgiveness, and encourage individuals to become and remain librarians in low-income schools and public libraries.

Let's hope it get's through the legislative process and sets a precedent.

Blogger working on Titus Andronicus

Infinite monkey theory....

We all know the old saying... if a million monkeys sat at a million typewriters, eventually they will come up with the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Well, it appears there could be as many as 100 million active blogs, that's a lot of monkeys at a lot of keyboards. Can we expect a blogged version of the bards great works? Perhaps not.

Anyway, try here for an account of the infinite monkey theorem. The University of Plymouth actually tried the theory out using six Sulawesi crested macaques. The monkeys, Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan, knocked out five pages consisting largely of the letter S (clearly trying to write Shakespeare), and made a bit of a mess of the keyboard.

For more about their literary endeavours try Notes Towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare or read a news report about the experiment.

Web 2.0 on you tube

This is an interesting video about web 2.0 from an anthropologist at Kansas State Uni

The machine is us/ing us
or straight to the source

Google Watch

What can Google tell me, what good information can I find?

How about the pyramids in Egypt?

I'll ask Google who built the pyramids

I have typed in the question 'Egyptian who built the pyramids'

Interestingly the second result suggests Aliens built them. Wow, who would have thought! That's a turn up, I hadn't known that. I'd thought for years that the Egyptians had built the pyramids in Egypt.

But this is the second result. What does that mean? ....Relevance obviously, and if something is relevant it must be reliable, if Google is reliable, and many do rely on Google for information, then the results Google lists as most relevant will be reliable.

Check it out Aliens built the pyramids Very convincing.

Communication

Are blogs useful? Let's not use this one as the yardstick.

They can be useful as a forum for an exchange of ideas, as a way of communicating. After all the internet is the great communicator, communication is what it does so well.

So if blogs are for thoughts, ideas, discussion, how do they fit into an information environment. Only so far as discussion does I guess. Discussion is good, to provoke more discussion, more ideas. Some blogs might be grounded in facts, used to showcase research, but most probably aren't.

How do we distinguish between types of 'information', types of dialogue, types of entertainment and types of research. The internet has all this and more in one place, and a phenomenal amount of it too. Some people have interesting opinions and ideas, other people just ramble on and on (ie me). So as with anything on the internet it is distinguishing, and then finding, the good stuff.

Anyway here is one blogger's very amusing take on Web 2.0, a bit old now but worth a read - Nicholas Carr's The amorality of Web 2.0

Blogs

Wow that was easy, it's a wonder everyone is not doing it, hang on everyone is. Who would have thought that almost everyone in the world has lots of interesting thoughts to add to the pool of data on the Internet. Is it just remotely possible that with every passing day, millions of people blogging random thoughts and opinions may be degrading the massive and unreliable body of 'information' that is accessed via the Internet even more.

Won't this post just make it that little bit harder to distinguish between useful information and random opinion? Am I making it harder for everyone to find anything? What if there are a million people like me adding a million posts as we speak? Does that make the internet better as an information source or worse? Is stream of consiousness opinion valuable to anyone, to many people?

Is everyones and anyones opinion on anything equally valid, equally well thought out, well researched, trustworthy?

No doubt blogging is a goldfield for sociologists, a vast number of people telling the world just what they think from the isolation of a keyboard. Not sure if it greatly enhances the research options of anyone else.