It's a wrap

The end already? Feels like I was just getting started...

If asked, I wouldn't have said I was particularly leading a Web2.0 life, but one effect of 23 Things has been to make me realise that maybe it has crept up and installed itself in my head without my even noticing. So, a lot of items on the menu were familiar to me, although in some cases I'm sure I could be using the tools more efficiently (Twitter, I mean you).

Of the unfamiliar stuff, I can see the theoretical merit in some applications, but they fell at the first hurdle by being difficult to load / inefficient to operate, or by not being significantly better than other tools I was already using (Diigo, Zotero).

The real potential for me lies in Flickr (for grabbing images rather than posting my holiday snaps), and Google Docs if I'm co-authoring something. I'm ambivalent about Doodle - it works well, but I keep having to cross-reference my Outlook calendar to complete a poll. Maybe I'm not doing it right.

Does Web2.0 have a future in Libraries? As I hinted at the top, it's already happening, and we ignore it at our peril. I don't believe it's going to suddenly solve our communication / liaison problems at a stroke, but it's another channel that somebody might be tuned into.

Will I keep up this blog? Not sure I have much worth saying. I also worry that I'm spouting either into a void (Hello - Is anybody out there??) or I'm talking to like-minded people (The Echo-chamber effect - add your own sound effects at this point).

Looking forward to the Wrap Party...

  by  moriza 

Wolverhampton accents and Dave Gorman perfume

Noddy Holder once told the story of how in America they all thought his band was called Slide (sorry Helen). I did briefly get excited by the thought that we'd be sharing Youtube clips of Cum on Feel the Noize. Which incidentally has now been turned into a folk ballad



A great resource, and poking around I came up with this "pitch" by an ad company, courtesy of Philip Slade. In shops soon...

Dave Gorman perfume

View more presentations from Philip Slade

Trusting your colleagues

I'd never used Google Docs, not being a great creator of shared output. I really should get out more.

Went to a book launch last year by a Warwick academic: the tome was co-written by a lecturer in New Zealand, so the Warwick author described writing his part, and then waking up next morning to find out that part of his text had been re-written and added to. Wonder if they used Google Docs?

To use the cliche, if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be writing Coronation Street scripts with John Fletcher (no, not that John Fletcher) using Google Docs.

Wikiseedier

Well, here I am as usual, thinging late on a Friday. I figured I would go with option B and have a fiddle with a wiki, so why not be ambitious and go with the big daddy, Wikipedia. As I try to warn students in info literacy sessions, the theory of crowdsourcing is great, but everybody should engage their brain and question the authority of what they are reading. As Jimmy Wales (one of the founders) said in a recent Guardian interview:

"You shouldn't really use Wikipedia as the sole source for anything, ever. You shouldn't use anything as the sole source for anything, in my view." 

 There are legendary tales of academics deliberately planting plausible disinformation in wikipedia articles to see how much comes back from students. And there are of course the irritations caused by jokers. Here, for example, is what the Wikipedia entry for Wikipedia said for a while on October 9th, 2010:

NEVER USE WIKIPEDIA BECAUSE RETARDS LEIK MEEEE CAN EEEEEDIT IT LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL'''Wikipedia''' is a Free content free,Some versions, such as the English language version, contain non-free content. World Wide Web web-based, collaborative writing collaborative, multilingualism multilingual encyclopedia project.....


Anyway, being a good citizen, I just edited the entry for Warwick Arts Centre to add a couple of touches.

Who are you calling "Common"?

As well as Flickr, another great use of Creative Commons can be found in the publication output of (for example)the think-tank Demos. Makes life much easier for students, and disseminates the original work without the usual financial barriers.


I guess I'm ambivalent about Youtube - the content is amazing, but every time I have a look, I suddenly realise that several hours have passed.


This is one of my favourite clips. Don't try this at work, much as you know you want to...

Featuring not flash photography

I've been aware of Flickr, and have occasionally grabbed images, but have never especially felt the need to post my photos. I still have that old-fashioned feeling that I'd rather store my photos on CD, my laptop or (gasp) paper rather than leave them at the mercy of the cloud. I *have* got rid of vinyl now, though.

  by  Better Than Bacon 

Wall / head interface scenario

Endnote Web is a familiar and not-at-all-loved thing for me already. It's flakey (and not in a nice Cadburyish way) and has caused me much angst in training sessions when it suddenly decides not to work at all unless I sacrifice a goat in the room before-hand. It may, however, have proved useful for any theatre students thinking of a career in acting - it's not every day that they get to study closely somebody turning purple, with foam coming out of his mouth.

So, to Zotero. I've heard students mention the name, but nobody has been so enthusiastic as to make me particularly want to try it, so 23Things is (cliche alert) again proving to be the tipping point. Installation was easy enough, and I like the simple way of grabbing references out of our catalogue. JSTOR is mentioned in one of the help documents as a database which talks to Zotero, and so it does. Total failure, though with Business Source Premier and Project Muse. Attempts a couple of hours apart gave me the same error message, which linked me to a page of known problems. Un-nervingly, the list includes Springerlink & Science Direct, so already I've lost 4 of my major databases. Further problem attempting to install the word processor plug-in - Firefox tells me that the plug-in is there, but no toolbar is appearing in Word. Perhaps I'm not technically savvy enough to make this work, but then nor are lots of our students.

Endnote has presented me with plenty of equally annoying challenges, and perhaps these are temporary problems, but as with the Diigo / Delicious choice, I needed a more positive experience to make me dump Endnote and migrate. Why swap one box of problems for another? Of course, the elephant in the room is Refworks, an option which is apparently not open to us.

  by  David Blackwell. 

Fresh out of Diigo puns

There is now a worldwide shortage of unused Diigo puns, so I won't even try...

I've used Delicious / del.icio.us / deli.ciou.s or whatever silly configuration they're using at the moment, and have been perfectly happy. Assuming that Yahoo don't sell the product on to a mega-corporation who will only grant access via a package which forces me to watch Jeremy Clarkson and listen to TalkSport with Kelvin Mackenzie, Andy Gray, Richard Keys and other heroes of the enlightenment, Diigo was going to have to offer something special to tempt me away. And to be honest, refusing to respond to my request for an account purely because I have a Warwick email address immediately put me off.

I persevered and used my personal RichardBransonislovelyreally.net account, and since I'm a techno-idiot went to the help video on the Diigo welcome page. Wow - how much information can they throw at you in a shortish clip? A lesson for us there as we go video-crazy. I quickly lost the will to live, so just dabbled.

Verdict? Virtual post-it notes don't really do it for me, so I can't see that I'll be moving away from Delirious unless forced to.

  by  staminaplus100 

Reflection time

Reflection time.

I've been lucky so far in that I've been already reasonably well-versed in Things 1-12. Challenges to come, I think, in future weeks.

As you'll be able to tell from the brevity of this post, my main problem is that I don't have nearly as much time to devote to following up as I'd like. I'm sure I'm not using RSS or Twitter as smartly as I could, and hoped to use 23 Things to push me to explore more. but no time. And I still haven't got over the nagging suspicion that Twitter, Facebook, RSS et al are creating an extra flow of stuff coming at me. Much of it is interesting, but where does the extra time come from? Maybe ignorance is still bliss.

Pearls of wisdom?

I've been on Twitter for a while, and follow an odd mixture of library people, arts organisations and comedians. The Twitter god must be very confused trying to profile me...I see the value of having a network of people who may spot and alert me to interesting stuff, but I do question the Twitter diarrhoea of some people who can't wait to update the world about their every move. Thankfully not bowel movements. Unless I'm following the wrong people. Why do they think anybody is interested?

I set up a Facebook account a few years ago to lurk and see if students were dissing the Library, so we could respond. I found the delightful groups "I hate the Library and its various staff members" and "The Fat Woman in the Coffee Bar Puts Me Off My Food". I'm not sure my desire to use Facebook actively ever really recovered from this appalling stuff. As an old codger I find Facebook protocol rather mystifying: some students will ask to be my Facebook friend minutes after I've run a training session for a group.

As others have said, these are just channels of communication, so I'm happy with the idea of throwing stuff out there to see what sticks.

Fox on the run

At the risk of turning into Mr Me Too, I've also been the recipient of a Doodle poll, so the pressure of the 23 Things project has pushed me into doing what I should have done before - use Doodle. So I mailed another participant to set up an entirely fictitious meeting. This could be the start of a beautiful friendship. Slight irritation that in order to use Doodle I'm pulled yet further into the embrace of Google. A bit like having to have a Yahoo account to use Delicious...

I've also previously been called into meetings by others using Outlook to schedule time based on individual calendars, although this of course does rather rely on people keeping theirs up to date. Cough.

So to Firefox. I've been asking myself why I've stayed loyal to IE. Inertia? Annoyance that Answer no.2 from IT people (after No.1 Have you tried switching it off and on again?) has become "Have you tried it with Firefox?" Minor irritations with Firefox like needing an extra click to change a small part of the page URL? 

Just recently a couple of things in IE are starting to irritate me: locally, I can't seem to set my preferred homepage (the option is greyed out) so I'm stuck with the University homepage (is this Big Brother?). Firefox is allowing me to use whatever I want. Then yesterday IE decided (apparently unilaterally) to change font and font size on some websites, especially Google. Not that I use that much  :) Is this nature's way of telling me to migrate? Since I have tried switching it off and on again, I clearly need to move to Step 2, so I'm giving Firefox a go. I just migrated my favourites to the Fox (incidentally this made me notice how many of them are very far from favourites, so a weeding exercise is well overdue here).



Is that Michael McIntyre on guitar???

Knowing my RSS from my EEBO (shameless steal) - Things 4-6

As others have said, it's nice to have already done my homework for the week. Jess introduced me to iGoogle a couple of years ago, and I enthusiastically added gadgets (widgets?) to my dashboard: BBC news, local weather, Google maps, Charlotte Brown's Library catalogue search etc. I find that I now only tend to use a couple of them: a feed from Twitter, and my Google Reader pulling together my RSS feeds. Like others, I experimented with other readers, but settled on Google as the most stable. I haven't gone the whole hog, though, and made iGoogle my home page - I'm still loyal to the University...

Interesting that the University has reinvented the wheel with start.warwick, where I can access local information, such as locating a room on campus or the amount left on my Eating at Warwick card. But it's a faff to access two dashboards.

RSS feeds are great for pulling everything into one place, but the constant flow can seem rather overwhelming at times Don't you occasionally wish that it would all stop?

There should probably be a still from an appropriate film at this point, but the Disney Corporation might sue me, so you'll have to make do with

Why am I here?

I should confess that I'm already a user of many of the elements of the 23 Things programme, so am mainly interested in exploring some of the others. Obviously if you've never Doodled you haven't lived...

My blogging experience so far has revolved around targeting information at students (and staff) on specific courses, with mixed results. The students like the information, but seem to prefer to receive it either via email or to the Facebook group they use, so the blog ends up more as a dynamic archive. Not necessarily a bad thing...

Reservations? I have a few.

Am I just adding to the increasing noise out there?  Does the world need me to contribute another pile of words? Am I just talking to like-minded people? Am I going to write another sentence starting with the word "Am"?

Looking at some blog entries (and tweets) I often wonder why people think anybody cares what they are eating, whereabouts on a train they are sitting or what they did today. Maybe it's a generational thing, and I'm simply too old to want to share my every thought with the world.  As the song goes,

You're talking a lot, but you're not saying anything.

Logically I should shut up at this point. So I will.