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.