Edtechkat

Con Wiebrands and I gave a paper about library unconferences last week at the LIANZA conference. You can find the whole 5000 or so words here: The unconference: a new model for better professional communication . Ignore the title - we both have *no* idea why we claimed it was *better*, rather than *different*.

We plan to dust it off a bit and submit it for publishing. We are not sure which journal - it’s not the library tech that we usually write. Any suggestions from you about a suitable journal would be most appreciated.  We will add in the results of our survey of participants of  four library unconferences in Australia and the United States.

The paper covers:

1. Definition
2. Open Spaces Technology
3. History
4. Elements of unconferences (decisions you need to make if you are holding one)
   1. organisers
   2. publicity
   3. costs
   4. food
   5. venue
   6. numbers
   7. invitees
   8. weekday or weekend?
   9. volunteer participation
   10. facilitator and deciding topics for the day
   11. opening session
5. Comparison between unconferences and conferences
6. Results of survey of participants of the 2008 Western Australian Library Unconference.

I met Liz Wilkinson from the University of Auckland at the LIANZA 2008 conference: Poropitia: Outside the Box. I was very impressed with an information literacy package she had helped to design. Te Punga uses online graphic novels and simulations to introduce students to the library catalogue.

I was even more impressed with her philosophy behind the design - and I have tried to capture this in this movie, Information Literacy: Seven ways to think outside the box. She was very gracious about being filmed with no rehearsal time, and I’m very grateful to her and the University Of Auckland for allowing me to use her words and screenshots from Te Punga in the movie.

Here are her main points:

1. Literacy beyond text
2. Student centred, not library centred
3. Outside experts
4. Involve students
5. Use students’ environments
6. Learning by doing
7. Make students feel at home

I made this little clip of question time in Lawrence Lessig’s keynote at the LIANZA conference. No powerpoints. No fancy fonts. Just plain talking, Lawrence Lessig: literacies, takedowns, trusting google .

The questions were:

1. How are new literacies being affected by copyright laws?

2. What are the likely effects of the takedown provisions in the new New Zealand copyright laws?

3. Do you trust google?

In the last minute of the clip, he has some interesting things to say about librarians’ ethics.

LIANZA 2008 has continued to be an open, warm and intellectually stimulating conference.

I liveblogged the sessions I attended on CoverItLive, so there is much more detail here (keynotes) and here (individual sessions). Did I mention that the conference committee have provided free wifi iin return for liveblogging? Thank you very, very much for this. A nice win/win situation.

Here are the main ideas that took my fancy today:

1. Keynote - Professor Mason Durie. Talked about transformational leadership and the need for people to be Future Makers (proactive) rather than Future Takers (reactive). He talked about 5 contexts in which future leadership will take place and gave a New Zealand perspective on these:

• Demographic transitions
• Changes to Technology
• Information Avalanche
• Economic Transitions
• Globalisation

Leadership for tomorrow will require leaders who can look outside their own institutions and make connections and community. He talked of many leaders and I saw a common theme - these were all people who could make links with business for economic support or community groups for social support. Professor Durie suggested that maybe leadership will become a separate career in the future - people with qualities needed for future leadership are hired  specifically to lead, rather than getting people who have been in the organisation for a long time and have risen to the top.

2. Charlotte Clements and Timothy Greig talked about two Instant Messaging projects set up among four universities. They had teams evaluating chat reference - one looking at proprietary purpose-built library reference software and one looking at Open Source solutions. They chose to test QuestionPoint (OCLC) and VRL plus (sirsi dynix) from the vendor based software and look at Psi, Trillian and Meebo for the  Open Source. Eventually they decided to implement meebo - straight away - without a trial. No stats on the usage yet.

The second project involved creating a “toolkit”, with instructions for libraries to implement  in-house instant messaging. Libraries could then adapt it for their users. They chose Pidgin as the chat aggregator - providing an individual account for all staff. They used  Meebo widget for embedding chat in web pages. There was a wiki with instructions and links to downloads.

The brave, brave souls then did a live demo of what a student and staff member would see during an interaction using the setup.

3. Dylan Horrocks session on which comics people should stock in their libraries was just that - cover after cover of really engaging commentary of what each comic was and why it was inportant. The list is in my CoverItLive stream and really, really worth checking out.

4. Keitha Booth gave a very intellectually rigorous paper about Open Government information and Andrew Matangi, one of the originators of NZ Creative Commons, talked about Creative Commons in NZ . Keitha looked at the role of librarians in opening up tax-payer and rate-payer funded information. Although it is data, not collections, we have a role in knowing how to free this up and make it accessible to, and on behalf of, our organisations.  There are a lot of links to useful references and websites in Keitha’s paper. They are really worth following up.

I am sure I will have much more to say tomorrow about Creative Commons after Lawrence Lessig’s keynote (insert intellectual fanboi swoon here).

5. The last session, a keynote from Sydneysider, Mark McCrindle talked about the learning styles of different generations. He’s a presenter who knows his stuff - very few slides and stood in the middle of the stage. After the “hard stuff” that  made us think, he interspersed a funny anecdote or newspaper clipping to  lighten things up before the next major point.

He made the point that we need to use many factors when making predicitons - if you look at the growth rate in Elvis impersonators since 1977, you could feasibly predict that 80% of the world population will be Elvis impersonators by 2018. It was a very information rich presentation - worth checking the liveblog. One of the major take-homes for me was that changes in technology, work  etc mixes up the lifestages- with 20 year olds voting conservative and grannies wearing jeans and going to uni, we cannot necessarily make predictions about someone based on their generation. It is not just GenY people who want to be entertained and stimulated and create their own content online.

Tomorrow I give my workshop about creating scripted objects to go in Second Life libraries (for people without geek superpowers) and Con and I give our session on unconferences.  Add in Lawrence Lessig, a cruise around Auckland harbour and a masquerade ball at night and I think I have another fabbo day to look forward to.

I had the best time at the  Bridging Worlds conference. The speakers were excellent and gave a worldwide perspective. The food and venue was fantastic. The small number of participants - around 250 -  made it easy to navigate and access. The backchannel and “unconference” elements of it - twitter, chatting in the breaks and general playfulness of a few delegates - made it the best conference I have ever attended.

The sessions were all videod and most presenters wrote a full paper to accompany their session. These will be available soon - keep watching the Bridging Worlds blog. You can also view the slide sets, collated at slideshare.net: BridgingWorlds 2008 .

Here are some ideas I came home with:

• We need to share - our data and our co-operative efforts.

• Standards - data storage, web application, metadata - are vitally important to our work. We need to know what applies in our area and work to ensure they are developed sensibly and used well.

• 3. The GLAM sector - Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums - is converging. Libraries play an essential role in preserving, collating and providing access to these collections.

• 4. We can stop debating and trying to find definitions of Library 2.0 now. A participative, user-focused, web-enabled, Open and Transparent library can exist; whatever we want to call it. It does exist in places and we need the technical and visionary skills to facilitate it if our profession can survive.

• 5. The physical library can be a Third Place- somewhere that is not home, not work, but a gathering place where citizens feel pride of ownership and “at home”.

• 6. The online library is often a Second Place. Users come to our resources after they have first tried google, and they need more depth or organisation..

• 7. Not everyone is using Web 2.0 tools - it varies a lot within library staff and library user populations.

• 8. Unintended consequences often happen when we use Web 2.0 tools - many of them full of benefits for which we did not plan.

• 9. Digital preservation is an essential service to our community. Sometimes it is easier and cheaper in staff time to just save everything in a domain, rather than be selective.

• 10. True leaders of libraries are humble, down to earth and have grasped the implications of global and technological changes. (Naming names - Penny Carnaby (National Library of New Zealand) and Dr N Varaprasad (National Library Board Singapore) - both extremely impressive and very human and nice).

• 11. Sometimes the best move is for the librarian to step back and allow users to interact with our data and each other via widgets and re-purposed library spaces.

• 12. What practical means are we taking to ensure that if google, flickr or youtube collapsed tomorrow our archives and services are isolated from this?

• 13. A quote from Peter Godwin’s  Information Literacy and Web 2.0: is it just hype presentation: “We want to change their habits rather than just develop their skills”.

• Play can be incorporated to enhance a serious enterprises, like the SMARTlab’s style of teaching PhD students (including a facility shaped like a pirate ship) or a conference presentation where you aim to mention as many animal legs as possible and SMASH the competition. (Oh Hai Cindi, Brian and Liddy).

• Lots of world-class speakers would be happy to come to Australia and just need an invitation to do so…

There was much more, I am sure…but after going non-stop for four days - including walking Little India, the Night Safari, shopping at Mustafa, buying rather too much Lego for the kids, drinking cocktails at The Raffles two nights in a row, and a three hour wallow in the kitch splendour that is Tiger Balm Gardens - I’m going to catch up on some sleep.

I’ll leave you with some images of Tiger Balm Gardens from my set of 60 photos, including a set of the Ten Courts of Hell. Check out what happens in the afterlife if you deface books.

CoverITLive is a web application that allows you to live blog an event, and for people watching to ask questions and give comments. I did this for three events I recently attended.

CoverITLive does not embed in the Murdoch Blogs installation, so I’m linking to the original blog posts containing the embedded liveblog:

Bridging Worlds: CoverItLive

CoverItLive - LIANZA Poropitia:Thinking Outside the Box

CoverItLive: Karen Schneider and Lizanne Payne

I’m at the Art Librarians’ Conference, MySpace is an ArtSpace in Brisbane.

Me - Second Life as a platform: social space, art space, real space

My keynote was called - to keep with the theme - Second Life as a platform: social space, art space, real space. It involved about 17 minutes of machinima that I created to illustrate my points, so I’m not inserting the slides here as they don’t make too much sense. Basically I talked about:

1. Fly over of Info Island. Machinima

2. What is Second Life, Limitations, Possibilities and Libraries

3. Questions about Real Life concepts raised by a MUVE:

• Identity
• Individuality
• The Body
• Ability and disability
• Having a voice
• “Game” and “play”
• Time
• Location
• Co-presence
• Intellectual property
• Public and private
• Lawfulness
• Consumption
• Visual metaphor
• Representation
• Aesthetics
• Exhibit

4. Art Objects not born digital in Second Life - Sistine Chapel at Vassar island and Machinima of Info Island art gallery and Museum of Music

5. Art Objects born digital in Second Life -  Machinima of Babelswarm, the Australian Arts Council funded project

6. Art in the Space between Real Life and Second Life - Augmented Reality. Excerpt from little movie of Julian Stadon’s SLARIPS installation

7. I finished up with a clip of an art environment built just to make a movie. I didn’t want to spoil the mood afterward, so the last two slides just said “Aaaaaaaah” and “Thank You”. Robbie Dingo’s Watch the Worlds clip is below so you understand what I mean:

Axel Bruns, who was the second keynote speaker has blogged the session, New Impulses for Libraries: Drawing on Second Life and Produsage… so you can check out what a third party thought.

Axel Bruns - All the world’s a library: produsage and user-led curation

Axel’s talk was just what I wanted to hear about. In his book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage he raises the idea of “produsage”. It’s the idea that in order to use new web sites, you have to produce output.  He showed a great image of peoples’ tracks in the snow - making similar points to Stephen Abram with his “Paths of Intention” slide. People will find their own ways to navigate and organise information and often will join together to create the pathways. Axel talked a lot about tagging and folksomies and what this means to librarianship. He still saw our jobs as important, but pointed out that there is just too much information to control and catalogue, so we are going to have to find different ways. I liked his point about “folk experts” - these are the people who know about the knowledge in their area and how it is organised online - maybe they will become the librarians of the future.His slides are online at his blog All the World’s a Library: Produsage and User-Led Curation (ARLIS 2008)

Kelly McKeon - The “virtual clubhouse” the ARLIS/ANZ website, web 2.0 and our future

This used material from a paper given by Kelly and Ellen Thompson  at the last ALIA conference: M IS FOR MEETING PLACES: THE ARTS LIBRARIES SOCIETY OF AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND BUILDS A VIRTUAL WEB 2.0 ‘CLUBHOUSE

The ARLIS website was created by students in the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT using drupal. They had three groups of students working on the project and were able to take the idea that most appealed to them. Most universities have units where students who have to complete a task like this for third parties - it’s how we get environments built on Murdoch University Island in Second Life. If you are a library that wants something specific and techie prototyped, you may want to contact the techie faculties at your local uni to see whether you can form a partnership.

Tom Irwin - From Inhouse Index to Online Database

The University of Auckland has maintained a press cuttings index about NZ art and artists since the 1960’s.  They also had n in-house journals index. To talked about the decisions and process to create a database using Inmagic, which is ultimately marketed as a site license at NZ$2500. He talked about the standardisation between the two resources and how they augmented the “Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus” with some of their own local terms. It raised questions to me about Open Access in light of the recent Brisbane Declaration .

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>..

I’m really enjoying the mix of formal and informal sessions. There have been tours and formal meetings and a gallery exhibition as well as papers.

I’ve been away on holidays and at conferences for the last five weeks.  I’m playing catch up with this blog and reprinting a few posts from my personal/professional blog in this one.

Apologies if you have read them before.