Edtechkat

Ubiquity is a Firefox extension from Mozilla Labs that launched a couple of days ago.

Is very alpha but will change the way we browse. Allows a command line window to be used to create mashups on the fly and browse the web in natural language:

http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

These sessions from the upcoming Information Architecture conference in Sydney are library topics - even if the presenters wouldn’t think so. http://www.oz-ia.org/2008/program.shtml

I think we need to be paying attention to what is coming out of Information Architecture / User Experience conferences and literature.

Are users really ready for faceted search?

Elizabeth Pek

Short Session

Easy content discoverability is a goal for any business. This session will discuss the faceted search experience and whether a Google style simple search interface works in all context.

Building a navigation structure for HealthInsite using thesaurus management software

Prue Deacon

Short Session

This presentation will show how the broader/narrower relationships in a thesaurus structure can be the basis for a classification scheme and hence support a site navigation structure.

Taxonomy, Social Networks and Pace-Layering

Roger Hudson

Advanced Session

Is our growing reliance on search rotting our brains? Will social software replace conventional site taxonomy? Can pace-layering provide an answer to these questions?

Website to Webapp - designing for workflow

Shane Morris

Advanced Session

Web applications are much easier to design than traditional web sites, right? I mean, there’s only one page in the site map! How hard could it be? Right?

From research fluff to useful tools

Stephen Cox

Short Session

Having lots of research data can be frustrating, what do you do with it all? Learn how News Digital Media transforms its research into practical tools for design.

I like this list of the different terms used by uni libraries to refer to their catalogue, federated search, virtual reference etc…

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p8kTawTxfuMk3AFyxwaEaXw

Bibliocommons has just gone live at Oakville Public Library in Canada, as reported in the latest Library Journal -“>BiblioCommons Emerges: “Revolutionary” Social Discovery System for Libraries

It is a discovery layer (like Encore or Primo or VuFind) that sits over the top of a library management system.

This is definitely one to watch – the vendors claim to have thought more about the “architecture of participantion” (what will make people *want* to tag, review etc) and have worked with major LMS vendors like SirsiDynix.

It seems to be funded privately and by subscription, but to have arisen out of library consortia. I will be interested to see what their pricing/support/source code policy will be.

We have had a LibX Firefox extension for our library for about 6 months. We are about to add details of it to our web pages and start promoting it. I made this screencast to embed in the page, Murdoch University Library Toolbar (LibX Murdoch).

[blip.tv ?posts_id=954395&dest=-1]

Blip.tv turned out to give a clearer embed than YouTube or Viddler.

I’m doing a demo of LibX for the Learning Technologies Steering Group tomorrow. Here are the links that I will need to open on setup to do the same as I did in the screencast.

A. Web page with LibX unmarked http://screencast.com/t/iisxsipBX

B. LibX page marked up on screencast.com http://screencast.com/t/BLvysxLOx

1. The Murdoch Library Lib X pages on the Development server

2. The LibX Murdoch edition home page

3. kittenwar.com

4. Amazon.com. Intorduction to Phenomenology

5. Google search for Introduction to Phenomenology

6. Google search for author Shri Rai . (Highlight the text and drag to Google Scholar). Google home page .

7. sciencedirect.com http://sciencedirect.com

I’m also doing a demo of Zotero, so here’s a link to JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/

Today JISC (in the UK)  released the report “Great Expectations of ICT: How Higher Education Institutions are measuring up”.  From their description on this page: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/greatexpectations

JISC commissioned Ipsos MORI to undertake research among first year students studying in higher education to:

• Understand first year students’ experiences of ICT use and provision in HEIs, particularly in light of the expectations which emerged from the first study in June 2007
  
• Examine whether there is a mismatch between expectations and reality

The research re-visits a cohort of the school and college students who participated in phase one² of the research in June 2007 to explore how their current experiences of ICT in their first year of higher education match up with their expectations. A representative sample of first year students from across the UK was also surveyed to identify whether findings emerging from the cohort were reflected across the wider student population. Over 1,000 students were researched using quantitative and qualitative techniques.³
Download the full report³ (pdf)

The first link provides a very nice table and summary of the findings.   From a library perspective, they point out that ”There is also an opportunity to help students understand best practice for checking the validity of internet sources used for research, something which 69% of students believe they are doing despite evidence elsewhere suggesting they may lack the critical and analytical skills to do so rigorously.”

The slides are here: Web 2.0 and repositories - have we got our repository architecture right?

[slideshare id=457881&doc=talis200806-1213086014243443-9&w=425]

Zotero is a Plug-In for Firefox that harvests and stores bibliographic data from many formats of web objects, including online journal articles, web pages, pdfs, images and video clips. It interfaces with a number of other programs including Wordpress and Endnote. It also helps you organize and store electronic documents.

I’ve used it a tiny bit for preparing conference papers, with my Zotero library saved on a thumb drive along with portable FF where I have installed the Zotero plug-in.

The web based collaborative version (Zotero Commons) - which would make it an absolutely killer ap - has been rumoured to go live in June, but it has been a long time coming. It is being developed in collaboration with the Internet Archive using a Andrew W Mellon Foundation grant.

This White Paper from the (rather better funded) equivalent of LTSG at Penn State University is excellent. 7 Things You Need to Know About Zotero: a white paper from Teaching and Learning with Technology at Penn State. http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/wp-content/uploads/zotero_hot_team.pdf

1. What is it?
2. Who’s doing it?<
3. How does it work?
4. Why is it significant ?
5. What are the downsides?
6. Where is it going?
7. What are the implications for Teaching and Learning?

I *love* the iResearch interactive materials produced by the librarians at Uni of Sydney. http://elearning.library.usyd.edu.au/index.php

• See the dinosaurs show you how to “Search Smarter, Search Faster” http://elearning.library.usyd.edu.au/learn/topic/index.php

• Ask the mice for help with citations as you play Find the Cheese! http://elearning.library.usyd.edu.au/learn/readinglist/gamefindthatcheese/index.php

• Win a $60 Campus Coop book voucher for rearranging the books and getting the highest monthly score in the Bookshoot game. http://elearning.library.usyd.edu.au/learn/readinglist/gamefindthatcheese/index.php

What I like about these is that it looks like the content and concepts were designed by their regular liaison librarians, not super-duper wonder-people. I think they work because the librarians have pared down the absolute core concept that the user needs to learn and then built on that, rather than starting with “hey, lets see what we can do with a cool flash interface”. There has obviously been some serious $$ thrown at the project as well.

Here’s how. How to make a Google Gadget in 15 minutes or less

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Here’s google’s hand-holding page:

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Here are the elements we need before publication:

Step 1: Set your gadget preferences.

The Reference lists all of the <ModulePrefs> attributes that you can use to provide “meta” information about your gadget. Here is the information you should include in your gadget spec:

• title
• description. This attribute is important to let people know what your gadget does, particularly if it is not obvious.
• author
• author_email. This is so that Google and users of your gadget can contact you. You can use any email system, but you should not use a personal email address because of spam. One approach is to use an email address of the form helensmith.feedback+coolgadget@gmail.com in your gadget spec. Gmail drops everything after the plus sign (+), so this email address maps to helensmith.feedback@gmail.com. You can create a Gmail account here.
• screenshot. This is a string that gives the URL for a gadget screenshot. This must be a well-formed URL, not a relative URL. This image must be on a public web site that is not blocked by robots.txt. PNG is the preferred format, though GIF and JPG are also acceptable. Gadget screenshots should be 280 pixels wide. The height of the screenshot should be the “natural” height of the gadget when it’s in use. This helps users understand how much space a gadget will consume on their screen before they add it to their page. The screenshot should not have any whitespace above the gadget’s blue header bar. Screenshots should show your full gadget, including its title bar, but nothing else. Alternatively, you can screenshot the gadget with the edit window open. Screenshots should not be resized or cropped. For quality and consistency, Google may take its own screenshots of a given gadget.
• thumbnail. Thumbnails are used in the content directory to give users a preview of a gadget. They should capture the main functionality of your gadget without showing it in its entirety. The value for this attribute is a string that gives the URL for a gadget thumbnail. This must be a well-formed URL, not a relative URL. This image must be on a public web site that is not blocked by robots.txt. PNG is the preferred format, though GIF and JPG are also acceptable. Thumbnails should be 120×60 pixels. They should not include title bars.
• author_location
• author_affiliation
• title_url. You use this attribute to link your gadget title to an external HTML page. For example, if your gadget is a front end for a service, you can link the gadget title to that service’s website.
• directory_title (required if title contains user preference substitution variables).

(from: Publishing to the Content Directory on the Publishing Your Gadget page of the developer’s guide. )

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Polly’s comment on my Flickr image of a google gadget leads to some very useful code:

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Here’s the code for one I made for my blogs by amending someone’s code:

Which is visible under the “work” tab of my igoogle page.

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We will probably want to use an “add to google” button, as seen on this link: How to turn your feed into a google gadget .