NHEMA talks 2006

gave two talks at the NHEMA conference this past week. I think they went well, other people tell me they went very well.

The first started out to be an overview of the concept of library/web2.0. I wanted to put '2.0' in the title, but the conference organizers had no idea what that concept was, and said the attendees wouldn't, either. So the talk evolved into a brief overview of social software that will be impacting education soon, if it hasn't already, and a more in depth introduction to rss feeds and aggregators as a way to explore 2.oish concepts in more detail than we had time for. My boss attended the talk, and she seems to be still reeling. All the attendees said they learned a lot, but they looked kind of stunned. My boss said I pushed them, and that was good. Not sure, though. At least they are now familiar with a couple concepts they weren't. But it still weirds me out that things I take for granted are totally new to them, especially in light of the fact that there is so much out there, so many people, who are way more cutting edge are way more knowledgable than I. I was sort of hoping by the end of this talk to get some people excited about maybe making a NHEMA blog. Maybe next year.

The other talk was on digital audiobooks, focusing on our own very successful program, but giving a lot of background information, links to research, and lots and lots of nuts&bolts. It was the kind of talk where I got to say two sentences, then there was a question. Good for audience interactivity, bad for trying to keep up with my own slides. Good for keeping me on my feet.

Wrong About Japan, Peter Carey

Wrong About Japan, Peter Carey
Originally uploaded by plentyo'moxie.

I ordered this book because I thought our manga/anime crowd might get into it - they've checked out other non-fiction books about Japan and Japanese culture and can't seem to get enough. They haven't gotten into this book at all - I don't know if they haven't found it, if it's just plain unappealing, or what. So I finally took it home myself, and it turns out to be a great book for educators to start to understand teens' obsessions with all things modern Japan. There's a lot of good detail oriented stuff about manga, with history and culture woven into it all. The writing isn't particularly engaging, but it isn't off-putting either. And the length of the book is short enough. Educators and librarians looking for more background info on manga and anime will be pleased with the content of this book.

iTunes isn't as mean as it pretends to be

A little bit of talk over on Lifehacker seyz that if something happens and you lose all your purchased music, iTunes may let you redownload it. Mebbe. Never hurts to back it up anyway.

Bloggerific v. DOPA

I had a bloggerific day the other day. A reading class (seriously, it is a class where they just read and read and read - mostly whatever they want. On Thursdays the teacher brings them in to read magazines and newspapers, sometimes they need something non-fiction, and there are all sorts of options for assessment - I love this class) stopped by to read and use the computers to blog about what they were reading. I had already introduced this class to the blog, so that was out of the way and many happily, easily blogged. For others, there was a lot of tech support. You need an email address to be invited to be a contributor of our blog - more than a couple kids didn't have email addresses (?! - we are a mostly wealthy, white district - mostly very connected at home - this surprised me, though a few explained they just use MySpace to communicate with friends - a very teachable moment in both directions). There were kids that kept clicking on the 'create a blog' button v. the 'create a post button.' And so on.

Overall, though, the kids wrote about their books, checked previous posts for comments, read other people's posts, and then went back to reading. It was awesome to read their posts, to see them read the other posts and then be interested in the book the other student-blogger recommended (peer reader advisory!), and to generally interact with the blog in terms of the content, not the delivery.

And then I got home and read about DOPA. Something that blindly would put a kabosh on all this good learning - tech learning, peer learning/teaching, personalized, independently paced, individualized learning, learning relevant to the real(virtual) world- all of which are apparently the big education buzz words and things we are supposed to be emphasizing and doing more of.

Punch in the gut.

Except it isn't any sort of done-deal yet, in fact it is barely off the ground. Action, people, action.

random reflection brought on by malfunctioning technology

Wednesday the wireless went wacky in the apartment. B came home to try to help, but I was prepping food and the house to have people over for dinner, so we never did get it working that day. We did figure out that it was some sort of communication error between lappy and the Airport Express, because everything else worked, including hardwiring the laptop to an ethernet. This was more than awkward, so I decided I could just use B's big bad g5 with dual monitors for the light stuff I'd be doing that day - checking email, aggregator, class discussions - not doing any actual homework.

Getting closer to the point: I have a hella lotta passwords and user ids. I actually had no idea just how many of these things I have going on, because I let the computer remember most of them. I don't let the computer remember anything about my online banking, but that's about it. In the daily course of checking email, aggregator, and grad school class space, there's a lot of *other* stuff I end up doing - blogging, commenting on a lot of blogs, looking at pictures, adding to wikis, writing more emails, looking at a lot of links, looking up books at the library and so on. And a lot of these things require the user ids and passwords I created and save on lappy.

I have probably about 3 core variations on the user id, which also means I'm spawning multiple identities across the net. There's my real name, there's my libraryish screen name, there's my foodie screen name. Then there's the issue of if my screen name isn't available and I need to choose a variation. Sometimes my standard variation of that particular screen name isn't available, so then I have to make up a new variation. So I might have up to 10 different actual user ids.

And then there's passwords. Let's just say my passwords are probably only secure from me. I can't remember which one I've used where, and more often than I like have to go through the process of resetting said password.

I suppose why I found this so interesting (really frustrating as well as I kept getting stopped in my tracks) is that I generally avoid creating accounts whenever possible. I use bugmenot.com in my rabid avoidance of creating accounts for news organizations. But I think its a very telling sign of the interactivity, the 2.0-i-ness, of the web, that someone who generally won't comment on a blog or read an article if I have to create an account has ended up with this long list.

In no particular order, some of the many places I visit and have to login for:

• bank
• home email
• work email
• grad school email
• project email
• flickr
• blogger
• grad school class space
• grad school library
• grad school grades
• grad school money stuff
• yahoo groups
• typepad
• public library opac
• library elf
• blog aggregator
• amazon (which i don't purchase from anymore because they donate a lot of money to the republican party)
• powells
• zingermanns
• delicious
• eat local wiki
• wikipedia
• meredith's library wiki
• paypal
• livejournal
• grad school ftp web stuff
  

Yet another reason to love Canadians

As if we needed any more . . .

Canadian Music Creators Speak Out Against File Sharing Lawsuits

To quote extensively (hell, I'd love to paste the whole thing here, make sure you check it out - there's only a couple paragraphs more):

Major international music artists based in Canada have banded together to form a group aimed, among other things, at protesting the recording industry's practice of targeting fans with lawsuits.

With Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne and Sarah McLachlan as members, the Canadian Music Creators Coalition stated in a White Paper Wednesday:

1. Suing Our Fans is Destructive and Hypocritical: Artists do not want to sue music fans. The labels have been suing our fans against our will, and laws enabling these suits cannot be justified in our names. We oppose any copyright reforms that would make it easier for record companies to do this. The government should repeal provisions of the Copyright Act that allow labels to unfairly punish fans who share music for non-commercial purposes with statutory damages of US$500 to $20,000 per song.
2. Digital Locks are Risky and Counterproductive: Artists do not support using digital locks to increase the labels' control over the distribution, use and enjoyment of music or laws that prohibit circumvention of such technological measures. The government should not blindly implement decade-old treaties designed to give control to major labels and take choices away from artists and consumers. Laws should protect artists and consumers, not restrictive technologies Consumers should be able to transfer the music they buy to other formats under a right of fair use, without having to pay twice.
3. Cultural Policy Should Support Actual Canadian Artists: The vast majority of new Canadian music is not promoted by major labels, which focus mostly on foreign artists. The government should use other policy tools to support actual Canadian artists and a thriving musical and cultural scene. The government should make a long-term commitment to grow support mechanisms like the Canada Music Fund and FACTOR, invest in music training and education, create limited tax shelters for copyright royalties, protect artists from inequalities in bargaining power and make collecting societies more transparent."

here's another version of the same story, this one with comments/discussion.

Patrons are people, too

Aaron of Walking Paper points out that patrons might like to interact with their library website in cool ways just like they interact with other social software sites - creating content and making it amusing for themselves and others - and in terms of privacy, adults can make their own decisions about such things if given half a chance.

circulating art

What I like so much about this initiative from the Portland (Maine) public library is not just that they are recycling things into art, but that then they go ahead and circulate the art. And that they accept that things like stolen, lost, and damaged items happen, and treat those situations like any other circulating item. Art is meant to be appreciated, but not treated as too precious to be appreciated by people in their own homes. I *heart* circulating art. Story, from the New York Times, here.

Powells and New Orleans Libraries

Here's an easy way to directly help New Orleans libraries through Powells. One book cost $8.95, you can recommend a book if you want. Powells and the Katrina Project make sure the libraries get what they need. More info on the Katrina Project, including some intense pictures of what floods do to libraries, here.

more on schools and wikipedia editing

Apparently, our school isn't the only one being blocked on the basis of IP address from editing Wikipedia, and mine aren't the only students taling back and asking that the Wikipedia blockers give schools special dispensation. In this case, Andy Carvin asks the question, what are schools doing to make sure students are editing responsibly? ummmm . . . . nothing. But different in our case, our students do add constructive, though mostly very minor, edits. Probably not enough to balance out the vandalism. But enough to know there are some really cool kids who get it.

my kids rock the wiki house

A student came up to me a few weeks ago, all worked up because our ip had been blocked on wikipedia - he couldn't edit a page he was using for a class. He'd learned something for his project he didn't see on wikipedia and wanted to add it.

So he went into the user talk and made his points - and came back to me 20 minutes later with a few pieces of paper printed out from 'our' user talk page - he got his point across, and the wiki community came up with a compromise. Real world learning on all kinds of levels.

Check this out:

Excuse me, this is a school library IP. Can you really punish the entire school for the vandalising actions of just a few. Seems like an injustice to me, though I do not know the wikipedia's policies on this matter. Thank you. ~Jesse S. of Winnacunnet High School Hampton NH

And the response, a few minutes later:

Okay, the block should have expired now. I did not realize that this was a school IP, if I had, the block would have been shorter to limit the collateral damage. In general, we use blocks to prevent vandalism, sometimes that is the only way to stop it. It is regrettable that it affects innocents, if you have a registered account and your IP winds up being blocked for a long period of time, you will be able to e-mail the blocking administrator, explain the situation and hopefully you will be unblocked soon. Sorry for the trouble. Sjakkalle 15:44, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

The whole conversation.

we so cool . . . update

so far, so good. there were some trouble-shooting phone calls with my-friend-our-first-volunteer-reader over the weekend - I had given some piss-poor technical directions on one part, which reminded me why testing is such a good idea. Got the file, had to spend some serious time doing various things with it - serious time only because things like uploading .wav files and renaming id3 tags was new to me. It's in the LibriVox forums right now, an editor has claimed it, and soon it will be ready for prime time.

The project manager called the reading "charming." Which made me grin like an idiot. I love it when things work.

We so cool . . . the testing phase

At work, my boss wrote a grant so I could have some fun - we bought iPod shuffles and circulate them with audiobooks on them, which we get either from iTunes or Audible. Since we were wicked early in this game, we still get a lot of phone calls about this from school librarians all over the country, everything from how-to nuts and bolts type stuff to how to get people on board and believing in the project.

I've also attended a couple talks or conferences here and there where apple set up somebody to talk about what they are doing with iPods in education. Each time the person has mentioned having students create audiobooks - out of current, popular books. Each time I have asked about copyright. Each time the person has answered that it's ok 'cuz they're not selling it. Or, it's ok 'cuz its kept within the school. And the audience usually agrees, and because I'm just somebody in the audience, I bite my tongue while shouting in my head that they are in fact, breaking copyright law.

Fast forward to the good stuff: our new initiative is to try and partner with LibriVox.org, a group of stellar volunteers creating audio versions of out-of-copyright stuff that are really high quality, and available to all online, including us, for free. We're starting to recruit super-kid volunteers, I posted on LibriVox and they were pumped to give it a go. What made it all come together in my head was the LibriVox volunteers started talking about a method whereby people who didn't want to read would edit other people's files. I don't have time to edit these files, and while the super-kids are super-great, they are also super-busy - asking them to read a chapter of a book is one thing, to spend the time editing is another.

We couldn't find an apple product that we could use as a portable, circulating digital audio recorder - I looked. Since the new versions of iPods recently came out, the accessories haven't caught up. And there are angering quality issues. So we purchased a Sony Hi-MD with microphone. We were able to really quickly and easily record onto the Hi-MD, had to use their software to transfer it from device to computer, but for the very first and probably the last time ever, Sony has done the right thing. It recognizes files created on the machine using a line in as being your own. You can import them in their format, and use their software, or you can import them in .wav format. Which means I can then open them in a number of different ways, and convert them to different file types.

Inigo Montoya (as me), "Fezzik, you did something right!"
Fezzik (as sony), "Don't worry, Inigo, I won't let it go to my head."
(best if you can imagine the voices of these characters from the Princess Bride in your head)

This was a point I was really worried about, and could not really and truly know if it was going to work out until I had it in my hand. Very worrisome when you are spending someone else's $385. I knew I'd be able to do it somehow, but had visions of twenty steps. This was three.

So this weekend a friend with experience reading textbooks for the blind is going to be recording Hans Christian Anderson's The Elderbush for LibriVox, using our new toy. This will be our test file for making sure we can upload it and get it to an editor in a reasonable fashion. Then, bring on the kiddies.

Foodies luv libraries

Here's a cool discussion going on over at I'm Mad and I Eat about how to get the most from your library amongst foodies- not really any library insiders posting, just people exchanging info - you can get email holds? I didn't know that - kind of thing.

Call me pimp-mommy master . .

This is a rush job because I am just so damn excited I am posting in the midst of school work: I knew Ask Jeeves had reworked itself. I recently read about Gary Price's new job over there. And so when the class assignment for Principles of Searching had us compare a search using Dialog to a search engine of our choice (what results did they think we were going to come up with? Dialog? Seriously.), I decided to take a break from my love affair with google and test out Ask.

Coolness. Expanded search suggestions on the side, narrowed suggestions, too. I can save my searches? I can save my searches! And tag them!

There are plentyo'things I haven't played around with yet, and a couple features I haven't figured out the point of - like the little binoculars giving me a super small peek at the website I'm going to. It's way too small for me to make any judgements about. (Maybe I just need to put on my glasses.)

But holy cow. Tagging of my saved searches. This is just what I've been looking for.

Weekly Echo

Weekly Echo draws together images of the things/people/events most in the news/blogs/search engines of that particular week. Really interesting for me - I don't have tv, and I read my news in an aggregator and listen to NPR - in other words, I just don't see many images associated with the news (and this is also pretending that entertainment news is actual news).

It's simple but well done - mousing over images gives you a little pop-up to explain the image (and I needed a lot of explaining for some of them), clicking links you to a news story somewhere about the subject of the image. And soon there will be commenting. Social fun.

an interview . . .

. . . but not a job interview.

Heidi over at Quiddle asked me about my lack of membership in ALA and other related stuff. It's good to think these things through a bit more, and the act of answering her questions helped me do that. For now, it seems I am happy to be active on the local level, though I'd like to be more active.

The World Is Small . . .

So I've told you I applied for a couple different jobs. I also read Heidi's blog Quiddle, which is about a lot of things but is recently mostly about her experiences applying for jobs, the interview process, and so on. Quite excellent for all newer job seekers in the library field.

So the other day she posted about a telephone interview, including the questions and the vague description, "a public library in a small town about an hour away from a major city."

And I thought, nah, couldn't be. Heidi lives on the west coast of Canada. She's applying for jobs all over the country. But I emailed her anyway. And actually, it was one and the same job.

She was really gracious in the exchange, and I learned a lot, namely, a) that if that's the caliber person being interviewed, I'm out. But also b) if that's the caliber person willing to seek out a job in po-dunk NH, I need to step up my game if I'm serious. I didn't know before if I was, and this has only muddled that issue for me. Not the question if I would be serious about the job (I most definitely would be, it sounded fabulous in many ways), but if I didn't get that job, I hadn't really thought through how far I'd be taking this job applying thing. Still haven't thought it through thoroughly, but it is on the brain now.

PostSecret

Not 1, but 2 library related secrets in today's new batch.

If you are unfamiliar: the author encourages people to send in, anonymously, a secret written on one side of a homemade postcard. They are endearing, they are funny, they are disturbing. They create a connection with a stranger. Mostly, I love the art of it.

Now there is a book.

Small news

When I first talked to my wonderful current boss about applying for a different job, she took a look at the job description, nodded, said she'd be happy to write a recommendation, which she did, wonderfully.

Now another job opportunity has come my way. I went through the same thing, told her about it, asked what she thought, and she got really bummed. Paraphrasing, "I thought you'd go to the interview of that first job and say 'forget it.' The job description showed nothing promising. This position is worth applying for, and taking if it is offered to you." So she will give me the recommendation, and it will be a good one, and she will keep me without reservation if I don't get the job, but she is bummed.

So yeah, I'm applying for a job that looks really good. I didn't set out to do all this, I just needed something to give me a fresh perspective on my own job, which is great but pays poorly and is tiresome and repetative. I think this second job is much more of a reach and I am much less likely to be a super-strong candidate, though I think I'll make candidate status.

As I told my reference writers, I've never applied for a professional position before, so I consider these excercises in that - part of my grad school education.

Other small news - I'll be giving two talks at NHEMA later this spring. My wonderful boss is organizing the conference, so there's that. But there's also something I am still coming to terms with: in comparison to a lot of library folks, I am very techy and cutting-edge. If I compare myself to librarians online, I am ten steps behind. But the people I give the talks to are comparing themselves to me - and I am 20 steps ahead. It's all very weird to me, but since a lot of the stuff I talk to my cool boss about is new to her - and she is smart and in general keeps up with stuff - that makes me sure I have things to share with all these other school librarians. One talk is on digital audiobooks, the other is more generally on "Library 2.0" (gasp! I used that buzzy term! I didn't on the conference thingy though - I entitled my talk, "Keepin' Up With The Kids: The interactive web and how it can work with and for school libraries and their librarians.") So blogging, but also rss feeds and aggregators, social software spaces like LJ and myspace, flickr and other photosharing spaces, and so on and so on. You get the idea.