The Future of Reading: The Digital Librarian – “In a Web Age, Library Gets a Job Update” – third in a series of articles from the New York Times looking at how the Internet and other technologies are changing the way people read. School librarians have transformed into multi-faceted information specialists who guide students through the flood of digital information that confronts them on a daily basis.
Oops, they changed the video feed..so you’ll have to jump over to the website to take a look!
It’s the time of the year when we see the predictions for technology developments for the coming year. Michael Stephens at Tame the Web has published his Top Ten Trends and Technologies for 2009, and has made it easy for us to to get hooked on his discussion by being able to Download a PDF of the post here.
The ten on the list are:
There are many themes running through these trends and technologies, but you can’t go past the shift in devices, the power of the cloud, and the importance of the digital shifts that mean that the environment and information services of school libraries have a big challenge ahead of them.
Kathryn Greenhill at Librarians Matter alerts us to Top Tech Trends for ALA midwinter.
My favourites are:
The Semantic Web is really struggling to emerge, but I believe it will happen.
Tim Berners-Lee had a vision for the internet, believing that the Semantic Web would be able to assist the evolution of human knowledge as a whole.
Human endeavor is caught in an eternal tension between the effectiveness of small groups acting independently and the need to mesh with the wider community. The Semantic Web, in naming every concept simply by a URI, lets anyone express new concepts that they invent with minimal effort. Its unifying logical language will enable these concepts to be progressively linked into a universal Web. This structure will open up the knowledge and workings of humankind to meaningful analysis by software agents, providing a new class of tools by which we can live, work and learn together.
Roy Tennant considered this vision, writing about the Promises of the Semantic Web, and the state of Linked Data systems, programming and data structures that need to emerge to provide the kind of Semantic Web that Tim Berners Lee envisioned.
Folksonomy and tagging are very useful, but they are not the Semantic Web – not in the way Tim Berner-Lee imagined. All we are doing is aggregating our information (and our collective intelligence), but we are doing so idiosyncratically. Without standards, we have erratic compilations. The onotology of our data structures are the challenge – if the data strings don’t match, then the inferences won’t hold across data sets for the meanings of the content being expressed. There is great wisdom in the clouds, but there is no precision without accuracy! Somehow the Semantic Web will eventually be able to utilise machine languages to snap ‘meaning’ to a grid of structured data.
Read the Future of MicroFormats and Semantic Technologies. You can’t escape metadata, and you have to rely on markup languages.
The future of microformats is bright, by making it simple to encode your data, there is no reason not too. Tackling very common facets of the web, such as; people, places and events, microformats have helped to break the chicken and the egg issue. “Why should I mark-up my data if no one else is?” or “I’m not going to mark-up my data if there are no tools to extract it”.
Luckily the menagerie of tools is copious and being extended everyday. But I must admit I didn’t know that Firefox has the Operator toolbar which can detect and act on any information found in the page. Operator requires information on the Web to be encoded using microformats, and since this method for semantically encoding information is relatively new, not all sites are using microformats yet. However, Operator works great with any blog that uses rel-tag, and the sites Yahoo! Local, Flickr, and Upcoming.org, all of which contain millions of pieces of information expressed using microformats. As more sites begin to semantically encode data with microformats, Operator will automatically work with them as well.
Right! School libraries? Where are you in the discussion of these issues? I have a lot to learn!
‘Low level’ semantic systems are easy to understand. Today I noticed the ‘semantic’ support available in Feedly – my RSS reader.
The Reuters Open Calais service “is a rapidly growing toolkit of capabilities that allow you to readily incorporate state-of-the-art semantic functionality within your blog, content management system, website or application”. Apparently Calais “doesn’t just make data searcheable, it makes knowledge searchable”.
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The school year is over for us…but NOT for me. I started the year with high hopes, and conclude the year with a record of successes and failures. Typical year!!
Boys are gone and most school staff are gone except for the dedicated core who can’t stop planning, preparing, and working – always looking for better ways to serve their education community.
I am proud to say I am queen of all I survey – rubble, rubbish, sledge hammers, broken glass, and sweaty workmen ripping apart the school library. My staff are gone, but my cool architect, Cecilia Kugler from CK Design, and I are meeting, ringing, planning, and playing with colours, designs, and more. Cecilia and her team have been an amazing inspiration, and we are looking forward to the fruition of the plans that have been developed. Thank you CK Design!
These holidays we are dealing with Stage 1A! of four stages. We will keep rolling out the stages during the year, and into the next. But the worst part of the overhaul will happen over these holidays, with paint, carpet, and major
layout changes being accomplished. During Term 1 we will get our new shelves and our new furniture. Next will be our brand spanking new service desk – a beautiful marble and glass look! After that new offices, new learning spaces and more. But first the basic changes that underpin the re-design of our mulitmodal learning environment for our students.
But as I write this it’s just plain devastation and I’m regularly being evicted to work on my computer up in the staff dining room. Bonus is the ready access to coffee!!
My Nominations for The 2008 Edublog Awards are:
1. Best individual blog : Teaching and Learning Design – Dean Groom
2. Best group blog: Information Literacy Meets Library 2.0
3. Best new blog: And Another Thing – Sue Tapp
4. Best resource sharing blog: CogDogBlog – Alan Levine
5. Most influential blog post: The future of online learning – 10 years on – Stephen Downes
6. Best teacher blog: Cool Cat Teacher – Vicki Davies
7. Best librarian / library blog: Tame the Web – Michael Stephens
8. Best educational tech support blog: Mobile Technology in TAFE – Sue Waters
9. Best elearning / corporate education blog: Jane’s E-learning Pick of the Day – Jane Hart
10. Best educational use of audio: Audio Recorder
11. Best educational use of video / visual: The New Media Literacies
12. Best educational wiki: Web 2.0 Cool Tools for Schools – Lenva Shearing
13. Best educational use of a social networking service: Horizon Project 2008
14. Best educational use of a virtual world: Skoolaborate
The Tower, the Cloud, and Posterity
Going digital may be the most significant inflection point in the history of human record keeping. Never before has so much information been available to so many people. The implications of having more than a billion people with persistent connections to the Internet and exabytes of information freely and openly available cannot be overstated. With every significant innovation comes unintended consequences and amidst the plenitude we now enjoy in this arena are found a host of new cautions, threats and risks. We would never turn back.
Learning management systems now make it possible to capture and preserve the classroom contributions of tomorrow’s Albert Einstein.
The emergence of the networked information economy is unleashing two powerful forces. On one hand, easy access to high-speed networks is empowering individuals. People can now discover and consume information resources and services globally from their homes. Further, new social computing approaches are inviting people to share in the creation and edification of information on the Internet. Empowerment of the individual — or consumerization — is reducing the individual’s reliance on traditional brick-and-mortar institutions in favor of new and emerging virtual ones.
I had some Twitter fun on Grader tonight! Played with ‘education’ and got myself listed along with some VIPs. Checked out the Twitter Elite in Sydney – yep, seems I’m one! Other silly things too….all of which tell me that Twitter is still a pretty new tool. (Well I knew that didn’t I. The folks at my workshop today did not know what Twitter was, so no competition really).
So go and have a play if you like.
Meanwhile here is twitter-inspired ‘wave’ to Michael Stephens, of Tame the Web (and Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois). I remember when I became aware of Web 2.0 and then started blogging, because Michael became a key inspiration to me in my transformation into a 2.0 Librarian. Michael will be out in Australia again next year and I’m really looking forward to catching up with him and thanking him in person for the excellent learning journey.
Look what Twitter Gradr tells me has happened for “Librarian” 🙂
Twitter Gradr for Librarian
Do you think that makes me a real Librarian 2.0!
Saturday saw a group of enthusiastic Teacher Librarians gather to attend the last major professional development activity for the 2008 year hosted by the Australian School Library Association of NSW.
It was a great day because though it was cloudy, the sun shone with all the smiles as we acknowledged the work of a fabulous teacher librarian from Delany College here in Sydney.
Jan Radford and Head Girl and Boy
Congratulations to Jan Radford for winning the Teacher Librarian of the Year Award from the Australian School Library Association.
I caught up with her Principal, and the Head Boy and Head Girl after the award ceremony. They were there to see Jan receive her award and join in the enthusiasm of the day. What they have not been part of is the many many years that Jan has devoted to keeping her school library at the forefront of learning through the years of change, adopting and promoting the best ways to encourage our young adults to become readers, writers, and young people of passion. Thanks Jan for all your work.
My workshop
I chipped into the day’s activities with a workshop on Social Bookmarking and RSS. I’ve run this type of workshop a number of different ways, but the focus today was not just on opening and getting into a tool, but more about what these two tools can offer us as professionals to manage our own information needs, as well as organise good learning opportunities for our students.
The usual handouts of course! But to to help the conversation along (and so people could go away and revisit the things we talked about ) I put together a demo site in Netvibes, which includes examples and some information for further reflection. We could have spent a day working on this!
Visit Heyjude’s Demo site to see what I mean.
Studying my SLED calendar (which I have embedded in my Google calendar) more closely yesterday I stumbled across a morning (in my time) meeting from Sheila Webber, Information Literacy expert and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield, UK. The meeting was too early for me, but I was intrigued nonetheless.
I have followed Sheila’s Information Literacy Weblog for some years, but made direct contact with her as a result of the publication of Information Literacy meets Library 2.0 to which we were both contributing writers (have you got a copy yet?).
All librarians should keep an eye on Shiela’s blog and the work she is doing. I slipped up myself, so was delighted to catch up on one of her current initiatives The Seven Pillars of Information Literacy. Do pick up The Seven Pillars of Information Literacy model which are available for download and use.
The Seven Pillars model was designed to be a practical working model which would facilitate further development of ideas amongst practitioners in the field and would hopefully stimulate debate about the ideas and about how those ideas might be used by library and other staff in higher education concerned with the development of students’ skills. The model combines ideas about the range of skills involved with both the need to clarify and illustrate the relationship between information skills and IT skills, and the idea of progression in higher education embodied in the development of the curriculum through first-year undergraduate up to postgraduate and research-level scholarship.
I was actually on duty as Docent at ISTE Island, when the sim was shut down in one of the usual Linden Lab restarts. Being on the loose in Second Life I spotted the fact that Sheila was also inworld, and after a quick IM she kindly invited me to take a look at the work they are doing on the Seven Pillars over at Infoli iSchool in Second Life: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit iSchool/95/38/22/
Can I say, this is really an interesting project to watch!! I was so excited to see the framework growing in a 3D environment, allowing students to ‘walk the walk’ of the information literacy process. This is a model that can work not just in higher education, but in secondary education just as effectively (in teen second life).
As Sheila explained, she had students exploring and applying this information literacy model to their research and information needs during her course, after they had completed another unit which had included Second Life learning. This struck me as ideal!
We do need to look at innovative ways to capture the interest and commitment of our students to understanding the deep thinking involved in the information search process, and as the learning world becomes more and more immersive, these initiatives are an important step in the right direction.
The model not only allows students to ‘walk through’ the stages of the information process, but it also includes powerful investigation of both quantitative and qualitative research.
In fact, I would venture that using the 7 pillars in Second Life would very nicely tap into the cognitive AND affective domains of the information search process. By allowing collaborative discussions about the research process and by involving the students in use of such interesting tools as the Opinionater, a Likert scale social grapher (puts voting with your feet into a whole new perspective LOL), I can see an amazingly powerful application to information literacy instruction not just in tertiary, but also in school environments.
Wonderful experience. Thanks Sheila!
A nice find from Kairosnews ready for innovative use by any good school librarian – a wonderful story called The Puzzle Box. This is one for reading aloud, or working with online.
Either way, it’s a little bit of magic from Edward Picout! You might also like to visit the HyperLiterature Exchange, or do a search of the Electronic Literature Directory.
From Chapter 1:
“No, no,” said her Dad. “No, darling, I’m sorry, they didn’t have one. This is something else. It’s a present for you, but it isn’t a GameBox.”
“What is it?”
“Well, I’m not going to tell you that, am I? You’ll have to wait and find out. It was a marvellous shop, though, with all sorts of unexpected things in it. Not the usual mass-produced stuff at all. The shopkeeper was the strangest little man I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“Dad,” she said, “why didn’t you tell me Adam was in the back of the car?”
“What?” he said, turning round. “Adam’s in the back of the car? What are you talking about?”
Dora turned round too. The boy on the back seat had vanished.
“Honestly, Dora, you gave me such a turn.”
“But he was there, Dad! A boy called Adam! He was there just now! I was talking to him!”
“I think you must have fallen asleep and dreamt it,” said her Dad.
Google ’s answer to the Wikipedia encyclopedia, Google Knol (short for Knowledge), launched earlier this week.
Knol is a unit of knowledge! or so the logo proclaims. In fact, Knol is a collection of authoritative articles, written by a community of experts and as such Google Knol is positioning itself in direct competition to Wikipedia.
Knol is looking for authors (either singularly or in groups) willing to put their names behind their content on a wide of range of topics, “from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions.” Google will not edit the content in any way, but, like Wikipedia, readers will have access to community tools that will allow them to submit comments, questions, edits, and additional content — in addition to being able to rate or write a review of a knol.
In addition, Knol authors can share in the revenue generated from the Google Adsense ads on their subject pages.
I’ve read quite a few reviews, reports and comments about Knol.
It’s still in its infancy as a project, so issues about content and quality are still being fixed. However, my favourite take on Knol comes from Richard Gale, who (after giving Knol a drubbing) discusses some positive thoughts about Knol.
In particular he brings into play a discussion about tacit and explicit knowledge.
Huge amounts of information are collected inside a person’s head or on their computer. And it is not accessible to anyone else. Getting this tacit information out, making it explicit so that others can use it, is an important goal of many Web 2.0 tools.
By providing singular authorship, knols allow a more ego-driven approach for making the information explicit than Wikipedia does.
That is, Wikipedia also provides a means for moving tacit information into the explicit realm. But, there is no real sense of authorship, nothing to really plant a flag and say I did this, I am providing this to the world.
Finding ways to transform tacit information into explicit are crucial in today’s world. Wikis can do this. Blogs can do this. And so can knols. Knols will not replace other approaches. They provide a new path for the transformation to occur.
A danger point? – Knols can move us away from an open-source environment to a digital form of the ‘authoritative’ texts that we bought so frantically to support 20th century learning. Knols are about digitizing our global knowledge base and adding value to their interpretation and delivery of knowledge – by paying out some money. That’s publishing – online!
George Seimens (f Knowing Knowledge fame) says:
Google is essentially stating that individual ownership of articles is important. How will knols be listed in Google searches? Will they receive better search returns than Wikipedia articles? A part of me would like to dislike this service (how much more of our soul must we give up to Google?). But the idea is well conceived.
Digital Inspiration provides a Quick Start Guide.
Resources on the site are quite scarce now, as to be expected. But I am watching this development because I see furture e-texts staring me in the face. The anonimity of wikipeidia is its strength and its weakness. I’m tipping that plenty of teachers will love Knol as the content expands.
judyoconnell.com 