Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

What a year this has been! I've seen this site take off, met some great people while doing all the talks and workshops I've undertaken from Slough to Singapore, broken a finger, survived my 60th birthday celebrations, and conducted most of a Haydn symphony! In addition I gather from the publishers that the book is selling well. Then there has been the credit crunch and fears of what 2009 will bring.

Thanks for reading this stuff and this is me saying "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!"

Academia

This new site is really worth knowing about!
Richard Price of Oxford University and a team of people from Stanford University and Cambridge University have produced a social networking site for academic researchers.

It shows researchers around the world in a 'tree' format, organized
according to which institution/department they are affiliated with.
- It enables academics to keep track of the latest news in their field -
the latest people, papers and talks.
We are hoping that Academia.edu will eventually list every academic in the
world -- Faculty members, Post-Docs, and Graduate Students. People can add
their departments, and themselves, to the tree by clicking on the arrows.
The site is getting some traction. Over 9,000 academics have joined
Academia.edu in the last two months.

My paper at Bridging Worlds Conference

I promised to post a little more about the Bridging Worlds Conference in Singapore which I attended in October. Photo shows a fastfood stall which amused me, headed "Pig Organs and Kway Chap"!

The Conference focused on "how the information, knowledge and cultural institutions are responding to the social and information future while continuing to connect with their diverse communities in appropriate spaces, engaging with them to build the culture, information and knowledge dividend."

It was great to hear Dr N Varaprasad, the National Librarian there say that "Library 2.0 is firmly embedded in the Library landscape". For me it has been great to see the take-up by librarians since I first got involved with Web 2.0 back in 2006.

My presentation has been on Slideshare as part of the Bridging Worlds collection.

For convenience here is another link to the presentation "Information Literacy and Web 2.0 : is it all hype?"and a link to the paper.

Online Conference, Olympia, Dec. 2008

I've been quiet lately because I was at the Online Conference in Olympia. The Key Note speaker on Day 1 was Clay Shirky (author of "Here comes everybody") and it was inspiring. When asked about librarians he recalled the quote of us as "happiness engines". So, we are about increasing the happiness of our patrons, helping them to find the next thing to read or watch. This can be done by joining up groups of people who should be talking to one another. Later on he talked about the social origin of good ideas and putting experts and amateurs together which improves both groups. This reminded me of the potential power of a Library OPAC which could combine taxonomies and user tagging. I must read the book! If you want a full version of the talk see Jenny Levine's report in The Shifted Librarian.

Jenny also gave an excellent presentation "New Channels New Media and New Approaches for Libraries." I remember her emphasis on the importance of users as "collaborators" with user generated content becoming more important. Librarians need to become more nimble in approaches to their users : Yale University for example invite users to text a science librarian, and use Twitter and Facebook. She believes we are ahead in the use of Bloglines and iGoogle and therefore should be pushing these to our users. She made some of the same points in her presentation at Bridging Worlds 2008 and I can highly recommend this.

Marydee Ojala gave an interesting paper "See it, hear it" highlighting the inadequacy of the subscription services in keeping up with multimedia content. There is no single source. However, I picked up several sites to follow up including
Voxalead, (lets you search through multimedia content like audio and video podcasts).
Podscope,(lets you search the spoken word for audio and video that interests you)
Blinx (World's largest video search engine).

Anne Morris (Dept. Information Science, Loughborough University) presented aboput a survey undertaken about student perceptions and use of Library 2.o applicatioons. Main message to me and IL practitioners is the warning that publicity and awareness of the services by the user is crucial.

Guillermo Lutzky speaking about the ORT Argentina Virtual Campus project (which I chaired) showed how powerful Web 2.0 can be in schools to increase collaboration and community> The use of blogs there had produced over 250 active blogs since June 2007. ORT Argentina currently holds two educational complexes, two technical high schools and two post-secondary junior colleges with over 7000 students.

Fiona Lennox (Ofcom, UK) gave an interesting presentation about recent Ofcom reports
Media Literacy Audit: Media literacy of UK adults from ethnic minority groups

The Networked Student

With thanks to LoneWolfLibrarian and to Michael Stephens, I must draw attention to The Networked Student. This useful little video by which uses the commoncraft style of presentation. It is a wake-up call to teachers and librarians! Telling how students will gather their information and share it, at one point it asks "will they need a teacher?" The justification for one gives a whole list of roles which sound amazingly like those of a Web 2.0 librarian! Take a look!

The Networked Student was inspired by CCK08, a Connectivism course offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes during fall 2008. It depicts an actual project completed by Wendy Drexler’s high school students.