JISC & EDUCAUSE

Two major reports about virtual worlds and education

1. EDUCAUSE Review - Back to Virtual School
http://connect.educause.edu/er

Review by Lyr Lobo
http://ctusoftware.blogspot.com/2008/09/educause-reviews-back-to-virtual-school.html

2. JISC - Serious Virtual Worlds
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/seriousvirtualworldsreport.aspx

Author: Sara de Freitas

Publication date: 3 November 2008

Publication Type(s): Reports

JISC theme(s): e-Learning¹

The Serious Virtual Worlds report focuses on virtual worlds for educational uses, and explores the ‘serious’ – as opposed to leisure-based – uses of virtual worlds.

Internet Librarian - Implementing Web 2.0 at a Library

Looking back, it seems like I was so focused on my presentation that I missed a lot of excellent presentations at this conference. Too bad it wasn't on the first day instead of the last day. :-)

Implementing Web 2.0
The presenters spoke about how they do this at the Columbus Public Library.
I thought their job titles said it all, actually-- I don't think any libraries had job titles like this as recently as five years ago.

Joy Marlow - Digital Experience Analyst
Sam Davis - Applications Programmer

Challenges
Selling ideas to administratiors and staff
Your personal learning curve & your staff's learning curve
Keeping up with new technology
Bring customer along – if they don’t know how or don’t get what they want, they won’t use it
You’re at the mercy of 3rd party vendors & content providers – ex. Using twitter for updates on your site, when Twitter is down, your updates won't be visible to your staff and patrons
Terms of Use – copyright – for example, you are required to show attribution if you use blogger, google maps on your website
Unclear strategy – who will do it (implement) what will you do, how does it fit in, how does it fit into brand

Solutions
Engage your staff
Their staff is using the training program developed by Helen Blauer – Learning 2.0 – 23 things
Response has been very enthusiastic. They put short videos up on their staff website about people who are using the new technologies and how they are using them.
Engage your customers – Powertools page (blog—post “what technologies are you using, what would you see use do?)
Library toolbar
Believe in what you do – show your passion, to aqdministrators, to customers
Beta – experiment – Their toolbar is in beta, so people know it’s a work in progress, solicit feedback from customers, perpetual beta?

Tips and tricks
Prototyping – create working models of your applications, tools – give people something they can put hands on, look at – Cigtywaall – large multitouch stouch screen == Helsinki Finland – users can interact, move photos around, crop them, interactive—mulyi-touch, multi-functional – put prototype together using youtube videos, took cardboard bos, laptop, vwebcam

Let it be torn apart, get feedback, empowers customers, let’s tool keep making itself better

Don’t be afraqid to fail
Some of this stull won’t work

Keep up with the literacy

Library4joy
Monkey10@gmail.com


Sllverramtruck
silveramtruck@gmail.com

Internet Librarian - Branding

Greg Schwarz spoke about branding. I'd expected to hear about branding a library or organization, but this was about managing your perosnal online identity. It was besed on Greg's experience with his online identites of Planetneutral (blog) and gregschwartz (twitter).

Identity has two components:
What I say abut me
What others say about me -- this is the more important**

You do not own your online identity – but you do have ways to influence it

Personal branding – stuff you do to define who you are

Managing your online brand
1. Have a homebase. May be a blog, a website, a Ning. If you want to have your own domain, purchase your domain today, don't wait.
2. Own your username -- use a consistent username across the sites
3. Aggreagate your lifestream – provide a single place where somebody can go and find everything you do online – some sites that work well for this are Friendfeed, libraryland
4. Join the conversation – get online, get involved in various media
5. Follow what others are saying about you—Some ways to do this -- Google blog alerts (Google will email you whenever a blog mentions your name), technorati, twitter search feeds
6. Be authentic -- be yourself
Excellent presentation!!

Internet Librarian 2008 - Mary Ellen Bates

Mary Ellen Bates introduced a number of Internet tools that can be used to improve online searching.

GoogleTranslated Search
Allows searching in other languages
Very useful for those of us who only read English

Google Timelines has been improved
Now has authoritative dates
Gives timeline of mentions of word or phrase in Google news
Useful because you can limit your search to the specific time when a particular topic might be in the news

Google Graphing the news
Looks for frequency of a particular topic in news
#times people searched for wd or ph
Shows news volume
Shows where you were when you conducted the search
Relative # of mentions of search term by city
Useful for seeing when people cared about a topic

Yahoo SearchAssist
Gives suggestions for related or complimentary search terms

[yahoo brackets]=words in brackets must appear in the same order, but may have unlimited words in between

Yahoo Glue
in.search.yahoo.com
Google India's search result interface
Groups search results into related sections
Wikipedia box is by itself
Images in right column
Major websites such as How Stuff Works may be broken out (sites vary with query)
Blogs are broken out
Search results are listed

Live.com product reviews
Includes user reviews--broken out and classified

Live.com Prefer
Allows you to add an extra word to change relevance ranking
Does not change results
Ex: hybrid cars prefer convertible
Not an and or an or – dies not limit or expand - just re-sorts the search results

Searchme.com
Can help disambiguate works with multiple meanings
Ex: sun – breaks out astronomy, astrology, Sun Corp, computer, business, stocks

Powerset.com
Runs on Wikipedia
Another sense-making engine
Extracts meaning
Contains, makes, crops
Automatic search algorithm
Can be used to expand or narrow search based on meanings shown
Recently purchased by Microsft

Searchcrystal
Visual
Metasearch
Groups keywords in search results
Almost like a tag cloud
Can show where to go next – use as first tool

Carrot2.org
Lets you choose the clustering algorithm
Gives up to 400 search results (Normal is 100)
Default is Lingo algorithm, or you can choose from a list
Each algorithm gives somewhat different results

Silobreaker.com
Aggregates current news and tries to make sense of it
Shows hotspots on map
Related concepts
Background fact sheets on popular topics
You can narrow to just news on a particular topic (Environmental Science)

Searchcloud.net
Research engine
You input your search terms into a cloud
Larger the text you put your term in = the more important that term is to you

Loki.com toolbar
Used to locate public wifi networks near you
Looks at your ip addres & locates other public wifi networks
Does not run on Firefox 3

Surf.com
Web 2.0 rsearch engine
Runs a metasearch on web 2.0 tools
Gogleblog search, youtube, technarati, etc.

Twing.com
Searches discussion boards

How to find conference buzz
Figure out blog tag for this conference
Search technorati

Spokeo
Aggregator – pulls together everything you say about yourself in various media
Put in email address
Shows items about you from blogs, photoshop, sales on Amazon, flickr, Amazon wishlist, yout ube, Facebook, etc.

Internet Librarian

I'm at the Internet Librarian conference in Monterey, California. Oddly enough, the wifi in the Monterey Conference Center is terrible. I'd hoped to live-blog some of the speakers, but there was no connection available for any of the sessions I attended. There seems to be a good one up here on the 3rd floor of the Portola Hotel, so I hope this will go through properly. They announced that they will hold the next Internet Librarian here too, so I hope there is better wifi available for that one-- seems like it would be a given for an Internet conference.

There have been some great speakers here. Howard Reingold gave the keynote address this morning, speaking about how the web, cell phones, instant messinger, etc. connect people. He spoke about "flash mobs" where people use IM, Twitter and other online connections to organise action groups. Most of what he said was already familiar to me, because I follow him on Twitter andrecently heard him speak on SecondLife. But it was marvellous to hear him live.

Oxbridge Opens Very Soon

Desmond says Oxbridge may open for new avatars as early as next week. I am now faculty for the university group -- along with everybody else in Caledon who wants to be.

Reading the Names at 911 Memorial

On Sept. 11, I read the names of the dead at Hope's 911 Memorial. SL was being awful and logins were closed. Somehow I managed to slip in, but most of the other memorial participants didn't arrive until around 10. (It just occurred to me that perhaps being a premium member paid off here.)

Since nobody was there who knew what I was supposed to do, I improvised. Found a list of the names on the web, sat down on the stage (after some hesitation) and waited to do my thing. It was a really long list -- I had forgotten how many people died that day -- over 3000 names.

This was a commemoration of the police and firefighters. Chipmunk Zhang read several poems in memory of her brother, who died in the World Trade Center. Then I got up and started reading the names. Because sit and stand animations weren't working properly for me that day, I flew up and hovered a few feet above the podium.

Long, long list - divided into sections - with people's ages and occupations as well as their names. Names from nearly every ethnic group I could think of. All kinds of occupations. Police. Firefighters. Soldiers from the Pentagon. People on vacation. Many people from one financial organization - that company must have had one of the floors the planes hit in the WTC. Old people. Several students travelling with their teacher. A mother and her children, aged 8 and 3.

I came to the end of the list of Confirmed Dead, and then realized that there was also a list Reported Dead, and it was even longer. Section after section -- think it's finished and then realize there is another one yet to come. It went on and on.

It was an amazingly moving experience to read that list. Turned out I was only supposed to read the names of police and firefighters, but I'm very glad that nobody told me that until after I had finished. I hope they ask me back to do it again next year.