Infoblog

Archive for the ‘Web 2.0’ Category

Check out this very cool YouTube video, done in the style of Common Craft, that imagines what the library will look like in a networked world. As the author asks, “What is a library when ‘everywhere is here’?”

It’s one thing to write and post an Infoblog article on the subject of change, as I did last week. It’s an entirely different and far more visceral (learning) experience to observe projected changes occurring so rapidly that they are in place before we have time to digest predictions regarding their impending arrival.
One day after writing about Paula Singer’s current full-day Infopeople workshop— “Building Leadership Skills: Leading Change,” which continues statewide through February 25, 2009—I had moved on to a different endeavor: reading the 2009 Horizon Report, posted online on January 20, 2009. Having been introduced to what the annual Horizon reports offer trainer-teacher-learners shortly after the New Media Consortium (NMC) and EDUCAUSE posted the 2008 version, I was looking forward to seeing updated predictions on technological innovations which “are likely to have a significant impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression in higher education” over a five-year period.
The topic was already on my mind because I had heard predictions about Web 3.0 and Web 4.0 while attending a session at the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Conference in Denver late last month. One of the speakers at that ALA session had mused about the possibility that our mobile devices would soon be able to provide information including where the nearest Whole Foods market is, and would also notify us if one of our friends was in a Starbucks coffee shop two blocks away from us. Audience members’ reactions to the latter possibility ranged from “wouldn’t that be cool?” to “that’s creepy”—or, as one friend asked, “isn’t that cool and creepy?” Regardless of the reaction, the underlying message was that this was an idea to watch for over the next few years—a period which immediately shrinks when we read the 2009 Horizon Report.
Among the technologies evolving rapidly and which are meant to reach a new level of maturity over the next year, according to the Horizon authors, is mobile technology, and interesting innovations are already in place: “Applications designed for mobiles can…record a photograph of a CD, video, or book, then identify the artist or author and display that along with reviews of the piece and information on where to buy it” (p. 8). (Watch out, Whole Foods; our mobiles know where you live.) Furthermore, “(a)n increasing number of mobile and web-based services can respond to geolocative data in creative and useful ways…Mobile Twitter clients…add the user’s location to tweets (postings via Twitter), indicate nearby friends, and show messages tweeted in the user’s vicinity” (p. 15). (Watch out, Starbucks, we know who is Twittering at your tables and counters.)
So as I read that January 20 report in early February and thought back to predictions I heard at the end of January about what was literally on and in the Horizon, I suddenly understood at an emotional level what Paula Singer had said about “living in an age of permanent white water” and needing “the skills to help ourselves and others deal with change successfully.” And how much all of us can gain from Paula’s workshop and the recognition that the future is nearly behind us at times as change occurs even before we have heard that it is coming.
N.B.: To register for remaining sessions of “Building Leadership Skills: Leading Change” —Arden-Dimick Library in Sacramento (2/20/09); San Francisco Public Library (2/23/09); and Fresno—Woodward Park (2/25/09) —please visit the Infopeople website.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Infopeople instructors helped introduce many of us to Web 2.0. Our colleagues at OCLC this afternoon upped the ante by hosting “From Linking to Thinking: How We’ll Live When Information Surrounds Us” at the American Library Association (ALA) 2009 Midwinter Conference here in Denver.
Featuring presentations and a spirited yet collegial debate by David Weinberger (author of Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder) and Nova Spivack (founder and CEO of the San Francisco-based technology venture Radar Networks and the Twine.com project), the session featured plenty of predictions of how Web 3.0 and Web 4.0 are going to develop over the next two decades and lead to the development of online artificial intelligence.
For those of us involved in training programs for library staff, members, and guests, the picture is exciting, dynamic, and more than a bit daunting. We’re going to be working even harder than we already are to keep up with the expanding nature of information retrieval/sharing through online social networks so we can help our colleagues in libraries meet library users’ evolving needs. And, Weinberger asserts, we are going to have to do it together through the sort of group efforts and collaborations which produce tools including Wikipedia.
Even the sort of innovations we saw through the daylong “Mashup the Library” conference at Santa Clara University last spring already seem familiar in comparison to what Spivack described during his “Library 3.0” presentation this afternoon. Drawing from material posted online a couple of months ago, he provided a concise decade-by-decade summary of the continuing evolution of the Web: 1980-1990, the PC era; 1990-2000, Web 1.0; 2000-2010, Web 2.0; 2010-2020, Web 3.0; and 2020-2030, Web 4.0, culminating in the “intelligent web.” Then he described some of the work being done through Twine.com, a new, free service which allows users to “collect online content—videos, photos, articles, Web pages, products—and bring it all together by topic, so you can have it in one place and share it with anyone you want” in the latest expansion of social networking and information retrieval and sharing.
“The Web literally is becoming the nervous system of the planet, and like any nervous system, it doesn’t merely take input, it generates output,” he said in an interview included in an OCLC brochure given to participants at this afternoon’s session. “This is truly as if our species is evolving to a new level of collective intelligence.”
Key roles to be played by libraries in this setting, Spivack suggested to his audience, include “digitizing everything”; placing increased effort into finding, not searching; and asking whether questions about libraries’ relevancy should be rephrased to become questions about how libraries might best market what they do so they can effectively meet user’s needs as we move toward a Web 3.0 and Web 4.0 world.

When Infopeople and its wonderful instructors introduced many of us to Web 2.0 through a magnificent series of workshops underwritten by the California State Library last year, we couldn’t have imagined what a difference it was going to make in how we viewed and interacted with the world. Those of us who had not explored any of the online social networking tools and services at all, read or written for blogs, or done anything beyond giggling over how silly the word “Wikipedia” sounded in comparison to the names of the solid and respectable encyclopedias we still admired— even if we rarely opened them—were in for a big surprise.
Looking now at the massive transition we have made as a result of our acquaintance with and use of Web 2.0 tools, we have to acknowledge what a difference a year or two of experience can make.
Absorbing several news and journal articles this week for a graduate-level online course I am taking through the University of North Texas, I was struck by how quaint some of those articles written about the Internet not so long ago felt. Pieces like Benjamin Barber’s “The Uncertainty of Digital Politics” from the Spring 2001 issue of the Harvard International Review, and “The Internet Paradox: A Social Technology That Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being?” from the September 1998 issue of American Psychologist—both written before Web 2.0 tools began to be widely documented and promoted—warn that Internet use might divide rather than unite people and that it runs the risk of destroying rather than creating communities. Barber’s suggestion that “students are increasingly ignoring social life, community, and school activities in favor of time alone on the computer” (pp. 44-45 in the original publication) has been somewhat overtaken by students’ use—our use—of Internet access to a variety of information sources (including libraries); social and professional networking tools (including LinkedIn); and services such as Skype which combine computer time with social and academic life. The political divisiveness which he was seeing in 2001 certainly is far from gone, but the two most recent presidential campaigns demonstrate how candidates, their advisors, and their supporters united through efforts such as MoveOn.org have learned to use Web 2.0 tools to do everything from creating online and face-to-face communities to encouraging political involvement and donations from large numbers of previously unengaged voters.
Barber’s prediction that “we will have to start not with technology but with politics” if “democracy is to benefit from technology” (p. 47) is closer to fruition just a few years after Web 2.0 tools began spreading as a means for communication and community-building. His fear that “many of our problems today arise from the fact that we no longer know how to talk to neighbors, to husbands, to wives, and to fellow citizens” seems to have missed the mark in the sense that the existence or nonexistence of online communication is not going to increase or resolve the problem: these problems are resolved or exacerbated, as he concludes, through our own efforts to confront them (p. 47), and those of us working in or with libraries are in a great position to help the members of our extended community learn better how to use these online tools to their—and our—advantage.

It’s not as if we haven’t heard of podcasting—producing simple and inexpensive audio and video recordings which can be shared online with anyone interested in what we are doing. We may, on the other hand, be wondering what it means to us and to the library members and guests we serve. As mentioned in the first of this two-part series, the answer can affect our ability to meet our users’ needs.
“I think it’s something that is a technology or a tool that has become very mainstream,” Infopeople instructor David Free noted recently in discussing the Practical Podcasting and Videocasting workshops he is offering between now and November 2008. “You can get podcasts of TV shows and radio shows. It’s a technology that people in communities are going to be more used to seeing in other areas.”
And it is already a format which is providing library staff and library members and guests with resources when they need the information—not just when we’re available to provide it. Podcasting is increasingly used to post basic as well as specialized information of interest to library users as well as to staff in need of brief and readily available training on a variety of topics.
Infopeople itself offers a large variety of podcasts on its website—Michael Cart’s “Reviews” on books and those who write them; Joan Frye Williams and George Needham’s “Thinking Out Loud” series on innovations and contemporary issues in libraries; and archives of Infopeople webcasts and webinars from a variety of presenters. Free also suggests other podcast archives which may be of interest to those unfamiliar with the full potential of the format and the content it offers: the Los Angeles Public Library speaker series which has featured podcasts hosted by Alfred Molina, Debra Winger, Robert Scheer, and many others; the “Library Audio and Video to Go” series produced by the George C. Gordon Information Technology Division at Worcester Polytechnic Institute; and the “Behind the Desk Alden Audio Tour” produced by Ohio University Libraries.
Those attending Free’s workshops “are going to have a better understanding of what podcasting is—both audio and video podcasting—how libraries are using the technology for outreach and as a learning tool,” he promises. “They’re going to have had the experience of creating an audio podcast. They’ll also have an understanding of how to make a video podcast. You don’t necessarily have to be an expert to use this technology in libraries.
“I’m not going to say, ‘You all have to go back and make podcasts in your library’…but I think it’s important that everybody has an understanding of what it is,” he concluded.

If we’re feeling overwhelmed by all the relatively new tools and theories out there—podcasting, Cascading Style Sheets, and Experienceology come to mind—and wondering why we should be interested, we might find solace in the familiar truism that the more things change, the more they remain the same.
Reading Jean Freer’s “Louder Please” (Libraries & the Cultural Record, Fall 2006) and Vannevar Bush’s classic piece “As We May Think” from the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly suggests that facing up to and mastering the jargon and technology of our times is a never-ending challenge with ample rewards.
Freer, in examining American librarianship from 1926 through 1956, documents how “librarians struggled to define their role amidst competition from new media and information providers.” As we read about arguments as to whether phonograph records, films, and radio and television programs even belonged in library collections, we might look with longing at what feels to be a quaint debate—and then we have to wonder whether questions about the role of podcasting, Cascading Style Sheets, and Experienceology might be equally quaint to people looking back at us 30, 40, or 50 years from now. And just as Freer documents how “public and academic librarians produced films to promote their libraries” 50 to 80 years ago, we can already document how staff of libraries throughout the United States are producing podcasts with the same goal in mind. And much, much more.
Turning to Vannevar Bush, we find a great, imaginative, and creative mind writing at the end of the Second World War about someone who is “staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear.” Bush, as many readers probably know, described in great detail and with incredible prescience, ways of storing an entire encyclopedia on a device the size of a matchbox—flash drives, anyone?—and imagined a device (the “memex”) where we could “turn the crank” and produce exactly the information we were seeking—do we, between the lines, hear the birth of computer workstations connected to the World Wide Web, but without the crank?
What must have seemed absolutely fantastic in 1945 is commonplace and hardly fodder for conversation now: a “web of trails” which became our World Wide Web; a memex which in many ways is not too far removed from our typical computer workstation; “repositories” which are our servers; a “transparent platen” on top of the memex which has become our scanner; and a system of jumping from one item to another as hyperlinks routinely allow us to do today.
And just as our predecessors had to learn about and absorb the changes they encountered in the past, we need to take advantage of the resources we have to stay current in our endeavors so we can better serve the library members and guests who come in search of the assistance we can offer.
Next: David Free and Practical Podcasting and Videocasting for Library Staff

We don’t always post the information here, but Infopeople (okay, me) creates a podcast (MP3 audio format) version of its webinars after the live event. This audio version enables folks who have a hard time catching the webinars (either live or archived) another listening option. They are all linked on the appropriate archived webinar page and are also posted to iTunes. Here is a list of some recent podcast/webinar offerings (these links go to the MP3 files):

• Jul 22, 2008: Attracting Baby Boomers to Volunteer Service with Carla Lehn
• Aug 14, 2008: Understanding Health Literacy: Why It Is So Important and What Librarians Can Do to Help with Kelli Ham
• Aug 19, 2008: State Library Update with Susan Hildreth, Stacey Aldrich & Carla Lehn

You can view a complete list of Infopeople’s archived webinars & webcasts here.
Enjoy!

If we want to visualize a future drawing upon library mashups—combinations of data from different sources into a newly created tool for training-teaching-learning and many other purposes—we could do worse than to view a few of the search engines which are incorporating mashup technology into the way they display search results.
Jill Tinsley, an MLIS candidate from the University of Arizona, was among the presenters at the California Academic & Research Libraries North Information Technology (CARL North IT) Interest Group workshop “Mashup the Library” late last month at Santa Clara University, and her one-hour overview of “Information Visualization Using Mashups and Web 2.0 Tools” nearly inundated us with possibilities. (The PowerPoint slides, which were previously used for a New Media Consortium (NMC) presentation in February 2008, can be found at the bottom of an NMC page under the heading “Attachments” and provide fodder for hours of exploration on the topic.)
Starting with Grokker.com, she led us into a world of searching which currently draws from Yahoo!, Wikipedia, and Amazon.com to provide information on a wide variety of topics. Although the results can be viewed in a text-based “Outline” format, the fun begins when we choose the “Map View” format. The “map” is actually a large circle taking up about half of a screen, and includes smaller circles of interrelated topics; searching for the term “mashups” itself, for example, gives the large circle of the mashup universe, and smaller circles labeled “new application,” web applications, “music mashups,” and several others. If we choose to focus on music mashups, we click on the music mashup circle to view a new, larger circle with links within that category. By drilling down further into that visual display by clicking on new links, we continue until we find what we want or we zoom back out to the previous visual maps.
An entirely different display comes up through oSkope, which can be set to search Yahoo!, flickr, YouTube, and a few other sites we can select before proceeding. The results are displayed as a series of full-color thumbnail images, and we can manipulate the displays by choosing from several options on the screen. Placing the cursor on an image quickly brings up information about where the link will take the us and displays user tags which have been attached to that site.
The lesson here for teacher-trainer-learners is fairly obvious: if we want to display more visually interesting searches while engaged in workplace learning and performance, we can incorporate Grokker, oSkope, and many of the other tools which are quickly becoming available to us.
For further exploration: Online recordings of a dozen sessions presented during the NMC Symposium on Mashups held April 1 -3, 2008 are available, as are resources on nmcpedia. CARL North IT plans to post recordings of the “Mashup the Library” program. One other new development: another interesting example of mashups went live several days after the CARL North IT conference, in the form of the cuil search engine; it’s well worth exploring and has one the cleanest displays I’ve seen in online search results.

For trainer-teacher-learners who had not yet made time to read the New Media Consortium (NMC) – EDUCAUSE 2008 Horizon Report on emerging technologies, the California Academic & Research Libraries North Information Technology (CARL North IT) Interest Group workshop “Mashup the Library” last Friday at Santa Clara University provided a day of revelations.
Data mashups—“custom applications where combinations of data from different sources are ‘mashed up’ into a single tool”—received the bulk of the attention from NMC Vice President Rachel S. Smith and other presenters throughout the day, and those of us in attendance couldn’t help but walk away with an appreciation for this as both an old and new technology. Old, in the sense that mashups by different names and formats have been around for centuries in the form of data such as population figures combined with maps to provide graphic illustrations of how these pieces of information interact. New, in the sense that combining a Google Map with information about apartment rental data from craigslist is less than a few years old. As new technology tools such as VUVOX are developed and users combine data from different sources into VUVOX presentations, all of us involved in training-teaching-learning are going to find that we can push beyond the limits of what has previously been possible in designing and presenting effective learning opportunities in the library workplace.
The current ability to combine library location information with a Google Map to help library staff, members, and guests find library facilities is rudimentary compared to what is possible. A far more sophisticated mashup I recently encountered is the GeoLib project coming out of Florida State University College of Information under the direction of Christie Koontz; users can view mashups of maps and data including population characteristics from the U.S. Census as well as library-use statistics for thousands of American libraries.
And when we apply mashups to workplace learning programs, we don’t have to stretch much to imagine a new-staff orientation session prepared in VUVOX and delivered live, online, and even asynchronously through a mashup of graphics, links to pertinent documents, and connections to audio and audiovisual files created with Flip cameras and other easy-to-use tools which are being introduced to library staff through Infopeople workshops. The same tools might also be used to create introductory tours of libraries for new employees as well as for library members and guests via mashups delivered to cell phones as mobile broadband capabilities increase over the next couple of years.
Best of all is the probability that new authoring tools which are being developed will “enable non-technical users to create sophisticated products without programming,” the report’s authors confirm—which means that those of us who are more enamored of providing learning opportunities than in immersing ourselves in the complexities of coding will soon have incredibly productive tools at our fingertips.
Next: Mashups in the Search for Information

Because I’m a soft touch for creative uses of presentation tools, I was completely taken by New Media Consortium (NMC) Vice President Rachel S. Smith’s use of a cutting-edge online resource last Friday during an onsite event at Santa Clara University.
Serving as the first of several presenters at the California Academic & Research Libraries North Information Technology (CARL North IT) Interest Group workshop, “Mashup the Library,” Smith provided an engaging overview of the 2008 Horizon Report on emerging technologies (published jointly by NMC and EDUCAUSE) by using an emerging technology mashup tool: VUVOX.
To call VUVOX a step up from PowerPoint is like calling IMAX a step up from early versions of color television: the relationships and parallels are there, the results dynamically and explosively different. PowerPoint, at its best, offers a series of slides which can be interconnected through combinations of text, images, and links to websites as well as online audio and video files to produce a narrative flow—one slide at a time—for trainer-teacher-learners and other presenters. VUVOX, which is currently in its testing (beta) phase, functions as seamlessly as a Chinese scroll by using every online resource imaginable to provide an uninterrupted audiovisual flow of information. The result is visually stunning. And memorable.
As Smith herself noted in a brief conversation after her presentation, VUVOX was not specifically designed to be a formal training-teaching-learning tool; the VUVOX site itself promotes it as a way to “create one of a kind stories in an instant” by mashing up (combining) whatever video, audio, and text we have available. Recognizing the integral nature of story in training-teaching-learning, however, sets all of us up to explore VUVOX’s possibilities for onsite as well as online learning, and it appears that a well-designed VUVOX presentation can be an effective learning tool for live as well as for asynchronous learning if links to VUVOX presentations are created on a library intranet’s training site.
What was most engaging is that most audience members hardly commented on VUVOX and how she used it. Smith’s presentation, which was created with NMC colleague Alan Levine, is true to the spirit of first-rate training-teaching-learning experiences in that the tool is subservient to the information being shared with any audience she faces. It includes things as simple as copies of the Horizon Report covers for the past five years, screenshots of the Horizon Project wiki, links to videos illustrating the use of emerging technologies such as grassroots video, and an invitation to participate in the creation of upcoming Horizon Project reports. And it is up to the presenter or an individual viewer at a computer monitor how quickly or slowly the scroll moves since it is easy to pause, forward, or reverse the flow of the imagery.
Next: More on What the Horizon Report and Mashups Offer Trainer-Teacher-Learners