Library Video Game

I spent a large part of the weekend working on my Flash ActionScript programming to make an educational video game for our English composition course (the basic research paper). It's nowhere close to being finished, but you can get through it all the way.

Last week, I looked up Camtasia's ability to create interactive components to tutorials. I was able to get Flash last year and learned the basics back then, though drew the line at programming anything more complicated than a button. I believe I could have done this with much less of a learning curve with Camtasia or the other one they're always talking about on listservs, including multiple choice quizzes at the end. And they probably would have been able to print at the end how many the student got right. The idea of having wasted time learning Flash upset me, though getting the software might have been more difficult than getting Flash (it turned out the college had an extra, unused license at the time).

Anyway, I guess that helped me find a bit more motivation to learn some basic programming to

move beyond what Camtasia could do (it's the stubborn Irish blood coming out in me). You can actually do quite a lot with just Beginning Game Programming for Dummies and some good problem-solving skills. I can now tally up how many right answers a student gets for text-input, multiple-choice, and drag & drop questions. I can make a little guy move and send him to new screens when he runs into a particular area. I can make the buttons move around the page and move to the next screen only when they have clicked on all of the right buttons... okay, so that might not sound like all that much, but you can do a lot with it.

I'm hoping some of my colleagues and fellow librarian friends can help me come up with some other activities to make this more fun and varied. Please send me any ideas you have!

Here Comes Everybody

I finished Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody last night. I had read a review on Shelfari that said this book didn't say anything new, but was still worth reading. I think that sums things up. Anyway, here are some of the interesting points I took away.

• Communications between groups is part of what makes us human, so any technologies that change how we do that will change society.
• There are three levels of interactivity that increase in difficulty: Sharing (Flickr), Collaborating (Wikipedia), and collective action.
• Not just anything counts as "user-generated content," it has to find an audience first.
• Lots of the stuff on MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter (etc.) seems so banal and pointless. Why is that? Because they're not talking to you! This is interesting since it's a public place to write messages to only certain people.
• There are some times when people don't want professionally-produced content. He gives the example of singing Happy Birthday to his kids, they don't want a recording. This extends to journalism, photography, and other things as well.
• In the past, there was Broadcast Media, which was one-way and one-to-many; and there was Communications Media, which was two-way and usually one-t0-one. Now we have ways of producing content that can be many-to-many. However, fame still applies. A famous blogger cannot give each reader individual attention, it's not socially possible with the imbalance of writers to readers.
• "Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring" (105).
• Wikipedia is the result of a never-ending, collective argument.
• In the 1960's, they thought improved communications would cut down on people's reason to travel. Evidence has since shown that the opposite is true. The better communication systems are, the more people travel.
• New technologies make it easier for odd people to find each other, such as Meetup helping stay at home moms (SAHMs), witches, ex-Jehovah's Witnesses, etc. It also helps terrorists and groups that don't have societal approval like the pro-anorexia movement.
• Throughout the book, there is a theme of the online influencing real life, rather than replacing it. People are using online tools to act on real problems, to create support groups, and to meet up with people who have unusual shared interests. People aren't just sitting around on their computers and not meeting people face to face.

There was an interesting quote that involved librarians that I would love to hear him talk about more, since he studies information but not in the context of libraries. The first quote was this:

"In particular, when a profession has been created as a result of some scarcity, as with librarians or television programmers, the professionals are often the last ones to see it when that scarcity goes away. It is easier to understand that you face competition than obsolescence" (58-59).

That's the last time he mentions librarians, but shortly after he continued a similar train of thought:

"Professional self-conception and self-defence, so valuable in ordinary times, become a disadvantage in revolutionary ones [...] In some cases the change that threatens the profession benefits society, as did the spread of the printing press; even in these situations, the professionals can be relied on to care more about self-defense than about progress. What was once a service is now a bottleneck."

The printing press comment was talking about its effect on the professional scribes, and how it made them obsolete. I don't think he thinks that tv programmers are in danger, but I don't know what he means by librarians. Does he think we are obsolete? I really want to ask...

So overall, after being very impressed with the talk he gave at a Web 2.0 conference, I guess I had expectations that were too high of this book. Still, I got some interesting points. It may have all been said before, but it is said in a new way, he's very easy to read, and he illustrates his points with great examples.

So much to say

I am really liking a blog I recently started reading, called Please Be Quiet. She was able to go to LOEX 2008 and provides summaries for the sessions she attended. I am so jealous now that I am reading these summaries.

I am particularly interested in Session 3, and the idea of starting off an instruction session with Internet searching since that's what they know. Then move them into Google Scholar, then into the databases. This provides a better opportunity to show how database searching is different and explain why (more complicated = more sophisticated and precise!).

I need some good ideas for next fall to jump-start my teaching, and I think this may be the first thing I try. It's not active learning, but we can get some hands-on activities in there and it could be really great.

However, I will have to figure out how to fit in reference books into this structure...

Tech-Savvy Students?

I had a class yesterday afternoon even though it is summer. They're on their way to London and Prague for two weeks as part of a business May Term course. I was helping them get set up with a class blog on Blogger and a Flickr group to assemble thoughts and pictures on the trip for their families and future students. This is definitely an experiment and I can't wait to see the results.

So I asked the nine students if any of them kept a blog on MySpace or Facebook, or any other program. None of them raised their hand. I had thought a few would have used this feature of social networking. When I got to Flickr, I asked them how many had a Flickr account, and only one of the nine raised their hand. I should have asked how many posted pictures on MySpace or Facebook, I probably would have gotten more hands.

I have been assuming that these students are using all of the major Web 2.0 tools that I have become obsessed with, but I think that's a wrong assumption. I know they're using MySpace and Facebook, I've asked in large groups before and nearly everyone raises their hand. I think next time I have the change, I would like to hear what features they use, and how they use them.

I hope they have fun blogging. This could be a great product when the trip is over.

Censorship in Academia

I was listening to the radio this morning and got very interested in this story. At first, I thought I couldn't tie it into my blog, but then I realized it has several things to do with what my blog is about. The first is academia, and the second is censorship.

Even before I knew I would be working in academia, it drove me nuts to know how liberal academia tends to be. You can smeer feces on a statue of Jesus and call it art, you can burn American flags, you can claim to be Native American when you're not, you can sleep with your students, and you are usually protected by the administration. Yet voice one conservative opinion and you're in a lot of trouble.

There is an upper-level human resources manager from the University of Toledo that has just been fired for writing an editorial saying the Gay Rights movement does not have anything to do with the Civil Rights movement since being gay is a choice. She is African American, but I'm not sure that is a central issue. She was not representing the University of Toledo in her editorial.

I strongly disagree with what she says. I don't believe that being gay is a choice. For the first time in my life, I am fairly close to a gay couple. I had no idea it was that hard to be gay in our society, and I would happily go to their wedding if they were allowed to have one. If only all heterosexual relationships could be such beautiful examples of love and partnership as theirs is, the world would be a better place.

However, I believe that as I have the right to say this, she has the right to disagree. In the video, she seems like a well-educated, intelligent, reasonable woman. She says as a human resources person, she has hired homosexuals and heterosexuals without discrimination. She believes that others have the right to disagree with her and she respects their opinion. If her practices at work were discriminatory, then she should be fired in a heartbeat and no human resources department should ever hire her again. But that does not seem to be the case. She simply stated her opinion, and for that she was fired.

I suppose I can't help showing my political beliefs in this blog. I am very liberal on certain issues such as gay rights, women's issues, and the environment. Yet there are many that I am very conservative on, such as welfare and education. I'm a libra, I can't pick one side or the other and go through life struggling for balance!

I wish Ms. Dixon luck in her fight to protect free speech. It would be a scary blow to academia if she loses.

Metageeking

I met a friend from library school this weekend and did typical librarian stuff like go to Trader Joe's (food) and pour over the collection in a great used bookstore (books). The only thing missing was cats, but we certainly talked about them enough. What else to librarians talk about for fun other than food, books, and cats?

She taught me a new word when we were in the bookstore. I said that I wish I had a phone with Internet access so I could directly put book titles into my Shelfari wish list. Writing it on paper isn't good enough for me anymore! She exclaimed, "Talk about metageeking!"

This word intrigues me. My library school friends are technically up with things, most of us took the information architecture class that required writing HTML and CSS code from scratch without Dreamweaver. We stay in touch on facebook, Shelfari, and blogs. Most of us use RSS feeds and iGoogle, are addicted to cell phones and texting (okay, I haven't got into sending texts, but am okay with receiving them). This list would go on if I stopped to think of other technologies that are very ingrained in how we live. As I play with these more and read more about them, I know I am becoming more of a geek than I already was. I have to stop myself when I start rattling off geeky stuff to people who are not as into these technologies as I am (which is most of the people I have daily interactions with).

I am very excited to have a new word to describe what I'm doing... "Excuse me, I just started metageeking again. Please let me start over in English!"

Grateful student, grateful librarian

I was still in my office at 5 one afternoon this past week when the reference phone rang. The librarians normally go home at 4, and I wasn't sure if I really wanted to answer it. But I knew I wanted to help whoever it was, so I did.

It was a legal assistant student in Florida who was looking for an obscure, old book and we were the only library she could find that had it. Even I couldn't find it in WorldCat until a co-worker showed me a new trick, and then it turns out only 13 libraries in the country still have it, most in Florida. We kept it because the author had something to do with our college at some point.

Anyway, she only needed one chapter, so I told her to contact her public library and see if they could send the request through the traditional ILL means, and if that didn't work, I gave her my e-mail address. The public library wasn't able to do it, so on Thursday I scanned the chapter and sent it to her.

She called and sent the following e-mail:

Mary-This is PERFECT!!!!!! I got it just fine and have already forwarded it along. You are such a dear!! I can't tell you how very much I appreciate this!!THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!!! YOU'RE NO. 1!!! Please let me know if/when I can return the favor!

She said that she was a middle-aged woman, which is probably why she was so dedicated to finding this one obscure book, and why she expressed her gratitude so profusely. You can bend over backwards for the traditional students, but they usually either don't care enough or are too over-committed to care as much about finding the resource or the effort people took to help them. I'm over-generalizing here and I love our students. But sometimes profuse gratitude from anyone is enough to make a librarian very grateful for that opportunity to help.