Second Life Workshops in an Academic Library or “Fluffy librarianship”.
I’ve been doing a lot of work with Second Life recently and wonder if I’m hanging out at the fluffy end of librarianship.
While my colleagues in our uni library are finding the best electronic resources to meet scholars’ needs, I’m giving 8 workshops in the next 2 months for the uni community in “Creating your avatar” and “Doing more with your avatar”. In my classes in a library PC lab, people are giving themselves silly names, bouncing on virtual trampolines, changing their clothes in front of their classmates, banging into walls and laughing a lot. If you want to see what we’ve been doing, here’s the course outline, murdochsecondlife .
My interest in Second Life began as an extension of an earlier Sims 2 addiction and a curiousity about how you would “do” a library there. I saw it as a geeky playtime, much the same way as Andrew Finegan makes great clips about libraries on YouTube in his spare time. Bit of fun.
Yesterday I had an extremely exciting invitation to fly to the other side of Australia to do some professional development with public librarians, all about Second Life. (I should be cool and pretend it happens every day). I love showing people Second Life for the first time and explaining to them how libraries are using it – people get very engaged and have that “wow” look on their faces. (Well, some have a “OMG that’s a load of crap” and others a “I feel motion sick” look).
I guess, I’m becoming known as “that librarian who knows about Second Life”…not sure that’s who I want to be. And my Second Life stuff is taking me away from the serious, grown-up edge of librarianship, like finding out more about open source library management software.
Ord Canning, a library avatar
I do think Second Life will have applications in education and for libraries, if it can just iron out that “have to have an expensive computer and huge amounts of bandwidth” glitch. And people continue to think that it’s OK for each avatar to take up as much energy as a real person in Brazil. With faster and cheaper computers it is possible that access to SL may become more equitable and less costly.
Behind the fluffiness of my workshops lies a point. I think online virtual worlds require a new literacy that you can only learn hands on. The Horizon Report 2007 identifies virtual worlds as one of six major trends in emerging technology that will impact on higher education, so I think our academics and students need to be able to evaluate this tool. Half the workshops were full the day the notice was emailed out, and they are now booked out, so there is certainly great interest.
I still feel like I’m maybe having too much fun…I’ll get over it…..
I’m one of those people that has a “that’s a load of crap” expression on my face when someone shows me Second Life.
However, I digress… I find open source library software exciting in the same way that you find Second Life exciting. I’m most excited by the fact that I can contribute to OSS projects, if I’m so inclined (in fact, I recently contributed to LibX). The problem is that nobody pays me to get excited about open source library software.
I want your job for your freedom
I agree – OSS projects and how we can apply them in libraries are exciting. We should be working hard to engage other librarians in this. We should be creating “proof of concept” projects and showing our colleagues how they make their lives easier.
Like you, most of my time following new things in librarianship (be it Second Life, blogging, library unconferences, creating a vodcast) is done in my own time, with slivers of it benefitting my workplace.
I am extremely lucky to have a library management who believe that it is worth putting staff time into emerging technology – so I do get to do fun things…on the proviso that I can communicate why they may be useful to our staff, and pass the skills on as quickly as possible.
This defines the projects I can work on – immediately engaging projects with the best chance of exposing staff to new skills and attitudes are my focus.
(My secret plan is that when they are all skilled up and still enthusiastic for new technology, I’ll hit them one, two, three with Firefox Extensions and widgets and embedded apps and….. )
Ha ha, keep having fun, and congrats on the invitation, that’s very cool!
I still have never been in second life, have never been into ‘live’ chatting, or computer games or anything like that, so I don’t think I’ll like it much, so can’t be bothered looking into it, have enough other things to learn and waste time on!
And I’m afraid I might like it, and get addicted…! Which I certainly don’t have time for!!