I’ve been reading the book meme (Con) , TV meme (Mal), travel meme (Ghylene), the film meme (snail), the two things about you meme (Ghylene) and the “what’s your start screen?” meme (Jenelle) in the 30 posts in 30 days blog posts.

Rather than write a post for each of  the memes, here is the shrink-lit version.

I snack with most activity,

Reading Garner, Helen or Smith, Zadie.

Books are never marked or mutilated,

I remember where my eyes were situated.

.

I don’t watch news, I do download stuff

Being Erica,  Big Bang, and Big Love

90 second ABC News on iPad saves my time

(Which I wouldn’t spend with Channel Nine)

.
Amsterdam is furthest North I’ve been,

Cygnet in Tasmania most Southern I’ve seen,

Calcutta’s bustle, history and vigour I’d recommend

But not to a squeamish or nervous friend

.
Being There, The Graduate, Singin’ in the Rain,

I could watch again and again,

I love movies shot with 3D

Sound of Music I’m yet to see*.
.

Two names I’ve had (from my mum),

Bugalugs and Sparrow Bum,

I’ve worked in a parade as a clown

And  in an orchard thinning apples down

.

Now for the starting screen

Briefest one you will have seen

‘Cause this is a shrinklit one

Here’s the ap that I find most fun

.

.

.

.

.*not really, I just wanted to give snail a heart attack – seen it 5 times and sang along each time

Post 12 of the  30 posts in 30 days challenge.

OK – in the attempt to get more personal in the 30 posts in 30 days challenge.. as promised yesterday and requested by Hoi… A blog post about my cat…

Her name is Nougat, after the brown and pink speckles in her cream fur.

She spends as much time as possible during Winter like a joey, zipped inside the front of my jumper.

She’s almost fifteen years old this year, very small, very vocal and eats twice as much as the average cat. When anyone visits she follows them about asking for a cuddle and making sure that they do to her satisfaction whatever they are there to do.

She’s a Cornish Rex. She has just the “down hair” layer in her coat, without the other two thick glossy layers of fur that most cats have. In 1950 a mutant barn kitten was bred back to his mother, and the breed started. Keeping herself warm takes much energy – hence the big appetite and snuggle compulsion.

Not content with creating a mutant cat, breeders went a step further and created a Siamese marked version, which is how Nougat got her bright blue eyes, torti points and conversationalism. The variation is known as a Sirex …. Yup that’s where my profile name comes from.

Oh – and as this photo taken tonight shows, she writes all my blog posts:

Post 12 of the  30 posts in 30 days challenge.

This post isn’t really  personal enough to fulfil my week of personal blogging part of the 30 posts in 30 days challenge. I promise that the next one will be about my cat.

Yesterday, I tweeted something that touches on two great conversations that are going on in the 30 posts in 30 days blogging community:

@katiedavis FWIW My problem with “Libs do Lady Gaga” was – nooo… don’t make them use catalog, get ur good stuff out where they are looking

It was in response to Kate‘s tweet a couple of minutes before,  talking about how she was in a debate over at Sophie’s blog about what was the “hub” of students’ experiences, how the library can position itself there and what the future and role will be for the library. The comment that she had just written was:

as new educational environments develop, the classroom is definitely not the hub – especially because in some contexts, there is no classroom, no physical coming together of the cohort.

imho, i think students’ hub is the web, full stop. there are nodes scattered around the web that represent particular places that they frequent – facebook, their favourite search engine, twitter, wherever comes next – but ultimately, i don’t know that students really care where on the web services and resources are positioned. It’s about whether they can find services and resources when they want them. the web is the hub – that’s their environment.

student’s couldn’t give a shit that libraries buy millions of dollars worth of content in aggregator databases and that it’s all authoritative and whatever else. they care that they can find the information that they want and need, when they need it, in the format they want it. in a student’s mind, if they do a google search, they should find everything. and who’s to say that attitude is wrong? rather than focus on directing students back behind our walls, why don’t we figure out some way to expose all of our content through google? are we focussing on the wrong problem here? yes, we want students to be literate in their use of information, but surely the answer is not to force them to use our clunky interfaces?…

Kate’s comments immediately gave me an earworm of  “you can use my catalog” – from the Librarians Do Gaga clip, hence the tweet. (And another couple of tweets  when someone admitted they hadn’t watched it – to the effect that I thought the librarians were cool, but wondered whether the message was one that we wanted to project)…

And then here comes the other conversation connected to my tweet (and other peoples’ comments)  Putting yourself out there . Mal talked about the Librarians Do Gaga clip in the context of librarians putting themselves out there, having fun, showing their voice and showing guts, initiative energy and imagination. Yep the clip showed all that. And yes, it was very worthwhile in that context. And I liked the production values too – great voice and a very good job with the scenarios and the editing. And full of tongue-in-cheek references to stereotypes that showed they were aware of them and *playing*. And in that context I absolutely applaud what they did.

My comment, though, was made in the context of a discussion about “forcing users to use our clunky interfaces”.  In that context, the vision of (albeit cool, well intentioned and technically clever) librarians endlessly repeating “you can use my catalog”  scares me. In the context of the discussion on Sophie’s post, some of the lyrics (which are here at Sarah Wachter’s site ) do read like “your’e doing it wrong if you’re not using our tools, even though you won’t understand them without librarians’ qualifications”…

I think part of putting yourself out there is to do with letting go of the context in which you will be read… So my tweet could come off as ill-tempered grumpypantsing if read out of context, and the Gagabrarians could come off as my worst nightmare if read in another …

I’m also open to the possibility that I was just grumpypantsing. Anyhow, this Norwegian video about plagiarism below made me feel a whole lot less grumpypantsy, although it’s slickness is almost antiGagabrarain….

Taking a leaf from two other 30 in 30 bloggers,  moonflowerdragon and newgradlibrarian‘, I’ll have a go at citing it…

Selvik, S. (Producer). (2010, May 27) Et Plagieringseventyr . Retrieved June 10, 2010 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwbw9KF-ACY&sns=em

Post 11 of the  30 posts in 30 days challenge.

With my week of personal posts, I may as well jump straight into something meaty. Con asked to know about

how you learn. How you choose what to learn. How you practise what you learn?

… and no, in answer to your question,  it’s not too meta… Kylie also wanted to know about this one.

It’s a bit like asking me how I choose which pocket of air I’m going to breathe next. Ummm… it just finds me and I just do it.

I don’t seem to have moments when I sit down and think “what shall I learn next?”, or “I’d like to know about xyz, I think I’ll go out an find out more about that”. I’m just like a vacuum cleaner sucking up everything that gets in my path – and I seem to find most things fascinating.

The more I read about ADHD the more I think that I am probably a case of ADHD gone right…or rightish. This would put me in some very good company.  People with ADHD don’t have problems with paying attention to things, they have problems with modulating their attention. This means that some kids with ADHD can get caught up doing a project for hours and hours without eating dinner – and their parents conclude that they can’t possibly have ADHD because they can pay attention so well. Kids with ADHD may have trouble switching off one channel of information (eg. visual) to pay attention to another (eg. auditory) – classic “oooh , look shiny!!!!!” stuff.

For me, I seem to be paying attention to everything all at once all the time, and I seem to have learned how to modulate this artificially. In maths lessons I used to draw the teacher and my classmates, which took the edge off my desire to pay attention to something else – so it actually helped me focus better on what the teacher was saying about maths. In conferences I take notes and tweet because it takes the edge off my mind that would otherwise be wandering, so helps me pay better attention to the speaker. I seem to need to switch on more than one channel (visual, kinesthetic ) at the same time so I can focus on listening – otherwise my need(?) for stimulation on the other channels makes me go off searching for it, and I lose track of what the speaker is saying.

How does this relate to learning? Well, being immersed in learning is one of the best modulators I have found. I suspect – and correct me if I am wrong – that I have a higher motivation to get into a state of “flow” than other people. This diagram from Wikipedia is a nice encapsulation of where flow sits in relation to relaxation, boredom, worry and control:

I am very, very lucky in that I don’t get bored.  Or really worried too much. But then again, I don’t spend a lot of time relaxing either. Whatever staying still and just being does for other people, being in a state of flow does for me. I used to meditate, which is a great way to still the mind,  and I find exercise a really beneficial way to relax. When I look at the chart above, though, I see that theses activities are still in the “High challenge, high skill” sector.

Hey – thanks to your question, I just learned that  Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (the main Positive Psychology flow guru) has a concept of  the “autotelic personality ” – people with a high level of curiousity and persistence and desire to do things “just because”, rather than external reasons. … maybe that’s me ??

But, that doesn’t answer how I decide what to learn, just that I am highly motivated to be learning all the time. It really does feel like whatever I end up learning just finds me. A common thread in my writing and projects in the last couple of years has been around people organising together outside formal and traditional structures – but I wouldn’t say that I consciously set out to learn as much as I could about this. As to practicing what I learn, again, it seems to just happen. I do like to get out of the abstract and set up a concrete project – but usually one that involves extending my skills and learning as I go, rather than repetitively doing the same task that I have thoroughly mastered.

I don’t know if it answered your question, please let me know if it didn’t.

Post 10 of the  30 posts in 30 days challenge.

“First have something to say”. That’s my cardinal rule of blogging, which is what makes this 30 posts in 30 days challenge…well… a challenge. It’s similar to the Twitter365 Challenge, where sometimes I ended up with the oddest photos just to take a photo of something…

I’ve had less to say over the last six months with a change of jobs and completing my studies, and this blog has reflected that.

A couple of days ago, Sue wondered about blogging about professional issues and the effect on one’s career – the effect of having too much to say and it being taken the wrong way. She kicked off from a couple of posts from the insightful, wise and direct Dorothea Salo who has been concerned about her blog damaging her career as she moves to new responsibilities. Con and bookgrrrl put a different slant on the topic, looking at one’s own perception of having something to say – what made one “worthy” to have a voice in the professional area (conclusion – sensibly- there is not qualifying criteria, just do it).

Kate’s response has been closest to where I am. She has no problem with blogging about professional issues. That’s why she created her blog. She blurs her personal and professional anyhow, but wonders whether she could now start putting more of the personal into her blogging.

I’m wondering the same. I have another 22 posts to go in the 30 posts in 30 days challenge. After a week of trying to do “think posts” I’m going to change my goalposts and aim for a week of getting more personal. I’m not going to avoid the professional, but will maybe push it over to librariesinteract.info .

Now, I was going to talk about my motivation for blogging and how I have so far blended/separated my personal/professional…except I have written a post’s worth already and after reading Michael Agger’s post about How We Read Online, I daren’t .

(Except to say that I find it really confronting to think about blogging personally. I think I have built up my readership around the professional topics and “voice” of the blog – and mixing it up might disappoint my readers who come here for library thoughts, not to find out about me.

Maybe it’s a bit like a restaurant though – mix it up every couple of years or go out of business ( although here I sit in Gino’s coffee shop in Freo that has been the same for 25 years or so…)

So – to keep it useful to my readers, what do you want to know? What would you like to hear about? What have I been omitting in the blog-me that you would like to know about? What’s something you’d like me to talk about? )

Post 9 of the  30 posts in 30 days challenge.

Link post – all the way…

Big Creative Commons news  in Australia today – version 3.0 licences were launched and  The Australian Parliament goes CC – with v3.0 . Hansard (the transcript of Parliamentary proceedings) will now be released under Creative Commons… both links and the quote below via the Creative Commons Australia site .

Hopefully most of you have seen the official launch of the Australian v3.0 licences earlier today.

We’re very pleased to announce that the licences, only a few hours old, already have their first significant adopter. A couple of weeks ago the Australian Parliament officially announced, via the Australian Library and Information Association’s mailing list, that it will be porting its centralhttp://www.aph.gov.au website across to a Creative Commons v3.0 BY-NC-ND Australian licence. This is the website which houses all the most important documents of the Australian Federal Government – including all bills, committee reports and, most importantly, the Hansard transcript of Parliamentary Sittings – so this is a major move for the Australian Government.

From the Australian Parliament announcement:

The Parliament of Australia is committed to open access to the resources it publishes to support a vibrant democracy. Recognising the important of ensuring access to its resources published on the website the parliament has approved publication under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/) instead of copyright protection. Full implementation will occur when the new web site is released in late 2010. Until then a notice appears on the copyright page advising of this change.
…
We are enormously excited at this step to open up parliamentary information.

Since its endorsement of open access as its preferred default in its response to the Gov 2.0 Report last month, the Federal Government has released the Budget, the NBN implementation study and the Gov 2.0 response itself all under CC licences. This latest announcement solidifies the government’s commitment to openness and transparency, and means that the entire public record of our government will now be available for non-commercial reuse by anyone, without the need for additional permissions.

Post 8 of the  30 posts in 30 days challenge.

Today I print out the final version of my thesis to hand in tomorrow. After 18 months of living with it is a great relief.  

I’m not sick of the topic. The idea that librarians are getting out there and developing their own software and sharing it is still very, very exciting to me. When I compare my findings to the other scant literature about motivations for organisations to develop Open Source, it looks like libraries do have different reasons – less focus on economics and more on functionality. After so long with the same topic, though,  I have lost the ability to critically look at my research and how I’m expressing it.

It is not a full Master’s thesis, just a way to top-up my Post Graduate Diploma to a Master of Information Management, designed to be finished in 6 months full-time. I’m so, so glad that the VALA Travel Scholarship gave me the chance to travel through the US and meet so many fantastic library heroes and be welcomed so warmly by them. As you can see from this embedded video of the Gables Bed and Breakfast in Philidelphia, I suffered great physical deprivation in the name of research:

I am not sure that I have the energy right now to continue further research into the topic, but there are questions I am itching for someone to find answers to… like:

• Is it libraries’ non-profit status that makes them less concerned about economics of Open Source than other organisations ?
• How does the software produced and the community that arises vary between libraries and higher education institutions that develop OSS like Zotero or Connex ?
• Do motivations and perceived risks for those who develop Open Source library software differ greatly from those who adopt Open Source software?
• Is there a correlation between being an already innovative organisation and developing Open Source Software? Adopting it? Not adopting it?

Post 7 of the 30 posts in 30 days challenge.

No and yes.

I’ve had my iPad for 9 days so far.

It’s good in bed.

Excellent in bed…and on my lap…and as a social gaming device with the whole family watching (and touching the screen) as we complete a level of Bejewelled or Plants vs Zombies together. That’s different from my iPhone, desktop, laptop or netbook. I can put it on the window sill to watch TED talks as I cook, and the speaker is loud enough to be heard easily – unlike my iPhone .

It is this form factor that makes it feel like a different class of device. I agree that most of the time it feels like a big-arsed iPhone.. . or rather it makes my iPhone suddenly feel too small and inadequate for the touch interface and viewing movies or browsing the web. To me it is more of an “at home” device than an out and about device, although I have paid Telstra $30 for 1GB of data for the next month. My main motivation for this was to use the Google Maps ap for navigating in the car – I’m not great at squinting at the iPhone screen as I miss yet another turnoff…

There have been criticisms that the iPad is more a consumption device than a creation device ( The iPad? Well, it’s not exactly the Apple of my eye ). It doesn’t multitask, it is hard to use the keyboard, has no direct audio or video input …. but….but…

This is the first generation of the iPad, the one made to suck in the early adopters, make us part with too much cash, the version with the cut-down features so that there is somewhere to go in the next generation iPad.

Two applications give me an idea of the potential of this as a creation tool. They are much better on the iPad than their equivalents on PC. They make me suspend my judgment about the iPad as a creation device – at least until we have had 6 months or so of people creating aps for the gesture and touch based interface.

iMockups is a wireframing application, used to create mockups of websites. If you’ve ever resorted to using paper cutouts of furniture to move them around on a floor plan to work out how to furnish a room, then you have an idea what it is like to use iMockups.  Being able to flick a data entry box to one side of the page, or pull on the edge of a header to make bigger, or use a gesture to capture all elements and move them all up a smidge makes it all so easy. I was using post-it notes on an A3 bit of paper to layout the new webpage for our library, but this is even better. I did the one below in just a couple of hours while sitting on the sofa watching tele at the same time… easy peasy … are we revolutionary yet???

The other application that I have used to paw my device, in ways I am unused to, is Autodesk Sketchbook Pro. I found out about this when someone in my Twitter stream (Kim? Joyce?) pushed out a link to these notes taken during a conference session:

I have been fiddling about with it in a rather desultory way, but I have managed to produce digital drawings much better than I have with any other kind of setup. I don’t think I could do what Rachel did quite yet, but I also think that with a bit of practice it would not be far away.    I don’t think I would reach the level of the demonstration video , although using the symmetry option I was able to draw quite a funky human face like in the demo.:

Post 6 of the 30 posts in 30 days challenge.

I didn’t quit Facebook on Quit Facebook Day last week…. or Plurk, or Vimeo, or Second Life, or Odeo, or Squidoo, or Plaxo or …. you get the idea. If I go and check at namechk.com I can quickly see how many services I registered for, but do not use.

I don’t use Facebook any more. I kept my account way after I found it vaguely useful because I was working in a job where I had to know how students were using it. I learned how to set up a page and create a Facebook ap. Now that I no longer need such an intimate idea of how students communicate, if I (or the library users) thought it was useful, I could set up a library presence in Facebook and communicate with users. This is probably not likely soon.

I use Facebook differently from how my neighbour, kids’ friends or other librarians might do. Understanding that there are many ways that tools are used, how these tools work generally and having enough tech skill to master them in half an hour of playing about are essential skills for librarians, especially something so widely used as Facebook. This does not mean that I have to keep an account on a service that I no longer find useful.  I was rather pissed off when Stephen Abram wondered on his blog:

… how many info pros will announce to the world they don’t have the information skills to manage privacy by leaving Facebook today. If they do have the skills they won’t for long as outsiders. It seems to me that it should be a reasonable user expectation of librarians and information professionals that they should be able to manage privacy settings and use the full range of web tools. I also would expect to be able to receive informed, current and excellent advice and training on how to deal with the emerging social tools from my professionals in the social institutions I frequent (public libraries, schools, univerisities, colleges, etc.). (Today is Quit Facebook day for Dummies )

There are many valid reasons why other librarians made the personal choice to quit Facebook – the way it keeps changing the privacy goalposts, the walled garden aspect, the dependency on one platform, the social awkwardness of refusing a “friend” request… Just like it’s valid for me to have kept my profile, but not use it – although I may be the dummy for uncritically keeping my profile on a service that I no longer find useful.

Understanding this fluidity of use, different personal approaches to information and online tools and that there are no “one size fits all” tools for everyone are essential skills for librarians.

If you want to see one way the conversation about Facebook, quitting and librarians played out, check out the comments on Stephen’s post, Walt Crawford’s post in response  ( Does every librarian need to be an involved expert on everything?) and the 55 comment long thread on Friend Feed . Many valid and varied points are made.

Post 5 of the 30 posts in 30 days challenge.

Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Thanks to Fiona for reminding me about that, after my last post about the crucial role that libraries play in the freedom of ideas.

(…yes, it’s another link post, not a think post…)

Post 4 of the 30 posts in 30 days challenge.