I’ve been practising my presentation for the Libjam session at the Library 2.0 and beyond: getting our hands dirty unconference on Friday.

To give people time to write the program up on the wiki, and to get the energy level pumping, we decided to schedule a Libjam after we had set the topics for the day. The Libjam is a chance for people to talk about what they are doing in their libraries to get their hands dirty with Library 2.0. In. Just. Three. Minutes.

It sounded like a piece of cake, and like a good idea at the time we proposed it.

After trying to yell, talk twice my regular speed and cut half my slides – yes, I’m dumb enough to try to use Powerpoint – to pack it all into three minutes,  I’m coming to terms with how hard it is to say *anything* in just three minutes.

When I watched people at the Webjam Perth last year, they seemed to fit so much information into their presentations, and some of them even seemed calm about it all. I’ve gone back and watched some of the videos of the evening and am now really in awe of them .

One thing is for sure, it will be an adrenaline filled presentation. Not sure it will be intelligible. Maybe a pecha kucha would be a little less stressful ?

From the Libjam topics currently on the wiki, it looks like everyone else will be as stretched as I will be to smoosh it all into three minutes too. Wonder how strict we should be with the “exactly three minutes” thing? Much more of an arena sport (think Christians and Lions) if we stick to it. May the games commence!

• Murdoch University Library – web presence project
• Edith Cowan University – our learning 2.0 curve
• What happened since my last unconference – Hoi (really love to hear about YOUR stories too!!)
• DPI – effectively encouraging / promoting the use of Web 2.0 applications
• Curtin University Library – the story of a library blog
• SLWA Blog & wiki proliferation – any & all from SLWA
• Health Dept. – A Wiki as a collabrative tool in the Health Library network
• Water Corporation – promoting the library with a Library Toolbar

About nine months ago I made a screencast about the LibX, the Firefox Extension that puts the library into the user’s space. This was to explain to library staff how the tool worked and why it would be useful in our library.

A couple of months ago I made another screencast, this time aimed at our library users.The LibX toolbar was released live at MPOW a couple of weeks ago.

I thought I’d post a bit about the decisions I made when creating the screencast, aimed at those who haven’t really tried screencasting before.

LibX is a very complex tool with many features. Instead of explaining absolutely everything LibX can do, I just highlighted five features that I thought would be most useful to staff and students. These were:

1. Searching the library straight from the toolbar
2. Any ISBN on any browsed page being hotlinked back to a search in our library
3. Our logo being inserted into pages like Amazon.com so that users could check whether the library has a book
4. Link resolver (SFX) inserted in Google Scholar, so users can click to get full text of journal articles
5. Being able to right click on any passworded site to see whether the library provides access – and then enter login and password to get straight to the site.

Even if LibX only did those five, we would have released it, so I looked on any other functions as extras that the staff and students could find out for themselves. It made it a lot easier to work out what to say…and was a bit of “letting go of perfect“.

It was my first attempt at using Camtasia Studio. Before I began recording, I opened all the windows that I would need for the demo – one already on Amazon.com, one on Google Scholar etc.- and then just clicked on them to bring them to the front when I talked about them.

I didn’t have long to do it, so I thought ” I’m just going to run through this and leave in any mistakes” – more letting go of perfect. I’m not sure it was a useful decision, but I think I sound more natural and conversational once I get going, and that maybe mistakes actually wake people up and make them re-engage with the material. Then again, I may just sound like an unprofessional dork.

The only comment on the video at YouTube.com is “Your voice scares me”, so maybe Andy Powell is right when he muses that “our desktop use of audio and video in particular tends to highlight an amateurish approach to production. ” (What Web2.0 teaches us … )

The audio level is rather low, and uploading it seemed to make it even quieter on some sites. I tried uploading to YouTube, blip.tv and viddler. Blip.tv gave the least fuzzy screens when I embedded it elsewhere. Next time I would probably try using something like Tubemogul, which allows you to do just one upload that is then distributed to many photo sharing sites.

Anyhow, here’s the video from blip.tv, Murdoch University Library Toolbar (LibX) .

What do you think you are doing?

I think it’s worth asking that several times a day. This post isn’t a treatise about zen mindfulness, although that’s a good thing too… It’s more about understanding the motivations of other people, especially those well intentioned folk who get right up your nose.

I think we’ve all worked with people who just don’t seem to “get it”, when “it” is that thing that we are passionate about. This is a frequent complaint I’ve heard from other librarians and educators who are passionate about new technology and its transformative powers –

“those people back at my workplace, they just don’t get it”.

He doubted her seriousness Uploaded to Flickr on January 20, 2008by ben pollard

Friend of mine, here in the heart of Fremantle hippyland, did a “discover yourself” kind of course at our local Adult Education house. The exercise involved pairing up and one person asking the other “Who are you?” for 10 minutes. As soon as the enquirer had an answer, she asked it again, and again and again. By the time my friend had reached the three minute mark, she’d exhausted all the obvious answers and was beginning to surprise herself with what she was saying – it was all true stuff about who she was, but not always obvious – even to herself.

I’m not advocating chanting “who are you?” at your co-workers over and over … but it might be a useful exercise to take some time out to ask “what does this person think she is doing?”.

Let’s take a couple of examples.

When you are answering a student question on the reference desk, what are you doing? If you believe you are there giving the student the information that she needs, you will give a very different answer to a co-worker who believes she is there educating the student how to find information for herself.

If you think that you come to work to catalogue books, you are going to do things very differently to your colleague who believes she is there to provide access to information. If you think you come to work so that you can fund your real passion -restoring old lawnmowers – you are going to behave very differently to someone who comes to work because they would go around the bend looking after their small children all day. That’s different to someone who comes to work because she believes what she is doing changes lives in a good way, or that doing a good day’s work is reward in itself.

And then, how about adding in who your co-workers think they are serving? What if you are in a public library and think you are there to serve people who cannot otherwise buy books or navigate information, when your boss thinks you are there to serve the councillors on local government who fund your library?  How about in an academic library? What if you think you are serving the students and need to be up to date with the technology they are using in their everyday lives, whereas your colleague believes she is serving the academics and needs to support the traditional teaching methods used by these people?

I guess that it’s useful to throw “charitable reading” into the mix of questions. Looking at what other people are doing and where you have no information to the contrary, interpreting it in the best intentioned way on their part.

I think it’s easy, when you see someone who is not jumping on your bandwagon , to think it is because they are uncaring, or wrong, or not passionately engaged in their work. It’s probably worth taking time out to ask a few questions:

1.Why am I doing this job?

2. Who do I think I am serving?

3. What do I think I am doing?

4.Why is she doing this job?

5. Who does she think she is serving?

6. What does she think she is doing?

7. How could I read what she is doing in the most charitable possible way?

Maybe, just maybe, it would be a useful exercise to actually write down 10 different answers to these questions, and see whether the obvious drops away and something a little closer to the truth emerges.

Then, how about going back and answering this question:

8. How would she answer the questions above?

When those questions are done with, you will probably be better equipped to answer  the important question:

9. Where does the bridge need to be built and what’s the best way to do it ?

Thanks to Gary Hayes for sharing his adventures as he has explored over 50 virtual worlds as part of a commercial report that he is writing. He has recorded over 40 worlds in the clip below, which he says he has shared publically  because it:

demonstrates how ubiquitous, popular and streamlined many of these spaces are becoming across the intraweb / ‘cloud’

His post about it is here: 2008 Metaverse Tour Video: The Social Virtual World’s A Stage and the original clip on YouTube is here:  2008 Metaverse Video Tour – the social virtual world’s a stage .

I gave a talk on 16 July 2008 as part of the the Academic Work Matters series at MPOW .

I outlined the flexibility of blogging platforms and how blogs can be used in universities. I then talked a bit about the WordPress MU blogging platform that we are using to run a pilot project to provide blogs across the campus. (more about the specifics in a later post)

Here’s an outline of the talk:

1. What’s a blog?

• 1.1 Elements of a typical blog
• 1.2 How people find blogs
• 1.3 How people read blogs

2. Why blog?

• 2.1 Context – changes to scholarly communication
• 2.2 How people use blogs
• 2.3 Blog hosting options

3. Murdoch Blogs

• 3.1 Pilot project
• 3.2 Why Creative Commons?
• 3.3 How to get a blog
• 3.4 Customising how your blog works
• 3.5 Customising how your blog looks

4. Decisions to make about your blog

I recorded the audio during the talk. I was going to synchronise it to my slides at slideshare.net using their slidecast editing tool, but I used a lot of slides with very quick transitions and the tool couldn’t handle it. I got half way through syncing the audio on Camtasia and then just gave up.  So the audio is below and the slides embedded on this post and you’ll have to click in time.

You can listen to the audio here Blogging at Murdoch University: What, why and naked hamsters . At the blog site, click on the “Audio MP3” symbol. Otherwise check out: http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/let/Outside/Murdoch_blogs_Greenhill.mp3

And here are the slides: Blogging at Murdoch University: what, why and naked hamsters

Thank you to fellow Aussie library bloggers Fiona  (who has a great personal site using WordPress) and Peta (whose Blogs masquerading as  post gave me some examples ). Apologies to Jim Groom at the University of Mary Washington. I raved about his fantastically thought out and documented WordPress Mu installation – good. I claimed it was hosted by a totally different university – bad.

The last two Saturday nights in our household, we’ve output the laptop to our large TV screen and watched internet content. More later about what we watched, but I wonder how many people are blanking out the face of their tele and putting on internet content?

Marketers need to respond to changes in how people consume content. This post is just an observation of a couple of changes I’ve seen in the last few days, not a sustained, detailed argument about changes necessary.

Last night we watched the final “Gruen Transfer“, downloaded from ABC TV here. The panel were discussing a “Soccer idol” kind of cable TV program, sponsored by a breakfast cereal…so the logo appears over 400 times in the first half hour. One of the panel mentioned that it’s “almost impossible to reach the male 18-24 demographic” via traditional TV ads.This kind of program is one attempt – “we give you entertainment (something you want) and you give us your attention (something we want)”. Very Cluetrain.

If you are not from Australia, but want to watch an intelligent and very funny program about how advertisers think and sell products, then the shows are available for download for the next few weeks. Check out “the Pitch” at the end where two advertising companies are challenged to produce the best ad for the unsellable – holidays in war zones, spending nothing, whale meat…

Yesterday print media did something different too. To sell more copies, several newspapers on the other side of Australia included a free copy of Spore Creature Creator . This new game from EA, which is being marketed as a phenomena as popular as the Sims, can already be downloaded online, but only includes 25% of the anatomy catalogue. The other 75% is on the free DVD as well. So…. traditional newsprint is becoming the distribution point for one of its greatest rivals – gaming.

….back to what we’ve watched on the last couple of weekends. If you want to see content better than I’ve ever seen on TV, I’d advise you to unplug your tele for a couple of hours and watch these too. Both transcend their subject matter to tell fascinating personal stories.

Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture: achieving your childhood dreams

Randy Pausch died on 25 July from pancreatic cancer. He was a Computer Science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. The “Last Lecture” is a CM tradition where an academic gives the lecture containing what they’d tell their students if they only had one lecture to give. This lecture ranges over Randy’s childhood dreams, his career (including designing the Aladdin carpet ride at Disneyland) through what he learned on the way. Be prepared to laugh out loud and shed more tears than you would watching Steel Magnolias.

An anthropological introduction to YouTube.
Michael Wesch runs the Digital Enthnography program at Kansas State University and previously made The Machine is Us/ing Us , A Vision of Students Today and Information R/evolution….which you *should* have watched last year. With his students, he created 40 minutes of video to support the talk he gave at the Library of Congress. The focus is on what it means to talk to a webcam and upload it to YouTube.

Today I visited Julian Stadon’s SLARiPS installation at the John Curtin Art Gallery at Curtin University. It is part of their current exhibitions until 1 August 2008. The idea? Put on a headset with a webcam attached, look through a pair of goggles, watch an avatar jump out of Second Life and hold it on a paddle while you move it down onto your desk.

Julian kindly let me film the installation, which explains it so much better than words could:

Second Life Augmented Reality in Physical Space