presentations

Live interview via Second Life

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In an act of great faith in technology, I’m being interviewed live via Second Life next Tuesday. It will be screened on the big screen at the Experimedia at the State Library of Victoria, on the other side of Australia.

I had great fun with Indra from SLV last night getting the technical setup smoothed out and refitting her avatar with new skin and clothes, even eyes, so she will look the part for the interview Thanks to the two techies at SLV who were helping her out and stayed after their home time.

I just sent this email to our local librarians’ list, WAIN. Hope it doesn’t make the Technology Gods to rain all over Second Life next Tuesday …..

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I’m being interviewed live next Tuesday by Margie Anderson, ALIA Victorian Local Liaison Officer, about what Murdoch University Library has been doing in Second Life. The event will be screened on a big screen in Experimedia in the State Library of Victoria, as part of their “Outside the Box” series of professional development events.

I’ll be sitting in a PC lab at Murdoch Library for the interview, which we will be conducting via Second Life using two avatars and a couple of headsets. Anyone who would like to pop in and watch what happens from my end would be welcome. I’ll be focusing on ensuring the tech setup works, so may not be a stunning hostess, but will explain what I can. You will be able to hear/see the live interview on the lab screen…all, of course, technology permitting ….

The publicity info from the State Library of Victoria is below.

Details:
DATE: Tuesday 22 April 2008
TIME: 4:15pm – 5:30pm
VENUE: Murdoch University Library
ROOM: South Wing Level 1, 1.015
RSVP: Please let me know if you are coming by emailing me before midday on Tuesday:
k dot greenhill at murdoch dot edu dot au

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Get a Second Life! – An interview not to be missed

Join Margie Anderson, ALIA Victorian Local Liaison Officer and Second Life newbie interviewing Kathryn Greenhill, Emerging Technologies Specialist, Murdoch University Library in Second Life on Murdoch University Island! Margie will explore, with Kathryn, the library workshop series that led to Murdoch University purchasing an island in Second Life, the rationale behind the purchase, how the island is managed, projects run on the island and what they have learned from the experience.

Join in the discussion about the use of Second Life within the library and information industry and share your ideas about how Second Life can be utilised to enhance services to our users. Please email margie.anderson@alia.org.au with any questions you might like included in the interview.

Details

Tuesday 22nd April, 6.30 – 7.30pm

Venue: Experimedia, State Library of Victoria

Bookings: 8664 7555 or bookings@slv.vic.gov.au for catering purposes

Free Entry

This program is part of Outside the Box, a series of professional development events presented by the State Library of Victoria in partnership with the Australian Library and Information Association

Michael Stephens’ visit

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Michael Stephens gave a rocking good workshop in Perth this morning.

He’s posted details of his Hyperlinked Library talk on Tame the Web, including the slides use in the Australian version of his presentation and LINKS from the presentation. Michelle McLean gave a great summary of the Melbourne session, The Hyperlinked Library – a presentation by Michael Stephens.

With such rich information already on the web, this post instead talks about a couple of questions raised by the audience, and a few of the take-homes I got from the presentation.

Two audience questions

Web presence and employment

Michael showed a job advertisement for a senior library position that asked for links to the candidate’s “online presence”. Lutie Sheridan from ECU raised the concern that cases like this may unfairly bring a candidate’s private life into their professional arena. We temporarily went off on an interesting tangent about the effect of an online presence on employment – including images/comments about someone published by third parties.

Being too seamlessly in the user’s space ?

After the presentation, Lucia Ravi from the State Library of Western Australia asked what would happen to our funding if we used Web 2.0 so well that we became invisible to our funding bodies. What if we go so far into the users’ space, and are so successful at making the experience user-centred, that the user doesn’t even notice that it is the library brokering the connections to the information they need? (I hope I paraphrased the question right ???)

I think the question is a really interesting one – and that the answer probably lies in promoting our reputation as a reliable, unbiased, easy to use resource …. so that when users are linked mysteriously to the information they need, they look to see whether Brand Library was involved.

“Take-homes” for me

Presentation style

Michael wasn’t frightened to simplify or go back to first principles. He had obviously worked very hard to strip his talk of jargon and any buzz words that would make people glaze over. He was able to build from simple ideas and then keep the audience with him as he elaborated. They trusted him and were prepared to listen because his choice of words and attitude made it clear that he wasn’t going to do anything to make them feel dumb.

Makes me realise that when I am presenting, I often miss out essential basic information because it feels like I am insulting the audience by presuming that they don’t know things. Unless I am very, very well rehearsed, I have a tendancy not to give enough background or explanation of an idea before I try to elaborate on it.

He also slipped in story telling and audience participation (“who here does x?”) in a very subtle and effective way.

Hivebrarian, Twitbrarian

When Michael go to the bit in his presentation where he asked “does anyone here twitter?”, I was actually twittering someone to tell her she had just been quoted in his talk….. continuous partial attention and all that …. Anyhow, I mentioned Amy Kearn’s great “in-the-shower” idea from a couple of days ago.

She’s exploring how to capitalise on the fact that there are librarians on twitter 24/7 , and maybe creating some kind of “the librarian is always on” volunteer reference service. If you want to find more information, it is here at Amy Kearns’ wiki . Various folk have been working on the idea via twitter, including playing with channels and XML feeds. Cindi, Joshua and Robin have all added to the discussion.

My final note
The last sentence on my notes of the session is:

Re-evaluate KPIs!!! Need to do this – re-evaluate KPIs!!!!

I guess I’ll be thinking about Key Performance Indicators and what constitutes meaningful and relevant evaluation of our services in 2008.

Brave new world

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Where you can buy Rocket Packs for $2.00.

Where you can buy Penguin Paperback Editions of your favourite contemporary authors.

Where you can stupidly offer to do three presentations and one workshop over five days in two different cities – and not realise that probably one would be sufficient. Overexposing, excessive and stress producing (but thrilling and stimulating too). If you see me at any of these sessions, come up and say hi.

1 February 2008 Friday 3:15 – 5pm Second Life workshop. Creating avatars and doing more with avatars Web 2.0 : Beyond the Hype, Brisbane.

2 February 2008 Saturday 1:15 – 1:45 Hot Topic Presentation Five Social Software Sites that libraries shouldn’t ignore Web 2.0 : Beyond the Hype, Brisbane.

5 February 2008 Tuesday 11:20 – 11:50 Paper: Do we remove all the walls? Second Life Librarianship VALA conference, Melbourne

6 February Wednesday 2:35 – 3:05 Paper: Libraries interact: collaboration and community in the Australian library blogosphere with Con Wiebrands (but without Fiona Bradley the other author as she’s in the Hague having exciting fun doing marvels with the website for IFLA). VALA conference, Melbourne

I’m looking forward to meeting library folk from all over Australia, hearing new ideas and especially meeting some of the the lint folk for the first time (watch librariesinteract.info for details of the first Australian Library Bloggers’ Dinner in Melbourne on Monday 4 February – all bloggers or blog curious welcome). Not looking forward to those “mix ‘n’ mingle” events (like the Conference Dinner), where I get totally overwhelmed and am never sure quite what I’m meant to be doing.

By the way, if you’re wondering about the Rocket Pack. Look here .

Five social software sites that libraries shouldn’t ignore

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Here are the slides from my plenary session at the “Library of the Future” forum for the Learning Resources Network Services Network, hosted by Challenger TAFE here in Fremantle – Five Social Software Sites that Libraries Shouldn’t Ignore.

The presentation used a lot of pictures of monkeys to look at:

1. Why should libraries care about social software?

2. What is social software?

3. Massive content sharing sites

4. Five sites and:

  • The “so what” of the site
  • Usage
  • Sites with a similar purpose

5. Sites covered:

6. Not in so much detail, but libraries should know about

7. Information storage and retrieval is via social elements, not controlled vocabulary

8. Social does not mean trivial

9. Social elements

Used Adventures of Superlibrarian clip on YouTube as an example

  • Profiles
  • Subscribing
  • Friends/contacts
  • Internal messages
  • Groups
  • Tagging
  • Rating
  • Favouriting
  • Commenting
  • Related items
  • Responses
  • Remixing

10. How libraries are using these sites – two examples of each, but extra slides with more examples at end of slideshow.

YouTube

Flickr

del.icio.us

Facebook

11. Checklist for action

  • Ensure reasonable public access to these sites in your library
  • Ensure your staff know how to search content on these sites
  • Check your library’s web presence
  • Use social software to collaborate and have conversations……with other librarians about where libraries fit in this space

12. Finally, when considering social software and your library, remember that it’s not all about what suits US, but what suits our USERS.

Lego trainset 111 – Happy Halloween

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Ever have a brain fry in the middle of a presentation and start raving on about things you didn’t expect? All the while you are listening to yourself thinking “Girl! WTF are you TALKING about?”. Happened to me at Podcamp during my Blog Fodder presentation where I talked for about 3 minutes about “Lego Trainset 111″ to illustrate Ellysa Kroski’s 18 Different Types of Blog posts.

Here’s the video, Podcamp Perth 2007: The blog session, that the Co-Pilot put up at Viddler. If you push play on my blog, the video magically jumps to the start of “Trainset 111″. If you view it on Viddler, then mover the slider to the white dots marking start and finish.

Disembodied voices who made it all unconferency are Gary Barber, Sue Waters and Frances McClean. Plus Maeve and Trevor and Julia and Con chiming in too.
Other Podcamp videos now at Viddler include:

During my brain fry, I made the comment that a lego blog where someone took a step-by-step photo of the construction process would probably get many, many more readers than my blog ever would. For those uninitiated in this genre…I present…17 photos in a step-by-step guide to How to make a Lego minifig costume for Halloween

UPDATE 12 Nov 2007: Viddler removed the streaming feature last week, so the clip now starts at the beginning.

(And after upgrading this blog to v2.3.1, this post is stuffing up my template, so I had to remove the embedded video – ick)

Second Life, libraries, universities and Murdoch University Library

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Here’s a slidecast of my presentaion to the Queensland University Libraries Office of Co-operation‘s event on Wednesday 9th October – Social Software in Libraries. It is at Second Life, Libraries, Universities and Murdoch University Library. The audio is from my practice runthrough on Monday night.

The wiki I used as a handout for the “Doing more with your avatar” workshop in the afternoon is at Doing more with your avatar. Information about creating an avatar and education, libraries and Second Life is at the Murdoch University Discovering your Second Life wiki.

Online Learning Virtual Worlds clips

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Sorry if you tried to click through from the links in the last post about the Online Learning in Virtual Worlds Symposium. I uploaded the clips from my presentation yesterday to viddler . Unlike YouTube, this allows you to upload the original format, and lets you add a comment at a particular point in the video. I didn’t see the big “Save Changes” button that I should have selected to make the video public.

These links should work:

Libraries in Second Life

Murdoch University Library gets a Second Life

As an added bonus for bearing with me, here is a link to mashable’s Video Toolbox: 150+ Online Video Tools and Resources.

Online Learning in Virtual Worlds

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I had two mixed Real Life/ Second Life work events today. The first was more successful than the second one.

The second was a meeting with 6 ICT students who are working on some Teaching and Learning projects in Second Life as their semester long project. The library is the client for this. Our Uni Second Life Interest Group had identified potential pilot projects, so I kept track of who wanted what done, found a few relevant resources, gave the students some building/ navigation tips and watched them quickly outstrip my skills within a day or so.

Two of the group members are in country towns and one is in Europe. They had their avatars in Second Life during the meeting, however we had some hardware problems and I forgot my headphones, so they were left in silence for a while and I don’t think they really knew what was going on. It will be interesting to see whether the group develops an efficient method to use Second Life to communicate or fall back on something like Skype party calls.

The first event involved staggering out of bed and on to the PC by 7:30am. The University of Southern Queensland’s Faculty of Education Symposium Online Learning Using Virtual Worlds was streamed live on the web, into Second Life and involved people presenting at the campus in Real Life. I presented from within Second Life as Emerald Dumont and was on a telephone line into the room at USQ at the same time. My voice was then streamed into SL on the big screen…where Emerald Dumont was listening.

Other presentations were from Dr. Rob Sanders who coordinates the Appalachian State University Library Science program, and uses Active Worlds in his teaching, Dr Penny de Byl, a Senior Lecturer (Computing) with USQ Faculty of Sciences about ALIVEX3D and Lindy McKeown, PhD candidate at the University of Southern Queensland about Action Learning in Second Life. Dr. Daniel Livingstone who teaches Computer Games Technology at the University of Paisley and was going to present on sloodle must have slept through his alarm, as he couldn’t be found…not in RL, via IM or in SL.

I had prepared two clips – a 15 minute one about Libraries in Second Life and a shorter one called Murdoch University Library gets a Second Life, explaining what we are doing with SL at MPOW. While they were playing, Emerald was part the back channel typing comments within Second Life….so while I (Kathryn) was presenting in RL (although via telephone and streaming), I (Emerald) was also being an audience member with critical input. And I swear I never left my seat in front of my PC to do it all.

There were quite a few comments like “oh wow, those librarians are cool” and “these aren’t like librarians I know” and “oohh…a science fiction portal”. One avatar from Australia even asked me for a copy of my presentation so he could show his fellow scientists how far ahead librarians were of scientists. ( And so I think I may have unintentionally created more work for my librarian friend, Sue who works in the same organization – sorry).

For the panel discussion / question time, I was answering questions and once again part of the back channel typing responses and questions within Second Life. I think I was even Twittering when it all got a bit slow. The questions were about topics like copyright, plagiarism, what you say to people who call it “just a game”, how “real” you need to be to keep the experience immersive and whether Second Life is being used for research as well as Teaching and Learning.

I was surprised at how much I felt like a participant, rather than a spectator. I think it helped that the streaming video looked rather jerky – so the people in RL seemed less real and more avatar-ish. Lindy and her team of 11 geeks are to be congratulated on making an experimental event such a success.

Melbourne visit

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I had a great weekend in Melbourne. After a tech run through at the State Library on Friday, I met up with my friend Leanne who works there, for chai and muffin at Mr Tulk, the coffee shop at SLV. I spent half of Saturday curled up in bed with Harry Potter, trying to get over a cold.

Sunday and Monday I spent in the comfortable, intellectually stimulating, friendly company of Michelle McLean and Helene Blowers. Michelle was the perfect host – showing me around her hometown and introducing me to her kids and puppy who are all very sweet, cuddly and well behaved. I also caught up with a number of great Victorian librarians. A huge chunk of conversation all weekend was about how we can encourage library staff to increase their skills with emerging technologies in a way that is relevant to 1) their current jobs and 2) the future they will need to tackle.

The presentation went well. I liked Helene’s style of wandering the audience wearing lapel mike. I liked the way Lynette showed a montage of the blog posts written by Yarra Plenty participants during her presentation. I enjoyed Michelle’s enthusiastic detailing of the innovative libraries she visited – and her ability to prevent them all blurring into one. I liked the outline of the considerations of the State Library of Victoria as they redesign their website – and their attempt to get just one spot for the user to go to access many different systems. All presentations will be available on the State Library web site. I had a tour of the building during a couple of other presentations – wow and wow! I need a couple of days to browse next time.

I tried some liveblogging and hope to post Michelle’s talk in the next couple of weeks. But now, I’m back on the plane for another, even shorter, visit to Melbourne.

You can see other photos from my weekend State Libray of Victoria visit July 2007