shiny-things

Second Life Workshops in an Academic Library or “Fluffy librarianship”.

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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 .

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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…..

Me too..Odeo me too…

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I just made a post to VLINT about Timothy Greig’s slides on Flickr about MMOs and digital libraries, found via Tame the Web.

I wanted to ask him to expand it in a post for VLINT if he was interested, so I went to his home page. I saw the nice, shiny “record voicemail” button and just had to have one of my own.

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It uses Odeo to record. I’d already been playing around with Odeo, but like last time, it didn’t always play back the recorded mesage – even when I gave it time to download. I suspect it keeps timing out, but not indicating this. I don’t really believe it when it says “That totally worked”… but at least it doesn’t also address me as “dude”.

To set up a voicemail option for my blog, I looked under the profile option in my Odeo account, selected the “put this on your site” link next to “Contact me”, and Bob was my uncle..there was some html to add to my contact page.

Now if you click under the contact tab under the banner photo, you have my email address, an option to voicemail me or you can fill in a form.

But, if you want to play too….and I’d love someone to do so…. you can switch on that mike right now and:

Send Me A Message

Free kittens for your IT department?

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Sometimes I read things so sensible and so useful that I want to print them out and staple them to the forehead of every librarian I know…and add two copies to mine.

Karen G. Schneider has written a beautifully grounded, good humoured piece about what it’s like to be at the receiving end of IT requests from librarians – IT and Sympathy – in ALA Techsource. It has a very clear message about chanelling technolust to what is achievable, and considering what the usually smart and well intentioned, but very overloaded, IT department may already be doing.

She includes some strategies for IT planning by non-IT departments. A very brief summary below:

  1. Find out what’s already on your IT department’s plate
  2. Plan for your department. Write a timeline including the most basic needs and your blue sky dreams
  3. Work out what’s “free as in beer”, and what’s “free as in kittens”. If it’s the latter, who’s changing the sandbox?
  4. Share your plans with IT.

Will her post stop me from jumping up and down and wanting everything shiny “now, now, now”?. Don’t know. Hope so. Maybe now I’ll add in “when, when, when” and “how,how,how” and “please,please,please” for good measure.