Zico
August 31st, 2008 § 4 Comments
Shaun and I had to say a really, really hard goodbye this past week. Zico was our first dog, he was a part of us and a part of our lives in a way that defies articulation. One day I’ll be able to talk about all of the ways I’m grateful that we had this amazing spirit in our lives for twelve wonderful years, but for now it’s going to be quiet around here for a little while.
amd and zico - summer 2008
June 10, 1996 – August 29, 2008
How I’ll transfer my Olympics obsession to politics
August 21st, 2008 § Leave a Comment
via TechCrunch – C-SPAN gets a lot of things right…
Several months ago, Karen pointed out how libraries could learn something from information portals created by major media outlets and news organizations. The example she used at the time was a site about the U.S. Elections produced by the Globe and Mail. There was a lot of stuff going on on the site, but the overarching theme was a rich body of information presented in interesting-looking and attractive graphic forms. By presenting and re-presenting the information, the Globe and Mail provided some context and analysis to the data, and also supported the user as they made meaning out of that information themselves.
Karen asked then -
is this a kind of instruction that we’d like to work towards developing? Should we be training ourselves to create materials like this–if not a guide to the electoral process, then maybe an interactive history of African-American migration after emancipation, for that American History class we teach every year?
I think it is. Another major media outlet that has generated a bunch of notice lately for its informative and engaging visualizations has been the New York Times. Examples here, here, here and my favorite, here.
Karen pointed out at the time some of the barriers to this kind of thing, one of them being money and another expertise. After all, So today, when I saw that C-SPAN is augmenting its coverage of the upcoming major party conventions with a variety of familiar social software tools, I thought back to this post.
C-SPAN’s got two connected convention “hubs” augmenting their main politics site. They’re going to launch for real in the next few days, but you can get there now from the politics site or the TechCrunch review. They’re video-heavy, but much more stripped down and flexible than the videos normally provided by C-SPAN. These will be embeddable. There are also connections to YouTube, and to Twitter, and content aggregated from several blogs – some state-focused, some national. Bloggers can ask to be included in the aggregation, and can also ask for help getting their hands on video not readily available from the site. It’ll be interesting to hear how well that works.
There’s also a twitter feed. By using official tags (#DNC08 and #RNC08), people twittering from the conventions can get their comments included on the C-SPAN feed.
What I like about the site isn’t just that it’s exciting and more dynamic because of this content, but the social content seems purposeful. One of the TechCrunch commenters grumbled about C-SPAN jumping on the twitter fad, but I don’t know – I think this is the kind of focused thing twitter can do well. I use twitter now to follow live sports events in other countries, or film festivals I can’t go to. And recently I picked up a few people to follow through the TV Critics Press Tour and Comic-Con. This seems similar – and like it could provide two kinds of information that twitter provides very well – that vicarious sense of being there and in on exciting things as they happen and the sense of being connected to other people participating in or watching the same thing you are.
So I think this might be a connected but not exactly the same example of the ways we could build information portals that would help our students and our users make meaning out of the information and events around them — both with us and with each other.
oh no – is this serious enough?
August 7th, 2008 § 3 Comments
This morning, on my drive in to work I was thinking about ScienceBlogs (tagline – “the world’s largest conversation about science”) and in particular the “blogging on peer-reviewed research icon” you see on those posts.
I really like the ScienceBlogs project – the whole idea is to get experts to comment on research, but in a way that’s accessible to the general public. As a teacher and as a non-scientist myself, I love this project. Really, this might be the most important way the participatory web connects to scholarship – not in helping scholars communicate with each other, but in helping scholars communicate with the rest of us.
If you want to check it out, I’d recommend Cognitive Daily – cognitive science, just about every post is blogging on peer-reviewed research, and there’s lots and lots of connections to teaching and learning.
Connected to that is this broader effort – ResearchBlogging dot org — trying to make it easy for readers to find serious, thoughtful posts about peer-reviewed research in a whole variety of disciplines. They’re reorganizing right now, and on a kind of hiatus. When they come back, bloggers will be able to register their blogs that (at least sometimes) analyze peer reviewed research. And library science is one of the subtopics (under the main topic Research/Scholarship) bloggers can claim. They mean to aggregate such posts, provide a registry of blogs dealing with research-related topics, and they provide an icon bloggers can use to mark their analytical, research-focused posts.
And that’s what I was thinking about this morning – we should be using that icon when we talk about peer-reviewed research from our field. At least I should be using that icon, right? For posts like this one, and this one over at ⌘f.
But then I started reading the conversations over at researchblogging.org and I started to get nervous! Is the peer-reviewed research I write about peer-reviewed enough? I don’t know. More important, though, do I provide the kind of commentary that counts as thoughtful commentary. I don’t mean this as a call for people to tell me I’m thoughtful – it’s more a rumination on what I am thinking about when I write about research.
I usually say something about the research methods, but not always. I rarely contextualize the research itself within the larger discipline. I raise questions that I have about the method or the conclusions, but I don’t usually go into my analysis thinking “I am going to comment on whether or not I think this is good research.” And when I read the science bloggers – I want them to do these things. I want them to help me evaluate the research and contextualize it.
But I don’t do that myself. More often, I want to share how the research informed or sparked my thinking about the work we all do – the connecting of the theory and the research to my practice as a librarian. I’m influenced a lot by Donald Schon and reflective practice here, and I’m thinking I might write about that sometime soon. But not now. Now I’ll just say that I think there’s value there. Deeply oversimplifying – apologies to Schon – value in the idea that theory is useful when it’s useful, when it’s connected to knowledge generated by lived experience. There’s a lot of people out there who don’t have time or inclination to reflect on research and what it means for practice, but who find it useful to read what others have to say.
So I think that’s kind of interesting, and worth thinking about what the theory we generate, the research we do means for our discipline, which, let’s face it is not the same as biology or sociology or physics. I’ll be registering when knowledgeblogging.org comes back up, and I’ll be using the icon. I hope others do too. I’m interested in the idea of what peer reviewed research means to our field, and this is one way to think about that.
I keep remembering this one day in the library…
August 3rd, 2008 § 1 Comment
… because I just read that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died.
I was in high school, I went up to the Portland State University library to do some work and really couldn’t get into/ didn’t want to do the work I had gone there to do. Instead of doing the obvious thing, which would have been leaving the library and going into the city since I was from Canby and it was a school day and I was not at school but in Portland, I picked One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich up off a reshelving cart and started to look through it. Two and a half hours later, I was done and you know even though I still had the work to do, and even though I could have read that book in Canby, I never felt like I wasted that day
So this is a library experience that’s not about me being a librarian, and it’s not about how I think libraries should be. Plus it’s a library experience that might not resonate in its specifics to people younger than me. It was the 80′s, there was a Cold War, reading Solzhenitsyn probably doesn’t feel the same now as it did then.
It’s a library experience that’s just about libraries – that they are and that these spaces that put people together with ideas exist.
