Thinking Differently: Twitter and Zite can help

(Reblogged from something I posted here: http://informationonline2013.wordpress.com/2012/08/14/thinking-differently-twitter-and-zite-can-help/)

Here is a rag bag of different articles that you could have read and pondered over just the last 24 hours if you were a Twitter or Zite user. For those who don't know it, Zite is a great free iPad app that functions for me as a personal newspaper or reader. It knows my interests (I told it) and it learns what I like to read and delivers me more content on a regular basis without all the rubbish that clutters other services. I wonder how long it'll last like this so get in fast before Rupert kills it.

• The e-book lending wars: When authors attack. Fear of piracy and authors against lending on principle. It all sounds awful. What is lovely is this bit: As musician Neil Young put it recently: “Piracy is the new radio — it’s how music gets around.” So true. I heard a very experienced lawyer for US musicians recently at an ideas fest in the OPera House. He said that the problem the record companies had with Napster was not that they stole their content, but that Napster could do what they could not do: distribute music really fast (online).
• Top 10 Clever Uses for Dropbox. Normally I don't like top 10 lists, but I do like Lifehacker and I use Dropbox, so I looked at this and saw some uses that I wasn't familiar with like monitoring your computer for unauthorised access or managing BitTorrent downloads (not that I even know what a torrent file is!).
• Twitter and Scientists. A PhD candidate shares some of the things she finds useful with Twitter.
• Textbooks Unbound. A startup called Boundless challenges the textbook market by packaging (freely available) open access materials. This talks about moves by companies like Amazon to rent textbooks and the developing open educational resources movement (or market?). Boundless is being sued by at least three publishers. Of course it is.
• What Will Higher Education Look Like in 2020? Tanya's maths is bad: 2020 is only eight years away, not 12. This is, however, a topic that is concentrating a lot of thought in universities at present. It is all still a bit debatable. You could look into the economics behind Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in this essay Bitter Reality of MOOConomics or another article on What's right and wrong about Coursera-style MOOCs. How do future libraries fit into all this? If you have any thoughts please send them to me. And here are Four Reasons Librarians Should Join a MOOC.
• For those keen on sport and the recent Olympics in London there is this great article Swimming Australia's incentive model was a failure: fact. Essentially the article is about people, not sport. As a lapsed economist I agree with this sociologist's take on it all that not everything in life should be reduced to a simple cost-benefit analysis and also that sociability shapes our motivation. We do care what others think of us. I really enjoyed reading this article and the voicing of opinions like this is long overdue.
• Putting an End to the Biggest Lie on the Internet. Those pesky Terms of Service that we all agree to! A new site aims to give more power to users by summarizing terms of service, flagging potential issues and rating apps on a scale from A (the best) to E (the worst). TwitPic gets the worst possible rating so you might want to consider future use. Thanks to @marksmithers of Swinburne Uni for that tweet!
• BrainPickings is always good for thought-provoking content, so here's 10 Rules for Students, Teachers and Life by John Cage and Sister Corita Kent. I really like rules 4, 6 & 8. Life is short: share your passion!
• Finally, some tips for those with iPads: a how-to guide for Blogging Using Just the iPad.

All of this was collected and shared in just 24 hours using Twitter and Zite. It is that easy.

The obligatory iPhone post

After some inspiration from Kim and some assistance and advice from Sophie, here is my iPhone home screen post. I guess it is really another meme post.

A few days ago I managed to install the ios4 operating system and Sophie told me how to put everything in folders. My folders seemed to pick up labels based on what application went in first, but Sophie has since told me that I can change their labels.

I'm very fortunate that my iPhone is provided by my employer. Before I was given this phone early in 2009, I had a Palm Treo. I liked the Treo but found the plan I was on very unreliable and once I had used the iPhone for about a day I realised that the Treo was really a very clumsy device. The early Palm PDAs worked really well and I never went to a meeting at work without them. Then they changed to a Windows mobile operating system and everything went pear-shaped. One of the attractions of the iPhone is that "you already know how to use it" (as Apple says about its iPad). It is a very intuitive device. And, as I work in a university, if there is something I cannot figure out, I just step out into the Library and ask a student.

So by now you've probably realised that I don't have that many applications on my home screen. There are a few things I never or hardly ever use, like some iTunes U sites I was looking at, Stocks, iTunes (but I use that on my laptop), Shazam, RunKeeper, Ping, Evernote, Contacts, ShapeWriter, Dropbox, YouTube & Safari (I really don't browse the internets much on my phone) and BlockChalk.

I do use most of the following things on a regular basis:

Phone & Messages - of course

Mail - to check both work email and Gmail. I find it very reliable. I've got "Fetch" switched off because it was really expensive on data when I was overseas. I found that it is just as easy to download email when I want to check it. The Maps app is also data hungry, especially when you are moving.

iPod - I LOVE my iPod. This is my fourth iPod and it is a bit problematic as they all have different libraries now. This one is nearly full, but I listen to the music whenever I can. I think I have about 3-4 sets of earphones that I use regularly while walking, o the light rail and in bed sometimes when reading. I think iPod has been directly responsible for me buying much more music over the last 5-6 years.

Rage - I use the Rage app almost every weekend to see what is on and to set up my music video recordings on ABC TV. It is brilliant app that allows you to browse all clips broadcast each night and it has a great little fave feature for both songs and artists that collects your list for you. I also use Unearthed (a Triple J app that allows you to download and fave new music).

I get app upgrades from and sometimes search the App Store.

I've used Bump occasionally, but wish I could remember to use it more to swap contact details as it seems an awful lot more sensible than swapping business cards these days.

I sometimes use the Facebook and IMDb apps when I feel I need to, but they're not top of the charts.

I look at Weather quite often (to help me decide whether to run, ride or catch the light rail to work), but it isn't reliable nor very informative, so if I really want to know what might happen I usually look up the Sydney BOM forecast on Safari.

The Westpac app is excellent and I do use it occasionally. So too is Google and I've used the voice search feature very accurately when trying to find a bike shop with grubby hands after running out of spare tubes after a flat on my pushy.

Probably my most used apps are TweetDeck and Echofon, both for Twitter. They now live in the Social folder along with Facebook. And no, that isn't Grindr there with them. Well it might be, but only because Stephen Fry talked about it on Top Gear one night. I only read the articles.

UTS Library Planning Day #2

Some observations about VALA 2010

I made a few flippant and some serious observations about VALA 2010 on Twitter over the last week or so. Well, OK then, quite a lot really. I'll try and be less flippant and a little bit deeper in this post. Promise.
Firstly, I'd like to acknowledge the huge effort put in by all of those involved in putting this conference together. It really is an immense task and far too much to arrange for anyone wanting to keep their original hair colour. We should all be grateful to those who volunteered their time and energy to make the conference run so well.
From a content perspective, I think it had something for everyone and I know that the Program Committee made every formal and informal effort to consult with people about who to ask to give keynotes. I was also aware that people like David Feighan (the Program Chair) made an effort to encourage people to take some risks with what they said and to present it in an entertaining way. His opening address and welcome featuring the short video by Abbey the Digiberal Native was a brilliant example for us to follow. (If only David was wearing a tie.)
So, I came away satisfied that the conference pushed the buttons I wanted to have pushed:

• stimulating content and ideas that challenged some of my views or reminded me of reality (from RFID to networked books);
• the opportunity to swap ideas with colleagues from all over Australasia (& beyond!);
• the chance to let others know what we are up to;
• the opportunity to have some fun (away) with some of my colleagues and some new friends;
• stimulus to write a paper and prepare a presentation on a topic of some importance to us;
• connecting with old colleagues;
• watching and listening to some up-and-coming rock stars of the library world who are so passionate and enthusiastic about what they do; and
• sometimes I just needed a laugh (thanks to many of my Twitter friends and especially John Garraway from the University of Auckland who has a real gift for timing and delivery).

I don't think the real value, in terms of connections, content, conversations and encouragement, that such conferences give to their attendees can be discounted.

So, to some brief observations from my perspective:

SUSTAINABILITY: I was pretty surprised that this issue did not come up much apart from our (UTS) presentation. It is a major priority for us and was one of the main conference themes at Educause09.

TWITTER: It provided a very valuable back-channel for this conference and I think that, like Educause09 in Denver, if you didn't at least lurk, you missed a vital and really useful dimension of VALA2010. As @flexnib tweeted: "all of us are smarter than any of us". In a way, it provided a cloud for the crowd.

CLOUD COMPUTING: This issue emerged and was debated in several sessions, but again, I was surprised that it didn't feature on as many agendas as it might have.

ROCK STARS: I am glad that some new young Australian library "rock stars" are starting to emerge. I'm thinking of people like Paul Hagon, Kat Clancy and our own Sophie McDonald to name just a few of them. They need to be encouraged as examples for others to follow. Their essential role in connecting us to our clients or just the broader public cannot be underestimated.

INSPIRATION & LEARNING FROM OUTSIDE THE SECTOR: I really enjoyed two of the keynotes as they made me think . . . about everything. Firstly there was the wonderful Stephanie Orlic from Museum Lab, Musée du Louvre and finally we had McKenzie Wark from the New School for Social Research in New York. Both were brilliant. You could also argue that Paul Hagon's "cataloguing by faces and colours" session on 10 February was along the same lines - thinking outside the box.

FROM LITTLE THINGS . . . : One thing that disappointed me was hearing, I think from a panellist, that what some public and state libraries are doing in digitising their own historical collections and other popular and/or rare collection material is insignificant or really doesn't matter much. Well, I'm sorry, but it does. It matters big time. As Paul Kelly said "From little things, big things grow". It is an important start and if our public institutions don't make a start then someone else will start pulling the rug from under us. We should be encouraging any digitisation of cultural materials, not just endlessly debating which metadata schema to use or how to moderate user-created data, should we ever decide to allow it. What NLA is doing with Trove , what the Australian War Memorial has done with war diaries and more recently C.E.W. Bean's First World war records and what the State libraries and some public libraries are doing to provide online access to and digital preservation of our cultural and historical heritage is very important and a great example for others to follow. If we were really a clever nation, by now we'd have a national cultural digitisation strategy.

That's all!

accessCeramics: digital image collection using Flickr

Mark Dahl's and Jeremy McWilliams' presentation on accessCeramics was probably the most inspirational session that I attended at Educause09. I am an unashamed fan of Flickr and its possibilities and Mark and Jeremy explained just how they used it to its full potential. Many of us should be following their brilliant example as it shows just how an institution can use a Web 2.0 service to facilitate a collaborative project. You can see all 53 slides for yourself in the presentation link above. These cover: the history of the project, how they did it, who was involved, cataloguing issues, enhancements, lessons learned, gains, costs and future plans. And they are now using Twitter (@accessCeramics) as their news feed: another great idea.

Having been involved in a more traditional (i.e. expensive, never ending, painful and frustratingly complex) DAM program in a large museum recently that used commercially sourced software, I found slide #48 particularly illuminating. Yes, they had hurdles too, but nowhere near the issues endemic in the traditional models.

Recently, we've started discussions about a community-based project to develop a special collection as part of the UTS Library. We will certainly be looking very closely at accessCeramics.

Disrespectful and Time-Wasting, or Engaged and Transformative? The Mile-High Twitter Debate

This post is "loosely based" (as they say in films) on a series of my tweets (@malbooth) from the Twitter Debate session at Educause09. I've cleaned up and explained a few tweets in the interests of your sanity.

(#edTwitter is the hash tag for the Twitter debate at #educause09)

• RT @jeremyindenver Standing room only at the Mile High Twitter debate (yes, the room was packed and people were standing up lining all walls)
  
• Mostly academic theatre so far.
• Noise, safety, security, content, distractions, spam, reality?
• Or passion, diversity, helpful, connections, real time?
• Check this video out -- The Twitter Experiment - UT Dallas http://bit.ly/YlBZt
• CIOs as orange cones over potholes?
• A reference to Harvard now. The school that gave us those that gave us the GFC [sorry, that was unfair: I put it onto the jet lag]
  
• Is it about experimentation, innovation, making mistakes, exploring?
• "Messy creativity that leads to engagement" (I liked that)
• Do ground rules inhibit exploration & experimentation?
• Google on innovation. Comes when reflecting, not on schedule in a divisional structure. Self-organise in shared-value culture.
• Clay Shirky now: changing the world via social networks (from his recent talk at US State Dept)
• How to make best use of the media even though it means changing our ways (Shirky)
• Who cares what a CIO thinks about Twitter anyway?
• [I then noticed that:] #educause09 [was] now a trending topic - imagine what we could achieve if we really collaborated
• Twitter offers transparency, but [there are] some costs - uni reputation needs to be considered. Voices or consistency?
• Dialogue is important. can practices be integrated? Is it a distraction?
• Has tweeting become competitive in this debate? [This tweet attracted a response: "@kaiyen @malbooth no, unless you tweet faster than I do"]
• [I think it is] too early for best practice & benchmarking: read some blogs, but not [the] usual suspects: see practitioners
• Immersion is important! Follow @RWW, @mashable
• [The someone mentioned:] FRBR (groans) [actually I heard FRBR being a librarian, but maybe they said FERPA?]
  
• "Twitter is a basic information literacy skill" & [it is not] not in a walled garden
• "What better evidence of your engagement in learning than results when your name is Googled": be a citizen of open web
• "Please don't tell us what we can't do: help us, guide us"
• Someone raised the importance of the back-channel as a toll for LISTENING!
• Back-channel can be transformative, scary, invaluable and great guidance
• Does or should twitter emulate real life communications? Trust users to do what is right with it as a tool
• Can lead to moments of authentic connection!
• We will all make mistakes and need to be tolerant of each other
• Many different ways to use it appropriately - make a judgment
• Important to be able to use all forms of media for communications!
• Thanks for this session - it made me think
  

This was a very lively, active and well-presented session. My thanks to the two presenters: W. Gardner Campbell, Director of the Academy of Teaching and Learning and an Associate Professor of Literature and Media from Baylor University (who played the radical academic) & Bruce Maas who played (and is) the CIO of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (all universities should be so lucky).

Fines

@shitmydadsays is one of the most followed twitters and not just because most of his tweets are profane. Oddly enough, there is some wisdom in many of his sayings. This one relates rather nicely to the issue of library fines.

A quick presentation on using Twitter

I gave this quick presentation on using Twitter to my university's Teach & Learning Committee yesterday. Our Deputy Vice Chancellor (for Teaching, Learning and Equity), Shirley Alexander thought it was worth giving Twitter a try as a way of extending our reach and exposing the work of the committee. So here it is on SlideShare, below.
Oh, and one tool I used yesterday that isn't linked in the presentation is TwitBlock - a great help in ridding your followers of spammers.

Twitter: an introduction (for UTS Teach & Learning Committee)

View more documents from Mal Booth.

Of course hyperlinks still don't upload that well on SlideShare, so here they are, slide-by-slide:

SLIDE #1 https://twitter.com/signup http://delicious.com/malbooth/twitter www.slideshare.net/malbooth

SLIDE #3 http://twitter.com/ http://twitter.com/stephenfry http://search.twitter.com/

SLIDE #4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar’s_number

SLIDE #5 http://tweetdeck.com/beta/download/ http://echofon.com/ http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-iphone/ http://bit.ly/ http://cotweet.com/

SLIDE #7 http://twitter.com/KevinRuddPM http://twitter.com/BarackObama http://twitter.com/SAlexander_UTS http://twitter.com/AnneBB http://twitter.com/search/users?q=UTS&category=people&source=find_on_twitter http://twitter.com/Twitter_Tips http://twitter.com/timoreilly

Social media & world events

A number of people keep telling me that social media cannot save the world. Maybe not, but what a pessimistic thing to say anyway? There has actually been a lot of media recently that points strongly to the ways people are actually using social media such as Facebook, blogs and now Twitter to make or influence significant social change. Last night on the ABC's 7.30 Report I heard that the US Government has asked Twitter to not take itself off the air for regular system maintenance in case the link to what is happening in Tehran is lost. All other forms of media from Tehran are now being suppressed.
I think librarians need to better understand these social media tools in order to make the best use of them and to understand how our clients are using some of them, in our world. It is therefore wise to spend 17 minutes either watching or just listening to Professor Clay Shirky explaining social media to the US State Department (this month) on ted.com:
Clay Shirky's recent video on ted.com
And if you are further interested in the Q&A that happened afterwards, specifically about Iran, you can read that transcript here:
Q&A Transcript - Clay Shirky on Twitter & Iran