theorywatch

For the last week, I’ve been at the OU School of Community Medicine Summer Institute here in Tulsa, which is described in the following paragraph from their website:

“The OU School of Community Medicine inaugurated one of the most innovative education programs in the nation with the School of Community Medicine Summer Institute. The five-day program gathers first year medical and physician students, faculty from a range of professions and community leaders for an immersion in community medicine and Oklahoma’s health care needs.

The Summer Institute curriculum is creative, thought-provoking and engaging, taking attendees out of a traditional classroom and into the community to experience health care from the patient’s, not the physician’s perspective.”

Fascinating experience, and the attending faculty will be continuing to meet once a month to work on some of the projects that came out of the Institute, I think. I enjoyed meeting people that I normally wouldn’t get the chance to talk to, and going places I normally don’t (and won’t, if I’m lucky, though the issue of “situational poverty” was pretty eye-opening.) I was also involved in a hit-and-run accident on my way home from the Institute one evening, and the whole issue of uninsured drivers and some of the reasons for that (especially here in Tulsa) are a lot clearer to me now. One other thing I learned is that the social work students in my group were way more knowledgeable about specific community information resources relevant to the at-risk local residents of Tulsa than most of our library students are likely to be, so that’s something to work on.

A parting thought, though: we had a so-called “poverty lunch” one day (what $2.50 buys you for a meal), and I’m pretty sure that Spam isn’t all that popular with people on food stamps, either….

Thanks, Google, for this brilliant suggestion about ways to cheat on term papers. (If you haven’t actually read a particular book, it’s a little hard to do anything but copy a paragraph or so, hmm? Or cite something that you may or may not have understood correctly, and hope for the best!) Not exactly promoting information literacy here, are we? And, speaking of the quote generator on that page, whatever happened to “Don’t be evil”?

Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC has an interesting post about the concepts of online “residents” and “visitors” as being more useful than the ubiquitous terms “digital immigrants” and “digital natives.” He borrows this idea from David White and talks specifically about online courses, wondering what the temporary inhabitants (AKA students) of those consider themselves. To extend his thought, I wonder if the instructors here at the University of Oklahoma mostly consider themselves online “residents” or “visitors” to our course management system, Desire2Learn?

Bizarrely enough, I do consider myself a “resident” of my Desire2Learn courses, but I don’t see how students can (if only because everybody else is “evicted” at the end of the semester, for one thing.) Furthermore, I am, like it or not, the “landlady,” though I tend to have all kinds of issues with the “municipal authorities.” (Their decision to not make the pager tool available anymore, for example, still rankles.) Unlike in Second Life, however, I can’t buy myself an island to build on. Pity.

Concern about “inappropriate environments” (especially ones that involve social networking) imposed by instructors etc. on undergraduates etc. is now being dubbed the “creepy treehouse effect,” but it seems to me that many things can constitute “creepiness.” (In fact, you might call it “concept creep” for the “creep concept.”) For instance, how about wikigenes, which is allegedly built on a technology that can track the authorship of every word in an edit? Now, that technological concept and its potential uses and misuses in copyright suits, plagiarism accusations, and scholarly evaluation creeps even me out!

P.S. On the other hand, I think Trevor Owens’ use of simple RPG software to generate historical role-playing games is tree cool.

Somewhat disappointed that Bizzell apparently has a subscription to one or two of the AACE journals available via LORA, but not to the entire Ed/IT Lib, as it has a lot more to offer than we have access to (such as this, for instance.) Oh well, there’s always ILIAD…. even though it looks like I already have enough of a reserve reading list for this fall (and of course there’s always D-Lib for those who just can’t get enough!):

Baker, Nicholson. 1994. Discards. The New Yorker 70(7): 64-86.

Brenner, M. et al. 2006. Digital collection management through the library catalog. Information Technology & Libraries 25(2): 66-77.

Dalbello, Marija. 2004. Institutional shaping of cultural memory. Library Quarterly 74(3): 265-298.

Goncalves, M.A. et al. 2007. “What is a good digital library?”Information Processing and Management 43: 1416-1437

Hill, Janette R. 2007. Teaching and learning in digital environments. Educational Technology Research & Development 49(3): 37-622

Lee, Hur-Li. 2000. What is a collection? Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology 51(12): 1106-1113

Murray, Kathleen. 2008. Archiving Web-published material. Government Information Quarterly 25: 66-89.

Pymm, Bob. 2006. Building collections for all time: The issue of significance. Australian Academic & Research Libraries 37: 61-73

Rose. L. et al. 2008. The library is dead, Long live the library! Journal of Academic Librarianship 34(2): 145-152.

Salazar, E. 2006. Content management for the virtual library. Information Technology & Libraries 25(3): 170-175.

Seadle, Michael. 2008 The digital library in 100 years. Library Hi-Tech 26(1): 5-10.

Tuominen, K., Talja, S., and Savolainen, R. 2003. Multiperspective digital libraries: The implications of constructionism for the development of digital libraries. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology 54(6): 561-569.

Xia, Hong. 2006. Evaluation of digital libraries. Library & Information Science Research 28: 433-452.

Zimmerman, Ann. 2007. Not by metadata alone: The use of diverse forms of knowledge to locate data for reuse. International Journal on Digital Libraries 7:(1): 5-16

Back at the beginning of the semester in KM/LIS 5033, we had the usual introduction to the so-called DIKW hierarchy, which turned out to be WIKID cool in our reinterpretation. Thinking of another hierarchy (and its possibilities), I wonder what might happen to Bloom’s (revised) taxonomy if we were to look at that with an equally critical eye? (Special thanks to Andrew Churches of Auckland, New Zealand, for providing the Edorigami wikispace, because it provides additional digital resources with which to think about this!)

Another take on the idea of enabling “parasitic learning” (again, in the context of technology) by two of my favorite authors John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, who point out that Lave’s concept of “legitimate peripheral participation” may also function in this way. As the late Abbie Hoffman wrote, Steal This Book… but you have to care enough to want to, no matter how deliberately vulnerable to theft “the book” is made! (Come to think of it, this also works in a somewhat ironic juxtaposition with Freire’s “banking” concept of education, doesn’t it? Especially since lately so many people have been making “deposits” to my own “account”, intentionally or not….)

Funny they don’t mention the basketball program.

I had a wonderful time yesterday at the Oklahoma City Metropolitan Library System’s Staff Day, where I gave a little talk about some emerging technologies for librarians, largely based on the class I teach here at OU. They were a great audience (with lots of SLIS alums, as I was happy to find out!) but as usual I had far more material to share than was reasonable, and much was missed! I promised to provide a list of the “ten tools” with their URLs from my slides, so here they are:

AjaxLife (Second Life viewer)

Amaya (open-source web authoring program)

Audacity (open-source sound editor)

Anti-Phishing Phil game

Diigo (social bookmarking tool used by class)

DocStoc (wannabe YouTube for professional documents)

GIMP (open-source photo editing)

Lite-C (simple language for 3D game design)

Portable Apps (free software carrier)

VuFind (open-source OPAC)

WikiScanner (identification of organizational sources for Wikipedia edits)

And here are the two blog posts that pretty much sum up why “this stuff” is so important:

“20 Reasons Learning Emerging Technologies is Part of Every Librarian’s Job” (from the Librarians Matter blog)

“Under the Hood of Web 2.0″ (from The Other Librarian blog)

Special thanks to my 5433 class for providing almost all of these goodies, to Kellie of last year’s class for inviting me, and to Josh of this year’s class for being such a good sport in the session!

Another perspective on my ongoing literacy theme. Thom Gillespie of Indiana talks with Mihai Nadin about multiple literacies.

The book by Nadin they mention (Civilization of Illiteracy) is available for download through Project Gutenberg, and it’s not an easy read either. In fact, the more vested you are in traditional (textual) literacy, the harder this is to read. Ich bin ironic?