Category Archives: LIBR 559M

Second Life: My Life As A Book

Posted on March 25, 2013 | 1 comment

Note: This post is adapted from my discussion post to Module VI – Immersion: Visit a virtual world, and tell us about your journey.

I decided to give Second Life a try. My first introduction to the virtual world of Second Life was a few years ago when my friend was completing his visual anthropology undergraduate thesis about the game.

Like others before me, I found the controls a little fussy. And trying to do simple things like change my outfit were quite difficult. I ended up wearing about 4 outfits at once before I realized what was happening.

I found my way to Illumination Library which describes itself as “one of SL’s finest library collections of literary classics, religious works, philosophy and history. Please enjoy reading, listening, and browsing through our interactive books.” When I first arrived in the library a LibriVox recording of Northanger Abbey started to play. I went into a different room and a LibriVox recording of one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels started playing, and in another room another book. It was a little frustrating that I seemed to have no control over the audiobooks. I think this was a glitch because when I came back to the library later none of the audiobooks played automatically. I ‘touched’ Les Miserables and it opened an audiobook in my browser. I ended up listening to quite a number of chapters before bed. I actually find this a really neat feature. However, I don’t think I necessarily need to access these audibooks through SL as it is a bit cumbersome. It would be simpler to access these books directly through the LibriVox website.

I also was able to downloaded a copy of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I then somehow managed to wear the book. You can see my outfit in the picture below. At first I wasn’t sure if it was a glitch or not, so I went to a populated area and asked if I was wearing a book. The second picture below shows this scene. A helpful person named, sweetfang87, told me how to detach it and I was good to go. I chatted with a few people in this area. One of the conversations went downhill quickly with questions and comments like: “are you pretty in RL” and “I feel like I really like you”—it kind of reminded me of an ICQ chatroom in the late ’90s, very hit or miss.

After ditching the book I returned to Illumination Library and joined their literary group. They have a total of 251 members with three librarians. There were eleven other ‘book lovers’ online at 10:30pm EDT on a Sunday night. All three librarians had logged on sometime earlier that day. According to their group info, they have also run events in the past as well as notified the group of other events that may be of interest in SL. For example, this posting from St. Patrick’s Day:

The Royal Opera House presents “Celtic Odori”. Little Yoshiwara Geishas will be performing stories and dances in celebration of the Saint Patrick Day. Little Yoshiwara is the flagship of all Okiyas in SL. We cordially invite all members, their families and friends to attend the special Geisha performance today at 1 pm SLT. TAXI: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Beregovoi/61/86/56

The library also has a card catalog which can be touched. This will redirect you to a Google Doc of all of the books in the library and in which room they can be found.

It was an interesting experience, but I’m not sure if this is necessarily the easiest way for patrons to access audiobooks. They are all available through the LibriVox website—in addition to any that your local library might offer.

That being said, I did think of a few ways that this particular library in Second Life could be used by different groups:

  • Book club meetings. Stock the audiobooks that you are reading so group members can find them easily. Then you could use the chat and voice chat functions to hold discussions.
  • Literary lecture series. The text is made available for easy access and then you gather for a lecture and questions.
  • Study group. Students could gather and listen to chapters together and then discuss using the various chat functions.

All in all my experience with Second Life was positive. I do think that there are ways for librarians to make it work for them and their patrons. I think it was mentioned earlier in this module that librarians working with housebound patients find tools like Second Life quite helpful. This article, although old and not related to librarians, makes a similar point. The article talks about an Atlanta rehab clinic that offers ongoing therapy sessions through Second Life (Mollman, 2008). While it deals a lot with the psychological benefits of an immersive world in relation to therapy, the idea that for some people meeting in a virtual world gives them a sense of having been somewhere as well as being more comfortable meeting in a space that is familiar to them can translate to the patron-library experience.

Further reading:

  • Professional Avatars: Librarians and Educators in Virtual Worlds by Lorri Mon in Journal of Documentation Vol. 68 No. 3, 2012 (pp. 318-329).
  • Virtually There, Almost: Educational and Informational Possibilities in Virtual Worlds by Peter Edward Sidorko in Library Management Vol. 30 No. 6/7, 2009
    (pp. 404-418).
  • Virtual Worlds and libraries: Gridhopping to New Worlds by Valerie Hill and Marcia Meister in College & Research Libraries News Vol. 74 no. 1 (pp. 43-47).

Mollman, S. (2008, July 11). Avatars in rehab: Getting therapy in virtual worlds. CNN. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/07/16/db.secondlifetherapy/index.html

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Tying it all up

Posted on March 22, 2013 | 1 comment

We have covered a range of topics since January. From affordance, participate, collaborate, to create, aggregate, and finally to immerse. It’s hard to believe we are winding down. Despite my last post, I am optimistic about the future of social media for information professionals. I recently watched a 2010 TED Talk by game designer Jane McGonigal about how gaming can make the world a better place. I felt that her talk touched on a lot of ideas we have covered in LIBR 559m and helped me draw more connections between them.

So how do immersive worlds facilitate collaboration for information professionals? I think this question can be answered with four points McGonigal highlighted in her talk:

  1. Urgent optimism (gamers develop extreme self motivation, they have a need to act immediately)
  2. Social fabric (gamers are virtuoso’s at weaving a tight social fabric. We like people better after playing a game with them, because we build trust. Through game-play we build strong social ties)
  3. Blissful productivity (we are happier working hard if given the right work, which is why some World of Warcraft gamers dedicate an average of 22 hours a week to games)
  4. Epic meaning (gamers love being attached to awe-inspiring missions. The World of Warcraft wiki is the second largest wiki in the world. “They are bulding and epic knowledge resource about the World of Warcraft”.)

McGonigal suggests gamers can achieve more in virtual worlds than in real life because they receive better feed back in games than they do in real life. To access these skills we need to start making the real world more like a game. Sound familiar? It should: gamification.

For me this video ties it all (most of it) together: as gamers we are participating, collaborating, creating, all the while immersed in a virtual world. We can take the skills and lessons learnt through these experiences and translate them to our real world environment.

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Buzzwords

Posted on March 18, 2013 | 5 comments

I was in Halifax visiting some friends last week and one of them showed me this video by the Onion. It then popped up on the class discussion board. I took this as a sign.

The video instantly reminded me of the following lines from 30 Rock episode, “Winter Madness”:

Liz: Cross-promotional … deal mechanics … revenue streams … jargon … synergy.
Jack: That’s the best presentation I’ve ever heard.

Both the video by the Onion and Liz Lemon’s use of buzzwords sum up my feelings about social media and ‘2.0’ right now. Throw in terms like “social media economy” and suddenly you are an expert. Slap 2.0 after anything (see Fundraising 2.0 below) and you are a new internet economy maven (that’s a double-whammy, right there).

Social media eliminates the need to provide value to anyone


The more we look into social media and how libraries and other information organizations are using these tools, I am even more convinced that we do in fact need librarians and information professionals who are trained to use these tools. The skills to participate and create online do not come naturally to everyone. There is a big difference between using Facebook to stay in touch with high school friends or check in with adorable nieces and using Facebook to connect with your patrons.

It is not just a matter of setting up a Facebook page and waiting for patrons to ‘Like’ your page with no incentive. The value-added is so important. The use of social media should supplement their in-library experience. While I do enjoy reading the NYPL Twitter feed, at the end of the day I find greater value in reading my local public library’s feed.

In the new social media economy you just have to keep looking like you are doing work and people will pay you for it


In my last post, I talked about creating a social media strategy in relation to using social media as part of a comprehensive fundraising campaign. I’d like to add that I think establishing a social media strategy is crucial for libraries and other information organizations using social media to engage with their patrons in any way shape or form.

I think part of these slightly negative feelings come as a result of poking around the web for libraries using social media only to find half empty Pinterest cover boards, stagnant Twitter feeds, untouched Facebook pages, and countless other neglected social media tools. Does anyone else feel the same?

Further reading:

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Fundraising for Academic Libraries (a social media approach)

Posted on March 1, 2013 | 1 comment

Last semester, I wrote a white paper about fundraising for academic libraries for LIBR 504: Management of Information Organizations taught by Guy Robertson. If you are interested you can read the document here: White Paper on Fundraising for Academic Libraries by Alyssa Feir (PDF). As we have been moving through this course I have seen multiple uses of social media that would naturally blend with a comprehensive fundraising campaign. Fundraising 2.0 is not a new concept, there is lots of literature out there about how and why non-profits should be using social media. As Wedgeworth (2000) notes:

For all potential donors, the process of creating and maintaining a relationship is at the heart of any successful fund-raising campaign (p. 536).

This idea—the importance of cultivating relationships—is often the crux of the argument for non-profits to be using social media. Social media is all about interaction. Fundraisers have the ability to connect with potential volunteers and donors through Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Flickr … the list goes on!

Libraries are in a unique position within the university setting. Students don’t really graduate from the Koerner Library. They graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in English from the Department of English in the Faculty of Arts. Students aren’t the only ones to use the library either. The library has a wide base from which to draw potential donors and using social media can help the identification process.

I created a PowerPoint slide to introduce the idea of using social media in the library as a fundraising tool. In many ways these approaches are similar to general promotion of library services, but if framed the right way they can generate gifts.

Note: The links to the social media strategy documents do not work on the slides, but they are included below.

Further reading:

Wedgeworth, R. (2000). Donor Relations As Public Relations: Toward a Philosophy of Fundraising. Library Trends, 48(3): 530-539.

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Gamification

Posted on February 15, 2013 | 5 comments

I casually mentioned to my husband tonight that I needed a quest log for my course work. I play a couple of video games (mostly Skyrim and World of Warcraft) and I love completing tasks and earning achievements—I thrive on it. Just one more quest… I can’t say I have the same enthusiasm for the numerous readings, assignments, and various other components of my classes (did I really just admit that on my blog for one of these said classes?).

He told me that I should look up gamification of homework. Apparently, gamification is a real thing and has been since 2002 when the term was coined by Nick Pelling.

Gamification is the use of game-thinking and game mechanics in a non-game context in order to engage users and solve problems. Gamification is used in applications and processes to improve user engagement, ROI, data quality, timeliness, and learning (Gamification, 2013).

Seth Priebatsch, head of SCVNGR, gave an interesting TED Talk about the game layer back in 2010. He suggests that the last decade was all about the social. There is still a lot to explore, but the basic framework is there. The social layer is about connections. This next decade is about the game layer. The game layer is about influence.

He also talked about four elements of gaming:

  1. The appointment: having to do something at a predefined time, in a predefined place to get a reward(example: happy hour)
  2. Influence and status (example: badges)
  3. Progression dynamic (being only 75% of a full person in LinkedIn)
  4. Communal discoveries: everyone works together to discover something (Digg)

This is something I want to come back to and explore with more of a library professional perspective. I think there are merits to gamifying the library and other organizations and it is worth exploring. For now, excuse me while I go gamify my homework.

Read more on Gamification:

Gamification (2013). In Wikipedia Retrieved February 16, 2013, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification

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Critical Making

Posted on February 6, 2013 | 1 comment

I am currently taking INF 1240H Research Methods at the University of Toronto iSchool. One of the components of the course is a group research (b)log. In our groups we discuss the weekly readings and topics as well as hash out our individual research projects. Emphasis is also put on engaging with each other through comments or new blog posts. It is a similar approach to the Facebook group as a collaborative research log we saw in Module III: Collaboration.

While this is collaboration 2.0 in action, I actually wanted to talk about something else from INF 1240: critical making. Last week we were introduced to the idea of critical making. Ratto (2011) describes critical making as “a mode of materially productive engagement that is intended to fill the gap between creative physical and conceptual exploration” (p. 252).

There are three stages to critical making. The first involves reviewing relevant literature and compiling useful concepts and theories. The second stage involves groups of scholars, students, stakeholders jointly designing/creating an artifact. And the third stage is an iterative process that involves reconfiguring the artifact, conversation, and reflection (Ratto, 2011). The emphasis of critical making is not on the artifact created, but rather the process—the value lies in shared construction, joint conversation, and reflection (Ratto, 2011).

Through collaboration in this form, individuals from the social sciences and computer sciences can reduce problematic disciplinary divides. The process—construction, conversation, and reflection—can highlight disciplinary differences and as well as ways to overcome these differences. If you listen to the interview with Ratto below, he suggests that critical making can create an understanding and allow participants to see beyond the norms we as society associate with technology. It’s about transforming the personal and collective imagination.

While critical making may not fall into the category of collaboration 2.0, I do think it is worth discussing in relation to this module. The idea of the shared making experience and the importance of this process is very interesting. I think in many ways that is what makes collaboration in general useful. It is the process of collaborating—what we learn from each other through making, conversing, and reflecting—that has such great value. Of course, in situations outside of critical making the final product is important in and of itself.

Listen to Matt Ratto talk to Nora Young on the CBC’s Spark about critical making. Note: this interview was originally embedded on this blog, but it was a victim of autoplay.

Watch a short video of critical making as it happens:

Thing Tank: Workshop 13 – Energy Monitoring and Data Visualization from Ryan Varga on Vimeo.

Ratto, M. (2011). Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life. The Information Society: An International Journal. 27(4), 252-260.

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Data Privacy Day

Posted on January 28, 2013 | 9 comments

Today is Data Privacy Day. It is held every year on January 28th.

Data Privacy Day is an effort to empower people to protect their privacy and control their digital footprint and escalate the protection of privacy and data as everyone’s priority.(National Cyber Security Alliance, 2013)

After spending the last two weeks thinking about how we participate in social media, Data Privacy Day seemed like a well placed punctuation mark. We read Pearson (2009) and her thoughts about our performance on social networking sites—suspended between the public and the private. We also discussed Albrechtslund (2008) and his ideas about online social networking and participatory surveillance practices—where surveillance can be mutual, empowering, and a sharing practice rather than a trade.

So what does this have to do with Data Privacy Day, you ask? By participating in the online world—whether it’s sharing photos on Facebook, buying something from Etsy, applying to a job through Workopolis or tweeting what you ate for breakfast—we are exposing varying degrees of information about ourselves. We create an online identity. Albrechtslund (2008) states that “to participate in online social networking is also about the act of sharing yourself – or your constructed identity – with others.” It is important to be conscious of just how much you are sharing, and be a “good steward of data” (National Cyber Security Alliance, 2013).

I think this is an important conversation to be had. I have witnessed many instances of thoughtless overshares on Facebook and Twitter. Of course there is lots of discussion about [insert social networking site here] is abusing our privacy, but we should also be talking about how we abuse our own privacy. I also think information professionals are poised to facilitate this discussion and can serve as a fount of knowledge. I have seen libraries that offer social media instruction (Facebook 101 and the like). How about online privacy 101?

The National Cyber Security Alliance has a wide range of resources for parents, teens and youth, educators, businesses, international resources, and just plain-old-everybody.

Albrechtslund, A. (2008). Online social networking as participatory surveillance. First Monday, 13(3). Retrieved from http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2142/1949

National Cyber Security Alliance. (2013). About. Retrieved from http://www.staysafeonline.org/data-privacy-day/about/

Pearson, E. (2009). All the world wide web’s a stage: The persormance of identity in online social networks. First Monday, 14(3). Retrieved from http://www.firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2162/2127

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Affordances

Posted on January 19, 2013 | Leave a comment

We have moved on from affordances to participation, but I have been tossing around some ideas about the language of affordance. It began with a tweet and a reply:

Now, since blogger affords me a greater space for reflection as well as the opportunity to discuss with you, my dear reader, I decided to expand on my thoughts here rather than Twitter. The term affordance was first coined by James J. Gibson, an perceptual psychologist, as “an action possibility available in the environment to an individual, independent of the individual’s ability to perceive this possibility” (McGrenere, 2000, p. 1). The term was later used by Donald Norman in The Psychology of Everyday Things (now published as The Design of Everyday Things):

…the term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. A chair affords (‘is for’) support and, therefore, affords sitting. A chair can also be carried. (Norman in McGrenere, 2000, p. 2).

If we apply to this to a social networking site, such as Google+, we can say that it affords: connecting with people, sharing interesting links, images, thoughts with your ‘circles, and getting into arguments with other users via commenting. There are many affordances—some of them are positive (connecting with people) and some of them are negative (getting into arguments with strangers). Of course, some affordances can have both positive and negative impacts on your experience with the tool.

In my initial response on Twitter, I preferred the use of ‘affordances’ over ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ because of the flexibility of the former and the dichotomy of the latter. While I still think this is true, I don’t think the language of ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ is talking about the possible uses of tool in the same way as ‘affordances’. In my mind, we can assign pros and cons to the affordances. For example, in Twitter I can immediately share a picture of my new haircut with the my friends, family, and the world (pro), but I may also be ridiculed for how bad it is (con). Another example, I can post a comment on a friend’s wall (pro), but they don’t get my joke because it can be hard to read sarcasm and as a result are offended (con). A pro is an advantage of something and a con a disadvantage, and I see these terms applying to the affordances.

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