Category: Reflections

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Recommendations Reflections Wired World

The End of the Beginning

I won’t lie. It is a great relief that the summer courses have ended. The compressed nature of such courses makes taking two courses less than ideal and not everyone has the luxury of taking a break or just taking one course. My leave from work ends in May next year and in order for me to finish in time, I had to take the maximum courses offered in summer. That is why I didn’t agree with the disclaimer that our instructor Dean put up in response to some of the gripes the students have about the course on two counts but firstly the disclaimer:

“This is a graduate-level course on social media. As such, it is very software-intensive and some students have found that the course content and structure (use of blogs, tweets and navigating Vista) and the sheer number of social tools that are examined during the term causes considerable information overload. If you are unfamiliar with social media or are planning to take other courses while taking LIBR559M, please speak to the instructor first to determine your suitability for the class.”

Firstly, as I have mentioned, not everyone has the luxury of taking one course.

Secondly, knowledge of social media tools is important for information professionals and therefore, I think this is an important class. However, some people may not be comfortable due to the lack of familiarity but that is precisely why they would be taking the course in the first place – to learn and discover. To have a disclaimer that discourages those who are unfamiliar with social media is not productive and undermines the learning value this course has to offer.

I am a frequent user of social media prior to this course, except Twitter, but I still found this course valuable to me. I was delighted to discover plenty of new tools that can be used. It has been a springboard for me to think about social media related plans that libraries can adopt, all in all, I would still take this class again, given a choice, if only for the tools that it had allowed me to discover.

If this class is offered again, these are the things that I imagine would make it better (but this is of course only my opinion)

1) A wiki of social media tools (not definitions) that students are expected to go out and discover and when they discover new ones, they can add to it. This also makes it clear the amount of tool exploration they are required to do and they can better plan their time.

2) Assignments shouldn’t be a treasure hunt: it should be clear to quell anxieties of missed work and again, it allows students to plan their time around the assignment due dates/ expectations more efficiently.

3) I understand that the blog and forum have their uses but it was never clear to me what topics go on the forum and what goes on the blog and given that both forum and blog postings are requirements, then there is a potential that one may become redundant. I acknowledge that the forums are better for discussions and the blog is better for open topics and reflections so maybe what can be done is to have a specific discussion question or two for the forum for students to post in related to the module topic and leave the blog for open reflections, discoveries that are not tied to the module. This will give students the flexibility to explore areas of interest even more, from marketing to tools like (in my case), digital storytelling. The fact is that there are so many social media tools available and different ones will appeal to different people, giving students the luxury to explore whatever they want and helping them to discover what they find works best for themselves at the end of the day.

To be absolutely fair, the course probably does some of this but if it did, it wasn’t clear to me. This course has a lot of value to information professionals and I would like to see it offered again to a warmer reception. It has been an interesting journey for me, sometimes frustrating, sometimes delightful but one thing for certain is that I did take away good knowledge from it.

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Information Management Reflections

Civil Society & the Aggregation of Information

I thought for this week’s post on aggregation, I would think about how it affects civil society. The first thing I was actually thinking about is the type of civil society – from NGOs to community interest groups, the kind of impact aggregation would have on them would vary. The second thing was whether they would use it internally to collect and share information or whether they would use 2.0 tools to make increase their virtual presence.

On a very basic level, aggregation can benefit a group the same way it can benefit an individual, having a centralised place to collect and share information is great for exchanging ideas and tapping on each other’s knowledge. I thought Michelle’s recommendation Scoop.It. is great for interest-based organisations. The downside, however, is the assumption that everyone would be need to be technologically savvy enough to curate information or at least follow the person who does. Additionally, many charitable organisations do a lot of work on the ground and rely more on physical networks for information. In theory it seems like a great idea but it takes time to curate and many may simply not invest in that time.

Aggregation tools can impact an organisation positively, especially if someone has the required expertise and skills as well as a vision of how they are going to use such tools to reach out to the online public. A nature advocacy group can collect all their videos and articles so that people can easily find and follow them, a charitable organisation can share photos and information about their work and present them as a collective whole to get funding. With the world wide web, many groups can get international support where it would have once been impossible to do so. A petition against a controversial policy, international pressure, all of these have given much of civil society the bargaining power they need against governments or more visibility for a cause.

The flip side is this, bigger organisations often get more visible at the expense of smaller ones who do not have the resources or time to manage their online pressence. Let’s say I see a campaign for women’s rights online handled by an international NGO with all the resources to make themselves visible online and I find myself interested in the cause because they put up information, photos and of course a convenient link for donations. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I know there must be other similar organisations, maybe smaller and less media savvy but also doing good work. However, information about the work those smaller organisations do are either limited or not visible to me. I also do not know how I can help. As a result, I will end up supporting what I know. While it is true that these NGOs may be getting new supporters through the social web and these may be people who may otherwise never be involved in a cause, it is also true that they may overshadow others.

Information is both power and money and while these two things can be used to do good, it may also result in complacency. On the whole I think being able to manage a wide range of information online with tools for aggregation is a good thing but for every organisation we see online compiling their resources, there are many more out there who don’t and maybe as information professionals, a service we can provide for the community in our free time is to help some of these organizations, who are clearly doing good work, manage their information.

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Reflections

The Social Everything

(Note: If you don’t have a sense of humour, please don’t read this post and do your readings instead – it will probably be better time spent)

I’m on a roll, third blog post for the week… I’m not on the ball, I’m just inspired to be irreverent, which happens when you take two online classes and ask yourself why you are spending so much time indoors when there is so much sun OUTdoors. On days like these, I also reflect only the disjunct between school and what happens in the working world. So much of school work is hypothetical which is good for thinking about things but there is always this thin line where you know you have crossed when you start obsessing over how many blog posts you have made for the week, how many tweets you have tweeted and of course how many wiki edits you have made.

Thankfully, my ability to be irreverent shows that I am not there yet.

Let’s talk about “the social everything” – a term Anita and I coined today over a delicious dim sum meal (great moments of epiphany happens over food) where we were engaging in social food bonding. Social is big business, the social web, social media and if we go towards the internet of things, you might even have social household appliances! Many companies are realising the power of social media and are leveraging on it to reach out to more people either through direct advertising on social media platforms or creating a social media presence for themselves to engage people beyond the transactional. Social is the new business buzz word.

However, social is nothing new, it has just been given a new face. In China, businessmen secure deals over dinner and drinks, mutual partnerships have their roots in good business relationships, good customer service is about building good relationships with your clients; building relationships is intricately linked to building good social networks and not necessarily online. One of the dangers of social media is the assumption that if you are on it, you are building relationships. That is only partially true. Social media cannot replace real world interactions – the irony is that the convenience of it sometimes devalues the effort. It’s as simple as wishing a friend Happy Birthday over Facebook as opposed to sending a physical birthday card. Social media can be a start, a gateway but if you want meaningful relationships, you have to put in more effort than typing words over the internet.

Likewise physical classes as opposed to online classes. While there are benefits to online classes, they cannot replace physical classes in the area of relationship building. At the end of the day, content will only take you so far and if you have all the content in your head without the social skills to make it relevant to the people around you, you will only achieve limited success. It is better to have less content and more social skills than more content and less social skills (unless you want to become an academic). Getting the best grades, rushing to be first, proving yourself academically is only going to get you a piece of paper at the end of the day. Everything else after is social.

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Reflections Virtual Reality

When Social Media becomes a Crutch

I have never actively participated in Second Life – I tried it for a course but never got the hang of it (partly because it was not intuitive to me) and it felt like too much of an effort to create another world to live in for yourself. Living in any “world” requires work. You need to spend time to build relationships, you need to understand the rules that govern a place and adapt. I couldn’t understand why anyone would be addicted to Second Life at that time and reading stories of people who found the kind of “acceptance” they could not find in the real word or used it to escape made me wary of such “models” of reality.

Second Life is no longer as popular as it once was but I thought it was a useful place to start thinking about things, simply because it makes such a close attempt to model itself after the physical world; with land that you can buy with real currency and actual businesses having a presence there. The thing that bugged me the most was the claim that it was inclusive and allowed misfits in real life to forge an identity for themselves and to be who they really are. This article here is written by someone who says that “in SL we can not only find the opportunity to fit in but can do so openly and without fear of being treated as outcasts, or of separating ourselves and becoming remote from the world around us“. In some ways, this is a good thing but part of me wonders if it takes them further away from reality because now that they have a place, there is no need for them to work on their social skills in real life. These skills are important – they are the skills that get you a job, allow you to work with your colleagues, interact with people – and to develop them in the virtual world at the expense of the physical world does seem to me to be unhealthy.

Linking this to online identities: Dividing between the personal and professional and presenting two different facades is a matter of choice and I do not have any issues with that but what I think is not healthy is when the online identity becomes a crutch, something people lean on to present the self they would like to imagine themselves as. If this becomes a stepping stone towards them being the person they want to be, that’s good but if it becomes an excuse to avoid the physical world, then it isn’t.

Now that Second Life has fallen out of fashion, I wonder about all these people who found refuge there. What has happened to them.? Do they move themselves to another social media platform? Do they find themselves thrown back into real life and disliking the world they live in even more? I do not see Facebook to be all consuming the way Second Life is – it does not try to create for you a “second life” but I have known people who were really unpleasant in real life but amazingly friendly and thoughtful in the virtual world. How not to be when there are birthday reminders? Being thoughtful has suddenly become a lot easier.

Additional Note: This post is a little late – just slightly past the deadline for it but as they say, better late than never.

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Reflections Wired World

When plugging-out gives you connection withdrawal syndrome

Over the weekend, I took a short break and hopped over to Vancouver Island to visit friends, took long walks and enjoyed the natural scenery – it was fresh air and a welcomed change from staring at the computer from morning to night. Unfortunately, I was suffering from a connection withdrawal syndrome. Every few hours or so, I would wonder about the tweets and blog posts I missed, the forum posting requirements that I have yet to fulfill… it hindered my ability to enjoy my time on the island to my fullest capacity.

I am not always like that. I don’t have a smart phone, my ipad is wi-fi only and I am perfectly capable of going on a long vacation and leaving the world behind. In short, I enjoy being plugged-out. It is important because there is simply too much going on and to try to follow every single online update would be to fry your own mental circuits. Enough is enough – the world goes on without you and you are no lesser for missing one update. In fact, being away allows me to listen to my own thoughts. When I am online, I am bombarded with everyone’s thoughts and after a while, I am not sure which ones belong to me and which ones came from the great big cyberverse.

So why did I feel such anxiety over the weekend? Was it because all of a sudden my online activities were graded and the opportunity cost of not being active online suddenly becomes greater? Or was it because I spent an excessive amount of time online in the three days before that I had gotten used to being plugged-in and removing it felt like something was ripped from me? I personally thought it was the former and that is very much centered around the word “opportunity cost”. It stems from the fear of missing some quintessential update which is in turn linked to how you are perceived. In an online class, it translates to “participation” which has a grade. In the online social universe, it would be missing someone’s updates that would have made you a better friend had you wished them “happy birthday” or “congratulations” or a word of sympathy for some misfortune. Part of it sounds silly (trust me – I know) but I have been at the lashing end before, being told that I was a lesser friend for not “expressing” my care and concern over the social universe. In retrospect, it’s hilarious but it was not funny when it was happening and it certainly shows that social media has redefined our expectations in relationships, especially if both parties are wired. I certainly do not think making token remarks on friends’ updates makes you a better friend so I do not see why not doing it makes you a lesser one.

That said, circling back to the first point. There are two worlds, the physical and the online one – they are not substitutes for one another and people are learning to live with both. The online world should not come at the expense of the physical world and if taking a break causes you to have withdrawal symptoms, then it probably is a signal that you need to get more fresh air. A sunny day may not be there tomorrow but the computer most likely will.

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Blogging Reflections

Hello world!

Hi! I’m Felicia, an MLIS (Masters of Library and Information Science) student at the University of British Columbia. This blog was created for the class LIBR559m which deals with social media and information professionals. You can read more about my personal self in the about page.

Since this blog is primarily about social media, I would like to start by sharing my own personal experience with it. I started blogging since 2002 which is almost 10 years ago. In those early days, it was often an avenue of self validation. It was wonderful to be able to share one’s thoughts about something that happened and have people respond – my young adult self found it wonderfully assuring. Privacy meant very little then though I was conscious about not making disparaging remarks about others. As I grew older, I found that I did not relish the thought of people I was unfamiliar reading my blog which resulted in the move to private blogs. That caused readership to drop. People could not see it in their RSS feed and most found it a hassle to log in. When readership dropped, I felt less inclined to post anything. These days, I just use Facebook.

I realised then that blogs are written to be read, they are not personal diaries or a place to write long academic papers (as a friend of mine used to do) unless readership means nothing to the blogger which then begs the question of “why publish it?” It’s a wonderful tool when used correctly but many have run into problems like school teacher Natalie Munroe who got flagged for insulting her students on her blog (see article here).  I also realised that issues of privacy matter more the older you grow. Blogging did not happen in my early teenage years so I did not have a whole lot of “floating information” to delete and even then, erasing that footprint was difficult. I wonder about the children and teenagers of today who would have started at a younger age. By the time privacy matters to them, would it be too late for them to remove their digital footprint?

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