America's Next Top Information Professional

It’s been a busy week, and I haven’t caught up on my posts. On Thursday I went to the first Works (un)Cited event, put on by LASSA, our department’s student association. The goal of the evening was to give students a chance to practice public speaking in a low-risk environment, and also give us all a chance to learn what other folks are thinking about. The line-up was excellent — I missed the first talk, and walked in on the last tantalizing slides of Mahria’s talk on the human brain. I wanted to highlight some rambling thoughts relevant to LIBR 559M. Professor Heather O’Brien talked about her work on engagement. It struck me that this is a concept considered in many different disciplines, but rarely in intersecting ways. (This is a little of how I felt at infocamp — all the UX business has been going on in a big way, and I had just not tapped into those conversations at all.) To give just one example, take a look at this delightful article I found over the summer. It’s a designer’s musings on an issue that regularly wrestle with: how do we physically manifest the memories and information that exist in digital format? As the author states,

If so much of our personal history is getting compressed into data, and digital imaging, cloud computing, and streaming media have become an integral part of daily experience, being sensitive to the physical presence of these devices is an important responsibility.

I’ve been seeing many tweets about the Barnes and Noble e-reader Nook, which are mixed, as usual, with misguided statements about the death of print. My boss over the summer pointed out to me once that books have been a very successful media for a reason. Just because another format for reading will also be successful does not mean books will suddenly have no audience.

I realize this is all a bit of a ramble, but I’ll accept it as one of the “half-baked” blogs mentioned on the Sunday Edition’s enjoyable piece on News 2.0 this morning. One of their interviewees used that term to describe reports that say, basically, “This is what I know, this is what I don’t know…what do you know?” So, whaddya know?

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p.s. Did you know it’s Celebrate Learning week at UBC? There are a few events I’ll definitely be attending.

Monday is the zine workshop I’m teaching at Woodward, followed by “Videogames, Virtual Worlds and Real Learning,” which should be a lively panel. It’s 4:30-6:00 p.m. in the Dodson Room, Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.

Wednesday, there’s a student panel for our normal lunch hour colloquium, 11:45 in Barber 155, directly followed by a talk by Donna Kynaston, the head of records and archives for the World Health Organization.

Anyone keen on any of the other events?