Just another dent in the damage…

I’m a fan of technology… always have been. From my Dad’s first home-made ‘beeb’ computer I used to play what I consider to be some of the best computer games of all time on, to my first film-loading camera, to my first Walkman, to my first (and only) Playstation, to my first mobile phone, to my first iPod, to my first handheld games console, to my first laptop, to my first digital camera, to my first Mac, to my first iPhone, to my first ebook reader. Oh wait. It’s not actually my ebook reader. No no, it’s the library’s ebook reader. But still, there’s an ebook reader in my hand and for this week I’m calling it mine (it’s a pocket edition Sony eBook Reader)!

So why do I have one? Well, we’re looking into how we can make use of them in the library – whether ebook readers are an appropriate means to deliver content to our students, whether this is feasible or not and whether our users would even be interested in having access to electronic readers – and we have both the Amazon Kindle and the Sony eBook Reader to evaluate. I must admit, one comes in pretty handy when you’ve a load of PDFs to read – simple drag and drop them on and away you go (the Kindle even allows you to annotate, highlight and save clippings). It’s small and light enough to carry anywhere and everywhere and the long-life battery means you only need to charge every couple of thousand page turns. Now being used to charging my phone most days this actually blows my mind!

However, I’m not entirely sold. I found that rather than being as technologically advanced as expected the devices were actually rather painful from a usability perspective. They feel clunky, content is difficult to browse, page turns are slow and it does bother me that they don’t have backlights. Oh and did I mention that because we’re UK customers a lot of the Kindle functionality is not available – wireless access to Wikipedia/blogs etc – and we are unable to buy content for the Sony eBook Reader from the Sony eBook store. How bizarre.

What I will say is that when it came to reading I did rather enjoy using it. I don’t know much about this e-ink display thing but it’s not like reading from a mini computer screen (which to be honest is what I expected) and it was handy being able to just hold the reader and turn pages in one hand and eat my soup with the other.

As for the content, if you want to read classics fine but if not I’m afraid you’re rather limited. eBooks are expensive still and generally not particularly of interest to me (well of interest enough to warrant the initial expenditure) and in a library setting they’re not particular scholarly (unless we’re talking the study of classics). I’m definitely more sold on the idea of storing and reading PDFs or Word files on the device and being able to annotate documents is certainly useful. Princeton University for example went as far as handing out devices to students preloaded with content – but I don’t think this really went down so well either.

Generally I think I’m swaying more to the side of buying ebooks that are compatible with ebook readers to loan to students rather than loaning out the devices. But is this managable? Would we have the ability to remove content from a user’s device once the loan period had expired? Something worth looking into eh? I think what I’m really waiting for is the iPad! Now this looks like a handy piece of kit.

If you’re interested in finding out more about ebook readers there are seriously hundreds of review sites but some of the ones I looked at include: eBook Readers Review; eBook Readers and Wired.

…but like Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s modern dictator.

After the death of his brother, Basil in 1994 (first in line for Presidency), Bashar left the UK and his studies in ophthalmology to assume the mantle of President in waiting. Six years later his father Hafez al-Assad (in office 1971-2000) died and the new President arose.

Unlike Hafez, Bashar is a believer in the democraticisation of Syria and the liberalisation of its people, but to change a stagnant old-fashioned dictatorship is no easy task and with little (if any) leadership training is Bashar even capable of such a thing? Look at Barack Obama for example, has he actually met his promise of change yet? Hardly, to change anything means changing a system of doing things and we all know how bureaucratic these things can be. Change is difficult – even trying to change information on a webpage at work is complex enough for me. Changing the whole mentality of a nation is big and it’s probably why after a decade of Bashar we haven’t seen much happen.

It’s quite ironic that even the Internet, which Bashar himself introduced, is heavily restricted and is in itself an example of how to ‘deliberalise’ the people, limiting their freedom of expression. Learning about the decision making processes of Syrian politics came from reading his father’s meeting notes. And it was here where he learnt that ’unlike performing eye surgery, running a country like Syria requires a certain comfort with ambiguity’.

November’s edition of the National Geographic magazine featured an awesome piece about Syria and the Assads and is definitely worth taking the time to read.

Syria really is a beautiful country and the BEST place in the world to eat falafel… seriously. Aleppo’s citadel is breathtaking and if you happen to find this dude (on the left) in Damascus stop and have a chat, eat his patties – they’re awesome.

Have a look through this photo gallery too, the images are stunning.

When I began thinking about dissertation topics over two years ago I was met by one particular unenthusiastic criticism due to my lack of knowledge regarding the Persian language. I don’t think she ever really understood my subject or why it was important. it was either that or she was too busy playing around in Second Life to give it more than a second thought (maybe that’s another reason why I hate Second Life so much). But rather than let it drop I developed my ideas and took them elsewhere.

It was during the run up to dissertation proposals that I was becoming increasingly aware of Internet censorship in Iran and the growth of the Iranian blogosphere and decided that I’d like to explore this academically with the hope of encouraging further research or laying the foundations for a PhD later in life. I don’t necessarily think I ever achieved that or ever will, purely because I ran out of steam. It was my own doing. You know when you wrap yourself up in something so intensely for a long period of time that once it’s done you never want to look at it again? It was like that. I got my distinction and that was enough. But I’m beginning to realise that it wasn’t the end, it was only the beginning. The story continues and maybe I should be trying to tell it, in my own words?

I started with the concept of Internet censorship – how it was being censored, who was censoring it and why – and wanted to explore strategies being developed to smash down the system, to stick it to the man, to carry on regardless. But this was before Google Translate (although limited it seems to be serving a basic purpose right now) and with no Persian translator I was forced to restrict my exploration to a minority of weblogs written by Iranians in English. I specifically looked at weblogs because they were accessible and easy to document and analyse. All the data collection would be my own doing and analysed with my own criteria. But what exactly was I trying to find out? How would I use weblogs as an example of anti-censorship or more over a strategy to bypass censorship?

Having an idea about what you want your outcome to be always seems to cloud what you need to do to get there, to prove it let’s say. I wanted to look at the writing styles across a sample of Iranian weblogs to assess how people were saying things without really saying them – to look at the poetic metaphors Iranians so often use to describe all manners of life, love, feelings and even politics. To see whether the deep-rooted cultural norm of separating the private and public spheres applied to anonymous weblogs. But what would I compare these writing styles to? I decided that in order to assess how Internet filtering effects Iranian weblogs written inside Iran I’d need to sample Iranian weblogs written in the diaspora. Those written by the displaced, the deposed or even the die-hards who might be more likely to evade self-censorship given the lack of Internet filtering in the more moderate west.

And so I did and if you’re interested in actually reading the thing it’s available online. It’s called Looking for Freedom: An Exploration of the Iranian Blogosphere (and it’s also available in Google Scholar with a couple of spelling errors – doh). I also kept a wiki going whilst doing my research but I’m afraid my updates have lapsed a little. Some of the work I did here has come spilling back to me this week and become ever more relevant. given how Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, proxy services and weblogs are currently being used in the aftermath of Iran’s distuted election.

Google have been providing their useful Google Translate service for quite a while now but today seems to be a rather special day. They’ve finally released a support for Persian, something I think is much more appropriate than colouring the Google logo green for a day – simply because this is it far more useful to the current online ‘revolution’. It means I can not only translate useful sources such as BBC Persian but also all those Persian blogs I so wanted to read during my dissertation hell.

However, I think it’s important to say that this is a machine translation and of course it’s not perfect. But it’s a start and it means it can be developed and evolve into a practical solution for the spread of information. And, with respect to the theme of my dissertation it may in fact be used as another strategy to overcome online censorship, through enabling Iranians to translate English into Persian.

Facebook are also in on the action and the launch of Apple’s latest iPhone software has introduced support for the Persian script – Read more about this on Is This Ta’arof?.

Read Write Web has a really interesting post about a Twitter experiment in which a University of Texas History Professor, Monica Rankin, uses Twitter in a classroom environment to discuss the class topics.

Rankin uses a weekly hashtag to organize comments, questions and feedback posted by students to Twitter during class. Some of the students have downloaded Tweetdeck to their computers, others post by SMS or by writing questions on a piece of paper. Rankin then projects a giant image of live Tweets in the front of the class for discussion and suggests that students refer back to the messages later when studying. The Professor’s results so far have been mixed but it is clear that more students are participating in classroom discussions than they used to.

I think this is a fantastic way of generating bigger discussions and it gives students the opportunity to refer back to what was said and continue to contribute after the session. This then builds up a really useful study aid for when students need to compile coursework or prepare for exams. As a rather quiet student I think I’d have been much more vocal on something like Twitter as I find it much easy to get my written point across than my vocal one.

At my organisation we have introduced an Echo 360 system in which lectures get recorded and published within a student’s virtual learning environment alongside all the teaching materials used in class to ‘rewind, relive and reconnect with the classroom experience’. Twitter could in fact be another great way for us to do this and something I would definitely encourage academics to get involved with.

The other day I was quietly working away when I overheard:

But I don’t want to use Twitter, I’m not interested in what people are having for their lunch.

Firstly, how can you not be interested in what people are having for lunch? I actually find this fascinating and often recommend good places for people to get their chips and falafel from. But I understand that there are people out there not as nosey as I am or generally interested in what people do.

So, instead of arguing about why I think Twitter is the best thing ever I thought I’d put my energy into thinking about things you can do with Twitter (other than telling people how good your falafel wrap was). I know there is already a wealth of information for the Twitter user out there but you know, I wanted to throw my two cents in as well.

Who do you follow?

Well, generally I follow people who match one of this criteria:

• people from real life – friends, family (although my Dad hasn’t discovered Twitter yet – shame it’s the perfect way to spy on me) and work colleagues;
• librarians or information specialists posting interesting links to current issues or discussing new technologies etc;
• news services – including The Guardian Tech, New Scientist, Hollyoaks and Heatworld (obviously);
• whale defenders and marine conservationists – because we’ve got to save the whale to save ourselves;
• vegans – I like stealing recipes and looking at pictures of cake;
• and crafters – it’s a good way of finding free patterns etc.

The problem I have then is keeping the personal and the professional separate, particularly as I worry about being too personal in the professional. For example I’m majorly opposed to whaling (as you probably know) but as this has no relevance to my work do colleagues really need to know it? And should I be telling people about long line fishing in the Galapagos whilst having a break from my book orders? Plus there are those examples of how not to use Twitter. Yet given I actually love my job, my boss is really cool (seriously) and I don’t moan about being bored (usually because when times are quiet I get on the look out for new blog material or ways to improve services for students) then I don’t really see this being an issue for me. I did bad mouth Bloglines once though after a frustrating morning and got caught out by their auto searching, but they were actually more helpful than anything else.

One way of overcoming these problems are to make your updates private, but seen as Googling ‘lex rigby’ fills out the first however many pages of my stuff (although I was never a Communist Student and have nothing to apologise for) then it seems odd to try and make my tweets private. I’m quite an easy person to find out information about. I’m a science and engineering librarian particularly interested in new technologies, I’m insanely fond of whales and cats, I craft, I read stuff about Iran (mainly involving women and human rights) and I’m vegan. Simple eh. And I guess that if people didn’t want to know what Bella’s up to they wouldn’t follow me anyway.

What do you use it for?

The most useful thing I have found to do with Twitter is to do with #tags or hashtags. Hashtags are assigned to subjects/people/categories/conferences/companies/hobbies/films or whatever and are a great way to find out what people are saying about them. In putting a hash sign in front of a word you’re essentially creating a link to a stream involving everyone talking about that particular subject. And the great thing is is that it’s all in real time! A real-time search engine, now that is amazing.

OK, so say I attended the 2009 Lilac conference (I didn’t but some of my colleagues did) and I wanted to say something about what I was hearing alls I need to do is say it (or rather type it) and put a #lilac09 tag in. Voi la. But then say I wanted to know what other people were saying alls I’d have to do is go to Twitter Search (or one of the other many search sites) and put in #lilac09 and start eavesdropping. It truly is a fantastic way of searching – built for the people, by the people.

I discovered this during the Mumbai attacks last year. I wanted to know what was happening before the news stories told me and stumbled upon Mumbai attacks coverage powered by a service called Monitter. Brilliant, now I was getting real time updates from the people there on location, as well as others reporting on events as the news unfolded.

But what could I use it for?

Well, other than using #tags to keep on top of your interests there are a vast number of other things to use Twitter for:

• Use Twitpic to share your photos;
• use Tiny URL to shorten links into your 140 character limit;
• use @ signs to reply to tweets and engage in conversation e.g. ‘@lexrigby that was really funny’ (or direct messages to make your responses private);
• use Tweetworks to start discussions or join groups;
• use Twittangle to filter your timeline by rating users and tagging favourites (very useful if you follow people like Stephen Fry and get sick of his updates);
• use Twtpoll to create a survey;
• use Trackthis to track a package from UPS, Fedex, USPS, DHL etc;
• use direct messages to update your LibraryThing book shelf;
• use Twittercal to update your Google calendar;
• use Tweetbeep for a bit of vanity searching;
• use Fuelfrog to track your gas mileage;
• use Botanicalls to get your plants to tweet you when it’s hungry;
• use a Greasemonkey user script (a Firefox add-on) to get Twitter updates in your Google results page;
• or use RFID chips, computers and cameras to keep track of your cats.

See, it’s not just good for finding out what people had for lunch! It’s so much more than that.

Attention all you cat lovers! Mental Floss has a short article on cats taking over the interwebs. There are loads of ways of getting your cat on the net other than a Facebook Catbook ya’know. check out my Fake Bella pages, dedicated to my furry little friend or read this Cat Blogging and Blogging Cats .

I wanna get one of these Twitter/cat flap things fixed up to monitor the feline as I’m positive she just sleeps in my bed all day. And, I’m really into this Cat Cam idea too but I worry that if I got her hooked up to all this she’d be too weighed down by her collar to even go off and explore anywhere anyway!

So until I create some miraculous technology to track her every move that is little more than a grain of rice I’ll leave you with this:

(a cute picture of Bella hugging a Henry Rollins doll I made).

In the space of a day I’ve gone from being super skeptical of quick response (QR) codes to super enthusiastic – which is a weird predicament for me anyhow. I’m usually pretty quick on embracing new technologies but I just didn’t get what the fuss was about with these things. Now that I’ve had a bit of a play about with them I’m kinda getting them and beginning to see their usefulness in the library setting/educational sector. It obviously helps having a good piece of reader software but I’ll get to that bit later.

So what are QR codes?

Hailing from Japan, these two-dimensional barcodes are a device used to store information that can be downloaded at high speed (hence the name ‘quick response) via mobile phones. Originally they were being used as a tracking device but these days you can pretty much use them for just about anything. They can store text, URLs, telephone numbers,  and even entire poems (The Walrus and the Carpenter).  Put simply they’re like the next generation barcode. Traditional barcodes (those that you see on your baked beans) are only able to hold about 20 digits whereas QR codes have the potential to contain 7000 digits and 4300 alpha-numeric characters. Now that’s cool!

What do they look like?

Generally, they look a little something like this:

These small squares are usually 2cm x 2cm and feature a pattern of black and white pixels, which encode its contents. This example above contains the URL for my weblog and should you want to test how it works you’ll find that you’ll be re-directed right back here – pretty clever huh?

How do they work?

To retrieve the information contained within a QR code you’ll need a) a mobile camera phone and b) some QR reader software to decode the information held within the image. I lacked this second part for a bit and couldn’t understand why I couldn’t read the darn thing, looking back it’s pretty obvious something was missing. Doh. Anyway, what you need to do is use your camera to first of all snap a picture and then as if by magic the software converts the information into something more familiar. I have an iPhone so decided to play around with some of the free apps available in the app store and come to the conclusion that I really like BeeTagg. Looking at their website you’ll see they support quite a range of phones but failing that try a few of these:

• Kaywa;
• Nokia Mobile;
• Upcode;
• Quickmark.

How do I make my own QR code?

To make the image above I used the Kaywa QR Generator but there are loads of others to choose from. I just found the simple layout easy to use and easy to copy. Just select what type of message you want to encode, enter the information you want in your image into the box and voila, your very own QR code.

But what’s so great about them?

Had I been asked this question yesterday I probably would of said “nothing, they’re just another useless fad that people who think they’re ahead of the times buzz about on”. Now however I’d probably said something like “they’re a really useful tool for retrieving and storing information on the go, which help to connect you to the information you need much quicker”.

In libraries there are (upon reflection) a number of ways to get using QR codes, especially if you can’t afford those amazing RFID systems (but even then I don’t think these are particularly useful for library users in terms of retriving information about the item in your hand). Barcodes are used within libraries mainly to link items to a catalogue record. Using the traditional barcode the information contained is very limited and only by scanning the barcode (at the library counter) are you able to find further information contained within the catalogue record.

Now stop and think for one moment. If instead we started to use QR codes to label books, journals, audio/visual, offprints etc and a user wanted to see further information about that resource all they’d need to do is scan the QR code. They’d be able to find descriptive information, images, useful URLs etc all at the touch of a button on their phone. And what if at that moment in time they have too many books out? Well, by saving the QR code as an image they’d have a record of the resource stored on their phone so they’d be able to easily find it when they’re ready to loan it. Brilliant.

As a student I lost many a good book by scribbling down the shelfmark on numerous scraps of paper, leaving off other vital information such as its title/author, which I later misplaced. I’ve even lost count of the amount of times I strawn something on my hand to remind me to go and pick up that book at 575.0162 (D), only to find I’ve gone and washed my hands and half of the flaming thing’s missing. I’ve also had a great deal of experience helping users to find books from laboriously typed out messages on their mobile phones. What if there was someway to get this information onto your phone directly from the computer screen? Well, there is and it also saves on paper! Bath University are working on their catalogue adding text as QR codes to the bibliographic record summerising the key information, the resource title, the author, and the shelf location. For example see Bath’s library catalogue result for Sloman. By scanning the code from the screen I’ll have my own record of  ‘Economics for business / Sloman, John, 1947- Level 5 330 SLO’ on my phone to take to the shelf with me. Perfect.

What else?

How about using QR codes on your promotional/marketing materials to link users directly to where information can be found on the Internet? Do you have a library weblog? Are you producing leaflets to inform readers where they can find it? Why not stick a QR code on there so that they’re able to link directly to you? Got some particularly good skills tutorials you want your users to know about? Stick a QR code on your promotional material and they’ll find it straight away! Got an extensive reading list you want your students to read? Why not put a QR code on there to link students directly to the library catalogue record or even the article itself!! Fantastic eh? Why didn’t I think of any of this earlier.

Other sources:

• Tech Tips: High Capacity Bar Codes;
• iPhone in Education: Using QR Code in the Classroom;
• Educational QR Codes;
• Phones are close to cracking the barcode;
• What you need to know about QR codes.

My two most visited websites now optimised for the iPhone. Genius!

lexrigby.com/heatworld.php and lexrigby.com/reddit.php

Feel free to steal them! What more could you need in life?

Last week I attended my second Teaching Commons 2.0 entitled ‘Social Bookmarking: What is it and how can it be used in Higher Education?’ The commons is quite an informal discussion for both staff and students to come together and talk about their experiences of using web 2.0 technologies and how they can be applied to learning and teaching. This time Jamie Wood from the Inquiry Based Learning department opened the session, describing an activity in which he asked a group of students to use the social bookmarking tool Delicious to ‘tag‘ reading related to the course material.

At a grass roots level, for those not in the know, Delicious is a web 2.0 application used to bookmark webpages so that you can record and store your journey around the web. The good thing about using Delicious in this sense, as opposed to the bookmarking feature in any web browser, is that your bookmarks are held centrally – available from anywhere at anytime (providing you’ve an Internet connection) – and not restricted to the machine on which you made the bookmark. And by applying descriptive tags (keywords) to your bookmarks they become much easier to manage and organise.

So in this particular exercise Jamie encouraged his students to add two to three bookmarks a week that included one primary (deep links to subscription databases are supported – provided users are signed into their accounts), one secondary and one ‘other’ source such as a podcast or non-academic paper that related to the week’s topic. To this bookmark his students were also asked to add a short summary and descriptive keyword ‘tags’ to essentially categorise the resources. But, what Jamie seemed to be missing in his discussion was the reasons why we should bother to tag at all – This came later.

There are many reasons why people tag but generally I think these fall into four categories:

• To organise information into meaningful terms;
• To enable quick search mechanisms;
• To discover other resources with similar descriptive keywords;
• To create a network of folksonomies (as opposed to hierarchical taxonomies).

This last point seemed to form a great debate during the session as it was argued out as to whether it was more useful to create tags from predetermined categories or to opt for unstructured descriptions that even allow for spelling mistakes. Personally I’m in favour of the folksonomy arguments in that I prefer to write my own tags to create a more meaningful picture of links that I’m in control of. After all, creating a hierarchical taxonomy in tagging behaviour does seem to be the exact opposite of the general agreement of web 2.0 applications being collaborative networks.

Rather than asking students to sign up for individual accounts (which can be problematic due to the acceptance of third party terms and conditions) they were given access to a designated account set up by Jamie and all encouraged to tag items with their names (to distinguish between participation in the exercise). Generally I’d agree that this was a good work around the terms and conditions thing but in real life it meant that the social aspect was somewhat redundant with no opportunity to use the network features in Delicious to monitor peers etc and with students more technically keen or able than others the free riders were likely to become alienated from the group.

In conclusion Jamie indicated that the exercise had been well received with positive feedback communicated to the group. During exam time in particular students were appreciative of a designated resource bringing useful information together in one place with a searchable topic index. He’s intending to run the exercise again next year but using Diigo instead of Delicious and so it’ll be useful to see how they compare and whether one is more suited to the user’s needs than the other.