Just another dent in the damage…

Last time I got hooked on Monitter was during the Mumbai attacks last November when my need for real time information got so intense that it became difficult to deattach my eyes from the computer screen. This time it’s the Iran elections (#iranelections) that have really got me. Sat here feeling so overwhelmed and helpless I really have found the evidence needed to prove the usefulness of Twitter.

Twitter has in fact been so useful to Iranians tweeting the ‘revolution’ that scheduled maintenance was put back a day to keep communication open. My only criticism over the last couple of days is the difficulty to sieve through the millions of uninformative re-tweets and misinformation to actually get to the heart of what I want to know – what is happening right now!

Below are some links I’ve found useful over the last couple of days:

• For some great Twitter feeds see: persiankiwi/StopAhmadi/mousavi1388 and Change for Iran;
• For good Twitter round-up tools see: Twazzup and PicFog for images;
• For a round up of the larger context of the Iranian elections see: Revolutionary Flowerpot;
• For a collection of some amazing photographs see: Mousavi1388/TheStyx/Boston’s Big Picture and The Guardian;
• For some general Fisking see: Iran Erupts/Ahamdinejad whips crowd/Iran’s day of destiny and Fear has gone;
• For a bit about elections and democracy see: Christopher Hitchens;
• For some rally footage the best place was always going to be YouTube: BBC Persian/a brave female Iranian kicks police and 15th June crowds;
• For some Guardian Analysis see: election statistics and shots fired;
• For some live tweeting I kept up with Andrew Sullivan’s commentary at: The Daily Dish;
• For some expert analysis from Gary Sick and Karim Sadjadpour see: PBS;
• As always Channel 4 News have been right on! See: Lindsey Hilsum’s blog (she is the international editor for Channel 4 News and is currently reporting from Iran) esp. ‘A day in Iran.‘;
• Good blogs include: For a democratic secular Iran (he was also on Channel 4 News and the BBC)/The Huffington Post and The Lede blog;
• And also see the Channel 4 news broadcasts including nation in turmoil and violence at protest.

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.

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.

Teachingcommons: Teaching 2.0 Circle & Blogging

Twitter and Microblogging:

The general theme of last week’s teaching commons was the discussion of blogging – what it is and how it can be used. It intended to offer ideas to both those new to blogging about how to start up and get writing and to those wanting to get more out of it, if they’ve been blogging for a while, by introducing widgets and RSS. One area of particular interest for me, after reading Boutin’s article in Wired Magazine, was the discussion surrounding microblogging and how services like Twitter can be used in higher education.

Twitter is one of the more well known examples of microblogging, along with Jaiku, which limit posts to 140 characters. It’s basically a ’status update’ application like that found on Facebook but without all the other stuff. Instead of friends you get ‘followers’ and in turn you’re able to ‘follow’ others and their activities quite easily by searching names or locations. The good thing about Twitter is that once you’re signed up you may never need to visit http://www.twitter.com again. Twitter clients such as Twhirl or Twitterific are downloadable for free and automatically alert you to updates in real time as well as providing a user-friendly interface to search and add feeds to your profile. Updating your own status has also never been easier as there’s an abundance of medium to choose from – SMS messaging, email, desktop clients, IM clients and the web, and there’s an option to receive text messages of updates from those you choose to follow (limited to O2). This makes it fast and super user-friendly when it comes to posting quick updates about what you’re doing, whose keynote your listening to, what amazing new product has just been released or even what you’re having for tea.

I have mini obsessions with it. Some weeks I’ll be posting my life story, in others I can’t quite get why anybody would be interested in what I’m doing, in others I think ‘I’m not sure I’m really making the most of this’, in others I think ‘I wish I actually knew more people using Twitter’ maybe I’d feel like less of a stalker and in others I give up completely. This week however has been a week of ’so how can we make use of Twitter in higher education?’ Well after a little thinking, a little discussion and a little searching I’ve come up with a short list to outline a few suggestions.

Twitter in Higher Education:

• Classroom communities - Students using Twitter as a way to collaborate about class work beyond the classroom may lead to more productive discussions in class.
• Class communication – Teachers/lecturers could be encouraged to use Twitter as a way to communicate with students about homework, room changes, time changes, class preparation, further reading etc.
• Conference news – Conference tags (#tags) can be added in posts to identify updates as conference news. In following a conference you’re able to receive live news from an event and gain ‘insider knowledge’ that only the insiders are getting.
• Q and A sessions – Stuck on your homework? Not sure what the next class is about? Was there any reading to do? What room is it being held in? Who’s the guest speaker? If in doubt ask your class mates, surely one of them will know the answer.
• Feedback - Rather than waiting until the end of the module to fill in a feedback form Twitter can be used as a means to generate immediate feedback about a class or event. It can be used to encourage particular teaching methods and offer advice about how to do things differently.
• Distance learners – Using Twitter to communicate with distance learners has the potential to offer students greater learning support and encouragement throughout their courses.
• Networking – As a social networking application Twitter also provides the perfect space to monitor new developments in your subject area on an international scale.

For more see:

• An interview with David Parry;
• Twitter at Penn State World Campus;
• Can we use Twitter for educational activities?

Twitter in Libraries:

There’s also a lot of talk circulating about the benefits of libraries introducing a Twitter service to communicate with its patrons. Librarians could be using Twitter as a platform to discuss conferences and events and keep up-to-date with developments in the field of information as well as to promote library services or alert library users to service downtimes etc. There are examples of libraries using Twitter as a reference service or to inform its ‘followers’ about new releases, library events and even when reservations come into stock but I’m just not sure how well it has all been received.

For more see:

• The Ultimate Guide for Librarians;
• Casa Grande Public Library;
• Missouri River Regional Library;
• Nebraska Library Commission.

So it’s all a great idea, right? Well yes, I think so but in practice you might encounter a few problems.

Potential Cons:

• Encouraging students to sign up to external services may not be such a good idea as there are terms and conditions which apply to these services that are outside agreements students have already signed to make use of university services;
• Information platform overload – There are already a variety of platforms students are encouraged to use such as virtual learning portals, which already have forum facilities etc and as Facebook is already deeply ingrained in student activities some may be reluctant to convert;
• Service management – Like instant messaging (’Ask the Librarian’ services) if Twitter was introduced as a library service there would need to be someone who can manage that service and provide frequent updates. That could mean more staff and more money and could in fact stop the service dead in its tracks even before it hits the mark.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a SINTO training event called, Ills and Document Delivery in the Web 2.0 Environment. The purpose of this day long course presented by Stephanie Taylor of Critical Eye Communications was for document supply librarians to learn more about new methods of inter-lending and the benefits of social-computing. During the event we were introduced to electronic copyright and publishing contracts, in relation to the Internet, to discuss the importance of end-users and what this means for the document supply unit of library services.

In part 1 Stephanie gave an overview of how developing technologies have effected the traditional publishing model in terms of copyright, and the role of the library as a centre of information. Inter-lending and document supply, she says, ‘do not exist in isolation, and in the environment of the new internet technologies, this is more true than ever before’.

Over the years we have seen the ILL model alter from a simple triangle of requester, library and scholar to include the printing press (publishers), aggregators, authors, and later the Internet. Today everyone (with a computer and Internet connection) has the means to publish (online) and distribution has never been so easy. Within a matter of seconds information can be sent not just nationally but internationally and has the potential to generate millions upon millions of reader. So what does this mean for copyright and who has control?

The new model of information processing has moved the practice of publication into the electronic world and consequently made it more difficult to define the roles of traditional information providers such as publishers and aggregators. Therefore it also becomes increasingly difficult to control copyright. As a result publishers have begun to offer licensing agreements to standardise the sharing of resources and have introduced ‘chest agreements’ to cover content shared between academic libraries. For items supplied via the ILL department copyright declarations are usually required for legal purposes. Likewise for aggregators information and services are packaged up into ‘bundles’ for reselling.

For the author a ‘Creative Commons‘ license was introduced to create an opportunity for them to limit how their work is used. These licenses, depending on the one chosen, restrict certain rights of the work instead of traditional copyright licenses, which tend to be more restrictive. For example photos published on Flickr uploaded under a creative commons licence give authors the right to state under what conditions their photos are permissible to use i.e. ‘you are free to share, remix and reuse material for non-commerical purposes’.

In the second half of the course Stephanie provided an introduction to Web 2.0 technology by comparing its capabilities with ‘Web 1.0′. Based on a Tim O’Reilly (of O’Reilly Media, accredited with coining the term Web 2.0) brainstorming session Web 2.0 is generally agreed to mean ’social computing’ and it refers to web-based applications which allow users to tag, comment and collaborate on content.

During the afternoon we were set a task to discuss the experience of end-users, how web 2.0 technologies are leading to the development of personalised environments and how these may effect the role of the ILL service. A lot of the examples she used suggested that shes been listening to Dave Pattern, but I think that might just be coincidence. We discussed LibraryThing, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Blogs, Wikis, Flickr, Youtube and Amazon to highlight the added value of saved searches, social tags/bookmarking, recommendations, open access and RSS feeds. Like Dave, Stephanie emphasised the importance of the end-user and finished the event with a few ‘tips and tricks’ for integrating the ILL department into the library’s web presence and a list of resources/useful organisations for further information.

After a long day at the Library and Information Show courtesy of Birmingham’s NEC I feel ready to count my free pens and stress balls… All day I’ve been wondering why so many exhibitors offer free stress balls! It seems to suggest that us librarians are easily stressed?? Yet if we were really that stressed I can’t help but think a little squigy ball isn’t going to help all that much, maybe a large glass of vodka would, but as a non-boozer and all I’ll stick to pulling my cat’s tail for stress relief (that was a joke by the way, as if I’d be that mean to the little slime-ball).

I think the highlight of my day was sitting in on Dave Pattern’s talk about the continuing impact of Web 2.0 on library catalogues. I’m really into this whole Amazonisation of library OPACs but really, can such a thing take off? In my opinion, yes I think it could given the right setting. Knowing your library user and how they use the library’s OPAC seemed to be one of the key factors in helping the University of Huddersfield to really add-value to library services. In monitoring the keywords used to generate searches the University of Huddersfield were able to build up a bank of about three million words to create a ’suggestive’ service (and a really awesome tag cloud) to recommend titles and keyword combinations to generate more specific results. Now if that had been implemented at Sheffield University during my time it would have really helped me out! I’m not so sure I would have used the further features of Huddersfield’s OPAC 2.0 like comments and ratings but I’d like to think I’d have caught on to the RSS alerts early and personalised ratings without my own library account to keep track of books I’d already borrowed. There’s nothing more frustrating than forgetting the title of that awesome book that was really helpful when you’re standing outside the doors of a building that houses 1.4 million titles! ARGH.

I think I’ll probably have more to write about this but Heroes is back on our screens soon and I can’t be late! Check out these links to some of the libraries Dave talked about though.

Use his advice: ‘Have a play’:

• Ann Arbor District Library;
• Hennepin County Library;
• Library Thing;
• North Carolina State University;
• Plymouth State University;
• Topeka and Shawnee County;
• University of Warwick.