On Monday, I'll be presenting on Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts at the Eastern New York Chapter of the Association of College & Research Libraries conference. Linked belowis a zipped archive of the presentation.

Update:

Thanks to everyone who attended my presentation! I've updated the link below to go to the updated zipped PowerPoint and associated files.

Presentation

-Carl

A recent commenter posted a link to a fantastic blog, entitled "compos(t)ing, that has posts on topics ranging from wikis to privacy in the age of social software to neat apps like stu.dicio.us.

It's definitely worth taking some time to explore.

-Carl

A collaborative novel via wiki:

http://www.amillionpenguins.com/wiki/index.php/Welcome

-Carl

As an experiment in "back-channeling," I'll be updating this blog entry with ideas from the NITLE "Emerging Technologies" workshop at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. Please post any questions that you want me to ask as comments to this post.

Note that spell-checker can't be enabled on this machine, so expect some misspellings while I back-channel.

Bryan Alexander, Director of Research at NITLE is leading introductions around the room. I spoke with him briefly before the workshop. I asked if he knew Krista S. He does and said she is "great".

Bryan is talking about NITLE's mission and beliefs, using the website (http://www.nitle.org/). He points out their blog (http://b2e.nitle.org/) and says that we'll be talking about blogs today. Now he's moved on to their wiki (http://apps.nitle.org/wikifarm/research/index.php/Main/EmergingTech). All content for this workshop is/will be there, says Bryan. The agenda is there already.

Bryan has put today's presentation online at http://www.slideshare.net/BryanAlexander/social-software-in-education-an-early-2007-overview-20863/ (link fixed)

 "Talking about Web 2.0 is like talking about gaming"

"Web. 2.0 doesn't look serious".

3/4 of Flickr members are not from U.S.

One element of Web 2.0 is "microcontent" (individual "chunks" of information).

Open Content - Use Amazon.com to find books in library.

Pepys Diary from 1600's as a blog: http://www.pepysdiary.com/

Data Mashup: A "collage" of two or more screens of data and combine them. Ex. Flickr + Google maps. I was thinking of Google Earth and Second Life last week. Imagine an exact replica of the earth to travel as a virtual entity.

Web 2.0: Take a project and add a social layer.

Blogs, wikis, Flickr are "social objects".

Metadata on sites like Flickr is not "professional, (or even good)" but it still works (in many cases). It's "good enough."

Folksonomy: Taxonomy created by us (folks). Idea for Digital Asset management - allow users to create tags based on what they see as appropriate. There may exist a difference between what a professional librarian sees and what users see.

Now we're taking a 15 minute break. Someone please post a question comment!

We have returned from our break and Bryan is now talking about podcasting.

Social software is a way to deal with copyright. Users create content and make it freely available.

Blogs have privacy issues. Teachers don't want student to feel intimidated due to the global nature of the posts.

"Some people argue that you should violate privacy." Break down that wall.

In Liberal Arts sector, we look at anything as a potential "teachable moment." Use the openness provided by social software to take advantage of this.

Remix: Take existing objects and change them to make them "mine".

Social software is a new way to create a narrative (Pulse, Lonelygirl15, Flickr - tell a story in five frames).

I mentioned that I am blogging the presentation. Bryan asked that I add a link to this entry to his wiki at http://apps.nitle.org/wikifarm/research/index.php/Main/EmergingTech, which I have done. I wonder, does revealing this back-channel to the "front-channel" betray the concept of back-channeling?

Use OPML to save RSS feeds.

15% to 20% of blogs survive past the first month.

We are now moving on to mobile and wireless computing. Except for the U.S, the phone (enhanced cell phones) have become the dominant technology. We use laptops instead.

Multitasking: Wireless increases the opportunity to multitask.

Privacy issues galore. Cell-phones as spy device: Call phone, leave it on and put it in a person's car.

Humorous note (because we discussed this as an issue just last week): Bryan wanted to show a game in Second Life, but couldn't because an update was required.

12:30 - break for lunch

1:30 - return to conference

Bryan is demonstrating Gliffy (http://gliffy.com/)

We've now moved on to podcasting. Popularity of podcasting possibly fueled by desire for music files created by P2P apps like LimeWire and iTunes.

Most argue that podcasts need to be syndicated (RSS)

"ProfCasting" - Instructors record their class and podcast the recording.

"StudentCasting" - Student-created podcasts.

Indie Music Podcasts - http://www.garageband.com/

Audio Books - http://librivox.org/

Podcast Browser: http://odeo.com/

Story Corp: http://www.storycorps.net/

Bryan is showing Audacity. He strongly recommends it, and seemed surprised that many people in the audience used it as well.

Create a podcast: http://www.gcast.com/ and http://www.libsyn.com/

Archive of the Web: http://www.archive.org/

Flock - The social web browser: http://www.flock.com/

If you haven't had a chance yet, take a look at the 2007 Horizon Report. The two technologies that are described in the "one year or less time-to-adoption horizon," user-created content and social networking, are areas that the Hamilton College social software initiative are prepared to support. If you've attended the Course Possibilities Using Social Software information session or looked over the PowerPoint (available on this blog), you're already aware that the technology and support services to create RSS-enabled user-created content in the form of enhanced podcasts and social networking through blogs and wikis are available for course support projects.

Some excerpts from the Key Trends and Critical Challenges sections that I found especially interesting:

• "Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the information literacy skills of new students are not improving as the post-1993 Internet boomlet enters college. At the same time, in a sea of user-created content, collaborative work, and instant access to information of varying quality, the skills of critical thinking, research, and valuation are increasingly required to make sense of the world."
  
  
• "Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship. The trends toward digital expressions of scholarship and more interdisciplinary and collaborative work continue to move away from the standards of traditional peer-reviewed paper publication. New forms of peer review are emerging, but existing academic practices of specialization and long-honored notions of academic status are persistent barriers to the adoption of new approaches."
  
  
• "The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship. Amateur scholars are weighing in on scholarly debates with reasoned if not always expert opinions, and websites like the Wikipedia have caused the very notion of what an expert is to be reconsidered. Hobbyists and enthusiasts are engaged in data collection and field studies that are making real contributions in a great many fields at the same time that they are encouraging debate on what constitutes scholarly work—and who should be doing it."

The report also brought up the challenge of assessment of student work that makes use of new media. I believe that this challenge is actually an opportunity to analyze the processes involved in teaching and learning and evaluate what we want to students to learn, at what level we want them to learn it, and how we are going to measure their learning.  User-created content and social networking, if used to drive pedagogically sound learning experiences, offer new and exciting ways to foster multiple types of interaction, high-level cognitive skills, creativity, and extremely efficient models for information (course content) delivery.

Note that the NMC used a wiki (http://www.nmc.org/horizon/wiki/Main_Page) to manage the research and discussion process.

-Carl