Category Archives: Study

Reflective statement for INF506

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This is the twelfth and final post in a series produced for studying purposes.

This reflective statement is meant to be a little more touchy-feely than the evaluative statement. However, I feel there is a need for a little background before I launch into it…

To say that I wasn’t prepared to go back to study would be an understatement. I had originally enrolled with my best mate and planned to study two units per semester to complete the four units I needed to do by the end of this year. I then realised I was horribly overcommitted and dropped one. The unit I kept should have been a walk in the park for me, someone that already works with social media.

Regardless, INF506 – Social Networking for Information Professionals – was a definitely a learning experience for me. I learnt that I poorly manage my own information streams. I follow too many people on Twitter, I have too many “friends” on Facebook and I probably have a Dunbar number for RunKeeper too.

Right, that’s enough of the flagellation…

I came in to this unit already knowing a thing or two about practical applications of social media. I came out knowing that I didn’t know as much as I thought I knew. Are you still with me?

First and foremost, I learnt a little bit about social media policy. I long thought that social media policies were a daft idea and all social media issues governed by existing IT and PR policies. To some degree, I still hold that opinion, but it’s been tempered by the realisation that sometimes a single, clear-cut policy to deal with a particular issue is better than having many different policies governing one thing.

Furthermore, I originally thought that policies should not be used in lieu of common sense. This has been replaced with an understanding for the need of policies to protect people, not just govern them. For example, it’s all well and good to delete a trolling post, but if that troll then continues to stir up trouble and scream about “freedom of speech” (which we do not have in Australia, anyway), it’s far easier to point to the policy rather than argue with them, which could be bad for business, or ignore them and let them continue their rant, which could also be bad for business.

I’ve decided to shed some of my conservatism when it comes to suggesting experimental technologies at work. I try to temper enthusiasm with a little bit of accountability – thinking of things like cost overheads and budgets. I think that comes from my previous study in computer science and desire to please IT managers. It used to be that IT was considered a cutting-edge field, but now IT departments are certainly extremely conservative.

Sod it! We should have a budget for experimentation. I’m going to try and argue for it. I might even write a business case. A business case to possibly throw money away? Ask me how it went in six months.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that we should be carelessly experimenting for the fear fun of it without having any sort of direction. Social technographics is something that I’d really like to learn more about. I’ve previously mentioned the copy of Groundswell sitting on my desk, I think I’ll actually make an effort to read it. I’ll even go so far as to ignore social media whiling I’m reading this book about social media.

So where does that leave me? A little wiser and little more courageous, I think.

Evaluative statement for INF506

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This is the eleventh post in a series produced for studying purposes. This particular post is important as it forms a major part of an assessment. No trolls allowed!

I need to write two no-more-than-750-word statements as the final part of this particular assessment. This is the “Evaluative statement”, intended to be a somewhat objective look at my growth and development over the course of the semester, with regard to the learning outcomes. I will draw examples from three of my blog posts:

- demonstrate an understanding of social networking technologies;

I clearly have an understanding of social networking technologies and how can help (or hinder) people in their lives. Specifically, I have learnt through the management of my PLN (Personal Learning Network) how social networks sometimes need to be carefully curated in order to provided maximum return on investment.

Social networking technologies range from everything as simple in concept as Twitter to more complex and elaborate mechanisms like Facebook and Second Life.

- demonstrate an understanding of concepts, theory and practice of Library 2.0 and participatory library service;

During this unit, I oversaw the launch of a Facebook page for my library. I drew inspiration for the management of this page from peers at another organisation (members of my PLN). The Facebook page is an experiment – I wasn’t sure how it would grow and develop, but “play” is an important part of Library 2.0.

First and foremost – we welcome any sort of comments on the Facebook page. Library staff adhere to the University’s Social Media Guidelines and we expect fans to follow the Social Media Rules of Engagement. We have not removed any content at all, even complaints about the lack of computers in the Library – a perennial problem.

- critically examine the features and functionality of various social networking tools to meet the information needs of users;

I am aware that some social networking tools do not have particularly strong return on any sort of investment you may put in then. Second Life, for example, has a steep learning curve and can be frustrating for users. It is difficult to properly engage with users and help them with their information needs if they are struggling to learn a new interface at the time.

The most important feature to look for when evaluating social networking tools to engage users is user-friendliness.

When a particular tool is selected to meet the information needs of a user group, it must be leveraged to take advantage of the features it offers. It is simply not enough to use a Facebook page as another place to post headlines from your blog – it must be used as a framework to create a community of users that communicate in more than one direction.

- evaluate social networking technologies and software to support informational and collaborative needs of workgroups, communities and organisations; and

My personal learning network is the intersection of various informal communities, mostly other information professionals. We organically evaluate various social networking technologies in groups that spring up out of pure interest.

Similarly, at work, I look for opportunities to evaluate social networking technologies and software in “real world” applications. Even though full implementation of a technology for its own sake is generally a bad move, I embrace the opportunity to experiment with new technologies whenever possible.

- demonstrate an understanding of the social, cultural, educational, ethical, and technical management issues that exist in a socially networked world, and how information policy is developed and implemented to support such issues.

Although many issues that exist in a socially networked world can be addressed with existing policies, for example most universities already have policies governing how their staff may interact with traditional media, sometime special social networking policies are required.

When socially networking in a professional capacity, I adhere to social media guidelines developed by the office of Corporate Communications and Public Relations at Murdoch University.

Information policy and social media

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This is the tenth post in a series produced for studying purposes. I am a pizza-fueled blogging machine!

In this post, I need to use this video to identify five trends/shifts in technology and how they could affect/be affected by information policy. The video is almost two years old, so some of the statistics it quotes are already grossly out-of-date, but I shall have to make do.

Advertising – shift to targeted/customised

Businesses will try to customise advertising as much as possible, much like what we can see on Facebook today. Customers may get annoyed (like I am by ads for dating sites), but they will appreciate that they aren’t bombarded by irrelevancies (like I am whenever I watch TV). Massive databases on individuals will be built, and protected as confidential assets – not for the privacy of users, but for the bottom line.

Fast information retrieval

Customers will want information immediately. Want to know exactly what sort of information you need to provide to apply for that loan? Look it up straight away so you don’t need to actually waste a human’s time. Traditionally “confidential” information will be available on the open Web.

Print to digital

Printing out 200 page reports to discuss them at meetings will be frowned upon as wasteful. Everybody’s fondleslab will talk to the other so when one person discusses a particular aspect of the report, everyone will be automatically turned to the same page, so to speak. All employees will either bring their own mobile device, or be provided one by work.

Ordering via mobile phone

Customers will be able to buy those gorgeous shoes they just saw that girl on the bus wearing immediately. Major fashion retailers will have to have an Internet store, or they will lose business to cheap overseas knockoffs who are far more adaptable and savvy online.

Employees will prefer to use their own mobile phones for work purposes – having two devices to customise will simply be too time-consuming. Businesses will adapt to this form of BYO.

Microscopic computers

When your molecular structure modelling kit knows what you’ve built with it, it will communicate with your fondleslab to tell you more about that particular molecular arrangement. It will guide you through the oxidation process, gently correcting you if you haven’t properly converted that CH4 and O2 into the C02 and H20. Libraries will automatically know if you’ve returned the kit missing even one single hydrogen atom.

To develop a social media strategy

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This is the ninth post in a series produced for studying purposes. I think I’m starting to leak social media from my ears.

Groundswell is a book that’s been sitting on my desk for a number of months. Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to read it it, but I appreciate having to read at least an excerpt for my Social Networking unit at Uni.

Now in this post I’m meant to discuss how I would go about developing a social media strategy for my organisation. I might take a subset of that organisation – just the library rather than the entire university.

When it come to social technographics, I’m quite lucky in that the University’s marketing department has already run a survey. I’m waiting for the results with great anticipation, so I have something to wave at mangers when I want to start a Twitter account, but I digress.

I believe that a social media strategy appropriate for my library would be one developed by more than one person, not just me. I’d try and recruit a group of people of different backgrounds, etc (although they’d all need to be curious) and get our heads together.

The strategy would involve a selection of a variety of technologies that complement each other. I don’t like putting all of our eggs into one proverbial basket. I’d like to get as much exposure as possible, across all the different social media available.

I’ve never been particularly good at things like KPIs or things like that – the biggest issue for me would be to determine whether our strategy is actually successful. I’d probably have to seek guidance from other parts of the University about those matters.

Librarian 2.0

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This is the eighth post in a series produced for studying purposes. In the home stretch, right? Right!?

In this post, I’m meant to be defining what I believe are the most essential characteristics for information professionals in a Web 2.0 world.

I think there’s only one characteristic that is essential, and that’s curiosity. Nothing else is anywhere near as important as this single trait. You can have as much or as little energy as you want, be as technologically savvy or backwards as can be… Not even age is important!

I’ve spent five years trying to champion the use of emerging technologies (part of which is social media) in libraries and found that the best response is received from those with curiosity. I’ve worked with some ignorant dullards that have no curiosity and now run large libraries and I weep (figuratively, not literally) for how those organisations will be run.

Okay, now I’ll admit that there are some other traits and characteristics that could come in useful (but are not as important as curiosity). For example, being happy to engage in conversation is pretty important. There’s no point playing with social media if you’re not going to be social.

Designing effective library websites

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This is the seventh post in a series produced for studying purposes. You’re still here? Nice!

The Murdoch University Library web site recently had a major overhaul and redesign, so it’s with great interest that I go through Brian Mathews’ Ten essentials for any library web site to see how we stack up.

1 Promotion

The homepage has three (although currently four) boxes that promote important information. The opening hours box will display today’s opening hours, and links to a page with hours for the entire academic year. The other two boxes are intended to rotate between different content through the semester, as different things become important to our clients as semesters progress.

2 Segmentation

The Our services page is what has most of our market segmentation. I did argue that the market segmentation should be at the top level, but unfortunately I was in the minority.

3 Visual cues

Most of our links are plain text. There are some buttons, but we did not implement any glyphs or anything like that. I feel that the use of glyphs is something we should consider for the next revision of the site.

4 Inspiring photos

Our home page boxes use nice little photos to help highlight them (there is a Getting Started box, currently not there, that used a Creative Commons licensed image of someone running the New York Marathon). I’d like to spruce up the other pages with some photos, but that’s a matter of available time.

5 Search boxes

Check.

6 Mobile-friendly pages

The Murdoch University mobile site has a section for the Library. More content will be added in future versions of the site.

7 Feedback

We invite clients to connect with us on Facebook. We are more than happy to address any comments/suggestions publicly.

8 Redundancy

Visitors can either navigate to information or use the site search box that is on the top-right of every page.

8 Redundancy

Visitors can either navigate to information or use the site search box that is on the top-right of every page.

9 Analytics

Check – care of Omniture.

10 An easy way to ask for help

Our Getting help page details all the methods that our clients can contact us, ranging from email to phone to online chat.

A to Z of Social Networking for Libraries

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This is the sixth post in a series produced for studying purposes. If you’re still reading, I admire your tenacity.

The A to Z of Social Networking for Library is a list produced by AnnaLaura Brown. As a task for my Social Networking unit, I have to see how a library I am familiar with (I’ll use my workplace as an example) stacks up to five entries in the list.

A is for Active

I am one of five staff members that actively contributes to our Facebook page (is it not pretty?). We are each rostered on for one day each week to make sure that the page doesn’t go stagnant – we actively look for interesting things to post. We also stand ready to respond to any inquiries from our clients.

C is for Cookie

That’s good enough for me.

D is for Direction

Admittedly, our Facebook page is mostly an experiment. We just wanted to experiment with having an additional way to communicate with our clients. I suppose you could say our direction is to play with it for a year and then figure out what do to.

F is for Facebook

Well, all I’ve mentioned so far is our Facebook page. It’s the only social networking medium we’re using that is targeted at all of our users.

T is for Text-messaging

In the past, we looked at using text messaging for a variety of purposes, but ultimately decided against it for a simple reason: cost. It would simply cost too much money to communicate in a fashion that is easily replicated by online chat and Facebook.

Z is for Zeal

My little team of Facebookers are have plenty of zeal between them to support the entire Library, I feel. I’m very happy with what they’ve done so far – in only a few short months, we’ve amassed over 300 fans. At the moment we’re getting up to 10 new fans every day.

ASU and the Library Minute

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This is the fifth post in a series produced for studying purposes. They’re coming a little frantically at the moment because I’m not very good at time management.

Arizona State University has embraced social media in a big way. They produce videos for YouTube and Vimeo, upload photos to Flickr, post on Facebook and Twitter. The staff there are certainly not shy to dive in! How do they stack up to the 4 Cs of social media?

Collaboration

There doesn’t appear to be much collaboration going on. Perhaps internally, when they are producing their videos and such like, but certainly the vast majority of content is being created by the ASU Library itself.

Conversation

Looking at the Facebook and Twitter pages, most of the conversation seems to be pretty one-sided. The majority of posts are simply news blasts, with only a few being responses to other users.

Community

Between their Facebook and Twitter accounts, ASU has a community of 1,460 brave souls (at the time of writing), with about 90% of those being on Twitter and the remaining 10% on Facebook. I’m not sure how old the Facebook page is, but an audience of only 150 seems rather small for an organisation with a community of over 70,000 people.

Content creation

Well, ASU are certainly trigger-happy when it comes to making polished content. My favourite, so far, being the one that has a reference to one of my favourite movies of all time (bonus points if you know what I’m talking about).

Gaming and 3D virtual worlds

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This is the fourth post in a series produced for studying purposes. I realise now that I’ve been posting more about study than not-study. I might have to remedy this.

The Second Life project was our last, best hope for peace.

It failed.

(With apologies to JMS)

A few years ago, everyone was talking about Second Life and how it would revolutionise the way that libraries and educators would interact with their clients and students. It seemed everybody was jumping on board the Second Life bandwagon. It even appeared in the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Report as recently as 2007.

Before I continue on this rant, I must point out that I was never a big fan of Second Life. When I first logged in, I was confronted by an ugly and difficult-to-use interface. Despite having blisteringly fast (at the time) ADSL, the world would slowly load at a pace that was quite infuriating to a player of World of Warcraft and EVE Online.

I applaud the courage and gumption of my colleagues that dived in head-first and had a good play with Second Life. I applaud those that managed to avoid the anachronism of real-world architecture and actually realised that people could fly when they decided to make their buildings. Too often, however, someone would think that it was a Really Good Idea ™ to put a roof on a building that will never get wet.

Now, my lack of respect for people that failed to think using a new paradigm when encountering a world that doesn’t obey the laws of physics that we’re used to, my problem with Second Life as a tool for interacting with people that are far away really comes down to one thing:

It’s much faster to exchange information using any number of other communications tools, including Skype (video chat allows for body language) and your humble web page (which can transmit information at much greater bandwidth).

My dislike of Second Life must now be quite evident to you, dear reader, so I think I should perhaps talk on a more theoretical level. What of virtual worlds in general?

Currently, virtual worlds are mostly used as environments for massively-multiplayer online games like the aforementioned World of Warcraft and EVE Online. They are incredibly successful because they have a very limited scope in what they permit the user to do (generally killing things and doing missions/quests with other players).

Virtual worlds have the potential for incredible applications in teaching things like physics, where you could have a sandbox simulation that permits you to change the laws of physics (What happens if you change gravity of turn it off entirely? Not something you can easily do in the real world).

When it comes down to it, libraries are really about one thing: helping people find information. Frankly, I don’t see the use of virtual worlds in doing that. There are many other emerging technologies that will allow us to engage with our clients much more effective.

My online personal learning network

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This is the third post in a series produced for studying purposes. Not quite what I post normally, but I imagine it will let you see a different side of me.

We all have a personal learning network (PLN). Whether we use it for work or for play, our PLN is the group of people that we trust to provide us with useful information and/or advice. I’m sure it wouldn’t surprised you that social networking has revolutionised how we interact with our PLNs.

My own PLN is big. Probably too big. In fact, I actually spend far too many hours in a day keeping track of it.

I follow updates from many people on many different sites. Too many, I think. Following Dave Warlick’s Stages of PLN adoption, I would certainly say that I’m at Stage 3 “Know it all”, and probably about to fall into Stage 4 “Perspective”.

At work, my PLN impacts productive hours in the day. I spend a lot of time in just keeping up with all the updates from all the people I follow. Sure, I’m fed with lots of juicy information that I could potentially use in my workplace, but I lack the time to actually investigate things in-depth or, heaven forfend, actually implement something.

In my personal life, it’s a little easier – I don’t mind skipping updates on non-work-related things. That being said, Facebook emails me whenever something potentially interesting has happened. That makes my phone bing and I almost immediately hop online to see what the fuss is about. In my defence, however, transitioning from a dumbphone to a smartphone was responsible for cutting the amount of hours I actually spend in front of a computer.

Even when I was recently on holiday, I was almost always connected through my phone or tablet. I was social networking while I should have been either paying attention at a conference or sitting on a dive boat, recovering from the last dive.

The idea of disconnecting appeals to me more and more every day, but I still have a fear of missing out on something important. I rarely give my phone number out, so people can’t call me urgently. I feel there’s an expectation on me to be constantly online, just in case. Am I going mad? Perhaps!

Although I have no holidays planned until the beginning of next year, I might try and organise a short trip  for this year where I’m completely disconnected. I will actually have to leave the city or it’ll be too easy to keep the phone on. There’re plenty of holes in Optus’ mobile phone network – I shall have to find one to visit.