Kill your television

My sibling and I have had an ongoing conversation about the dearth of meaningful volunteer work and share a frustration that more non-profit groups don't make more use of the Internet's potential.

We're not the only one's who have recognized the untapped potential that exists. Clay Shirky has too - but has quantitfied it and put into a historical context in his recent essay, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. It's highly recommended reading.

Digg + Local Library Purchases

Digg + Local Library Purchases: "So here’s my idea: take the engine that runs Digg, the “social news” website, and repurpose it as a web application that allows library patrons to collectively decide which books the library system should purchase. Patrons would “login” to “LibraryDigg” with their regular library card number and password, and then could enter books, DVDs, etc. that they want opened up for consideration." [Distant Librarian]

What I really like about this idea is that this service would provide public feedback illustrating what the library community is interested in and what are their unmet desires. I'm positive that this sort of information would be of interest to more than librarians as in my library, one can always see users check out the responses on the library's complaints bulletin board (which one day I would love to put online like Carleton's Dear Library service.)

But I'm not sure that I would use the Digg engine. I check out Digg and Reddit frequently and its not exactly a secret that the system is constantly being gamed (e.g. "Garbage can be turned into oil through a green method. We dispose of enough garbage per year to create a years worth of usable oil! Why aren't we funding these guys millions! UP VOTE THIS!!").

Instead, I would be more inclined to use something more independent engine to determine popularity.

Digg's Design Dilemma - Bokardo : The result of all these factors is that Digg breaks the cardinal rule of voting: independence. As outlined in James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds, independence arises when a person makes a decision (votes, diggs) without the direct influence of others, on their own, by making up their own mind. Of course, there will always be influences on that decision…what others have said, where their political party is leaning, their current situation, but in the end they need to have the privacy of their vote. On Digg, no votes are private, and when you make them you can’t help but notice the way others are voting...

The voting on Digg is in contrast to a site like Del.icio.us, where voting (saving a bookmark) is done more independently, often without having any idea whether or not someone else even viewed it, let alone voted on it... On Del.icio.us, the main value is personal, as people use it to store bookmarks that are valuable to them. On Digg, the bookmarking utility is secondary to the voting, in both the interface and the wording used on the site.

This all being said, I do support the notion that a library community can be trusted to select some of the materials that can be found in *their* library.

A giant now off my shoulders

I have been reading, thinking and writing lots about academic librarianship and information technology as of late but you won't see the results of this work at this here blog.

That's because I, along with my Scholars Portage partner, Stacy Allison-Cassin, have just released a white paper called Scholr 2.0 on its very own blog to take advantage of the commenting goodness from the CommentPress WordPress theme.

While the purpose of the paper is to generate discussion among the librarians in the consortium that we both belong to, the conversation is open to anyone. Please join in.

My new mantra: Discover. Gather. Share. Create.

Through a Mellon Grant, the University of Minnesota developed a model for assessing support for scholarship and research on a large research campus. The framework focused on three broad components: information resources, infrastructure services, and research behaviors .

The model is, in essence: Discover. Gather. Share. Create.

This model begins at slide 17 (pps) and then it blossoms as research behaviors are mapped upon it and then their research findings. Then at slide 25, you can see how they've used to model to create a mock-up of a research portal called MyField which looks much more appealing than any of the other portals I have seen. [via]

Anti-social Software: The book

Daytime television is so unbelievably bad that I regularly choose to watch TV shows about video games rather than suffer the constant chirping of celebrities, even though I'm not much a gamer myself. I'm treating it as a learning experience.

One thing I've learned by watching video game review shows is that there is a very strong emphasis on multiplayer gaming. If a hot new PC, console, or handheld game doesn't doesn't allow you to play over the web, connect to a service like XBOX Live, or allow wireless play, then the makers of these games are called on the carpet. No one is content playing just against a computer anymore.

I thought of this as I was reading Everything Bad is Good For You. Steven Johnson imagines a world that's identicle to ours except that video games are invented before books. He then guesses what teachers and parents would have to say about reading:

Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical sound-scapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of sensory and motor cortices.

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new "libraries" that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sittle alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers...

But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. . . . This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to "follow the plot" instead of learning to lead.

While Steven Johnson is trying to make a point how much video games have been demonized by parents and pundits, I think we can still take some of the passages at pure face-value. To an outsider, reading looks terribly anti-social. To a non-reader, the library wouldn't been seen a social place (much less as a lauded "third-place") but as somewhere where people can be alone, together.

If we want libraries to be perceived as social places (and thus, have a place in a society where TV channels are dedicated to video games), we are going to have do more than provide chairs where people can read.