In the Parlance of Our Times

Next week the reference librarians and instructional technologists at Allegheny are kicking off the Learning Web 2.0 by Diving In project. We're looking forward to this project, based on one in North Carolina last year, and are hoping to get lots of participation from our colleagues at Allegheny.

If anyone else is interested in joining in, feel free to do so. If you've been wondering what this Web 2.0 thing is, there's no better time than now to learn!

I was watching YouTube today. It was work related. Really. Actually, my work takes me to YouTube quite often. Usually I watch whatever video I went there to see and then go back to work. But today, my mind and eye wandered over the the list of related videos and I started to explore.

What a trip! Starting from an educational technology related video I went through a series of clips that eventually led me to "Michael Jackson" dancing to Mr. Roboto to videos arguing that Michael Jackson's looks have or haven't changed over the years and then back again to an educational technology related video of a really cool design application.

If you have some free time - make that lots of free time - hop over to YouTube and enjoy the ride. Or just watch this video demonstrating an application that will translate what is drawn on a Smart board into a design in motion.

One of the things I like most doing online is video chatting with my family. Considering that I hate to put myself in front of a camera, this is somewhat surprising.

But I love video chatting because it's a much richer experience than talking on the phone. I can ignore the fact that I'm in front of the camera, because I so much enjoy being on the receiving end of video from my family. It's fun to be able to see the current state of Tom's facial hair, or to watch as the flowers on my parents' coffee table change each week.

In fact, video chatting feels much more like spending time together than like having a phone conversation. Louise often does a crossword with us while we video chat or sometimes we'll both look up a web site together. Michael might notice Louise drinking from an unusual beer bottle and ask about the brand. Last week, my father demonstrated the latest advice on how to hold the steering wheel of a car (forget 10 and 2 - it's 8 and 4 now). And often we have more than one person involved on one or both ends of the conversation. These are all interactions that are more commonly associated with in-person get togethers than with telephone conversations.

Does this mean video chatting is a substitute for in-person contact? Definitely not. But when getting together in person is out of the question, as it is for so many of us living far from family, it's a great way to stay connected.

I enjoyed reading Jason's post about Technorati and del.icio.us, partly because I have a lot of the same reactions to both of these services. I just find it all too much to keep up with and know that most pages I bookmark I'll probably never return to.

In addition to that, I'm still standing on the edge of the Web 2.0 ocean occasionally dipping my toes in to test the waters. I'm not ready to take the plunge for a variety of reasons, privacy not being the least of them. In the case of del.icio.us, the convenience of having my bookmarks available from everywhere doesn't quite outweigh my fear that I will lose access to them if they are stored on a third party site. I'd rather be without them sometimes than potentially be without them all the time.

But all that having been said, these sites are definitely useful. I think the biggest need Technorati serves is to make information about current events easily found, even as the event is still in progress. Google web search, because of the way the Google database is compiled, just can't keep up. (Note that there is a Google blog search, which works just like Technorati. I wonder how many people use that?)

In fact, in working through the exercises in the del.icio.us section of this project, I found a blog post that describes using Technorati to find interesting information about the recent explosion of posts containing the code to break HD-DVD encryption. I thought that was a timely example of how del.icio.us and Technorati can work together.

This week's topic in our Learning 2.0 project has been RSS. As we've learned, RSS is a geeky way to help us keep up with the web - not only with blogs, but most any site with frequent updates.

I've been using this technology for years, but haven't used Bloglines before. I did sign up for an account, but soon afterwards checked out Google Reader during our Social Software workshop last week. I'm not in love with either of them, but I've been using Google Reader this week and I don't hate it. It remains to be seen whether I'll continue using it or not. I wish that it didn't open a new browser window and go out to the web page when I click on a link. Bloglines handles this better, I think. And I still have "All Google, All the Time" issues.

At another workshop I attended last week we were shown the RSS in Plain English video, below. I think this does a great job of introducing the whole concept, and in under 4 minutes!

I finally created a Flickr account, as part of our Learning 2.0 project. I still have reservations about keeping my photos on a third party site, but I have to admit that there are some cool things you can do here.

I like the idea of using Flickr for posting images to a blog. It's easier than uploading to Moveable Type and doesn't clog up the web account with images. Also, it resizes the image to something reasonable for a blog post. I think we should start teaching this to the study abroad students, rather than having them upload images to the study abroad blog. By the way, the photo here was taken on one of my trips to Ireland, but I have no idea where this is or when I took the photo.

I also really liked the Trading Card Mash-up site linked from the PLCMC site. You could make some really cute party favors with that.

I found this photo when searching for something to post for our Copyright exercise this week. I wonder if the guitarist thought about the implied invitation she's sending out?

This was posted under a Creative Commons "Attribution" license. As I understand it, that means I have to say where it came from. Flickr's "Blog This" conveniently does that for me.

I'm confused about one thing, though. I found a photo I liked onFlickr, but the copyright said "All rights reserved". OK, so clearly I can't copy the photo and distribute it. But the "Blog This" button is still there in Flickr, which means the owner has made it public. And when you post a photo to your blog using "Blog This" you don't copy the photo - you just include a link to it in your blog.

So my question is this: How does linking to an image - and by that I mean displaying an image, but with the image source still on the original site - fit into all this? Is that OK, even under an "all rights reserved" license, because you are not copying it?

This week's Learning 2.0 topic is about using online resources for research. We are assigned the task of using Google or Wikipedia to search on a topic and to then search for the same topic using the online subscription databases available here at Allegheny. I decided to search for more information on video game addiction.

I began by using Google and the first result was this Wikipedia article on game addiction. Other results pointed to news article, blogs by gamers and anti-gamers, and research papers on the topic. The quality of these sources was very mixed. Some, like the Wikipedia article, were well written and thought out, included references for all quoted statistics, and included links to other sources. Others, like one anti-game blog, included sweeping statements and generalization without any evidence to back them up. Still others were heart wrenching stories of a life gone awry. Overall, I think the Google search gave me a better picture of the topic than I had before I started.

For the database search I decided to try PsycINFO. Perhaps this wasn't the best choice, but with so many databases available, it's hard to know what is best. My search turned up 25 print sources, only some of which were relevant to game addiction. I was shown abstracts of books, journal articles and book chapters, most of which were at least two years old. If there was a way to get the full text of a journal article, I did not see it. I gather one would either contact the library to gain access to the actual material, or check one of our other databases to see if the journal article was available there. One nice feature of PsycINFO was the ability to export the reference into RefWorks.

For the topic I chose to search on and for my purpose, the Google search was much more satisfactory. It gave me immediate access to very current material on the topic and at the end left me feeling like I knew more about the area than I did when I started. If I were doing scholarly research on the topic I would definitely need to supplement the Google search with a database search, and would probably not limit my database search to PsycINFO. But I do not think that I could get the full picture on this topic using just the online databases. The Google search led me to some valuable information that I would not want to ignore.