Archive for August, 2007

Six months…

Published on 17 August 2007 in Uncategorized. 3 Comments

…on, I find I still have moments where I miss Baubles the Cat. They seem to happen at the most unexpected times, like when I’m on the train, thinking about nothing in particular. Or Paco chews my hand playfully and I think, “Baubles would have drawn blood…”

Other people, particularly old women, make me miss Mama. I find myself wondering what she would have said in response to certain things that have happened lately. It’s still strange to realise that she won’t be around for any future family celebrations or events.

Media fast

Published on 16 August 2007 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

Via Andrew Bartlett’s blog, a story, from the Washington Post, about a US college class’s experiment - 24 hours without “without any kind of electronic media”.

The class was reading Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, by the late New York University communications professor Neil Postman. According to the lecturer Danna L Walker, Postman was concerned about American “society [being] destroyed by its worship of mass consumption and escapism. Postman believed television, in particular, was constraining higher thought and ‘transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business’ without our realizing it. He thought that, because we are engineered to avoid our own imprisonment, we just needed to be aware of what our growing addiction to media was doing to us.”

Writing about her students, Walker said:

Could my students, in fact, survive “the grueling pain that was the 24-hour, e-media fast,” as one self-described iPod and computer addict would later write in her paper?

The 50 young women and men in my class at AU are what are called digital natives or “millennials,” those born between 1980 and 2000, many of whom graduated from high school as the 21st century dawned. Researchers say they will constitute the largest generation in American history, outnumbering baby boomers by as much as 33 percent.

The students’ reactions:

“I was in shock,” wrote one student. “I honestly did not think I could accomplish this task. The 24 hours I spent in what seemed like complete isolation became known as one of the toughest days I have had to endure.”

Another student apparently did not see the irony in this statement: “I felt like I would be wasting my time doing the project. I did not want to give up my daily schedule, which mainly includes lying on my couch, watching television and playing The Sims2 — a [life simulator] computer game.”

Walker ends her article saying:

I’m not from the we’re-all-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket school of media thought. I use most of the electronic gadgets my students do. E-media keep us up to the minute on information, facilitate relationships without geographic constraint, make logistics easier and sometimes help us relax and fight boredom.

But I do know of a world my students haven’t inhabited — a world in which we may have had less ready access to information but had more power to turn it off and reflect. I hold on to the hope that we’re not too far gone in our media stupor to recapture the idealistic vision of the era of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, meaningful discourse and human-to-human interaction in the public sphere.

We recently had a weekend with no Net connection, but we did still have all the other usual diversions of radio, tv, the phone, games, music, and so on. I wonder how I’d cope without all that. I think it would probably bevery good for me to switch off totally from time to time. I’d need to get over my fear of being Out of The Loop, though.

Keeping up

Published on 14 August 2007 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

Is it just librarianship as a profession that considers “keeping up” to be an Important Thing? That is, keeping up with publishing, research in academic publications, changes in technology, and “professional issues” as a whole.

Pointing to Alyson’s blog, Fiona at Blisspix blogged about how she keeps up - or what she tries to keep up with. From the sounds of it, my keeping up strategy is very similar to Fiona’s.

Fiona says:

…for me keeping up to date is something that happens through the day, every day. Most things I read come through my aggregator - blogs, links to articles, newsletters; sometimes Twitter, although I do still subscribe to a few email lists. I read them in chunks at lunch, at home and on weekends. I don’t put a time limit on it, but I probably spend a few hours every week.

I don’t try to keep up with everything - I have a few favourite topics …that I follow.

I couldn’t keep up without RSS. Seriously, no exaggeration. There is so much information out there that is of interest to me, whether on websites or on blogs, that if I had to visit each and every site individually, I wouldn’t manage to do anything else! (I don’t like email lists and don’t subscribe, but that’s another post.)

That said, like Fiona, I don’t bother to try to keep up with everything. Fiona’s favourite topics are “library 2.0, leadership, presentations and life hacks” that she follows. Mine? I guess I’d say Web 2.0 (rather than just library), teaching and learning (edu blogs are great for this) and a vague sci-tech focus (this is vague, encompassing things like watching what Google and the journal Nature are doing, following the work of a few sci-tech writers and publications, and subscribing to science librarian blogs, like John Dupuis’s blog).

I’m often asked “But how on earth do you keep up?” I don’t deny that it takes time. Every day I read the stuff that flows through my aggregator - snippets in the morning, and at breaks throughout the day. Lately I have been having computer-free weekends (I seem to need this at the moment), but weekends too, if I’m online. I don’t necessarily read with an aim in mind (although the ‘Sphere can be very useful if you are trying to learn something or get some information) , or read something just because it could be useful to me as a librarian; I let my interests guide me (why force yourself to read a blog or a website that bores you?). It does help to do this every day or as close to every day as you can - there is so much going on, and it happens so quickly, that if you only looked at your aggregator once a week it would likely be rather overwhelming.

I keep up by not worrying about whether I am keeping up with everything. I don’t think it is possible, even if you only picked one area and tried to only read only in that area. The beauty of the blogosphere is that it is a huge, roiling, boisterous conversation, one that you can just listen to (read) and learn from. It’s even better if you participate and contribute, of course. If all I was doing was sitting in front of my computer and reading, the whole exercise would seem like a never-ending, excruciating run in a hamster wheel - I would just keep on keeping on and I would not necessarily get anywhere.

The thing is that the technology now allows us to talk with like-minded people all over the world, and to make connections - and these connections help us learn, and we can talk and share and find stuff out and experiment. And you never have to worry if you’re keeping up with everything, because your friends out there will tell you the stuff that you need to know.

So, what do you do to keep up?