Category: Non Sequiturs

Attention Deficit in the Classroom

What happens when university students have unfettered access to the Internet during classes? Anyone who has spent more than a few minutes in a wireless-enabled classroom knows the answer: of the students with laptops, many are online, and many of the online crowd are surfing far from the seas of academe. Such is the conclusion of an article in the Ann Arbor News today: "As U-M Goes Wireless, Results Are Not Always Academic."
The University is adapting, slowly. The law school, for example, “now blocks individual students’ access to its wireless network when they’re supposed to be in class.” And at least one professor, Ben van der Plujim, wrote software called “Lecture Tools” that enables a presenter to share slides directly with students, allowing them to follow along with the lecture, and take notes on their laptops — giving idling hands something to do during the lecture other than click around the web.
It will be interesting to observe the evolution of in-class technology use — particularly by students — as network access becomes better integrated into the classroom.

Photosynth: Organizing the World’s Pictures

Photosynth was demonstrated at the March 2007 TED Conference. A video of the demonstration blows my mind — particularly the segment that begins about 4 minutes 50 seconds into this 8-minute presentation (well worth viewing in its entirety):

Imagine being able to take photographs of any place, building, or object from all the world’s digital photos — and map them together using tags supplied by people who have already viewed the image. The Cathedral of Notre Dame example in the demonstration is a great start… But think of the possibilities, not just globally, but also locally, in terms of bringing your community’s experiences and knowledge to bear on any particular local topic.

RSS: Solving the World’s Energy Crunch One Person at a Time?

The August 15 issue of Wired has an article about using “ambient information” to generate peer pressure on individuals to achieve a social good. In particular, Thompson suggests that if we make a game out of conserving energy — by publicizing our individual energy use through our web sites — that we could create a competition around reducing our energy usage.

Here’s an even wilder idea: How about making our energy use visible to everyone? Imagine if your daily consumption were part of your Facebook page — and broadcast to your friends by RSS feed. That would trigger what Ambient Devices CEO David Rose calls the sentinel effect: You’d work harder to conserve so you don’t look like a jackass in front of your peers.

Are there ways, I wonder, in which libraries can use a similar approach to foster library usage? Maybe build a small tool that lets library users show the money they saved by not buying the book they just read from an online bookstore? Or perhaps brag about how much time they saved by consulting a reference librarian? As more people put more information about themselves and their activities into social networking and other sites, perhaps libraries should make it easier for their patrons to publicize our institutions’ benefits.

LibraryThing and the Danbury Library

This really has little to do with RSS, but it is such a useful and clever service that I can’t resist writing about it.

Tim Spalding of Library Thing today announced LibraryThing for Libraries with its first implementation, the Danbury Library (in Connecticut).
Tim explains the whys and wherefores in great detail in his post, but the upshot of it all is that when you search for a book in the Danbury library’s catalog, in addition to the catalog and holdings data, you also see:

  • Tags from LibraryThing’s 200,000 members and 13 million books;
  • Other editions and translations of the book you are looking at;
  • Tags entered by LibraryThing’s users describing the item you are viewing; and
  • Similar titles.

The last three items only show books held by Danbury’s library. And LibraryThing has restricted the tags that appear in the Danbury catalog so that tags that describe location of the book or the tagger’s intent (for example, “at the beach house” or “to read”) are not included.

Goodbye Boston, Hello Ann Arbor

A rare personal post on this blog… But I wanted to explain the lack of recent posts and what I predict will be continued dearth of items for the next few weeks.
Today is my last day at the Edwin Ginn Library at Tufts University‘s Fletcher School. I’m moving from Boston to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to be the Web Systems Manager at the Univeristy of Michigan libraries.
While I’m sad to be leaving many wonderful friends and colleagues at the Tufts libraries, I’m thrilled to be starting something new and working more deeply with the tools and technologies I’ve been writing about here. I may squeeze in an item or two in the coming weeks, but probably not until I’m settled in Ann Arbor.

Nature’s Open Peer Review Experiment Closed

Nature launched a bold experiment in June 2006 in which scholars could (voluntarily) post their articles for open peer review via a Wiki-like interface. After receiving a number of article submissions that surprised Nature’s editorial staff, the staff were perhaps equally surprised when comments from the broader scholarly community were not forthcoming:

Despite the significant interest in the trial, only a small proportion of authors opted to participate. There was a significant level of expressed interest in open peer review among those authors who opted to post their manuscripts openly and who responded after the event, in contrast to the views of the editors. A small majority of those authors who did participate received comments, but typically very few, despite significant web traffic. Most comments were not technically substantive. Feedback suggests that there is a marked reluctance among researchers to offer open comments.
Nature and its publishers will continue to explore participative uses of the web. But for now at least, we will not implement open peer review.

The full report, “Overview: Nature’s peer review trial,” is on Nature’s web site.
I find it interesting (though not entirely surprising) that while many members of the scholarly community were open to receiving feedback from peers in a public forum, they were simultaneously less willing to provide it.
I’m likewise curious to see if an experiment like this aimed more directly at rising scholars — those in the midst of, or having recently completed, their doctorates — might have different results. Or is the tradition of anonymous peer review is so deeply embedded in academia that it trumps these newfangled “web 2.0” tools?

More on Serendipity

I wrote about serendipity and its seeming decline back in the spring. I recently came across a clever catalog tool from the Allen County Public Library (Fort Wayne, Indiana) that enables a moment of pleasant surprise.
Ian, on the acpl.info blog, describes what the tool recreates for the patron:

…[W]hat happened when you went to look for something at the library was that you saw an intriguing title on your way to what you were looking for, and then you let yourself get a little bit sidetracked, and you looked over some other books nearby, and then you thought of something else you heard about or thought about or read about or saw on television or just realized you were interested in, and you went off to look that up, and maybe you passed the New Book display on the way and found something by your favorite author that you didn’t even know was out yet.

The new tool, a “bookwall,” shows the image of a book cover for each book cataloged at the ACPL the day before. Clicking on a cover image brings up a library card with brief reviews of the book — and, most important, a link to the book’s entry in the ACPL catalog. The order of the books is not obvious, which makes it random. A toddler’s picture book might be next to an adult biography and above a manga.
I’d love to see this pushed out to patrons as an RSS feed. And to implement this for my library, too!

[Via Tame the Web.]

Open-Access Digital Archive

The University of Michigan libraries have released a new digital archive, Deep Blue. Deep Blue aims:

… to provide access to the work that makes Michigan a leader in research, teaching, and creativity. By representing our faculty, staff, and student scholars, as individuals and as members of communities, Deep Blue provides a framework for preserving and finding the best scholarly and artistic work done at the University.

The library is offering its academic research colleagues permanence in the digital environment for research work. They acknowledge something more: by publishing through the University, the scholar’s works gain the weight of a major research institution. They’ve launched with an impressive collection of nearly 24,000 digital works, dating as far back as the 1950s. Access to some materials may be restricted based on the work’s copyright requirements, but much, if not the vast majority, of the collection is available in full text to everyone.
Now what they really need is RSS feeds for their author, topic, and collection lists…. But that will come, I’m sure.

[Via The Chronicle’s Wired Campus Blog.]