Tag Cloud

I did a tag cloud (thanks to TagCrowd.com) based on the text of all my blog entries from 2008 (excepting super-common English words and words built into the Blogger interface), and this is what I got:

archive article available books brewster class community companies content cool copyright davies digital display excellent farm flickr forum francisco free global google immigration important information interesting internet issues kahle library life literacy lot love media national number online open page people photos pretty probably public pupusas reading really rights san service social someone something space stop story street students studies sure talk technology things think used user usf war website week work world year youtube

created at TagCrowd.com

I love my tag cloud. Library and people stand as the most common words, which I think is a fantastic reflection on my values. Books, digital, photos, and USF are runners-up. Some common words reflect my mediocre vocabulary (lot, really, something, things). I love the sequence in descending size, "library literacy lot love" (with a tiny "life" sticking itself in there).

Clearly, most of my posts have been related to my Digital Literacy class, but my blog entries have rarely felt like assignments (at least not in the burdensome sense). I've had a wonderful time doing this blog and this class. I'm happy that I've created something that I like and find interesting.

This class was never about telling us what to do - it was about encouraging us to do something, to use these technologies in ways that work for us. For me, that was a lot of announcements about things happening at USF, random interesting resources or information, work I was doing in other classes, and personal reflections.

As the semester comes to a close, the question remains, what will become of this blog? I'm definitely going to continue blogging here, but I expect the common themes will shift as my activities shift. Over the summer you can expect a lot about service-learning, and starting in August you'll hear about JVC and worker's rights issues. I'm sure I'll still talk about digital literacy sorts of things, since that's such a big interest of mine, and of course I'll continue to post about any other random stuff I want to share with the world.

I'm excited.

Photos of the World

One of our final assignments for Digital Literacy is to come up with a concept, and ideally an implementation, of some sort of ongoing blogging project. The idea is that we start something knowing that we will continue to add to it over time. An example is David Silver's "gone" posts. Every time an evil leader (my words, not his) is fired or arrested or quits, he posts a photo with the word "gone." He also has a Flickr gallery of these entries.

One of the wonderful things about the Internet is how global it is. It can do a lot to break down artificial barriers we've built between groups of people. With the help of Flickr, I'm going to start posting photos from around the world.

Since I'm traveling to Tacna, Peru in a few weeks, here is the first photo, from Tacna:


"la dueña del pan"
by arcketipo

How to Post Photos on Your Blog

Something that's come up in our class is how to best get Flickr photos onto a blog. We went over it a bit in class, but I'm going to put instructions on here.

The easiest way is if you have a Flickr Pro account and you're working with your own photos or the photos of someone who has given others permission to use their photos through a Creative Commons license.

At the top of every photo, if you have a Flickr Pro account, there is a menu that includes "all sizes."
Click on "all sizes" and choose the size you want to include on your blog (probably small or medium, depending on your blog and the photo).

If the photo belongs to you or has been licensed for sharing, scroll down and you'll see something like this:

Assuming you want to link back to Flickr, copy the HTML from the top window into your blog post window. Note that if you're in "Compose" mode in Blogger, you don't have to go into "Edit HTML." I copied and pasted it in, and voila:



But! What if your situation is not so straightforward? What if you wanted to, er, borrow photos without permission? (Because clearly that person didn't know how to put a Creative Commons license on their photos, right?) Or, what if they are sharing their work, but you don't have a Pro account? Or what if you're using a photo that's not on Flickr?

What you do is find your photo of choice in your size of choice (if applicable), then control-click (Mac) or right-click (PC) and choose "Copy Image Location" (or the equivalent). Then use this HTML code:

<img src="http://imageurl.jpg">

But, what if you want that photo to link back to the page you got it from (or some other web page)? Go copy the URL for your desired page and use this code:

<a href="http://webpage.com"><img src="http://imageurl.jpg"></a>

But but, what if you want it centered? Do this:

<center><a href="http://webpage.com"><img src="http://imageurl.jpg"></a></center>

You can put those <center> </center> tags around your code copied and pasted from Flickr as well.

What if you want to insert your photo via the Blogger add image tool (if you have the image on your hard drive), and you want to add a link (to Flickr or wherever)? Click on this icon:


Browse to find the photo on your computer, choose your preferred size and alignment, and click to upload. It will put the image at the top of your blog post. Super annoying. You can click on the image to select it, then cut (Mac: command-X; PC: ctrl-X) and paste it in your desired location.

To make that photo into a link, find your desired URL, select the photo (still within your Compose window), and click the Link icon:


Paste your URL in there, and it will link-ify your image (you can check in Preview to make sure it worked). You can also go into Edit HTML and work from there, but if you're not familiar with HTML it's a little scary looking.

If you have any questions or problems, please feel free to ask in the comments, and I'll do my best to answer.

Update: I realized that even if another Flickr user is allowing their photos to be used by others, the HTML code to copy and paste isn't there unless they're your own photos. So if you want to use someone else's photos, use the code I provided with the photo URL and page URL.

Jasmine Park

Last Thursday, Jasmine Park of Pike/Pine, a Seattle-based street fashion blog, came to speak to our Digital Literacy class. During the week, Jasmine does program management at Microsoft, but every weekend she walks around Seattle looking for fashionable people to photograph. She told us about how she started out and how her blog has developed since September, 2006, when she started it. She created four rules for herself:

1. Take good photos.
2. Make people look good.
3. Be nice.
4. Only post what she's proud of.

And she outlined three lessons she's learned:

1. Everyone's a critic.
2. Diversity is good (and hard to find).
3. People are nice.

It was in interesting talk, especially because fashion is never something I've paid attention to. It was cool to hear from a part-time blogger. It's still just a hobby for her, as it is for most people. I also liked to hear her thoughts on comments and her decision to delete mean comments in order to create a positive environment.

Moral of the story: If someone stops you on the street and wants to take your picture for a fashion blog, be nice and say yes.

Gayla Trail at USF

Last week our Davies Forum speaker was Gayla Trail, creator of You Grow Girl, a website about gardens and gardening. Gayla used to be a designer, and she started the website in 2000 as just something fun to do. She wanted to meet other gardeners like her, who were young and urban, which was not the audience most garden writing focuses on. She said garden writing is dominated by books and magazines, and it is written in a very authoritarian way (this is right, this is wrong, this is how you do it). There's also usually an expectation of space, like a yard, and lots of money. She wanted something different, so she created it herself, and it has become very popular. After a while, she ended up quitting her design work to focus on the website. She talked about the importance of play, and how good it is to be able to have fun and try new things without the pressure of doing well and making money. That's how her site developed the way it did.

To me, Gayla's example shows the power of the internet as a means for creativity and alternative information/messages. I also love the concept of using the internet, which is so "virtual," to share information and experiences about something so earthy and "real life" as gardening.

National Library Week

National Library Week is fast approaching! In our Digital Literacy class, we are doing a display in Gleeson Library to celebrate. Hooray!

We've each been charged with taking as much responsibility as we are willing, so here is what I will do.

Books!

I will collect the list of everyone's favorite books, and collect them from the stacks. I will make a list of them (with call numbers) to post on the back wall of the alcove, so patrons can see them even if they've been checked out.

Options: I can make something for patrons to write down their favorite books to recommend. We can talk to Gleeson Gleanings about posting our list and encouraging people to respond with their recommendations.

What will I need from the library? If they want to change the status of the books to "display" in the catalog, we'll need cooperation. If someone (e.g. Vicki Rosen) lets them know what I'm doing ahead of time, I can go to the circ. desk and ask them to do it.

If we want to do the book recommendations on Gleeson Gleanings, we'll need someone to do that post.

Fun!

Kevin Epps

Kevin Epps, a filmmaker best known for Straight Outta Hunter's Point, spoke to our Digital Literacy class (along with quite a few other people, many of whom were from the Performing Arts and Social Justice "Company" class, which is doing a production based in part on service-learning they did in Hunter's Point) last Thursday. He was fascinating, and it was wonderful to hear his story. What struck me most is his efforts to give a voice to people who are ignored. Not only does he make media about these people and these communities, but he empowers others to do it as well.


My camera battery is dead at the moment, so I hope Lis will forgive me for using one of hers:

Blogger, Flickr, and Copyright

I decided while I was at it, I would check out the copyright policies for Blogger and Flickr, since those are the two websites where I post my creative (in the loose sense of the term, heh heh) work.

Flickr, via Yahoo!, says in its Terms of Service:

Yahoo! does not claim ownership of Content you submit or make available for inclusion on the Service. However, with respect to Content you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service, you grant Yahoo! the following worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license(s), as applicable:

With respect to photos, graphics, audio or video you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service other than Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Service solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available. This license exists only for as long as you elect to continue to include such Content on the Service and will terminate at the time you remove or Yahoo! removes such Content from the Service.

(Section 9, incl. Paragraph B)

That "solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available" part is significantly different from YouTube. It seems like basically they're saying, if you upload your work, it's okay for us to display on the website... which is what happens when you upload your work. I might be wrong though.

The Blogger TOS says:

Your Intellectual Property Rights. Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google services. You or a third party licensor, as appropriate, retain all patent, trademark and copyright to any Content you submit, post or display on or through Google services and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the members of the public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, publish and distribute such Content on Google services for the purpose of displaying and distributing Google services. Google furthermore reserves the right to refuse to accept, post, display or transmit any Content in its sole discretion.

(From Section 6, emphasis in the original)

So they can use my work, but again not to the same extent as YouTube. Interesting.

YouTube and Copyright

The issue of YouTube and who controls copyrights came up in two of my classes today, so I decided to investigate.

I took it upon myself to read the Terms of Use, and I think it's within fair use to copy this paragraph:

For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube's (and its successors' and affiliates') business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels. You also hereby grant each user of the YouTube Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms of Service. The above licenses granted by you in User Videos terminate within a commercially reasonable time after you remove or delete your User Videos from the YouTube Service. You understand and agree, however, that YouTube may retain, but not display, distribute, or perform, server copies of User Submissions that have been removed or deleted. The above licenses granted by you in User Comments are perpetual and irrevocable.
(Section 6, Paragraph C)

So there you have it. They can do whatever they want with your work, but it's non-exclusive, so you can still do whatever you want. If you remove your video, they can still keep a copy, but they can't use it anymore. Interestingly, they have a Copyright page within their Help Center, but it doesn't mention this.

On a side note, the issue of jurisdiction for Internet companies has come up in my Communication Law and Policy class, and I noticed the last paragraph of the Terms of Use begins with:

You agree that: (i) the YouTube Website shall be deemed solely based in California; and (ii) the YouTube Website shall be deemed a passive website that does not give rise to personal jurisdiction over YouTube, either specific or general, in jurisdictions other than California. These Terms of Service shall be governed by the internal substantive laws of the State of California, without respect to its conflict of laws principles. Any claim or dispute between you and YouTube that arises in whole or in part from the YouTube Website shall be decided exclusively by a court of competent jurisdiction located in San Mateo County, California.
(Section 14)

The Terms of Use are actually pretty short and simple, so if you're unsure about anything, you can read it yourself.

Corners

Kelly Quinn, an assistant professor of American Studies at Miami University, came and spoke to our Digital Literacy class on Thursday. She spoke about cities, sidewalks, grids, social intercourse, and public spaces. She was amazing.

This week's assignment is to talk about a place we like, using the concepts of Kelly Quinn and Jane Jacobs to describe why. This was an interesting exercise for me, because while our Jacobs reading made a lot of sense to me, I tend to enjoy parks and relatively isolated places (unsafe as they may be). However, in Kelly Quinn's lecture on Thursday, one thing that stuck out to me in particular was her description of the value of corners, which there are many of when your city is set on a grid. This brought to mind the most famous corner around: Haight and Ashbury.



Quinn said that the grid is the most democratic form of urban planning, and that at corners you connect with people who are unlike yourself. One of the things I like about Haight Street is the variety of people you encounter. You find tourists, locals, yuppies, hippies, poor people, wealthy people, young people, and old people, of all sorts of colors and orientations. Jacobs writes about good urban planning being a way to fight segregation and racism (she offers the example of someone in Los Angeles who had never actually seen a Mexican person). If we don't isolate communities from each other, they will interact and come to realize that their differences are superficial.

Jacobs wrote about the importance of eyes on the street in order to maintain safety. Haight Street is always bustling with activity, even until late at night. I would feel safer walking down Haight at night than I would walking back home through the quiet residential streets.



Another very important thing to Jacobs is the anonymity that cities offer. Residents don't want to be best friends with each other, but for a safe and stable environment, there needs to be a level of trust. To me Haight Street feels like it has more of a culture of trust than other busy city streets I know, perhaps because of the quantity of pedestrians and the fact that many of them are there for the sake of being there, rather than just passing through on their way somewhere else. They have a certain level of investment in the neighborhood.

Gleeson Library Display

Our Digital Literacy class has taken the responsibility to fill this space:

for National Library Week in April. Our display will be in response to the questions:

What do I love about the library?
What do I wish the library offered?

I spent five semesters working at the Gleeson Library, so it's interesting to think about these questions. What I love most about the library is the books. I like Prof. Silver's idea about each of us choosing a few of our favorite books to display. Some books I would like to include are: Who Needs Donuts? by Mark Alan Stamaty, Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (though it's checked out right now), Pathologies of Power by Paul Farmer (also checked out), Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs.

Other things I love about the library: the 24-hour atrium, the Thacher Gallery, the old card catalog on the lower level, all the places you can hide in the stacks (especially in the lower level), the carrels (those individual study cubby things - I'm not sure how I know the name for them), and all the online resources (databases, e-books, online journals, etc.). In order to represent these things, I like the idea of taking photos. I see two main options for presenting the photos (and we could do both): 1) We can get photos printed and put them on the wall, 2) We can have a slideshow running on a laptop. My vote is for option 1, first because it will save us table/counter space for other things (like books), and second because most people are just going to glance at this exhibit as they walk by. They'll take in a lot more of the photos if they can see them all at once instead of waiting for them to cycle through on a computer screen.

What would I like the library to offer? Online study room reservation, clearly designated "quiet" and "okay to talk" areas, clocks throughout the library, a better access system than the terrible gates at the front, and more music and movies (also presented more accessibly than they currently are), and book discussion groups. Smarter and nicer patrons would be cool too, but I think that's beyond the library's control. I know I'm not dreaming big here (though I did like the in-class idea of hugs and head massages), but those are practical, doable things I would like to see.

These are harder to represent than what the library has already. I like the idea of a space where patrons can say what they would like the library to offer. That makes more sense to me than just the opinions of seven students and a professor. We could encourage people to draw as well as write. We could provide colored pencils, markers, and crayons. As a digital alternative (or addition), we could set up a computer with a blog (or something) where people could write their suggestions. That way, if people were writing inappropriate things, we could easily delete them.

A fun field trip for our class would be to go into the library storage space on Lone Mountain. You go through the Del Santo Reading Room, and there's a door in the back leading to the storage space. There are a few floors of books that used to be where they had closed stacks at the Lone Mountain College library. Now it's space for books that don't circulate very often. It's dark and hot and stuffy in there. Kind of scary when you're alone. If I were a ghost on Lone Mountain, I would definitely hang out in there.

High-speed internet in SF public housing

Brewster Kahle is so cool. He's putting high-speed internet in public housing in San Francisco. You can read about it in the New York Times here.

I really really want us to spend some time on the digital divide in our digital literacy class. I've been meaning to write more about it here, but I haven't gotten around to it. I actually did a brief presentation (plus reflection activity) for my coworkers about the digital divide, particularly in San Francisco, last month. I should post the basic information and reflection stuff on here.

Preliminary thoughts on Brewster Kahle

Okay, this is going to have to be a short post because it is getting very late, but after reading this interview with Brewster Kahle, I am completely stoked on libraries. I love this question and answer:

As a “digital librarian” and an Internet pioneer, how do you view the library system?

I see the library system in this country as a $12 billion industry dedicated to preservation and access of materials that are not mediated through a corporate experience. You don't have to sign a nondisclosure form to come up with a new idea in a library. In libraries, materials are preserved in original form, uncensored. The alternative is that the materials people learn from are forever mediated by a relatively small number of commercial companies in terms of selection and presentation. This is one of the biggest issues facing libraries in the future: what services will they perform, and what services will be performed by companies or by nonprofits acting like companies. If all content is moderated by a few companies in the digital world, we'll have a giant bookstore rather than a library system.

He knows how to go straight to my heart: Pro-free, uncensored, unmediated information and anti-commercial.

I have mixed feelings about Google. One the one hand, it is a wonderful search engine, and they have lots of really awesome stuff, like Gmail. On the other hand, they have so much power, and while they haven't been too irresponsible so far (I don't think), I am very wary about one company having so much control. I'm sure many of Google's employees have excellent intentions, but as a for-profit and publicly traded company, the primary goal is to make money, which can lead to lots of problems. I haven't spent of a lot of time on the Googlization of Everything, but I'll be interested to read more about this specific issue of Google's power.

Back to Brewster Kahle, the Open Content Alliance sounds wonderful. Books should be digitized, and we need to make it open, free of digital rights management, and accessible to all.

Random information I have learned about Brewster Kahle recently: He is a major donor to Streetside Stories. Also, he (or his people) are able to make an exabyte of space fit in a shipping container. (A terabyte is a thousand gigabytes, a petabyte is a thousand terabytes, and an exabyte is a thousand petabytes. That's a lot, folks.) I'm not sure what the implications of this are, but judging by the reactions of the computer science people I was with, this is impressive.

Another quote (also from "Scan This Book!"):

We have to recognize that it's not only possible but it is our responsibility to bring digital services to the world. If we can build this next generation in the open, the same way the open network and the open software infrastructure of the Internet developed, it will be the librarians' day. Media companies, the Googles and Microsofts, they will play their roles. They'll bring things to hundreds of millions. But they will never bring things to our patrons the way we can as librarians.

I'm really excited to hear him talk. One question I have is what do they do to protect all this data they're archiving? What do they do to make sure it won't be lost? Do they back it up all the time? Do they have servers spread out geographically? I can just imagine a giant magnet falling on their roof and erasing everything (okay, that probably wouldn't happen, but something along those lines). It's a lot easier to erase digital information, especially accidentally, than it is to destroy a paper book (which this article brings up). This is something I've thought about when people talk about blogs as future historical archives. How do we know it will stay online, especially if someone else is hosting it? Google is doing pretty well for itself now, but things change so fast that it could disappear, along with every blog hosted by Blogger, in just a few years. People who are careful will save it and post it somewhere new, but think of all that could be lost. Web pages can require active maintenance - I know I've had web pages which no longer exist, and many of the web sites I frequented in my early teens aren't there any more. This is why something like the Internet Archive is so wonderful, but they'll have to guard their data carefully. This is another reason it's so good that their work is DRM-free, so if something happens to Internet Archive, their work can still be used by other people.

Sarah Houghton-Jan on the Future of Libraries

For my Digital Literacy class this Tuesday we attended a lecture at the San Francisco Public Library by Sarah Houghton-Jan, a.k.a. the Librarian in Black. She is the Digital Futures Manager at the San José Public Library, and the focus of her talk was on the future of libraries. She identified some of the issues that libraries are facing and talked about some things she sees for the future of libraries.

She talked about a lot, so this is a selection of some of her main points. I'll look forward to reading other people's accounts of/thoughts on the lecture.

She said that libraries aren't used to change, and when technology began to develop so rapidly, libraries were slow to catch on. In the meantime, many companies and the population in general moved way ahead. As a result, libraries lost their role as primary sources of information, being replaced with online resources. At the same time, however, the number of digital library users is growing exponentially. Those are users which only use the library's online resources and never come into the physical library building. She said that libraries are not doing a very good job of counting those people because they never see them. These users are becoming unhappy because their needs are not being addressed. Her advice to libraries: listen to the digital users.

She went through quite a few reasons people don't like or don't use libraries. One problem is that if you want a popular item, a new item, or something the library doesn't have, it's a long and potentially expensive process to get a hold of it. If the library has it but it's checked out, you can put a hold on it, but then you have to wait till that person returns it, and one or more people could have put holds on it ahead of you, meaning you'll have to wait that much longer. Another option is interlibrary loan (ILL), which is slow, complicated, and often costs money (when I worked at Gleeson Library, I would process ILL requests occasionally, and it was simpler than she described, but it is a slow process). She said that she and her husband, who both work in libraries and could literally have materials delivered to their desks, often resort to buying things online so they don't have to wait for them from the library. Something that some libraries have experimented with is when a patron wants something the library doesn't have, the library orders it from Amazon and has it shipped directly to the patron. Apparently Amazon will do some preliminary processing (e.g. barcode, labeling) for the library before sending it. It's turned out to be cheaper and faster than ILL. She has a blog entry dealing with this here. Be sure to read the comments. Even if this became common, I still see an important place for ILL. This is probably more applicable in academic libraries than public libraries, but a lot of things aren't available on Amazon (*gasp*). Many of the ILL requests I processed were for journal articles, for example. I would go up in the stacks, find the bound volume of periodicals, make a photocopy, scan it (most of the time), and send it to the library that requested it. We had this nifty software that is standard enough that most libraries had it, and we could send the document electronically straight from the scanning software; otherwise we would fax or snail mail. I asked her her thoughts on alternatives like Link+ (similar to ILL but among a smaller number of libraries geographically close to each other, way faster, very easy, and free), and she seemed to think it can be good, but if users don't find what they're looking for there, they tend to give up and think that's their last/only option, which is not good.

I wonder how common it is for people to buy stuff when they can't get it immediately from the library. Besides books for my classes, which I usually need for a long period of time, and may need to mark up, I have a really hard time buying books when I know I can get them for free. It has been rare for me to want a book that was not available through any of the libraries I can access (including the Link+ network). Usually that's only been when I'm researching obscure topics for a class. When I do buy books (usually for school), I rarely buy books new if it's possible to get them used for cheaper. If I thought to myself, "Hey, I'd like to read ____" and my library didn't have it on hand, I would not just go ahead and buy it, especially not if I could order it through Link+ and get it within a week. Even if that weren't available, books are expensive, and I wouldn't spend $20 on a whim, especially one I would only want to read once. Maybe I'm just cheap/poor. (As my dad says, "You already have a book." Next time I'm home, I want to take pictures of the huge numbers of books in my house to share with the internet. We have a building in our backyard that used to be a garage, but we converted into a "library room." It is filled with books. I'll save that for a later blog entry.) However, if the only option to get a book a library doesn't have on hand is to buy it, that brings up serious issues of access across economic levels. That's what's so great about libraries: they're free. They bridge economic divides, making information available to everyone. Libraries should do whatever they can to maintain and promote that.

Moving on from that, something interesting she said was that digital rights management is a huge problem for libraries in terms of home access to digital materials. I never would have thought about this, but it makes a lot of sense. She thinks libraries can play a big role in changing this. Along similar lines, she told us that libraries have a very few choices for where to buy their catalog software, and they have to keep paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to continue using it - not because they're getting new features or upgrades, but just because the companies say they have to. Because of this, libraries are starting to develop open source catalog software. This is something else she sees for libraries' futures. Nice.

Another thing she says libraries need to do is embrace the democratization of information and expertise. Librarians need to let go of telling people the "right way" to do things. Libraries need to allow the user to have more control and incorporate things like tagging, social labeling, decentralized data creation (such as user-created reading lists), and social organization of data. This is interesting and potentially cool, but the little librarian inside me keeps saying "no, no, people will mess stuff up." Fortunately, the little librarian inside of me is probably wrong because people have shown that they're good at this sort of thing and they'll improve what's already there. It's also a really good way to engage people with their libraries.

This is really just a smattering of what she covered in her excellent talk, but I'm sure the things she spoke about will come up again, and I will blog some more.

Digital Literacy Taskforce

I have an exciting opportunity for USF students, especially if you are not graduating in May (though even if you are I don't think it's out of the question):

We invite you to serve on the University of San Francisco's Digital Literacy
Taskforce

Membership:
The Digital Literacy Taskforce (DLT) is made up of faculty, staff and students and meets monthly. The DLT is chaired by the Assistant Dean of Students.

Charge:
Knowing that any kind of media can be used well or can be misused the University of San Francisco will take a mission driven proactive approach to teach faculty, staff and students to make the best use of technological resources while limiting the negative consequences that can be attributed to misuse.

Mission:
Create sustainable goals in the area of digital literacy that will be integrated into the larger University community.

Please contact Julie Orio, orioj@usfca.edu, if you are interested.

I have been on this taskforce for a while, and I really enjoy it. It's interesting, you get the opportunity to give a really important student perspective, and it's not a big commitment in terms of time. I'm the only student on it right now, and it would be great to get more students on board, especially since I'm graduating this semester. Feel free to ask me any questions if you have them.

Ivan Chew, the liblogarian, comes to USF

Last Thursday, the Davies Forum was lucky enough to have Ivan Chew, a librarian from Singapore, as a guest lecturer. Ivan is a prolific blogger (with nine blogs!) and works for the Singapore National Library Board. He was a very interesting and engaging speaker. He focused on three topics in his presentation: his personal reasons for blogging, the Singapore Public Library's digital experiments, and senior citizens and blogging (follow the links for abbreviated sets of his presentation slides).

Instead of a general summary, I'm going to touch on a few points that stuck out for me.

First, I was mortified to discover that I did not know specifically where Singapore is. General area, yes, but specifically, no. I stand educated and appropriately embarrassed. In general I like to think of myself as more geographically aware than the average American (with the possible exception of U.S. geography, probably because I homeschooled). Anyway, thanks Ivan!

He talked about some of the history of blogging in Singapore, from early on when people were wary about the possibilities of inappropriate content and misinformation, to now, when the Prime Minister has encouraged people to use new media, and all National Library Board employees are required to take new media classes. They even did a call for citizen journalists to cover the closure of one of their libraries. This was interesting and very cool. They (Ivan especially) are recognizing the importance and potential of new media.

I especially like how the libraries are using the blogs to "publicize" and "engage." I love libraries and I love the internet, so I was glad to see the successes that they are having in meshing the two together. I asked him what he thought about the future of the (paper) book, and he asked whether it matters. Very interesting point, and one that's come up in a slightly different context in our class discussion - how important is the medium of the information? Aren't the content and the way we read it the most important? Of course, the medium is related to those, but maybe we shouldn't get caught up on whether a word is made of pigment and fiber or 1's and 0's.

Since Ivan works with young people, someone asked what age he thought kids should be introduced to the internet. He said "As soon as they have something to say." So cool! It's a shift from when I first began to use the internet, when I was 10. Back then, everything was about cybersafety, not getting "lost" on the information superhighway (that never made sense to me), and always asking a parent's permission. Cybersafety for kids is still really important, but his response is a shift from "old enough to know better than to give an ax-murderer her address" to "old enough to participate and create." I love it!

He talked about a conversation he had in which someone asked him if he thought there would ever be a point when there were no more wars. His response was no, but they could be a lot fewer and far-between if the memory of the horrors of war stayed in people's consciousness for longer. This, to me, is an excellent reason for people, especially senior citizens, to blog, and is an excellent reason for us to blog about the war in Iraq. And then when we're old (or probably before then), and the U.S. is trying to get into another ridiculous war, let's look back through our blog archives, remind ourselves what a bad idea war is, and do something to stop it.

And finally he closed his presentation with a cool music video that he made, Dolphins Galaxia.

Here's a nice picture of Ivan, Professor Silver, and a librarian from the USF Gleeson Library.

Mary Madden and my online presence

On Thursday evening, Mary Madden, a researcher at the Pew Internet and American Life Project came and spoke to my Digital Literacy class (and the many other people who showed up!). She give a very interesting talk, with a good question and answer session at the end. On Friday she was nice enough to make herself available and a few of us met in Crossroads Cafe to have a more informal conversation.

One thing she talked about which is really interesting to me is online identity management. Increasingly, we have more and more information about ourselves available online. That can be good or bad, depending on the level of visibility we want (some people want it to promote themselves), and depending on the quality and type of the information. I might be happy to put my name, my major, my interests, my activities, and a list of my friends online, but I don't want my phone number or address to be so readily available.

Professor Silver has mentioned a couple of times that by the end of this class, the number of Google hits with our name will go up dramatically. To see if this is true, I searched for "amber mcchesney-young" in quotation marks in Google, and got 10 hits.



All of them are about me - as far as I know there are only four other McChesney-Youngs in the world, and they are my immediate family. If you search for my dad's name you get 4,460 hits because he is a very active member on lots of archived email lists. My mom gets 46 hits, my older brother has 19, and my younger sister has 6 - I will always be the middle child. ;-) Anyway, there's kind of an interesting variety there. Most hits are relatively recent, since I've been at USF. One of the more obscure ones is results from a Bay Area Orienteering Coalition activity I did, I think with my Girl Scout troop, on the UC Berkeley campus. We had to navigate around the campus, and answer things like "Which direction is the bear statue facing?" (East, by the way.) Two others, which are fun and just a little embarrassing, are guestbook entries I wrote when I was ten years old (that's almost twelve years ago!). Remember back in the day when people had their Geocities and Angelfire pages with random information, animated GIFs, and guestbooks? They always said "Please sign my guestbook!" and sometimes I did. It's similar to the comments we now leave on blog entries. In these guestbook entries, I told the person that I was 10 years old and liked synchronized swimming. It's from 1996, the year my family first got the internet. Very magical and exciting. Check out Kate's Twenty Second Guest Book. It's fascinating - totally a blast from the past.

In addition to my Google hits, I have a MySpace page (which only includes my first name on the page, but does have pictures and says that I go to USF), and my Facebook page (which is only visible to people in the USFCA network and my friends in other networks). My MySpace page has very little on it, but Facebook has a fair amount of information (no address or phone number). I don't think there's anything I wouldn't be okay with an employer seeing, though. So to sum up, at this point, I'm pretty cool with my online presence. If someone wanted to find me in person, I'm sure they could, but it would take a bit of effort. They can find out a lot about me, but it's stuff I'm comfortable with. Yay.

Just a note for accuracy, the 10 hits that show up are with "very similar" results omitted. When those are included I get 19. Some are the same page over and over, but there are some distinct hits there. Let's see if Professor Silver's prediction is correct and my number of hits goes up.