Technical/Tangible/Social

Technical/Tangible/Social
Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Director, RIT Lab for Social Computing, Rochester Institute of Technology

link: http://delicious.com/mamamusings/il08
blog: mamamusings.net/

This talk was the final keynote presentation of the conference. Elizabeth’s talk was about ways that old technology (that she characterized as tangible) and new technology (the technical) relate to social interactions. Hence her keynote theme: when you combine the three concepts of technical/tangible/social you have something magical. She spoke of the balance to technology that can be found in traditional crafts, the realm of old technology. In her presentation, she showed two magazines for the combining the technical and the tangible that she says should be in every public library: Make and Craft: transforming traditional craft
Quote: “So often in technology there is nothing tangible that results from your work. The sense of making something that matters is especially important for people who work with technology, that you can see by how people like to knit and crochet at conferences and other places. The tangible, the technical and the social combined in an object = magic.”

As I listened, it was interesting to me that she separated knitting and other forms of craft from technology; these are just older forms of technology, necessary ones, too.

The rest of her presentation was a tour through ambient technologies, objects that can notify us of changes in the physical environment or alert us to the need for action. Many of these were humourous objects that seem to fit the world of distracted multitaskers.

Ambient devices: We deal with overload by letting some things slip into the background of our perception. Ambient objects tell you by color: today’s weather, high temps. in your region, current cost of electricity, current energy usage etc.

Availabot – this is not commercially available yet. A little figure that tells you when IM is available.

Chumby is an interactive media player that constantly streams your favorite parts of the internet in a fun, always-on, always-fresh format.

mir:ror – give power to your objects – ex. keys; who’s home? if you choose to, add rfid to your library card, and when you go in the library, your friends may be there too and you will know.

botanicalls – Botanicalls: The Plants Have Your Number From the web site: “Botanicalls opens a new channel of communication between plants and humans, in an effort to promote successful inter-species understanding. Botanicalls allows plants to place phone calls for human help. When a plant on the Botanicalls network needs water, it can call a person and ask for exactly what it needs. When people phone the plants, the plants orient callers to their botanical characteristics.”

arduino – Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

lulu: make your own books etc.

Play money, the craft project – a virtual and tangible book, an artifact

outlets to go – a practical and lightweight device powerstrip, social hardware “share power outlets in airport” a well-designed object

Concluding statements - how to encourage people to visit the library more frequently? She offered the idea to create a welcoming physical space with good technology access, along with the “tangible” elements of comfortable chairs and food, where people can sit together, particularly in academic libraries.

Pecha Kucha – Conversation Face-off

Pecha Kucha – Conversation Face-Off!
Greg Schwartz, Library Systems Manager, Louisville Free Public Library
Rebecca Jones, Dysart & Jones Associates
Stephen Abram, VP, Innovation, SirsiDynix & President, SLA
Nancy Dowd, Director of Marketing, New Jersey State Library
David Lee King – substitute speaker

This session was well-attended by a crowd and set of presenters in high spirits, or so it was my impression sitting in the front. Maybe it is just the focused stress to get your ideas across in a short amount of time and under 20 slides. Look up Pecha Kucha on youtube for more on this idea.

Rebecca Jones: Planning is all about knowing. What are the frameworks for creating 2.0 experiences?
Planning is all about knowing where you are, where you want to be, and then closing the gap between the two. Why do plans get derailed? Get the barriers out of the way.

Stephen Abram:
Trendspotting. Some examples: Youtube is more influential than tv ads in this election. This is a visual population. During the Olympics, more people watched the Olympics on computers than tv. video stores are going out of business in preference to netflix. most of the people who are in distance higher ed are single moms. geocatching increases usage as a way of finding places, portability – we are changing to a mainly mobil focus. In colleges, Stephen notices these days that students use mobile phones instead of laptops for taking notes in class.

David Lee King: (substituting for another speaker)
the librarian is the product. Libraries have lots of products: books, magazines, databases, information. We have websites, subject guides, and reference services in im, at the desk, on the phone, or through blog posts. What product should we be selling? Books? – others do this. Search results and info? google already does this. But David says we should promote our stuff more than we do. How? Google answers, but we improve the question. We provide experience, by making the books fun and easy to access, providing an experience for a question. We hold the library together. We (librarians) are the product, we invite people in.

Nancy Dowd, A Marketing Manifesto
we don’t know what to call people who come in the library – she is going to call them by their names
she is going to be transparent; listen and respond
she will no longer support the silence of silos. everyone will communicate among systems that are divided
she will support innovation, try again when there are failures
she will make demands to her vendors.
she will honor all choices of communication tools to connect with people
she will embrace diversity
she will act green, not just think green
she will find the “me” in her library
she will measure the right stuff
she will market to voters.
she will tell stories – takes facts and figures to create stories about the library that matter to people
[a great powerpoint video followed at the end of her slides about the value of libraries]

A vote at the end for the best by cheers and claps – with Nancy Dowd the winner.

Wed. short sessions cybertours

These brief sessions were held in the exhibit hall, off in a corner where it was a little more quiet, but with screen projections and microphones, which makes a big difference at times.

Social Networks for Business/Professional Use
Richard Hulser, Hulser Consulting

The first Tuesday cybertour was about using social networking sites for business purposes.

Why would you want to connect with people for business or professionally in social networking sites?
- because you can connect not just with your personal friends, but business and professional contacts
- because there are many sites for professional use, and new ones all the time that you can try out
- notices for changes in colleagues work so you can keep up
- it’s good to see our colleagues and what they are working on.
- helps so you can remember details about colleagues’ work, and who they link to that you might want to connect with for work.
- you can post questions and polls to share information with others

A few things to watch out for:
- be careful about other people importing your friends list, at times without your knowledge.
- be careful about uploading of other email contact lists, that can occur without your knowledge
- you need to make a profile, which may be cumbersome or time consuming if you subscribe to many.

Here are the social networking sites that the speaker referred to, with the advantages and disadvantages of each:

Linkedin: this one is the best if you need to choose one for professional contacts. The speaker subscribes to this as a paid service, though you can use it as a free service with less options. It is useful for professional contacts in a professional standpoint. good for connecting with colleagues within an organization in addition to those in your industry. It is easy to search for others in your area of work. A problem/distraction: some advertising is beginning to appear.

Facebook: key advantages are links to twitter and other networking tools, plus you can add photos and videos. A concern: you have to join it to view any substantial information about a person or to see photos, videos, etc. Facebook does provide a url to photos within facebook, that you can send to people who may not belong to facebook. Uses: friends of the library photo event phots.

Xing: more international; good for professional contacts for international businesses and individuals.
Stats are useful. The speaker found businesses in xing that are marketing virtual world applications that he didn’t find elsewhere.

Plaxo:another international site much like xing.

Naymz. A self-described reputation site where people can ener their knowledge ofyou and can agree to be a reference. This is free, but there is another paid version that has more options.

Myspace: First thought of the speaker is that this is not appropriate for business, but if myspace includes your demographic group, you do need a presence there. The look and feel can be radically changed to whatever the user wants, including music. A few problems: ads at the top may include a message that you don’t want attached to your site. Another concern: people mix up the use of myspace pages as personal or professional.

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Organization 2.0
Rebecca Jones, Dysart & Jones Associates
Rebecca’s talk was about the characteristics of the “organization 2.0” and how libraries are recreating their structures and processes to thrive in a collaborative internet-based environment. The entire concept of how organizations function is changing: will enterprise 2.0 software transform organizations?

She next gave some examples of researchers who are looking at this question and their thoughts:

Tom Davenport = web 2.0 applied to organizations: changes in the internet won’t change the power differentials that affect lack of trust, missing incentives, unsupportive cultures, or other factors. There is way too much power invested in the heirarchies of organizations, and these sites are often blocked for access by employees.

Andrew McAfee Quote: “My enthusiasm and cautious optimism about these tools stems from the fact that they’re already being used heavily and delivering huge amounts of value. This usage right currently takes place almost exclusively on the public Internet; Enterprise 2.0 is my shorthand for these tools’ migration behind the firewall.

If you believe that this migration won’t take place, you believe essentially that companies — interdependent groups of people with a common mission and a profit motive — are less able or less likely to engage in free-form collaboration than the mass of previously independent volunteer freelancers that have made Wikipedia, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, del.icio.us, Digg, etc. so powerful and successful.”

Jon Husband: a techno-anthropologist who is researching 2.0 changes in organizations. Here is a quote from his website:

“We all know and understand hierarchy – the enduring principle of the institutions that govern us and in which we work and live. The people at the top of the institutions control the agendas and make the decisions.

And yet, taking decisions and managing organized activities are being impacted in powerful ways by interconnected networks of people and technology. The Internet is connecting customers, employees and communities and empowering them with information in ways never before possible.

Every week the impact of hyperlinked, horizontal and vertical networks is being felt more clearly and in more insistent ways. The impacts are creating new dynamics in organizations as well as emergent forms of organized activities that are based on participation and peer-to-peer interaction, resulting in nimble, responsive, and results-focused networked group / team structures.”

Want to know more? Look up organization 2.0 in rss feeds to follow this topic on the internet.

Organization structure basics:

1. past structures are not effective for present or future work processes
2. The younger the staff, the more comfortable with technology (Yikes! though she added that she is changing her mind about this) Instead she now thinks: the more comfortable people are with technology the more they are inclined to work collaboratively with new technologies overall.
3. small agile groups move faster than large bureaucracies
4. leadership and followership are important
5. 85% of the time if a person is not working to their full capacity, the systems are in their way, not the person

Organization design principles:

1. form follows function. Functions change quickly, form drives behavior
2. reporting relationships create ‘tied that bind’
3. collaboration decreases as distance and priorities increase. do you agree with this?

Rebecca Jones has begun a research project about how libraries integrate organization 2.0 processes into library work. She has found that 2.0 libraries are realigning staff on a team-by-team basis. They recognize that it’s the people skills and approach that matter the most. They know that the larger organizational issues have to be addressed, but…most haven’t gotten very far incorporating these ideas into structure.

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New Roles for Info Pros
Ruth A Kneale, Systems Librarian, ATST, National Solar Observatory

This cybertour looks at some of the interesting roles and jobs that information professionals have these days. We do much more than we learned in library school.

Jill Hurst-Wahl: she teaches how to use Second Life.
Joseph Murphy: Yale University science librarian. he set up social networking sites and instant messaging for librarians at Yale Science Library.

Amy Buckland – McGill University librarian. her work is entirely to organize the Second Life structure of her library. You can search the catalog in second life; she connects the processes of the bricks and mortar library to the second life library, including art exhibits and other events.

Laura Carscaddon – University of Arizona Business Librarian. Introduced 2.0 concepts in her library plus a friendfeed account. She teaches a class “social networking and you” for faculty as well as students and staff.
Part of her work is teaching faculty about web 2.0 concepts.

Joshua M. Neff – Library Society of the World, plus Content Developer at the Johnson County Library, working on projects for the JoCoTeenScene and JoCoKids.

Wednesday keynote:Social Media & Networked Technologies

KEYNOTE — Social Media & Networked Technologies: Research & Insights
danah boyd, Ph.D. student, School of Information at Berkeley, School of Information at Berkeley & Fellow, Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Her Ph.D. research is in the area of how people negotiate a presentation of self in unknown audiences, such as facebook, etc. funded through the Macarthur foundation.

Wow! An amazing talk. I tried to catch as much as I could of danah’s many fabulous ideas as they flew past. Apologies for comments that don’t go far enough in explanation. if this interests you, I suggest you look at her website.

As much as possible of these notes are in the form of quotes from what danah said, or what flew by on powerpoint slides.

Web 2.0 means different things to different people. Some think it is a perpetual beta, but we see also that users affect the technology cycle (like in H. Rheingold’s talk). Web 2.0 came after the tech crash, and the silicon valley tech people and others saw this as a way to repurpose hope.

But web 2.0 has reshaped entirely how people use technology and think about the internet. From usenet to now, we have a complete reshaping of how people use the internet and communicate online. Now it’s all about friends and communication with other people.

Among the social network sites, there are several factors that are consistent among all of them. What makes them unique is not the chance to just meet new people, but how these systems [paraphrase] enable the connection to people in an ongoing way for basic communication.

Factors across all these systems:
A profile. You already have an ip address, but it doesn’t say much about you, and who can remember it? The profile gives a way to say who you are, a “digital body.” Many people lie about their age, including young people, who don’t see why age should matter. A profile is somewhat like a physical space that people decorate, such as their room, or house.
A set of friends: It’s awkward how you have the problem of who your friends are and who they are not. The term “friends” means different things. (a) a few friends (absolute true friends) (b) 300+ friends, the social network of friends (c) 1000+ collectors, as in politicians, 14 year old boys, celebrities, musicians. In the awkwardness of this friends situation, social network sites handle them differently. MySpace = you must choose your friends in ORDER of 1st, 2nd, etc. and this makes a difficult situation for young people especially. Facebook does not have this system, and you can organize friends in looser structures. Young people figure out ways around this problem.
The Comments: mostly trivia, such as “how are you” “what are you doing” but for young people, this is a form of greeting that is an important social ritual online and in person.
Status updates: these are short comments from friends about what they are up to, how they feel. Like twitter, status updates are a form of microblogging. This system creates a culture of physical awareness but in a digital framework. danah expects this to evolve in the next few years.

Why does all of this matter? Social networks are a place to gossip, to make sure everyone around them is ok, flirt, socialize. Online has become the place to “hang out” like the malls of earlier years, or other places. Online spaces have become this place partly as a result of decreased mobility – parents don’t want their children out around in the suburbs or city for safety. Keeping up with friends moves to online when physical mobility is restricted for whatever reason. Community gathering places have shifted to online. A climate of fear, overstructuring of kids’ lives, the lack of mobility for after school and evening socializing have contributed to the rise of these online networks for young people. In order to exist within peer groups, you actually need to have a presence online. Creating a presence online with artifacts of your existence (such as photos, music) is essential to be part of groups of friends in the physical world. This is the new public space, but not the same as what older generations grew up with for public spaces.

For educators, it’s really important to understand the properties of these systems.

• There is a persistent quality to online info. Facebook entries are meant to be ephemeral by people as they write them, but these writings are actually publications that stay around a long time.
• Replicability – there is a high frequency of copying an item from one place to another. But the context can change for an object when placed in a new site. You don’t know where the original is and where the copy is any longer, and this is confusing in itself, aside from the whole question of copyright.
• Scalability – what you post will be read by millions of people, so they say. But the average blog is read by 6 people. The internet has weird scalability issues: the potential to reach many, but the possible reality of reaching nobody. How do we deal with the viral nature of the internet, since it is an attention-driven medium? You (a person in a social network) need to deal with the intricacies of scalability and how you feel about the issues involved with access.
• Searchability: in the usual sense day to day you are not searchable in the physical world. But when you participate in the internet you are searchable, including by those people who you do not want to have this ability. This can be most deadly for those who hold power over you, such as parents, teachers, law enforcement.
• There are invisible audiences. In a physical sense, if you are in a group, you may not know your audience or those around you, but they are visible to you always. But online, you don’t know who your audience is, audiences are invisible. You don’t know who is there right now, later, by search, and who is the audience anyway? This is something that journalists have struggled with for years. Within social networks, those classified as your friends are the intended audience. You exclude others by profile settings, but if you have a public profile, your audience is unknown to you. This doesn’t just apply to young people: as a parent if you don’t include your children as online friends, you don’t intend them as your audience.
• Collapsed contexts and events. There are no walls online, so you have multiple audiences in an unscripted situation. Compare this to events such as parties, where you have a known environment, a known setting, and duration for time and place.
• Public vs. private spaces: You need to set the controls online: public access is completely out of your control for structure.

What does all this mean? We see these structures play into internet technology changes. Metadata tagging is an example of how organizational structure is in the process of change by the users of these systems, affecting more formal structures in turn. So we need to learn about this; how to do it.

Non-experts are creating content. What does this mean for authenticity and authority to create content? Wikipedia=the most transparent encyclopedic construction that has ever been created. You may not like everything that is created, but you can contribute and challenge it. danah is amazed that librarians are so horrified by it, but they are the ones who could really contribute quite a lot to wikipedia. It is fascinating how really large questions such as evolution are played out in different viewpoints, by different nations.
For media literacy, we need to teach young people about how online information is produced in social networks, and about the process of this form of communication.

We no longer have a distinct separation between consumption and creation. Ex. fan fiction comments online show this ability to creating new text. Young people are reading and creating new writing with fan fiction.

All the ways that we write are increasingly connected to technology.

We have an attention economy, in other words, what gets the most attention among readers shows up in visibility. How do we deal with an economy where attention effects visibility on the internet? (my note: we have this in the print world of course, with publishing for best sellers compared to visibility of more obscure titles)

Larry Lessig: 4 factors: social norms, the market, architecture of what’s possible, and the law. Law is the most conservative factor of these 4. Law is not changing to accommodate the other 3 factors.
How are social networks affected by these 4 factors?
- net neutrality: does your isp control what you have access to? We need to stop the problem of isps blocking access.
cannot get to most of what she would like to get to for research. If content is locked down in journals, or other forms of cultural content, this limits creation of new cultural artifacts. Cuts off ability for people to engage with text. We need balance of open access a – drm – control of information through locking down of journals, or other forms of blocking access. danahnd the original efforts of copyright to protect authors. How does fair use impact linking in web sites? danah has had a problem with this with publishers who have told her that she can use only 10 words only in a quote.

Web 2.0 is about to expand significantly through mobile access devices. Technology of web 2.0 is becoming more part of the mobile worlds, as with the i-phone and similar objects. Cluster effects don’t work as well for mobile technology as for they do for computers, since with both pcs/macs you can look at equivalent content. Mobile phone networks are a barrier to development since different apps work on each, without the equivalent forms of communication among them. China is beginning to solve this problem.

Delocatability: a goal of equivalent access through distributed physical space. No matter where you are you can bring friends with you by communication devices, uploading photos, etc.

Technology is radically changing physical culture. We are in a big melting moment that will shape how people interact with other people.

Flash Maps

I really enjoyed Tim Donahue’s talk about the flash maps he made for the Skidmore College Library. Macromedia Flash is an amazing program and I was totally inspired by how he uses his skills for making useful library materials. If you look at the rest of the library website, it’s really well done: mostly text that conveys action with good design. The flash map has an option for green/black or grey. The grey default map is visually subtle, but perhaps not enough contrast of text to background for some people to read. So the green/black skin option for the map gets around this completely with high contrast. It’s the same as for contrast in text/background color for powerpoint slides, where it really matters to pick high contrast for display in large rooms. If the colors are too close, you really can’t see at the back of the room what the text even says, and can’t rely on the visual to follow the presentation.