Thing 23 -- Whoo-hoo! I'm done!

Wow. I feel like I've run a marathon.

A few thoughts. First, this took a lot more time than I expected, however, I feel like I got a lot out of it. So it balances out.

Thanks to Cindy for the comments and encouragement!

I'm now actually looking forward to going back and revisiting some of the Things. I think there are a few that I will understand better and see more value in now that I've finished, and have more of a picture of the whole.

So, maybe I will keep blogging, at least for a while!

Thing 22: Keeping Current

I feel like I'm signing up for an eternity of information overload...

As I was following the links provided for continuing our learning curve, I looked at the Blue Skunk Blog and had to laugh at the latest blog entry by Doug Johnson. He says he thought of Mr. Creosote after the latest invitation he received to join another social network.

For those of you who may not know or remember, Mr. Creosote was an archetypal glutton played by Terry Jones in the 1983 Monty Python movie The Meaning of Life. Creosote eats, vomits and eats more until a final mint, as I remember, causes his entire body to horrifically explode.

I am worried that Diigo just might be that final 2.0 mint. At what point does one's social networking time commitment become so consuming that one figuratively explodes?

I am therefore adopting the same rule I apply to adding books to my bookshelves, clothing to my closet and RSS feeds to my reader - for every item I add, I toss one as well.

I believe it to be the only path of sanity and survival. Entirely too much of my life is already taken up by trying to keep up.

Ooh, I too think this might be a good idea!

Unfortunately, I realize that keeping up with the new also means keeping up with which of the old have been merged, morphed or tossed in the waste bin.

Frankly, I'm not sure whether I'll keep up this blog, although I do want to find ways to keep talking with folks. Perhaps it will be through a social network instead of a blog. This is actually the second blog I've had. I started the first after I finished my novel and found that I was terrified of the thought of anyone actually reading it. So I started a blog in order to "train myself" to know what it would feel like to know that total strangers were reading and evaluating my words.

What actually happened is that, like my novel, my mother and partner were pretty much the only ones who read it. I missed that whole marketing part of it, I guess.

I think this is the reality of blogs: there are some that "make it" but the vast majority have a very limited readership. It takes a lot of work to make a blog interesting and relevant.

The good thing is that after going through the 23 Things, I know of several avenues other than blogging that I can use to stay current and to communicate with peers.

Thing 21: Beyond MySpace

This is what I really like about the concept of social networking sites. The Internet makes the world seem both smaller and larger: you can be a lonely geek in your little corner of the world, but via the Internet, find a whole bunch of similarly geeky folk to share with. That's an amazing thing, and very exciting. It takes the old idea of pen-pals and makes it much more immediate and exciting. You find others like yourself and discover the extraordinary breadth and diversity of people, places, cultures... that's so very cool.

I liked the look of Gather and Ning, and I also wandered around Bake Space for a while. I also played with google briefly and found Schmooze, a Jewish social network; Citizen Scientist for the layperson with a lot of curiosity, Maccaca, an online Digital Museum of Art for artists, and so much more.

So yes, I'll spend more time looking through these sites. I'd also like to find a way to let patrons know about these sites -- it seems that MySpace and Facebook get all the press, but they are so oppressively glitzy and teen oriented. It's nice to know that there are options for people who don't want that.

One note: I was watching a little bit of snowboarding on television yesterday, and between runs they were interviewing a couple of the "star" snowboarders. The interviews were not what I would have expected, instead they were right out of the MySpace "Coke or Pepsi?" survey. Sort of a media mashup. But it's alright for snowboarding, I guess, though I will be really scared if interviews start looking like this on the nightly news.

Thing 20 - MySpace & Facebook

Sometimes I think of MySpace and Facebook as black holes... I go near them and all sense of time and place is forgotten...

I haven't actually spent that much time on them. Don't have pages of my own and have zero inclination to start one, but I'm just totally fascinated by them all the same. It's the whole idea of "social networking" and how these sites are creating a paradigm shift in our definitions and perceptions of privacy, identity, place, community, association... even the definition of "friend" has undergone this strange transmutation. It's fascinating and perplexing.

In my professional capacity, I think of MySpace in two primary ways: first, to protect kids' right to go online and connect with their friends (however they define "friend.") Second, to learn as much as possible about these venues so that I can talk coherently with the parents who come in to the library and are concerned about their kids going online and therefore being exposed to the evils that may lurk in cyberspace. For them, I want to know enough about MySpace to be able to sit them down at the computer and give them tips on how to explore it as well as being able to suggest books that might help them parent in this new frontier.

I watched a PBS Frontline episode called Growing Up Online. It's available for viewing online, and I would highly recommend it to parents/teachers/library staff and other concerned folk. The program covers a lot of ground, from kids spending so much time online that they have more of a virtual life than a real one, to cyber-stalking and cyber-bullying.

I was struck by one of the parents in the program, a New Jersey mom who was incredibly concerned about some "bad man" stalking her daughters online. I don't want to minimize this concern in any way, but how is this worse than the greasy, doorway perverts who we grew up learning to avoid? (One note from the Frontline episode: the reporter said that in every case where a teen was stalked online the teen had been an active participant, at least initially... It stands to reason that it's much easier to block an inappropriate advance online than face to face with a real person.)

I think one thing that will be very interesting to watch unfold is what these online networking sites will mean for our evolving definitions of privacy. The little time I've spent bouncing around on MySpace shows me that people put the most unbelievably private info out there. And I'm not talking sexual things. I'm talking about cell phone numbers, place of birth, age, full name, etc. Everything but the social security number. (This while we hear more and more about identity thieves creating endless havoc for their victims.)

This should matter to us as library professionals because we (should) put a great deal of care and thought into issues around protecting privacy, not to mention media literacy, copyrights, etc. What does that mean for us as professionals to be zealously guarding patrons' privacy, then watch them put their entire life up on MySpace? I'm guessing that we haven't even begun to imagine how this will play out.

Then there is the whole issue of our privacy. We are out there in the public eye, and I have no doubt that there have already been several occasions, whether it be bored teens or bitter patrons, where individual staff get Googled. Not a bad thing if you lead a stereotypical librarian's life. But what if you don't? Is it safe to be Out in your blog if you identify where you work (okay, that might fit a certain librarian stereotype, still, I think you can get my point)? Then there's a whole gamut of choices and behaviors that fall into the category of "questionable taste." You have to wonder how many ways it could come back to haunt people. We all did stupid stuff as kids. Many of us do dumb things as grown-ups. But hopefully by now only a few people remember, and we can count on memories to fade and fugue with time, details to blur. The nature of people's memories allows a lot of room for compassion and forgiveness.

But when it's sent out to the Internet... it's really there. Forever. Any anyone can access it. The new NEA Today came today, and in it is an article called "The Whole World (wide web) Is Watching." The article gives several examples of teachers who were fired because their students or administrators discovered "inappropriate" content on their MySpace pages. In every case cited, the teachers had sexually explicit content on their pages. None of the examples involved interaction with students or minors. So the teachers were not blogging about things that were technically illegal. Still, they were fired.

The article goes on to say:

But what about free speech? Don't school employees have the right, on their own time, to blog about their private lives without fear of losing their jobs? Probably not... It's the general rule that school employees can be disciplined for off-duty conduct if the school district can show that the conduct had an adverse impact on the school or the teacher's ability to teach.

The article ends with the comment:

There's an old lawyer's adage that goes something like this: Never put in writing anything that you don't want read in open court or by your mother. Maybe it's time for an updated adage: Never put in electronic form anything that you wouldn't want viewed by a million people, including your colleagues, students, and supervisors - and your mother.

I don't think that these Internet social networking sites have made life more dangerous, although it is more overwhelming packed with options and opportunities for catastrophically stupid choices. I think there are some really, really good things about these sites (I'll get to that with Thing 21). It's just that it was safer to screw up when your friends were folks in your neighborhood, and you knew their secrets as much as they knew yours. But all of you could leave your neighborhood to go elsewhere and start over, making all new mistakes with all new people.

Now, you misstep online and it could follow you everywhere and for always. That's a really big paradigm shift. I'm not sure the ape side of our brains is up to processing the full ramifications of that.

Thing 19 - Podcasts

Ooh, I love podcasts. I am a big fan of NPR programs like This American Life and The Splendid Table. However, it's not often that I have the radio on at the "right" time for catching these shows. I think podcasts are to Radio sort of what TiVo is to cable -- and, I love my TiVo, too. I find that I'm not real keen to set up RSS feeds however -- or else it's the same thing that happens with magazines and books on hold. We subscribe to several magazines, then I put others (as well as books) on hold, and sometimes I just feel buried under the avalanche of things I could use to amuse, educate, distract or alarm myself with. For me it works better to just know that the podcasts are available and then go seek it out when the whimsy strikes.

Work-wise, I appreciate the educational potential provided by podcasts and such. I've taken advantage of quite a few webinars and podcasts about various library topics. Some were great and some not so much. I was talking with a former coworker about this a couple of months ago, and I think that there are still a lot of creators of educational podcasts who haven't quite adapted to the medium. They deliver podcasts the same way they would an interview or lecture, completely forgetting that with the podcast they do not have nonverbal communication to support what they are saying verbally. They can't check in with the audience to tell if they are boring people silly, and they can't do dizzy signs over their heads to show that they are being ironic when they say something. So the end product suffers.

Regardless, the possibilities are endless. And thanks for the resources list. I rarely go further than NPR/MPR websites. I look forward to exploring these other sites more.

And, the link to one of my favorite episodes of This American Life. Should be required listening for all Americans, I think.

Thing 18 - You Tube

Viewing You Tube videos is one of the few ways that I actually "play" on my computer. I can waste a significant amount of time perusing videos, though I don't think I'm the "typical" you-tube viewer. I love looking for new videos from places in Europe and Africa where I've lived/traveled. I also like looking at mashups put together by Browncoats (those freakishly devoted to the Firefly series and the movie Serenity) and Discworld aficionados (those freakishly fanatical about the stories by Terry Pratchett).

However, what I have never found You Tube to be particularly good at was helping me find practical information. I'm sure it's out there, and a percentage is probably well made. But generally speaking, it hasn't been useful in that way. I looked for a video on weeding a library collection... nothing found. At least nothing relevant. I was thinking that it would be good to add such a beasty into the GRRL weeding manual wiki (which I'm currently updating). Guess we'll have to make it ourselves.

Anyway, here's a short video clip of the market in Kpalime, Togo, about 15 k from where I lived a lifetime and a half ago (okay, from 1990 to 93). I've spent many a day perusing the aisles here, looking at beads and fabric, mostly. If my memory serves, there was some excellent street food to be found there as well.

Thing 17 - ELM Productivity Tools

I've been using some of these tools for a while. I love the journal alerts feature provided by Ebsco. It's an easy way to keep up on what's new. There are three or four journals that get circulated throughout the GRRL libraries. However, since there are 32 branches as well as several HQ departments, it's not uncommon to get a particular issue six months to a year after it's come out. That's hugely frustrating to me, so I've set up journal alerts for my favorite journals so that I can get the info right away.

I have fiddled with the web page feature a little, but didn't really find it that useful. It feels fairly cumbersome and putzy, especially in contrast to the ease with which you can create text, add links and graphics, etc. in Blogger.

That said, I can see where this could be a useful tool for school libraries and teachers in those districts where there are not sufficient funds for the district to support much in the way of teacher/staff websites. Based on what I see with my partner's school and what I hear from parents at the library, it is becoming an expectation that teachers will have web pages where they list assignments due, suggestions for projects, etc. Parents want to be able to look on a web page to see whether their child has homework due. However, I'm unclear as to whether ELM assists with hosting the page, as opposed to simply creating it. And, I'm not clear why a teacher would prefer an ELM-created web page as opposed to a Blogger-created blog. I suppose it could be as much a matter of what you start with (and invest time and energy into) as anything.