National Library Week Wrap-Up

Here is the audio slideshow that Lis Bartlett and I made for National Library Week:



Also, check out the Davies Forum National Library Week display in Gleeson Library.

What I dislike about Gleeson Library at USF

What I dislike about Gleeson: 

Swiping to get into the library. Sometimes I have my hands full of books or other study items when I approach the library and trying to open the doors is enough of a challenge - fishing around for an ID doesn't make this situation any easier.

I realize that the card swipes might help secure the building, but requiring cards for access is also discouraging to those who want to use the library. I was waiting at the circulation desk, near the entrance, attempting to pay some late fees (another thing I dislike about the library, though admittedly my fault!) earlier today. While I was standing there, a number of individuals who were not part of the USF community but were on campus for a conference approached the gates to be let in. 

A woman came in through the doors and waited for a little while at the gates, confused, before retreating back out the doors. Later, a man approached the desk, looked imploringly into the circulation desk area, as one must do if she forgets her card, before being interrogated by a deskworker for entrance into the library. The deskworker asked him if he was a teacher, which he was not, and then asked what he was here for, to which he responded "just visiting", so she let him in. I'm not sure, but I doubt that someone asking for admittance into the library would admit that they were there to "steal some books" or "graffiti the third floor bathroom". 

That's not to say that I don't think monitoring the library is worthwhile. Certainly, we have a lot of awesome books to protect! I think that the video monitors set up throughout the building are probably good prevention against nefarious activity (like graffiti or promiscuity in the stacks) and the metal detectors (book detectors?) at the exit are a perfectly reasonable defense as well.

One thing I do like about the gates is their sound, strangely enough. I used to try and block it out when I was reading on the 2nd floor balcony, but now I embrace the sound like many San Franciscans embrace the bellowing foghorns late at night. The unique gentle swooshing of the gates is somewhat comforting against the trickling waterfall nearby. It reminds me, while I work, that I'm in a special place surrounded by books and knowledgeable people and, for the most part, peace and quiet. The loudest my library experience gets is when someone forgets their card, setting off the gate alarm, and must then carry out a loud cross-room conversation with the circulation attendant as to who they are and why they don't have a card. 

I wonder, could we keep the swishing sound and lose the card swipe?

My Blog, My Self: Understanding Online Identity

So you are a budding musician with two cats, a Vespa, a college degree in computer science and thing for extreme frisbee on the weekends in the park -- that's not what your MySpace says.

According to MySpace, you are the recently-single drummer for a band called The Death Tulip who likes to "rrrrrOCK!", collects psychedelic 60's concert posters, rides a "hog," and maintains an athletic build through rigorous weekend activity ("about which one need not elaborate"). On Facebook, one learns that you are the founder of the Phoebe Cates's Bikini fan club, are "friends" with over 400 people from your school, are an Atheist, and have recently graduated to the Pioneer level of Oregon Trail status. One might also speculate by your decision to include both men and women under preferences that you are bisexual (although this was not really your intention). On your online company profile for the software-related magazine to which you contribute, they have you listed as a "quiet guy whose true personality comes through in the many ARG's he plays." Oh, and you just tweeted that you "think Hilary(sic) is a racist."

So, who are you really?

Well, you are someone I just made up, if we are to be fair. But the figurative you reflects the increasingly common issue of cultivating one's online identity -- and maintaining it.

Upside of creating multiple online profiles: One can, as blogger sweetheart Dana Boyd says, "write oneself into being." In other words: go wild! Be who you want to be! You can be the quiet journalist AND the hog-riding athletic drummer of a supposedly kick-ass band! 

Downside of creating multiple online profiles: There is a reason that people take medication for schizophrenia. One finds plenty of challenges managing a single identity (as we do when we enter this world) -- managing two or three or more identities (especially if you throw in the ones created by other people about you) is understandably stressful. What does my intended audience need to know about me? What do I want them to know about me? Who am I to these people? v. Who am I to these people?

Deciding how to represent oneself in different areas of our online life is only half the battle. The other half is about controlling these potentially disparate representations. People like Fred Stutzman and his colleagues at ClaimID are attempting to address this issue.

ClaimId addresses what Stutzman calls the "Google Problem" -- the (at time, unfortunate) results of someone plugging your name into a Google search. You may not be ashamed of your first website or online high school science project, but when they pop up as the number two and three entries in a search for your name, it becomes somewhat problematic if you are trying to impress potential employers (or dates?). Those sites represent the yous of a past era and there is no reason for them to receive the attention they would in such an important slot in your ego roll.

Stutzman refers to claimID as an "activist tool". It allows you to regain control of your online identity by creating identity awareness. " The site allows you to group your blog, website, news articles about you, and any other relevant sites that might otherwise be over looked in a Google search, into one place. "With claimID, you can put your best face forward and let people see the identity you with to present," the claimID site reads.

The final kicker about online identity is that nothing you put out there ever really goes away. The things you say about yourself, the things others say about you -- they are in there somewhere forever, especially now that organizations like the Internet Archive are busy trying to record it all (thankfully). This could be a good thing or a bad thing for you, depending on the context. Is there any way to delete unfavorable entries that keep popping up on Google searches? "Whoever figures that out will be rich," said Stutzman.

With this in mind, I might be inclined to say something like "blog at your own risk", but even the cautious blogger cannot anticipate all of his or her future publics. We might think we are beating the system or using it to our advantage by crafting different profiles -- different selves -- to match various audiences; however, we are merely just creating an interactive, multidimensional image that grows richer in ways we might not anticipate nor appreciate (not always, anyways). We must learn to cultivate this library of our selves.

Firestone: Rubber or Rubbish?





Emira Woods discussed the Stop Firestone Campaign as part of the Global Women's Rights Forum at USF this week, focusing specifically on Firestone's involvement in the issues of "modern slave labor" and child labor. Firestone's workers are, in order to get paid, required to fill a quota, hauling large, heavy quantities of rubber sap over great distances for little pay. Additionally, the wives and children of these men are dragged into the equation because the men need the extra help and have no other way to spend time with their families during long toilsome work days. A more in-depth account of Woods' points on the matter can be found on my friend Lis' blog.

I wonder... would the Michelin Man force his workers to live in shanty houses?

Alexander Technique

"How many times a day do you tweet?" asked Bryan Alexander, Director of Research at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, a non-profit initiative dedicated to promoting liberal education.
"Six to ten times," the student responded.

No, this isn't bird school.

Guest speaker Alexander was simply talking about www.twitter.com, a site that encourages individuals to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of brief, frequent answers to the question "What are you doing?" These exchanges are known by those who use the site as "tweets."

Bryan Kicks Back
Originally uploaded by luluisforlovers

Alexander is definitely a frequent tweeter. Even as he lectured us on pedagogy and Web 2.0., tweets of various hellos from around the world scrolled on the projected computer screen behind him.

Vermont_snow_2005Oct-b
Originally uploaded by BryanAlexander

The long-haired, bearded technology buff was visiting USF from his home in snowy rural Vermont, where he conducts research primarily on mobile and wireless computing, digital gaming, and social software. "It's fun to lecture on 3D technology and then go off and chop wood for an hour," Alexander said.

One area of particular interest to Alexander is "ARG": Alternate Reality Gaming. An Alternate Reality Game is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions. The first two Alternate Reality Games, according to Christy Dena in her essay 'Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games', were Microsoft Game Studio's The Beast and Electronic Arts Majestic. In his lecture, Alexander also mentioned www.ilovebees.com, Perplex City, and World Without Oil as good examples of Alternate Reality Gaming.

Reflecting his easy-going approach to technology, Alexander followed discussion of "Connectivism" (G. Siemens, 2004) and "Wikipedagogies" by taking us to the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator.
"Web 2.0 is easier than web 1.0," he said.

If that's true, then I should have no problem disintermediating my A-list web services and designing social folksonomies later this week.

Louden Up Now!


I have decided to write about !!!'s album, Louden Up Now, for my 20-30 page Popular Music & Communication paper. Intimidating? Yes, a bit... but I'm up for the challenge.

This album will be a good one to dig into because, as Professor Andrew Goodwin would say, it has a lot of "purchase." Musically, the album combines punk, disco/funk with the rave mentality of the late 80s and 90s. It speaks equally about drugs and politics (not in George's favor, go figure). It encourages you to dance, it encourages you to scream. It will be interesting to see what else I get out of it.

Here is the music video for the single "Hello? Is this thing on?" off of Louden Up Now:


Oh yeah, and the band's name, !!!, can be pronounced by repeating anything three times. Chk Chk Chk is the most popular, but bam bam bam or uh uh uh would work, too.

Ciao Ciao Ciao

Brewster Kahle takes us way back with the Internet Archive

One Lap Top Per Brewster
Originally uploaded by luluisforlovers

Brewster Kahle, the founder and digital librarian at the non-profit Internet Archive, stopped by USF to speak with the Davies students and friends last Thursday. Kahle also helps direct the Open Content Alliance, a collaborative effort among a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content.

Kahle noted that, with Web 2.0, there is a desire to share information that we need to explore now because "we could lost it really quite quickly," he said.

"Knowledge available to everyone is a possibility," said Kahle, " but the political will to live in an open environment is missing from society." Kahle believes in "Universal Access to all knowledge" -- free information to all. "Free as in beer, free as in speech," he said. Kahle works towards this end by focusing on archiving texts, audio, moving images, and software on the web. "We live in an unexamined world," he said.

One of his primary projects is digitizing texts so they can be accessed and easily reprinted. So far he has up to 300,000 books in eight collections. Many of these digitized books are printed out for only $1 a book by the Book Mobile, a library on wheels. He is setting his sights on digitizing the Library of Congress, which houses 26,000,000 unique texts.

The Internet Archive is also home to recordings of 40,000 concerts and 2,500 bands that range from The Grateful Dead to chamber music and 55,000 moving images in 100 collections. These videos tend to be "those films that they showed you in junior high when you had a substitute teacher," Kahle said. This would include things like drive-in movie ads and tobacco industry videos. "It's an influential medium that almost always goes unexamined," he said. Additionally, the site has been recording television 24 hours a day for the last eight years.




One of the most interesting and popular projects the Internet Archive has done is the "Wayback Machine," which takes a snapshot of every page on the internet (with some exceptions) every two months. It has been operating since 1996 and "it's getting pretty big, " said Kahle. It now houses 2 PB of stuff.

Should the Internet be public or private? Open or proprietary?

"How we communicate across generations is in our artifacts. We are in our most interesting phase in the battle over the internet. It's got to be public or we will perish," Kahle said. "Universal access can be one of the greatest achievements; our generation's gift. All you need is curiosity."