Task Force on Social Networking Software

An article from the September issue of the Journal of Medical Internet Research offers an interesting and critical overview of three-dimensional (3-D) virtual worlds and “serious gaming” that are currently being developed and used in healthcare professional education and medicine. Also includes discussion on two learning theories applicable to the use of 3-D learning environments, and the challenges and benefits associated with it.

Link to PubMed Abstract & free full text
Versatile, immersive, creative and dynamic virtual 3-D healthcare learning environments: a review of the literature.
J Med Internet Res. 2008 Sep 1;10(3):e26. Review.
PMID: 18762473 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

For a librarian’s point of view of health care education in virtual worlds, check out P. F. Anderson’s Emerging Technologies blog for a load of visual presentations and reflections on Second Life.

Ah internet forums, the original online networking tool. Whether it was a question about Star Trek or feeding advice for long-haired cats, forums & bulletin boards have always had their place in the collective wisdom of the Net as a place of debate, wisdom and flaming insults.

Now from the ALA’s Office of Information Technology Policy comes an active, free and useful forum for any librarian who’s had copyright concerns and no one to talk to.

The Copyright Advisory Network is an open bulletin board for copyright questions, with a community of “librarians, copyright scholars, and policy wonks” standing by to offer their expert (but not legal) advice. The purpose of this site is to encourage librarians to discuss copyright concerns, and seek feedback and advice from fellow librarians and copyright specialists. Communication and discussion are encouraged, and you can even ask questions anonymously.

As a part-time digital project manager, I cannot tell you how helpful it is to have a forum like this available to ask stupid questions. It’s all thanks to Freya Anderson’s copyright presentation at Internet Librarian 2008.

PS: there’s also a great digital slider from the OITP to quickly determine copyright.

The sun is setting on the Internet Librarian 2008 conference, but I’ll be back next week with more highlights and reflections from this most excellent learning experience. In the meantime, you can view many sessions from the conference on the Slideshare IL2008 group, or search Twitter or Flickr for conversations or photos (try using the IL2008 tag).

Jeff Wisniewski was back at IL2008 today talking about measuring social media. Notes behind the cut.
The sea lion approves this message. (Read on …)

Darlene Fitcher (Univ. of Saskatchewan) and Frank Cervone (Chicago State Univ.) offered a ton of great links for website optimization along with plenty of bon mots and a brief discussion of Google goggles during their IL2008 session “Cool Tools for Library Webmasters”. But I’ll let their presentation do the talking

From choosing color palettes and designing 404 pages to a tool that simulates eye-tracking studies and something called FileHamster, this presentation runs the gamut from usability to security to just plain fun.

Jeff Wisniewski, Web Services Librarian at the Univ. of Pittsburgh, offered tips on how to ‘harness the awesome’ of your library website with tips and tricks you can do in under a minute to fine tune your site. Of course, if you do not have server access or certain admin rights (the status quo for many hospital and academic libraries), some of these may not be possible. At any rate, here’s the highlights grouped by credibility, content and navigation, design, performance, search engine optimization and social media optimization. Or check out Wisniewski’s June 2008 article in Computers in Libraries. (Read on …)

Making sense of search results is currently a big trend in search engines. That’s the word from Mary Ellen Bates, founder of Bates Information Services, prolific author and all around search engine expert (read her blog here). For example, take a service from Yahoo India called Yahoo Glue, which organizes search results by platform, instead of the classic list format. Take a look at this search for ‘cat‘. Instead of a single list, you get results grouped by categories such as Flickr, Google blog search, Yahoo answers, wikipedia, howstuffworks.com, and more.

More “sense making” search engines you may have not yet heard about… (Read on …)

This is what happens at conferences: between old friends, seldom-seen colleagues and serendipitous networking, 5 librarians from the South Central Chapter managed to rally 13 people for an impromptu dinner last night. But it wouldn’t be a true networking event without a relational flowchart.

Or dessert.

Dinner napkin illustration courtesy of Julie Gaines at Univ. of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Full stomach courtesy of Rosine’s Monterey. 

Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs, professor at Stanford University and shoe artist (see photo) opened IL2008 with his keynote lecture “Communities & Communications in a Social and Mobile World”.

Historically, literate populations were able to do things together through the mediums available to them at the time. Think of the invention of the printing press: Martin Luther was not the first priest to oppose the Church, but he was the first to do so with the aid of printed broadsides to distribute his 95 Theses. Similarly, the rise of the internet, SMS text messaging and other new media provide new tools for organizing social movements in the modern world, to both good and bad ends. How can we harness the power of participatory media? The answer may be media literacy: not the tools like blogs, rss, photo/music/video sharing, social bookmarking etc, but also the ways in which people are using them.

How do you find the answer if you can’t pose it correctly? And once you find the answers, how can you determine if the answers are true? Certainly information literacy is key to answering those questions, but we also need to address how to use new media platforms. As Rheingold observed, if you want to keep up, “don’t keep up with the technologies, keep up with the literacies.”

To this end, check out these links for more information on media literacy and educational efforts concerning it.

Participatory Media Literacy: http://www.socialtext.net/medialiteracy/index.cgi
Learn about the characteristics of participatory media literacy

Social Media Classroom: http://socialmediaclassroom.com/
A growing public resource of knowledge and relationships among all who are interested in the use of social media in learning. Includes a content management system (running on the open source CMS Drupal) which provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes, as well as a basic set of curricular materials to get started.

From the IL 2008 opening session…
10. Shelf-pointer librarian
9. Analog librarian
8. Legacy librarian
7. Librarian unplugged
6. 3×5 Librarian
5. InterNOT librarian
4. Retro-brarian
3. [insert name of supervisor] librarian
2. Wallenda librarian (“librarian who’s flyin’ high without the net”)
1. Librarian 1.0

coming later, lots of free, useful tools from the first day of Internet Librarian, and a close up Howard Rheingold’s shoes.