Impressions Scholarcast

About 2 weeks ago I installed the Surveys, Petitions, Votes, Polls and Quizzes application on Facebook. Via their Facebook profiles Peta Hopkins and Mark Sutherland had brought this to my attention.

I used the app to create a simple survey called Use of Facebook with the welcome message ‘Just a quick survey on how you are using Facebook at present’. The description invited friends to provide a ‘Snapshot of how you are using Facebook this week’. The questions were few and simple as shown below.

Peta kindly distributed the invitation to complete the survey to the Friends and Readers of Libraries Interact several of whom answered the survey.

To date 20 people have answered and the results at the time of writing are:

Question 1: How often do you access Facebook?

Question 2: Has Facebook become part of your communication routine, like email, web page reading and blogging?

Question 3: Any other comments? (Optional)

• the applications are confusing ….
• used facebook to track new apps being investigated (facebook and non-facebook) by friends
• Facebook is becoming more of a semi-professional zone for me and so I m paying more attention to the messaging and networking aspects there lately.
• It is a fun way to meet and network with librarians – more personal than library 2.0 on Ning.
• A little bit. Most of the time I use it to check on somebody’s health progress (rather than badger her all the time) or play heaps of Scrabble.
• Not convinced yet by its value – but am enjoying making contact with people not seen in a while, and have benefited from a few links people of like interests have posted along the way. Mainly just a big poke-fest though! I have had one series of legitimate work related messages arranging an article to be written.
• Interesting article here — http://ramblinglibrarian.blogspot.com/2007/10/facebook-at-work-address-cause-not-hide.html
• Fb is interfering with my blog reading!

My thanks to all who replied, especially the telling comments.

It is worth checking out a recent article from Wired Campus for a surprising finding that students don’t want more computers in libraries. Our own students don’t appear to be exhibiting this view – may be it is an aberration. The podcast mentioned in the article may be worth a listen. A quote is:

“I thought that since students are online so much that they always wanted to be near a computer,” one of the librarians said. “But it turns out that part of the reason they’re coming to the library is to unplug, is to actually have some time where they can concentrate on their work. So we wanted to make sure we had lots of big spaces, where they can study, and can be quiet, and can concentrate.”

Along with 0.3 M other readers that initially took his blog server down for a few days I have become a fan of Stephen Fry’s foray into blogging. Of course I am long a fan of his TV and movie performances.

Going further, I particularly like his new word ‘blessay’. It perfectly describes his long blog posts that need a full ten minutes of more to digest. Fortunately Stephen’s blessays don’t appear too frequently so the significant time investment is worth it.

That said his other attempt at neologism ‘blisquisition’ is not nearly so attractive and it’s sheer difficulty in pronunciation rules against it from the start.

Two more thought provoking videos from the Digital Ethnography group at Kansas State Uni:

• A Vision of Students Today: 
• The Information R/evolution:

Each video is only 5 minutes long. Do we believe our students fit this model?

Thanks to Robert Scoble for bringing this to my attention.

Recording your attention profile – activity in all your social media sites – as a structured XML file will be extremely valuable to monitor your own behaviour. Imagine how much more valuable it will be for advertisers, employers and government. Guard it well.

APML, Attention Profiling Markup Language, would make it possible, and Bloglines has just joined the working party. Check them out on Facebook.

I was alerted by Peta and her UQ librarian contact, Andrew Bennett, to an article on academic blogging by Fred Stutzman of UNC. He echoes my own thoughts nearly exactly but writes them down so exquisitely.

His first statement reminds us ‘As academics, we are educators and communicators.’ and then launches into the notoriety of blogs in the educational environment:

… the ongoing debate over the role of blogs in academia is both illustrative and confounding. Fundamentally, blogs are communication tools, ones that when used in context become powerful tools for digital learning. Many in academia have effectively leveraged blogs to share their work and connect with students and colleagues, all the while spurring conversation and research.

I concur completely. He then makes a telling observation about the blog technology:

… a blog is little more than a populist follow-on to the self-maintained HTML page, one that often grew stagnant due to the complexity of the update process. As we discovered blogs, we socially constructed uses for the software.

He goes on to explore the extreme views on blogging in a succinct fashion – his article is worth the short read. In his concluding remarks I wholeheartedly agree with his postulation that blogs are one of the main tools to create a digital identity and

It is up to the academic to craft their digital identity in a way that will be of greatest assistance to their ultimate goals. Such a task is non-trivial, but as many academics are coming to find out, it is more valuable to embrace, rather than suppress, their digital identity.

What a refreshing and uplifting read! His blog is worth a look too.

Fred is also very busy at promulgating his ideas at UNC and as I write is offering a subject called Online Social Networks. As a social media aficionado he uses a wiki (Mediawiki) as his subject site, a Facebook group to encourage social interaction amongst his class and stores his bookmarks on del.icio.us.