Thing 16: Student 2.0 Tools

Oh, great timing. Here I am: a Student 2.0.

I first encountered the Assignment Calculator about a year ago, although I can't remember what brought it to my attention. I tried it for a paper that was due shortly after Thanksgiving. I suppose I can't blame the Assignment Calculator for the fact that I let myself get distracted by eating turkey and baking holiday cookies and ended up staying up the night before the paper was due, writing it at the last moment just like when I was in college. Plus, the Assignment Calculator is more organized than I am, period. It talks about creating an outline and a thesis statement before starting the first draft--I've tended to skip outlining altogether and my thesis statement is often about the last thing I come up with. If the U didn't create an Assignment Calculator for grad students because they thought grad students had matured and had their acts together...well, not necessarily.

The Research Project Calculator looks like an excellent idea. If you can keep any students from developing my procrastination habits while they're still young, their future professors will thank you. However, I can't imagine us getting any students here except law students, and most of them probably hang out at their school libraries. So I don't see us using the Assignment Calculator, much less the RPC. I suppose what we need (or what our pro se patrons need, rather) is a calculator that will walk them through the steps to file an appeal on schedule, including getting a brief written. The Appeals Calculator--doesn't that sound useful?

Well, for me, another semester starts next week, bringing more opportunities to use the Assignment Calculator. I really am trying to be better about outlining and sometimes I know what my thesis is before the end of the paper, so maybe I can get more practical use out of the Assignment Calculator.

in-between thing: newsvine

I said I would try this for a while, and I have. I like that Newsvine doesn't make you create an account to get anything useful out of it. But I find it irritating that when I see a story I'm interested in, clicking on the link just takes me to the comments on the story, not the story itself. I have to click a second link to go to the story. Without a context, what good are the comments?

Thing 15: Online Games and Libraries

When I first looked over this Thing, I thought, Oh, something completely out of my experience. After all, I'd never heard of Puzzle Pirates and while yes, I know of Second Life, having a dial-up connection on my home computer pretty much prevented ever playing with it. But then it occurred to me that I am playing a couple of games online, albeit through Facebook. I admit I haven't done much with Knighthood other than build several buildings, but I'm still fairly new at it. And while playing a Scrabble-clone with friends is maybe not what the point of this Thing is, it's a game and it's online--I'm going to call it an online game.

Sorry: I'm just not feeling motivated to tackle Puzzle Pirates. I saw Pirates of the Caribbean and it was a fun movie, but that's the extent of my interest in piracy.

I was all ready to plunge into Second Life (if I could find a fast-enough connection) until I watched the video tour of Info Island. It was so jerky and pixelated that I decided that Second Life itself must be a really unpleasant experience. If I had to watch my avatar twitching walking like that, I was going to get a headache (it was so much better when the avatar finally took off and flew). This is maybe not the best video to promote this Thing with! I then watched Ohio University's video and realized that this was probably a more accurate picture of what Second Life is like. So while I've been beset with technical difficulties lately for getting a fast connection, I think I will take a closer look at Second Life, maybe even create an avatar and fly around a bit.

This is definitely one of those Things that looks to have more application for a public library or an academic library than a law library. Not that you couldn't build a law library on Info Island and stock it with the finest in brown books with red and black stripes on the spine. But I don't know how many law library patrons would want to go through Second Life to visit one. For the most part, the law is just not Fun. Maybe when today's teenage virtual reality devotees have become tomorrow's law clerks, this will be more feasible, but right now it doesn't seem worth the effort to establish a presence in Second Life.

Thing 14: LibraryThing

LibraryThing. Again, whee!

I joined LibraryThing a little over two years ago. It was meant to be: I'd kept my own little card catalog since childhood, which I'd eventually migrated to an Access database, but Access was merely adequate for this purpose. LibraryThing and Book Collector (library catalog software which I'd bought just before learning about LibraryThing) were much better.

I haven't been all that social on LT. I mostly use it for the cataloging feature, although now that a couple of friends of mine have joined, I'm getting a tenuous social network going. I've joined several groups, but I just don't have time to check in on them.

While I have about 888 books in my LT catalog as of this writing, I'm not comfortable with opening my entire library to strangers. So I have created a second account for 23 Things on a Stick and dropped in about 200 books. It should at least give a taste of my collection, and if it looks a bit sparse tag-wise, well, I assure you my master collection is tagged, filled with LC call numbers, and generally maintained to the best of my abilities.

Thing 13: Online Productivity Tools

Toys! Whee!

I tackled the start page first. It's not that that sort of start page is new to me: my ISP (EarthLink) has had one like that for years. But there are lots of gadgets on it that I don't like that are hard to get rid of and the look is generally cluttered, so I was willing to try another one. I went with iGoogle's page because it had a nice clean look, figuring that I can always go back to EarthLink's if iGoogle starts to annoy me. It's a bit odd getting a peek into my Gmail account instead of my EarthLink email though, since Gmail is only one of my backups.

I would get a lot more out of these tools if I didn't already have a PDA. It takes only a few seconds to turn on the PDA and three minutes bare minimum to get a computer up and running. These online tools aren't much use for reminding me to do stuff that isn't computer-based (set the rice to soaking, return the library books). The PDA has problems in this area too--it doesn't really remind me of much if I forget to check it in the first place--although I can set it to sound an alarm as a reminder, which has been helpful.

That aside, many of these things looked useful. Google's calendar was more than adequate for the events I typed in to test it with. Remember the Milk seems to be getting lots of good reviews, but when I try to enter a task, it locks up. I'll try it from another computer, but how much use will it be if I can only use it on certain computers? Backpack was probably useful as all get-out, but it was overkill. Actually Backpack looks like it might be an equivalent to Microsoft's SharePoint Server, in which case, Backpack does a much better job of explaining itself than SharePoint does. We could probably use it at work except that we've already got SharePoint.

The sticky note programs look like they have potential. But because they need to be downloaded, I'm going to try them out at home first; our IT department frets about unapproved software being installed on our work computers.

Thing 12: Do You Digg?

No.

So let me get this straight: once upon a time, librarians kept abreast of the news so that they'd know what their patrons were talking about when those patrons came in wanting to know more about what was in the headlines. And now, librarians can use Digg or Mixx or Newsvine to funnel all those news stories to them instead of taking the time to skim several newspapers and glance at CNN.

This sounds like a great idea, except that I don't see Digg and its siblings fulfilling the function that scanning newspaper headlines does. The patrons of way back when had already heard the news and wanted to know more. It looks like Digg, et al. are there to give you the news for the first time. Do libraries often get patrons in asking reference librarians what's going on? If so, wouldn't it just be simpler to point them toward the newspapers?

I understand that in a time-crunched world, people would appreciate a service that would push them just the most crucial news stories. It takes time to skim a newspaper and you can't really fast-forward through a current TV news broadcast. But I don't see that letting the masses determine what I should see is any less unbiased than leaving that judgment to editors; it's just different criteria and a different number of people that are involved.

It looks like you could get these "social news" sites customized to your preferences eventually, but they mostly seem designed for you to try to get people to validate your taste in news. I'm going to give Newsvine a try--it seems more oriented to news rather than entertainment. But I think this is going to be another Web 2.0 innovation that I can't find much use for personally and none professionally.

Thing 11: Tagging and Del.icio.us

Or, as they're calling themselves now: delicious. That will be easier to type, anyway.

I was first introduced to tagging via LibraryThing when I joined a couple of years ago. I took to it almost instantly: it was do-it-yourself subject cataloging without the barriers thrown up by LCSH. Not that I want to trash LCSH--I see the advantages of a controlled vocabulary--but that controlled vocabulary could be improved, and overall LCSH...well, let's not get into that right now. Suffice it to say, tags are much more useful for an individual and usually more fun as well. I've been tagging these posts as I've written them. Tagging works best for grouping similar things, so I've found tagging posts to be a bit of a challenge. I've tagged this one "LibraryThing" knowing that there's a LibraryThing Thing coming up so I'll have at least two posts with the tag, but I haven't peeked ahead enough to know if the "tagging" or "Delicious" tags I'm using will ever be used again.

I joined Delicious a couple of years ago as well. I don't know why I don't use Delicious more, since if nothing else, the idea of saving bookmarks to a website where you can access them from any computer makes so much sense. But I've memorized the addresses to the sites I visit the most and I just never think to go to Delicious. Maybe I'm just not adventurous enough: obviously I should be going out, finding new sites faster than I can memorize them, and seeing more of the Internet!

Since I barely use Delicious for its most fundamental purpose, as you may guess, I haven't been using the social networking aspect at all. I think some of my friends must have Delicious accounts, but we never talk about them, I have no idea what their account names are, and if I had an interesting link I wanted them to see, I'd just email it to them. Nor have I felt much urge to poke around in strangers' bookmarks. I just popped over to Delicious and looked at the popular tags...no, nothing called.

Despite my lack of personal enthusiasm for Delicious, I think it would be a good tool at work. Saving a collection of work-related bookmarks to an account that anyone on staff could access would be useful, and it would also be nice to browse Delicious for other potential bookmarks relating to law libraries, to see things we would probably otherwise miss.

Thing 10: Wikis

So now I've worked with both Google Docs and the wiki we're developing here at work. It's a matter of scale, isn't it? If only a few people need to contribute to a document, use Google Docs or a similar service. But if you want input from anywhere from several people to the world, you'd be better served by a wiki.

I don't think I'm enough of a free spirit to truly enjoy a wiki. I like a little uniformity in my documents (note that possessive pronoun). The wiki at work is intended to replace our procedures manual(s) and several people are contributing.This is excellent for many reasons: the person who understands her/his job best is the one writing it up, the work is shared with everyone and not just dumped on the hapless soul who couldn't get away fast enough, and if we remember to keep it up, the wiki will be reasonably current. But no two people have the same writing style, so each entry is organized differently--heck, no two people really agree on layout. And yes, I'm a perfectionist, but that touch of chaos irritates me. Other wikis out there look like they have more uniformity--perhaps someone lightly edits the whole thing, or they have templates to work from?

My obsessive-compulsive tendencies aside, wikis have a lot of potential. Wikipedia has been on my mind recently because of the reference class I'm in. The professor has not wanted us to use Wikipedia, and I haven't been sure if that's simply because it's the easy answer (and in a reference class, understandably, you want students to familiarize themselves with several sources) or because of Wikipedia's slightly unsavory reputation. When I've looked up a subject on Wikipedia that I know enough about to catch errors, the articles have been accurate, so I think of it as a good place to find a "good-enough" answer. Perhaps Wikipedia just needs a little more time to gain acceptance. After all, a co-worker told me that when she went through library school, in the pre-Wikipedia days, the reference professors wouldn't let them use Google to look anything up--it wasn't seen as being as reputable as Yahoo.

Thing 9: Online Collaboration Tools

[I've asked for editing rights to the test documents for this Thing. But it looks like some people have had trouble accessing the documents even with permission, and I'm not sure when the permission will come through, so I'm going ahead with what I already know.]

My experience with online collaboration has been recent, but positive. I'm in a class this summer, and last week we had a group paper and presentation due. What with jobs, family commitments, school, etc., my group of four was finding it almost impossible to find a time when we could all meet. I was not looking forward to emailing a document back and forth. And then another group member suggested we do the project on Google Docs. It was easy to get all of us editing rights. We worked on our sections of the paper separately, uploaded them to Google Docs, and then one of us pulled the whole thing together and made it hand-in-able. In addition, we also used the Presentation module (Google's equivalent to PowerPoint) to make slides for the presentation. While we didn't take the time to use Presentation's templates so our presentation was a bit on the bare bones side, the basics were there and it worked smoothly on the classroom computer, which doesn't always happen when you're trying to run a PowerPoint presentation off your flash drive.

Collaborative documents is a Web 2.0 innovation that I can see many uses for and which could make life easier. And it seems to be taking off: I got an email from Microsoft inviting me to try Microsoft Office Live Workspace, which I gather is their attempt to catch up in this area.

Thing 8: Share Your Creations

I take it PictureTrail's target audience is teenage girls? The default templates for their various Flicks are laden with sparkly stars, butterflies, pink and silver swirls, and so on. But I have slogged through the sugary collection and found a frame that at least doesn't twinkle, and a way of displaying the photos that won't make me seasick. Apparently continually moving pictures are not my forte.

Of course the Internet is a visual medium. But I find myself working through all these photo-oriented Things thinking, Yes, more ways to share photos. Been there, done that. Isn't there anything else one can do with Library 2.0? Not fair, I know: blogging (Thing 1), after all, is primarily verbal, and all those activities on Thing 7 weren't about photo-sharing.

I thought PictureTrail itself was easy enough to navigate, and I'm relieved to see that they'll delete my account if I never upgrade it--one fewer unused account cluttering up the Internet. Boy, they're not subtle about the advertising. I don't see myself using PictureTrail either personally or professionally (sparkly hearts and swirls just say LAW LIBRARY, now don't they?). But I might be able to come up with a use for the shared database or possibly eFolio.