my del.icio.us tags are telling
, originally uploaded by robotika.
I’ve been away from the blog for a bit because I have been trying to read and draw a lot more. This is how I celebrated the glorious school-free month of May!
I got a bit of a Canadian bug in me these days and have plunged head first into Canadian poetry. I am a little addicted to holding these little small press books of poems in my hands and spending hours just reading a line or two.
One of the poets I’ve been reading, nelson ball, actually sells his work from his house through American Book Exchange. So being the nerd that I am I actually bought one of his small books FROM him. He was really sweet and write me a nice note back.
I hope to take a trip up to Toronto and Montreal before the end of the summer, so that I can fill my pockets with more canadian poetry and comics. Oh paradise!
my list
bp nichol
- the true eventual story of billy the kid
- martryology (just starting with book 1)
- lament: a sound poem
nelson ball
- water-pipes and moonlight Everyone should read this!
- bird tracks on hard snow
- force movements
- pre-linguistic heights
Michael Ondaatje
I’m just reading a collection of his works now, but secular love is on its way!
Leonard Cohen
- Beautiful Losers. It’s about time that I read this. Nearly everyone I know has loved this book.
stef lenk
comic book writer based out of Toronto who just won a Xeric grant for her work Teatime. She sells her wordless comics throug etsy. I haven’t had a chance to hold one yet but they look really beautiful and inspiring. Anders Nilsen’s “Ballad of the Two Headed Boy” was sponsored by a Xeric grant.
notes from the berkman conference on internet and society, harvard law school. may 15-16, 2008.
As I wrote in my last post it was amazingly refreshing to go to a conference that was not library-centric. I actually wished that more library folks were there just to listen in. There are so many groups of people, lawyers, sociologists, teachers, bloggers, government officials, “digital natives”, that have opinions about the way information is handled and the future of this information on the internet. Librarians need to hear these voices from outside the library “walls”.
From the workshops I attended it seemed like there were two major ideas about the internet.
1. ” A collective hallucination”
Jonathan Zittrain, author of the new book The Future of the Internet, spoke the “dark energy” of the net. “Dark energy ” being the creative power, openness, and willingness of people to do the right thing. The Internet now, has so many informal norms, that rely on people making the next right decision, hence the “collective hallucination”. He thinks that we need to start looking towards “bottom-up” user driven, hierarchical solution to the net. Ethan Zuckermann’s post talks more about the details of Zittrain’s ideas.
2. global skillshare
Open Education with Gene Koo and Charles Nesson
This workshop was in the “unconference” style so it was just a room full of amazingly brilliant people musing on the future of the university, education, and teaching. I am a strong believer in learner centered education and worked two years in a “Debbie Meier” public pilot school in Roxbury, MA, so I use a lot of Debbie’s jargon to describe the ideas we came up with. If you haven’t read any Debbie Meier, start with The Power of Their Ideas.
“What will open education look like when the audience is anyone who can get to a node and all content is free and out there?”
Themes
-difference between information and learning and formalized systems of learning
-letting learners create communities of sharing, learners become teachers, pass on best practices
-who is a “teacher”? what part of teaching can be built into our tools and what part is magic?
-how do we pay for the open material, open course-ware?
-learning based on knowledge, skills and values
-what are our values in supporting open education?
-critical evaluation skills and habits of mind are essential in this global skillshare environment
-end of the Harvard siloed walled university as we know it
- discovery and serendipity
This last theme was really just mine, but I had a good discussion with a few other teachers after the workshop about it. An idea was raised that the future of the open education involved matching learners up with teachers. For example, I want to learn German, so I try to match myself up with a German community of sharing on the net. Although this idea of matching learners with teachers is learner-centered, I think that it misses the whole idea of education through discovery.
I don’t want to have to identify my “education need’ up front. I don’t think most of us CAN identify our “educational needs” so clearly and maybe we don’t even know that we have a need. If we could we would not need reference interviews right? The joy of learning for me is being able to jump around, try things on, discover, play, and create. Maybe this is just a sales pitch for information literacy skills, but I think that the future of education is not as linear as :learner has need; teacher/tool/community fills need; learner moves on to next need. I am not sure what a system looks like that can support education and learning in this way, but I know that I am encouraged by the number of dedicated people out there thinking about breaking down these walls.
More open education ideas I am still thinking about:
-multiple intelligences and the internet
-motivation or what learners have at stak
, originally uploaded by shannon rae.
I just returned from the berkman center for internet and society conference at the Harvard law school.
Although I didn’t know a soul who was going somehow we library folk found each other. John Palfrey, head of the Berkman center, just took a position as head of the Harvard Law School library, so there was some great library karma in the sea of lawyers. I found out that Jessamyn West was there by checking twitter on the first day. Apparently she was sitting right behind me as I was looking at her page because she leaned over my shoulder and said “hey, that’s me!’. Soon I met another great library friend who works up at the Canadian National Library and Archive in Ottawa, which made me discover this gorgeous photo of the library of parliment in ottawa.
The conversations at the berkman con were amazingly interesting and are things we should be discussing at library cons. net neutrality. digital natives. open education. future of the internet. Although many of the workshops were over my head, I got some great ideas about the future of open education and teaching, which I will post later. Unlike my experience at ALA, around every corner was a person who wanted to talk to me about their ideas and projects. I talked to professors, business people, lawyers. sociologists, and techies, and everyone was eager and excited to exchange ideas. Check out the workshops at:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/berkmanat10/Main_Page
My post-berkman reading list includes:
Weath of Networks by Yochai Benkler
Born Digital by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser
Future of the Internet by Jonathan Zittrain
Growing up Online - Frontline PBS special
When old technologies were new by Marvin
People to remember:
Charles Nesson- Berkman guru, open education, open university
John Palfrey- digital natives, education, intellectual property
Eszter Hargittai- participation gap, social inequality and the net
Only four more weeks before summer classes start so I better get cracking! Oh and I want to read Cory Doctorow’s Littler Brother too!
To get myself ready for the Berkman Internet and Society Con next week I am catching up on net/society/culture books that I have been meaning to read.
Here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations. by Clay Shirky
Free Culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. by Lawrence Lessig
Shirky, in Here comes everybody, writes about the power of the new social tools of the web and how they create an alternative to hierarchy and management. I am really interested in his ideas on collective action group forming. Now that it is so “ridiculously easy” to form large groups outside of institutional structures how will people use these tools for collective action?
I am not quite to that chapter yet but I watched a great lecture with some interesting examples about students in Belarus protesting the government.
[From a personal email to me from Stephen Catalano. Thanks to everyone who contacted HUPD and HU Admin. -Wendy]
Below please find a statement from the Harvard University Police Department’s Chief of Police.
On May 6, following a report of an assault and battery on the Harvard campus, the HUPD issued an advisory to all College students. In retrospect this advisory should have been distributed more broadly to include all students, staff, and faculty as well. We have since disseminated the advisory to the entire University community.
The HUPD has a long record of issuing timely and accurate advisories implemented to help enhance the safety of our entire community. We regret the initial judgment not to make the advisory more broadly available and we will review our advisory distribution procedures to ensure that future incidents are handled appropriately.
Francis D. Riley
Chief of Police
Thank you for your concern.
I wrote to the HUPD inquiring why Harvard employees had not been informed of the attack at Lamont Library on May 6, 2008.
Steven Catalano wrote me back.
Based on the investigation it was determined that the public safety threat was minimal and that an alert to the undergraduates would be sufficient.
“Why was it deemed only necessary to inform students; do violent predators discriminate between undergraduates and employees?” - A fellow Harvard Employee
This just seems like a blatant public relations move by Harvard with no regard to the safety of its employees. If you are a Harvard employee and agree that Harvard should have warned employees about the attack please write to:
Crimson Staff writer June Q. Wu, at junewu@fas.harvard.edu.
Steven Catalano @ steven_catalano@harvard.edu
Original Email
From: Wendy
Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2008 4:59 PM
To: General Questions
Subject: User comments/questions via the HUPD web site
I am a staff member at a Harvard Library and it was only through word of mouth that I heard about the Lamont Library attack. The Crimson article that I found states that HUPD sent out a warning about it but none of the 10 Harvard library staff members that I contacted received a notice about this event.
Could you please explain why we were not notified about this event?
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=523527
Thank you,
Wendy
From: Steven Catalano [mailto:scatalano@vpgc.harvard.edu]
Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2008 5:56 PM
To: Wendy
Subject: RE: User comments/questions via the HUPD web site
Wendy:
Based on the investigation it was determined that the public safety threat was minimal and that an alert to the undergraduates would be sufficient.
SGC
Steven G. Catalano
Assistant Director for Strategic Planning and Analysis Harvard University Police Department
1033 Massachusetts Avenue, 6th floor
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
617-495-9225
steven_catalano@harvard.edu
—–Original Message—–
So I heard yesterday about a woman who was attacked on Harvard’s Cambridge campus on Tuesday May 6, 2008.
The article in the Crimson, Harvard’s undergraduate newspaper, said that the woman was attacked from behind and that the attacker put a wire around her neck. She eventually beat the guy up and escaped, but that the “attacker remains at large”.
Okay so I live in the city and horrible violent things happen all the time. The thing that gets me is that I heard just through word of mouth and I am a Harvard employee! My boyfriend happened to be in Cambridge and overheard a conversation about it. After digging up the Crimson article I asked all of my Harvard Cambridge campus friends and no one had received an official HUPD (Harvard University Police Department) email. HUPD always sends out notices to employees for things that happen off of Cambridge property, and most of the time it is petty theft.
It is outrageous that I, or more importantly my friends who work in Cambridge in the Lamont Library, were not informed. Is Harvard just trying to save face by not telling its employees about this? I can’t stand for that!
Thanks to College and Research libraries journal going open-access I can now read the ACRL articles without having to wait. YAY!
So I started reading “Information seeking through students’ eyes: The MIT photo diary study”.
The MIT librarians asked 32 students to keep track of how they sought “information related to their academic life” for 7 days. The study used screen shots, notes, and interviews to gather this information.
I am getting more and more excited to do a little information diet study on myself. I would not want to separate my “academic life” information behavior from my “social life” though. I mean, according to this study I am a millenial (born between 1976-1996), and although I loathe the name, I live a woven life.
For example right now I am working at my library’s ready reference desk, reading this paper, and writing this blog post!
I have been thinking for a while about monitoring my information diet. I envision taking a week or so and keeping a little list of my information habits outside of work. How do I obtain information and what sources do I use? What kind of information do I need? I think that I am in the habit of getting my information from people, but I am not sure if this has changed since I have been in library school.
When I was still teaching we always had the kids do small data collection projects like this. Look at the stars and moon for a week and write about what you see. Write down what you have had for lunch in the past week. This last one was right before we talked about nutrition and saw Super Size Me. Watching that movie with a bunch of middle schoolers was awesome! I know that as a library teacher I probably won’t have a long term relationship with my students, but I think self-awareness is important if we are really trying to create a student-centered curriculum.
