Just in time for this week’s topic, CBC News has posted an article Podcasting download volume lagging behind buzz: study says. It reports on the Pew Internet & American Life Project Podcast Study done this August, which indicated that only 1% of internet users download a podcast on a typical day, and that 12% of internet users claim to have ever downloaded a podcast. Significantly, this last number is up 7% from February-April.
First of all, I would like to send a big thanks to this weeks presenters on Podcasting, they did a great job.
Before this class I listened to a couple of podcasts that I searched for on iTunes and downloaded onto my iPod. I looked for Spanish broadcasts to keep up my skills (ha!) and found one that I subscribed to for a while, but then it disappeared. I haven’t tried finding podcasts since. I have noticed them proliferating on news websites and have considered listening to some of them, but never got around to it. I guess I just felt as though I could read and filter news faster on my own then in having someone read it to me. A little silly considering I do watch the news, but that is my prejudice. But I have heard that some people love them… I just don’t know of anyone that does. I wonder if podcasting is another ‘RSS’; that is, I wonder if I tried it out for a while I would love it and wonder why everyone doesn’t do it. Nah. I just don’t see it. For one, the podcast that Amanda assigned two weeks ago annoyed me. It annoyed me because it was 40 minutes long and too many people were on it. I suppose this tells me that I would not like to have a distance course given entirely through podcasting. This week’s Educase reading helps me articulate why - it mentions that a downside to podcasting is that, when it is not done by a professional broadcaster, it can sound very amateur-ish.
But for arguement’s sake I think I will look for Spanish music podcast (Ritmo Latino!) and try it out for a while, and maybe try a news channel (CBC!). Ha, I’m addicted to Ritmo Latino after one minute!
Now onto libraries using podcasting. I’ll start with the good. I really like the idea of broadcasting children’s storytime, like the Thomas Ford Library’s click-a-story (thanks to this weeks group presentation on Podcasting for that link). What appeals to me most is that I feel that the storytime librarians are professional presenters who are skilled in voice projections. But what about the pictures! I always liked the part where the librarian showed the pictures. Another great podcasting idea linked from the group presentation is the Waterloo Public Library’s city history tour, which they lend out on iPods and accompanied with a city map. People pay for audio tours in some cities, and in a lot of museums, so why not?
Now, in saying I’d start with the good, I implied that I would get to the bad/ugly. However, I didn’t hate any of the library podcasts I came across. To me this means that librarians have already thought of some great ways to use the technology and that we can feel free to imitate - thanks everyone! This is not to say that all the good ideas are taken. I think one podcasting trend in the future will have to do with the fact that Apple and other iPod-type devices are trending towards larger screens. I see this as a sign that videos will be more popular than ever and podcasts should at least come with good cover art. Librarians as vidcast/vodcast stars?
I’m using a blogging break this week, but thanks for checking!
I can’t resist mentioning that Zotero is asking librarians for help promoting their tool across campuses.
I just signed up for Facebook! Being a bit on the edge of the age group using Facebook (i.e. TOO OLD), I’ve never felt the need to do so, and apparently neither had my friends (Facebook lets you check if any contacts from your email addressbook have accounts). But I found my classmate Susan! I doubt that I will continue to use this service, since I feel rather lonely on it right now…
After reading Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace (Boyd) I admit I was curious to see my classmate Shauna-Lee’s perspective, since I know she was a teacher. I gained a lot of perspective from Boyd’s article about how teens use sites like MySpace to practice ‘identity production’, and Shauna-Lee sums up perfectly the “benefits to teens of online social networking: 1. Identify experimentation; 2. Identify formation; 3. Peer-validation; 4. Solidification of social groups; 5. Formation of social skills; 6. Tool for information sharing” from this week’s readings. Thanks Shauna!
There is a lot about the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) in this weeks readings, and how this US Act will restrict the types of online services public institutions will be allowed to provide access to. The most important result is that poor youth will be hit the hardest by this act (as discussed in the article The Moral Panic over Social-Networking Sites), since they do not have home PCs and rely on public computers (libraries and schools, mostly). Poor youth will no longer be able to keep up with their more wealthy peers who have 24/7 access to PCs in their homes and are free of the government’s restrictions. While tearing access to a crucial part of youth culture away from the poor, the government will be doing little to protect youth from predators, who are generally known to the victim and most often related. Furthermore, by blocking access to a few sites you will not succeed in protecting youth, since other internet sites will still pose a danger to youth, and since other social networking sites will quickly pop up in their place (just as how new downloading tools crop up whenever a popular one shuts down, i.e. Napster). Henry Jenkins nails the solution when he says that to truly save young people from online predators, we need to “teach social networking in the classroom, modeling safe and responsible practices, rather than lock it outside the school and thus beyond the supervision of informed librarians and caring teachers.”
The DOPA act would also rob US educators (including librarians) of using these tools in instruction. Henry Jenkins article discusses a thesis by Ravi Purushotma that puts forward many uses of social software for delivering innovative instruction. I can relate to the language instruction comments, being a Spanish major, and I have often thought of how much more interesting and relevant some of my classes could have felt if they involved more learning outside the classroom, on my own terms, and catering to my own interests, through social software tools like blogs, podcasting, flickr, etc. From looking at library’s foreign language collections in the past I know that funds must be scarce in those areas since books always look well-used and old - web content, especially the social software content, is current and free! It would be a shame to loose this instructional option just as it is catching on.
And if you are looking for a shortcut this week, the last article Discussion: MySpace and Deleting Online Predators Act nicely summarizes everything.
Don’t forget to poke me on Facebook!
D’oh… reading week has melted my brain and I forgot to post this LAST WEEK!
The Lawley article has an interesting start - discussing the potential ‘evil’ in folksonomies, such as deliberately mislabeled items. I have wondered about how advertisers could misuse tags to promote their product (simply add the ‘most popular tag today’ to your item and wham-o!). But this article changes direction pretty quickly to discuss some intriguing implications of a tagging game - that taggers copy others’ bad choices without thinking in-depth about the best tags. While it is a good cautionary tale, I must agree with my classmate Gonzo Librarian who says “It’s possible that this weakness may be a consequence of that particular game, rather than an inherent flaw of folksonomies.” But I do often find myself looking at the suggested tags when labelling my items… hmm… I will think more critically about my choices in the future!
We’re reading two articles by Carol Ou this week, White-Paperish Thing (about distributed classification), and folksonomy? ethnoclassification? libraries? wha?. The first one is a 2003 blog post about the potential of “a system of distributed classification” for electronic journals, which seems pretty forward-thinking to me. The second one is from 2004 and discusses “partial ethnoclassification” or “distributed classification,” a happy classification medium that lies between leaving it all up to the users or paying huge sums to a librarian.
The podcast Talking with Talis: the Library 2.0 Folksonomy Gang was long. This is why I forgot to post! I decided to go to sleep and listen in the morning. My initial impressions of the podcast were not related to folksonomy: it was great to recognize some of these specialists names, thanks to this course; it was a nice way to spice up the homework, Amanda; and it is a little difficult listening to so many voices on one podcast, it sounds a bit like a conference call; podcasts are harder to quote than articles. These speakers tend to share the general opinion that folksonomies and tagging should be used to compliment traditional classification systems, and are excited about putting some of the control into the users’ hands. They debate implementing restrictions on tags for library systems, such as suggesting words for patrons to select, so as to avoid having too many similar categories in use. But the key point is not to have librarians dictate the folksonomy, but for the suggested words to come from previous entries from other users. Yikes! They just chatted about reordering the books in a library according to users’ tags. I am not a fan of that idea because I think the key point of tagging is so that the individual can find it, not the collective, so one person’s tags could be very random to another person. The discussion about the special implications of mis-tagging in a library situation was very interesting. Both sides offered a good point: people will inevitably become upset about seeing a racist tag in a library setting, but on the other side internet users are used to filtering out such offensive content. I think librarians will have to monitor the tags somewhat, at least to remove offensive ones that have been brought to their attention. Finally, one participant poses the question - who would want to tag a book in a library? How would you achieve a significant number of tags? We must all consider this before getting to excited about its use in a public library for books.
