Thing 16

We use Google Docs extensively. We have had our domain hosted by Google for the last two years. I regularly share documents with my assistant principal and a half dozen faculty who feel comfortable with the tool. Every DC student has a gmail account through us and we encourage them to use Google Docs to collaborate on projects (particularly presentations) remotely and asynchronously. We have experimetend in a few classes with having students submit assignments through Google Docs. The Playwriting class this past spring submitted their projects this way and their teacher was able to comment on their work in progress and make suggestions to shape the final versions of their plays. One of the great benefits to using this tool is asynchronous collaboration: two out of every three of our students are athletes and often do not get home until 8 or 9pm. Google Docs allows them to catch up on work that peers have started. For faculty, Google Docs has helped us to think through curriculum maping and strategic planning for our accreditation visit. We have found it useful to have each contributor choose a color to make individual contributions jump off the page. We rarely have to revert to earlier versions of a document but has proved useful whe we share documents with students who are new to Google Docs and mistakenly overwrite someone else's contribution. We have had great success with Google presentations which our studets prefer to PowerPoint because they only need Internet access and do not have to bother with thumb drives and finicky format issues (Office 2007 vs 2003 suite loaded onto our school computers. We really enjoy the ease with which data can be migrated to Google Spreadsheets using CSV data.

Thing 15

I have still not made RSS a habit. I went ahead and added a few more news feeds ( Rolling Stone, Fast Company, Publisher's Weekly)and skimmed through the two hundred feed updates that I had accumulated since last I checked (earlier this week. I am not finding skimming all that beneficial as most of what I collect I end up marking as read (whether I have given it my full attention or not. I also played with subscribing to a delicious tag. I decided to try and follow feeds on one of my favorite authors, Jose Saramago. Potentially, this could reap some benefits as I am unfamiliar with the Portuguese sources that Saramago's name returned. If these sources turn out to offer bilingual posts, I will have found a tool that rivals Google or Yahoo where typically my searches are monolingual. Being able to filter according to popularity may help me identify those fan communities that delve deeper than Blindness or Seeing and appreciate Saramago's work in its entirety. If social mobs are to be "value-added", I think they will need to be polyglot global communities of contributors versed in something more than the most recent fads. I yearn for expert communities of affinity.

Thing 14

My Delicious username is dclibrarymius. I enjoyed playing with Delicious, but I doubt it will increase my productivity. I decided to explore chess once again and was led to Jen Shahahde 's page and her recent work on Marcel Duchamp. For most of my bookmarks, I was part of a small community. Often fewer than a dozen people had tagged the pages I found. I think the key to delicious is herding and I prefer to stray from the beaten path. I am concerned that social bookmarking that prizes popularity and trendiness will lead to less intellectual diversity. I chose to keep my bookmarks public even when some pages included nudity. I think the "do not share" option is a cop-out. If social networking is to promote communities with shared affinities, contributors have to make a commitment to share the paths they explore: the dead ends, the dark alleys and the open highway that everyone can see. Profiles appear somewhat manufactured for some of the pages that I looked at. Some folks seem quite content to celebrate the homogeneity to which they subscribe or with which they would like to be associated. Social networks should be honest, complex networks.

Thing 13

I think that social bookmarking and tagging will be useful to me. I do worry about becoming a "lemming" and "following the herd". I understand the need for conventions and for a controlled vocabulary. Still I suspect that there are more cognitive liabilities with social bookmarking than with indexing. I also have some concerns about the the potential for online mobbing and bullying using tags. In settings such as Facebook or Flickr, I worry that our students may succumb to the temptation to be cruel. On a more positive note, I can see benefits for persons with "orphaned" academic interests. I wrote my undergraduate thesis ( a long time ago in a land far away) on Edward Blyden and the work of the Southern Baptist Convention in Liberia in the nineteenth century. My research would have been much speedier if I could have leveraged the knowledge of my "social mob" to track down references to Blyden, the SBC or missionaries to Liberia. Still I cannot see bookmarking serving as an adequate substitute for research. I spent most of my time in the archives of the SBC in Richmond reading through correspondence. If the letters had been "tagged", I would have missed a lot of useful information because herding might have led some taggers to categorize a letter as "evangelism" where I might be looking for competing cosmogonies, theodicy, soteriology...I worry that tagging lends itself to reductionism and that complex social phenomena might be misunderstood or mis-categorized.

Thing 12

I added Polaroid Puzzle from Widgetbox to my blog and what annoyed me is that I have to pay in order to remove the "Get widget" button and to avoid having ads populate my blog. I thin this is the tradeoff for free onlined stuff that troubles me the most. In his excellent new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Chris Anderson shares wonderful insights on the new expectations that consumers have now that the cost of processing, bandwidth and storage are nearly negligible. One of the expectations is that Web 2.0 tools will resemble Flickr more than Widgetbox. I expect to have a less functional version of an application for free and to pay a freemium in order to enjoy the most refined version of the same app. What I think is less than honest is to lure me into adding a banner ad masquerading as a widget in order to defraud an even larger audience. The cost outweighs the benefit for me. I encountered the same problem when I initially added the Simpsons Quiz to my blog. Because the preview window in Blogger works poorly, you only realize that you have been suckered after you hit save. Of course you can remove the widget, but what I would prefer is informed consent from the get-go with transparent disclaimers about the commercial nature of the app. I think there might be a market for testing beta versions of widgets without the shameless self-promotion by developers and their marketing departments.I decided to leave the widget on my page for now as a kind of cautionary tale: CAVEAT EMPTOR and of course CAVEAT NON-EMPTOR in this radical new digital economy that is sullying our best intentions and pimping our best ideas.

Thing 11

I still feel somewhat uneasy leaving comments. I feel like a stranger in a public place sharing unsolicited advice. I tried to be complimentary every time I left a comment and to be as brief as possible. On many of the blogs I chose to comment on the pictures that my peers had dowloaded from Flickr. It felt a little less awkward to comment about a third party's CC licensed photograph. I didn't feel as intrusive. Comments in my mind presuppose a level of familiarity that I simply do not have with professionals outside of my school or the associations to which I belong. I am an introvert by nature and leaving comments stretches my comfort zone. For those who actively solicit comments I can understand how this bi-directional medium can enhance learning and build community. For me a blog still remains rather personal and I would prefer to be invited by a peer to converse about a topic where we can learn from each other. I also must admit that it is difficult to establish a context for any aspect of a post that catches my eye. I do not want to telescope arguments or decontextualize reflections by a blogger. That's why pictures feel safer. When a post captures sustained and complex thought, the challenge to the person commenting is to demonstrate active and charitable listening while giving evidence of authentic engagement. I don't know how to do this yet in a meaningful way.

Thing 10

Since I anticipated in Thing 9 the embed part of the exercise, I went ahead and grabbed embed code from one of my favorite sites, reuters.com, and included one of their latest news videos. I am glad to see more sites making embedding more convenient with "Share" buttons trhat allow the user to paste html to the clipboard and then right click in Blogger to add the video to a post. As a librarian, I am happy that these tools make attribution more likely and more convenient. I am heartened by the mounting evidence that our students feel comfortable using these tools to share online resources ethically. I am also glad that they are not limited to YouTube which seems pretty cutting edge to my age group, but very passe for some of the tweeners and teens entering our school buildings today. I am also interested to see if these tools are just as easy to use as phone apps which are our students preferred way of communicating with each other and with their teachers (when it is allowed)

Thing 9

I love YouTube and thankfully it is not blocked in our building. I used this exercise to search for my favorite episodes of "Battle of the Planets" and to immerse myself in the volatile debate on whether the Japanese original "Gatchaman" or the Americanized "Battle of the Planets" was cooler. I commented on the following episode. This is the first time that I have commented on a video. Usually, I just watch my favorite videos anonymously. There is something about leaving a post on Youtube that is a little unsettling because I know anime/manga enthusiasts take this stuff much more seriously than I ever will.

Thing 8

I had fun creating this motivational poster. It was very easy. I uploaded the picture, gave it a title and provided a caption (all under a minute). I can imagime our students gleefully uploading their pictures and ordering the full sized posters to adorn their rooms. In fact this might make a pretty nice graduation gift for the freshmen who are pictured here when they finally head out to college. I can also imagine student council elections being a little more humorous if we made use of this tool. The challenge will be to encourage students to be funny without being mean. I worried a little about my caption because I wanted to refer to the action on the chess board and not suggest inadvertently that freshmen are pawns.

Thing 7

I uploaded a number of photos that I have taken over the last two months. The pictures capture many different aspects of our library. We consider the library a vital node in the life of Divine Child High School and Flickr allows us to share some of this vitality with parents, students and alumni. We have the parents of each of our students sign a waiver at the beginning of each academic year allowing the school to use their photos in publications and online as a part of our public relations activities. I still worry about privacy concerns and chose not to identify the students by name and instead used the abbreviation DC to describe them. I also hesitated to identify myself, my wife and my mother. I did however identify our most generous donors. I can imagine using Flickr to recognize those members of the DC Family who deserve public praise for their ongoing support and their continuing kindness. I have not yet played with the editing features within Flickr and feel somewhat conflicted about modifying photos. It feels like cheating to edit red eyes and shadows and glare. I expect my photos to capture the flaws in my technique and the graceful imperfections within my world.

Thing 6

I chose to upload this Winslow Homer sketch of rugby pioneers for two reasons. First , I will be traveling to a workshop on American Art next week and I have grown fond of Winslow Homer's seascapes and was less familiar with his work for Harper's Weekly. The second reason I chose this particularly photo is because I imagine that this is the type of primary evidence my students will want to engage. Flickr provides students with access to primary sources and the ability to be an eyewitness to history. I could not believe this 1865 sketch was available through Common license so long as I provide attribution ( it was uploaded by Frederic Humbert as part of his rugby-pioneers.com photostream and also belongs to USA Rugby) A long long time ago in a galaxy far away I was once a rugby player and this is just how I remember it.

Thing 5

My continued challlenge is to check Bloglines and see what's new on the blogs that I am following. I decided to follow some chess blogs in order to vet them for my chess club members and I find myself only reading through my blogline chess folder once a week ( or once every two weeks) . I am convinced that successful use of RSS requires a change in habit. I am used to thinking about chess by myself or with a small group of people. Subscribing to chess blogs opens up a wealth of knowledge, but also undermines the comfortable universe that chess has always been for me. Once I start reading, I realize how vast a network of chess players there are and it is somewhat overwhelming. RSS facilitates global chess awareness but threatens the sufficiency of my local chess universe. I am forever comparing what our team and our individual players have accomplished to the talented young men and women who have made chess their life. Blogs in this sense force one to take regular stock of one's affinity, talent and expertise. Each time I log into Bloglines and I placed my cursor over my chess folder, I confront my fear of inadequacy. I wrestle with my true commitment to the hobby that has for years been one facet of how I define myself.