Thanks to Library Web Chic, I now have a little indicator next to my IM link that shows if I’m available on IM or not. Green = yes, grey = no. Nifty.
Category: ‘puters
subversive gardening, or why wikis?
A metaphor for wiki understanding: the community garden. If you’vbe got a little time to do some reading today, I’d dive into Luke’s article about Ranganathan, gardening and Wikipedia.
…there is no monolithic point of view, there is no monopoly on truth. From a critical perspective, if the object lesson centers around a Wikipedia article as the participants negotiate and carefully choose language to approximate NPOV (the Wikipedian “neutral point of view”), it’s going to be a pretty effective lesson, which will teach above all that no source — not even Wikipedia — should be taken on its own in constructing meaning. If, on the other hand, the questioning student is handed a Britannica article — equally anonymous but somehow anointed with some magical pixie-dust librarians call “authority” but fail to satisfactorily explain to anyone outside the profession — the lesson will fail (again, from a critical pedagogical perspective, at least).
delightful wikipedia timewaster/tool
Steven points me to the live recent changes feed for Wikipedia. This is sort of a neat way to look at how dynamic the project it [good news and bad news to librarians, I know] but also to get a ton of examples, an overview if you will, of what a good update looks like, or what all these updates are doing. You see logged in users, annotated changes, links to more information, and nonsense pages deleted so fast it can make your head spin. Fascinating.
a few words about the Google paradigm w/r/t libraries
Siva Vaidhyanathan who is one of the contributors to his great blog Sivacracy recently pulled out some comments I’d written about Google’s strong move into the world of [formerly] library content. If you haven’t read his book The Anarchist in the Library I strongly suggest you do so.
add directions to your library website quickly and easily
Speaking of effective web presence, this nifty trick to allow users of your web sites to get Google Map’s directions right to your [library’s] door is a pretty good tool. [mathowie]