I like to think that this blog is read by a steady and eager group of colleagues… but really, I blog for myself. I use it to keep track of ideas, tidbits and interesting stuff. If you find it useful, great, else, well… see you around.

I liked this study from British colleagues about why academics blog. See also this post on the perils of academic blogging, namely being copied without attribution (of course, that’s why copyright laws exist).

I had to put in my 2 cents. Well, I suppose I consider myself an “academic” as I do occasionally teach, do research, sit on a wide range of committee meetings and get a university to pay my mortgage.

I like big ideas. I really like big ideas that solve some of the theoretical issues that I worry about. That’s why I had to follow a thread that come through my RSS feeds… “Unified Theory of Information” – has a nice ring to it, no? Like leafs blown onto my yard by a chance gust of wind, I had to follow them to the tree.

First came the post, an item from a table of content from a scholarly journal:

Claudio Gnoli, Riccardo Ridi, (2014) “Unified Theory of Information, hypertextuality and levels of reality“, Journal of Documentation, Vol. 70 Iss: 3

Quick Google searches have given me these threads:
– The group behind this epistemological idea: Unified Theory of Information (UTI) Research Group – Association for the Advancement of Information Sciences
– This 20-question long essay explaining the concept by Wolfgang Hofkirchner, a central figure behind UTI.

Man, I’ll have to stop searching… I keep stumbling on these awesome pockets of ideas !!! More later on the UTI (I am not certain it is of immediate interest to my doctoral dissertation, but definitely worth keeping on my radar screen).

Great TED Talk by Stuart Firestein called The Pursuit of Ignorance:
[ted id=1827]
He gives a course at Columbia called Ignorance and I love how in his model, knowledge leads to “better” ignorance and not the reverse. In this age of readily available facts on Google and Wikipedia, the role of universities is to articulate meaningful questions that science will chip at. He uses the analogy of ripples on a pond, where knowledge is a drop in the human experience and the ripples represent the extent of our knowledge. Science and academic research aims to work beyond the edges of these ripples, in the nether regions where ignorance lies.

I stumbled on a web-based tool that allows the creation and analysis of surveys based in a Canadian University, see the French-only Sémato.uqam.ca.

On the MOOC thread, I noticed this session on Library related MOOCs.

Interesting article on the games played in libraries of old:

Playing in the Past: A History of Games, Toys, and Puzzles in North American Libraries
Scott Nicholson
The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy
Vol. 83, No. 4 (October 2013), pp. 341-361
ABSTRACT

Games and other forms of play are used in today’s libraries to attract underserved patrons, to introduce patrons to other library resources and services, and to facilitate engagement between library patrons. While many perceive gaming as a new library service, gaming services have been part of librarianship since the nineteenth century through chess clubs. During the Great Depression, libraries supported patrons with puzzle contests and developed circulating toy and game collections. Academic libraries built game collections for research and classroom needs, while school libraries collected and facilitated educational games to aid teachers. Video games have been used in libraries to help patrons learn to use technology and to bring groups of patrons together to enjoy shared experiences. The goal of this article is to demonstrate the different ways in which libraries have used games, toys, and puzzles over the last 150 years through both collections and services.

Mark Weiler had an awesome idea. As a member of the UWO Student Chapter of the Canadian Association of Professional Academic Librarians (CAPAL), he posted a message to our mailing list (I am a member of CAPAL) and asked us to send him the list of conferences we attend. A few weeks later, the list includes about 75 mouth-watering conferences, enough to send you around the world a few times.

Mark has very graciously and generously allowed me to post the list here. As he says:

“I think it’s a list for academic librarians to reflect on — a kind of starting point which librarians can use to advance the profession in important directions. “

Well said ! If you have additional conferences, please feel free to add them to the comments section of this post!

 
 
Interestingly, this could be the start of an interesting research project. For example, I notice that some of the conferences are held by library-related groups (IFLA, CLA, ALA…) while others are from other fields. Why is that? Is it related to the field of interest of the librarian (social sciences librarian will prefer library-conferences or domain-conferences)? Or perhaps the location of a librarians home institution (Ontario librarians will just naturally gravitate to the OLA super-conference). Or does it have to do with the timing or location of the conference (Paris in the Spring anyone)?

In any case, enjoy the list and thanks again to Mark!

I just listened to a great podcast from Educause with e-Learning Librarian at Wake Forest University Kyle Denlinger by Gerry Bayne (about 20 minutes). It covers an information literacy MOOC for alumni & parents of students – a great way to reach out to an extended community, impress the Provost and schmooze with potential donors.

See also this presentation at the Spring CNI meeting.

The Spring 2013 issue of Library Trends deals with gaming in libraries (v. 61, n. 4), public, academic or otherwise. The editor of this special issue presents it in light of his recent book:

In my book, Everyone Plays at the Library: Creating Great Gaming Experiences for All Ages (2010), I created a model for the library gaming experience that brings together players, the game world, spectators, and library staff and explores how each interacts with the others. On the basis of this model, I developed a set of five Game Experience Archetypes that provides the organizational structure for the book and a basis for librarians to assess the usefulness of games of all types in meeting the goals of their libraries. Librarians looking to create a gaming experience can start by selecting an archetype based on their goals and then choose games that will bring about that game experience. This ensures that the chosen games meet the goals of the gaming program and fit into the mission of the library.
Each of the five archetypes—Social, Narrative, Action, Knowledge, and Strategy (SNAKS)—focuses on a different area of this model. Specific game titles can fit with more than one archetype, so librarians seeking to use games to meet different needs for different audiences should select games that span a variety of archetypes. Social game experiences are those that focus on facilitating social interactions among players; they are useful when a library uses games to forge connections between different groups of patrons. Narrative game experiences are those that immerse players in a story and can be useful for libraries wanting to connect games to literacy. Action game experiences reward physical skill, either with the use of a digital game controller or the manipulation of something in the physical world, and can create a lively game experience that generates excitement in players and spectators. Knowledge game experiences are focused on the knowledge that players bring to the game table and are a good match for libraries meeting educational goals. Strategy game experiences emphasize the decision-making processes that challenge players; these game sessions [End Page 752] tend to be quiet and create opportunities for players to engage with a few others at a deep level.
The goal of this special issue is to take a close look at different library gaming programs. Authors who wrote for the issue were challenged to explore the impact of gaming programs in their libraries. In each of the articles, the author presents a different way of bringing gaming into the library and then explores the impact of these library gaming programs.

Of particular interest for academic libraries is this article:

Brawling in the Library: Gaming Programs for Impactful Outreach and Instruction at an Academic Library
pp. 802-813 | DOI: 10.1353/lib.2013.0016
Angela M. Vanden Elzen, Jacob Roush

Interesting press release from the FemTechNet Commons about a new approach to open education: do it in a network! From their press release:

FemTechNet, a network of feminist scholars and educators, is launching a new model for online learning at 15 higher education institutions this fall. The DOCC, or Distributed Open Collaborative Course, is a new approach to collaborative learning and an alternative to MOOCs, the massive open online course model that proponents claim will radicalize twenty-first century higher education. FemTechNet’s first DOCC course, “Dialogues on Feminism and Technology,” will launch fall 2013.

The DOCC model for 21st-century higher education recognizes and is built on the understanding that expertise is distributed throughout a network, among participants in diverse institutional contexts. This model explicitly departs from the typical MOOC approach organized around the delivery of information from an “expert” faculty (or a pair of instructors) to the uninformed “masses.” The organization of a DOCC emphasizes learning collaboratively in a digital age by enabling the active participation of all kinds of learners (as teachers, as students, as media-makers, as activists, as trainers, as members of various publics and/or social groups). By virtue of its reach across institutions and learning sites, the DOCC also enables the extension of classroom experience beyond the walls, physical or virtual, of a single institution.

Their own version of a DOCC in 2013 is called “Dialogues on Feminism and Technology” and calls upon a team of “nodal” contributors.

I have to admit that this model speaks more closely to what I have in mind with my video lectures about business research and copyright, particularly as I aim to embed them in the classroom.