Peter Carey podcast

I’d like to say a big thankyou to the SPOETNIK team for the tip about the podcasts on Guardian Unlimited Books. I found a podcast there featuring an interview with my favorite author, Peter Carey. In the interview Peter also reads two excerpts from his latest book, His Illegal Self. I wrote a short post on this book two weeks back. I’d read it in one sitting because I simply wasn’t able to put the book down.

I’ve added the Guardian Unlimited Books podcast feed to my Netvibes. It works perfectly. All I need to do is press the ‘play’ button. I also get the option in the feed to download the podcast to my computer.

From Little Things Big Things Grow

When Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, delivered an apology to the indigenous people of Australia and in particular to the stolen generations he probably didn’t think about how this message could be picked up and celebrated by the GetUp! musicians and activists. Parts of this historic speech have been ‘sampled’ and blended into a new release of the Paul Kelly & Kev Carmody classic that was released today. The song is performed by the Getup Mob (Kev Carmody, Paul Kelly, Urthboy, Missy Higgins, Dan Sultan and Mia Dyson). See the GetUp Mob perform the song.

Profile

I spent a little time this evening exchanging invitations to social networks and filling in profile information. I never did like writing CVs and luckily haven’t had to very often in my working life. Now in a short space of time I’ve had to fill in profiles for 4 different networks. This is getting to be a chore, just like my ever growing list of registration information and passwords. You can go back later to update your profile and add photos. Maybe I’ll do that if I ever get around to updating my CV!

Let’s Hyve!

I started a hyves on the 17th of January at the ‘Meet the Expert — and make your own Hyves profile’ workshop organised by the NVB HB/WB. The expert in this case was Martijn Hulst (adviseur zorgmarketing bij Twynstra Gudde). You can read what he talked about that day in his blog. Martijn uses Slideshare to share the presentations he’s made. Here’s the presentation he gave us at the workshop.

Martijn Hulst gave us a very enthousiatic account of all the software he uses in his job encouraging health care workers to network and exchange information. He gave us a mind boggling list of web 2.0 applications, examples of use in practice and statistics on the groups that use them.

He’d been talking for one and a half hours before we broke for coffee, and had spoken for another three quarters of an hour after the break…Just as I was thinking – ‘gee I’ll never find the time to try this stuff out’ he announced that he was at the end of his presentation and that we could all start practicing by starting up our own Hyves.

I’d come prepared with a bit of text about me for the profile, a photo taken by holding the camera at arms length (and a little too low according to Bonny because you can see up my nostrils) and the only film I have – taken by Bonny with my camera at the Natural History Museum in London and featuring me and a T-rex.

I had my Hyves up within a half an hour which I was pretty proud of until I came home and showed it to Bonny. “You’ve got a Hyves but zero friends” was her comment”, followed by “Change that photo, I can see up your nostrils”. So of course I spent the next week asking people to join my Hyves, changing my colour scheme, adding stuff to my profile, and browsing YouTube for movies to link to my Hyves, oh and I added ‘Pac-man’. I’ve kept the photo because I quite like the way it looks down into the page, anyway everyone has nostrils.

The whole exercise has been fun and I have a deeper understanding of why every second computer screen in the library shows Hyves. Unfortunately I’m supposed to be thinking of ways to use social software ‘seriously’ to link into the communication channels of the younger generation, maybe I will, but for now it’s a playground. If you’d like to play too, just click on the ‘add to friends’ link underneath my photo.

LinkedIn is another type of social network, one in which you can keep track of professional contacts. I was invited to join a little while back by a SPOETNIK contact. I haven’t done much with LinkedIn, except to provide a short profile to get started. I can see how it could be handy for advertising your expertise, searching for new staff, targeting people for invitations to seminars etc etc. You can invite people to join your network by uploading contacts from your e-mail accounts. To invite other SPOETNIKers, the easiest way is to upload your gmail contacts using the accounts on the deelnemers page.

Letters from LAVA and me

A few weeks back I reported on a workshop ‘Ontwerp je eigen lettertype met ontwerpbureau LAVA’ held at the Museum voor Communicatie in the Hague. I’ve been waiting impatiently since then to see the font ontwerpbureau Lava has made using the letters created during the workshop. The font is ready and can be downloaded from this page. The first thing I noticed – my ‘s’ is upside down! I suppose this is what they mean by ‘creative license’.

LAVA alphabet 1

Lava@muscom (33), originally uploaded by Museum voor Communicatie.

These are the stencils for the first half of the alphabet. Note my ‘C’ (egg shaped because of Easter)

LAVA alphabet 2

Lava@muscom (42), originally uploaded by Museum voor Communicatie.

Here’s the second part of the new font, The letters have been spaypainted onto the canvas through the stencils. Here you can see the ‘S’ the right way up!

His illegal self / Peter Carey

Peter Carey is one of my all time favorite authors and this is his new book. Peter Carey writes in a way that is surprising and convincing at the same time. He lets you see events through the eyes of his characters, and his characters through the eyes of other characters. He can take you back in time and from one continent to another, switch you from a sheltered life to one of of a fugitive. I couldn’t put this book down. Now I finished it I’m thinking of reading it again to see what I missed the first time.

Wiki voor Informatievaardigheden

Followers of the SPOETNIK program at the University Library of the Universiteit van Amsterdam are using a wiki to build a guide for new staff members. They are pooling their experiences to create an information resource for new and future users. They are also learning how to use a web tool (a wiki) by doing what they do best, providing information about information resources.

The LOOWI (Landelijk Overleg Onderwijs Wetenschappelijke Informatie) started using a wiki to exchange information about the information literacy activities of the participating libraries about a year ago. This not only eased the task of the note taker at the LOOWI meeting, it also made it easier for the participants to share their news and keep the information on their activities up to date. It’s a great time saver too during the meeting, leaving more time for questions about each others activities. The wiki, LOOWI-OUI, complements the LOOWI website which is a showcase for information literacy resources developed by libraries in the Netherlands and overseas. A wiki is a collaborative tool that fits perfectly with the aims of the LOOWI to work together to build and share resources.

Wiki’s waarheid

I’ve just finished watching the documentary, Wiki’s waarheid. This episode of Tegenlicht was devoted to Wikipedia (for a description of the program in Dutch please see the link in my previous post). The makers of the program showed us film of internet gurus talking about Web 2.0 and ‘Wikipedians’ including the founder, Jimmy Wales talking about how Wikipedia came about. Wiki’s waarheid presents Wikipedia as an example of a Web 2.0 application that is both enormously popular and heavily criticised. I need to elaborate on why I chose these last two describing phrases. ‘Enormously popular’ describes the huge number of readers and contributors from all walks of life around the world. ‘Heavily criticised’ describes the manner in which a few media experts including Andrew Keen, writer of the book: The cult of the amateur, and Robert McHenry, formally editor in chief of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, talk about the rule of the masses (Andrew keen) and lack of authority and publishers responsibility (Rober McHenry) in Wikipedia. Andrew Keen sees Wikipedia as a threat to established knowledge vetted by professional experts. His catchphrase was that Wikipedia was about ‘truthiness’ and not about truth. Personally I found the arguments used by Andrew Keen extremely muddy. He doesn’t like the personalization of the web brought about by ‘unqualified’ individuals expressing themselves, but if one isn’t ‘qualified’ to express one’s own self who is?. Andrew Keen seemed to have a very territorial attitude to knowledge, an ‘us and them’ thing. A ‘we, the experts have to protect the truth’, sort of thing. The worries that Robert McHenry had were those of an editor used to thoroughly researching and correcting information before publication. Ndesanjo Macha, an African digital activist sees Wikipedia as a tool for sharing knowledge and giving a voice to people who have traditional wisdom but no western style education.

And what do I think? Well, I have the advantage of a library school education, and one of the first things I learned about encyclopedias was that if you looked up 1 fact in three different encyclopedias you’d get 3 different answers. This is normal because knowledge isn’t static. If you want to try this for yourself, look up the length of the Amazon river. The lesson here is, you should never limit yourself to one source, however popular.