Podcasting

Urban dictionary has many faults, but also many virtues and can help pass the time on a rainy afternoon.  It tells me that the word Podcast is derrived thus:

Short for: Personal On Demand broadCast are audio files you can download into any MP3 player or computer. These audio files are broadcasted over the Internet automatically to subscribers of specific podcast channels.

Thanks for that, although I think the past participle of 'broadcast' is just 'broadcast'.  I like the idea that pod stands for something, although I'm not wholly convinced it doesn't have something to do with Steve Jobs' seemingly existential music playing device. 

I've only ever used podcasts that are either radio 4 programmes (taking after my mother here...she downloads The Archers' omnibus every week to listen to in the car...) and foreign language podcasts to aid my attempts to learn Dutch.  They're great, but they can bombard you a little too much.  This is the irritation with many RSS feeds, you simply don't have time to keep up.  I cancelled my today programme podcasts because I was swamped and heard a fair amount live as I got ready for university each day and had the internet to read up on the rest.

The term seems to be used more loosely to refer to any MP3 download that is either spoken word (but not audiobook) or home made.  It's not a podcast unless it automatically starts to synch (or could do using the right technology like itunes).  I will check out the British Library podcasts, I love their blogs and perhaps could listen to this in the morning sometimes on my way to work.  As for individual universities - well I'd be interested to see what their download stats were like and then whether those people ever listened to them.  It's a neat idea, but when I was/will be a student I know I have better things to do with my time!

How do podcasts fit into web 2.0?  Well it's sharing, it's multimedia but it's not interactive.  Unlike youtube where you can comment and have debate about video content, in the podcast world it is entirely one way traffic.  What'll be interested to see is if anyone finds a way to make podcasting more collaborative.  It's a blue sky thought, I have no suggestion or answer.  The internet's full of clever people who come up with innovative concepts, so we'll just have to see.

For now podcasting is basically subscription radio (at least on the BBC), which in an age of constant backlash against the license fee, greatly unsettles me.  All it would take would be a small charge per download and then...

"YouTube if you want to"

- wrote Hazel Blears to Gordon Brown after she very publicly resigned from his cabinet.  She went on to say

But it's no substitute for knocking on doors or setting up a stall in the town centre.

Now, libraries and politics tend to mix quite well, but politics and the internet is normally thoroughly divisive/exasperating/not worth it, especially on this particular blog, so the politics of this example is not going any further.  What I wanted to note was this very famous example of criticism of YouTube as one-way traffic of communication.  You can't ask YouTube and you can't get a tailored service, YouTube gives information on what the creator wanted to give information about.

In libraries, this is very useful.  Imagine walking into the library to photocopy for the first time and being able to watch an explanation of how to buy credit and use the machine on your smartphone or tablet.  Similarly, imagine watching videos about your library's classification system to make it easier to find a book.  This is really useful, but when it comes to 'why do I have that library fine' you really need to talk to someone in person.  Video technology certainly does have a role to play, although it is easy when preparing to make a video to view all users as homogeneous.  In reality there are numerous specific factors that will alter every users library experience. 

For information literacy, specifically advice on finding, using, digesting, referencing information effectively, videos can be very helpful.  This video (on 23thingscity blog)



is absolutely superb.  But why?  Well, I'm inclined to say its because of the production values.  It is exceptionally well made, and is more authoritative as a result.  Unless you make your video deeply ironic, or take off a 70's kids TV show it just looks a bit lame.  Any library that wants to invest in making videos that are engaging and informative need to seriously consider the quality of the sound and the images.  If the sound is poor then why not use slideshare and upload a presentation.  If the images are no good then why not make a podcast?  Both have to work together and be high quality to make your library look professional; it's not about staff having fun making the thing, its about the end user.

I really like this video, the music reminds me of Pinny's House, but I'm left wishing she had gone to more effort to make the text legible and didn't have the tacky end.  If she'd perfected the video it would work so very much better.



One of the things I love about librarians is their drive to be excellent, to learn how to do new things, and their ability to stay one step ahead, and a lot of librarians I know would make fantastic videos.  To those I hope they do, and use these videos as a dynamic presentation tool both online and included as part of their training sessions.  To those who can't YouTube, then I advise that they simply stick to the presentation.  In either case the training session is still key, because videos about information literacy are bound to throw up some quite specific questions for users who are digesting the information and making it applicable to them.

Wikibiccie

Coutesy of Pen Waggener

Wikibiccie would be a site devoted to biscuits.  It would be a truly encyclopaedic place to learn about every conceivable tea-time crunchy treat (cakes excluded, I'm afraid).  You would even be able to go to some far flung land, discover a tasty treat and add an entry.  If you hold invaluable resources to add to the age-old Jaffa Cake debate, which was always bound to be controversial, you can share them with the people who want to know.  Unfortunately for all users of the world wide web, wikibiccie is not a reality.  It's a fantastic idea that I just made up (though I think it has potential - watch out when I learn HTML at library school!)

What would tell you that wikibiccie allowed you to add your own biscuit entries and edit other peoples?  One word: wiki.  It has become a universal expression of interactive publication.  Oxford English Dictionary defines 'wiki' it as

a website or database developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to add and edit content.

It is a way of publishing material that utilises the perceived wisdom that more heads are better than one.  The best possible content will arise through a collaborative community of authors who can add, edit, delete, flag and insert additional sources.  On this blog I can publish an outrageous lie:

The 23thingscity project has been running since June 1972.*

All you can do is comment and tell me I'm wrong.  If this was a Wiki you could actively participate and change that defect.  You would be improving the quality of this blog, which really demonstrates that wikis are more useful than blogs.  The revisions are also open to be viewed, so that major alterations are glaringly obvious.  This time trail can be very useful when assessing the quality and reliability of the source.

If you have ever edited Wikipedia then you'll know there are many tags to navigate in order to format the wiki correctly, which can be learnt quite easily but takes some thought when you first get started.  The gift of many other wikis, such as UK Library Blogs, is that they are much simpler - writing a wiki is just like word processing.  I have added my blog to their list.

*the correction to this outrageous lie would be that 23thingscity began in June 2011.

Share and share alike

Just a test

View more presentations from OliverRobert.

'Just a test' is probably the most boring presentation...ever. As the name suggests it is just a test so don't worry 23thingsadmin/information literacy guru, I've not gone completely mad.  I just wanted to create a SlideShare account, which required me to make a quick PowerPoint to upload as a test so that I knew what the website was like (I used a few of the images from my previous Prezi - see below).

At first glance I hadn't realised what slideshare was.  I thought it was an online PowerPoint-a-like, like a more static Prezi.  On closer inspection I discover that it is actually a presentation sharing website, a simple but excellent idea.  Once you upload a presentation to the site, you control whether you share publicly or privately and you choose whether to allow others to download your presentation or not.  Others can comment, follow your presentation uploads using RSS and you have a single profile holding your archived presentations, each one tagged for ease of searching.  To view presentations you don't even need to register, and if you do register and upload it's incredibly intuitive.  This is a simple innovation for Microsoft's well loved PowerPoint programme: it creates the potential to share presentations, a potential only possible in this way through social media.

What is the application of SlideShare?  In an academic setting (ie a university class) this tool would probably be surplus to requirements, because presentations can already be uploaded and shared through the institutional VLE, but in other settings this is a really useful concept.  Conference presentations can be shared on SlideShare, without hundreds of paper handouts being printed.  University students can use it for group work without having to be physically together: when working on a presentation they can share, download, edit and re-upload it remotely.

Slideshare supplements Prezi perfectly.  Prezi is both a zooming presentation creator, and a zooming presentation sharer because all prezi's are on the site and (with public settings) are viewable to anyone.  SlideShare allows all other presentations to be viewable to anyone (PowerPoints, Google Docs and even PDF's).  Together, they allow any currently conceivable presentation to be sharable, downloadable, able to be viewed multiple times and therefore make presentations much more flexible (and I'd say useful) than presentations have ever been before.

Drum roll...

Prezi is great.  It allows you to create a really different type of presentation from PowerPoint or Slideshare.  Since it's currently a novelty presentation tool, I suspect as time goes on we'll all calm down a bit and find them a bit mundane.  There's nothing about prezi that makes it better, but an engaging presentation is a successful one.  For now, however, they are hot!

I do have some criticisms though.  Like Frankenstein's monster it sometimes seems to have a life of its own.  We all know the saying about the bad workman blaming his tools, and I'm sure that's what I am about to do, but it's not always the most intuitive thing to use.

1. I don't understand the lack of spell check.  This is a reckless assumption that we can spell, and frankly it's not one of my key strengths.  It came as a surprise to me when my boyfriend pointed out that I had the word oppountiy (opportunity) in my presentation.  When you are creating a presentation for other people to take information away from, the need for accuracy is even greater. 

2. I don't see the sense in a lack of standardised text sizes.  In a couple of instances I created two text boxes for one frame and found that it was ACTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE to get both blocks of text the same size.  Who's crazy idea was that?

The great drawback of Prezi is that it takes a long time.  I found the information on the website very useful, the videos explaining how to use (the strangely named) 'Zebra' were really helpful.  Actually getting down to learning, however, is very much trial and error.  I discovered that creating a plan on paper of the route helps and avoids too much nauseating zooming and gave my presentation coherence.

The pressure to make a good prezi is phenomenal because they are still a novelty, and the brave presenters who are putting them out on the internet are good at using this type of tool.  Mine is far from perfect, it has room for improvement and any input on how I could make it better would be welcome.  I will happily update this. 

For now, though, without further ado, I present my offering.  I hope anyone wanting to be a trainee, or my replacement trainee on September 1st at City will find this a valuable thing to watch.

Traineeship on Prezi

Prezi

Ok, we're all still anticipating my Prezi, but while we're waiting, here's an excellent one that someone else made (via @theREALwikiman)

Monkey Puzzle

Courtesy of mccheek on flickr

Thing 15 - This thing is Survey Monkey I haven't (yet) created a survey monkey for this project, but mindful that this would come up at some point I decided to create a survey monkey (a bit quickly) for an ICS training course assignment I completed last month, so I do have an experience to reflect on.

My criticism of Survey Monkey is mainly to do with access, and the requirement to pay for certain services.  This is an obvious gripe, and really it is neither unusual nor surprising for an internet company to focus on revenue creation from subscribers not just advertisers.  Without a subscription the layout of your survey is left wanting.  There are a very small number of themes to choose from and they don't look great; customised themes are only available to those who pay.  I would be interested to know how many people choose a paid subscription, what indivuals or organisations create surveys frequently enough to pay for a full Survey Monkey package?  Many organisations that rely on surveys on a daily basis, surely have bespoke software that makes something more professional looking and doesn't have the words 'survey monkey' at the bottom of every page.

Creating the survey itself is easy, and it gives you a lot of control over how you opt to ask your questions.  Multiple formats are available, though it does take some thought to ensure you make appropriate choices.  I find it better to think of the future analysis of your results when designing the questions - for many surveys a final 'score' will be extremely helpful, for others this not.  The free statistical graphs and data and the ability to analyse data easily is the best asset that Survey Monkey has, it really is the full package.  What I find particularly impressive is that it is possible to export the data from survey monkey to Excel and create graphs of the results (I have not done this, though I have read their FAQ on it and I'm not sure if that's complementary or, again, requires a paid subscription).  However, there is a big limitation in that you csnnot exceed 10 questions per survey on a free subscription, which means your survey has to be about something quite narrow, or very much to the point.  An advantage of that, though, is an end of interminably long surveys (though it's the usefulness of the information at the end that's crucial).

Survey Monkey has the potential to gather data through a variety of sources, by email, URL, embedded into another website or via Facebook.  This versatility is also a great feature.

Survey Monkey is big, I have come across it in many different contexts and it must be the market leader.  However, it faces some stiff competition.  Zoomerang also looks intuitive and offers similarly detailed statistical analysis.  I think the interface of the final survey looks better than Survey Monkey (view this one courtesy of this very helpful review site).  A great advantage of Zoomerang is that you can actually import your surveys from Survey Monkey.  For someone starting out with free survey software this is a gift: make a Survey Monkey, import it to Zoomerang, play around with it and compare the two!

For any inquisitive minds looking for similar resources beyond Survey Monkey and Zoomerang, then this list is very helpful and spells out the limitations of free subscriptions on many different sites.  It's great to see a number of websites offering this service.  In a customer focussed workplace like a library, gathering feedback to improve the customer experience is key to opening up dialogue with readers, ensuring the quality of the service offered and meeting expectations.