Summer Lessons: A Project in Connection

I'm considering starting a project.

I'm going to make myself a little kit. It will have envelopes, paper, pens, stamps... and every week, I'll write a letter to someone. Maybe it will be a friend, if I can get enough of them to send me their up-to-date contact info. Maybe it will be family. Maybe it will be a politician, or a celebrity, or someone I know of who's incarcerated. Maybe it will be someone I remember from long ago.

But I'll write a letter a week.

Connect with people in a personal, if archaic, way.

I hate when people knock on technology and decry our use of it as being too wired, too impersonal... Humans are social creatures, and much of our use of technology is simply extending that even further. I even read a great article which refers to the proprioception that arises from the use of social media.

But that being said, sometimes being a sprinkler gets tiring.

All that whirling, making sure every blade of grass gets watered. Sometimes you have to get out the spray bottle and give specific plants a little TLC. A lot of our relationships are like grass; make sure they get enough water and you don't really run a risk of them shriveling up and dying away. They may not thrive into towering trees or flowering shrubs; but it's grass, that's not what it's for. Not every relationship in your life can, or should, be monumental. Heck, the human brain is only cognitively capable of maintaining 150 true friendships.

But some plants you baby and pamper. You tend them carefully. Not because they're more important than the grass; but because they're the ones you want to see thrive.

I guess I just want to make a point of doing that in my life.

My family never was very good with plants.

Day 86: Best Dressed

Today's lesson is an old one that cannot be overstated.

Lesson 84: Presentations will take so much longer than you think they will.

We had a group presentation today, and despite our best efforts, the mere presentation part went so long we only had 10 minutes for discussion.

I really hope it doesn't affect our grade too much, I mean other than our unfortunately meager discussion, our presentation presented some good, solid analysis of social media and its use in library settings. And ultimately we only ran a minute over the 40 minute time limit.

If you're interested in the content of our presentation, I can share it. But ultimately...

Lesson 85: The Toronto Public Library is an excellent example of cohesive online presence, productive social media use and clean online branding.

They've really done a very good job of maximizing the usefulness of these tools and ensuring that they are responsible for the library's online identity, and not hoards of trolls misappropriating their identity.

Snaps for the TPL!

Day 71: The Great Distinction

A large chunk of my class and day were taken up by planning a presentation about the use of social media by libraries. A very interesting topic to be sure, but that will have to wait. You see, it took us far too long into our discussion to realise our fundamental flaw. We hadn't defined what we were considering and how.

Is YouTube the same as twitter? Is Second Life the same as them? Facebook? These can't all be the same beast! It doesn't make sense! Heck! Why are we even discussing Second Life? I mean, honestly....

Lesson 67: Social Media Sites are distinct from Social Networking Sites. Though they may overlap, and can all potentially be referred to with the blanket term "The Social Media", ultimately Social Networking Sites connect and share between profiles while Social Media Sites create content and connect profiles.

It's the focus. Social Media Sites focus on creating content, like Twitter, YouTube, DeviantArt do, whereas Social Networking Sites focus on connecting profiles, while their users may create and share within that framework.

What a headache...

Day 51: Legend of Korra? Quorra of Tron? Nope, Quora

As much as I love "Avatar: The Last Airbender" and enjoyed "Tron", neither of those are the Korra/Quorra that I learned about today.

Today, I learned about Quora. It's a very knowledge management oriented site, aiming to get information out of people's heads and onto the internet where it can be useful to others.

Lesson 49: The Yahoo Answers format is not by necessity bad.

It's not that I have a big problem with Yahoo Answers, it's just that there's so much trolling, and in some cases downright abuse, that it's not always worth sifting through to find answers, plus the ultra hierarchical subject structure can sometimes make it difficult to find what you're looking for.

Quora uses a folksonomic system which allows for more discrete subjects and categories and easier natural searching and browsing. By folksonomic (pesky librarian vocabulary), I mean user-edited tagging, though Quora's is done in a more structured way than say, tagging in Delicious.

Quora is basically a better, smarter Yahoo Answers. It's apparently very popular in Silicon Valley, and it is frequented by a lot of big names across many disciplines. Heck, J.J. Abrams was on answering questions in the moviemaking category while I was on this afternoon!

There seems to be more moderation as well. Name-calling is not tolerated, and most of the responses are well reasoned, self-contained, and polite. It's more discourse than argument even in the touchier subject areas.

There is a lot of really interesting and accessible write-ups about very specific, but common, scientific questions. I've been particularly enjoying the "cultural faux pas" section, it's quite interesting.

Of course when I say that it's a better, smarter Yahoo answers, I suppose that should be modified with a "for now". Who knows how it might be destroyed when more people start trying to answer outside of their expertise and abusing the anonymous function. I've already seen one or two rather obnoxious homophobic and fatphobic responses, but nowhere near the levels of other forums, and mostly only in less fact, more opinion driven topics (ie/Etiquette).

I really hope it stays awesome...