Final Reflection - Week 13

At the beginning of this unit I felt very apprehensive about blogging and the amount of work I felt it was going to take to complete the blogs on time. I tried to nominate my blogs so that I would have some time at the end of semester to review them and focus on the proposal and assignments for other subjects. The blogs I chose to write were:

Play: weeks 5 6 7 8 9
Reflect: weeks 4 7 9 10 11

I was looking forward to learning about various information programs and interested to see how they could be incorporated into a library environment. I was unfamiliar with a number of these programs and thoroughly enjoyed playing around with them and writing about them. I believe I would have gotten more out of this course if the play activities were mandatory for all of the programs. I definitely learned better by interacting with the programs I was required to use for my blogging activity, but I didn’t find myself motivated enough to explore the programs that fell outside my blogging schedule.

As for the reflect activities, while I was engaged with what I was writing about, I often found a disconnect between how the particular reflect activity was related to an information program. If I had my time over again, I would choose weeks where the play and reflect activities corresponded with each other. I felt like I was getting a wholesome experience with my week 7 (Creative Commons & Instagram)  and 9 posts (Mobile & QR Codes). I liked discussing theory and applying a program to that theory rather than just writing a reflection or just doing a play activity separately.

My favorite reflect activity was the final post I did on mash-ups. I liked writing about creative commons and looking through all the pictures on the Library Hack website. I believe it was my favorite because it still required me to complete an activity and then comment on it. It helps that creative commons is an interesting subject to investigate in terms of libraries.

It is hard to choose my favorite play activity because I enjoyed engaging with the different information programs. The play activity which surprised me the most was the week 8 screen-casting program. At the beginning of the activity I was very doubtful of my abilities, but as I progressed and worked out a plan for my screen-cast I began to gain confidence and realised that engaging with these activities means just having a go.

I enjoyed commenting on peer blogs, but I found it hard to consistently post on the majority of my classmates blogs. It was difficult to access posts by my classmates unless they specifically linked them to the Facebook group page. I utilised the rolling blog feed via the Blackboard site, but because it was a rolling feed I was only able to see the most recent posts. In the future, I think it would be better to have one static page with everyone’s blog posted so we can systematically make sure that everyone in class has at least one comment on their work.

I believe commenting on people’s blog is helpful for the learning process but I don’t believe the assessment weighting on 20% is appropriate unless there were more guidelines ie. 10 compulsory posts. I valued the interaction with my peers, especially on the Facebook page. I liked having a semi-informal gathering space for us to ask questions about assignments and link each other to interesting news articles. I didn’t engage with Twitter as much, simply because I check Facebook every day. If we had whole class activities specific to Twitter I would have engaged with that program more.

The key take-away I have from this unit is that there are a lot of free programs out there for librarians to find and implement in their work. I liked that these programs were for the most part, easy to use and valuable for a personal and library setting. I learned not to doubt my abilities and to always try new things. I also increased my knowledge of blogging and commenting through participating in this course.

Overall, I enjoyed this course and the blogs that went with it. My initial apprehension was for nothing as the act of blogging became a weekly project I looked forward to completing. My major concern, however, is for the final assignment as the proposal has seemingly come out of no-where. Hopefully I can manage my time better in the future.

Mashups - Week 11

The Reflect activity for this week was in response to Mashups. A mashup is essentially combining two or more pieces of data to create one, singular, new piece of data. Mashups can ultimately consist of anything, whether it be pictures, sound, video, or even a web-page. I first heard about mashups through songs on the radio. People all over the world combined popular songs to make new ones, various websites popped up and it even featured in movies like Pitch Perfect. The problem with pop-song mashups is obviously the copyright issues, although these songs exist they are not legal unless endorsed by the music company that owns the songs.

This leads me to the competition by Library Hack which asked participants to use data from Australian and New Zealand libraries to create something new. The purpose of this was to raise awareness about the amount of shareable content libraries have and encourage users to engage with the collection by creating something new. This is an ingenious way for libraries to expose their collections to a wider audience, not only do artists and amateur artists get to exercise their skills, but viewers as well.

My favourite mashup was by Gardey, who 'mashed up' two photographs and added text for a comical effect.

After having a laugh about the picture as a whole I start to ask myself some questions:
1. What is the original context of the diver in the photo?
2. What beach are the people below standing at?
3. What are the people looking up at in the original picture?
4. What year were these photos taken?
5. Who were the people in each of these photos?

It is these kinds of questions I think Library Hack were trying to elicit from the users. The mashups trigger curiosity in the viewer and leave them wanting to know more. How do they know more? By engaging with the collection! The competition by Library Hack shows the potential for libraries to extend their audience by utilising their creative commons and open access data.

An article by Nicole Engard relates mashups specifically to a library setting. The mashups discussed in the article are used to increase efficiency within the library rather than provide entertainment, but they are relevant and interesting nonetheless!


Reference.
All rights reserved by Gardey
The birth of stage diving and moshing in Australia
◾Photo 1: Taking the plunge at the Valley Baths, Brisbane, ca.1930-1940
◾Photo 2: Dirigible over tamarama, Hall & Co. Home and Away -34701
URL of this entry: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gardey/5775416779/