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/

Gamification - Week 10

At the beginning of this week I was unaware of the extent of gamification within the library world, but after doing some research and reading a couple of articles I think that gamification definitely has its place within the library community. Gamification is defined as bringing elements of game design into a non-game context to help improve user experience. Ultimately I would like to work in an academic or public library and I can see the benefits of gamification in both settings.

Initially I was having a difficult time trying to relate gaming to a library environment. An article by Bohyun Kim discussed the applications of applying game dynamics to library services. An interesting point was made about creating a game that taps into people’s creativity and diligence. Games traditionally get harder as you progress to various levels. A person needs to utilise their creativity to pass these levels, but also use diligence to keep getting better. This article asserts that this type of interaction does not need to remain solely in the game world and can be transfered into the ‘real’ world, or even library environment.

Some brilliant suggestions are made in the article as to how to incorporate gaming within the library. While I wont state all the suggestions here, I will talk about one suggestion I found particularly interesting. With the rise of social media and libraries adapting their catalogues to incorporate social interaction with users ie. ratings, book reviews, etc. the idea of awarding ‘status points’ for posting something about the library to Facebook, or borrowing out a large number of books. Of course, the awarding of an essentially arbitrary points system is a form of extrinsic motivation which hopefully begin to trigger the intrinsic rewards of interest, peer acknowledgement and motivation, and pride. The idea of using status points is a small and simple way of adding gaming elements into the library setting to hopefully motivate users. Librarygame is a unique tool to help libraries modify their discovery interface and engage users. I'm looking forward to reading about other examples of gamification in libraries, if anyone has any suggestions please let me know!

Some personal apps I have used with elements of gamification are:

Duolingo - A free language learning tool (Manzana means apple in Spanish!)

Zombies Run! - I'm almost at 5k!

Cookie Clicker - I found this on Reddit. I don't understand the point of this game, but it definitely uses extrinsic motivation!

Mobile - Week 9

For the PLAY activity this week we were asked to create our own QR code and post it to our blog. A QR code is something like a barcode which allows mobile users to scan it and then receive information on their smart phone. The activity this week was my first experience with QR codes and I found it quite enjoyable!

Participating in this activity and previous activities (Instagram comes to mind) has made me come to realise how important smart phones have become in our world. I am a new smart phone user, it was actually starting my Masters that prompted me to update from my Nokia "brick" to Samsung Galaxy. One of the reasons I opted for Samsung over the iPhone was that it had a bigger screen which I find perfect for reading material on the go. I can check my emails, message my friends internationally, take a photo if I see something interesting, and call my family... all from one device. It's like having my own personal computer in my pocket.

I think the point of going mobile is to create more opportunities for yourself with a small gadget. When I found out that many librarians use Twitter as a form of keeping up with industry knowledge I was pleasantly surprised. I can keep up now too from my phone! I can't say enough about the benefits of my smart phone both in my personal and professional life. The only downside to having a phone constantly by my side is that... it is constantly by my side. I find myself checking my email or Facebook or Twitter absently when I am waiting for the train to Brisbane.

QR Code - Week 9

This week we were asked to play with QR codes! I have seen them around but never interacted with them, this week was the perfect opportunity to see how they worked.

If you have a QR scanner on your phone, see where my code takes you!

P.S. It's not that interesting... haha

Screencast-O-Matic - Week 8

Here is the video for Week 8 PLAY.

I enjoyed making this video, Screencast-O-matic was simple and easy to use. What a fun way to share information!

Instagram - Week 7

This week we were required to use Instagram for our PLAY activity. We were asked to post a photo for 7 days and add the hashtag #inn333

I used Statigram to search for our class hashtag when I was not using my phone. I have only posted some of my photos on this blog, the rest of my photos can be viewed, along with the rest of the class photos, on Statigram.



I enjoyed this activity because it allowed me to take advantage of a program that I had installed on my phone, but forgot about. I believe Instagram to be a useful tool for connecting with friends and complete strangers. I like seeing what interests other people and how they choose to portray that interest.



I will definitely be using Instagram in the future.



(Tenby didn't feature on the #inn333 page, but he looks so cute I can't resist putting him up here!)