PLENK 2010 notes and other activities

The PLENK2010 Elluminate session on Wednesday (Sept 29) by Janet Clarey - interesting! She provided a lot of space in her presentation resulting in a lot of chat among the participants. I came away with names (Jim Groom http://jimgroom.net/about/ ) and links to check out (https://www.zotero.org/groups/gt and https://www.zotero.org/groups/critical_pedagogy_in_a_digital_world and https://tekri.athabascau.ca/analytics/ )
The group got on to the topic of privacy. What about tools such as Foursquare that pin-point one's location? Are we giving ourselves over to commercial interests? Is what we're giving up in privacy worth it? What about students' privacy when educators insist that students post their work without password-protection? Some say that privacy is a lost cause. Why fight it? We have more transparency than ever - as if we all live in a small town. Transparency become the norm. (What about the tragedy of the student at Rutgers who committed suicide after a video of him having sex was posted on the Internet without his permission? No right to privacy? How much life-logging do we need? Do we have a right to decide how we're presenting ourselves to a general public?)



Reading the Chronicle yesterday. An article by Jennifer Howard called Conference Explores How to Find—and Make Findable—Information in a Digital Sea (Sorry! this article is for subscribers only) sent me off to look at the ITHAKA Sustainable Scholarship Conference 2010 and then to Google's "user happiness" guy Daniel Russell's home page (http://sites.google.com/site/dmrussell/) and then on to his SearchReSearch blog (http://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/) to see what he has to say about user research skills - and to his August 29, 2010 post "Why libraries?" and looking at his "20 Things You Probably Don't Know About Search... But Really Should () where he outlines six components of expertise (pure engine technique, domain knowledge, assessment, information mapping, search strategy, site-specific knowledge) and where he has some good examples of how to do a search - and then... over to Google Web Search - Classroom Lessons and Resources (http://www.google.com/educators/p_websearch.html) and "Why is Search Easy & Hard: Search Quality and User Happiness" and then back to ITHAKA to read up on their report on University Publishing in a Digital Age (July 2007) and then over to the ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) site (http://www.erialproject.org/participants/universities/) where I noticed that they have a book coming on Spring 2011 titled College Libraries and Student Culture: Learning from Collaborative Research.... I like the way anthropologists have become engaged in studying the use of libraries and library users.