LIBR559M: Intrigues
My avatar at the American Library Association in SL
This week my LIBR559M course on social media for information professionals wraps up. We covered, discussed and collaborated on a number of interesting topics during the 6-week period of the course. I’ve listed below the top three parts of the course that I found the most intriguing:
- Affordances – That which an object or system “allows” for a user to do. As someone who is interested in information architecture design, I found this concept useful to consider when analysing a website or a system. Although the concept can be a little difficult to understand at first, we as a class were able to begin to develop the skill of articulating the affordances and constraints when considering the user interface and design of social software.
- Collaboration – For one of our group assignments, our group of five people collaboratively created an online document using wiki software (our completed project is here: http://wiki.ubc.ca/Course:LIBR559M/Social_Media_Instruction). This project was completed online with no in-person meetings. I found this project intriguing. At the beginning I had assumed that we would all write our assigned parts on the wiki. Then, like ants, we would crawl all over each others writing and edit what we had written and then at due date time we would have what we had. It didn’t quite turn out that way. One of the challenges was the wiki software itself, which didn’t really faciiltate discussion well and the formatting was difficult to learn (the markup language was also really annoying and not necessarily intuitive). Lastly, we discovered as a class that we felt more comfortable editing on wikipedia when other editors and writers were anonymous, but in our collaborative setting it was felt that we would need to have some discussion with a classmate before editing his or her work.
- Second Life – Upon exploration of second life, I was left feeling a little disappointed. It seems to me to be a 3-D “container” for creation but not very well used for educational purposes, where the Croquet Project may serve as a better example. The Croquet Project does well with 3-D modeling in architecture and anatomy and can power whiteboard interactivity. I also observed that library-oriented sites, such as the American Library Association, are “flat” representations of real libraries. Information and its delivery are typically flat and I questioned whether or not it could be considered viable in a 3-D environment. An excerpt from my class forum post:
Information searches and retrievals tend to be viewed as “flat” information, & not 3-dimensional. This concept is based on the traditional libraries model. Information that is culled and delivered to patrons is indeed in a “flat” manner. The libraries in SL are representations of this “flat” model, which makes me wonder if we’re ready yet to experience all information in a 3-dimensional format. Will search strings be only the flat/written word , or will it extend itself to verbal search strings (like on Star Trek) as well as textile searches? So my question is whether or not “flat” information currently fits into this 3-D SL model. How will 3-D information flow? And how will information professionals deliver this to us? I think we may be onto something with these virtual environments, but we’re not quite there yet.
Thanks for posting that image of your SL avatar. Although we didn’t really touch upon this in the course, I am very interested in the way that librarians might try to represent themselves in virtual worlds. I notice that you kept the curly hair (way to be!) but your avatar looks way tall – it is just me? Or did you mean to do that? When I experimented with SL I went crazy and made myself into some kind of human-beast hybrid, just for the fun of it. I doubt other SL users wanted to approach me, but I thought it was pretty funny. Do you think that there should be some kind of protocal related to librarians and their SL avatars? I don’t mean to suggest that all SL librarians should be forced to own cardigans and wear their hair in tight gray buns, but…would users be more comfortable approaching a “normal” looking avatar, like yourself, or my experimental hybrid self?