Serendipity35

Part of today's content at the PCCC Writing Initiative Summer Institute will be a hands-on session creating a LibGuide for our faculty involved in redesigning their courses as "Writing Intensive."

Though LibGuides, a product from Springshare, is aimed at libraries, we are already using it in ways other than just a library tool used by librarians.

As of now, in New Jersey, there are only 2 public libraries -Burlington County Library System and Camden County College and 4 schools - Ocean City Free Public Library, my own Passaic County Community College, Princeton University, and Rowan University - using LibGuides. However, there are currently 8,322 LibGuides published online by 3,757 librarians at 226 institutions. The number of institutions has doubled since January. (See the Community page)

We purchased a license this year because we specifically wanted to have each of the 20 Gen Ed courses we are redesigning over the next 5 years use a LibGuide. What we like about this tool is that it a very easy web design tool that also allows for easy collaboration (through accounts). Each of our courses will have at least one faculty member who is teaching the course as a lead editor, and at least one librarian or subject matter expert as an editor.

We also have guides for the Writing Initiative, our college writing exam, Spanish audio files, the College Experience course and online learning resources - and , of course, for the college library.

It you're a very 2.0 person already, you might say it sounds like a wiki, and there are some similarities. Creating a blank guide is very simple for anyone with an account. Then the web pages are built using a series of "boxes" that you select. There are simple text and rich text types, plus video embedding, links with annotations, RSS feeds, pathways to your libraries databases etc.

The first guide I did when I was learning how to use LibGuides was a simple one page meta-LibGuide for my fellow PCCC account holders with links to particular other school guides that I thought they could use as models, and some help pages. You can pick a custom URL for your guide (I made it http://pccc.libguides.com/users ) or just accept the system-generated URL (in this case http://pccc.libguides.com/content.php?pid=5263 )

There's an admin toolbox for your account that lets you set sitewide colors and formats (basically CSS), design the home page, banner, etc. You can also leave some areas open. For example, we have chosen to allow individual guide creators to change their colors and other style settings.

You can allow or disallow comments for a box, page or guide.

There are nice 2.0 plug-ins like a del.icio.us tag cloud or your Twitter or other feed and links since you will want to be able to share your guide with friends (in the social networking sense of friends anyway) via your favorite social sites and tools like Digg or MySpace or that old favorite, email.

LibGuides was the first library app to be added to Facebook, so you can meet your students where they hang out.

Every page in a guide has a link at the page bottom that says "View this page in a format suitable for printers, mobile devices and screen-readers" which will strip out the styles that make web pages suitable for those applications and accessible for those with special needs.

And the plain text or rich text or code view editors allow users ranging from those who are only used to a word processor (rich test) to code monkeys to create new pages easily.

You can also collaborate by pulling information from other guides that you have already created, others from your institution or from other institutions. For example, you create a course guide that includes a page on eTutoring and another on using MLA style for the research assignment. When you create your next guide, if you want to use those two pages again, you simply select them and they will be pulled into the new guide. Not your traditional learning object but the same concept. It's the same for someone else's content. A good idea for people to share pages within a department or college.

Which brings me to permission and rights... Within PCCC, it would be easy for me to ask a colleague permission to use their content, but what about if a teacher at PCCC wants to include some of the history research material from an Acadia Libguide or the 12 step guide to "Writing College Papers" from Anne Arundel Community College? 

When you find the guide you want to use as a template for your guide, contact the guide owner (their contact info is in the profile box on the right of a guide) and get their permission to use the guide as a template. What if you don't ask first? Keep reading.

When you create your new guide, the options for the guide template (at the very bottom) are to use a guide from one of community institutions. Select that and the pop-up will expand and ask you for the URL of a guide from another institution that you would like to use as a template. LibGuides will find this guide and copy its contents into your newly created guide. It will also send an email notification to the original guide owner telling them you used their guide as a template. Your email address, your institution, and the name of your new guide will be listed in this email sent to the original owner. Springshare can remove permissions and accounts for abuses. I'd like to see the option for me to add an editor from another institution to a guide so that we could collaborate on a guide. (Are you reading this post Springshare people?)

I wrote about Clay Shirky's newest book, Here Comes Everybody, in an earlier post. Later, I was reading on Shirky's own blog that a reader was creating a webliography with links to sites from the book. If a print book was "hyperlinkable," (Kindle books don't count) it would have this feature.

The reader is a librarian whose blog, My Mind on Books, is a reading blog that is a guide to books (with a focus on consciousness, the mind, cognitive psychology...).

He actually published his guide in four separate posts, but I have waited for him to collect them in one post which you can now access at mymindonbooks.com.

This is what I will call "Reader 2.0" - the reader as collaborator - which is certainly part of the wider web 2.0 shift on the Net.

For chapter 3 of the Shirky book, "Everyone Is A Media Outlet," there are 12 links to go beyond the book. Just on the topic of "mass amateurization" (page 60), you get these 3 links - and an error correction! “Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing” by Clay Shirky, “The Pro-Am Revolution” by Charlie Leadbeater (misspelled “Leadbetter” in the book) and We-think: the book by Charles Leadbeater.

Page 75's reference to "crowdsourcing" gets you a 2006 Wired article by Jeff Howe and a Crowdsourcing blog which includes excerpts from the upcoming book, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business.

Blogs are a great way for a reader to extend the reach of a print book. It would be even better to see an open wiki develop around a book with many readers adding additional materials. This has happened in a few instances I'm aware of for books like The World is Flat. There are somewhat useful wikis like Wikisummaries that offers a detailed chapter by chapter summary of the book - useful for someone just wanting to check what it's all about AND for a student who discovers there are no Spark Notes for Friedman's book. More interesting to me are wikis like The Flat Classroom Project that uses Wikispaces for students from classrooms around the world to collaborate on projects and discussions based on their reading of the Friedman book.

This is active reading for students as well as being a resource for the teacher using a particular book in their course. It overlaps in some ways the open textbook movement. More importantly, it gets readers involved with what they are reading.

If you know of any good "Reader 2.0" sites online that extend the print version of a book, please comment with a link below.

I attended an NJ Best Practices conference yesterday (more on that in a future post), and sitting in the audience had me thinking about teachers as presenters.

When I think about doing a "presentation" I don't immediately imagine a classroom lecture. I associate that word these days with presenting at a meeting, workshop or conference. Classroom teachers should be great presenters. In the NJ K-12 world you often do 5 a day for 181 days, so you get plenty of platform skills time. But, not all teachers, at any grade level, get opportunities to present at venues that expose their work to a larger audience.

The Web changed that. Having a website or blog immediately gives you a larger audience, though it may take some time to build one, if that's what you want to do. Many educational speakers now post their materials online for the presentation and allow access to them after the presentation to audience member or those who didn't have the opportunity to catch the live presentation. Presenters offer slide presentations, video, wikis, links, blogs, bookmarks and sometimes entire sites.

I wish I would see more classroom teachers offer their materials online. If not in the interest of open courseware, it would be a good thing for that person's own professional life to get the word out on what they are doing in their classroom. I'm actually not thinking so much of college professors as those in K-12 who don't get as many opportunities to present or attend conferences. That's my real push in this post, and here's some tool information that might get you started.

Teachertube.com offers both a medium and a library of teachers presenting in a YouTube-style format.

I have used Slideshare a few times to post a PowerPoint presentation to the world. At first, my intended audience was pretty small. I posted a presentation and offered the link to it to people who attended my session. But what you are likely to find is that there's a kind of "long tail" effect. There's a small but very interested audience for your presentation. On one of my Slidehare accounts, I posted two Moodle presentations last spring and one of them has had over 5525 views, 21 users marked it as a favorite, 517 downloaded it and 7 embedded it somewhere on a web page. Those are not viral video numbers, but I had presented it originally to about 50 people in New Jersey, so my audience has grown 100 times already.

On Slideshare, you can make presentations public or private, downloadable or not. Of course, in the spirit of open everything, I have to make them public and downloadable, and I've had a few users email me or post a comment that they appreciate that.

More recently I started using the Google Docs presentations feature. If you think about it, of all the "document" types available presentations are the ones that really are created to be shared. The presentations feature is one of the newer parts of Google Docs and it lets you organize, share, and, more importantly to me right here, even present and allow collaboration on presentations.

The slides can be imported from existing files or actually created online using the slide editor. The presentation is filed with any other Google Docs you have made. The cool feature (which is far beyond the Slideshare sharing) is that the presentation can now be shared and edited by several collaborators working on your slide deck simultaneously, in real time. You can also share the presentation while you're actually presenting and an audience could follow the presenter through the slideshow. (The option is to share as a "viewer" or "collaborators." Participants are also connected through Google Talk, so they can chat about the presentation as they're watching. Plus, the presentation feature is available in 25 languages.

Of course, there are lots of other apps that a teacher/presenter can use. You might like Zoho Show (now at version 2.0). Take a look at their online video demo.

I'll also recommend a few books on presentations that I found useful - even if you believe it's not possible to make compelling PowerPoint presentations. You might want to have the library order a copy...

• Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery by Garr Reynolds
• Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2007 to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate, and Inspire by Cliff Atkinson
• Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations by Stephen M. Kosslyn
• Why Most PowerPoint Presentations Suck by Rick Altman

Hey, I didn't say it. Take a look at the "GTISC Emerging Cyber Threats Report for 2008" from Georgia Tech's Information Security Center. The report was released at the GTISC Security Summit on Emerging Cyber Security Threats and Countermeasures last week. The report identifies the key data security threats to watch in the coming year and "Web 2.0" is on their list of the top 5 emerging security risks.

They are looking at threats to both consumers and the enterprise and by "threat" they mean people exploiting holes in these new applications - most likely for financial gain.

Part of the 2.0 problem is that these new apps are developing so fast. If you use Facebook, you know there's a new tool/widget/app available every day. Most users make the assumption that "someone" is checking this software out and watching out for us. Apple iPhone users were mad that you couldn't add third-party applications onto the phone (though people have now hacked the phone to do so, of course) but those kinds of cool 2.0 applications are what this report is addressing. And, of course, no one reads the "Terms of Agreement" before they install, do they?

The report's 5 big areas of threat are:

1. Web 2.0 and client-side attacks on social networking technologies, aimed at "stealing private data, hijacking Web transactions, executing phishing scams, and perpetrating corporate espionage;"


2. Targeted messaging attacks, aimed at individual users, largely for the purpose of stealing authentications and private data;


3. Botnets expanding the scope of their activities to the theft of information and increasing abuse of DMS servers;


4. Mobile convergence threats (includes vishing and SMiShing - bet you didn't even know they existed) plus denial of service attacks targeting your voice infrastructure


5. RFID attacks, tracking users via RFID devices, cloning, RF blocking