Meeting Minutes, November 5, 2008
Nov 14th, 2008 by Chulin Meng
Minutes
Emerging Technologies Committee
November 5, 2008
Present: Bob Seal, Susan Malisch, Jane Currie, Fred Barnhart, Leslie Haas, Susan Wardzala, Chulin Meng, Ewa Laska.
I. Information sharing session. The following items were brought to the attention of the ETC for sharing and discussion:
A. Haas: delicious.com, a site devoted to social bookmarking in which one can manage favorite web sites, provide tagging, and share interests with others.
B. Barnhart: an article about how libraries are utilizing FaceBook to reach out to users. He will post to the ETC blog. The citation is Jennifer L. Behrens, About Facebook: Change at the social-networking juggernaut creates new opportunities for law library outreach, 12, No. 6, AALL Spectrum, 14-17 (April 2008).
C. Laska: Komando.com, the website of the Kim Komando Radio Show, a potpourri of information on general topics of interest. Both educational and fun.
D. Laska: TED.com, an educational site which provides hundreds of videos of “inspired talks by the world’s greatest thinkers.” Includes library and technology topics and many others. TED = Technology, Entertainment, Design.
E. Malisch: TechConnect, the site created by ITS which offers a “list of free or discounted software and hardware.” Much of the software listed is aimed at increasing productivity. www.luc.edu/its/techconnect
F. Seal: An article on Cloud Computing from the Chronicle of Higher Education (online edition, October 30, 2008). The group had a brief discussion of the concept and its possibilities for the future, though the jury is still out on the latter.
G. Malisch: a thought-provoking YouTube video: “A Vision of Students Today” by Michael Wesch, an anthropologist at Kansas State University, and his students: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o. Wesch also did “Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us,” a video already familiar to many of us but worth watching again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE. See also the video of his presentation (55 minutes) at the Library of Congress in which he takes a cultural anthropological look at YouTube and, more generally, at “new media”: http://www.nmc.org/blog/keene-haywood/michael-weschs-youtube-presentation-library-congress
H. Wardzala: Wordle.net, a Microsoft Live site that lets one create on-the-fly graphical representations of any group of words. An example is http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/294673/Obama%27s_Victory_Speech%2C_11-4-08
I. Wardzala: Photosynth.com, a site that lets you create a 3-D image of a room, an object, a scene, etc. using a group of photos taken of the subject. Very cool.
J. Malisch: Doodle (mentioned on TechConnect), a scheduling program that, among other things, allows you to set up meetings with people at several institutions.
II. “The 23 Things.” Susan Wardzala and Chulin Meng debuted the University Libraries’ version of the online Web 2.0 tutorial which introduces the learner to the many of the social networking tools now available. The program will be introduced to the library staff on November 20 at the all-staff meeting. Susan and Chulin will send a sheet to staff after that meeting on “how to get started” and “ten ways to find time for the 23 things.”
The next ETC meeting will be scheduled for early December.