Friday, November 30, 2007

new reviews in cyberculture studies (december 2007)

each month, the resource center for cyberculture studies (RCCS) publishes a set of book reviews and author responses. books of the month for december 2007 include:

Color Monitors: The Black Face of Technology in America
Author: Martin Kevorkian
Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2006
Review 1: Cristina Lopez
Review 2: Paul Khalil Saucier
Author Response: Martin Kevorkian

Social Consequences of Internet Use: Access, Involvement, and Interaction
Authors: James E. Katz & Ronald E. Rice
Publisher: MIT Press, 2002
Review 1: Curtis Fogel
Review 2: Mara Hobler
Review 3: Asa Rosenberg
Author Response: Ronald E. Rice and James E. Katz

The Metaphysics of Capital
Author: Nicholas Ruiz III
Publisher: Intertheory Press, 2006
Review 1: David Christopher Jackson
Review 2: Kevin Douglas Kuswa

Web Campaigning
Authors: Kirsten A. Foot & Steven M. Schneider
Publisher: MIT Press, 2006
Review 1: Scott Dunn
Review 2: Gerhard Fuchs
Review 3: Lydia Perovic
Author Response: Kirsten Foot & Steven Schneider

enjoy. there's more where that came from.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

town hall meeting at gleeson library

today was gleeson library's "town hall meeting," an all-hands-on-deck meeting for USF librarians and library staff, and i was invited to be the speaker. the title and topic of my talk was "blogging."

i began by showing the NSUBA Library Blog, a blog for northeastern state university's broken arrow library (that i learned about via linda summers' poster session at last week's OK-ACRL). wordpress + images of the library and people in the library + brief posts that educate readers about the library's offerings = a smart library blog. i mentioned the magic of comments, the importance of tags, and the possibilities of group blogs.

then i temporarily moved away from libraries and talked about blogs across USF. i talked about father privett's blog, USF 2028, and encouraged more people to comment on it. i mentioned the USF journalism blog, an online forum to bring together past and present USF journalism students to discuss the morphing landscape of the beast we call journalism. i mentioned what a pleasure it is to read the blogs of my colleagues and friends - michael robertson and andrew goodwin. i think i turned to the librarians and said something like, "i don't know if you all want to know more about what your colleagues think and do but i get a real kick out of keeping up with michael and andrew through their blogs." i said this because a) it's true and b) i wanted them to imagine the ways that a gleeson group blog could be good not only for USF students and faculty but also, and i think more importantly, for USF librarians.

then i returned to the library, to get graphic, a past gleeson library book display that i have used countless times to illustrate the concept of harnessing collective intelligence. it was a treat to talk about a library book display to an audience that included the two librarians who designed it - kathy woo and debbie benrubi. i concluded the talk by saying that a display like get graphic requires real work, real time, and real resources. blogging about it, however, is sort of easy. snap some digital photographs of the display, snag some of the words used in the display's handouts, and include some hyperlinks to display-related library resources, and viola: a blog post.




excellent refreshments and conversations followed. thank you gleeson library.

Thursday, November 08, 2007

gone


gone gallery

mystery jets on USFtv

USFtv, USF's campus television station run for and by students, gets better and better each week. this week's episode features, among other things, an exclusive interview with two of the members of the band mystery jets. enjoy.

Sunday, November 04, 2007

talk in tulsa

today i'm in tulsa, oklahoma, where tomorrow i am a speaker at the ACRL-OK conference. my talk is called "where books meet facebook and other web 2.0 tales."

if things go as planned, i'll begin by using my old home page as an example of web 1.0 and my blog as an example of web 2.0.


i'll move on to discuss how the relative ease of use of web 2.0 applications has lowered the barriers for mass contributions to the web, highlighting the give and take nature of contemporary media with examples like yelp and wikipedia.

at this point, i'll stress that library conversations do not require web 2.0.


and i can't imagine not talking about what happens when librarians comment on student blogs.

update: here are some pics from this morning's talk.




update two: here is a flickr set from the conference and tulsa.

Thursday, November 01, 2007

how to make a chicken dinner

how do you make dinner out of a live chicken?

how do you kill it? does it really run around post-dead? how do you get all those feathers off? what kinds of spices do you add when cooking the chicken? and can you do this at home?


here's what you do:

1. right now, go to www.howtohomestead.org and check out the video;

2. this saturday night, november 3, from 10-12 pm, go to bernal bubbles and join others to talk about this video and the video series that it is part of. chicken paté will be served.

"making chicken dinner" is episode one of the How to Homestead Serial, a project "dedicated to cinematically distilling and disseminating rich folk wisdom and new fangled experiments in 21st century homesteading." the serial is written and directed by melinda stone, usf media studies professor, filmmaker, homesteader, and all around freak of nature.

see you there.