Gateway Tools in Online Social Technology: Online Scheduling

This is one part of our series introducing social technology tools that we think will be particularly useful for people in general, and especially for academics and researchers.

Mobile-izing the Library

Edward Vielmetti gave a preliminary presentation on the potential use of mobile devices and cell phones for providing library services and resources. Here are my notes from his presentation.

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worst possible interface
– screen is too small
– poor user interface
– keyboarding

Assumption that it is a waste of time to try to adapt because of barriers
Challenges fitting archaic systems into mobile footprint and tech

Bookstore side of the world driving this more than libraries
– Kindle
– revival of Star Trek franchise

Wind back to late 1940s
Vannevar Bush, Memex
trailblazing
production workstation
scientific production
would have taken a whole desk > physical size

What if the Memex was your mobile device?
What would it look like?

Collecting things, not just passively absorbing/reading
– pictures
– record audio
– communicating with others, the authors,
– public production
– with you everywhere
– your access to the World Brain is not just behind yr desk, but everywhere you are

What portions of a library fit in a mobile world?
– source of handbooks, manuals and field books
– ready reference
– ePocrates (drug info and PDR type of tool) (lots of info, frequently updated)
– ie World Radio Television Handbook >> embed this in your radio
– ie Star Trek tricorder (“I’m a doctor, not a librarian, Jim”) device with sensors being informed by books, embedded in the device
– embedded / embodied knowledge “baked into” the device
– fiction becomes interactive fiction
– UNIVERSAL DEVICE
– notion of traditional library activities meshing with mobile devices (ship’s computer)
– upload, download, query
– Hamlet as the right size device > pocketbook
– Google model? will you get back the right answer?
– is it a perfect memory? logging items, will they be there forever and not disappear
– can this advocate on your behalf with others?
– if the first question doesn’t get useful answer, can the device continue searching without your direction?

OK, fictional landscape covered.

To design good user interfaces, we have to think beyond what they can do right now.
Tech is moving fast enough that you can’t catch up, you need to lead
You’d be dissatisfied everytime
Tap into people’s imagination of what it could be

EG. Reading Kafka’s “The Trial” while waiting for jury duty.
– locate
– download
– reader software
– read
– does it fit on this screen?
– has it been digitized?
– rights to it? public domain? licenses negotiated on my behalf

“Any book ever written could fit HERE.”

What if my vision is bad?
– Audio
– text to speech
– ask someone for help to find and they will queue it for me

Planning and decisions developed by REAL patterns of use

How wonderful could it have been, could it be?

From the LIBRARY point of view:

Relationships:
– patron
– support library through taxes, donations
– subscribers
– friends of the library

Similar to Bookstores, but not always equivalent
– “buy NOW”

Metrics
– circulations, not sales
– measures of success?
– “renew all my books now” button >> on phone? why not?
– authentication barriers
– no real API
– would need undocumented system access

patron innovation frustrated by library system complexity

how to empower your patrons to solve your problems?
crowdsourcing yr endusers

customer relationship gives you clear success metrics
libraries lack clearcut success measure with mobile systems

maybe just “we got good press”

Library relations with their communities?
– who cares enough about you to try this out?

Mashup Power
– top ten most circulated books
– what’s hot this week
– mosaic of cover images
– outsider visions of potential

Is the book too big to fit inside the screen? Well, the cover pic will fit.
Browsing the stacks with your mobile device
iTouch interface for browsing

browse the cover art or table of contents for books on the 6th floor via your mobile device
NOTE: words are hard to read on the small screen

navigation tools get you into the building, but not through the building

VIDEO: Harlan Hatcher Graduate Labyrinth

Useful things a library could do:
– wayfinding information
– convert full page maps to handheld application
– race to the location > scavenger hunts in lib
– library as game

Keep it light, or you’ll be frustrated by the device
exit the practical every once in a while

ways people have built systems for mobile use
A. good behavior > some one else has already built reference info for device
– Library (Brown?) menu of relevant items for mobile menu
– discovery and sharing of tools created by your users
– risk: people sometimes remove apps they’ve made
– systems that are well adapted to mobile access
– Buses >> system down for 6 weeks at coldest time of year, politics
– parking spaces >> was not launched properly , system use resulted in access cut off access to the data
– partnerships, data sharing, who owns/supports data?
– intellectual property murky for much of this
B. Beyond technical issues of squeezing things onto small screen
– Kindle > does it fit in your pocket?
– small enough to carry
– large enough to see and type
– Memex
– reserve items via device >> texting (Like TrialX for CTs)
– reading something, want to fetch other item, “Buy Now” button as “Reserve Now”
– capture trail of what I’ve already read
– Reference collections
– what sorts of materials
– miserable user interface to e-ref sources
– logins, permissions, interfaces
– accessible formats
– Using SMS or Twitter for query/access
– How much paper would we save by putting bus schedules onto mobile devices?
C. Private wiki
– personal library
– papers
– articles
– chapters from books
– quotations
– snippets
– commonplace book

Devices: size comparison
contrast mobile devices with comptuers

What sort of things are in libraries that could be used on mobile devices?
(What are books?)
phonebooks
what happens to the newspaper when it isn’t paper anymore?
reading on the bus

what can you fit on a 3×5 card?
mobile device as business card
postcards
writing changing to fit in small spaces
– postcard poems
– twitter novels

How libraries interact with people who are not their typical patrons?
– children’s rooms, how to find all libraries with nice children’s rooms in geographic area
– locations/hours of local libraries while traveling
– have our patrons shifted with mobile population?

using library catalog on mobile device really tells you how bad your search itnerface is

Wish I had examples of wonderful interfaces, but I don’t right now. They are coming.

Different information needs, different information access

Questions that can be reframed if you assume that people have no computers

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Q&A

NYT article: mobile device to identify plants along a park path
birding

device add-ons
– pedometer
– GPS maps
–

reference
– people
– good set of friends to ask good questions
– chacha
– trialx
(take people who are too helpful with a grain of salt – they might have a hidden agenda)

Match making service: news stories sources match up with reporters writing on topic

More of Jane McGonigal’s Talk – the SLIDES

Yesterday I posted my notes from Jane’s talk. Here are the slides. Put the two together, and you should have some good stuff! Better yet – go see her. This was the best keynote I’ve seen at Enriching Scholarship in years.

Jane McGonigal at Enriching Scholarship 2009

I attended Enriching Scholarship. I couldn’t get a network connection in the room, so I did not livetweet, but instead am liveblogging. Here are my notes!

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JOHN KING INTRODUCTION

“We don’t look to the center for innovation but to the fringes, the schools and colleges.”

We need to get better at pulling innovation to the foreground.
Thin line between innovation (creating new ideas) and exploitation (using the new ideas you’ve just created)

Awards for innovation ($5,000)
– See University Record for details (I can’t find the link right now, but will add it later)
– Experimental cross-disciplinary ???? IPD: Wm Lovejoy & ???. SoAD
– Family Centered Experience Program: Arno Kumigai & Rachel Perlman
– Animal Diversity Web
– LectureTools (Engineering, Sampson)
– Virtual Microscopy

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JANE MCGONIGAL
director of Game Research & Development
Institute for the Future

ARG – alternate reality games

Reality is broken, why games make us happy and can help change the world

EPIC WIN: Why gaming is the future of learning
best case scenario outcome for teachers, students educators researchers
connect gaming with everyday work

slides@avantgame.com

SUPERSTRUCTING
a new way of working together at extreme scales…

no skills, simulations

a gamers way of thinking, learning, working
don’t need a literal game to take place

“Gameful way of working” >>> ssuperstructing

Collective intelligence, mass collaboration
Wisdom of crowds
Wikinomics / Tapscott, Williams

COLLABORATE OR PERISH!!!!!!! (Wikinomics)

Superstructing supported by game platforms and mechanics

We need to steal MMP strategies and idaes

I am Making the Future (IFTF.org)

predicting the future – early mover advantage, and then you are stuck with what you saw
want to make the future, pick the one you want, get tools and communities ready

become really skilled at tech, ideas, ways of working

Game Use:
72% heads of household
96% kids
78% employers
40% women
average 35 years old
1/4 gamers over the age of 50
68 billion dollar industry
entire generation of hardcare gamers spending >20 hrs a week

** participation bandwidth
what do we do with it?
shared problem space
doing good work
real world change

****** looking back at least twice as far as we want to look forward *********

Goal:
Nobel prize for gaming

LOOK BACK
look back at nobel prize winners
Einstein: Games are the most elevated form of investigation (apocryphal)
reverse engineer concepet >> what did he mean
Einstein was an avid chess player
two people explore tightly bounded problem space
– spatial
– strategic
– psychological
community of chess players contribute to this problem space
repeat play, new understanding and layers
not just the center of the problem that gets worked on
outlier strategies, periphery
innovate
WHY: Clear boundaries that focus our attention on a shared problem, community of players, time to play, relatively risk free, adopt unusual strategies

Games have gotten bigger
MMO Map Eve Online space (preetty)
immersion

SIGNALS process
disruptive
cues that show something is changing
look for clusters
individual signal that catches on, transforms the present

3 million game designers, develpers, hackers

extreme scale of processing >> superstructing

graffitti: I’m not good at life
gamers are good at games
World of Warcraft >>> important signal
feedback, collaboration, people
important work to do
“the greatest IV productivity drip ever created” (intravenous)
immersive, immersed in shared mythology
This feels better than reality

Why MMOs beat reality??
– more exciting work to do (fate of the world depends on it)
– does the fate of the world hang in the balance of school & job?
– better feedback, more FIERO (pride when you overcome an obstacle that was hard) (arm pump + cheer = FIERO)
– challenge + you show to others that you perform and overcome
– “running through the library … FIERO”
– stronger social fabric – more likely to return request for engagement, reciprocity
– connected by story, believe in same values >> you don’t see people turn down requests to collaborate
– constant awe, wonder, and curiosity >>> very visible to self and others
– real world is not constructed to allow us to leave our mark on it

CogSci looks at vagus nerve – choked up feeling when you get choked up, emotionally. Is story amazing enough, engaging enough. Piloerection >> goosebumps and chills. Is this in our everyday learning environment. These inspire us to do more.

Signals that connect:
Crowdsourcing / Tribes (Jeff Howe, Seth Godin)
self organizing
mass collaboration

EXTREME SCALE COLLABORATION
1. satisfying work to do
2. experience of being good at something (status motivates more than money or things)
3. time with people we like (social feedback creates positive feedback loop)
4. the chance to be part of something bigger than ourselves
(15 minutes of noble contribution beats 15 minutes of fame)

MMOs >> happiness engines

XBox Live image
ambient sense of who else is around >> who is doing what of your friends
stats/metrics
playfire.com
desktop, iPhone >> info even when you are not playing

Gamers love ambient collaboration
“Life is not as well designed as games”

Citizen Logistics (Grandcrew)
make life more like a team activity
you get points for making people’s dreams come true
what times you’re available to do missions for other people
trust level
call to action
desire for RL to give people the same sense of purpose as game life

Here Comes Everybody – Clay Shirky
organizational theory

Harnessing social surplus
cognitive resources (hours)
+
cognitive diversity (players)
+
engagement instensity (heart)

measurements
Wikipedia – 100 million mental hours
5-6 yrs
equals 5 days of World of Warcraft gameplay
WoWWiki second biggest wiki in the world
scaffolding an extreme knowledge culture

“The purpose of all video games is to train a player to work harder while still enjoying it…” Nick Yee
“how seductive and concealed the work treadmill can be”
how can we harness this for something bigger and better?

Herodotus –
where dice game from, abt 2500 yrs ago?
moral truths we learn from history.
Lidia undergoing famine
dice invented to give people something to do
eat one day, dice the next (during famine)
playing games together to help culture to survive, survive a challenge)

Edward Castanova >> global mass exodus to virtual worlds and gaming enironments

starving for meaningful work, meaningful social connection

Games that are feeding hunger for real work
– FOLDED – protein folding (crowdsourcing) UWash
– GalaxyZoo: John Hopkins + Oxford
– analyze galaxies
– 4 peer-reviewed scientific papers and 4 more in progress
– Voowerp mystery > new solar object discovery

Spore – Will Wright
universe simulator
SEED Magazine interview
“learning to be good at a game makes you good at changing the world
reinvent your environment
global awareness and looking longterm
100 or 200 year horizons.
bad stuff happening now is result of short term thinking”

Scientific Lab
SIGNTIFIC LAB
scenarios for the future
wiki
CubeSats, relatively cheap ($30,000 to launch, hopefully $100 in next ten years)
positive imagination card / dark imagination card
microforecasting platform (140 characters like twitter)
CARDS:
momentum
antagonism
adaptation
investigation
FORECASTING PROFILE
Penguicon small but strange ideas SF con for open source programmers
non-trival problems

space medicine
solar prosperity
space sourcing
challenging or collaborative

World Without Oil
– immersive research platform
– strategies for dealing with disruption
– health without oil
– nascar without oil (zoom zoom)

Black Swans
the future will be full of really big disruptions that we can’t imagine
most really are imaginged by someone, but no one was listening
playing forecasting game forces us to build calluses for our own real life
mPathy Test >> Jane McGonigal

SUPERSTRUCT
do the thing you’re studying to get the real idea

welcome to the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS)
Assumption: Humans have 23 years to go
survival horizon
how would you extend the survival horizon
– quarantine
– ravenous
– power struggle
– outlaw planet (griefers)
– generation exile

GameDemic > stay home, play more, stay healthy
social distancing vs. social isolation / how to stay connected

Top Secret Dance Off

Micheala Robiss

survivability metrics
the higher our numbers get the better our future will be
your personal survivability score
collaboration badges
age 7-87
90 countries, 6 continents
7000 forecasters
1000 stories
500 discussion forum topics
500 collabroative superstructures

Tara Hunt (social networks)
Educycle freecycle
crowdsources p2p education online so anyone can teach someone somewhere something

Warren Ellis >> graphic novelist
strange structs
insects4food >> peak protein scenario

Tim Kring >>
unexpected Heroes
lifeliners
tech-savvy humantiarisn
bootstrap hightech solutions to basic needs

Chris DiBona
open source @ google
Pandora Award
Society for the creative breaking of shit
give super empowered angry individuals something constructive to do
harness the power of griefers, hackers and terrorists for good

Together we can reinvent the way the world works

Unexpected missions
which superthreat would you choose?

choose a group
play for 15 minutes

SEHIs – first tiem I feel capable of making a difference (Andrew)
super-empowered hopeful individuals
\new way of working together at extreme scales

Entering an era of EXTREME LEARNING
awe-inspiring questions and problems
concrete challenges
competitive collaboration
spurts

Everyone is an SEHI
classroom and campus

SKILL SETS:
evolvability
extreme scale
ambient collaboration
reverse scarcity
adaptive emotions
amplified optimism
playtests

think of superpowers, not lessons
epic achievement, badge of honor
collective fiero – show it off, meaningful collective outcome
unexpected extension if you could get 1000 people to do one thing, what would it be? how would it add up?
DIY X prize
awe-inspiring humanity elevating missiongyour field cd plausible achieve in next decade?
what breakthough wd deserve $25million prize?

iGoogle Tabs, Continued: Health Sciences Libraries

In an earlier blogpost about iGoogle, I promised to share links to some of the special tabs I created as examples for my class. I am going to put each one in its own post so that if people add tools or make changes they want to share with others, they can post their links to the update on the original post and we can all benefit!

One of my colleagues here, Whitney Townsend, is the person who started this tab. Most of what’s in it is her work. I need to give her full kudos for being the person who got this whole idea started! She is brilliant, creative, and hard-working. It is an honor and a pleasure to work with her.

What I did was to change the theme, add a new books feed for our library, add in one of our blogs, a little personalization to go with our marketing. There are more blogs from our HSL librarians here, but I don’t know them all. I’d love to blend a stream from all of them, in addition to a separate one for our news stream. This is an example of using the iGoogle tabs as another way to promote the other good work you are doing. Anything that generates an RSS feed can be put in the tab. I am sure we will be revising this again, and this is purely my own personal attempt — this is not yet up to specs for being pushed out as an institutional resources.

There are things I would like to see added. Our library has done a number of videos and screencasting tutorials. I want to see those put in a YouTube channel so we can add a video gadget to the tab. We have podcasts and presentations that are in iTunes, but again, to get them into the iGoogle gadget, we would need them to be in a YouTube channel. So, pushing that angle a bit. For this tab, we included just RSS feeds from just a few of our most popular journals. These are ideas, but I bet we could look at that more rigorously and refine that part. I have put custom PubMed searches in other tabs. Here, I would like to see a really good search focusing on our institutions authors.

We’ve been blessed with a really talented grad student who is working with us — Hung Truong. He has helped make gadgets for both Facebook and iGoogle. One idea he is working on right now is a Plain Language medical jargon translation tool. What we have here is an alpha version, very rough, but even so still useful enough that I am utterly delighted. You will hear more about that through official channels when we have a final version available. I can hardly wait! It is going to be an amazing tool. Watch for it!

Click here: UM Health Sciences Libraries iGoogle Tab