I’m lucky enough to be speak­ing at next month’s Online Infor­ma­tion 2008 con­fer­ence in Lon­don, where I’ll be speak­ing about new media chan­nels for libraries (in other words, get­ting your con­tent out in front of users where they already are). I’m in the Brave New World for Libraries and Pub­lish­ers track on day one, but there are many ses­sions at this media con­fer­ence that should be of inter­est to librar­i­ans. I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing ses­sions in the Order Out of Chaos: Cre­at­ing Struc­ture in Our Uni­verse and Infor­ma­tion Pro­fes­sion­als Sur­viv­ing and Thriv­ing in the New Age, among oth­ers. I’ll also be mod­er­at­ing the Knowl­edge Struc­tur­ing in a Seman­tic World ses­sion on day two.

The con­fer­ence orga­niz­ers have just posted a pod­cast inter­view with me, which is just one in a series with some of the speak­ers. They’ve orga­nized quite a line-up of pre­sen­ters, start­ing with con­fer­ence opener Clay Shirky (hear his inter­view here). If you’ve never heard Clay speak, I encour­age you to take advan­tage of this oppor­tu­nity. I guar­an­tee you won’t regret it.

Please feel free to sub­mit ques­tions ahead of time, and if you’re attend­ing, please intro­duce your­self. Also, I’m still look­ing for exam­ples of libraries tak­ing advan­tage of RSS to dis­play their con­tent on exter­nal sites. If you know of any, please leave me a com­ment here.

Tags: onlineinfo08, podcast

A reminder that today is National Gam­ing Day @ your library. All types of games are included, and not just for teens, plus 150 libraries par­tic­i­pat­ing in videogame tour­na­ments (you can watch one of the brack­ets online to find out who wins!). The tag for track­ing after­wards is ngd2008.

There are more than 600 libraries on the map, and I’m sure there are more we don’t know about. It warms my heart.

Have fun everyone!

Tags: gaming in libraries, ngd2008

Notes from John Palfrey’s talk for the MacArthur Foun­da­tion at Google Chicago

point of the book Born Dig­i­tal was to bust some of the myths and look at dif­fer­ences in behav­ior between dig­i­tal natives and peo­ple like their grandparents

shouldn’t treat every­body the same way just because they have the same tech­nol­ogy — may not use it the same way
how they define this spe­cific group of kids (not all mil­len­ni­als) — born after 1980, access to the tech­nol­ogy (only 1 bil­lion peo­ple), skills to use it

5 char­ac­ter­is­tics

1. “I blog there­fore I am“
express their iden­tity online and offline — they don’t dis­tin­guish between the two
avatars as another ver­sion of iden­tity
one dif­fer­ence is “sub­scribe to *me*”

2. mul­ti­taskers
a lot of debate over mul­ti­task­ing and what it is, but they’re doing mul­ti­ple things at once
exam­ple of game in which boys tried to main­tain as many IM con­ver­sa­tions with as many girls as they could at once

3. con­sumers to cre­ators
inter­act with dig­i­tal for­mat — seems self-evident, but pre­sump­tion is imme­di­ate access because dig­i­tal (eg, dig­i­tal cam­era vs a dis­pos­able one); movie the­ater vs YouTube, print vs search­able text
pre­sump­tion of media in dig­i­tal form and that it’s social and shared

held a con­test to design the logo for “Dig­i­tal Natives” project at Har­vard Law School — got 136 entries (32 from the kid who won), just for the glory (no prize)

4. mash up dif­fer­ent media, putting dif­fer­ent forms of media together

comes down to a series of tech­nolo­gies — RSS, Google Docs, light­weight col­lab­o­ra­tive tools

5. an inter­na­tional per­spec­tive
“couch­surf­ing” Google Maps mashup — 89,000 friend­ships created

(I think these were the five char­ac­ter­is­tics, but I wasn’t pay­ing atten­tion to num­ber­ing until later)

Issues: Secu­rity

secu­rity — Inter­net Safety Tech­ni­cal Task Force (Texas is the only state not par­tic­i­pat­ing in this!)
“stranger dan­ger” is num­ber one fear
data shows kids are not any less safe than they were 10 years ago (fewer inci­dents), although some kids do meet their attack­ers online (it’s become a pub­lic park in some ways)

bul­ly­ing is borne out by the data, though — clearly an increase in this, although maybe it’s more that adults can see it now, as opposed to in the past (it’s asyn­chro­nous and per­sis­tent now)

social net­works:
– unin­tended audi­ence
– replic­a­bil­ity
– per­sis­tence
– search­a­bil­ity
– unin­ten­tional contributions

adults on dat­ing sites are just at bad as post­ing too much per­sonal infor­ma­tion as kids are on myspace, etc.

his big fear now is “dig­i­tal dossiers,” which start as early as sonograms

side­bar: what is a book? why take dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion about dig­i­tal behav­ior and put it in print?
didn’t write the book for kids, because they won’t read it
the book started as research posted in Base­camp
put chap­ters on a wiki

Issues: Pri­vacy

kids like 3–5 minute videos, so this sum­mer they gave some money to a few interns and had them remake each chap­ter into a video that they then put on YouTube
showed the video on “dig­i­tal dossiers”

Issues: Intel­lec­tual Property

copy­right piracy — notion of “stick­ing it to the man” still an excuse
kids that did get music from iTunes used gift cer­tifi­cates (often from par­ents), so they were actu­ally kind of down­load­ing it the same way — for free

remix issues — enor­mous con­fu­sion on this score
once a kid sees the artist, or once they become a cre­ator, they start to think dif­fer­ently about piracy
but there’s an enor­mous range of under­stand­ing about this
played the video of the piracy chapter

Issues: Cred­i­bil­ity

mis­in­for­ma­tion, cheat­ing, hid­den influ­encers, blogs, wikipedia
gen­er­ally, kids don’t go to the library unless forced to go there
“I went to the library on a field trip once“
Har­vard libraries are packed but with kids using lap­tops, not books

infor­ma­tion over­load — is it real? can you get addicted to this stuff?
thinks we have to take seri­ously the idea that you need fil­ter­ing tools for all of this

Oppor­tu­ni­ties

there are cor­re­spond­ing ben­e­fits and oppor­tu­ni­ties in each of these prob­lem areas
cre­ativ­ity, media lit­er­acy, social pro­duc­tion, semi­otic democracy

a world where peo­ple can remix cul­ture and his­tory — it’s much more pow­er­ful out­side the US but still impor­tant for democ­racy here

knowl­edge cre­ation, equity/democratic, participatory

empow­er­ing indi­vid­u­als, access to infor­ma­tion, infor­ma­tion creation

digitalnative.org
join the Face­book group

ended book on the chap­ter on activism — some young peo­ple are very involved with using these skills and tools to change the world and par­tic­i­pate
Obama cam­paign as an example

have to choose how we embrace these things while fight­ing the worst of them

Ques­tions

- what was the cut­off point for the upper age of kids since those born in 1980 would be in grad­u­ate school now
– older kids were actu­ally more sophis­ti­cated and thought­ful about issues like pri­vacy, show­ing that kids do learn; big­ger con­cern might be the gap in the under­stand­ing of par­ents and teachers

- par­ents who didn’t go to col­lege have less expe­ri­ence in this area for edu­cat­ing kids about this stuff or show­ing them how to be cre­ative with these tools
if this is a cru­cial life skill, then we need to rethink this

- atti­tudes from the data about news?
– they asked a lot of ques­tions, and kids don’t read the NYT cover to cover or watch the evening news (this is a big gen­er­a­tional dif­fer­ence — every­body doesn’t get the same truth any­more); they graze for head­lines (which might be through RSS, a Face­book feed, on a mobile device, etc.) — get­ting lots and lots of facts; a smaller num­ber of them would “deep dive” and click on the link; fewer still engaged in a feed­back cycle (post it, cri­tique it, etc.); if the net effect is that we have every­body get­ting a shal­low ver­sion of the news & the most sophis­ti­cated ones are doing the most with it (tri­an­gu­lat­ing data, etc.), then that’s prob­lem­atic; asked if any­one has ever edited a Wikipedia page — only a few had ever done edits, and they were usu­ally to fix typos — didn’t find this recre­ation of the knowl­edge store

- did your research show what might hap­pen when dig­i­tal natives become old enough to change our IP law, fair use for exam­ple?
– copy­right law used to mat­ter only to map mak­ers, etc., but now it mat­ters to every­one; long way from being changed

Tags: born digital, digital dossiers, digital natives, john palfrey, liveblog, privacy

I love that my bank is mak­ing it eas­ier for me to do busi­ness with them by no longer requir­ing me to put deposits in envelopes. I can just imag­ine the com­mit­tee meet­ings for this one:

• But we’ve never done that before.
• But it will mean more work for our staff.
• But we don’t know what crazy thing might happen.
• And on and on

This makes my user expe­ri­ence eas­ier and more con­ve­nient, which I really appre­ci­ate. And of course, those who still want to use envelopes can do so.

What small things can your library do to make your ser­vices (both in your build­ing and online) eas­ier and more con­ve­nient for your users?

Tags: banks, user centered

• I thought I had blogged about National Gam­ing Day @ your library, but amaz­ingly I haven’t — sorry about that. This is a national event coör­di­nated by ALA on Novem­ber 15 that cel­e­brates the oppor­tu­ni­ties libraries offer for play between diverse groups of peo­ple in a safe, non-commercialized envi­ron­ment. To help pro­mote this event, Has­bro is send­ing a copy of the game Pic­tureka! to every pub­lic library in the U.S. (thanks, Has­bro!). The ship­ments have gone out so if you’re at a PL, you should auto­mat­i­cally receive your game in the next week or so. Sug­ges­tions for how to use the game (and oth­ers) are avail­able on ALA’s Games and Gam­ing Resources wiki, and Scott Nichol­son has made a great video show­ing how to play the game, which also sug­gests other NGD activ­i­ties, too.

  In addi­tion, Wiz­ards of the Coast donated two gam­ing kits to libraries that signed up to receive them (sorry, but that offer expired last week), so I want to thank them, too. It’s *very* easy to par­tic­i­pate in National Gam­ing Day, so I hope to see your library on the map. If it’s too late for you to do some­thing this year, you can start plan­ning now for next year’s event on Novem­ber 14, 2009.
   

• The ALA Tech­Source Gam­ing, Learn­ing, and Libraries Sym­po­sium ends today, and the tag is GLLS2008 so you can track it on sites like Flickr and Twit­ter. What a great group this has been. Thank you to every­one who came — you all rock! We’ll be col­lect­ing slides from pre­sen­ters and post­ing them online, along with what­ever audio we could cap­ture (not pos­si­ble in some cases). Give us a few weeks to get all of this posted, but watch the ALA Tech­source blog for more info.
   
• I also want to high­light the 6th Annual Chi TAG con­fer­ence for folks in the Chicagoland region. This is “the only toy and game fair open to the pub­lic,” and it will take place on Novem­ber 22–23 (Saturday-Sunday) at Navy Pier. The show’s founder, Mary Couzin, is an amaz­ing per­son, and she’s offer­ing librar­i­ans (and edu­ca­tors) free admis­sion to the event. (There’s also a dis­count park­ing coupon you can print out from the site.) This is dif­fer­ent from a trade show, as it’s a chance to lit­er­ally sit in the aisles and play boardgames all day. ALA will have a booth there, but I’d be going any­way just to see all of the dif­fer­ent games. If you’re in the area, this event is going to be a blast, so come join us!

Tags: chitag, gaming in libraries, glls2008, hasbro, ngd2008