Rebecca Nesson, speaking via Skype and appearing before us as her avatar in Second Life, offered her experiences as a co-instructor of Harvard Law School’s CyberOne, a course being held jointly in a meatspace classroom and in Second Life, and open to students via Harvard Law, the Harvard Extension School, and to the public that [...]

Posted November 15, 2006 by Casey
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: academia, cyberone, distance learning, gaming, harvard law, nercomp, online courseware, rebecca nesson, second life, social software, SSTL2006. 2 Comments.

They don’t want to engage in chat with their professors in the classroom space, they want to chat with other students in their own space.
— from Eric Gordon’s presentation this morning.
Hey, isn’t that the lesson that smart folks have been offering for a while now: “Nobody cares about you or your site. Really.” How [...]

Posted November 14, 2006 by Casey
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: academia, academic discourse, chat, im, nercomp, social software, SSTL2006, students. One Comment.

Our CIO is asking whether or not Plymouth should get involved with blogs. Not to be overly academic, but I think we should define our terms.

Despite all the talk, “blogs” are a content agnostic technology being used to support all manner of online activities.

What you’re really asking is instead: what kind of content do we want to put online, and who do we want to let do it?

Posted September 27, 2006 by Casey
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: academia, academic blogs, blogging, blogs, class blogs, examples, faculty blogs, fear, plymouth state university, policy, psu, student blogs. 6 Comments.

Lichen pointed me to this Librarian’s Guide to Etiquette post about new technologies:
Keep up to date with new technologies that you can co-opt for library use. So what if no one will ever listen to the pod casts of your bibliographic instruction lectures, subscribe to the RSS feeds from your library’s blog, send your reference [...]

Posted January 30, 2006 by Casey
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information. Tags: academia, durable links, facebook, future libraries, information behavior, internet and academia, internet and society, libraries, library, myspace, social internet, social software. 14 Comments.

Way back in April 1997, Jakob Nielsen tried to educate us on Zipf Distributions and the power law, and their relationship to the web. This is where discussions of the Chris Anderson’s Long Tail start, but the emphasis is on the whole picture, not just the many economic opportunities at the end of the tail.

Here’s [...]

Posted November 1, 2005 by Casey
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: academia, academic library, google, google economy, googling, group think, jakob nielsen, libraries, library, lowest common denominator, networked information, popularity, quality, research, search engines, search rankings, search result rankings, search results, wikipedia. One Comment.