Step 23 - the final frontier

I am Very Happy to have reached the last step. The 23 Things program was difficult to fit into my workload. I was only able to do it by putting aside one hour a week each week since the program started in August and making sure I did nothing else for that hour. Some weeks I finished a step on the program in that hour and in other weeks I didn't and it had to be carried over to the next week. The other strategy I used to be able to get through the 23 steps was to ask some of my colleagues to put aside the same hour so that in fact we were tackling it together, even though we were out of sync in which step we were on it was the encouragement of my colleagues that stopped me from giving up. I would recommend that people have a 23 Things buddy or buddies that they do the program with.

As for what I learned, I was forced to explore new softwares and parts of the the web that I had not looked at before. This was a good thing. Having grown up, done all my schooling and my undergraduate degree before computers, has meant that I am naturally resistant to using computers and the web and unless I am told to do a program like 23 Things I will not go out and explore these new things on the web.

I can see the many Library applications for the 23 Things programs: like Meebo for communicating with the students, Blogs for individual units informing academic staff and students of tailored services for their study. Flickr & YuoTube to put up images of changes to the Library as with the Learning Commons project at Footscray Park and a VU Library presence on MySpace to promote our services where the students are spending time on the web.

Step 22 - Web based Communication Tools

I was so close to finishing the 23 Things program after yesterdays
steps 19 & 20 that today I'm pushing on to do steps 21 (done) and
22 (here it is) and give my feedback for step 23. I already use Skype at
home to communicate with my Dad in France and my brother in Queensland
and I must say it is a fantastic way to talk to and see people that I
may not meet in person for years. For Step 22 I thought I'd have a go
at Google Talk as I've seen Meebo in action on the VU Law Infolink page. I've now installed the Google Talk gadget on my blog and have added a colleague, Lou Connell, to the contacts, and have been able to 'chat' with her, even though she is in the next office. As with Skype & Meebo, this is a great way to interact with students, without them having to come into the Library and maybe without us having to leave home!
I'm looking forward to seeing these communication tools incorporated into our Information Service in the near future.

Podcasts

I love podcasts, whether I'm driving long distances in the car or just walking to work, I use podcasts to catch up with my favourite radio shows. I sometimes use the podcast directories to find podcasts in particular areas but mostly I go directly to the webpage of the producer of the podcasts like NPR in the US at: http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_directory.php
This is a fantastic resource of podcasts in all subject areas. I particularly like the news analysis and arts podcasts but people have told me that the NPR car buff podcasts are the best! For local content I use the ABC webpage to get the podcasts of my shows, the Night Air: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/nightair/default.htm
and Life Matters: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lifematters/

At VU I can see the application of podcasts for lectures.

Wiki & YouTube

Having completed the previous 18 steps, today I tackled steps 19 & 20 of the 23 Things program. Getting close to the end now!

WIKIS
I use wikis in my day-to-day work not only Wikipedia but I have participated in the wikis that the AEHD Faculty has created for 1st Year students and another temporary one for drafting the Faculty's 'Sustainability Guidelines'. Wikis have a big future in Academic life, whether it's to store collective knowledge or get quick feedback on an issue, they are a great way to communicate with the students and have applications for group assignment work as well. It was quick & easy to resize my cat, Frida's photo, and add it with some text to the Library Pet's page wiki.


YouTube
This year in the Knowing & Knowledge unit for first year students in the AEHD Faculty
I taught them in the Library tutorials how to embed TV News & YouTube videos into powerpoint. To do this I first had to teach myself. This made the 23 Things YouTube task quite a simple one for me. YouTube's widespread popularity an ease of use makes it an ideal forum for the Library to post short 'How to' videos on its services and
to promote changes to the Library. We could use YouTube video postings over the course of the Learning Commons building project at Footscray Park to keep our clients up-to-date with progress.

Cats in the Kitchen on a cold day.

Is this too many cats in one kitchen?

Delicious and Web 2.0

After a week off due to my annual leave, this week I tackled Delicious.
It was quite quick and easy to do. I was able to create a list of bookmarks on a topic that a student asked me about yesterday (it was Wellbeing) and I could email the Delicious list link to that student. While the Delicious list does not have the layout or parts of our Infolinks pages it's a good way to quickly put a list together for an assignment or as in this case an individual Reference query.

I read the Web 2.0, Encore, Library 2.0 and EBSCO 2.0 articles and feel I have a better understanding of the changes to Libraries that are here now and coming in the future.

iGoogle

This week I had a go at iGoogle.
It was a very quick and easy way to
create a customised Google homepage for my PC plus
create a tab page around one of my interests, film.
I was able to find and add the gadgets I needed.
I'll definitely adopt this new application as it is one that
will save me some time and improve the way I work.

Google Books and Google Scholar

I had a look at Google Books. It's an easy and fun application to use.
Particularly good for searching for works that are out of copyright.
I was able to browse through classic texts by ancient Greek writers
such as Plato, Homer and Zeno. Great for researchers and students alike.

I use Google Scholar a lot in my work. It is great to be able to set the 'Scholar Preferences'
so that my searches pick up books in the VU Library Catalogue and direct links to articles in full-text from our subscribed databases. It is fascinating to see how quickly Google Scholar has become essential to research since its launch in 2004. I hope that in conjunction with the rise of institutional eprint repositories Google Scholar wll be able to break the costly hold that publishers like Elsevier have over Universities. VU Library currently pays over $100,000 per year for the citation tracking products Scopus and Web of Science, and yet when I search a free product like Google Scholar for citations I get better results. Go figure...

Google Docs

I've logged into Google Docs and uploaded a document into my account. I've shared this document with two of my colleagues. The portability of Google Docs is a great thing. I'm doing all this work out at the Info Desk between clients. I don't have to be at my desk to collaborate with others on a document. In fact I could be at home right now!
In the Knowing and Knowledge unit, AXF1001, they introduced the students to another online collaborative, free software called Zoho. There is even an animated tutorial for the students about Zoho that you can find from the Library Webpage under the 'Web 2.0 toolbox' link. Here's the Zoho tute URL http://intranet.vu.edu.au/AEHD/web2_usersite/tutorial2.asp
Zoho won a court case against Microsoft to be able to use the same icons on Zoho so it is even more familiar to those of use raised on Microsoft products. I think Google and small , entrepreneurial web companies like Zoho will eventually break Microsoft's hold on the market.
This will be a good thing as it will allow Web 2.0 innovations to be introduced and developed much more quickly and hopefully they will be low cost or free to use, benefiting Universities like VU and cash-strapped students.

Google Maps

Google maps is great. I can get directions of how to travel from place to place and I could see my house in great detail from above and see the front of the house on 'street view'. However it does cross my mind that the 'Big Brother' George Orwell described in his book, 1984, has happened by stealth without us knowing or asking for it. This type of technology is not always benign, as the article below shows:

German police investigate serial rabbit killings - 9 July 2008

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008. All rights reserved

Some 40 rabbits have been beheaded and drained of blood in northern Germany, prompting a police inquiry

Fear is driving rabbit owners in Germany to lock up their pets at night after a spate of brutal bunny slayings in which pets have been beheaded and drained of blood.

More than 40 rabbits have been killed in the country's Ruhr district since late last summer, prompting police in the Dortmund area to set up a special task force to find the culprit.

There has been speculation that satanists could be responsible because many of the way the rabbits have been killed.

Since April, five officers in the small town of Witten have been investigating the case, according to Spiegel Online.

The task force is looking into the possibility that the rabbits were being targeted using the online mapping programme Google Earth.

The officers have interviewed more than 300 people but have so far found nothing, the website reported.

Initially there were only a few isolated killings, but this spring the number of incidents picked up with four fatal attacks in May.

Animal rights groups in the region have put up a reward of €2,500 (£2,000) for information leading to the arrest of the killer.

My Space and Facebook

I had a look at Myspace and Facebook for the first time today. Myspace seemed okay, the pages used by Libraries and Librarians were informative but a bit dull and I would wonder how useful they are in terms of the time spent on them. Some had an 'Ask a Librarian' box which might make our younger clients more comfortable when they want to send in a query.

I created a Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1439345212
and added a few friends. As with Myspace, you'd have to be quite careful using this as a medium to talk to clients in a professional capacity. Myspace and Facebook seem to be very informal spaces both in their structure and the language used on them. I'd question how useful it would be for individual Librarians to have Facebook pages. However I thought the widgits that I could add from different information sources, ie JSTOR, Libraries Aust & Deakin Uni were a particularly good way of getting our 'wares' out where the students are spending time.
The Deakin Library search widgit was clear and easy to use.

Digg

I'm now on Digg. It sure makes it easy to find the popular sites on the web.

Thieves in it for big Monet
Herald Sun. Melbourne, Vic.: Sep 13, 2006. pg. 60

TOGETHER, they would make up a stunning gallery: 167 Renoirs, 166 Rembrandts, 175 Warhols and more than 200 works by Dali.
Experts have a world tally of 170,000 important pieces of missing art -- burgled from private homes, snatched from museum walls or pilfered from storerooms.
Only a fraction is ever found: Interpol puts the figure at 10 per cent. Yet well-known masterpieces such as Edvard Munch's The Scream and Madonna, recovered this month in Norway, turn up more often, partly because of intense police work to find them and partly because they are so tough to sell.
Criminals sometimes mastermind a spectacular burglary, then discover nobody will touch a work of art so famous any buyer would have to hide it from view, says Karl-Heinz Kind, a specialist officer on art theft at Interpol.
Thieves may demand a ransom, or try to sell works at a fraction of their worth. This is when some thieves trip up: the Italian house painter who stole the Mona Lisa in a famous 1911 heist was caught two years later when he tried to sell it.
After a robbery, "the second step is . . . to make money out of it", Kind says. "And that's the much more difficult part and I think very often underestimated by the thief."
But for lesser treasures, the market is lucrative and vast. The FBI estimates the market for stolen art at $7.8 billion annually.
The Art Loss Register, which maintains the world's largest database on the subject, has tallied 170,000 pieces of stolen, missing and looted art and valuables, staff member Antonia Kimbell says.
Interpol has about 30,000 items on its database.
In museums, many thefts occur in storerooms and sometimes go unnoticed for years until museums do inventory.
Then there are the dramatic raids, such as the 1986 assault on the National Gallery of Victoria when the "Australian Cultural Terrorists" stole Picasso's Weeping Woman from the wall. However, Kind wants to dispel the myth of art-world criminals such as Pierce Brosnan's suave character in the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair.
"I would warn against considering art thieves as gentlemen thieves," Kind says of criminals who are increasingly armed and violent.
The Munch paintings were stolen by masked gunmen at the Munch Museum in Norway in 2004, when the museum was open. Police have said little about their recovery. In 1994 another version of The Scream was recovered undamaged three months after being stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo.
In February, gunmen raided the Chacara do Ceu Museum during Carnaval celebrations in Rio De Janeiro. They made off with a Picasso, a Monet, a Matisse and a Dali before blending into the party crowd.
In 1990, two men disguised as Boston police officers walked into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. They persuaded security guards to unlock the doors, then stole 13 priceless items including works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas and Manet.
That heist appears on the FBI's list of the top 10 art thefts. The list is topped by the looting of Iraqi artefacts after the US invasion in 2003 -- an event that mobilised the international community's response to cultural theft.
IN 2004 the FBI dedicated 12 agents to a special art-crime team. In its first year the team recovered more than 100 pieces worth more than $65 million.
"International law enforcement is getting better, they are devoting a lot more resources to it -- specifically in the US, where they really upped their staff," Jonathan Sazonoff, who runs a website on stolen art, says.
Some mysteries are solved without happy endings. Stephane Breitwieser, a French waiter, was sentenced last year to 26 months in prison after he admitted to stealing 239 pieces -- worth $18 million to $26 million -- while he visited small provincial museums.
But the story didn't stop there. Prosecutors said Breitwieser's mother tried to protect him by chopping up paintings and tossing other items into a canal. Investigators recovered 102 pieces -- watches, cups, vases, statues and others -- from the mud. Many other works are believed lost forever.

For Pete's Sake

Peter Hannah at Work

Julie-anne's Show at 69 Smith Street

Here's the link to Julie's website

This is the press reslease and invite for her show:

"Against the weather: arid land”
-a series of paintings by Julie-anne Armstrong-Roper

Julie-anne Armstrong-Roper's latest exhibition, “Against the Weather: arid land” will open at the 69 Smith Street gallery on 31st July. Since 1991 Julie-anne’s work has been widely exhibited in Melbourne and overseas, including a major solo exhibition in 2000 at Australia House in London.

During the past eight years the works have explored the complexities of the human psyche. Julie-anne’s paintings were not purely landscape but abstractions where the weather was used as a metaphor for the emotive changes we experience throughout our lives. Using the sky in all its moods not only to communicate her own feelings, but also to invoke an emphatic response from the audience, Julie-anne has united the external with the internal.

In her latest body of work she has expanded upon these themes. Moving on from abstractions taken from nature, Julie-anne has returned to the figurative, endeavouring in her new works to use the whole landscape to express a feeling of isolation and a sense of the frailty of humanity exposed to the elements. Julie-anne believes this to be the natural continuation of her work, expressing human nature and emotion using the atmospheric and geological environments.

In her art practice Julie-anne aims to create a sense of light and depth beyond the painted surface. She does this by building up the layers of paint and medium over a long period of time. Light is absorbed and contained in her paintings, allowing the viewer to look into the canvases and become totally engrossed by the images.

Julie-anne’s works will be on exhibition until 16th August at: 69 Smith Street Gallery, Collingwood.