tech

conferences - tech

Code4Lib North convert

May 10, 2011 by 0 Comments

I attended my first Code4Lib North conference last week. The first day was Hackfest – I love the notion of getting a bunch of people together, people who have not worked together before, to solve agreed upon problems. I would love to see more of this happen within the library world and wonder if it could work within an institution. One day a week or month, get everyone together, decide on a problem or two, and spend the day actually trying to solve it. I want to try this (I’m pretty sure this occurs in other industries – has anyone done it in their library?).

The second day was full of short presentations on all of the neat projects programmers and web folk were working on – be sure to check out the wiki and here for content from the day (video link coming soon). The group was small – great for meeting and talking with a bunch of interesting folk. This was one of the first conferences in a while where I went away with really exciting new tech ideas – I felt I learned a ton but also left excited to learn a heck of a lot more!

odd stuff - tech

Fun with Words

November 25, 2009 by 0 Comments

I’ve been encountering some terms lately that I’ve found intriguing – not necessarily groundbreaking, but interesting. The first term is informavore. I came across this in a post on BoingBoing, which lead me to an article on the Edge. I would like to consider myself an informavore, and I suspect most librarians would. What intrigued me in the article was the parallel of information to Darwin selection – in a world filled with information, how do we choose which information is important, what can be left out and what might this mean for culture, history and the future? I’m sure I can not do the article justice, so I will simply recommend that you go read the article.

I came across the other term in a Spark podcast. In this episode (episode 90), we learn of the term continuous partial attention (it also talks about email apnea – an interesting concept in itself). I think this explains a lot of what I do, certainly better than the term multitasking. I also think that many of the students I work with also fall prey to continuous partial attention. If this is the case, what does this mean for educating these students? Does it change they way we think they work – or should it? I think I will be spending some more time considering what the implications for this might mean for the students I teach. I’m becoming more and more interested in how technology affects our students and their learning and I think continuous partial attention is certainly one side effect of technology.