wat3rm0le's burrow

Saturday, October 3, 2009

I want an invite "super-bad", but this guy deserves one more

Several people have been asking me what Google Wave is; this video is a good "in-plain-English" explanation. I'll say it again, if anyone gets an invite, please invite me. . .please. (yes I know I'm playing right into Google's marketing strategy)

Monday, September 14, 2009

Reading Plan for LIBR 250

I'm taking Design and Implementation of Instructional Strategies for Information Professionals, and one of our continuing assignments is to do broad reading in educational theory. I'm going to blog my reading notes here.

Taking Wiggins & McTighe’s Understanding by Design as my focal point (This is a text I have read and that we are using where I work so it seemed a logical focal point) I set out to read various supporting texts from its bibliography. In the first phase of my reading I wanted to get as close to the foundation of their thought as I could, so I limited myself to works in the bibliography published before 1970. The assumption being that this would be the work of their predecessors upon which their own work would rely and/or respond to.

The first work that I randomly selected was Beyond the Information Given: Studies in the Psychology of Knowing by Jerome S Bruner.

“On Perceptual Readiness” pg. 7-14
This very dense and deeply psychological work begins with a review of scientific and psychological studies of perception. He maintains and defends two theories of perception:
1. Perception involves an act of categorization
2. Perception is somehow a representation of the world and therefore predictive
in varying degrees
While these theories may seem obvious to some, Bruner makes it clear that neither of these two claims can easily be assumed.

I was especially interested in Bruner’s discussion of categorization given its prominence in Library and Information Science. He takes us back to the level of primitive or autochthonous categories such as: motion, causation, intention, identity, equivalence, time and space (very close to Kant’s a priori categories). Though even here there is some question given the phenomenon of synesthesia (one remembers Nabokov’s colors being associated with letters)

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Older me vs. younger me

I just had an experience that made me reflect on growing older. I was in my car about to walk up to my apartment door when I was faced with a problem. I had picked up 10 rolls of quarters from the bank (for laundry) and I had my laptop and a long power chord to take up as well. The younger me would have tried to hold all of the quarter rolls in one hand while trying to hold the laptop and the tangled power chord in the other hand and walk up. But older me calmly looked around, found a pair of shorts that I had left in the car, put the quarter rolls into the pocket of the shorts, rolled up the tangled chord and took them all up easily. Now I'm not saying that younger me would have necessarily dropped the quarter rolls, scattering quarters all over the place or drop an expensive laptop, but it would have been a riskier enterprise than what a little calm thought avoided altogether.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Dublin Core Metadata for this blog

I just found DC-dot which generates the Dublin Core Metadata for any website. This is the list of keywords that the site generated for my blog:

Atom; Bibliography; Delft; Chicago; Debating; October; view; power; Testing; Monitoring; sooo; Subscribe; Setting; private; Class; Sh; follow; comparison; Random; catharsis; 3:27; February; ounce; Twitter; Daddy; Evaluating; electronic; BAISL; Cybriarian; Blog; Pete; AM; cells; progress; obligatory; Friday; tips; charge; checker; Books; reading; Browsing; 8:04; Wave; spell; review; post; comments; Library; Media; Service; War; December; seen; 4:54; 9:37; future; red; user; links; Viewpoints; definitely; Librarian; Fair; data; Librar; Learning; Hard; burrow; ready; Giving; List; otherwise; Musings; Anderson; 0 comments; doing; free; Mary; personal; intermediary; Personal; Sites; tax; phone; Archivist; 10:11; September; Cooley; Teacher; worth; View; Sunday; Ebsco; Se; Hosting; hands-on; list; Pixelpipe; Review; School; video; Commons; Information; Reference; Extremem; Links; Alice; Ch; negative; January; 3:09; Alpha; August; April; Google; watermole; Subj; Learners; Im; libraries; curse; web; Practices; Saying; Seamless; school; students; Opposing; Holy; movement; David; faculty; running; using; Posts; 6:46; Code; Dream; iGoogle; March; Platypus; Integrated; G1; search; page; ton; November; Blogs; patterns; 9:43; aeonity.com; Archive; algo; translator; Koha; interface; 11:32; nympholepsy; sites; Finding; wikis; questions; Investigations; Mashable; Pro; Sorry; Antitrust; Martha; 6:15; Time; Tuesday; Taxonomies; Makeover; library; Morphing; drive; July; Followers; reference; Moonlighting; June; dead; article; Loertsche; Wolfram; Thursday; Sean; Notes; databases; information; PM; teens; Updates; blood; iPhone; Saturday; Systems; Eugene; book

Interestingly enough, when I tried to embed the metadata into this post I got this error:

Your HTML cannot be accepted: Tag is not allowed: link rel="schema.DC" href="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"

This is the html sans tags:

link rel="schema.DC" href="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
link rel="schema.DCTERMS" href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">
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Sunday, June 14, 2009

Evaluating Integrated Library Systems

I've been looking at various job openings for librarians and noting the different ILS's of which I would like to get at least a passing familiarity. I'll record my impression of them and compare them to Koha here.

In the mean time, I need to explore Integrated Library Systems Report (http://www.ilsr.com/vendors/search2.cfm). It's old, but looks like a good place to start.