Imagining Tomorrow's Future Today

This article by Art St George and the Educause Evolving Technologies Committee reports on the seven evolving technologies that they consider are having the most direct impact on higher education. The report is based on the white papers written by individual members of the committee. These white papers can be found on the Evolving Technologies Committee web site.

1. The Web in 2007: It's not Just a Browser, It's a Platform. Not only do we have APIs (application programming interfaces) and mashups, we also have RIAs (rich internet applications) - tools that can be moved out of the browser and onto the desk top. RIAs could become the 'balance point that joins the advantages of Web and Internet access with the "user experience" of desktop applications.'
2. Integrating Google Apps for Higher Education. These Apps range from Gmail to Google Groups and GoogleSketchUP6 and they can be used to enhance collaborative learning. They're part of the whole Web 2.0 environment - users can publish, discuss and become part of the content.
3. The Evolution of Web Conferencing. This technology 'provides a way for individuals and groups to bridge distances and to communicate in exciting new ways."
4. M-Learning. In this context it means portable and personal technology and its use in higher education can produce much greater flexibility and enhanced communication.
5. 3D Printing: Turning Virtual Models into Hard Copy. This can add a tactile experience to design work.
6. Virtualization: Applications, Systems, and Beyond. Allows for greater customisation in the delivery of applications.
7. Information Lifecycle Management and Physical Storage Technologies for Digital Preservation. As increasing amounts of material is digitised, or born digital, ways of preserving it for the long term become increasingly necessary.

Let's share

Another article in the AFR of 18/1/08 is titled 'Social sites must learn to share'. It's on page 79. It highlights the problems associated with transferring your content from one social networking site to another. For example, you might want to move from MySpace to Facebook or Twitter, or transfer your photos from Yahoo! Flickr to Google's Picasa, but the current lack of standards mean it's almost impossible to do so.
Companies that own these sites may be reluctant to allow this, but users are saying that they (the users) own their friendships, not the sites.
There's now an Australian-based working group, Dataportability.org, that's 'aimed at creating and promoting open standards for personal data across the internet'. One member of this group is quoted as predicting that the company that's the first to allow such data portability is in a powerful position as users would become committed to such as site, knowing that they can move in the future if they wish.

Offices Face up to networking craze

The Aust Fin Review from 18 January 2008 has an article on the use of Facebook in the workplace (see Pages 1, 57). For example, Qantas group QF Crew is for staff using it to swap stories about their 'high-flying workplace'. Then there's the Qantas Flight Atendants group for, you guessed it, flight attendants.
In some workplaces Facebook is now seen as a third means of communication (the others being email and phone). Members can include senior staff and board directors - this is especially likely in 'knowledge work' in industries such as consulting, legal and financial services.
Included in the article is a table of Australian based companies showing their attitudes to the use of Facebook in the workplace. These range from 'official corporate presence' to 'tolerates it' and 'bans it', plus one company, AMP, which is believed to be working on an alternative.
Those that ban it cite reasons such as time spent on the site and the effect on bandwidth of 'content-heavy' pages. Most of those that tolerate it provided employees' use doesn't breach internet usage guidelines. Some use it as a way to communicate with staff and customers. Some are also investigating developing their own internal facilities because of the potential value as a team space.
One concern cited is that of security, that is, the potential for sensitive or confidential company information to be inadvertently revealed to the world.
However, 'ultimately, if there is one message that corporate Facebooks users commonly espouse, it is that the technology and social networking are here to stay'.

Work <--> Social online

An article in USA today, Social, work lives collide on networking websites, starts with the story of Wadooah Wali who, after her marriage, changed her status on Facebook and MySpace to 'married' and posted some pictures of her new partner.
Congratulations and best wishes from family and friends poured in. Then there was a short comment ('nice pictures') from a little-known professional contact. Wali realised that her work and social circles had intersected and that privacy as we know it offline doesn't extend to online and social networking sites.
The article goes on to discuss how easy it is to befriend people, even comparative strangers, online, and how this 'friendship' can open up your personal information to a wider and wider audience. And these friends can add information to your pages - information that may be derogatory, uncomplimentary, or just not nice.
Now Facebook and MySpace plan to allow users to 'manage' their friends, separate them into different groups, and decide what and how much information these groups can see.
Or should we just become more open and transparent about what we share online if we feel the benefits outweigh the risks?
(Maybe you're wondering why Wali was concerned that a professional contact had seen her wedding news. Her partner is a woman, and she was apprehensive that knowledge of her sexual orientation might cause some work colleagues to react negatively towards her.)

Information behaviour of the researcher of the future

This ciber briefing paper, commissioned by JISC and The British Library, suggests that the term 'Google Generation' is a myth. The paper was based on a literature review plus some new primary data from a study of how people actually use the British Library and JISC websites.
The study investigated whether young people (the Google generation) are searching for and researching content in new ways, and if they are, whether this is likely to shape their future behaviour as mature researchers. Will these new ways be any different to the ways that current researchers and scholars work?
They found that typical information seeking behaviours are diverse, and include skimming, spending a lot of time online just navigating, browsing rather than in-depth reading of a document, lots of downloading a lot of content but not necessarily spending a lot of time reading that content, and relying on favoured brands such as Google.
Young people, the authors concluded, spend little time evaluating what they find, they have a poor understanding of their information needs, they use natural language rather than analysing their needs to identify relevant keywords, they don't necessarily understand how the internet is structured, and they may find library resources unintuitive to use - they prefer Google or Yahoo for their simplicity and familiarity.
Young people like the social networking aspect of the internet, but for socialising, not for study and work.
A number of assumptions about the Google generation are discussed and are found wanting in many cases, and often not unique to this generation - "In a real sense, we are all Google generation now".
The message for librarians and others is that we need to make our resources as easy to use as possible, and these resources should be better integrated with commercial search engines. More effort needs to be invested in ensuring that young people acquire appropriate levels of information and digital literacy skills at an early age.

The 2007 Australian Federal Election on the Internet

This paper, by Edgar Crook, Senior Librarian Web Archiving Section, at the National Library of Australia, discusses the use of the Internet in the election, and outlines some of the challenges associated with archiving the associated internet sites.
The internet tools used included web sites (eg parties, newspapers), online videos, YouTube, FaceBook and MySpace.
There is also a comparison of how, and how effectively, the different parties used the internet.

Web 2.0 - it's everywhere

More and more is being said about Web 2.0 in more and more 'mainstream' sources. The latest two issues of InCite have some articles.
The November 07 issue compares and contrasts Library 2.0 and EBLIB (evidence-based library and information practice).
The December 07 issue reports on the SLQ Library 2.0 Unconference 2007, gives some of the blog posts from participants in ECU Library's Learning 2.0 program, and has some musings by Kerry Webb (in Webb's web) on Web 2.0.