Reflections for Information Professional Transformation – Page 3

August 26, 2019

Out of Nothing, Everything: Conversations with Larry Harvey

This is a review of the piece of digital literature Out of Nothing, Everything: Conversations with Larry Harvey (1989 – 2019 burning man project, 2019a) evaluated using the effect on the reader of the conceptual frameworks of grasp, figure, and memory as outlined by Bourchardon and Heckman (2012).

This work is offered in eReader and PDF files rather than the most widely adopted ebook file format Epub developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum. It consists of transcripts of 3 interviews conducted by the author Jeff Greenwald between 2013 and 2015 with Larry Harvey who was a founder of the Burning Man event which as described on the website is “a temporary metropolis dedicated to art and community” (1989 – 2019 burning man project, 2019b) of 70,000 people aligned in their actions by the words of Larry Harvey in his 10 principles of Burning Man 1989 – 2019 burning man project, 2019c) which were written in 2004 to promulgate what was happening with the project around the world as further regional iterations occured. The book’s journey to me was fuelled by the principle of gifting which is one of the above principles that intersects with ease the capabilities of digital literature. I discovered the work through an email I received from the Burning Man Journal regarding a new publication from the Burning Man Project’s Philosophy Centre. The interviews were originally conducted for potential newspaper publication but when that didn’t go ahead the author gifted the content to Burning Man who then published it as a gift available to all.

Grasp was most challenging with this format. I focused on exploring the eReader version from my computer and when I clicked on it found myself in a database. My initial journey of accessing the work was exploring the folder system it was placed within and I was distracted into exploring the Burning Man Colouring Book before trying to open the item I was originally trying to access. The online accessibility of related texts is a mixed blessing allowing both distractions and delving into content. None of the software on my computer displayed an eReader file so I used Microsoft Store and downloaded freda due to it being the highest rated free application and was amazed to see it would function with personal computer, mobile device, surface tablet, and hololens. Two critical parts of how the reader experiences digital literature formats are both the hardware and software but I theorise that having to place a hololens on my head to read something would only be a barrier to more reading. I downloaded the freda application was able to proceed into the work quite seamlessly but the barriers to access were high.

My engagement with aspects of figure were mixed with this work. The cover image did not appear on freda’s virtual bookshelf just a black square thumbnail with the title at the bottom. It is uncertain whether this is due to freda or the publisher’s misstep. I clicked into the book and find a default format of white text on a black background with 2 pages viewable at one time. The opposite of Microsoft Word or Google Docs and I surmise this is due to the use-case of spending a significant amount of time focusing on reading text and how it may impact a reduction of eye strain. I read half of the book before exploring display options other than the default of which there were many. Changing the view to a single page gave the reader not only longer line lengths to read but also changed the number of pages in the work displayed at the bottom of the page. Thus there are cataloging issues as the workdoes not have a discrete number of pages; the number depends on how the work is formatted for viewing. I also try the autoscroll function so I no longer have to navigate pages myself but even on the slowest setting I find that I am being left behind. This may be due to the nature of the content as a dense philosophical treatise which left me rereading parts and slowing down for others and I would suggest this function may work well for less dense texts or if multiple people were reading a document the speed may represent a compromise to the slowest to allow all enough time.

Memory was not particularly engaged with in the simple format. The freda application was able to remember what page I was up to when I reopened it. The work had a couple of hyperlinks which were out of date. One for example said it would link to a photographic exhibition but instead linked to the local newspaper that had hosted that page.

The only benefit of this work being digital literature was that I discovered and was able to access it. Otherwise it would have functioned better in my life as a traditional work of print.

Grasp 2/5

Figure 3/5

Memory 2/5

References

1989 – 2019 burning man project. (2019a). Burning Man 2019. Retrieved from https://journal.burningman.org/2019/06/philosophical-center/tenprinciples/out-of-nothing-everything-larry-harvey/

1989 – 2019 burning man project. (2019b). 10 Principles of Burning Man. Retrived from https://burningman.org/culture/philosophical-center/10-principles/

1989 – 2019 burning man project. (2019c). Burning Man 2019. Retrieved from https://burningman.org/event/brc/

Bourchardon, S., and Heckman, D. (2012). Digital manipulability and digital literature. Retrieved fron http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/heuristic

August 4, 2019

Meta Information of the Orthogonal Discipline

Due to the pathway I am taking to qualify as a librarian I will probably only get to do one unit related to cataloging. That unit however is definitely scratching the itch related to the orthogonal position of the discipline of information science and its rabbit holes of definitions, standards, and systems. A constantly updated plethora of potentialities superseded, held on to, and further evolved.

The catalog evolved from a tool of record to a tool of search with the expansion of the size of library collections. I know that larger and larger libraries with family collections became fashionable in the Roman culture and I wonder what systems they used. In the ancient world collections of books could be recorded on clay or stone tablets. France after their revolution published the first comprehensive national system of cataloging. At what is now The British Library in 1841 the 91 rules of cataloging were published however the collection was never cataloged completely under this system demonstrating the resource constraints that metadata creation has always faced. The 91 rules did however form a basis for later cataloging systems in the 19th and 20th century. The most up to date catloging system previous to the wider adoption of computers appears to have been the Anglo-American system but this was retired soon after the beginning of the 21st century due to it originally not being designed to deal with digital objects and further and further additional appendices for specific examples in the modern world.
MARC or Machine Readable Cataloging was developed in the 60’s to allow the electronic transmission of records from one institution to another. This was not so much a standard for how to catalog however as a language to write the catalog in.

Modern reinterpretation of the nature of information and the behavior of users has led to IFLA’s Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records which is a conceptual framework rather than a standard with its division of records into WEMI or Works, Expressions, Manifestations, or Items. To describe for this framework there is currently RDA which stands for Resource Description and Access and represents modern rules for describing items into a catalog using any framework you like.

July 29, 2019

INF533 Assessment 1: Reflections

The concept of Digital Literature is still not satisfying defined to me and perhaps will never be due to the exponential iteration of content creation from across the world. But perhaps by looking at certain qualities seen in the medium we can gain an idea of what distinguishes it from what came before. At the fundamental level digital consists of digits, of 1’s and 0’s, that encode information. This practice allows for easy transmission, printing, and manipulation via computer. This contrasts to the pre-computer past where literature was either manually copied with a stylus or more recently with the assistance of a machine such as moveable type or a typewriter. The increased speed of reproduction and transmission changes the nature of the medium into one where we can modify, reimagine, and remix works back into the cultural milieu that in the past may have seemed inviolable sacrosanct works.
Marx argued that the means of reproduction determined the nature of society but never foresaw a book being reproduced with cntrl +A, cntrl +C, cntrl +V.

To look at it on a less theoretical and a more practical level. Digital Literature is what takes advantage of our technology hardware and infrastructure. Devices such as smartphones, laptops, or dedicated e-readers combined with trusted suppliers of electricity and internet. Additional content becomes accessible across different works through hyperlinks between texts and the reader’s experience can wander from one author’s work to another according to their whimsy. Reading styles have changed due to this functionality of the medium; from reading whole works, in one to a few sittings, to taking numerous bites of many.

In the museum sector we are seeing numerous new ways of storytelling and the delivery of experiences to our visitors. Apps can work if they have a focused function tied to their design. A good example is MONA’s O which is designed to replace didactic panels on walls and allows the visitor to choose the flavor they receive information in as well as being able to review their visit in the order of their experience and thus relive it. There are many apps that try to do everything for everyone and end up doing nothing for all due to bloatware interfaces.

Is a website automatically Digital Literature? Is an app? What I like to think about is the boundaries of systems where they break down so where is the boundary of Digital Literature? are there print books today that have never been emailed to the publisher? are there book printers who receive works in a non-digital way? just because it looks like a book and smells like a book doesn’t mean it hasn’t been assisted by a digital pathway during its genesis. The limits imposed on a work are the choice of the author, their intentions, their selections of technology. A print book containing a QR code is linked to the digital web and any image that is not individually hand drawn was printed from a file. We are trying to put in boxes a phenomenon of infinite graduation and we are better off engaging with literature just as we have before to understand it through experience rather than taxonomy.

May 27, 2019

ETL 401 Introduction to Teacher Librarianship – Reflective Practice

Part C

Throughout the ETL401 unit I have deepened my understanding of the contextual and discipline specific nature of information literacy. The transformation of data, through processing, into information and the analysis of information into knowledge occurs in different ways in different situations. Not all information is transmitted through the written word as intangible culture incorporating movement, sound, and art each have their own practitioner norms of transmission and thresholds of fluency. I enjoyed the early discussions on the nature of information in the discussion forum where I had discovered modern librarianship as an “amalgamation of Librarianship and Information Science and the latters origin in electrical engineering combined with mathematical treatments of logic”. The library model is not limited to just texts even if that is what most libraries focus on but on information; and providing access to it for its target audience. In my very first blog post for the course on March 15 reflected from my more naive understanding of the teacher librarian role I felt it involved maintaining a multifunctional space and broad resources. This is true as far as it stands but the role in promulgating information literacy was unknown to me. Visitors who want more than to pull random books off a shelf can be empowered to navigate the catalog with boolean logic, to uncover shelves of content they never knew they missed by understanding the Dewey taxonomy, and to research without fear or feeling overwhelmed through metacognitive perspective of how they will continue their process through to conclusion.

I also posited a couple of theories that were not supported by the literature of the course. Firstly on May 5 that information literacy has a fractal nature due to the granular nature of the information landscape and each individual’s unique experiences “of how you define, search, process, store, and retrieve the components of information you choose to engage with” and secondly on May 6 that “digital literacy of the navigation of hardware, software, and connectivity” was a part of information literacy once moved from the abstracted world of theory and into the classroom.

Having an understanding of the academic models of information literacy contextualises both my past and future practice as an educator. On May 4 I blogged of my circus teaching framework “teaching individual skills with props as ‘words’ and developing sequences of tricks as ‘sentences’ with the goal of students being empowered to rearrange and reconfigure” to self express. This self-created metaphorical framework aligns with classical definitions of literacy but in future working in school libraries I feel Kuhlthau’s Information Search Process especially as enacted through the Guided Inquiry model has a more evidence based appeal. I noticed when meeting my peers for a study session that each was very keen to continue with whichever information literacy model they were already using in their school as the cognitive cost of translating their practice into another form was prohibitive. Our course materials in describing information literacy models stated there are “multiple skills for a range of evolving formats and delivery modes [and that] IL is more a way of knowing and thinking. IL is about being able to solve problems, access and use the right information and then re-purpose this information to meet a specific need” and so the model either needs to be highly abstracted and generalised or highly specific to a particular discipline or outcome.

The teacher librarians role in inquiry learning comes from the ability to “establish preeminence in our domain of information literacy, and to lift students and teachers towards excellence with our expertise” as I reflected in my March 23 blog post the words of Karen Bonannaro’s 2011 Keynote I realise that teacher training will always have gaps where specialists have a role to support and the teacher librarian training in navigating information collections and role in teaching others to gain competency and then fluency in the same. Part of the teacher librarians ethical obligations in this role is to critically illuminate for students “the imperial origins of our information institutions constructed in the Western ideological ideal of taxonomic breadth, hierarchical control, and limited accessibility”, which I mention in my May 22 blog post, and how this affects the presentation, organisation, and navigation of libraries. Well supported inquiry learning over time will allow students to understand and question these invisible boundaries and unspoken rules that surround them and allow them to eventually engage in active informed citizenry which is the goal of our current education system.

May 24, 2019

ETL503 Assignment 2 Part B – Reflection

ETL503 has illuminated the collection practices behind the The Teacher Librarian (TL) role in a school library which impacts across school communities. Australian research shows the inverse relationship between student to equivalent full time (EFT) library staff ratios and increased NAPLAN scores (School Library Association of Queensland, 2013, p. 6). Australia’s House of Representatives (2011) has detailed the importance to school libraries of buildings, collections, and qualified staff. The aspects of collections including: development, management, evaluation, as well as ethical and legal considerations do not always have clearly delineated boundaries but are all critical to effective function of library spaces.

I would like to move away from the limits of “the imperial origins of our information institutions constructed in the Western ideological ideal of taxonomic breadth, hierarchical control, and limited accessibility” (Sacha.juggler 2019 May 22) and the dichotomy of censor vs selector described in Jenkinson’s (2002, p. 22) work. Though the contemporary praxis is shown to be one of continues compromise (School Library Association of Queensland 2010) I aim to remedy this through collaboration as (Sacha.juggler 2019 March 24) “Firstly I advocate for the establishment of stakeholder advocacy groups empowered and emboldened to put forward items for the collection. Groups could consist of teachers, students, or parents and these bottom up organisations would be accountable to their peers and guided by the collection policy whatever process they used for decision making” though I would be ultimately responsible through my professional responsibilities to the selection criteria as the structural reforms for alternatives would be beyond most principals.

The importance of a written collection policy lies in its process of creation and implementation. As every library collection exists for a different audience the policy must be constructed individually for that community while taking account of best practice such as Australian Library and Information Association Schools and Victorian Catholic Teacher Librarians (2017) recommendations. The creation attunes the policy to the vision, mission, and objectives of the institution and needs to be endorsed by the executive in order to provide authority to the outcome. The implementation allows for resilient processes and outcomes not vulnerable to challenge from ignorance, fear, or bigotry. This is critical to the ethical duty of the school library towards providing open access to diverse viewpoints.

ETL503 has shown me the depth of complexity of collection practices such as evaluation through collection mapping, regular stocktaking, the perils of selection and acquisition and the pains of weeding. Also that “The TL is the steward of the collection which can be collectively a significantly sized financial asset. Management of the funding resources therefore goes not only into acquisition but also maintenance and repair” (Sacha.juggler 2019 April 13) and there are never enough resources of staff and volunteers to complete all these tasks that the ideal library system would encompass so ruthless triage of priorities by professionals is essential. There is also not complete agreement in the best way to approach digital resources such as Ebooks as “established processes, relationships, and stability in how libraries made books available to their users which have been upended by the nature of the digital medium … Some … are refusing to engage in purchasing these works at all as the risk of corporate failure removing access to purchased works is too great” (Sacha.juggler 2019 April 14). Risks such as these must be encompassed in collection policy to future proof the resources held, the physical infrastructures that hold them, and the qualifications of the people who manage them as any lapse in in any one of these can lead to an inexorable decline of what can be delivered to the population that you serve.

The practitioner’s duty to the collection also includes legal and ethical considerations as well. Ethically librarians are needing to be “more assertive in their professional responsibilities to protect the free speech rights of their users” (Lukenbill 2007 P. 5) which in the Australian context (McCloy v New South Wales, 2015) means the right to political discussion which has been interpreted as encompassing International, federal, state and local issues which implies all topics should be able to be discussed and therefore resources from diverse views should be provided on all topics possible in the collection as according to the collection policy. The largest key legal issues discussed in ETL503 were issues of copyright and licensing. The former of which is part of the specialty of a TL and needs to be constantly promulgated to staff and students. The latter of which encompasses sourcing the most advantageous licenses for the school community and reading all the small print carefully to minimise hidden costs or unethical clauses like being able to use the information generated by interactions with the licensor to further monetise, limit, or exploit the school community.

Reference list

Australian Library and Information Association Schools and Victorian Catholic Teacher Librarians. (2017). Manual for Developing Policies and Procedures in Australian School Library Resource Centres. Retrieved from https://www.alia.org.au/sites/default/files/ALIA%20Schools%20policies%20and%20procedures%20manual_FINAL.pdf

House of Representatives. (2011). School libraries and teacher librarians in 21st century Australia. Canberra:Commonwealth of Australia. Retrieved from http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=ee/schoollibraries/report.htm

Jenkinson, D. (2002). Selection and censorship: It’s simple arithmetic. School libraries in Canada, 2(4), 22. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.csu.edu.au/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lih&AN=7277053&site=ehost-live

Lukenbill, W.B. (2007). Censorship: What do school library specialists really know? School Library Media Research, 10. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/aasl/sites/ala.org.aasl/files/content/aaslpubsandjournals/slr/vol10/SLMR_Censorship_V10.pdf

McCloy v New South Wales 2015 257 CLR 17

Sacha.juggler. (2019 March 15) Reflections for Information Professional Transformation [Blog post] Retrieved from https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/sachareflections/

School Library Association of Queensland. (2010). Primary School Case Studies. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=2ahUKEwi5nZyPwrHiAhVUg-YKHUf6C0AQFjAAegQIARAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aph.gov.au%2FParliamentary_Business%2FCommittees%2FHouse_of_Representatives_Committees%3Furl%3Dee%2Fschoollibraries%2Fsubs%2Fsub283.1.pdf&usg=AOvVaw0uttzRW8H4LFHgn_Q7h9tK

School Library Association of Queensland. (2013). School libraries, teacher-librarians and their contribution to student literacy in Gold Coast schools. Queensland: School Library Association of Queensland. Retrieved from https://eprints.qut.edu.au/60260/37/60260a.pdf

May 22, 2019

Thoughts from Alice Springs Conference

I have just spent 9 days in Alice Springs and 5 days at the Australian Museum and Galleries Association conference. While there I attempted to make progress on assignments and readings; related mostly to collection policy as that felt like the most relevant part of what I was studying in terms of what I was engaging in at the red centre.

Though the event focused mostly on museums the keynotes, workshops, and concurrent sessions were broadly applicable across the GLAM sector. A couple of key takeaways I have been ruminating on include:

A) the imperial origins of our information institutions constructed in the Western ideological ideal of taxonomic breadth, hierarchical control, and limited accessibility.

B) The unconscious privileging of male white voices over female black voices and how this is played out in the lives of our institutions and practitioners

I do not yet know how to confront these in my practice but I have been thinking about them more and more.

May 6, 2019

Information Literacy Barriers – Hardware, Software, Connectivity

It strikes me as strange that amongst all the successes and privilege of my life that the progress of technology leaves me so far in its wake that I am feeling like I am barely clinging on to access I require with the resources at my disposal.

The hardware I own can just keep up with the demands forced upon it. My laptop from 2006 lies in a bag in my room and makes loud groans of death whenever it tries to use its fan. My current laptop handmedown from a family member’s upgrade is old enough that the most up to date operating system it can run cannot operate an up to date browser meaning I am stuck with older software that warns me the CSU university website may be a malicious attacker trying to steal my credit card details. I was panicked for a while when starting the course that my laptop’s Chrome browser I was using wouldn’t run the CSU online learning environment at all but managed to work around this with an older version of Firefox which as an open source project supports better backwards capability albeit with the same warnings of websites that aren’t particularly malicious being signposted as such.

The most up to date piece of hardware I own is actually my IPhone which I purchased from work when my workplace replaced older models with new. This model was released in September 2015 and issues include Apple’s notorious intentional obsolescence program where later software updates slow down the functioning of the device, the battery lasting only hours of full use, and the model having the minimum 16gb of storage which somehow doesn’t allow the IOS, apps, and media content to happily coexist and so the device will delete apps it thinks I am no longer using to make space for whatever I have most recently downloaded.

Information Literacy can be seen to include digital literacy of the navigation of hardware, software, and connectivity and as without the device, program, and access it doesn’t matter what kind of model you have for engaging with information.

We must be careful not to assume the perfect theoretical environment where all students have laptops that are up to date, fully charged, and the wi fi works without interruptions. Not only will the failures of our systems have to be worked around but the functioning of the system itself will be worked around through students getting around censorship, banning of games, and into each others walled gardens of social media.

Technology provides many pathways to achieve objectives and it is the empowered and informed choice that we seek to encourage. Knowledge of the alternatives, knowledge of the compromises, knowledge of the environmental impacts and consequences.

As an example. My 1995 automobile has a tape deck player but my line in tape deck device for playing audio media become broken. My solution was to use the cigarette lighting 12V port and I have plugged in a FM transmitter, that connects to my smartphone via bluetooth, which also has two USB charging ports of differents amps. In truth this is perhaps actually my latest and most up to date piece of hardware not the smartphone.

We are left in our lives with an empire of asset management; fixing, replacing, upgrading one tool at a time in order to maintain our connection to the constantly progressing technological river of change.

May 5, 2019

Information Literacy

Information Literacy is a mildly amorphous concept given that it is dependent on the context and purpose that the term is being deployed in.

The assumptions of what it involves will differ whether you are a teacher, librarian, researcher, apprentice, artist, or tenured professor.

There is also a fractal aspect to the quest for information literacy as the deeper you go the further you can venture into your individual experience of how you define, search, process, store, and retrieve the components of information you choose to engage with.

I have become fascinated with the criticisms of anthropologist Jean Lave and her ethnographic work demonstrating that competency is socially mediated. She showed that mathematical applications that are fluently possessed in the grocery store can be diminished in other contexts such as formal testing. This presumably also applies to information literacy and the uphill battle in getting students to engage and practice in contexts where they feel they do not or can not excel due to the social context.

Information literacy beyond the surface level is also discipline dependent and personality dependent so the cultural norms that shape the pathways we take will also structure the selection of tools and practices we use along our journey.

May 4, 2019

Literacies

The concept of students learning to be literate and this consisting of reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing, and understanding as mediated and enabled by by the written word is an anachronistic model of how learners need to function in the contemporary world.

The New London Group (2000) redefined the nature of literacy teaching as multiliteracies that function within any semiotic activity embedded within a design framework of available designs, designing, and redesigning. This theoretical framework and pedagogical approach has the benefit of being generally applicable within any learning discourse or subject area. It focuses on communication as the nature of what literacy is applied to and empowering the learner to know what is possible, how they can interact with that, and turning it to their own purpose.

The false dichotomy of behaviorism and constructivism figures into this as well. Our students are not merely vessels to be filled and yet without a foundation to engage from they will not be able to aim their engagement particularly high.

Even before I was qualified as a teacher and worked teaching circus skills to students I had my own framework of teaching individual skills with props as “words” and developing sequences of tricks as “sentences” with the goal of students being empowered to rearrange and reconfigure the work to make their own sentance sequence which reflected their own identity and passion.

This model uses the older version of literacy as a metaphor to enable progress in a physical discipline. The same metaphor can work in digital disciplines or even more disparate ones. Learn the components, learn how they fit together, empower yourself to rearrange them and create meanings that are meaningful to yourself.

References

The New London Group (2000). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: designing social futures. In B. Cope & Kalantiz, (Eds.), Multiliteracies: literacy learning and the design of social futures 9-37. London: Routledge.

April 30, 2019April 30, 2019

Copyright of Copywrong

There appears to be agreement that the currently applicable copyright laws in Australia are outdated and not suitable to the modern world where information generation, transmission, and engagement are markedly different from when the original conception of copyright was produced.

The laws themselves are written in general terms meaning that ongoing interpretation is required within each decision making process and missteps likely along the way.

The impetus within an educational context is to then be within the letter of the law for when the punitive and complete sweep of what has been photocopied in the staff room or hosted on school content management systems is analysed the school is to be punished without mercy for any infringement and the maximum capital extraction through penalties is to be implemented in order to satisfy our oppositional legal system and uncaring neoliberal framework.

Given that, as Bourdieu claims, education is the reproduction of society surely it is in the best interest of societies to allow students, at the very least in the underfunded public system, access in as many ways as possible to the cultural inheritance that has been produced.

When someone is being enculturated it makes the least sense to involve money unless inequality is part of what you wish to reproduce.