The Librarian's Lounge

Phil Zimbardo on TED

I was watching this TED talk earlier in which Phil Zimbardo talks about the "Lucifer effect":

What strikes me is his list of the "7 social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil" which are as follows:

1. Mindlessly taking the first small step
2. Dehumanization of others
3. De-individuation of self (anonymity)
4. Diffusion of personal responsibility
5. Blind obedience to authority
6. Uncritical conformity to group norms
7. Passive tolerance of evil through inaction or indifference

This is my food for thought for today.

In other news, my Dell support contact has managed to successfully figure out the problem I was having with corrupted files on my laptop and has helped me get it back into perfect working order. I'm so thankful I was put in touch with him. This experience, which was handled by the Global Escalation Management Team, was entirely different from the first support experience I had with Dell. This tech was extremely knowledgeable, patient, and determined to help me out. And I didn't even have to reformat my drive.

A Vision of Students Today

Check out this video created by Michael Wesch's 2007 Cultural Anthropology class. It has some interesting info on how the young adults today learn and spend their time and has much to say on the state of education. These are things librarians might want to think about as well when trying to meet the needs of this segment of our community.

There is an excellent presentation given by Wesch at an Educause conference earlier this year about the "crisis of significance" that explains the above video in detail. Watching it really made me long for the good old days of being in my anthropology courses at ASU. I miss being surrounded by professors and students who engage in this kind of thinking, learning, and discussion.

This video, also by Wesch, is very relevant to libraries and how we have organized information. It takes us through the evolution of information on paper as a tangible object to the world of digitized information that we live in today. Quite thought-provoking!

In the News

I saw both some good and not-so-good news today. Let's get the bad news out of the way first. I don't know what else to call it when a whole county's library system is preparing to close due to lack of government funding - other than plain tragic. The ramifications of this loss of funding are huge - who wants to live in a town where there's no library and criminals will be prematurely roaming the streets before their sentences are up? Let's hope either the county's residents or the federal government will come through and stop this from happening sometime in the next 6 weeks. Time is running out.

Okay, better news - it looks like Diebold is thinking about getting out of the e-voting business.

And check out what MIT has decided to do - by the end of the year, their entire catalog of classes will be offered as open courseware. That's 1,800 courses you can take online, free!

Web Roundup

What do you get when you mash together a book and Google Maps?

Learn how to make your own invisible bookshelf.

In Finland, a novel comprised entirely of text messages is published.

A list of the top 100 alternative search engines.

I'm infatuated with The Monster Librarian. Check out his page for all your horror readers advisory information for all ages! One of the greatest features of this website is the "coming soon" information. I love the Genre Reader's Bill of Rights!

Longing to go back to school but don't have the dough? Check out this huge list of free classes available online - here's your chance to attend MIT, Berkeley, and Notre Dame simultaneously, if desired!

Something about author John Green's Brotherhood 2.0 just tickles me. I'm hooked. I especially like the bookfights.

Pass it on: Win a free copy of "An Incovenient Truth"

If you are a teacher in the U.S. and would like a copy of Al Gore's documentary, register here to win one of 50,000 copies being given away by Participate.net. Contest ends January 17th.

Sans Blague!

Ahhh, French in Action. A staple of learning French in the classroom if ever there was one. If you've been exposed to it, you likely either love it or loathe it. Pour moi, c'est vrai, je l'adore. And now they are all available online for viewing at our leisure! C'est magnifique - my video copies of a copy are so decrepit you almost can't make out the picture anymore, so je suis tres hereuse to be able to finally trash them!

Wordprocessing On the Go and Free Movies

Writely, a freely-available web-based word processor has just re-opened and will soon have a Google account sign-in prompt. This program works much like Microsoft's Word and allows multiple authors to edit the same paper in real-time simultaneously from various locations. As you can imagine, this is a big help for students who have group projects and find it easier to meet virtually than in living color.

Also of note, the 5th annual Media That Matters Film Festival is now available online. Sixteen new short films are presented for your viewing pleasure.

Students Create a Wiki to Cram for an Exam

Students in a class at the University of California at San Diego decided to channel their brain power and class notes into a wiki in order to help each other study for the final. Thankfully, this professor realized that this was a good thing. What a great way to bring a study group online!

Virtual Vaudeville

Virtual Vaudeville is a simulation learning object that allows you to experience a real historical vaudeville act from various perspectives inside the Union Square Theatre in New York during the year 1895. The theatre is no longer in existence but lives on virtually through this object. The designers strove foremost for historical accuracy in the recreation both of the performance and the building itself. For those who may be skeptical of the educational value of games, this is a great example of how, using gaming technology, a learning object can be built to engage students in learning history.

The video about the making of Virtual Vaudeville is particularly interesting, especially the part about how they animated the 800 audience members and made them all unique characters. They used a game engine known as Gamebryo, which has been used in other games such as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Sid Meier's Pirates. In the video clip about the project, they mention their plan to create an avatar mode that will allow users to actually become a character in the audience, enabling them to participate directly in the simulation.

Funding for this project came primarily from the National Science Foundation.

Add gaming to your resume

In Wired's article, "You Play World of Warcraft? You're Hired!" gaming is regarded as a form of experiential learning. The advantages of playing games: learning by accident, the high risk of failure but low cost, immediate feedback, and, depending on the game (in this case it's Warcraft), perhaps even a chance to try out a leadership role and see how it fits.