This year I get to write a dissertation for my degree course. I’m going to blog the development of my focus of study and my argument here and use my wiki and other tools to share resources I’ve found useful. I can’t wiki my work though - it needs to be all my own effort! But I will be publishing here it after its been submitted - another 10,000 words to add to the global text pool that is the internet.

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Goldsmiths SU has successfully campaigned for changes in the opening hours of the colleges library and ICT facilities. I’m interested in exploring what other ways the information that is stored in the library building can opened up to the benefit of students and staff alike. I’m not so much speaking about new things that the library can do, rather I am interested in ways in which existing services and resources could be linked up, extending their use.

Currently recommendations for reading / viewing / listening are distributed to students as files to download from learn.gold.ac.uk (which we usually print) or in hard copy (which we then annotate). Students then navigate to the library website to find out whether a given publication is even available, and what its shelfmark is.

However, there is the potential to make the process of recommending, finding, borrowing and even commenting on the value and relevance of a particular library resource more seamless by linking-up the library website and learn.gold site.

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I’ve invested a lot of time in researching and testing tools to support my studies. i wanted to to break away from so-called ‘productivity tools’, as in all my years of using software like Visio, Word, Outlook, I’ve never really been productive: too much of my time and effort has been wasted in taming the application, or repeated manually generating my desired formatting - perhaps counter-productivity tools would be more accurate.

I’m in my third year of studying for a BA. I’m researching my subjects and my ideas, reading lots, annotating my reading, working on assignments, editing and revising my work. I work in different locations and at different times and I want access to my work where and whenever I am. As such, a piece of hardware, a laptop or a pda is not the whole answer to these needs, I need software to support my study too.
bring on the tools.
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Sarah Teather and other Brent Liberal Democrates have joined facebook. I’ve poked her, have you?

I wasn’t expecting to see our Sarah on Facebook… A few years ago electronic networking wasn’t on her list methods for constituency communications. How things change over time: the ubiquity of the term “social networking”, meaning a twittering, bebobuzzing space for me to show my face on the internet, has overtaken “blogging” in terms of its penetration into the nations daily lexicon.

Sarah sees Facebook as a compliment to her existing constituency working: “It’s important to be accessible to all my constituents, and there are lots of ways for people to meet me face to face.”

“Young people often have very strong opinions on local and national issues. Sites such as Facebook provide another way for me to hear their views. I can also use the site to tell young people about the work I am doing on their behalf. For lots of younger adults the internet is now the main way of keeping in touch. I hope that having a page on Facebook will encourage many more people to come forward with issues and campaigns they would like me to take up.”

But Facebook is a closed community, a members only space on the internet: at least MySpace member pages are public! These “Social websites expose class divide“. Blogging, i.e. online publishing with comments, is open and public and seeks to engage readers in a transparent dialog.
As we know from recent escapades that some people around Brent’s elected representatives like to engage in online ‘activism’… So I hope that Sarah’s Facebook account and our other MPs for that matter are only being operated by her and not by their teams. As we know from the Facebook terms of service, in the User Conduct section:

• In addition, you agree not to use the Service or the Site to:
• register for more than one User account, register for a User account on behalf of an individual other than yourself, or register for a User account on behalf of any group or entity;
• impersonate any person or entity, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent yourself, your age or your affiliation with any person or entity;
• impersonate any person or entity, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent yourself, your age or your affiliation with any person or entity;

Towards the end of term at Goldsmiths I participated in a huge number of half-baked surveys and poorly designed questionnaires. Still, that’s my own fault for saying ‘Yes’ to all the last minute BA Sociology / Psychology students, desperate to get some data to evaluate for their assignments. The E-benchmarking survey for CELT, on the other hand, was a focused piece of qualitative research using interviews with students to benchmark e-learning activity at Goldsmiths.

I’ve posted the full transcript of the interview on my wiki if you’d like to read it.

My key messages to CELT were:

• more bandwidth on campus and in halls of residence as the disconnection of students is lamentable
• more student participation on learn.gold so that we can originate content
• less (hopefully no!) attachments on learn.gold - I hate downloading PDFs and word documents to read some text that could have been displayed in the web page… especially when the download is not something I am going to edit, like, say, a reading list or a course timetable.
• working and useful interfaces to resources such as the library catalogue

I await the complete report from CELT to see what other feedback there has been and to see what recommendations have been picked up.