Less perfect. More effective.

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I struggle, sometimes mightily, with the urge to make the work I do a certain way. I have come to recognize when this is happening by the list of “great ideas” that never seem to get born.

Yesterday, I published two video introductions of myself to the online political science classes I am helping as a course embedded librarian. The perfectionist in me wanted to learn Camtasia, hire out a studio director, and rent a sound stage for the production. But time is even scarcer than money. I had a 10 minute window to get this done and then had to move on.

I recorded my first 3 1/2 minute video in one take. Watching it I realized that I make a dozen unfortunate faces and say “uhhh” or “ummm” over 50 times.

What to do? I published.

I needed those students to see my face and hear my voice so they could relate to the email I sent with all the information about how the library was going to help them succeed.

And rather than apologize in advance for what the video was not, I am offering a small prize to the first student who successfully counts the number of “uhhh” and “ummms”.

A watched video is far better than an unwatched video, even if imperfect.

Better than a birthday card

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Yesterday was my 38th birthday. I had a very nice day. We picked up my daughter early from school. Had a free sandwich from Firehouse Subs. Went to the zoo. Had dinner with my mom, dad, mom-in-law and grandmothers.

I kept checking Facebook along the way. The very kind wishes and quick messages through the day made the whole day more special. Just small, constant reminders that people were thinking of me. It made me happy in a way that birthday cards rarely do.

Birthday cards are pre-fab. They rarely say what you need them to say and, even when they do, you have to decide whether to keep it filed away someplace or recycle. I generally recycle.

That’s not to say that birthday cards are bad. My grandmother always takes a lot of time to pick out the best card and writes a long, special message every time. Then, she further personalizes by underlining the key phrases in the card that she wants to emphasize. Something very special will be gone from my life when she isn’t around to do that. I don’t want my grandmother to post to my Facebook Wall.

But everybody else, thanks for thinking of me. Your thoughts, messages and notes made me feel like I had friends with me all day.

Why Mobile Matters: take 1

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I’ve been working on a short statement explaining why mobile learning technologies matter so much to academic libraries.

I want this statement to be clear, concise and compelling.

I would welcome your comments.

Why Mobile Matters

Learning doesn’t only happen in classrooms. Truly transformative learning reaches outside the classroom to connect new ideas to our daily lives. This isn’t radical. This is how people learn. Learning requires a person to actively do something with new information to connect to their own experience and assimilate into their understanding. That’s what makes knowledge.

Libraries are often referred to as information centers. We want to be knowledge centers. We want to work with our faculty to develop and deliver extraordinarily rich resource collections that encourage intellectual curiosity and inspire exploration. This is about books, but it is about much more. TBR Libraries provide eBooks, journals/eJournals, video/eVideo and other learning objects. This includes mobile apps.

Apps represent a new kind of learning resource. The best mobile apps blend text-based learning with other modes of learning. Consider the rich potential of new books which blend text, video and interactive animation in a focused way to make a thesis more than understood.

Many of our students carry smartphones, eReaders and tablet computers. As mobile technologies proliferate on our campuses, our faculty are excited about the potential for using these commonplace devices to increase student engagement and extend learning outside the classroom.

The rise of smartphones is not about voice and text messaging. It is about ubiquitous internet connection. Many students and faculty now live our lives with a constant, direct access to the internet wherever we go. We are always connected. We are always communicating. We are always learning.

Library resources need to be as easy to discover and use as Google and Wikipedia. We imagine a college where library books, journals, videos and other collections are available “on demand” when and where they are needed.

We want to partner with our faculty who see the huge learning potential of mobile teaching technologies. We want those faculty to have access to the resources, tools and best practices required to develop powerful new ways of teaching.

We want our administrations to understand their libraries as active partners for creativity, knowledge and innovation.

We want our students to trust their libraries to be available when and where they need them and to think of their librarians as learning guides who can make their learning easier and more effective.

We are committed to creating mobile-friendly library environments that are useful, relevant and convenient. We are committed to understanding the desired learning outcomes of our institutions and delivering library services that support those outcomes.

We are TBR’s mobile-friendly libraries, and we are ready to help.

Are you prepared for “disruptive innovation”?

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A few weeks ago I got an email from a vendor asking me if I was “prepared for the latest disruptive innovation”.

What I wish I had said:

Dear Sir, a truly “disruptive” innovation is something for which you can neither plan nor prepare. Are you prepared for a free punch in the nose?

My latest training fail!

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People who love new technologies need to be careful when teaching others how to use them. We need to remember that technologies should solve problems, not create them.

I get excited and lose sight of this basic idea sometimes. I get my reminders several times a day. The reminder is always painful.

My most recent reminder came when doing the first staff training session for downloading eBooks to eReaders.

The problem we face is pretty complex: getting library books distributed easily and immediately to our students, staff and faculty at 8 teaching locations plus online. eBooks are the technological answer.

The problem is eBook downloads are, by design, not easy. Here’s the nutshell: two product platforms; a proliferation of eReaders which use different file types, three different passwords (library authentication for off-campus use, product login for download, Adobe ID for DRM authentication) and a separate download of Adobe Content Manager to drag the book through to receive its DRM christening. For tablet users, don’t forget the need to download the app and the app store password you will need to get the app if not already loaded. BTW, if you have Kindle Fire and are wanting a non-Kindle compliant title, you will need an entirely different set of instructions to go outside the normal Kindle app process, modify your device settings and then download the reading app while ignoring your devices warnings that the app you are downloading may not be safe.

Sounds bad, yes? It is. At least, the set up is. Once past the initial set up, downloading eBooks works great and solves a pretty significant problem: how to get library books where I want them, when I want them.

Here’s how to train staff on this process: give them step by step written instructions, give them laptops that have not yet been associated with ACM software and have them walk through the proccess step by step for themselves and then discuss what and why.

Here’s what I did: explain the difference between “dumb” eReaders (non-cloud based) vs. “smart” tablet eReaders; touch on why authentication is required and, if possible, a bit about how that works; describe what DRM does and why publishers want to ruin their own products with it; gush about all the technical things going on behind the scenes that make eBooks possible. Then, do a demo and then have them do one on the device of their own choice.

FAIL! We all came away a bit dispirited and thinking that maybe eBooks cause more problems than they solve. That isn’t true, of course. eBooks are a useful, practical solution to a real and significant problem: getting library books to patrons where they need them, when they want them. The process isn’t as elegant as it needs to be, yet, but is still a real improvement over the need for patrons to search the catalog, request a book and then wait one or two days for the book to be sent to a campus they will physically visit to receive the item.

eBooks are great. They work and will help our students, staff and faculty. That isn’t what I taught my team on Friday.

It wasn’t a total loss. Any time I can get reminded to make training simple, direct and practical, the better I become at training. I should be a training superhero pretty soon!

The takeaway:

When teaching others how to use new technologies, the focus has to be directly centered on what the particular tool at hand can do for them. Presumably, the use of appropriate tools makes part of our work easier so we can focus on more complex matters at hand and achieve bigger things. Forget this and you’ve got a recipe for failure.

Facebook gives me superpowers

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When I was a kid, there were two recurring fantasies that kept me fascinated for years and years:

  • What if every moment of my life were being recorded by my glasses so that everything I saw, said and heard was documented for future archivists to explore and piece together the meaning of my existence?
  • What if I could know where my friends were and what they were doing all the time?

Those would be kinds of super powers. I was a strange kid. Now I’m 37, and I’ve been given those powers. Its called social networks.

I’ve been thinking a lot about social networks recently – what they are for, how they connect us, how they isolate us, how they can make life seem simultaneously more intimate and more remote.

I did an inventory of the social networks I use:

    Facebook
    Twitter
    Google Plus
    LinkedIn
    GoodReads
    WordPress

And I just joined Pinterest, which apparently is more intended for 20-something ladies planning their weddings.

I don’t use these networks all the same way but they all give me superpowers.

Facebook

I check Facebook at least 5 times a day. I check in when I am someplace interesting. I post pictures and videos of my daughter. I post articles and I like stuff. Timeline may or may not be a huge violation of my personal privacy but I think it is pretty great that it can aggregate data from my day and put it all together in one neat, well-organized, more or less sequential line. Some of my friends do the same. That’s both powers: the power to document my own life — mundane and sublime — as well as the power to know where my friends are at any given time and what they are doing.

Twitter

I’ve become a bigger Tweeter just recently. Mostly because it is the most compact, information-rich way to find out what people you are interested in are thinking about. The biggest difference: you “friend” people on Facebook; you “follow” people on Twitter. Reading someone’s Twitter feed can be like peeking inside their brain. People unfollow me from time to time. I don’t get offended. When people “unfriend” me it hurts just a little.

Google Plus

I’ll be honest. I don’t actually use Google Plus very much. I haven’t taken the time to figure out what it’s for. I do like the concept of Circles where groups of friends can share posts but I haven’t had a “group” of friends since early high school. I’m pretty much an everybody or nobody kind of guy these days. So, maybe Google Plus doen’t actually give me superpowers, yet, but if I had a superhero outfit I could do worse than the nifty +1 logo.

LinkedIn

I will have to save LinkedIn for another post. I have a passive-aggressive relationship there. I love the ability to see who I know that knows somebody else I know in a completely different context. Superpower: omniscience. The ability to directly perceive how everything is related. Unfortunately, LInkedIn fails to satisfy my kidhood fantasies as I rarely check in and keep meaning to update my profile with all the Important, Serious Stuff I am doing at work. If I’m not updating my basic profile, am I really present?

GoodReads

I underuse the social aspect of this network. I use GoodReads pretty much just to list the books I’ve read and keep track of books I want to read. I do keep up with what a few of my friends are reading there, but, to be honest, my favorite part is posting GoodReads updates to Facebook because that’s where the people are.

WordPress

Very few comments on my blog so far. To be fair, I very rarely read other WordPress blogs, let alone comment. So, I don’t know for sure that I am actually using WordPress as a social network. But I do get a thrill when people read and tell me they read what I wrote. Superpower: back to the documenting my existence for future scholars. Its the Quotidian in Ubiquitous Quotidian.

PInterest and Tumblr

I’ll leave both of these alone for now since I haven’t used them much. I suspect I’m too wordy to connect with these image blogs much.

I can see that this post started out as one thing and has become something of another. Back to the beginning, Facebook gives me superpowers. That idea deserves another try again soon. I should slow down a bit and notice how I really use Facebook.

SOPA author attribution error: the kind of funny that makes you want to weep

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Turns out SOPA author Senator Lamar Smith violated the terms of his own bad legislation. His reelection campaign website (www.texansforlamarsmith.org) recently featured a background image illegally “pirated” from photographer DJ Schulte. Schulte posted the original image under a Creative Commons license requiring non-commercial users to attribute the image source when reposting. That didn’t happen. Don’t bother checking Smith’s site. The image has been removed.

There are lots of great articles about this. It seems that this article at vice.com started it all. Nice work!

I will support reasoned efforts to curtail blatant piracy and will line up behind attempts to help artists preserve the integrity of their own intellectual efforts. I can’t support SOPA. SOPA is written so broad it will further confuse people about what can and can’t be posted or published online. Our culture works through remix. We are constantly mixing ideas, writings and creative expressions into our own work to make something new. That’s called art. The web is really great for that. The so-called Stop Online Piracy Act is not about protecting copyright. It is about preserving corporate control over our own culture so that companies like Disney and Viacom can endlessly repackage and resell our own culture back to us over and over again.

Do not support this legislation. It is bad for artists. It is bad for Web users. It is bad for American culture. Find out more. Do something.

A fate worse than procrastination

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I sometimes don’t accomplish the things I intend to accomplish in a timely manner. Standing on the outside, I can see how it might appear that I am an inveterate procrastinator. But procrastinators are often seeking fun diversions to keep themselves from doing the serious, un-fun work at hand. That’s just not me.

I rarely take more than a 20 minute lunch break. I often forget to take breaks at all. I usually get to work around 7:30am and leave around 5pm. I have had very few days when my serious, important work felt un-fun. I enjoy working. I like being productive and getting things done.

So what’s the problem?

It isn’t procrastination. It isn’t fun-seeking distraction. I am trying to accomplish too much in one day. I start my day with unrealistic expectations of how much I can accomplish and occasionally bruise myself trying.

The problem isn’t doing too little. My problem is attempting to do too much.

In the spirit of my Stop Doing list, I am (for the moment) no longer using the to-do list productivity app on my iPad. Using it, I feel like I am drowning in my list of things to do.

Instead, each morning I jot down the items on my iPad list that need the day’s attention. By “jot down”, I mean on actual paper. **gasp** Beside each task I estimate how much time the activity should take. And then I number the tasks in order of need and get to work. So far, so good.

Epiphany #1: I am not really good at estimating how much time something is going to take.

Epiphany #2: You only get points for not being a procrastinator if you are actually accomplishing what you set out to accomplish. It doesn’t matter if the problem is too little effort or too much. The end result is the same.

My New Year’s Resolution: Make New Mistakes. Lots of them.

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Once again, Kind Readers, you are spared my own musings because something way more inspiring landed on my screen. Here’s fantasy/horror/YA author Neil Gaiman’s New Year’s wish for us all:

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.

So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.

Make your mistakes, next year and forever.

Love this! My thanks to my dear friend, Daryl Nash (chaos_sleeps) for putting this on my screen. He must have known I needed to hear this.

We have an obligation to spend our time doing great things

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I was planning to write something about the importance of writing a personal mission statement to help clarify your personal terms of success. Then I read this blog post by Seth Godin (“The Chance of Lifetime“) and I would much prefer that people read that instead.

Just a taste:

The thing is, we still live in a world that’s filled with opportunity. In fact, we have more than an opportunity — we have an obligation. An obligation to spend our time doing great things. To find ideas that matter and to share them. To push ourselves and the people around us to demonstrate gratitude, insight, and inspiration. To take risks and to make the world better by being amazing.

Read it. Right now. Go.