The autodidatic quests of this ingenious hidalgo: A Quixotic tale.

There were a few novelties on the list of things last week with things that I had mainly come into contact tangentally but that never really explored. Recently I have been ploughing through Don Quixote (in English as the Spanish would be impossible), which has made me wonder about my various attempts at teaching myself things. Here is a quick run through of my adventures:

Slideshare #16
in which our hero encounters a collection of presentations and ultimately relflects upon the couragous deeds of chivalry

In the past I have stumbled accross slideshare from links from presentations. This was the first time that I have used it as a resource. Being an avid autodidact, I am always looking for new resources for my next project. So I selected three topics to evaluate this collection.

1. Computer things - I am on a mission to make myself more computer aware, recently this has covered markup languages, mainly XML. I found lots of presentations from beginner to advanced by searching XML and other related key words.
2. Maths things - Another project is learning about the branch of mathematics called set theory, which was loosely covered in my maths lectures as an economics student. The resources I found here were very basic and only seemed to cover notation, perhaps this flaw is the nature of slides being summaries.
3. Literature things - I found the resources even more sparse as I continued into the more abstract realms of literature. Although a search for the great Don Quixote de la Mancha did throw up this great presentation, which puts real life landscapes to the quintessentially Spanish novel.

POR ESPA�A CON DON QUIJOTE

View more presentations from formespa

Above all I am impressed by the international nature of slideshare; my searches returned presentations in English, French, Italian, and Spanish. For a moment I felt part of an international community, which was nice.

Wikis #17
in which our knight errant faces his most stressful demons to date

Wikis are scary. It's fun playing with content but it's scary when it is something that everyone has contributed to and there is the possibility of deleting things forever. I added my blog to the 23things section of the UK library blogs. I write and edit my blog posts in html because I like the control that it gives me but editing the "source" was too scary. So I tried entering html with the <a href="..."> bit but it left a box with JavaScript, which was also scary. In the end I just left the http://... address in the fear that doing otherwise would break it!

Delicious #18
in which the fraught dealings with Wikis are put to rest as our hero emerges triumphant

I've had a Delicious account for a while now but never used it. After I got rid of the handful of ancient links and got started afresh I realised that I had found something very handy indeed. Working on a handful of computers scattered hither and tither throughout the land means that I make frequent use of email drafts to save nuggets of interest and while I have tried things such as evernote and delicious before I have never really been able to keep up.

This time I put the effort into organising and maintaining my delicious account for a week and I am impressed by the results. I like the search facility a lot. A lot. Sad I know but I like the ability to filter by tags as well as by tag exclusion as well as the graph for tags added by time. I will definitely be using this in the future.

Thanks to Delicious leading me to yet another apt comic from xkcd.

Evernote
an addendum quest which acts as a clever little moment for reflection on the week

Evernote is a lovely little tool that I have been using for a while but as with some of the things from this programme it is probably most effective for people who are very organised. I am not. I pick things up and put them down without finishing them. I am not synced. I don't have all of my applications up to date and nor do I want to. My concentration is fickle and I like it that way. I carry hundreds of notes and lists written down on scraps of paper and while Evernote is probably the perfect tool for organising everything I find it requires a patience that I don't really have. I suppose it's a matter of habit, like writing a diary, which is something else I've never been able to maintain.

Doodle and Google

Doodle was new to me and using it was straightforward. I liked the features and it was really easy to use. Crucially though, I think would imagine it works best with a large group of people or for when the meeting and a time frame is already agreed. When I tried it, the lack of an option for "not" this time and an undefined time span essentially meant we had to confirm by email in the end anyway, thereby doubling the things we had to do. A good example in how not to use technology purely for the sake of it. I think that it would be a useful thing to use when n>2 because the number of emails required to get all to confirm rises exponentially.

I love google docs. I have been using them for years. Recently I have used it to help my brother apply for university by being allowed to view and edit his applications and I am maintaining a spreadsheet with my sister as we plan our next adventure - a hike in Finland during the midnight sun next year. I didn't know that you could embed google docs. That's something I want to try in the future.

Next week: sharing.

Survey on 23things participants and their commutes.

I quite like Survey Monkey. Although I haven't had a huge amount of time to investigate as much as I would like, I quickly put together a survey here to try some of the features. Anyone who knows me, or who has worked with me, will think it apt.

I would like to know whether there is the facility to create conditional questions (in the form if you answered x then complete question y) which would allow for more specific questions. I am interested to see what it will let me do with the analysis.

The Lancet Liver Fluke: an eccentric but true adventure.

Inspired by seeing the other prezi presentations in the 23things project I decided that I should have a go myself. I tried to be educational and picked a subject that not many people on the project would be familiar with as a test on how well this medium can introduce new subjects.

Perhaps the venerable Don Quijote de La Mancha, whose love of literature drove him insane, seeing stories of chivalry everywhere he set out on an adventure where we get our word quixotic, had a point. Nature does often appear to have been written by Holly Martins. Perhaps it's true that "The world doesn't make any heroes outside of your stories" as Harry Lime tells Holly, but there are strange tales of subterfuge, cunning and manipulation. Here is a good example:

Copy of The eccentric life-cycle of the Lancet liver fluke. on Prezi

I tried to follow my guidelines from the previous post but played with the idea of the narrative using a cycle. The canvas approach also lets the life-cylce of this parasite be seen as a whole and people can zoom in at particular points. I think it is for presentations like this where Prezi works best.

My prezi principles.

Presenting is not easy. Over the years various media have developed to aid us with presentations but it's important to remember that it is only an aid. When I was a masters student at LSE our Econometrics lectures were delivered on blackboard in an exhilarating fashion by an excellent lecturer and we all sat there, week on week, writing down all he said and wrote. This was a very important lesson in communication for me and, as librarians are doing more educating, it is worthwhile remembering that the medium is not the be all and end all, rather an aid to what you say.

I think people are too hard on Powerpoint, it strikes me that we are often too eager to damn the medium rather than the presenter when our concentration wains. Slideshows can still be innovative, one of my favourite bands when I was at university was the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, who crafted songs to go with vintage slides picked up from carboot sales. Jennifer Egan's A visit from the Goon Squad features an entire chapter in powerpoint (you can find Egan's tips on using the medium for telling stories here).

Prezi combines the "canvas" approach of the blackboard and the slides of Powerpoint. While it's good at making presentations spin and swirl I think its strength lies in the ability to arrange the information on a canvas and draw connections between them. I'm a rather dull chap when it comes to presentations; I only like the motion between prezi "slides" when it is used to carry out a narrative - for example the zoom in function is great if used to emphasise a detail and if the panning movements represent a logical train of thought from start to finish - otherwise it's pointless and makes me feel a bit seasick. In other words, I want as few things between the information and me as possible.

If I were to use Prezi for presentations I would try to stick by some rules:

1. Zoom to focus on detail and pan out to generalise, to cover a wider issue, or overarching point
2. Twist and swirl to demonstrate conflicting arguments
3. Use left to right movement to construct a narrative or a sense of progression
4. Never do something for the sake of it
5. Always make sure you are the main focus of the presentation

I have put some effort into thinking of an interesting prezi but at the moment I am without inspiration. Luckily, when my sister was taking a course in teaching english as a foreign language I suggested that she use Prezi to liven up her classes, which I think is a good simple example of using its strengths without becoming nauseating.

Fashion Victims 2 on Prezi

¿Qué opinas? What do you think?

At the start I used my experiences with Twitter to illustrate some issues I have with social media. Over the past week I've been putting in a lot of effort and while there has not been a revelatory moment, I am now more comfortable with it. Here are a couple of thoughts:

• Information source.
  Twitter can have a number of uses but for me it's just like an interactive form of teletext. I can search by hashtags and filter something like the old teletext news feed; I can watch real time reactions and keep track of things like the Tour de France and the News of the World fallout as it turns toxic. Although I wonder about its value; I can get these things elsewhere, often covered in greater depth, on news websites. I don't think I gain that much from seeing it all happen in real time but it does feel more exciting.
• Conversation analogy.
  I am not comfortable with the conversation analogy. For a conversation I need to know whom I am adressing but with Twitter I don't; it strikes me as being like shouting into a dark cave and waiting to see what echoes come back. Twitter is not a conversation but rather provides a medium for user interaction: it is good at providing people with a medium to interact with information; it provides a medium to broadcast as well as receive; and it provides a marketplace for people to advertise and generate a sense of brand interaction or strong brand identity. All of these provide opportunities for libraries but I do not see it is a conversation.
• Talking Personally
  I follow a variety of accounts from personal to corporate. This means I get personal conversations between friends from which I would usually be excluded mixed with news items, interesting pieces of information, and the occasional plug. At times it can be a fascinating polyphony but I still find it annoying. I do find this mixing of public and private space odd and I have noticed that Twitter is a medium where larger organisations adopt similar language. ¿Qué opinas? asks El País What do you think? wonders the guardian yet I wonder why they care.
• Taking Time
  Twitter is an excellent resource for links and articles using a crowd sourcing principle to filter the internet. However, it does take time and frequent attention. I will persevere with it but as an information source. For a while I have used it as a newsfeed for my tumblr account, I also publicise blog posts I have written for my Spanish friends, which a great way to learn a language as their comments are encouraging as well as helpful, and the occasional interaction.
  

Many thanks to foryouriasonly, Twinset & Purls (again), and Oli for their informative posts on Twitter, which have been very helpful.

Ice cream and some things to catch up on

I didn't plan it to happen this way but a trip to see my sister in the Alpine city of Turin was arranged long before I knew the 23things programme. I'm not sure it's possible to feel alienated by a zeitgeist - the Germanic root of the word leaves me lost for an appropriate metaphor -  but if this geist does have some form of anatomy then it's definitely given me the cold shoulder when it comes to Twitter and LinkedIn. I was relieved to see my trip coincided with these two things and I did a splendid job of putting it off by spending the majority of the last week eating Italian ice cream, drinking Italian coffee, and doing little else.

So now that I have returned from sunny and stormy Italy. Bouyed by some lovely posts from Twinset & Purls, Peter, Oli, and Eliterate I am going to try with these two technologies and I will write it up later in the week.

First some preliminaries.

I've been on Twitter since the start of October and find it reasonably useful for some kinds of information. As usual Phil Bradley is a brilliant resource, as is Ned Potter, I get updates from friends who are not on other social network sites, or use them less frequently, news from my main news providers (El País and the guardian), and Armando Ianucci always makes me laugh. Thanks again to Twinset & Purls [idem] for this presentation by Ned Potter although I am sorry to say that while I am not all that familiar with the "to tweet or not to tweet" debate, it struck me as a series of straw men felled by an ill-fitting slogan (mixing my metaphors), which is a shame because I generally find Ned really encouraging.   

I have never had a problem with character restriction (I send text messages all the time) but I don't like the neologisms or the information overload and while lists help I think you really do exposure and frequent visits to cope. At the moment I think the most important part is selection - both of audience and feeds - but we shall see later in the week.

I joined LinkedIn a while a go but like other people on the programme failed to see the point. It struck me as being rather corporate and soulless. I just carried out a contact search of my gmail account and the people it suggested weren't really who I want to contact through this medium but I will put some more effort into it.