Ask a Librarian 2.5?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-drips-with-ambition-can-it-fulfill-googles-grand-web-vision/

 

Google Wave is looking to make a splash and I am excited to test this and see how far we can take it for our reference services.

Facebook a distraction from studies?

Jeff Young from the Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog recounted a new study from Ohio State in which the performance of students was assessed using their use of Facebook as a determining factor.  There are many raised eyebrows surrounding this topic, but the data so far is inconclusive and not accurate enough to draw true correlations between use and performance.  Frankly, I would wager that there are more factors than just Facebook for poor performance.  What if one student didn’t use Facebook but constantly texted their friends in class, played Warcraft until 3a.m. and then spent most of the other times watching old Kung Fu movies without cracking a book?  I would wager that performance would rate rather low.  Then again what if there was another student which had a similar behavior pattern but used Facebook to organize get togethers with their friends, shared assignments online, and contacted their librarian for help via Facebook.  They may still perform poorly, but it wasn’t their use of Facebook that brought them down. 

I would be curious to run a study in which the students are assigned a level of social networking proficiency.  From that we could try to rate whether their networking seemed to add or detract from a normalized pattern of studious behavior.

10 SKills for Software Developers of the Future

Justin James submitted a post about possible preferred skills software developers will need in the next few years. It isn’t a far leap to realize that many of these skills will be necessary for librarians dealing with web and application design.

You Tube goes edu

As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, You Tube has recently created a channel for colleges and universities.    They are only accepting one channel from each institution, but this is a great way to focus your library videos onto the You Tube network.  Now when your users look for your library’s information literacy video, they won’t have to spend hours browsing through unrelated videos.  There are over 100 institutions signed up now, so don’t wait and start the process to get your videos into the You Tube Edu stream.

Google Chrome is shiny

Google has just released their first foray into the internet browser race with their product called Google Chrome. Though my first hand experience has only been for a few short hours, I am already impressed by what they have built.

Chrome features easy tabbed browsing, but bumps it up a notch by dynamically showing you sites that you frequently visit when opening a new tab.  The tabs themselves are easy to move around, pop out from the browser into a new window, and won’t crash the entire application if one tab goes kaput.  Chrome has instant bookmarking options as well as application shortcuts.  It features secure browsing and the newest hot topic for future IE releases, incognito mode.  (I am instantly reminded of the Simpsons reference to Guy Incognito.)

I suppose this may be a bit annoying to non-technology nerds and systems administrators, but there is something nice about seamless interoperability in a secure and stable browser.  I am anxious to see how people react and what types of hurdles Chrome must leap before it is featured amongst the big names in web browsing.