For years educators have leveraged curation tools such as Scoop.it, Storify, and Pinterest to help students critically evaluate online resources.
(my bold to emphasize the difference between the definition of digital literacy, which I am fighting to establish at SCSU LRS and the continuous “information literacy” trend of the reference librarians )
Mapping Digital Literacy Policy and Practice in the Canadian Landscape
A well-rounded digital literacy incorporates print literacy but adds new capacities, competencies and comportments into the mix. Now included is the technical know-how to create a website, produce and upload a video, edit an image, design a functional information architecture for accessing or sharing knowledge – as well as many “soft skills” such as critical thinking and ethical behaviour. One of the primary transformations of the digital era in the 21st Century has been the introduction of end-users as actors in the world of communication, autonomous (producers and consumers of information) who can access and disseminate content in Web 2.0 domains without the regulatory controls of traditional filters and gatekeepers. Given this development, end-users now need greater critical thinking capacities to manage content: to decide what is valid and truthful and be able to incorporate multiple perspectives and voices into expanding worldviews. Additionally, exhibiting ethical behaviour in what may be said or posted online is essential to contemporary civic mindedness whether in a local context or the broader global village.
Facebook, Twitter Engagement Done Best at Baylor and UW-Madison
By Dian Schaffhauser 04/11/16
Want to know how to do Twitter or Facebook right at your institution? You might want to study the practices used by the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the first and Baylor University for the second. Those two institutions have been deemed the “top users” of the those social media sites by Engagement Labs, which develops technology for measuring online social engagement.
Using its eValue Analytics service, the company said it can measure social media performance based on an aggregate of engagement, impact and responsiveness.
My note: let me repeat: engagement, impact and responsiveness. Whereas the environment where I am at is using Facebook as “easy to create” Web 1.0 page; namely to “announce.”
And recently, mimicking what other libraries are doing (NYPB), although even novices know that social media is about “branding,” AKA finding your own voice. Measurement being “how many people “follow.” Which three years ago was proved as futile.
And most most recently, since stumbling like blind man in the darkness of new ideas, they dropped everything on a student to “resolve” innovations for them.
No wonder that I am ostracized from the social media process, since I repeatedly insist that Web 2.0 is NOT about broadcasting but about dialog and insisted from the beginning to do start activities, which are a circle in a squared thinking.
Truth and Power, the final episode of which airs tonight on Pivot. Directed by Brian Knappenberger.
Knappenberger, who directed the feature-length documentary The Internet’s Own Boy, about the late Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz.
Social Media Has Helped Activists Reclaim the Narrative
it’s not just activists who are benefiting from new technologies. Knappenberger spends nearly half the series carefully explaining the myriad ways governments and corporations use digital tools to surveil social movements. From examining the cell-phone tracking technologies used by law enforcement to uncovering how repressive regimes work with American tech companies to thwart social movements, the series offers up a smart meditation on the threat of digital surveillance on political dissent
It’s a problem Knappenberger illustrates in the “Activists or Terrorists” episode, where he unpacks how “Ag-gag” laws were passed under pressure from corporate lobbying and have made it illegal to film or photograph inside any animal farm without consent of the facility’s owner.
“Prisoners for Sale,” the seventh episode, explores the story of two inmates-turned-journalists who started an independent publication to document systemic failures of the prison industrial complex.
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More on technology and civil disobedience in this IMS blog
It’s become increasingly common for hackers to sell compromised streaming accounts for services like Netflix, HBO, and Spotify on the dark web — a section of the internet only accessible from a special web browser. These account passwords are often recovered from phishing attempts, a hacking method that involves tricking someone into giving up their account info to what appears to be a legit source.
My note: the US News and World Report is behind times on its reporting, unless this article has been held for a while by their editor: teenagers moved from Snapchat as quickly as they moved away from Facebook to Twitter and from Twitter to Snapchat. The generation, which is running US News and World Report is way too slow to notice the nomadic social media moves of the Millennials.
The cited case from Nebraska, Katelyn Gilroy, a library media specialist, who is using Snapchat or school purposes, can undoubtedly have a niche in education, enticing students to learn about their library, reading, etc.
However, it is questionable to present the media specialist’s case from Nebraska as a blank statement; a case, which can be adopted nationwide. Ms. Pannoni fails to mention that since 15 years ago, when instant messaging was the “snapchat” of the times, U.S. students consider these applications their “virtual mall,” where they like to hang out, but are not keen to consider them for educational purposes. In the same fashion, U.S. students are somehow unique in considering Facebook, later Twitter, then Snapchat and now Kik, Yammer, Celly, or Elgg a domain reserved for their private, extracurricular activities.
More about use of social media in education in this IMS blog:
This article explains how the University of Nebraska Kearney Calvin T. Ryan Library improved their social media strategy by using an RSS 2.0 feed to update and sync social media tools and create a slideshow on the library’s home page. An example of how to code a well-formed RSS 2.0 feed with XML is given, in addition to PHP, HTML, and JQuery utilized to automate the library home page slideshow.
My note: such use of social media + blog was exactly what I have been proposing to the SCSU library for several years to no avail.
In order to sync content, and coordinate those channels, libraries can turn to enterprise solutions, such as Gremln, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or Hootsuite; however, a simpler approach is to utilize an RSS (Really Simply Syndication or Rich Site Summary) feed to disseminate content to various social media channels.
using a WordPress blog for news and events in the library that grew to include items of potential interest to the campus community connected to the library. Categories were created to describe posts in more detail, structure content and link related posts, such as “Library Info” or “E-resources”.
Paul Scifleet
Charles Sturt University, School of Information Studies, Chalres Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, NSW 2678, Australia Maureen Henninger
Information & Knowledge Management Program, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
Kathryn H. Albright
Charles Sturt University, School of Information Studies, Chalres Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, NSW 2678, Australia
The view we bring to this study is one of documentary practice as the set of techniques, including processes for the selection, synthesis and interpretation of the material form of documents and their content, meaning and context, that librarianship brings to the organization and management of knowledge (Briet, 2006; Pédauque, 2003). Current emphases in social media research on ‘big data’ and quantitative analysis are distracting from the significant role social media have to play as a record of social significance that should be brought into public custody for future use.
In its multiple manifestations, social media are “a new kind of cultural artefact” (Lyman and Kahle, 1998, para 15), as was the World Wide Web when Brewster Kahle set up the Internet Archive, reasoning that “in future it may provide the raw material for a carefully indexed, searchable library” (Kahle, 1997, p. 82). My note: what the German start promoting in the 60s as Alltagsgeschichte.
the possibility of selective acquisition and management of social media, as a document of specific events and topics, as an alternative to the Library of Congress’s whole-of-archive approach with Twitter.
