Although I actually finished my INFO580 research project some time ago - in October of last year - I’ve been slow in making it available here on the blog. A combination of work, Christmas, and taking an interesting paper on Web and Intranet Content Management over trimester three has really meant that I’ve barely thought about my research, and Second Life in general, since finishing the project. (more…)
This week is orientation week at Victoria University, and yesterday I gave my first orientation session to the students. This presentation was a pretty simple introduction to all things library, with a friendly and welcoming tone, for first years up at the central Kelburn library. I’ll be taking some more complex ones soon enough, for Second Year Design, and hopefully Architecture, too. (more…)
Keith (one of our acquisitions crew) posted a link on our library blog today to an amazing, spontaneous, accidentally educational, treasure hunt game that some person (I’m still trying to work out if she’s actually a librarian or just an interested student) created in her local academic library.
Coreopsis Major left clues in the form of call numbers at her library, at first on tables, then leading to books at various locations around the library, to take the finder of these clues on a treasure hunt around the library. Eventually, there’s treasure at the end.
(I borrowed these pictures from Coreopsis Major’s page on SFZero, go check out her project!)
Coreopsis was playing SFZero, a kind of Alternate Reality Game. In this game, players create “Characters” who perform all kinds of “tasks” out in the real world in order to obtain completion “scores” when they report back their progress on the website. In many cases, the tasks, submitted by other players to the game, are simple, yet ambiguous, designed to allow players to exercise huge amounts of creativity. (more…)
“Games give you hand-eye coordination and spatial intelligence together with map reading skills” Aussie comedy trio Tripod explain musically why video games are more important than other things.
“You can call them criminals and use the law and technology to block them, or encourage them by making a wide range of material available that gives them a better understanding of their past and a better opportunity to say something about the future.”
“Within minutes, if you’ve written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers.” Awesome visualization of the network activated by a blog post!
I am currently working on a new assignment for the Web and Intranet Content Management course I’m taking (INFO561). The assignment requires me to write a report evaluating a website, using the concepts learned during the course of the trimester.
One of the main reasons I enrolled in this course was to provide myself with an opportunity to consider in detail the design of our own library website here at Victoria. I wanted an opportunity to prepare for the library’s planned total re-design of our web presence later in 2008. So, for this assignment, I’ve decided to select the Victoria library website as my target, in the hope that it will help stimulate and refine my ideas about the website’s future growth. Perhaps I’ll have the change to engage with the team responsible for the re-design!
From reading the assignment brief, I think the main areas my report will need to address are:
Additionally, I need to refer to more abstract questions as well:
I’m going to try to blog my progress a little as I work through the assignment, and will be creating a project page to collect these posts and other information about the assignment.
