Folks here and there have observed that Michael Stephens and Jenny Levine are doing a bang-up job leading instruction in an innovative Library 2.0 Boot Camp, complete with blogs, wikis, podcasts, and bards, but as Greg over at Open Stacks notes, something is a twee awry with the technical environment they were provided.
This isn’t a Jenny-and-Michael problem; they’re the instructors. In fact, I feel a big ol’ surge of empathy for hapless instructors trying to teach new technologies in a limited environment, and I am sure their instruction is top-notch.
Greg notes that the podcasts students are producing aren’t treated as true media enclosures. For those of you whose eyes just glazed over, that just means something important is badly kerflummeled so you can’t correctly subscribe to the podcasts.
What I noticed yesterday, in reading Nancy Kranich’s one-post blog (hmmm… I know Jenny and Michael, and I bet their druthers would have been for the students to participate in one group blog) is that most of the blogs won’t display correctly; the right side is cut off on my 17″ monitor. I might have posted a brief comment on Nancy’s blog, but I needed to register to comment, and that always stops me cold.
It’s not hard to trace the root of the display problem. The stylesheet used to define the blogging environment has fixed widths. That’s not too surprising, because the company that has overall responsibility for this training–The Otter Group–has a main page for its site that has identical problems.
Aside from the nuisance quotient–please don’t make a user do the Horizontal Scroll!–this design violates basic accessibility guidelines. It’s a simple no-brainer. But then, the Otter Group’s website doesn’t even validate, and given that they’re paid to deliver technology solutions, that’s interesting. (Yes, I know, this blog’s page doesn’t validate, but I’m quite forward in admitting that I can’t code.)
I’m also wondering about this group using Blogware, a little-know blogging platform, rather than WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger, Typepad, or something at least vaguely familiar. Teaching always imposes a little artifice, but if the classroom environment is too artificial, it becomes harder to apply what you learned to real life. (Unless… say it ain’t so… ALA plans to use Blogware association-wide!)
I’m surmising Michael and Jenny have had to issue a few disclaimers about the class versus real life. Hang in there, keep working around the obstacles (as Greg notes in his post, Michael has already addressed some of the podcasting issues), and pull those folks forward two or three decades!
Posted on this day, other years:
I’m so happy you wrote this because now I can just link to it instead of offering my very very similar observations. I’ve been keeping up with a few of the blogs and I can see people’s frustrations with the technology. Some of this is just being new at the game, I’m sure, but I can’t help feel that one of the most important parts of new technology — being able to CHOOSE it because it makes your life BETTER — has been withheld from the participants in this case. I feel the same way about some of the top-down tech solutions that ALA has implemented in the past. People who aren’t part of choosing their own tools don’t have as much invested in learning them.
Using an off-brand blogging solution which is almost guaranteed to work differently than the top three, four or five (free) tools out there seems like an odd way to start out and while it’s great to be able to read participants’ thoughts as they go through this, the blogs haven’t really felt like a conversation as much as my favorite blogs out there. I wish everyone some luck and patience working through this, I know it’s not easy, and I know we can be all L2 about it and use the feeback to make it better the next time.
As a participant in the Bootcamp, I say “What she said!” I have been struggling with a constructive way to get my frustrations out in blog form. I think it will have to wait until tomorrow. Michael and Jenny are doing an awesome job but it would have been much better if ALA had just let them choose a bunch of open source stuff.
More on my blog later.
Wouldn’t even have to be open source–Movable Type, Typepad, or Blogger would have been safe choices as well. I think “most likely to be deployed in a library environment” might be key here–which would actually give the tip of the hat to TypePad in many settings.
Your post finally made me get off my butt and write what I had been thinking for a couple days. Thanks for the “push.”
As the person responsible for choosing Blogware for the ALA Boot Camp, I should go on the record about why we made this choice. We have been using Blogware as our “outside the firewall” blogging solution because it allows us to manage customized blogging offerings for groups. We can quickly develop, create and assign blogs to groups. Blogware is designed for re-sellers. Typepad is designed for individual users. Movable Type is about to release an enterprise option which is probably what we standardize on for our enterprise customers. ALA will have to make its own decisions about what to use. Each of these solutions has advantages and disadvantages. But the basic mechanisms are the same.
This is the first time the width problem has been brought to our attention (probably because we have recommended people use BlogBridge or Rojo to read the posts). Many of the librarians in the program have been playing with and customizing their style sheets, which has been fun for them and a nice surprise to us. But it also may have created problems in display.
This is a pilot. In order to keep the support costs down, we have chosen technologies that we are already set up to support and manage. We chose iTunes over an open source podcatcher because we have back-end systems in place that make it easy for us to get podcasts posted. Since iTunes is free and ubiquitous, it seemed like a logical choice.
But I think you missing the forest from the trees. The goal of the pilot is to immerse people in a set of web 2.0 tools so that they can understand their strengths and weaknesses and then use this understanding to design new methods of operation for librarians. This group has come up with a very powerful set of project ideas that they are working on. That is where the important value in this program lies. To read the first drafts on these projects, go to http://library2.0.alablog.org/blog/_WebPages/2006TeamProjects.html
I hope you will re-post this to your main blog so that Jenny and Michael are officially let off the hook and so that your readers have some understanding of the thinking behind the choices.
Jenny and Michael were THOROUGHLY “let off the hook” to begin with; in fact, they not only need to be let off the hook, they need to be free to swim. ALA is darn lucky to have Jenny and Michael teaching this class, and I look forward to watching this latest batch of change-makers shake things up.
My concern for them, and the comments I was getting in private from participants, were two reasons I initially posted about this issue.
I don’t have extensive time to respond–I need to attend to my day job–but I’m an educator and trainer, and a pretty good one if I say so. The rationales for the software you use make no sense.
First, on the width issue, your own website doesn’t display correctly, so suggesting that it’s the students tinkering with displays isn’t persuasive. I’m not sure you’re understanding the depth of the problem: as a provider to a library-based organization, your own services should model what librarians need to provide in real life, and that includes accessible code that validates to a published standard. Suggesting that the user is in error if she’s not using yet another proprietary tool–the aggregator you’re relying on–is even odder.
Your arguments for iTunes-based “podcasts” are equally convoluted. There are any number of simple tutorials about podcasting, and most begin with creating a file with modifying the RSS feed so it accepts media enclosures, creating the podcast with a simple tool such as Audacity, uploading the file to a website, and creating a blog post. I don’t know what kind of “backend,” “enterprise” software is forcing you to use iTunes, but a decent, secure FTP client is relatively inexpensive.
Furthermore, as a number of us insist, forcing students to use nonstandard tools–such as the blogging software and the aggregator–detracts from the educational experience. I am just now finishing a second master’s degree, and when it’s time to submit an essay, my teachers don’t tell me to write a haiku. It’s the most fundamental educational task: solve for X.
Here’s an aerial view of the forest. This class isn’t just about theoretical concepts; it’s about the practical application of theory in the real world today. But that makes the decision to use nonstandard software even more questionable, because part of the modeling in this training should be about how to select tools, and to guide librarians away from their natural tendency toward expensive, obscure solutions and toward practical implementations that can be replicated as quickly as possible. It’s taken a few depth charges from outside the training to push the podcasting closer to a realistic scenario. As for the blogging software, I’ve seen so many “enterprise” implementations of major products such as Movable Type and WordPress that I can’t agree that Blogware was the right choice.
I’m sure your company provides value to many customers. But in this project, in this particular setting, your approach seems to have complicated the path to success.