The Technology Trifecta

I work with the soft side of technology. I don’t write code (I only have the tiniest bit of coding ability, and I haven’t used it in years), I don’t do hardware. I don’t monitor servers. The soft side of technology is all about working with the people trying to use it, and helping them to understand it. I’ve come to believe that there are three key things required to help other people use technology effectively. I’ve come to this realization as part of the rethink and reworking of our faculty training program this year, and it’s forced me to think about the whole experience from another angle.

Granted, my background in theological studies and my penchant for writing fiction in my spare time probably play a role in my perspective on this, but I’m going to run with it.

The (soft side) Technology Trifecta

1. A Good Metaphor

All technology requires a good metaphor, something people can seize onto. The wrong metaphor can leave a technology languishing for ages. Metaphor is how the brain learns what to do with a thing. When they called it “email” (a stroke of genius) everyone knew what they could do with this network messaging system: send and receive, store, forward, add attachments. That metaphor is what, I believe, makes email the most obvious and easiest-to-learn application we’ve got. Blogs had a good one with old school journaling and diaries (and explains why the first run of blogs were all intensely personal). Without decent metaphors, our patrons will struggle with the web. A good metaphor might take years to think up, and we might only come up with one really good metaphor in our lifetimes, but I think coming up with them is a worthy pursuit.

2. Faith

I had the experience recently of having to investigate something pretty dire, and then relay my findings back to a distressed and disconcerted instructor. He had to take my word for it that the thing he was afraid had happened had not in fact happened. I had to reassure him that he could still trust the system. If you don’t have faith in the system you’re using, if you think it’s possible that, without your knowledge or understanding, it’s revealing secrets or displaying your content to the world without your permission, your willingness to be creative with it will rapidly vanish.

There’s a difference, however, between selling someone a system and helping them to have faith in it. You don’t have to adore a bit of software in order to have faith in it. You need to know that when you trust it with information it will do what you expect it to with that information. Setting those expectations appropriately helps people develop faith in a system. I see my role not as making you love the institutional system, but to have faith in it.

The best gift I could receive in this situation is to have the instructor believe me when I explain what’s happened. I want him to have faith in me, too. (He did.)

3. A Mac Friend

This one takes a bit of explaining. Back in the 90s when I first started using macs, I wasn’t comfortable making that decision on my own. Everyone I knew was a PC user: what if I ran into a problem? There were no mac stores then. I would have been on my own. I might not have stayed a mac user if it had not been for the one guy I knew who used macs. I had my mac friend, and I knew he could help me with the things I didn’t understand. Knowing I had a mac friend meant I could try things and feel comfortable knowing there was someone I could turn to.

In a meeting several months ago, a retiring librarian told me she wanted to switch to a mac but wasn’t sure she knew what she was doing. I said to her, “It’s okay. I’ll be your mac friend.” That was when I realized that I didn’t need a mac friend anymore. But I had become one for other people.

Of course, this is the genius of the apple genius bar: they sell mac friends.

I think every technology needs a mac friend, and that’s how I’m currently framing faculty technology support. They may not need you to walk them through every “click here” and array of options. They may just need your help to get them started, and your reassurance that you are there for them when they hit a wall. They have a mac friend; they can try things and not be afraid of having to dig themselves back out on their own. It’s like a safety net; personal, one-on-one, on call reassurance.

We’ve spent years focusing on the content of training when it comes to technology, not realizing that the most important thing we were doing while giving that training was just demonstrating that we know what we’re doing and we’re here to help.

So that’s what I’m focusing on now. I know what I’m doing, you can trust me. I’m here to help you, not just now, but all year long. See this thing? It thinks its an archive. Go play with it. If you run into trouble, I’m always here to help.

Is Librarianship a Profession?

Just starting to follow a feisty discussion around the use of the term “librarian”, helped along by Rachel Singer Gordon’s excellent post on librarianship’s attitude toward library paraprofessionals here. I must bow to Dorothea, who breaks down the idea of “profession” and how librarianship fits in in her post here. A teaser:

Profession is monopoly labor protectionism, driving up the price of the Elect. End of story. All the training, all the oaths, all the conferences, all that other stuff amounts to pissing in a circle to mark territory, hoard resources (i.e. jobs and social status), and keep the unwashed out. Where an individual doing a particular kind of work can more or less swan about naming her own price, labor perceives no need for the trappings of a profession.

What a fascinating and powerful exchange.

Ping Me

My friend June figured this one out first, and it’s so rad I had to follow suit: meebo, the wonder tool that allows anyone to log into their AIM, Yahoo, MSN or Jabber accounts from any browser anywhere, came out with a widget you can stick on your site. And it does what I’ve always dreamed of such an app doing; it’s connected to a client, so I can launch the client and get IMs from guests who visit my website. And they don’t need to log in to do it.

You can test it out on me here.

You could do something like this with those floating chat windows (very cool, all of them), but this one really bridges the gap between proper IM and web-based chat. You don’t even need a meebo account (or any other) to talk to me!

One of the big advantages to the meebo widget is that it’s entirely private, only two-way communication. If two people land on the page at the same time, you just get two IM windows in your client, they aren’t aware of each other. There are other apps to allow people who are visiting the same site to natter at each other anyway. I’ve been wanting something like this.

I think this widget is a really nice step to move into v.ref. No accounts, no special software; and you coud stick it all over the place, including, say, in a course-specific web resource or pathfinder. And the thing tells you if the person on the other end isn’t available right now. Sweet!

Reference, Transcripts, and Ethics in SL

So here’s the situation: I dropped into the Info Island Reference Desk because someone asked me what librarians in Second Life look like. A neat question, I thought. How do librarians represent themselves when they can look like anything they want? Do they look like traditional librarians, with glasses and buns and sensible shoes, or do they mix it up and look more radical? So I thought I’d drop in and see if I could take some pictures of people to show the variety of looks librarians sport. But this is what I found instead: a librarian sitting in a chair with text over his head saying he’s just listening in to reference questions. (click the picture to see it bigger; the key parts are the hovering text over him, and probably also the two lines of chat in the bottom right corner. That tells you how people were reacting to the fellow!)

Does this seem appropriate to you? I mean, would we let someone just hover around the reference desk and record to the kinds of questions people ask us? This guy is sitting there completely mute. He’s probably away from his computer, so the joy for him will be in reading the transcript. I make no secret whatsoever about my issues with transcripts; I found this guy entirely creepy. He’s sitting in his chair, staring blankly out at us, recording everything we say. We apparently give our permission by merely being in the space. Since this is a reference point, this basically says, if you want to ask a question, you have to let this guy record it. And newbies may not realize that that’s what’s going on. I have a bad feeling about this.

He didn’t mean anything by it, I know it. He just wanted to get a sense of the kinds of questions that are asked at a SL reference point. He’s trying to learn. I understand that, but I think this approach is a classic example of misundertsanding the nature of a virtual environment. While it might look like it’s just another form of virtual reference software, it’s important to remember that you have a body in Second Life. You have presence and you can intimidate people. Someone plonking down in your living room and staring into space, with a tape recorder in their hands, is going to be saying something to the occupants, even if he says nothing at all. While body language is a null issue in traditional virtual reference software (I didn’t think it was time to attach the word “traditional” to vref, but there you go), body language has real meaning in a virtual space, and we need to be conscious of that. It would have been wiser to ask to shadow a reference librarian in action in SL rather than to just sit around and listen while afk. Actually participate in the process, like reference librarians in training tend to do. Watch and learn, participate and learn, interact and learn. The things we do in real life often work pretty well in an immersive digital world.

Is it respectful to record people’s conversations at the reference desk in real life? Why would we do it here? It’s possible here, of course; you can always record the conversations around you. It’s just transcripts, it’s just text. But in SL it’s not just text; it’s more personal than that. While it’s possible to record and study every word that’s said in SL, I expect librarians to be more thoughtful and more careful about patron privacy. We live by it in our work lives, so why shouldn’t it carry over? Why is it so difficult to bring the rules of real life social engagement into a digital world? Is it because, in the end, it’s hard to believe in the place and the people inside it? Is it too easy to dehumanize the virtual?

I used to run into that in text based environments. It was just too difficult to read closely and feel the three dimensions in text. But this is a three dimensional world, with human-like avatars. I would think it would be easier to humanize our presence there. But maybe I’m wrong about that.

MLearn: Don’t forget about Training!

There’s a bit of a recurring theme to the presentations so far that hovers around teacher training in particular, and training in general. It started with the Keynote (which I blogged about yesterday), its head was raised again in this morning’s keynote (about the “Net Generation”) and crops up here and there in various presentations. It seems there’s a devout belief from on high that training is simply not necessary, particularly not for anyone under the age of 23.

I’ve fought this beast a million times. First: there have been legitimate studies that indicate that access to a computer doesn’t make students any smarter, or get them better grades. I think I’ve already blogged a few of those studies. A computer alone doesn’t solve anything, and even if a student knows how to play WoW (World of Warcraft), it doesn’t mean she is a technogenius. In my experience, undergraduates are not only not “digital natives” in the way that people over 30 like to think of them; they have cell phones, they have IM, but they have no idea how to find information on the internet, are floored by a new web application, aren’t comfortable playing around with something like a wiki to see how it works, and no idea why it’s not a good idea to send email from their h0tchk1987@yahoo.com account to the registrar’s office or two a potential employer. Technology literacy cannot be judged by a person’s gadgets; I often think these ideas are generated by people who are in awe of the toys available and find them difficult to use. Seeing that their 12 year old daughters aren’t intimidated by these gadgets, they decide that kids just Get It. It’s just natural for them, somehow.

I really wish the people who write these things would stop using their (genius!) 12 year old daughters as models and would instead ask the people who actually work with students on a regular basis. I did. I asked at UTM’s Computing Services what they thought about this idea of younger age == tech virtuosity. Their experience: just because a person is 19 years old doesn’t mean he knows how to set up his wireless, or knows how to do a windows update, or can work out how to configure his email account. Technology is a wide world of its own, and you can be extremely proficient at one part of it and be hopeless with another.

The result of this deep-seated belief that Kids are born with a USB plug in their mouths had a serious impact; my friend Minna Saulio from Finland reported in her research from South Africa that private corps provide money for computers, but no tech support; they have rooms full of computers they can’t use.

In sum: training is important!

Radical Trust

An idea came up at the UTL staff conference on Monday that has stuck with me; it was from Stephen Abram‘s keynote, and it reverberated throughout the day (and the week): radical trust. Stephen was evoking amazon.com and suggesting (as many people do), that we need to radically trust our users and let them add to our catalogues, add to our resources. Talking about this in terms of radical trust changes the dynamic of the conversation; rather than talking about keeping the catalogue “objective”, we’re talking about how we perceive students, what we expect from them. And I think the issue of trust is a completely relevant one. We tend not to trust students.

And it’s not just us, not by a long shot. This is the real challenge of the so-called “web 2.0”. We can’t control everything. The whole point of interactive technologies is that you can’t control them. The only way we can use web 2.0 applications is by trusting our users. We can anticipate the worst, and even have some policies in place to deal with the worst case scenario, but we have to have a general belief that students have a capacity to engage with each other, to offer something to an academic community, and that they will actually do that if we give them the chance.

The other piece of radical trust is one that shoots straight to the heart of librarianship; we need to let users radically trust us. This is the more dangerous option. In order to serve students well, the best thing we can do is let the students tell us who they are. We need to remember them, tailor our resources to their needs and interests, build on what they’ve done before. This is what amazon.com does, this is what Google does. It profiles a user and delivers customized information back to them. It profiles a user. We hate this idea, I know we do. It’s tinged with commerciality, it screams violation of privacy. I don’t even know what I think of this one, frankly. We do need real portals. We do need to customize our resources; our information landscape is so turbulent and confusing, we need to offer some support. But do we want students to let us know these things about them? Do we want to keep records on them? We don’t want them to trust us that much. We don’t want the responsibility of that trust, because we can see how easy it would be for that trust to be betrayed. Should they trust us? Can we be trusted? Can we protect them once they do?