Category: lectures
Blogging about Leslie’s visit
Leslie blogged about her visit in a post on Talking to Strangers on ALA Buses and put up a picture as well. Michael Stephens then mentioned her post and then Karen Schneider mentioned it on her blog. Michael was just using it as an example of her posts, but we were still glad that he chose the one about our event.
Leslie Burger’s visit…
…was very successful. About 20 students attended the brown bag lunch at the Health Sciences Library. Leslie also had time to meet with Sarah Michalak (University Librarian), Dr. Griffiths (our Dean), and Rebecca Vargha (SILS Librarian and President-elect of the ALA. About 90 people showed up for Leslie’s talk (“Transforming Libraries for the 21 st Century: A Call to Action”) and about 45 stayed after the reception for the panel (“Uniting Education and Practice: Preparing Students for Tomorrow’s Workforce”). The press release for the event is located here. A .pdf flyer is also available. We got a digital video recording of the whole event, and took a lot of photos. I will post again when they are available.
Update: Leslie Burger’s visit and the Kerouac scroll
Thank you very much to the Graduate and Professional Student Federation for their generous sponsorship of this event. Interestingly, their site is a Wiki. Maybe it was good luck that Jimmy Wales was visiting when they made their decision. Thank you also to all the other folks who helped in this process.
We have also gotten confirmation on when her flight will be arriving which makes it possible to continue with planning the details of her visit. It looks like she will be arriving in time to have the brown bag lunch that we hoped to have for students that can’t make the talk.
One of the places we hope to show her while she is here is the scroll that Jack Kerouac typed On the Road on. The scroll will be on display as part of a display at the Melba Remig Saltarelli Exhibit Room on the third floor of Wilson Library until mid-December. The press release for the event can be read here.
Jimmy Wales visit to my virtual communities seminar
Jimmy Wales visited my class this morning. I learned a lot about the way conflict has been managed on the U.S. version of Wikipedia. One topic of discussion was how the communities of different language versions have developed different methods for mediating conflict. It makes sense, but I hadn’t thought of that. Jimmy admitted to having little direct knowledge of how some languages are managing these issues because he can’t read many of them himself. This is good news when considering the sustainability of the project once he leaves. It was very interesting to hear his thoughts on issues of control and how the Wiki model is very different in this respect from many other models for social software. I definitely need to do some more research into the theory underlying the Wiki model. One funny thing I found out about was the Guerilla UK spelling campaign. Fortunately, I just discovered that their is a counter campaign. Had I known sooner that my nation’s honor (not honour) was at stake, I might have become a more active user!