Going green

At an orientation for new faculty the other day, the environmental officer handed me a flier on ways to contribute to my university's "sustainability efforts." Some of these are long-accomplished in our library, but others are new ideas:

* Policy to prefer recycled content paper or other products

* Shut off equipment overnight and on weekends (computer monitors, lights, projectors and copiers

* Reduce waste:
~~~~ Choose re-usable over disposable where feasible
~~~~ Go paperless with processes & communication
~~~~ Use scrap paper trays to re-use paper; double sided copies, print sparingly
~~~~ Use your mug for drinks at the caff rather than disposable cups

* Recycle
~~~~ Glass, metal, plastic, paper, cardboard, cartridges
~~~~ Donate usable office supplies, furniture & equipment

* Reduce your transit footprint
~~~~ Bike, public transit, zipcar, carpooling

* Share your ideas for sustainability

Now that I think of it, it's kind of ironic that it was a paper handout.

The image is a 2005 poster from NOAA (National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration at http://www.noaa.gov/earthday/index.html where they evidently have been taking Earth Day seriously right along. Good for you guys!

Memo to self on exploring social media

A seamless web, not of the law, but of law librarians....

Image is a fractal, courtesy of http://www.sgeier.net/fractals/indexe.php A wonderful collection of beautiful images created through fractal math.

Slate takes on printers that lie about toner

As a certified cheap-skate librarian, I was tickled pink to run across the Slate article linked in the title of this post. Click on the title to read about how printers often lie about when their toner is running low. And even better, for links to hacks on the web that will help you (and your library users!) to run the toner cartridges dry before you have to replace those pricey cartridges. Covers a lot of differnt printer types.

Twitter and Online Community

This morning my friend Connie Crosby tripped and sprained her ankle. Connie, a former law librarian and now independent social media consultant, mentioned it on Twitter. Within minutes, half a dozen friends responded with sympathy ("owie! owie! sorry to hear this. hope you recover quickly") and advice ("perhaps selfmedication is in order! wine or beer before noon is allowed under these circumstances.") I first met Connie online, through her blog, and developed a friendship with her through her frequent guest appearances on the Check This Out! Podcast before we first met in person at a Podcasters Meetup in Toronto over three years ago.

A little later this morning, I exchanged a series of chat messages with another law librarian friend who has accepted a new job and wanted me to suggest some names of librarians to recommend as his replacement. This was yet another law librarian friend I first met online (first through his blog, then through Twitter) whom I might not otherwise have encountered, but who has become a good friend (and part of my Fantasy Law Library team.)

I've just come back from lunch with my partner Kristina Lively, who is also webmaster for University at Buffalo Law School. Kristina and I first met in Second Life, and after a few months of chatting for hours online--and falling in love--we met in real life at her then home in Washington DC. A few months later Kristina moved to Buffalo, where we share our life and work with our colleagues and friends. We spent part of our lazy Saturday afternoon together planning the next Buffalo Tweetup, an almost-monthly opportunity for folks in the Buffalo area who happen to use Twitter and other social media to get together for drinks and conversation.

Two weeks ago Kristina and I spent the weekend at the Niagara on the Lake Podcasting and Social Media Meetup with our old friends Connie Crosby, Keith Burtis, Mark Blevis, Wayne MacPhail, and new friends John Meadows, Bill Deys, Sean McGaughey, and others--all people we first met online.

In just over three weeks Kristina and I will be going to Podcamp Montreal, where (at last count) 267 social media users from all over Canada (and a handful of Americans), all of whom know each other through podcasts, blogs, and Twitter, will be getting together to share ideas and simply to have fun.

Can someone explain to me how all of this constitutes an "imagined community," and how it lacks "the subtleties of types of connection possible in the meat world"?

(Cross-posted at Buffalo Wings and Toasted Ravioli.)

Work-Life Balance in Firms

Click the title to this post to read a nice, brief article from Sunday's Boston Globe about what law firms are doing to help keep younger associates, especially women, in the firm. The article notes many of the large firms are offering 12 - 18 weeks of leave for primary caregivers (like maternity or paternity leave, but more flexible). Also notes that the culture of the firm must also back up the policy, so that folks who take the leave aren't stigmatized.

More on Twitter

On the Media this week has a segment on Twitter. Since Twitter caused some stir on this blog, readers may enjoy listening to the episode, available at http://www.onthemedia.org/

The blog posts on Twitter intrigued me. I have been reading about privacy issues and I would have thought that a blog dedicated to legal research would have brought up some of those issues. Instead, the defenders of Twitter took up what I call the first users’ credo: it’s good to be connected. To which I reply, connected, but communicating what? How deep and intimate is the connection? What is the potential for surveillance, bullying, crime, and thoughtlessness? Can Twitter logs be hacked? Why pay for a service that you cannot tweak? How does following people change the sense of self in a period of government surveillance?

Since the Twitter post only allows 140 characters ,and has even started a twitter haiku genre, not much can be communicated. I would have thought this would have been discussed by librarians. Why not write letters to individuals who share interests or edit a newsletter? As librarians, we are supposed to be involved in developing thought.

There was a post this year by a blogger writing how constant blogging changed his relationship to the world. He changed in ways that disturbed him. He became a constant observer seeking the quick retort. His writing was oriented toward readers. He described my unease with much blogging. The writing style on blogs often disturbs me and I found a good quote this morning that could apply. The author said too much fiction was being written to be read aloud to workshop attendees. Writers were losing their involvement to their work and anticipating the responses of classmates. I wonder if this shift applies to blogging and twittering.

What I want from technology is increased self-reliance, support for contemplation and the ability to “enlarge my ambition.” Twitter does not do that.

Librarians in Capes!

Wow! I wish my cape made me look this good!

Image courtesy of Plainfield Today blog

A library haiku

Books and dust on shelves,
Students bend over blue screens
To snare wild data.

This is actually a picture from the 7th floor into Suffolk's main reading room. And it's just about as empty this beautiful afternoon.

Suffolk Chowder and Marching Society

I don't know if this is really going to take off or not. I had a chat with one of my faves on the faculty and we thought about putting together a regular lunch date and inviting friends as available. If we don't do the marching part, though, I guess I'll be buying more clothes in the XXX sizes. sigh.

PS. OOTJ readers who were very kind when I announced the loss of my good dog, Beau last fall may be happy to know that we have adopted a new dog. Dover is a rescue shelty. To see a picture and read a bit more, visit here, at my Poyetry blog.

An iPhone for Every Student?

That is what is happening at a number of schools, which are giving out iPhones and Internet-capable iPods to new students, according to an article in yesterday's New York Times. These schools point to the potential usefulness of the devices in emergency situations and also as a way of keeping the campus community informed about more quotidian events. The article speculates that the "lone losers...could be professors," who are already confronting distracting laptops and cellphones in their classrooms. Some say that the presence of the electronic devices will force professors to enliven their classes, while others say that the role of technology in higher education is unclear. Ellen G. Millender of Reed College is "always worried that technology becomes an end in and of itself, and it replaces teaching or it replaces analysis." I was interested to read that Professor Robert S. Summers of Cornell Law School has banned laptops from his contracts class because he feels they work against the goal of an "'active intellectual experience, in which [students] develop the wide range of complex reasoning abilities required of the good lawyers.'" Several of my colleagues have issued a similar ban for similar reasons. They fear that laptops turn students into scribes, faithfully taking down every word uttered in the classroom, rather than true participants in the dialogue that should go on in the law school classroom. The ban is not popular with stuents, who feel that it smacks of paternalism. As Professor Millender said, there is always the danger that technology can turn into a gimmick and a distraction rather than an enhancement to the educational process. However, at some point the educational establishment needs to understand that technology is not going away, and bans are short-term responses to the fact that we haven't figured out how to use technology to enhance the educational experience of our students.

I am thinking about this issue right now as I prepare to use clickers in my Advanced Legal Research course this semester. Initially, I am going to use the clickers for a diagnostic quiz given very early in the semester that will test students' general knowledge about legal research. Each question will provide an opportunity for me to comment about the subject of the question; in the final analysis, the point of the quiz is not for the students to get the right answer, although that is always nice, but rather for us to discuss the themes that will emerge and be discussed in more detail during the semester. It might be interesting for the students to retake the quiz at the end of the semester and see what they learned. I also plan to use the clickers at the beginning of each class to assess how well the students retained what we covered in the last class; if their retention was poor, I can go back and review the content. When we had our clicker training earlier this week, I was a little surprised to learn that students today have an attention span of about seven minutes (I had guessed twelve in the multiple-choice question that was posed to the participants), which means that the clickers have the potential to refocus our students. Cell phones can also be used as student response devices, but tend to be more distracting than clickers. I'll let OOTJ readers know how the clicker experiment goes.