Thursday, January 17, 2008

Wikipedia, Virtual worlds etc.

On December 17th there was a discussion led by Ishbel Hartmann (Vicki Cormie in real life), reporting on some key sessions from the RL international conference, Online 2008, held in London, UK, in December. The discussion took place on Infolit iSchool, in Second Life (the virtual world) and it was part of the Centre for Information Literacy Research discussion series. There is a full transcript of the session at http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=216. I'm Sheila Yoshikawa in thsi chat, by the way.

Ishbel provided brief information on sessions by Jimmy Wales, Ian Rowland and Roo Reynolds and the discussion followed on from this. Some of Ishbel's background notes were "Jimmy Wales gave an interesting and entertaining talk on the development and future plans of Wikipedia. He talked about a video which will be released next year looking at how Wikipedia is being used in developing countries, in particular slum schools in India and in creating information resources in African countries (see http://underdogpictures.com/wikidoc/site/trailer.htm [unfortunately this starts by basically making fun of librarians]) He then went on to discuss Wikia (http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Wikia), his new project which takes the Wiki forward from being just an encyclopaedia – or “building the rest of the library”.

Ian Rowlands, Senior Lecturer School of Library, Archive and Information Studies, University College London, UK, talked about How the Google generation’ searches for information and the implication for research collections. "This was a fascinating and challenging discussion that there was no such thing as the an age based “Google generation” and that the demographics are far more complicated that we believe." Roo Reynolds (Metaverse evangelist with IBM) talked on Enterprise 3D; living and working in virtual words. The complete audio track and slides are available online http://rooreynolds.com/2007/12/07/
my-talk-at-online-information-07/

No comments: