Barack Obama on libraries

In June 2005 Barack Obama keynoted the opening general session at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, while he was still a U.S. senator from Illinois.

This article, published in the August 2005 issue of American Libraries, is an adaptation of that speech, which drew record crowds and garnered a standing ovation. Not surprising as it is inspiring stuff:

Bound to the Word

Guardians of truth and knowledge, librarians must be thanked for their role as champions of privacy, literacy, independent thinking, and most of all reading ...

What is Cloud Computing?

The latest Horizon Report for 2009 lists Cloud Computing as one of the key teaching and learning technologies to watch, with its time to adoption one year or less.

So what is Cloud Computing? My understanding is that we are all using this without necessarily being aware of the term "cloud computing". For example keeping this blog on a server out there "on the cloud" rather than on a desktop would qualify as using cloud computing. Nothing new really.

This YouTube video interviewed Tim O'Reilly and other gurus at the Web 2.0 Expo last year. They don't all agree on what the term means, but it's worth watching what some of them say.

Press Freedom in Sir Lanka?

I am shocked by the murder of Sri Lankan Sunday Leader journalist Lasantha Wickrematunga, who was was assassinated in Colombo on 9 January 2009.

Lasantha Wickrematunge was the editor of Sri Lanka's Sunday Leader and an outspoken critic of the government. Before his death, knowing that he was a target, he wrote an editorial entitled ‘And then they came for me’. The Leader published this 3 days after his death.

It begins:

"No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces - and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the last few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print institutions have been burned, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories, and now especially the last...."

Read the full text of this amazing piece here on the Guardian website. It has now been republished in a number of sites.

Mobile Sri Lanka

While the ASAA Conference in Sri Lanka was not a rich experience in terms of emerging technologies, there were some interesting observations I made on the use of technology in the country generally and at the conference.

Sri Lanka, like many developing countries, has leapfrogged the wired era to some extent and are well into using mobile technologies. So you are more likely to get mobile coverage rather than wired. The major company providing mobile phone coverage is Mobitel

Of course mobile phones are everywhere. Monks even use them! I’m not sure why I should be surprised by that, but I was. Those ASAA conference delegates who used their global roaming had the joy of constant welcome messages from Sri Lanka’s mobile providers.

As far as internet connection goes there were some internet cafes in Kandy. At the Hotel Suisse in Kandy where the conference was held, the one wired internet computer for guest use, was pretty slow. The hotel rooms did not have internet access. However good wireless coverage was available in the hotel lobby for those who brought their laptops.

Visit to University of Peradeniya Library

The ASAA Conference in Kandy was a great success . There's a brief report about the conference in the 21st December 2008 edition of The Island which is the main independent English newspaper in Sri Lanka.

After the conference we visited the largest university in Sri Lanka which is 20 minutes drive from Kandy: University of Peradeniya

Their beautiful campus was established in 1954.

After speaking with the Vice Chancellor and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, I visited their Library which is the the oldest and the largest University Library in Sri Lanka. It was quite late in the day when we arrived, so I did not have a lot of time, but did have a meeting with the University Librarian, Harrison Perera, and took a photo of their atmospheric Periodicals Reading Room.

I'll hopefully find time to post more about some of the fabulous conference papers from this cross-disciplinary conference.

Media Participatory Activism Seminar in Perth

A small, but select group of students and academics attended this CREATEC seminar at ECU Mount Lawley yesterday: “Media Participatory Activism”, with the Keynote address delivered by Prof Geert Lovink.

Lovink is a Dutch/Australian media theorist and Research Professor of Interactive Media at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA) and an Associate Professor of New Media at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). His keynote topic was: “Publish Now: the Cultural Politics of Blogs and Web 2.0”

It was all stimulating, and too much to summarise in a blog post but some brief dots point might give an idea:

• Blogging has moved on from being a separate entity and is now completely integrated into websites and embedded in social networking sites
• Technorati reported on the phenomenal growth of blogging which has probably not yet peaked, but Technorati itself is undergoing changes and their annual report on blogging is no longer happening
• Not enough is being done to map the Australian blogosphere
• World internet statistics show use has reached saturation in North America, but growth in China or India has not nearly reached its peak
• While the predominant language of the internet is still English, Mandarin is growing rapidly and will surpass English within the next few years
• We are now at the end of the Web 2.0 economic cycle
• The world economic crisis is putting enormous pressure on internet companies such as Yahoo and there is concern re the future of Flickr.
• MySpace and Facebook are matched internationally by examples of other social networking sites, which have enormous take up in their countries/languages of origin such as: Studieverzeichnis (Germany) Hyves.net (Netherlands), SkyRock (France/Africa),
• National webs are being created in an attempt to recreate the “nation state” online. One example of a national web is even Australia’s ABC website as it is closed to overseas access

You can follow up on Geert Lovink's work as he has written widely. His latest book is Zero comments : blogging and critical Internet culture, Routledge 2008

A great panel discussion followed consisted of: Mark Balnaves is Professor of New Media at Edith Cowan University, Associate Professor Matthew Allen is the foundation Head of the Department of Internet Studies, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia and Tama Leaver teaches Communication Studies at the University of Western Australia, focusing on digital media and participatory culture.

Off to Serendip

All the security problems have been elsewhere in Asia this week.

Sauron's evil eye is focussed elsewhere (I hope), so this little hobbit is headed off to Sri Lanka to attend the ASAA conference in Kandy. There’s been so much drama surrounding DFAT Security warnings and so forth, that it looked like my paper (on literary blogs) would be read by someone else. But now it’s all happening.

ASAA, what's that? stands for Association for the Study of Australasia in Asia.

No more blog posts for 2 weeks, then, while I’m out in elephant country. I hope I see some.