Final Version of Chapter One is Live at http://www.edpath.com/stn.htm

2007-03-18T03:08:00.000-07:00

All future posts related to "SurfingThroughNoise: Riding the Online Knowledge Wave" are now available at http://www.edpath.com/stn.htm where the final version of Chapter One, which is much different than the first draft, is now available as a downloadable PDF.

First Presentation on STN Available in PDF

2007-01-28T13:16:00.000-08:00

My first presentation about STN (and an important milestone for me personally) was held on January 22, 2007, at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative 2007 Conference in Atlanta, under the banner of a University of Central Florida pre-conference workshop, titled "Building a Campus Culture for Information Fluency." Download a PDF file of George's presentation.

Comments (good, bad, indifferent, or ugly) are always welcome.

EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Conference

2007-01-24T09:14:00.000-08:00

Sitting in Atlanta airport after attending the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative conference. I had the pleasure of participating in a workshop on information fluency with the University of Central Florida. More to come when I get back to my office. . . Meanwhile, anyone who has comments about any part of the workshop, or about information fluency, in general, is welcome to post here.

First Draft of First Chapter

2007-01-12T13:35:00.000-08:00

The first draft of the first chapter of STN is now available as a pdf download at the new STN website. The STN website also has a sign up form for anyone who may want to receive future e-mail updates about STN from author George Lorenzo.

Comments about STN are welcome here at the blog.

Getting Started

2007-01-01T06:07:00.001-08:00

SurfingThroughNoise^TM is a book in progress.

The phrase SurfingThroughNoise popped into my head during the first quarter of 2006 when I started an assignment for the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) to co-author three papers on information literacy in higher education (two have been published and one is in editorial - see "Ensuring the Net Generation is Net Savvy" and "How Choice, Co-Creation and Culture Are Changing What It Means to Be Net Savvy").

The ability to know when information is needed, how to find it, how to discern good information from bad information, and then use it to your advantage, and hopefully to the advantage of others, is a valuable skill commonly referred to in the halls of academia as being "information literate."

In many other academic circles it is also called "information fluency." According to the University of Central Florida, which has a sophisticated information fluency initiative currently in progress on its large and growing campus, information fluency is "the ability to perform effectively in an information-rich and technology-intensive environment. Simply put, information fluency is the ability to gather, evaluate, and use information in legal and ethical ways. Information fluency encompasses and integrates three important skills: information literacy, technology literacy, and critical thinking." (From "What UCF Students
Need to Know for the SACS Review.")

Prior to this, in February 2003, I wrote a feature, titled "At the Online Library," about information literacy in higher education for the newsletter I write, edit and publish - Educational Pathways.

This ELI assignment has put me on a long and winding research trail, and in contact with lots of academic librarians and other educators and professionals, all of whom and which continue to enlighten me about today’s web-based information explosion and how to deal with it.

Overall, however, I continue to lose my mental footing and patience due to extensive travels through, and discovery of, an overabundance of good, bad, and awfully confusing information online. Basically, I’ve been trying to harness and really understand the web - how absurd! As I continue to surf through the vast array of Internet pipelines, I find myself, at times, holding up my head with my hands covering my ears, like I’m attempting to cover up some "noise."

In short, the web, with all its new implications that change with the click of a mouse overnight, has become a morass of incomprehensible noise, a cacophony of websites and web services. My goal now is to somehow make it quieter, with a tonal quality that I can control and listen to in comfort, similar to turning down the volume knob a few notches on the stereo or radio, or, better yet, sliding my thumb over the the iPod volume function.

Bolstering my use of the word noise, a "define: noise" prompt in Google
brought me this response, among many: "Noise is incomprehensibility resulting from irrelevant information or meaningless facts or remarks." Additionally, the 2e definition of noise from Merrian-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition, is "irrelevant or meaningless data or output occurring along with desired information."

How to surf through all the noise without going crazy became more evident to me when I attended the 10th Annual Internet Librarian 2006 conference in late October, where I was introduced to even more websites, web services and information about where the web is heading. I thought I had a fairly good handle on what’s happening on the web until I attended this conference.

This was my first annual Internet Librarian conference, and I highly recommend it for anyone who is a student of the Internet and the web. It is put on by Information Today, Inc., and The Special Libraries Association was the main "learning partner" for this event. The conference definitely lives up to its billing of being "designed for information professionals who are using, developing, and embracing net- and web-based strategies in their roles as information searchers, Webmasters and Web managers, content evaluators and organizers, product developers, and more."

While I did feel bombarded with another case of information overload, I also came to the realization that dealing with overload is really all about making intelligent choices that are based on experience, relatively simple logic, and, in many cases, plain old luck. Plus, it also helps to be tied into a smart network of friends and colleagues - like the folks at this conference - who know a lot about what’s happening online these days.

For the moment, I will talk about a presentation that was one of many eye-openers for me. (There were many unbelievably great presentations that I plan to refer to in future posts.) It was given by Gary Price, director of online resources for Ask.com and publisher of ResourceShelf.com, a weblog with search engines news, research-oriented resources, and an opt-in weekly newsletter (there are many other weblogs that aggregate resources and news items about the latest developments in web-based technologies and information; ResourceShelf is one of the best at doing this).

Price gave about six presentations at the conference, and this particular one covered a number of his favorite online resources from ResoucesShelf. Here’s a short list:

Docuticker - A daily update of new reports from government agencies, NGOs, think tanks, and other public interest groups. DocuTicker’s chief editor is Shirl Kennedy; contributors include Price and other librarians.

Pandia - Helps people surf the web more efficiently. Pandia is currently popular among librarians, teachers, students, webmasters, managers and others who would like to learn more about search
engines and web searching.

WordPress - Price gave this free blog and weblog platform tool high praise, as did others at the conference.

Public Radio Fan - Price said this site has been around for a long time, but this was the first I heard of it, and now I love it. It features a schedule of listings for thousands of public radio stations and programs from around the world. Visitors can follow audio links to hear their favorite programs and discover new ones.

Search for Video - An online database of videos, as well as a video podcast directory. Price called this the one of the best federated search tool for online videos, but he added that there are many other similar websites.

Flight Aware - Provides free online flight tracking services for both private and commercial air traffic in the United States.

Bloglines - A free online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content.

Topix - This is a very impressive website that crawls and categorizes breaking news from over 12,000 media sources and over 38,000 blogs, 24 hours a day.

My next Surfing Through Noise^TMpost will feature the first draft of the first chapter.