WordForwardWords

Welcome to WordForwardWords. This blog seeks participation to explore posibilities of our emerging information transfer paradigm.

Have you any thoughts about rationale for establishing hyperlinks within our markup language? What is hypertext? What advantages for sound information retrieval can be furthered through conscious application of logical principles in defining hyperlink placement? We can recapitulate familiar practices and extend our thinking in the interests of optimum information transfer. What are the implications of linking one idea with another? Please join this discussion if you are considering such issues.

Have you read Vannevar Bush?

I consider his 1945 essay, "As We May Think" essential reading.

Thanks for visiting.

Summary: PALSPlus2.0 Learning

Excellent!

This instruction / exploration has been one of the most exciting aspects of my recent life. Realizing this may sound pathetic to those of you who are not social cripples like I am, I admit that I do have children – even extended family - and do love them dearly. But being given work-time assignment exploring these new web2.0 applications is like being paid to think happy thoughts.

Easily, I can foresee setting forth some of these applications as ongoing lateral pathways amongst members of our Consortium. We should definitely keep the initial PALSPlus2.0 website going and look into ways that new features might be added to facilitate our communications. It is fun and useful.

To go in these directions, we should be clear that we are embarking on a journey experimental in its particulars. At Claire’s Testimonial Dinner, after a few weeks of Library2.0, I noticed that my personal interface with colleagues had developed in depth and texture as we regarded new character facets revealed through web2.0 online activity. Other colleagues, whose names I learned that evening for the first time, were not even strangers to me as we had previously gazed into each other’s toy boxes via web2.0 activities for this PALS Plus instruction.

For my voice, I submit a hope to continue this work direction. For my personal website responsibilities, I will plan to add web2.0 capabilities as I think through the needs of my service populations. Certainly, we can minimally keep to the PALSPlus2.0 Bulletin Board and wiki, this amongst ourselves as Consortium staff. But folks, we must encourage participation throughout our communities. Collaborative endeavor is little other than another pie-in-the-sky without shared input and initiative.

As I think this through more carefully over some time, I will post to the PALSPlus2.0 Bulletin Board with suggestions on how we can begin to integrate web2.0 applications into our responsibilities as a Consortium. Individually, we can even begin to add features via hyperlinks to the Bulletin Board posts. The PALSPlus2.0 Committee can discuss the evolution of the website itself as we consider uses for web2.0 functionality.

Elaine Bindler’s bundling of cataloging resources as a del.icio.us grouping immediately shows example of accessible utility for our daily work:
http://del.icio.us/Bindler
All catalogers will note the usefulness of such a tool.

LibraryThing could easily be used to aid various collection development strategies. For instance, various LibraryThing accounts could be established as subject specific collections with both all-Consortium contribution potential and reference access.

Zoho word processor and other shared online productivity tools could easily be made commonly accessible for members sharing committee work, developing documents for the Consortium in a more truly collaborative manner.

And, we must remember: PLAYING...

These are four examples that come readily to my mind. Surely there are many others. We need only find the inspiration to understand these newly available potentials and – especially important – to participate in making the cooperative effort real, beneficial, and wholly salutary.

Podcasts

I hear of podcasts; I hear podcasts! Great potential, certainly a hope for those more oriented to receiving information via auditory mode. As this is NOT my preference - for linear thought - I am somewhat less enthralled, but I certainly commend the availability of technology that would be meaningful to many. Myself, I prefer auditory mode for abstract experiential - read music. For words and exposition of linear information, I much prefer reading as I can control my intake review for optimum comprehension. Auditory is for me a place for intuitive expansiveness, NOT work! To each his own... I added the RSS feeds for SirsiDynix Institute and Open Stacks to my Bloglines account. SirsiDynix Institute seems relatively sophisticated.

The array of podcasts is very catch-as-catch-can at this point in history. In my opinion, the present indexing is lacking in vision. I foresee a task ahead for the MLS and related specialties.
We need content analysis acuity as well as technical facility to make complex information access both comprehensive and humanly possible.

YouTube and Web2.0 Video

Wonders unfolding, I have discovered - right here at work while behaving myself - that in the overwhelming alarm I feel at the television choices and even possible available selections of my children I have not really been left alone in the desert to perish of thirst! Here, today, I find wholly ordinate use of our marvelous video technology in amateur non-fiction on YouTube. I am much pleased. Now I can watch knowledgeable experts explain how machines work to my heart's delight. Soon, perhaps, I will find evidence of a Norwegian sailor building birdhouses while thinking about zinc! This is legal, educational, progressive, and orbital. More, please...

Writeboard

I have established a Writeboard for PALSPlus2.0 activity. All participants in PALSPlus2.0 learning are invited to add content and collaborate in this exploration of an award winning web2.0 application.

The access hyperlink is now established on the PALSPlus2.0 Bulletin Board. Feel free to contribute and edit as we go along.

Login is the same as for our original Google spreadsheet documenting class progress on PALSPlus2.0 assignments.

Glow with me, people! Let’s make this better than writing-on-the-wall!

http://123.writeboard.com/27a688f689f68070e

Online Productivity Tools

How wonderful that such essential applications are now within the reach of anyone who can login to a public library computer! As long as public libraries can offer free public Internet access, this level of software capability will represent potential that is arguably egalitarian. As long as I have any Internet access, I have one too! Zoho and Google are both useful and easy enough to use. The office applications together with the calendars offer a nice freedom of access-in-travel that can help us to check in on even complex scheduling assignment beyond the scraps of paper-with-scribbles bulging in my pocket. The possibility of sharing is bright. All we now need is friendship!

Web2.0 AND Library2.0 AND Thinking

As per this reading:
http://www.webology.ir/2006/v3n2/a25.html

These emerging technological capabilities are certainly interesting, offering potential of many various uses and new directions. However, in my years, I have noted great works and sublime ArtStatements ignored by the great masses of people. Just because a potential exists does not imply that it must be used or even if it WILL be used in reality. I hear much rhetoric in the above presentation that seems to assume hierarchical expertise to be evil and outmoded. This assumption is not even remotely true, in my experience. In fact, the purveyors of this egalitarianism-is-itself-goodness line are themselves gifted and expert - though hypocrites - leading a parade themselves and saying there is no god. Indeed, equal ones; take me to your leader. Hierarchical expertise is the REALITY of ALL situations and will NEVER go away.

Interactivity and social networking are delightful endeavor. Tagging each other's resources - once understood - will be a very hopeful possibility. Expertise is indeed much more multifaceted than we may have believed in the past. Nevertheless, it is expertise that brings us closer to truth, to problem solution, and to progress - NOT the cyber-complicity of many voices. Many voices tend to noise and distraction and blur. Right voices will always prevail, eventually. The content-value relativity presented as VIRTUE and implied by the preceding exposition is worthless, in my opinion.

Technorati

So we see that blogs are now very available all web2.0, and - accelerating - we've a way to catalog, tag, and gather for consideration a presentation of selected blogs. This is exciting. In these few weeks, I have certainly come to understand that many of the connections I imagined as possible in-the-future are already here for our considerate and intelligent use. The element of acceleration is very much my feeling here as I reflect that these web2.0 tools place within our grasp truly multi-dimensional reach for interrelating ideas, for binding in mutual relation various currents of thought. Vannevar Bush, in his 1945 essay, "As We May Think," anticipates a study machine he calls the memex. One important capability of the memex is the capacity to juxtapose for study purposes a selection of documents, sources, streams of information. When Tim Berners Lee wrote his program World Wide Web - and it was in 1990 - he practically realized some of the imaginings of Ted Nelson and others for directly linking one study element with any number of others. Now, in web2.0 - in Technorati and these other applications - we are surely advancing on an accessible path.

Here is my first Technorati work:
http://technorati.com/faves/wanaquelibrary?show=blogs

Tags / del.icio.us

This is another new service with much useful potential. As I go along in the PALSPlus2.0 course, I am amazed and grateful that I am often experiencing a personal readiness such that I can apply these new tools to my existing work and projects seamlessly. The timeliness of Web2.0 is clear. Tags work with del.icio.us shows promise for various applications. My first thought is to use this program as an enhanced Works Cited page for my website work. In this way, readers would not only be able to access source information but to further make leaping connections between works shown as interrelated. This hyper-associative aspect of Web2.0 is thrilling. Our learning and the very research process itself is greatly facilitated in ways that never before existed in human history. We are fortunate.

For this introduction, I have begun to work with materials available for Wanaque Borough local history. Thank you, PALSPlus2.0 Committee!

http://del.icio.us/wanaquelibrary

Rollyo As Site-Search

My use of Rollyo so far is that of a one-site search for my website on hypertext theory. For some reason unknown to me, I was getting some sort of noise responses with multiple URLs listed. I will look into this further when I have enough time. For now, though, I have been able to establish the JavaScript Site Search capability of Process Truing Alcove. It is available in the left-hand features bar on this Blog, making my personal website fully searchable by keyword. The only preference further that I would advance is a hope for such interface without extraneous sponsored links diluting direct purpose.

LibraryThing

This service is bright; more than a toy, I would say. Here is my work so far, in hopes that genuine personal interest proves worthy as theory.
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/wanaquelibrary

I want to explore the linking of my selections to the choices of other participants.

Catalog Card Generator

This generator offers a lesson in humility for us all.
http://tinyurl.com/2n76ed

Remember deleting catalog cards after weeding the non-fiction?
It's getting better all the time!

Technology and Perception

Consider the following current reference:
http://tinyurl.com/yw6vm5

As a species we characteristically learn in terms of focus lighted or even newly realized by our emerging technology. In 1929, Soviet filmaker Dziga Vertov - art name meaning 'Spinning Top' - prepared a film called, Man with the Movie Camera. Before he was silenced, he celebrated the movie camera as perceptual artifact, itself changing reality and our acknowledgement of history as changing second-by-second within the camera's view and because of the camera's actuality. Further, whatever photographs have presently been taken of 1870, will for all history be the only photographs taken of 1870. There will never in history be photographs of 1770! To our minds, 1870 has a photographic-reality presence that 1770 will not develop. This window of appreciation is directly as a cybernetic synergy too often neglected in our present day consensus and fiction-dulled millieu. Let us appreciate technology and learn.

Flickr Postcard Browser

I like the Flickr Postcard Browser.
http://tinyurl.com/4e99j

Exploring further is on my list of things to do. Try a search for keyword technology. The first page displayed is interesting and varied, but from page two on almost all pages are documenting our ubiquitous personal computer workstations! GOD Bless thimbles! Of course, by the time we migrate into interstellar space we will need be perfectly at ease living inside a computer so I guess this preponderance goes with the territory.

Flickr Photo Link

After the intro to Flickr, I was very pleased to find as photos original record covers of my musical devotion, Karheinz Stockhausen. Stockhausen is still alive - about 80 years old now - and is to my appreciation the foremost innovator in realization of electronic music. His work bears a sophistication unmatched. If you have ever wondered about a resonating electronic sound in any avante garde music, you are hearing the reverberation of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Stockhausen as much as said, "Use electricity to MAKE A SOUND" in 1956. Add also the very art itself of highly kinetic stereo imaging - through quad and even octophonic potential. I consider Stockhausen a genius. Here is a hyperlink to a photograph of an original record cover for Gesange der Jünglinge, 1956.

http://tinyurl.com/36s6ul

Here is an audio file of Stockhausen, 1954, "Studie II."
http://tinyurl.com/yqbtv3

Thank you.

____________...
Nota Bene:

Karlheinz Stockhausen passed away on Wednesday, December 5, 2007. He was 79 years old.
Born: August 22, 1928. Died: December 5, 2007.

I, Richard, was alive during his incarnation. Those who love him will continue to love him.
____________...

Lifelong Learning AND Success

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for palsplus20_23 Things, I will be forthright in saying that the program 7 1/2 Habits... is certainly true enough but that these strategies and perspectives need to be taught to fifth graders. My life is well along a path that included such thinking years ago. The My Learning Contract schematic is looking useful. It has become for me a time management strategy on a project that extends through the beginning of 2008. Perhaps I will report a real success using this technique come the new year, the process outlined - I hope - bearing some practical results. Overall, I can say that this program does involve me and motivate my efforts for this blog and on my own projects - to my delight. I do add, however, that I am really no longer among those who bewail the institution as per the spin of the presentation.
Long live the corpus scholasticus!