Jason Puckett.net

Google Code has published (created? sponsored? I’m not sure how that works) a plugin for the Pidgin IM aggregator client that works with Facebook chat.  Once it’s installed, you can add your Facebook account as a new account, and it works just like every other chat network.

This is great as far as I’m concerned.  I use Pidgin and am not a fan of Facebook chat (or web-based chat in general). Some of my friends use Facebook but not regular IM.

Facebook Chat Plugin for Pidgin

Michael Sauers posted a great presentation introducing the ideas and practical aspects of open source software, with examples from desktop applications to Linux to server software and library examples. He explains the concepts in a way that’s highly suitable for non-techies. If you’re curious about OSS I recommend it.

I like that Michael discusses the pros and cons in pretty honest terms here, and his point of view is (to borrow from Karin Dalziel) “OS agnostic” in a sensible way.  I’d have liked to hear a little more about library-specific applications, but cramming that into a 30-minute introductory presentation would have been tough.

It’s a half-hour audio presentation and his slides are available as well (though the audio stands fine on its own).

Introduction to Open Source Software

(And another example of Twitter is becoming more useful to me: if I hadn’t been following Michael on Twitter I probably would have missed this.)

Earlier this semester, we added a chat widget to the desktops of our student computers in the library. Our computers are using Windows’ Active Desktop, which essentially just means that the wallpaper is an HTML file instead of an image.

We’ve been using the MeeboMe chat widget on some of our web pages. Essentially, all you have to do to put it on the desktop is edit the HTML file you’re using as your desktop background and add the widget code to it — just like a web page — and it runs the widget on your desktop instead of in a browser.

I ran across the idea on another library blog (I wish I had saved it; I’d like to give credit!), and e-mailed the idea to our IM coordinator and learning commons manager. Within five minutes, they had IMed me and asked
me to log out and in again. When I did, the widget was working. It started immediately propagating throughout the library as students logged into computers.

Man, talk about free publicity. We immediately saw a huge jump in our IM reference traffic, to the point that we had to warn the rest of the desk staff to expect it when they came on duty. (For the first week or two, a lot of the questions coming in were “What is this?”, “Does this work?” and “Is someone there?”.)  Our IM reference stats are three to four times what they were a year ago, but that also includes expanded service hours so it’s not exactly scientific.  My gut feeling is that we could account for at least doubled traffic from adding the widget, though.

A while back I got an e-mail from Twitter: “zotero is now following you on Twitter.”

Cool! They (he? she? does Zotero have a gender? It writes about itself in the first person) must have found me via my Zotero workshop outline, which I had sent to them. They (I’ll stick to “they” until I learn otherwise) don’t update very often, but maybe if they had more followers they would. It’d be a great low-key way to drop news and updates about the application.

I just posted my teaching outline for my new Zotero workshop.  Consider it CC-licensed, and please let me know if you find it useful.  I’d be particularly glad to get feedback from Zotero users or instructors.

By chance, yesterday’s maiden voyage for this class ended up being a small group of my library colleagues, which was a great beta test.  They grilled me pretty thoroughly, and thought of many questions I hadn’t considered!  It was a very useful way to try out a new class, and if possible I’m going to try to  arrange a similar test run for future workshops.  I’m thinking if I just sent an e-mail to my team (30 or so librarians) saying I’m offering it as a training session, I’d get a good turnout.

That’s one more thing crossed off the spring semester to-do list, which feels really really good.

I just posted a guide to Zotero:

http://web.library.emory.edu/r_guides/how_guides/zotero.html

I’ll be teaching Zotero workshops starting in a couple of weeks.

I made all my screenshots using the GIMP instead of going over to the media center and using Photoshop.  I’m a big open source software fan, but I find the GIMP just plain awkward to use.  Is that because I’m so used to Photoshop, or is it inherently kinda clunky?

Zotero swag

Zotero’s campus rep sent me some swag for teaching Zotero workshops this semester. Stickers, flyers and a t-shirt.

When I showed my friend Rachel the t-shirt, she said “Wow, Jason, I didn’t think you could get any nerdier, but you have a 3×5 card on your shirt.”

I’ve been thinking a bit about my use and abuse of Powerpoint in the classroom. I don’t use it much, but I taught a new workshop on RSS this week and found it useful to organize my thoughts with new material. I ran across this blog post on iLibrarian: 4 ways to spice up your presentations. If you use Powerpoint at all, at least watch Meet Henry and Death by PowerPoint for some great ideas and examples of PPt done right and wrong.

(Wow, Henry gives me a Clark from Smallville vibe.)

My institution just announced a contract with iTunes U. I’m going to be as involved as possible with the pilot program this fall, and I’m really excited.  I’ve really felt like there’s a bottleneck in my team, as far as producing a/v materials goes — there are only two or three of us doing it, and I think there’s a sense that it’s hard and mysterious.

My sense of how iTunes U works is that it will make the publishing part very easy, and I’m hoping that this will get the ball rolling and inspire more people at my library to record instruction materials.  As I’ve mentioned before, our real problem with producing podcasts has been the lack of an easy publishing platform, so this should remove that hurdle.

How have I not heard about this until now?

We have a few individual licenses for Camtasia, the software we use for creating video tutorials.  It’s fairly expensive, so a couple of us have it installed on our personal workstations, and everyone else has to go to one of a couple of shared computers or over to the technology lab in order to use it.  The result, of course, is that almost no one creates videos.

At the GOLD GALILEO conference on Friday, I learned of the existence of CamStudio, a free open source equivalent.  I haven’t played with it much yet, and I think it lacks a bell and/or whistle here and there compared to Camtasia, but it seems like between CamStudio and Audacity, that would cover most media production needs for free.