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Posts Tagged ‘ODBS’

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October: Progress Update

In My Work on October 3, 2010 at 9:58 pm

The first month of the academic year was a whirlwind, and it wasn’t until I started getting some sense of closure of previous reading courses, funding applications, and meeting random conference deadlines that I was beginning to feel like I was making progress. The amazing SPO concert featuring the Toy Piano Composers was also a high, I think I’ll buy a few CDs in support of them and send it around to friends who couldn’t make it. Most things are now well under way. Having interdisciplinary interest is both a blessing and a curse, but the key is knowing how everything relates in order to hit two birds with one stone. Below are some areas that I will be exploring vis-à-vis my thesis entitled “Online Music Knowledge: The Case of the Non-Musician” (which, by the way, I will be recruiting subjects for soon, just waiting on ethics approval!).

A few conferences coming up in Toronto that I’ll be participating in includes the BooksOnline’10 Workshop at the CIKM (Conference for Information and Knowledge Management) in October, and a collaborative submission with Kiku Day at the DIY Citizenship Conference. I’m especially looking forward to what Kiku and I might come up with as part of the hack space exhibition, as we co-present our prespectives on the transmission of shakuhachi performance utilizing skype as a communication tool. Way more fun than writing a paper. Not that there’s a lack of papers in my life.

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April: Progress Update

In ICTs on April 6, 2010 at 10:21 am

Greetings mates, from the British Isles, which might explain why my usual monthly report is a bit late. That and the fact that March was completely monopolized with helping Prof. Nadia Caidi design and implement a public event for the On-Demand Book Service, in collaboration with K-NET. It has been an experience that opened my eyes to the world of First Nations in Canada, and the challenges of information service delivery that bridges geographical and cultural differences. Below you will see the equipment and demos being setup at the Keewaywin First Nation School. It consisted of a computer station, an all-in-one colour laser printer and scanner, a thermo book binder, a DIY book binder. What you don’t see is Daniel Reetz’s DIY book scanner, as well as the Adobe software that was purchased and installed on the machines.

The Reading in First Nations multi-node video-conferencing event was a success. The event is being archived, but the experience itself is much more than the footage.


Reading in First Nations

In ICTs on March 25, 2010 at 11:43 am

In about 24 hours, I will be hoping onto a plane towards Sioux Lookout, Ontario, and getting ready to meet in person many of the community partners at KNET that I had first worked with last year at around the same time. In addition, I will also have the opportunity to experience first hand the realities of a northern aboriginal community, Keewaywin. It’s only for a couple of days, and we will be busy trying to set up the technology we have purchased to enable them to engage with the On-Demand Book Service, but it will be nonetheless eye opening and humbling experience.

An email invite that the Dean of the Faculty of Information sent out to his network had a paragraph that pretty much summed up how I feel right now: “I must say that I have watched with amazement as Prof Caidi, her colleagues, her contacts, and her students have worked over the past couple of weeks to pull together this event… linking distributed nodes to create from physically dispersed communities a single virtual community for the day to explore issues of reading in and for First Nations communities in such a short timeframe is quite an achievement for Prof Caidi’s team and is a testament to the strong and meaningful relationships she and her colleagues have built over the past few years.”

I am looking forward to the last class with Dan Reetz as a guest this afternoon, as well as a project brief with everyone that is going up north tomorrow to the various nodes in Thunder Bay, Sioux Lookout, and Keewaywin. You can participate too on Monday if you have internet access, in the breeze room on http://odbs.knet.ca.

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