Euphemia Dorcas Crail Upper IV H : Half Term Report

Somewhat surprisingly, Crail has worked moderately hard these last few weeks, with varying degrees of success. Crail has responded reasonably well to being prompted to explore things she should have explored of her own volition. She has found the detailed instructions given in the classroom most conducive to her own somewhat sheep-like learning style.
Google Calendar telling her nicely by e-mail that she has the day off etc, and the realisation that she could have the same, tabbed, iGoogle home page [instead of the previous three different ones on different computers] has helped her time management considerably, although e-mails reminding her of PE classes have unfortunately not elicited any response.
She has enjoyed blogging but needs to be more concise and less irascible in her comments. She has found the blogs of other pupils most useful and entertaining, and has populated her Delicious account with numerous leads to be followed up next half term.
She appears to have found the tagging exercise helpful, but has still to learn the discipline and self-control of cataloguing as a necessary component of her education.
She spent far too much time on non-productive activities on Flickr, and has yet to submit her report on Slideshare.
She unfortunately failed miserably on the Twitter assignment, and must complete her detention for failing to come up to expectations on this before the term finishes. The detention task is to tweet 100 times in 100 ways 'I love Twitter really & I am just about to go to bed after a nice cup of tasty and very reasonably priced Tanqueray gin Good night everybody' [140 characters nota bene].
She is still working on her term project - dropping RSS feeds of blogs into web pages, which she has found more difficult than she expected. She needs to persevere and apply herself to this more diligently, and refrain from calling computers names entirely inappropriate for the learning environment.
Crail has pledged to work harder in the next few weeks, but sadly we have heard that promise on numerous previous occasions.
General comment: Could try [a bloody sight] harder.
Mildred Pierce, Form Mistress
St Vitus' Academy [Motto: Apropos Nullae, Carpe Ginevram]

Marks so far:
iGoogle, Google calendar: A
Delicious: A
RSS feeds: A-
Blogging: A-
Flickr: B
Doodle: B
Tagging: B
Slideshare: C
Twitter: Fail
PE: Crail has not attended a single lesson this term and therefore has no mark

Aversion therapy - Or, Thing 7 re-re-re-revisited [again]

Right then, I resolve, spurred on by Aidan's convincing and well-presented reasons why I should embrace Twitter, I'm going to conquer this irrational aversion. He promises no mentions of breakfast et al. Library Wanderer says I'll find 'less rubbish than you think'. And Andy Priestner has already warned me its not just about being off the Cool Wall - my ability to keep up in my job will be compromised. So once again, much in the spirit of 'And now I'm going to clean the toilet', I have a little rummage around in ... I was going to say 'the cess-pit', but I won't.

It is Saturday morning, 9.30 am, and I decide to visit a well-respected much-followed-by-librarians blog, where one might find the serious, meaty stuff. The zeitgeist before it is even zeitgeist, and most definitely not about people who are thinking of maybe going out later to get a newspaper.

What do I find? I was going to post a screen-shot, it was so ... shocking. With the identifying areas blocked out of course. I've genned up on the law of libel in the past ... but that's another story. Word picture instead. 31 tweets in the last 12 hours, all of them ... deposited ... within 3 hours. Three of them relate to possibly useful online resources [in response to other tweets, mind]. The rest are about this person's private life [including bedroom arrangements and that s/he is about to make a cup of tea] ... or football. Well, how was I to know there was a football game on? OK, fair do's, this person is a fan. Irrational but it's a free country. Sort of. Understandable perhaps that s/he is half-watching the game, half furiously tweeting [If England were in a nailbiting final - oh per-LEASE - would they still be doing that?] Of course not everyone will share the same bizarre and frankly almost socially unacceptable personal interests, but there may be a niche audience somewhere. But - does anyone care that s/he is about to have a cup of tea? Didn't dare scroll down in case bowel movements were described. Not even a mother - not even a Jewish mother - would care about the cup of tea. ... Might about the bowel movements though, come to think of it.

So, I did try, and I did go to one of the most respected tweeters. I keep opening the same old wound because I do so want to be one of the cool people, the tweetoscenti, absorbing the gently falling rays of information outside a Shoreditch pub, conducting a clever conversation and tweeting at the same time all about it. I WANT someone to Take me to the River and to Let Twitter into my Life.


Sorry Aidan and Andy, but whilst you separated your reasons for using Twitter as basically (a) professional and (b) personal interests, the recipient of even a moderate and not-too-taxing number of supposedly all-professionally-aligned bunch of tweets has to do a frankly onerous amount of editing. Like wading through Google results, only 1000 times worse, no refining the query. It is making us work. The football, the kitchen, the bedroom, and for all I know the toilet, are there. In my face. In fairness I am forced to mention that the person under fire [sorry, scrutiny] did warn in one tweet that there will be useful tweets in the day and personal ones at night.

And now I'm going to make a cup of tea, gunpowder and mint, brewed for 4 1/2 minutes exactly in a silver teapot, plus one rich tea and two chocolate digestives on a doily, which does make them taste better, and then I'm going to settle down with 'The People's Friend'. Tell you what happens in 'Daisy's new romance' later. Oh, and you probably need to know that there's a definite twinge in my right thumb and I think I might be getting a cold.

Just one more thing. Cilip tweets? Why would I want tweets about a cleaning product?

Ah Twitter let me hate you in a thousand ways

WARNING: This is an untrammelled rant, delivered in the hopes that someone will MAKE me see the light. I just cannot find anything good in Twitter. I really don't think Twitter will remain long on the landscape, and I'm not sure we should be pandering to these mobile-device shackling tactics. Went to Emma Coonan's demo of Twitter in the UL a while ago with an open mind [well, not quite, more like arms-folded, 'Go on then, convince me'] and I'm afraid that didn't work. Poor Andy Priestner sounds almost despairing about trying to explain to unconverted oiks, and has made a great attempt to list its uses, and I'm sorry he's tried a gazillion times.

I'm still unconvinced [Sorry again]. Yes, the requirement to be concise and precise is a boon, but 140 characters reduce almost all of us to a level of brainlessness that is not appropriate. I look at my Twitter page with all its links and re-Tweets and I just .... loathe it. Don't know exactly why it is, but I have to force myself to read down, which is odd because presumably the idea of tweets being short is for people to find them attractive. This extremely adverse reaction is not provoked by the blog feeds, so it's not general info-overload. Perhaps it is because the need for brevity makes a lot of it appear almost meaningless white noise to non-cognoscenti. I don't want to learn another language. It's all back to a dark classroom, circa 1969, double Latin last thing on a Wednesday. 'Right everybody, Caesar's campaigns, page 43, let's crack on, there 600 to go. Crail, for pulling that face, construe until I tell you to stop' Mind goes blank, eyes cease to focus, bottom jaw hangs loose, begin to dribble.... Erm, does not loading it all up with bit.ly links and shortening devices aka dodges and tweaks infer in a way it is already not really 100% working?

On a purely personal level Twitter can be used to communicate, but what can you say? Not much. Unless we want to know that [well known female singer] is bored or feels fat. Should she be sitting at a family lunch tweeting about how bored she is? Should we care about such stuff? Have we nothing better to do than semi-stalk Z-listers? [And if we want to look at Demi Moore's ass, we still have to follow a link elsewhere]. Segueing on from that, we get Derek Simpson telling the world what was going on in the BA/Unite negotiations when as a senior official he should have been participating, or at least paying attention. Twitter made it easy for him to do something totally out of order, and, by the by, to commit another Twitter sin [in my opinion], the 'Am in a meeting/am on a course' tweet - what's the point in telling us that?

At the other end of the spectrum, should I put a 'Follow the library on Twitter' button on the website? 'The UL is open until 10 pm tonight'. Fine - there could be a point, but not for where I work. 'Have just been to an interesting demo of Mendeley'? Darling, they don't CARE - regurgitate it later when they want to know. Tip of the day? In 140 characters? Are you joking? And I'm afraid I can see one student leaning over another student's shoulder and saying 'The LIBRARY!!?? That's a joke, right?'

So we get to the middle ground, where a chink of light briefly hit the retina - the professional/personal interface. The useful tips, links. Fine, great, sometimes helpful, but again - is Twitter really the best forum/format for mutual help?? A blog can be a windbag's delight, and Miss Crail found herself sucked into that quagmire last week [and right now too of course], but we are getting thoughtful, useful insights [from people other than Miss Crail] regarding the Cam23 tasks. Twitter's just an annoying waspy buzz, another thing that makes us sit on our little isolated desert islands, its format actually militating against reaching out to non-believers [part of what we try to do, eh?]. The name flippin' well says it all.

Gawd, I hope I'm not the only person on the programme/in the world who thinks this way. Maybe I'm certifiable....? Please, Andy, don't throw me off the programme

Twitter - But that's next week!!

Getting an e-mail saying someone is following one of Miss Crail's alter-egos on Twitter has prompted another Cam23 Crisis. OMG haven't tweeted for days! [Actually Miss C doesn't think 'OMG', more likely an expletive]. She may not be the worst offender, but it feels as if a sizeable part of the web is being littered, polluted even, with begun-and-though-with-the-best-intentions-quickly-abandoned Projects [major and minor]
It is great that Cam23 is making the picking up of all the loose ends imperative, but how many balls can one juggle? it all started when Miss Crail tried to set up her blog for this course [under another alter-ego] and found she already had one. When did that happen? No idea!
The Tweets? Hopefully nobody is missing out on life waiting for the next gem from Weaslette [and what a disappointment it will be]. But how is one to DO all these things?
And how is one to comply with Thumper's [slightly altered] dictum 'If you ain't got nothing to say, don't say nothing at all', especially as one has just said pretty much ... nothing at all. Am I allowed to call it 'Blogshite' or will I get into trouble for that?