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The Provenance of Facts
Brian Feldman has a newsletter called BNet and on May 30th, he published an insightful and whimsical take on facts and Wikipedia called mysteries of the scatman. The essay is an excellent reminder that if a fact without proper provenance makes it way into Wikipedia and is then published in a reputable source, it is…
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The future of Big Te(a)ch
Last week, my place of work announced that the university campus was going to be primarily online for the upcoming fall semester. From my understanding, the qualifier of primarily is being used because there are some professional programs that have compulsory in-person components such as in clinical nursing. Replicating hands-on or lab components of classes…
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It’s time to cut the CRAAP
I do not have a good understanding of what academic librarians are currently teaching students in regards to evaluating information they find on the Internet. Rather than read the literature, I searched for the word CRAAP in my custom Google Search Engine for Ontario Academic Libraries. I found that many libraries – including my own…
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The Librarian as DJ
On Saturday night I had a Zoom call with a friend of mine from high school. My friend prefaced our chat with a warning that she was going to keep the conversation short because video calls are exhausting. I heartily agreed. During this call, my daughter and her son would grace our screens and through…
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Personality Testing using H5P
We don’t all play games the same way. One useful means by which we can categorize types of players by their style of play is through the use of Bartle Types, named after Richard Bartle who formed the characterizations from observing participants playing MUDs: So, labelling the four player types abstracted, we get: achievers, explorers,…
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Make good choices
I’ve decided to assign all the game-related posts here with the label of ludo. The word ludo is likely related to the words, luden and lusory that you can learn more about from my first-games related post in this series. Ludo is the name the Danes call the game that Canadians would call Sorry… unless…
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The Untitled Game of the Goose
I am an aspiring game designer in the same way that so many people are aspiring writers. I have been meaning to design games for several years now but despite my good intentions, I haven’t found a way to sit down and do the work. I have done some self-reflection on why I fail to…
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Choose your quarantine character
Choose your quarantine character: I have decided that the character that I am going to embody for this quarantine is an advocate of games. You may notice that I did not use the word gamer to describe this role. The reason why I do not call myself a gamer is because to do so would…
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The Library of the Living and the Library of the Dead
I am in the process of re-organizing my Google Drive and in doing so, I stumbled upon a bit of writing from 2013 that would have been a perfect addition to the post Haunted libraries, invisible labour, and the librarian as an instrument of surveillance which I wrote earlier this year: When I was a…
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Considering dark deposit
I have a slight feeling of dread. In the inbox of the email address associated with MPOW’s institutional repository are more than a dozen notifications that a faculty member has deposited their research work for inclusion. I should be happy about this. I should be delighted that a liaison librarian spoke highly enough of the…
Librarian of Things
Mita Williams. Her blog.