Social technologies in public libraries : exploring best practice

Purpose This article reports on a research project that explored social media best practice in the public library sector. Design/methodology/approach The primary research approach for the project was case study. Two organisations participated in case studies that involved interviews, document analysis, and social media observation. Findings The two case study organisations use social media effectively to facilitate participatory networks, however, there have been challenges surrounding its implementation in both organisations. Challenges include negotiating requirements of governing bodies and broader organisational environments, and managing staff reluctance around the implementations. As social media use continues to grow and libraries continue to take up new platforms, social media must be considered to be another service point of the virtual branch, and indeed, for the library service as a whole. This acceptance of social media as being core business is critical to the successful implementation of social media based activities. Practical implications The article provides an empirically grounded discussion of best practice and the conditions that support it. The findings are relevant for information organisations across all sectors and could inform the development of policy and practice in other organisations. This paper contributes to the broader dialogue around best practice in participatory service delivery and social media use in library and information organisations.

Human-centred methods for design of mobile social technologies : a case study of agile ridesharing

Social contexts are possible information sources that can foster connections between mobile application users, but they are also minefields of privacy concerns and have great potential for misinterpretation. This research establishes a framework for guiding the design of context-aware mobile social applications from a socio-technical perspective. Agile ridesharing was chosen as the test domain for the research because its success relies upon effectively connecting people through mobile technologies.

Emergence of creativity in learning via social technologies

Creativity is an elusive skill desired by many. Debates on 'What is Creativity' and how it can best be nurtured and supported had resurgence in the 1950's after Guildford's address to the American Psychology Association about the positive benefits of creativity. Since then creativity has been investigated in many forms and within many disciplines. Of note is that creativity is apparent within four components: the person, the process, the product and the environment. On some level creativity is assessed within one of the four components of creativity: person, process, product or environment. In this study creativity and the environment is under investigation, with a number of factors presented that allow creativity to be supported. This paper explores the role of creativity within the education of tertiary students studying Games Design and Development (within an IT discipline) from an Australian University. Particularly this paper focuses on how social factors, such as purpose built collaborative environments and virtual communities, aid in the creative pursuits of the students.

The interaction and collaboration of experienced teachers deploying social technologies

In this paper authors have discussed about creative approaches in building confidence of experienced teachers in using social networking technologies. Working in the collaborative ebook chapter authoring and editing gave an insight into the advantages of using social learning platforms. Authors of this paper argue that if experienced teachers are given such opportunities to work with international colleagues, it becomes less complicated for them to handle modern day tools in teaching and learning context.

Applying social technology to Business Process Lifecycle Management

In recent years social technologies such as wikis, blogs or microblogging have seen an exponential growth in the uptake of their user base making this type of technology one of the most significant networking and knowledge sharing platforms for potentially hundreds of millions of users. However, the adoption of these technologies has been so far mostly for private purposes. First attempts have been made to embed features of social technologies in the corporate IT landscape, and Business Process Management is no exception. This paper aims to consolidate the opportunities for integrating social technologies into the different stages of the business process lifecycle. Thus, it contributes to a conceptualization of this fast growing domain, and can help to categorize academic and corporate development activities.

Emerging technologies and the contextual and contingent experiences of ageing well

Based on a series of interviews of Australians between the ages of 55 and 75 this paper explores the relations between our participants’ attitudes towards and use of communication, social and tangible technologies and three relevant themes from our data: staying active, friends and families, and cultural selves. While common across our participants’ experiences of ageing, these themes were notable for the diverse ways they were experienced and expressed within individual lives and for the different roles technology was used for within each. A brief discussion of how the diversity of our ageing population implicates the design of emerging technologies ends the paper.

Social media(tion) and the reshaping of public/private boundaries in employment relations

Tensions surrounding social media in the employment relationship are increasingly evident in the media, public rhetoric, and courts and employment tribunals. Yet the underlying causes and dimensions of these tensions have remained largely unexplored. This article firstly reviews the available literature addressing social media and employment, outlining three primary sources of contestation: profiling, disparaging posts and blogs, and private use of social media during work time. In each area, the key dynamics and underlying concerns of the central actors involved are identified. The article then seeks to canvas explanations for these forms of contestation associated with social media at work. It is argued that the architecture of social media disrupts traditional relations in organisational life by driving employer and employee actions that (re)shape and (re)constitute the boundaries between public and private spheres. Although employers and employees are using the same social technologies, their respective concerns about and points of entry to these technologies, in contrast to traditional manifestations of conflict and resistance, are asymmetric. The article concludes with a representational summary of the relative legitimacy of concerns for organisational actors and outlines areas for future research.

Wikis, blogs and podcasts - using Web2 technologies in teacher education

This paper presents a reflection on the infusion of Web2 technologies into a teacher education program. It explores issues surrounding the use of a range of Web2 technologies including wikis, blogs and podcasts. Web2 technologies are currently being taken up at amazing speed. This paper draws on the experience of using these new technologies in two units of a pre-service education course. As part of their assignment requirements pre-service education students were immersed in these new technologies as they grappled with issues to do with learning how to use these technologies as well as reflecting on how and why, or why not, they might they might use them in primary schools including the potential for democratic collaborative communities of learners. The opportunities the Web2 technologies afford educators as well as the consequences of such educational use of social technologies will be considered.

Envisioning Indochina : the spatial and social ordering and imagining of a French colony

The emergence of Indochina in the French imagination was articulated in both representational and institutional modes. Representation involves the transmission of colonial ideals through more obtuse means; that is, through literary texts, travelogues, exhibitions, film and advertising. However, these textual sites feed from and invest in a material situation, which was the institutional arm of colonialism. Indochina was institutionally articulated in cartographic maps and surveys, in the new social spaces of cities and towns, in architectural and technological forms, through social technologies of discipline and welfare and in cultural and religious organisations. The aim of this thesis is to analyse, across a number of textual sites, the representation and institutionalisation of Otherness through the politics of space in the French colony of Indochina, Indochine in this sense becomes a spatial discourse. The French constructed a mental and physical space for Indochina by blanketing and suffocating the original cultural landscape, which in fact had to be ignored for this process to occur. What actually became manifest as a result of this projection stemmed from the French imagination. Just as the French manipulated space, language also underwent the same process of reduction. The Vietnamese script was latinised to make it more 'useable' and ‘accessible’. Through christening the union of Indochina; initiating a comprehensive writing reform; and renaming the streets in the colonial cities, the French used language us another tool for 'making transparent'. Furthermore, the colonial powers established a communication and transport network throughout the colony in an attempt to materialise their fictive (artificial) vision of a unified French Indochinese space. The accessibility and design of these different modes of transport reflected the gendered, racial and class divisions inherent in the colonial establishment. At the heart of representing and institutionalising Indochina was the desire to control and contain. This characterised French imperial ordering of space in the city and the rural areas. In rural areas land was divided into small parcels and alienated to individuals or worked into precise grids for the rubber plantation. In urban centres the native quarter was clearly demarcated from the European quarter which functioned as its modern, progressive Other. The rationale behind this segregation was premised on European, nineteenth century discourses of race, class, gender and hygiene. Influenced by Darwinian and neo-Lamarkian theories of race, this biological discourse identified the 'working class', 'women' and 'the native' as not only biologically but also culturally inferior. They were perceived as a potential, degenerative threat to the biological, cultural and industrial development of the nation. In the colonial context, space was thus ordered and domesticated to control the native population. Coextensively, the literature which springs from such a structure will be tainted by the same ideas, and thus the spaces it formulates within the readers mind feed on and reinforce this foundation. Examples of gender and indigenous narratives which contest this imaginative, transparent topography are analysed throughout this thesis. They provide instances of struggle and resistance which undermine the ideal/stereotypical level of architectural and planned space and delineate an alternative insight into colonial spatial and social relations. The fictional accounts of European women and indigenous writers both challenge and reaffirm the fixity of some of these idealised colonial boundaries. In various literary, historical, political, architectural and cinematic discourses Indochina has been und continues to be depicted as a modern city and exotic Utopia. Informed by the mood of nostalgia, exotic images of Indochina have resurfaced in contemporary French culture. France's continued desire to create, control and maintain an Indochinese space in the French public imagination reinforces the multi-layered, interconnected and persistent nature of colonial discourse.

Tecnologia social: o papel do Terceiro Setor no fomento de inovações para a sociedade

Este trabalho apresenta uma investigação sobre o fomento de tecnologias sociais através das organizações do Terceiro Setor. O propósito é analisar como os critérios de participação, diálogo, inovação, conhecimento e gestão são conduzidos por instituições que não fazem parte do Estado e mercado. Com base nos conceitos de cidadania e democracia, o trabalho relaciona as tecnologias sociais a um comportamento dialógico em função da realidade social. O resultado, enfim, reposiciona o Terceiro Setor diante de um paradigma crítico, enfatizando que a aprendizagem, por meio das tecnologias sociais, podem ser um meio de transformação em diferentes contextos, desde a concepção teórica até os resultados práticos.

Economia solidária e tecnologias sociais: mediação para a emancipação social de grupos autogestionários

The goal of this paper is to critically analyze the practices developed by Solidarity Economy and to merge them with social technologies, aiming to achieve social transformation of popular groups. This transformation consists in the empowerment of those groups in means of work organization, considering their self-management and also the development of techniques and technologies utilized. Based on the understanding that technical development has no neutral character and it follows linearity within society, a discussion around the forms and uses of technology is conducted here, aiming at the perspective of changes in technologies’ development and also assigning social character to them. To think of social technology requires us to consider the space in which it is inserted, once it refers to a collective demand that belongs to self-managed groups. Therefore, to intent beyond self-management work, new productive forces are discussed here, and also the analysis and adhesion of an alternative technology for popular cooperatives

The human side of social technology for climate change mitigation and human development: the case of "efficient stoves" in Brazil

Carbon management has gradually gained attention within the overall environmental management and corporate social responsibility agendas. The clean development mechanism, from Kyoto Protocol, was envisioned as connecting carbon market and sustainable development objectives in developing countries. Previous research has shown that this potential is rarely being achieved. The paper explores how the incorporation of the human side into carbon management reinforces its contribution to generate human development in local communities and to improve the company's image. A case study of a Brazilian company is presented, with the results of the application of an analytical model that incorporates the human side and human development. The selected project is an "efficient stoves" programme. "Efficient stoves" are recognised in Brazil as social technologies. Results suggest that the fact that social technologies value the human side of the technology plays a key role when it comes to analysing the co-benefits of the project implementation.

Why creative industries matter to economic evolution

This paper proposes that the 'creative industries'(CIs) play an important yet widely unexamined function in economic evolution through their role in the innovation process. This occurs in terms of the facilitation of demand for novelty, the provision and development of social technologies for producer-consumer interactions, and the adoption and embedding of new technologies as institutions. The incorporation of CIs into the Schumpeterian model of economic evolution thus fills a notable gap in the social technologies of the origination, adoption and retention of innovation.

Design from the everyday: continuously evolving, embedded exploratory prototypes

One of the major challenges in the design of social technologies is the evaluation of their qualities of use and how they are appropriated over time. While the field of HCI abounds in short-term exploratory design and studies of use, relatively little attention has focused on the continuous development of prototypes longitudinally and studies of their emergent use. We ground the exploration and analysis of use in the everyday world, embracing contingency and open-ended use, through the use of a continuously-available exploratory prototype. Through examining use longitudinally, clearer insight can be gained of realistic, non-novelty usage and appropriation into everyday use. This paper sketches out a framework for design that puts a premium on immediate use and evolving the design in response to use and user feedback. While such design practices with continuously developing systems are common in the design of social technologies, they are little documented. We describe our approach and reflect upon its key characteristics, based on our experiences from two case studies. We also present five major patterns of long-term usage which we found useful for design.

'Savoir fare': are cooking skills a new morality

There has been a recent surge of interest in cooking skills in a diverse range of fields, such as health, education and public policy. There appears to be an assumption that cooking skills are in decline and that this is having an adverse impact on individual health and well-being, and family wholesomeness. The problematisation of cooking skills is not new, and can be seen in a number of historical developments that have specified particular pedagogies about food and eating. The purpose of this paper is to examine pedagogies on cooking skills and the importance accorded them. The paper draws on Foucault’s work on governmentality. By using examples from the USA, UK and Australia, the paper demonstrates the ways that authoritative discourses on the know how and the know what about food and cooking – called here ‘savoir fare’ – are developed and promulgated. These discourses, and the moral panics in which they are embedded, require individuals to make choices about what to cook and how to cook, and in doing so establish moral pedagogies concerning good and bad cooking. The development of food literacy programmes, which see cooking skills as life skills, further extends the obligations to ‘cook properly’ to wider populations. The emphasis on cooking knowledge and skills has ushered in new forms of government, firstly, through a relationship between expertise and politics which is readily visible through the authority that underpins the need to develop skills in food provisioning and preparation; secondly, through a new pluralisation of ‘social’ technologies which invites a range of private-public interest through, for example, television cooking programmes featuring cooking skills, albeit it set in a particular milieu of entertainment; and lastly, through a new specification of the subject can be seen in the formation of a choosing subject, one which has to problematise food choice in relation to expert advice and guidance. A governmentality focus shows that as discourses develop about what is the correct level of ‘savoir fare’, new discursive subject positions are opened up. Armed with the understanding of what is considered expert-endorsed acceptable food knowledge, subjects judge themselves through self-surveillance. The result is a powerful food and family morality that is both disciplined and disciplinary.