Troy Swanson's Page

I listened to Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson being interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air (available here The New Price Piont 'Free'). I am a pretty big fan of Chris Anderson. He has done some good things to popularize technology-related trends.

A small portion of his Fresh Air Interview covered the topic of using Wikipedia and the difficulties it presented. He was super positive about how great Wikip… Continue

I don't know if anyone has noticed this, but a colleague of mine pointed out the Google Image Labeler. The is a pretty cool idea. Google has turned tagging into a game where you are partnered with someone else and the two of you have to try to match tags to images. Very addictive and smart. This is a way to add a bit more precision to tagging. This could be something useful for libraries.

I finally listened to this podcast, Will We Recognize the Future featuring Ray Kurzweil on Talk of the Nation's Science Friday. Kurzweil talks about how processor speeds doubling each year, which means that processors would be 1000 times as fast in a decade. His larger point was that speeds will increase at such a rate that it will be difficult to predict how things will change. We will exponential growth and that he is predic… Continue

For over my entire career in libraries, I've been reading about the doom and gloom, end of the world-type stories about libraries, but I wanted to post about this particle, The Library in the New Age in the New York Review of Books. I enjoyed, and there are a number of reasons that it is very relevant to libraries and Web 2.0.

First, it takes a historical perspective in understanding the question, "What is information?" here's a quote:… Continue

I have put together this short tutorial about taking an RSS feed and using our Feed2JS feed parser and incorporating it into BlackBoard version 8.

The Moraine Valley Library is happy to announce a new Web site that we have created in collaboration with our communications department: Information Literacy General Education Expectations and Resources.

We have made our slides from our CIL presentation available in slideshare.

… Continue

The demise of the blogosphere has been predicted, as Martin Weller comments in this blog post, Whither the Blogosphere?. More importantly, he notes that blogs are probably not really dying, but the online options are growing:

What I think is happening is another example of technology succession. The blog was the primary colonizer for the barren landscape of online identity. The presence of this coloni… Continue

We are just finishing up our Malcolm X Map Project. This is a pretty cool way to distribute student work. If you are a second life resident, you can also visit our SL MX Exhibit.