Category Archives: Pretty Sweet Tech

Have you ever considered a library-hosted podcast? With the right equipment, you could help patrons record and edit local podcasts and link them to your library’s website! Topics could range anywhere from book and movie reviews to local/ state history, and anything in between! Read on to learn how you can make this happen in your library:

What is a Podcast?

Podcasts are audio recordings that are geared towards providing new information, entertainment, or asking listeners to look at topics from a different point of view. Podcasts can have a single host/narrator, have a more conversational format between multiple hosts, or be an interview between host and guest. There’s no one right way to podcast!

How Can We Plan a Podcast?

There are a ton of resources out there for how to plan and record your own podcast. I’ll put a few pointers that have worked for some other libraries here, then add some additional resources at the end of the list:

1. Target Audience: Try to anticipate who your target audience is. You don’t want to use teen slang for a podcast about retirement getaways!
2. Length: Start asking potential listeners how long they like their podcasts. If your listeners only have time for 15 minutes, don’t record an hour long podcast!
3. Topic: Start listening around. Find out which podcasts exist about your preferred topic. Listen for what works and what doesn’t work for you.
4. How to Record: Some hosts record all in one, long segment. Others record in short bursts and stitch the sections together. Short bursts leave room for error.
5. Ad Lib or Script? Some hosts plan their show down to the last word. Others wing it. It’s really up to your comfort level. Kids and teens might need structure.
6. Where to Host? Think about what you need to be able to do with your recordings when you’re done. Some hosting options like Lisbyn have editing features and will help you sync the podcast to your website. But it can cost a bit. Podbean is an option if you want to start with free and grow. Free doesn’t have as much functionality, but everybody starts somewhere!

Here are some start to finish guides for planning a podcast:

• The Podcast Host: Podcast Scripting: How Do I Write a Podcast Script?
• Shopify: How to Start a Podcast: (for Under $100)
• The Podcast Host: How to Start a Podcast in 18 Steps
• The Podcast Host: Best Podcast Equipment: Your Ultimate Guide

As you can see, pretty much everything you need is on The Podcast Host. They know all, and I’ve used a lot of their stuff when learning how to use our makerspace audio kit stuff. Happy podcasting everyone!

What if someone hacked your smart device and started talking to your baby through a baby monitor? It’s chilling, but it happened in Detroit. Smart homes are the cool new thing, but how do we secure our homes in a digital world?

Possibilities of Using Smart Devices

Some of you may have an Amazon Echo or another smart device nestled quietly in our living room. Other hardware can connect through Wi-Fi through a central smart device and you can control your home through voice commands or an app.

There are smart thermostats, security cameras, baby monitors, webcams, alarm clocks, home security systems, lighting, vacuums, and more. Much more. This opens the door to some infinitely powerful opportunities. Possibly more smart libraries too!

Possible Risks of Using Smart Devices

Now onto the part nobody wants to know about: how can we get hacked?

Norton, a company that specializes in digital security, wrote 12 Tips to Help Secure Your Smart Home and IoT Devices. This article describes some common ways cybercriminals can hack into your smart devices:

• Router Hack: Cybercriminals can infect your router using malicious software, then sneak into your system through the backend.
• Security Cameras: Unsecured network connections linked to a security camera can allow access points for cybercriminals to spy on you through your camera.
• Data Misuse: Devices like your thermostat collect data about your home to run more efficiently. Unauthorized access to this data can allow cybercriminals to guess when you’re not home to break into your physical location.

I’ll leave it at those few examples for now. You can check out the article to learn more.

Smart Device Security

Now for the most important part. What can we do about this?

• Routers: This is something most consumers don’t think about. Here’s an article with more information about how to secure your wireless router at home.
• Firewall the Network: It’s hard to secure individual devices. But here is some more information about how to further secure your network and add firewalls.
• Strong Passwords: Check out the article above about using strong passwords to further secure your devices and data.
• Data Misuse: All the data collected by these devices has to go somewhere. It is stored and used by the company that made the device. Here is an article from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) describing data concerns when developing IoT. Remember to look at data policies from your devices.

Have fun with your Smart Devices. Remember to do all you can to keep yourselves safe. With great power comes great responsibility!

Libraries the world over are using images from the web to build websites and other cool projects. It’s easy to do a quick Google search, find some cool stuff, copy, and paste. This is not always exactly legal though. This post will give you the briefest of brief overviews of image copyright, then dive into how to find copyright free images on the web.

What is Image Copyright?

First of all, image copyright can get complicated. Only a copyright lawyer will be able to give you sound legal advice about images. That being said, MIT put together a useful slide set about what copyright is and a Fair Use Quiz. Here’s a helpful rule of thumb from their slides: “if you are not the creator of the work, you don’t have the legal right to copy, share, or display a photo, figure, music, video or a piece of text that you did not create, and you could face penalties if you do so”.

The exception to the rule is the somewhat murky fair use of copyrighted material. The Fair Use Quiz also has a handy table describing the factors that go into determining fair use. Copyright.gov also has a lot more information about copyright law and application.

What are Free-to-Use Images?

Here’s some good news! There are some images where the author automatically made their stuff free for commercial and public use! You’ll know you found one because it will say “Free for Commercial Use, No Attribution Required”. Some may be free with attribution, meaning you need to add a small caption with the creator’s name, and possibly the original website from which the image came.

Finding Free-To-Use Images

1. Google has an advanced search tutorial to filter results to free to use images
2. Pixabay has a wide variety of free images. There is an optional donation to the author and to keep the site running. It’s also free to set up an account!
3. Search Engine Journal put together a list of 41 Places to Find Free Images Online That You Will Actually Want to Use. Some sources also have video clips.

That list should keep you busy searching for a while. I hope you all have a fun, safe search!

Recently I was asked an age old question: do libraries need their own app? To answer that, let’s take a look at how apps are made:

The Life Cycle of an App:

1. An Idea is Born: Your library has identified a need in the community. You have explored different technology options to solve this need and discovered an app will reach the most people since more patrons own smartphones than computers.
2. Designing the App: You put your dream team together and brainstorm how this app will work. What are your main goals? What do you want people to get out of this app? How will the user interface look so it is easily navigated? There are many questions here. A simple navigation prototype in PowerPoint or on paper will work for getting ideas on paper.
3. Getting User Feedback: Describe your app idea to your target audience. Is there interest in the app? Would people use it? Which devices do users have? Which platform should the app be built upon? iOS? Android? Both?
4. Fundraising: Apps are not cheap to build. They take time to design, build and maintain over time. App development is a marathon, not a sprint. Depending on complexity, apps can take between $10,000 and over $200,000 for the initial build. Then $1,000 or more for monthly updates to keep the app working. More if you want a native built app across multiple platforms. Plus consulting fees.
5. Development: If you’re developing in-house, you need to identify existing staff, or bring on new staff to complete the project. If you’re using an outside company, you’ll probably need to use a bidding process, then communicate clearly with the company to let them know what you want. This process takes time and effort.
6. User Testing: It’s time to test your first build to see if it meets the need you intended. It may take time to raise awareness that the app exists and get people using it. User feedback can be tricky.
7. Updates/ Maintenance: A good developer can translate user feedback into workable updates for product improvement, without losing (m)any features.

All in all, a good app should suit a specific need, be well-designed for user navigation, and be updated regularly to retain users. Think about the apps on your phone. How many apps do you download and use consistently? What is the shelf-life of your apps? Which apps are competing for your attention? Think about what makes you repeatedly click an icon.

Can your library design an app that will stand the test of time for your patrons? You won’t know until you try.

A push to add Art to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) learning took storm a while ago. Then technology took over the world. But what about the humanities? The study of people is what made most technology possible. Ethnography, anthropology, psychology, linguistics, literature, and ethics are the driving force behind how and why technology is created, marketed, and how technology influences society as a whole.

Natural language processing would not be possible without breakthroughs in linguistics. Virtual reality games wouldn’t be very interesting without a good plot line to draw in gamers. Video game designers use psychology to study their target market and cater their product to the needs of the gamer. The internet is changing the way people think and interact with the world at large. To steer technology creation and use towards a positive impact on humanity, the humanities must be considered.

That is what we are doing with digital citizenship. We are asking people to look at how technology impacts themselves and others. We are asking people to look at the world today and ask themselves if their actions are making a positive impact on those around them. That is the core of ethics. What is the world today, and what do we want the world to be? How can we make a change towards the better? Can we agree on what makes life better, then work together to build a movement towards positive change?

Ethics teaches us to look at the complex nature of humanity and decide where we want to fit in the world. Are we making a positive contribution to our friends and community? What happens when everyone goes along with the status quo? What makes us do the things we do and how can we identify the need for change. Ethics.

Digital literacy will require us all to ask ourselves some hard questions. We are teaching kids to build an online identity that will make them look good to their friends and future employers. But what is their identity after they log off the computer? Making a positive impact in our small corner of the world means building introspection, empathy, and deciding who we are as individuals. How does an individual fit into their community? How does our community fit into the world? What can one human do?

There is no simple worksheet or lesson plan that will instill this thinking into growing learners. This will take large scale change in the world. It will mean looking at how technology affects us as individuals. It will mean guiding the use and creation of technology towards a greater purpose. There are no easy answers here.

Knowing how to use a tablet, a smartphone, a computer, and choosing the best device to suit your purpose is a good start. It opens doors to endless possibilities. But using that technology to shape yourself and the world into a better place is the real challenge.

The humanities are the beating heart of digital literacy. Humanity can exist without technology. But technology shouldn’t exist without humanity. And right now, it seems like the H in STEAM is silent.

I’ve had a Raspberry Pi and a mess of electronics components sitting on my desk for several months. My original Pi plan was to demonstrate how Raspberry Pi could be used in a functional project that could be actively used in the library. So I set it up using Python Programming’s Raspberry Pi Tutorial series. I’ve dabbled in Python before, but not extensively. It was kind of fun to play in the terminal again.

For those who haven’t used Python or Raspberry Pi, the Pi is a little $35 computer. But you do have to add your own monitor, keyboard, mouse, power supply and SD card. I use ‘$35’ loosely here. The Pi also has a set of GPIO pins that will let you add on motors, sensors, LED lights, and various other bits of electronic goodness. Python is a programming language that can be used for robotics, computer programming, machine learning, and many other things.

If you Google ‘Raspberry Pi Projects for Beginners’, you’ll get an overwhelming number of ideas. My problem was finding one that wouldn’t just be another cool thing sitting on my shelf. Finding the motivation to learn as an adult is drastically different than when you’re a kid. To devote the amount of time necessary to learn more complex electronics, I needed a project that would motivate and mean something to me personally.

Then I got to a tutorial in the series that told me to uninstall Wolfram Engine to save space. This isn’t the first tutorial that has recommended doing this, and nobody seemed to really know what Wolfram Engine is. So, being a good librarian, I looked it up.

From their website, “the philosophy of the Wolfram Language is to automate as much as possible, so programmers can concentrate on defining what they want to do, and the language will automatically figure out how to do it”. Stephen Wolfram explains it better in his explanatory video on the site’s homepage.

Anyway, the language is fascinating, but what really interested me were the demonstrations of use that were categorized by subject. The demonstrations on this page show how math can make the real world come to life in a visual, sometimes interactive, diagram.

I discovered that Wolfram can be used in machine learning. So I waded into Google’s Machine Learning Crash Course to learn more. After going through a good chunk of that crash course, I returned to the demonstrations available on Wolfram’s website and explored them through a different lens.

You can learn a lot about how artificial intelligence works by playing Rock, Paper, Scissors with AI Player. This player is found in the Life Sciences- Psychology section of the demonstrations. Machine learning looks for patterns the developer tells the program to look for and learn from. If you look in the “details” section below the player, you can see the factors that went into the algorithm behind the AI Player.

These factors are rooted in psychology. Other developers might place emphasis on different factors. This is a good reason to question the basis of machine learning algorithms. Depending upon the application for machine learning, we might all want to start looking deeper into the patterns these algorithms are told to look for in the data.

I digress. After returning to Wolfram, I then returned to the Pi. From a $35 computer, I discovered a fascination with machine learning. That led to a fascination with robotics and augmented reality. I returned to the Pi and still couldn’t find a project that really interested me for the library. It’s difficult to force learning when there is no real interest. But without the Pi, I would never have discovered a fascination with those other topics.

So what did I learn? Sometimes your learning outcome is drastically different from what you set out to learn. If you follow your natural curiosities and let them lead you where they may, you can discover a depth of passion that was previously unimaginable.

Given the right tools and information paths, your patrons could use the Pi to learn the basics of computing and pair it with other information sources and subject matter experts to create something the world has never seen. You can’t force learning, but you can encourage self-discovery.

If you’re looking for ways to introduce beginners to computer programming, block-based programming is a great place to start. These programming languages use graphical, drag-and-drop interfaces that make it easier to understand, develop, test, and tweak programs. In the case of Lego Mindstorms EV3 software, this program can control a robot made of Lego pieces that look similar to Knex pieces. Users just drag blocks into the programming area and change the settings to make the robot move, interact with sensors, display text or images on the screen, and more. This video made by Lego Discover will show you how to build your first program.

Lego Mindstorms is a more expensive option that the Library Commission uses through the Library Innovation Studios project. If your library wants to test out a powerful, free block-based programming interface, check out Scratch, made by MIT Media Lab. Scratch will let you program online stories, games, and animations. For free.

When learners want to expand their coding capabilities, they can transition over to text-based coding. Some good beginner options to look into are HTML and CSS coding to make a standard website from scratch. Add in Javascript to add more interactive features to the website. These links will send you to a YouTube video for freeCodeCamp.org, each video has a link to a written curriculum option as well.  There are a lot of other coding languages out there, but it’s difficult to choose a language until you know what you want to do with it.

Rather than get bogged down in which language to learn, libraries can focus on how to learn. The best thing we can all learn is how to break complex information into smaller, more manageable steps to learn from the ground up. After people learn how to think like a programmer, they can decide what they want to learn more about.  When people know where their interests lie, they can choose a program to suit their needs. Choosing a language without a purpose is a great way to quit before you start.

To encourage people to learn to code, try to connect them with good reasons to code. Technology is being used in multiple industries right now. People of any age or subject interest have a reason to learn programming. I will talk about more motivations to learn coding in future posts. Stay tuned.

Digital literacy has taken the library world by storm! What is digital literacy, you may ask. You will likely get a slightly different answer from every person you ask. The concept has also been called multiple literacies, technology literacy, 21st Century Skills, and similar.

What it all boils down to is that we are all trying to prepare students and all library patrons for the rapidly evolving digital world. There are 81 years left of the 21st Century. Nobody knows what the future will hold. But experts in digital and technology literacy have an educated guess as to the skills people will need going forward.

Here’s what the International Society for Technology in Education has come up with after working with a variety of leaders in education (excerpted from this table):

1. Empowered Learner
2. Digital Citizen
3. Knowledge Constructor
4. Innovative Designer
5. Computational Thinker
6. Creative Communicator
7. Global Collaborator

For a description of what all of those mean, check out the ISTE Standard’s website. This will provide information for what students should know, how educators can prepare, and how coaches/ professional development assistants can prepare for the future. There is also information about Computer Science Standards on this website for those who want to dive a little deeper into the wonderful world of coding and the process of creating or adapting technology. Be forewarned, it’s a lot. And it won’t all happen overnight.

We all have a long way to go before we’re all ready for the rest of the 21st Century, but we’ll get there eventually. As we move forward into the technology revolution, take a moment to think about how much technology is too much technology. Be selective about what is probably just a fad and which tools might gain momentum and be worth your time and effort. Do the best you can, mistakes will happen, and the world will keep on turning. Keep in mind that just because a new technology exists, doesn’t mean we have to use it.

Students will still need to know how to use a paper and pen by the end of all this.  Soft skills and social skills will be more important than ever as people become tempted to isolate themselves in a digital world. It’s time to find a happy medium between digital and physical tools. We’re only human.

Have you ever been on a website that asks you to login using Facebook? This usually appears as a quick one-click button that lets you link this app to Facebook so you don’t have to manually enter a lot of your own information into the new website. So how do websites get this button on their website?

It’s surprisingly easy. Take a look at the Facebook Login Overview on Facebook for Developers. Any website can use the Login if they only need access to a user’s public profile and email address. The overview states that “to ask for any other permission, your app will need to be reviewed by Facebook before these permission become visible in the Login Dialog to the public who’re logging into your app with Facebook”.

Looking at their App Review process, apps have to submit a request on a feature by feature basis and match that request to the product offered on their site. Businesses also need to verify their business identity. Businesses also have to sign a usage agreement.

That is somewhat reassuring, but let’s rewind a bit here. Any business, verified or unverified can use this Login feature to gain access to the public profile. Think about what’s on your public profile: a cover photo, gender, networks, schools attended, age range, language, country, and any information that appears on public searches. Imagine what companies can do with some of this information.

Some of these third-party websites may also sync up with Facebook to post some of the information from their app on your profile’s timeline. For example, Goodreads is a very popular website among librarians. Depending on how you set up your Goodreads account, you may have given Goodreads permission to automatically post your completed books to your timeline. Do you want all of your Facebook friends to know everything you read?

If you’ve already accidentally synced an app with your Facebook profile, there are usually ways to undo or change the settings. Here’s Goodread’s Help page if you want to take a look at the permission shared between Goodreads and Facebook. They also provide information about how to adjust the settings.

One day, drones may deliver library books to home bound library patrons. That day may come sooner than you’d think.

Drones are Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and can be controlled remotely or fly autonomously through the use of a pre-programmed flight plan. These drones use sensors to control their flight path and to collect various types of data. This data can range from weather information to chemical emissions to a collection of photographs.

Today, drones are being used in the military, by landscapers, construction workers, farmers, artists, researchers, and just about every industry known to man. So how are they being used in the library? Here are a few examples:

Drones on Loan: People want to learn about drones and take them for a test drive. The Arapaho Library has 4 copies of a Hover Camera Passport Drone available in their regular catalog. Georgia Highlands College has a similar system in place. If you would like to replicate this in your library, try testing out demonstrations with one drone and gather patron interest. If there’s interest, it might be time to update your loan policy to cover damage and incidentals on a drone for loan!

Delivery Drones: Right now, Amazon is pilot testing a delivery drone. Their website says their drones are “designed to safely get packages to customers in 30 minutes or less using unmanned aerial vehicles” using Prime Air. It’s not hard to imagine how these could come in handy for libraries one day.

Drone Demonstrations: You can also do some drone demonstrations in the library. This might take a bit of practice to get the controls down, but it’s definitely possible! It’s quite probably you could find an enthusiastic patron who has experience that might want to teach a few classes in the library.