• Under the Spotlight – Trainers on New Media Tools
• E-learning on Information Literacy for NTU students
• Getting Creative to Raise Reading Interest!

Under the Spotlight – Trainers on New Media Tools

New Media such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networking tools and more are gaining prominence in our work and personal lives today. We had a chat with Vivien Tan and Isaak Kwok, the two advocators and trainers of New Media at NLB Academy (NLBA) for their take on this rage.

Q. Why is New Media becoming increasingly prevalent?
Isaak: I believe new media is the next phase of the Internet. Increasingly, more information has moved into the online world. And surprisingly, most of this information may not even come from printed books! They could possibly first appear online on blogs, videos, etc. For example, you might not find some entries from Wikipedia in Encyclopaedia Britannica, even though they could be relevant. This demonstrates that on the Internet, you can find information that can’t be found in so-called ‘mainstream’ sources.

Vivien: What you get in reported sources are mostly factual briefs, while New Media allows for immediacy and caters for different angles of coverage. You get both reported news and also perspectives from people on the ground that have experienced or are experiencing it at that same time. It allows people to form their own opinions based on different sources of media instead of just reported sources.

Isaak: Some musicians and film producers have decided that it is economically viable to distribute and sell their music and films online. Increasingly, more amateurs are creating content for sale as the Internet helps in reducing the costs of production.

Vivien: With everyone busy running around in today’s urban cityscape, we don’t meet up as often as we’d like to. Social networks allow us to reach out to our friends, family or simply people who share the same interests as you and to stay in touch with one another. To me, it’s very much the community aspect that sees us putting up hundreds and thousands of photos and videos online.



Q. How is New Media different from emails?
Isaak: Emails are intrusive in a sense because you have to send the mail and it will most probably end up in your mailbox. With New Media, you can decide which RSS feeds of blogs, videos, and podcasts to subscribe to. You can then choose to just glance or go through in details; it’s really your choice and not so in-your-face.

Vivien: You get a lot of unsolicited emails too. New Media is definitely about choice. It allows you to control what you want to read, watch and hear. When you subscribe to a blog or a [RSS] feed, it’s because you are interested in that. It’s a way of filtering the information overload.

Q. What are the challenges of using New Media tools?
Isaak (jokingly): Too time-consuming!

Vivien (joining in with a laugh): It’s addictive!

Isaak: But seriously, the big challenge is in maintaining and integrating the different New Media presence that you have created through blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Twitter, etc. More and more start-ups are coming out with software to integrate them into one page such as iGoogle, Netvibes, FriendFeed and myYahoo!. It’s still not perfect.

Q. How should a newbie get started?
Isaak: Using New Media is like riding a bicycle – you have to use it to know what it is all about. You need not be blogging or podcasting immediately; you can start off by just reading the blogs, watching videos and listening to podcasts. Then when you have something interesting to talk or blog about, the next step would be to incorporate your personal inputs.



Vivien: It’s just doing what you’ve already been doing, like showing off your travel photo albums, sharing your opinions or seeking them, but in a different way. It all comes down to your intention and finding the best tool to serve that purpose. Some people are scared when they think about wikis or blogs, but many of them don’t realise that certain e-newsletters they have been reading are actually blogs! So the engine doesn’t matter; it’s more the communication channel and what you want to achieve. It’s not scary!

With that advice in hand, do get started by checking out (just) one of Isaak’s blogs - blogginglibrarian.com