• what’s your experience of finding, accessing, using and sharing scholarly information?
• what would that experience be like in an ideal future, say 10 years from now?

Take our 15-minute survey and let us know!

Results of the survey will be published by the Information Futures Commission and used to inform discussions during April, May and June about a scholarly information strategy for the University of Melbourne.

Credit where it’s due:

• Michael Wesch’s videos were a source of inspiration for this survey
• Several of the survey questions were inspired by the work of ANU PhD candidate Danny Kingsley — see her VALA 2008 conference paper (PDF 80 kb) for details about identifying information-seeking differences across academic disciplines
• Many thanks to Guy Sangwine (Enterprise Applications) for his help with constructing and running the web version of the survey. Love yer work, Guy :-)

EPIC was first released in 2005. It was made for the (fictional) Museum of Media History. It’s a timeline for the next decade, imagining what might happen to news media as the Internet became more ubiquitous. It questions the traditional notions of ‘authoritative information’ and the role of the Fourth Estate in civil society. This original video is now renamed EPIC 2014. The acronym stands for Evolving Personalized Information Construct.

Creators Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan blogged about EPIC at Poynter Online in July 2005.

The movie was released about 10 minutes[1] before podcasting burst[2] onto the interwebs. For bleeding-edge geeks, EPIC immediately lost some of its street cred.

Now a revised version of the movie is available, EPIC 2015, incorporating some of the podcasting, social networking, grid computing and other innovations that have emerged or matured in the last three years. Where Michael Wesch’s videos are optimistic about the future, EPIC strikes a more sombre tone.

Definitely worth a look, especially if you’re interested in scenario planning.

Notes:

[1] 10 Internet minutes, that is ;-) In the real world, it was about 3-6 months.

[2] When I say burst, I’m choosing the word carefully. You could almost hear the whooshing. On 28 September 2004 there were 526 Google results for “podcasts”, up from about 24 results just days earlier. On 1 October 2004 there were 2750 Google results for “podcasts”. By18 October 2004 there were more than 100,000 Google results for “podcasts”. From May 2005 to April 2006, the number of podcast feeds managed via Feedburner increased from 6000 to 45,000 — more than the number of radio stations worldwide. Feedburner said there were more than 1.6 million subscribers to its podcast feeds. In mid-2007, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation alone was serving up 5 million audio and video downloads per month.

Anthropologist Michael Wesch made a splash in the online world last year when he released Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us. In this short video, Wesch explores the different ways in which people are now interacting with digital information and technologies.

In an interview with John Battelle, Wesch observed that “…if we don’t understand our digital technology and its effects, it can actually make humans and human needs even more invisible than ever before. But the technology also creates a remarkable opportunity for us to make a profound difference in the world.”

To date, the first and revised versions of The Machine is Us/ing Us have been viewed just over 5 million times on YouTube.com.

Wesch followed this success later in 2007 with two further videos. In Information R/evolution, he explores “the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.”

In collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University, Wesch’s third video — A Vision of Students Today — identifies some typical characteristics of today’s university students: “how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.”

Finally, a slight change of direction. The Medieval Help Desk sketch, from a Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation TV show, reminds us that even the most helpful scholarly technologies can be daunting and confusing when we first encounter them.