Julian Assange Interviewed by the Brazilian People

Interview:

Julian Assange Interviewed by the Brazilian People.

Awesome reprint of Brazilian interview with Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks.  This is his most recent interview.  He gave this interview to an independent journalist, who culled the questions from submissions by the readers of her blog.  In it, he discusses the relationship between information control and power.

An excerpt:

It is the gap in knowledge which delineates who is inside the most powerful parts of the state and who is inside the powerful parts of a corporation. The free-flow of knowledge from powerful groups to less powerful groups or individuals is also a flow of power and hence an equalizing and democratizing force in society.

–Julian Assange

So, a question to my classmates: if you care to read the interview, I’m interested to know.  In light of a librarian’s role as gatekeeper of information, what do you think?

Wikileaks:

http://wikileaks.ch/

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Self-Assessment and Goals

The area I seem to be lacking in is databases.  I’d really like to learn more about those, as it seems to be a back-door into programming.  The rest of those scores are pretty high.  I’ve been online since the mid-90s.  I’ve built websites using HTML and the site I administrate now runs PHP.  I can tweak the code enough to install new modules and keep them from conflicting with each other, but I don’t know enough to build modules of my own.

I transcribe audio from home for a living, so I’ve used all of those skills at some point, many of them every day, even Web development in that I FTP files back and forth.  I don’t use presentation skills though (I don’t know, maybe playing audio files counts) but I’ve taken two public speaking courses across 20 years, and one of my previous employers required all employees to lead group training meetings at some point.

Goals for the course.  Good question.  So far it seems like we’ve discussed the ways technology is used in the library.  We’ve started to learn how the technology is used by starting blogs and wikis, but I’m not convinced yet that these technologies have necessary or vital purposes in the library.  Maybe that’s something I’ll better be able to understand through working in a library, rather than taking a course.

So, I guess my goals for the course are to find out more about what forms of technology really are vital to its operation, the cataloging software, the ordering/purchasing software/process.  How are spreadsheets used in libraries, by the staff, not the patrons?  What is particular to building a website for a library that’s different from building a website for any other organization?  These are kinds of things I’d like to learn from this course.

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My Self-Assessment of Entry–Level Information Technology Knowledge & Skills

You demonstrate a 86 % comprehension in the Basics Knowledge area.
You demonstrate a 100 % comprehension in the Basics Skills area.
You demonstrate a 91 % comprehension in the Basics Assessment Group.

Continue reading My Self-Assessment of Entry–Level Information Technology Knowledge & Skills

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