Web 2.0 Tutorials

As anyone who reads this blog regularly will have guessed I am a great fan of using Web 2.0, particularly its potential for making libraries more "with it". This list of 100 Free Library 2.0 Webinars and Tutorials from the College@Home blog will help anyone who wants to find out more or give instructors ideas for spreading the word amongst unbelievers. I'm sure that library staff have already been converted but part of my mission is to get others to understand. Any library that hasn't yet run a variation of the 23 Learning 2.0 Things programme should consider implementing it as soon as they are able.

Web 2.0 distractions

I was asked to do my standard presentation on Wikis and Blogs yesterday but "to make it fun". Well, these workshops are always fun but I thought that I could provide a new slant on this one by running through a few Web 2.0 applications and letting participants make whatever use of them they could.

I gave everyone the following handout and we worked together through each of the activities, referring along the way to what other people (myself included) had done with the tools available.

What are we doing here?
1	Create a Google account www.google.com
2	Create an iGoogle page www.google.com/ig
3	Add elements to your iGoogle page
4	Create a Blogger account www.blogger.com Write about what you hope to achieve today
5	Create an avatar -- a representation of yourself. Go to http://avatars.yahoo.com/ ; design an avatar with a funky background. (You will have to set up an account if you don't use Yahoo!) Save your avatar and export to your blog.
6	Create a reader and add some RSS feeds http://www.google.com/reader
7	Facebook http://facebook.com Create an account, find some friends and send them a message.
8	Del.icio.us http://del.icio.us/
9	LibraryThing http://librarything.com
10	Picasa – organise your pictures http://picasa.google.com/

Participants were fully absorbed throughout and I had to get stroppy to get them to stand up after a couple of hours to help themselves to coffee and biscuits.

These are only some of the activities that we do in the 23 Things programme. I'm still thinking of rolling it out to the whole college but also struggling against lack of support for such "distractions".

Web2.0 in a nutshell

eLearn Magazine has this feature article Ten Web 2.0 Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes to Be a More Successful E-learning Professional. It could be valuable for all "23 Thingers" or anyone interested in learning about or maintaining their Web2.0 skills.

Social networking in the library

Jessamyn West on librarian.net has a thoughtful discussion about why libraries should be socially networking. She mentions popular tools such as flickr, facebook and twitter, with helpful links to the ways in which some libraries are using them and recommends that all libraries should be offering 23 Things to help their staff get up to speed with the technology.

Librarians in the 21st Century

I attended another session in the intermediate course on Virtual Librarianship in Second Life yesterday. It was not as stimulating as the previous three sessions, probably because it related to working with teens and I have have been turned off that age group by my experiences as a high school teacher. However, one thing that did come out of it was a reference to an article about Librarians in the 21st Century.in which the writer, Joyce Kasman Valenza, claims that ... librarians cannot expect to assume a leadership role in information technology and instruction, and we cannot claim any credibility with students, faculty, or administrators, if we do not recognize and thoughtfully exploit the paradigm shift of the past two years.
This is particularly relevant in light of my current efforts to run 23 Things at my library and my struggle to achieve acceptance of the role that Second Life or any other virtual world may play in the learning/teaching environment. I am empowered by the comment:
You do not take “no” for an answer when a network administrator or technology director refuses to support a pedagogically sound activity. You seek a way to get to “yes” if learners will benefit.
In yesterdays SL session I mentioned that I was trying to introduce my colleagues to new technology in spite of my director's reservations - and virtually behind her back, and received a resounding cheer from my classmates.
I wonder if the 23 Things participants realise just how much effort goes into running this exercise and how disappointing it is for me when they "cannot find the time" to complete each "Thing" as it is posted.

Engineering Librarians Lunch

It is some time since I last attended an Engineering Librarians Group meeting so when Susanna sent me an invitation recently I jumped at the chance. I was able to combine work and pleasure as not only did I meet up with old friends but also Tamara from Nature Publishing Group was there to tell us about her company's new and enhanced online products - as well as paper based.

Coincidentally, on my return to my office I was working on a wiki for 23 Things @ Central when I came across this post:
Though del.icio.us is great, and I use it all the time, if the student happens to be science-oriented,(Connotea is a fantastic tool that was created by the Nature Publishing Group (publishers of Nature, etc.) specifically as a social bookmarking tool for scientists. And, unlike del.icio.us, it is set up to automatically retrieve bibliographic information from several recognized sites (PubMed, etc.).

Thanks for lunch Tamara. And without your presence I would probably never have become aware of this tool.

Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 Blogs

From Library Journal is an article by Melissa L. Rethlefsen, Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us, I found this, and other useful information, on the iLibrarian blog which contains lots of news and resources on Library 2.0 and the information revolution. If you are "doing" 23 Things there is much material here that could be used.

Video tools

Central TAFE's "23 Things" team has had a lot of fun playing around with various online video tools, mostly visible on YouTube. In particular there have been some hilarious mashups using JibJab. It's fortunate that our colleagues (and bosses) have a sense of humour.

To find videos why not try the Google Video Search Engine? This article from Research Buzz tells us more about it:

** Fun With Google Video
<http://www.researchbuzz.org/wp/2007/09/17/fun-with-google-video/>

As you probably know, the Google Video Search Engine (http://video.google.com/) now encompasses other video sites, like YouTube. But if you don't want to search anything but Google Video, you can go to the advanced search page and specify that you want video only from Google.com, or you can use site:google.com from the home page.

That's how I discovered that site:google.com works as a standalone search. That's also how I discovered that Google Video has something over 4.8 million videos (just over 4.9 million if you turn off filtering). But if you start sorting the results by anything but relevance, the result count drops to about 333. So I couldn't get a handle on what the highest-rated video was or how many videos have been rated lately.

If you use inurl:video.google.com at Google, you'll see that the main search engine gives a result count of about 1.5 million pages.

23 Things @ Central

We're in week 3 of this programme and the 9 participants have put up a variety of blogs reflecting their tastes and interests. I'm finding out a lot about them as they explore their 23 things and make new discoveries. Marsha advised us to take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid. This turned out to be quite an eye-opener for me

You're Pale Fire!

by Vladimir Nabokov

You're really into poetry and the interpretation thereof. Along the road of life, you have had several identity crises which make it very unclear who you are, let alone how to interpret poetry.

You probably came from a foreign country, but then again you seem foreign to everyone in ways unrelated to immigration.

Most people think you're quite funny, but maybe you're just sick. Talking to you ends up being much like playing a round of the popular board game Clue.

How little I know myself!

Kathryn Greenhill's latest post has some great pointers about how to find time to do the 23 Things:10 ways to find time for 23 Things

Who am I?

As part of the 23 Things programme that I am coordinating for my college I started playing around with avatars from Yahoo earlier this week. Here is my avatar:


She's quite unlike the character I play in Oblivion (blonde, fair-skinned, delicate-looking but a champion fighter with "hands like a smith" or my Second Life avatar (she changes virtually every time I go in-world as I have an amazing array of free hairstyles, skins and clothes in my inventory as well as the ability to change my appearance at will). It's sometimes hard to come back to reality and look at myself in a real-world mirror.

23 Things @ Central

On Monday I started a trial run of the popular 23 Things programme based on the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County's 23 Learning 2.0 Things. I'm learning things myself as I go along but think that I and the participants should get a lot of fun out of it.

One of my favourite sites for finding out about new Web 2.0 things is Go2Web20.net; It has an endless variety of Web 2.0 sites and an RSS feed that goes some way to keeping me up to date.

Back in the Saddle

My plane from Bali touched down in Perth at 5.00am on Monday. After 2 weeks of perfect tropical sunshine it was difficult to adjust to the rain and cold of a Perth winter and wearing heavy clothing is a definite no-no. Oh for the ubiquitous bathers and floating sarongs worn by most tourists in Bali.

Tuesday I returned to work and it took me all morning just to work through my email. We are short-staffed because of all the winter bugs that so many have succumbed to so it's head down and tail up and I've not had time to attend to this blog.

Before I started blogging I would sift through the various newsletters to which I subscribed and feed through snippets of information to my colleagues. I realise that I have drifted away from this and become a bit more personal in my posts. One of my colleagues has been requesting copies of old emails that she found interesting at the time but can no longer find. Had they been in the blog and tagged that would not be a problem. I should start to do more of that though I think I stopped because so many are already doing it.

I've been preparing the "23 Things" exercise that will be having a trial run staring next week (comment from my director: "Do we have access to Web 2.0?"). I look forward to getting that under way. Also various presentations are planned for Adult Learning Week in September (SL demo and discussion and Wiki and Blog workshop).

Catchup

Although the college is closed for the mid-year break Library staff have been working hard behind the scenes. The bulk of our stocktaking assignment is complete at Leederville campus and we are getting ready for the influx of new students next week. I'll be leaving my very capable team to manage on their own as I'm swanning off to Bali for two weeks, my first real holiday in years. I'm so looking forward to having no responsibilities for a while as well as finding out about another culture and its people. Then, of course, there's the shopping and I've been given a list of things that various people want me to bring home for them. I hope my luggage allowance will cope with it all.

During the so-called break I've prepared a project brief to have a trial run of "23 Things (Learning 2.0)" at our library and had it accepted to start in week 5 of the new semester. My manager wants to be involved himself and I don't think I'll have any difficulty finding 5-10 volunteers for the trial.

I've also done a lot of reflection as I worked on my performance management review. It seems that our HR department has had to justify its existence by producing more and more forms to replace the old ones. So much is repetitive and doesn't seem to serve any useful purpose. Why not just a few simple questions such as:
What have you done during the past period?
What have you been unable to do - and why?
What do you plan to do during the next period?

The beginners Virtual Librarianship course is complete. Last weeks' session was interesting and some quite lively discussion evolved but it ended very suddenly leaving me with a feeling that there must be something more. We didn't even have an end of course party - not that I would have been able to keep my eyes open much later than the 12.30 pm Perth time the session ended. I'm planning to register for the intermediate course and, now that SL is available on the staff computer network, I'm hoping to be able to attend classes at a more reasonable time.

Swan TAFE asked me to give a brief demo of SL at their Black Friday function last week. If only they'd told me about the theme I'd have dressed more appropriately both on and off screen! It went down well and I hope to have made a few converts among people who are looking for new ways to get in touch with our students.