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".

On Blogs, Wikis and RSS

Yesterday I presented 2 training sessions on blogs, wikis and RSS. The first was for staff at my college and I was pleased to see that our professional development sessions are being made available to staff at other colleges too - swelling attendance at this course by 3. However, had I known in advance, I might have planned for a generic login to be available instead of wasting time (mine and my students') running around finding out how to log them into our network. We had fun and I was gratified to read the comments on the evaluation sheets. I hope I gave them all something that they can use both for work and for personal communication. They were so eager to get stuck into the practical part of the workshop that they didn't even want to stop for tea and Tim-Tams.

That afternoon I repeated part of the session (blogs and RSS only) for a group of Library Studies students. This was at a different campus and I made the fatal mistake of leaving my nerdstick with all my presentations stuck in the pc where I did the first workshop. Fortunately I was able to download a copy from the shared drive and use a usb stick from lost property so the day was saved.

These students had a blogging assignment but I tried to give them more than just the basics. We discussed web 2.0 and library 2.0 which they claimed to have never heard about! I think I managed to get across the need for finding out for oneself about all the new tools and technology available and not just waiting to be told what is and is not important. To that end this blog post from LibraryCrunch and the accompanying comments make interesting reading.