Oh Meredith, why can’t you just write a nice, short, concise post? I really don’t know what happens! I start writing and my fingers just seem to take over. This is what happens when my husband goes away and leaves me alone with my thoughts. Sorry folks! Something I frequently think about when I go …
When I was asked to be one of the Top Tech Trend experts, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to attend the actual panel session this year, because I was slotted to be on another panel at the same time. I knew I’d at least post something to the LITA Blog, but I …
Stephen Abram wrote a column for Information Outlook on Learning 2.0 called 15 Minutes a Day: A Personal Learning Management Strategy. So it got me thinking. If I had 15 minutes each day to keep up with technology and libraries’ use of technology, what would I do? Here’s what I would suggest… Keep up with …
When we taught Five Weeks to a Social Library, we used Drupal and kind of had to hack it to make it work as a course management system. Too bad DrupalEd wasn’t out yet. But it is now! The goal of this site is to create a flexible framework that allows for users to set …
I was beyond thrilled to see the Wired article featuring Helene Blowers’ amazing Learning 2.0 project and model. You know when you make it into something like Wired, you’ve MADE IT. 🙂 It pleases me to no end to see so many libraries replicating the program to provide accessible and fun technology education to staff …
If you have any interest in implementing social software tools at your library, you may want to check out some of the amazing proposals created by our participants for their libraries. I have organized the proposals by the technology they want to use and by library type. It’s obvious looking at proposals by tool that …
In this post, I’m going to talk about the decisions we made in creating the course and what I would do differently next time. Hopefully this will be useful to those of you who wish to replicate the course. I’m sure my fellow organizers will have other insights to add from their perspective. Certain decisions …
Last Spring, while Chairing the library track of HigherEd BlogCon and feeling like it was not an engaging enough online conference model, I had a crazy idea to create a free online conference with more synchronous and asynchronous pieces to really draw people in and build a community. I refused to believe that the only …
Wow! I can’t believe we’ve just finished Week 4. It’s definitely a bittersweet feeling. I can’t imagine waking up in a little over a week and not finding new posts from my friends in this program. I have gained so much from my interactions with them, more than I could have ever imagined. I only …
As you all know, I’m a big fan of wikis, such a big fan that I often cannot gauge how other people will respond when they are introduced to wikis. Well, imagine my surprise to discover how incredibly enthusiastic our participants were this week about implementing wikis in their library; probably more so than any …
Week two of Five Weeks to a Social Library is now over. RSS and del.icio.us really generated a lot of excitement for our participants and many could see the personal and professional benefits of using these tools. We have people spending 16 hours per week on the class because they want to play with these …
The weeks and months before the start of Five Weeks to a Social Library required a significant amount of work, but I don’t think I was prepared for how much time I would need to devote once the course started. However, it has been totally worth it so far. I am literally blown away by …
I have always been an idea person. I probably get that from my dad who has had dozens of business ideas in the 29 years I’ve known him. However, before I became a librarian, I rarely pursued any of the ideas I had. I usually either didn’t know where to start or I didn’t think …
Jennifer Macaulay, who really just has to stop writing such insightful pieces or I will never get anything done, wrote a piece on her experiences as a distance learner a couple of weeks ago. And if I didn’t know better, I would have thought that I had written the entire thing myself, so much did …
I am pleased to announce that, after much deliberation, we have chosen our participants for the Five Weeks to a Social Library course! They are a diverse group — geographically, in the type of population they work with, and in terms of their position at their library. Here is the list: Bayer, Dell – Sr. …
I just wanted to remind folks that December 1 is the deadline for applications to participate in the Five Weeks to a Social Library course. You can find the application instructions here. We have gotten an incredible number of applications for the course from people all over the world — from all different types of …
I have been ridiculously busy getting ready for the five talks I have coming up in the next three weeks. I have to have the slides for them all totally done this week because I’m going on vacation from the 13th until the start of Internet Librarian. And, for the first time in a long …
I’m so pleased and excited to see how Five Weeks to a Social Library is shaping up! We have a terrific group of presenters involved in the course who will help to teach participants all about social software and how to successfully implement social technologies in their library. You can see a very preliminary preliminary …
Friday was the deadline for proposals from content creators for Five Weeks to a Social Library. At the beginning of the week, some of the planning committee was beginning to sweat because we only had 8 proposals total. After having planned HigherEd BlogCon, I knew that most would come in over that last week (and …
Friday is the deadline to submit a proposal to provide content for the Five Weeks to a Social Library course. While we have gotten a lot of proposals on certain topics, there are others on which we have not gotten any (or have gotten very few). If you have experience using or know a lot …