Giving and TakingALA, free the information!, hi, librarianship, online education, open access, open source, social software, Wikis

by Meredith Farkas on 6/28/2007 with 19 comments

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 …

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Want to implement social software at your library?free the information!, online education, social software

by Meredith Farkas on 3/22/2007 with 2 comments

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 …

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Making Five Weeks to a Social Library happen: The down and dirtyfree the information!, online education, social software

by Meredith Farkas on 3/22/2007 with 4 comments

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 …

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A model for the future of online learningfree the information!, librarianship, online education, social software

by Meredith Farkas on 3/21/2007 with 10 comments

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 …

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Five Weeks to a Social Library: Highlights from Week 4free the information!, libraries, online education, social software

by Meredith Farkas on 3/10/2007 with Comments Off on Five Weeks to a Social Library: Highlights from Week 4

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 …

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Five Weeks to a Social Library: Highlights from Week 3free the information!, online education, social software, Wikis

by Meredith Farkas on 3/4/2007 with Comments Off on Five Weeks to a Social Library: Highlights from Week 3

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 …

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Five Weeks to a Social Library: Highlights from Week 2free the information!, hi, online education, RSS and Syndication, social bookmarking, social software, Wikis

by Meredith Farkas on 2/25/2007 with 4 comments

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 …

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Highlights from Week 1 of Five Weeks to a Social Libraryblogging, free the information!, online education, social software

by Meredith Farkas on 2/18/2007 with Comments Off on Highlights from Week 1 of Five Weeks to a Social Library

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 …

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Application Deadline: Five Weeks to a Social Libraryfree the information!, online education, social software

by Meredith Farkas on 11/29/2006 with 2 comments

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 …

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The good, the bad and the utterly hillariouslibrarianship, online education, our digital future, social software

by Meredith Farkas on 10/8/2006 with Comments Off on The good, the bad and the utterly hillarious

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 …

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Five Weeks to a Social Library: Participant Applicationfree the information!, online education, social software

by Meredith Farkas on 10/2/2006 with 8 comments

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 …

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