Librarian by Day » library2.0

State wide Learning 2.0 programs

Bobbi Newman — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:01:26 +0000

Something that came up while I was giving my presentation at MLA is that Missouri should have state wide Learning 2.0 program. My response – I’d love it! here is who go you suggest this to and let’s see what happens. I ended up having several conversations with the “right” people before I left and as prep work for my follow up email I sent a question off to the Twitterati - anyone know of any states organizations doing Learning 2.0 statewide? with participants from multiple libraries?

I thought I’d share the responses.

Edited to add – thanks to even more responses from Twitter

Idaho

I know these types of programs are great for small library systems that don’t have the staff to run their own program.

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How do you find the time?

Bobbi Newman — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 13:14:30 +0000

It seems every time I give a presentation on Web tools one of the questions I’m asked by overwhelmed participants is – how do you find the time to keep up with everything? I give an off the top of my head answer, which, while truthful, doesn’t cover everything. I’m hoping writing about it will help me give a clearer answer next time, maybe get some tips and tricks from you and provide a reference point for future questioners.

I dont’ try to keep up with everything. There is so much going on, I think it would be impossible to try to do it al and have a balanced life, so I accept that there will always be something I don’t know about.
I have a great network of people; when I find something new I share, when they find something new they share
I take what I like and throw the rest out. I’ll try most new services, set up an account, play with it for a while. If doesn’t click or do what I want, I stop using it.
I dont’ use every tool everyday. Twitter is often overwhelming to me, and it interrupts me when I’m really focusing, so some days I don’t check in at all. I know I miss some good things, but it’s part of that “can’t do everything” acceptance.
I’m organized – I use a feed reader and have over 10 folders. One title daily – those are the blogs that have high priority, I don’t necessarily read them every day but if I have time they are the first ones that get read. This is a select folder and there are never more than 10 blogs in there. Other blogs are organized under subject. I try to read most of these once a week or so.
I don’t try to do everything at once. First I got a Myspace page, mastered that (it took a while let me tell you and I cursed Myspace more than once) then I moved on to the next thing.
I use gmail for my email list subscriptions, it groups emails together which makes is easy to follow conversations or delete the whole thread if I’m not interested. It also allows me to create custom labels (instead of folders) and sort incoming email by those and color code them!

Tools I use: a feed reader, blogs, email lists, FriendFeed, Facebook, Twitter, but use what works for you and you feel comfortable with. When I help my coworkers get organized I do 4 things with them

set up a feed reader, show them how to use it and organize it
put 5 library blogs in it that I recommend they read
add folders for other RSS feeds they’d like to follow
tell them to take half an hour everyday to read them.

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We are del.icio.us!

Bobbi Newman — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 15:09:02 +0000

With a “to do” list a mile long I feel as though I’ll never get anything finished. Technically this isn’t finished either as it’s meant to be a living page and it’s well on it’s way.

My library is using our del.icio.us account to create our Weblinks page for our patrons. Robin set up the page using dishy and I’ve been busy adding links left and right. This is so much easier than maintaining a classic weblinks page, the Reference staff only has to know how to use del.icio.us and agree on a taxonomy for tags. No need to know html or use page editing software, which makes our website designer happy too. No creating each link manually or worry about ordering and descriptions. All I have to do it find the webpage, tag it with del.icio.us, assign my tags, add any descriptors I feel are necessary and voila it’s on our page. It’s just as easy to delete or update links too.

As I’ve been browsing other Library’s Weblinks page for links to include on ours, I was surprised to see no one else using this method. I’m sure they are out there, I just haven’t found one yet.Similar Posts: