My favorite experiences in the course have been going through each different tool, reading, discussing, and thinking about practical ways to apply them to my library. I continue to be fascinated with delicious, for both personal and professional uses. Flickr is also one of my personal faves. Professionally, many of the tools can be useful but the one that has the most obvious potential at my library is the wiki.

Outcomes that surprised me -- I was surprised that I'm leaving the course with lower opinions of MySpace and Second Life. Although I think these tools are great to use in some libraries, I don't think that they would necessarily be successful at a rural community college with many first generation students. Maybe in a few years, but not as of yet.

Final Proposal

Development of Class Research Guides using Wikis

My final proposal will utilize wikis in the development of class research guides. A wiki is a website that multiple users develop together. No web design or HTML skills are needed. Successful wikis are collaborative projects that depend on user interaction.

Both students and college instructors will benefit from the use of wikis in class research guides. Relevance is the key in any successful project involving students. Students are interested in and use resources that will help them succeed in a given class. Class research guides target specific classes and class-related sources. When a wiki is used as the platform for one of these guides, the students not only have relevant sources for their class but also have the option of adding sources to the guide that they find helpful. Instead of spoon-feeding information to students, students have a say in the development of the guide. It’s a collaborative project that is tied into the students’ success.

After digesting week 4's content and the previous weeks as well, I'm more and more excited about the use of wikis and less and less excited about using software like Second Life and MySpace. I think that the use of Second Life and MySpace by some libraries is great. Those libraries know their users and know that through the use of these tools they can connect with their users. Likewise, I know my library and my users and, as of yet, I don't think that the use of these tools would be worthwhile. Perhaps in the future, a MySpace account. Now, however, I'm going to focus on the tools that I feel can have an impact, most notably wikis.

I know I'll try to implement class research guides in wikis. After watching Chad's webcast, it's evident that the flexibility and collaboration aspects of wikis make them the ideal format for this purpose. In addition to this, however, I want to think about what works in this community. Innovative and successful projects at this college in the past have incorporated the entire community of Astoria, not just library users and the college. A couple of English instructors started the Fisher Poets gathering 10 years ago and it's grown into a huge event.

I've explored many of the options for hosted and installed wikis now -- Media Wiki, PM Wiki, Seed Wiki, and PB Wiki. I want to use wikis in the development of class research guides AND I want my students to feel comfortable contributing to the wiki. So, I feel in my case that simple is good, and PB Wiki fits that description very well. While I could definitely do more with one like Media Wiki, PB Wiki is as basic as they come. I think that if I am successful at getting students in particular classes to use and contribute to these wikis, they will appreciate an interface that is as straight forward as possible.

I love delicious. I think it has great promise for library instruction. What I'd like to do is incorporate the RSS feed in delicious into the development of class research guides. There are so many ways to use tools like delicious and bloglines, but I think incorporating them into instruction is a very relevant way to reach students. Also, maybe finding a way to incorporate RSS feeds into CMS like Blackboard. A really great way to reach distance students.

I put IM into effect on the library web pages this week. That was sooo easy! All of these tools are easy and useful. There's a whole lot of potential out there.

The more time that I spend as a librarian at a small, rural community college, the more I understand the abilities and knowledge of the users at my library. For example, I taught a class the other day where a third of the class did not even know what a "browser" was -- and these were 17 & 18 year olds -- and didn't really seem to care! I was not prepared for that. So, my goal in implementing some type of social software at my library is to keep it simple and relevant to my users' needs. I'm sure that's what everybody wants to do. I think that I'll have to try something specifically integrated with students' classes.

Hello, everyone! My name is Candice Watkins. I live in Astoria, Oregon (of Goonies fame) and work as the Reference & Instruction Librarian in the library of a small community college - Clatsop Community College. I've only been on the job for a couple of months and already I can see that there is much to do and much opportunity -- they haven't had a full-time reference librarian for years. There are currently no social technologies in use at the library, but I'm anxious to change that. I have experience using del.icio.us to collaborate with teaching faculty at my previous library job, and hope to continue to find ways to use that software.