this was a fantastic and successful online offering for a variety of reasons.  One signficant reason is that the creators of the course provided "mulitple learning opportunities"....chatting, listening, watching, practicing, reading....to accomodate multiple learning styles.  Fabulous. Another reason: bleeding edge practitioners were recruited to provide presentations.  A third reason: fantastic participants representing every kind of background, library, and level of exposure to social technologies.  Most significant reason: enthusiastic, supportive, reliable, bleeding edge course facilitators and creators.  Round of applause coming out of Seattle...thanks much.  

i'd probably be more excited about flickr if i wasn't having such a hard time uploading my photos to it.  still, i can see why it's so appealing.  i use it more than google images now, depending on what i'm looking for, image-wise.  the social tagging feature, the communication it can facilitate, all of that makes sense.  but mostly on a detached, intellectual level.  i like the idea that flickr could provide a virtual tour of a library for distance students, (but then again, why would distance students care about how the library looks?), or giving a "face" to the library (staff, users, etc).  but most of the ideas for its use still seem like frills....maybe this is because i feel like there are really basic services at my library i'm working to address.  i feel like flickr use would be way down the list...

Hi all,

This is probably old news for my news-savvy, tech-savvy colleagues in this course, but in case anyone missed it, social networking and libraries got a boost in no less than the Sunday NY Times yesterday.  Was it the Styles section or Business, i don't remember...but it put in a thumbs up for Library Thing software and talked about the community of users it has created.  I've been wanting to catalog my own collection for ages. ...Once again, just a trend follower, not the trend setter.... 

I know we're focusing on wikis right now, but i'm furiously trying to max out my collection development requests and realizing how useful it would be to get "pushed" new titles in my subject areas via RSS feeds.  This is the group to ask: does anyone know of sites that have feeds where i can "customize" my feed requests by subject? or even not customize but just see new titles as they are coming out? Happy for any suggestions...or places to look. Thanks. I'm still new to collection development, and haven't had the time to explore the best tools, which I know are out there...

it's great to learn about new technologies and feel abreast of developments in the library world.  but i know i'm not the only one constantly asking myself during this course "great, but how am i going to use this at my institution, and what problems will this technology solve?" 

the most appealing thing about a wiki from my perspective is that it allows you to essentially create a web presence without the barrier of learning html/css or other coding.  anyone with basic technology skills can participate and contribute to a website.

i'm thinking that in my library, a wiki would be a great tool for creating an "intranet" of sorts.  a place to schedule our instruction sessions, create an instruction request form (i'm assuming there's a way to do that, right?), post library procedures, maybe have a page for "new staff orientation", and a link to any shared documents (which right now are kept in several different digital and 3-d places, without a shared network for all staff).  

I'm just wondering if we have any course participants from Illinois, and/or anyone who can shed more light on this attempt to legislate away social networking sites on school campuses/libraries. What are the librarians and associations there doing to educate legislatos and the public about the positive aspects of social networking sites?  When are folks ever going to get that censorship doesn't work?  What can we do to help remind people of that?

This is the name of a study that was being conducted (maybe still?) at the University of Washington's Information School when I was a student there. I have been thinking about that project in relation to delicious, which has really revolutionized--at least for me---how i "store" the websites I need. I have tags like "errands" for my banking and bus routes, "hiking" for routes and directions to trails, and way too many items under my umbrella tag for work: Professional. I just started a new tag for readings I am using for my Lib101 course in the spring. One great way to use delicious for libraries is for instruction purposes. Instead of having to create a website or powerpoint with links to examples for class, you can create a tag for a specific class, or call it "Instruction" and keep the sites you need to show your students there. I'd be interested to hear how other folks think delicious can be used in the college library context. I mostly think of it as a personal professional resource.

One of the facts I was struck with from the screencast about millenials is that they now represent as much of the U.S. population as baby boomers.  And, baby boomers are retiring now and soon, while millenials are and will be coming into the workforce.  This is more reason than ever to be thinking about how libraries can approach their programming and service delivery to reach these patrons.  I'm almost tempted to disregard my own inclination to consider the philosophical quandaries of whether we should be catering to their habits or if we should be teaching them to develop some basic s

Hi everyone,

 Trying to keep up w/the blog entries and just read an RSS feed on my bloglines (I don't remember which blog) predicting that subject indexes (like Google directory or LII.org) will soon be irrelevant because of social bookmarking, tags, etc...

 I am sure we'll be talking about this during the course at some point, but I wanted to mention that it's a point of interest to me; i'm assuming i'm not the only library instructor who frequently encourages students to use these tools rather than blindly doing an open search in google.  In an academic context, don't we still want some screening of content that is provided by "subject experts", and can we assure this happens in social bookmarking? 

Why am I enrolled in this course?  Because I just started my job as a community college librarian, and I think my fluency in new technologies is a key criteria to making my library relevant to its audience; because the structure of a course helps focus me and force me to develop the skills I'm interested in; because everyone is talking about these tools, but I'm still not sold on their value to my patrons and my library (I guess i'll go with full disclosure up front); because it's free and my institution has limited funds for training.

How are we using social technologies at South Seattle Community College?  Well, I'd say we're not. Technical savvy outside IT and the Distance Learning faculty is fairly limited amongst the faculty, with most people using email and that's about it.  I don't even think many faculty use aggregators, but I'd like to share that tool with them...