This day in Five Weeks to a Social Library
Submitted by hollyristau on Wed, 2007-02-14 04:21.
What an interesting and frustrating day! I ran a city block away in 20 below windchill to get earphones for this morning's chat, logged on a little early, and then was very frustrated with the whole process. First of all, I logged on to the chat without having first watched the on-line presentation. Duh! Oh, and I didn't need earphones for a chat! Then the connection had problems with people getting kicked on and off. It was humorous after a while. It was also hard to follow the trains of thought when there were many participants. In our group of six, it's not too bad, but it wasn't easy this morning. After 20 minutes, I had to give up and go back to work. If the process had gone smoother, and I had been able to decipher the different threads I may have lasted longer. At my second job tonight, I tried to log in to Opal but after getting there, wasn't sure where to go. (There were a few of us in the auditorium!) It would be very handy to have direct links to the opal chatroom readily available. I was 20 minutes late but finally got in. I read the article Steve recommended about the new generation gap on the net and believe me, I'm feeling it this evening! I did come through this day with some very basic basic questions that I post in case someone else in our group has the same questions:
1. Duck Soup. Was that a program, application, product or just the term the presenter came up with to use?
2. Is a blog hosted just like a webpage? Does it have it's own address? Could I have a blog that could only be accessed by my staff?
3. If I do a blog for my library, I would create it in blogger and everyone would then have to access blogger to get to that blog? Is blogger just another format like Drupal?
All right, i'm going to publish this before it disappears, but thanks for any answers you can supply!
Holly
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Hi Holly, I'm sorry you had
Hi Holly, I'm sorry you had so many problems yesterday! I think they should all be ironed out soon (I think the chat is fixed now). We did send an e-mail out a little over a week ago to all participants with instructions on how to get into the OPAL classroom. We can't post that on the wiki or on Drupal because the Webcasts are limited to only those in the class and there is a strict limit on how many people can even be in the OPAL room.
I'll leave question #1 to be answered by our esteemed presenter, but as far as #2 goes, a hosted blog is just like a regular blog only you usually don't have as much control over it (can't customize it as much, which doesn't matter to many people). You have a regular Web address (for wordpress it'll be blogname.wordpress.com or for blogger it'll be blogname.blogspot.com). You can password protect some blogs so that they can only be accessed by certain people, but I'm not sure if that's possible with the hosted blogs (someone else may know the answer to that).
If you create a blogger or Wordpress blog, people would just need to go to your blog's URL to read it. If you want other people to write the blog with you, you just need to give them accounts and then they can login to the blog and write posts too. But people who want to read it can just visit the URL. Blogger is just blog software (like Drupal, though not nearly as extensive or complicated as Drupal).
Yes, I know for a fact that
Yes, I know for a fact that you can limit who can see hosted Blogger blogs. The librarians at my library just set up a private blog to share news with the librarians at St. Olaf (that school is only 2 or 3 miles from us, so we enjoy collaborating as much as possible). I set it up simply by going to Blogger, creating a new blog, and then in the "settings" section you can set viewing permissions. You can either invite specific people or set it to be visible only to the authors of the blog.
Just to add to Meredith's
Just to add to Meredith's pretty comprehensive answer - although people can see blogs as web-pages, I've really pushed my user group towards signing up for news aggregators (usually Bloglines) and grabbing my posts through RSS / Atom.
The ones with least IT access LOVE Bloglines the most - many drugs workers only have computer access once a week, once a month or less regularly (the UK is not as online at home as the States), and as one guy said to me "I can't thank you enough for showing me Bloglines and how to use it. Before I kept a list of all the websites I needed to visit to keep up-to-date and it took me HOURS on my desk day each week to wade through them all. Now, I can zip through 200 feeds in 30 minutes!"
Next week, when I'm back from Scotland and not on a pay-per-minute dial-up connection, I'll post some of the stuff I've pushed out to my guys for information literacy around blogging, in the hopes it will be of use. (Also because I'm really, REALLY interested to know about what you think about literacy issues as I know from the chat and from your profiles that some of you are working with just as mixed an audience as far as IT-literacy goes).
Best
Anne
Hi, Holly. I want to
Hi, Holly. I want to apologize personally to you, to our excellent presenter Anne, and to the other participants for the problems with yesterday's chat. As best we can make out, my installation of the Akismet anti-spam module caused serious problems with Drupal stability that all came to a head yesterday morning.
Meredith backed out the module, Adam Farkas gave us some breathing room on the webserver that should help keep the chat running when there are a lot of people in it, and with any luck that will be the end of the chat problems. I'm very sorry for yesterday's snafu, and we're all going to do our best to keep it from happening again.
Hi Dorothea I was really
Hi Dorothea
I was really impressed with the way that both you and Meredith were there for back-up. I could tell that there was something (something too techie for my little brain to cope with) that was stopping us all be there at once. Some of the places I've presented, even when they're in the same room, the organisers crack under the pressure, and I felt really supported by you and Meredith throughout.
Holly, I'm sorry you had a bad day - there's a lot for you guys on the course to get on top of. I was available on AIM throughout the chat time and for 60 mins after, and you could have got me there (as a couple of people did). I'll be in Scotland from tonight till next Tuesday, but will check in with the blog as and when to post replies, and you can AIM me whenever I'm available over the next few weeks if there's anything you want to ask.
Best to all
Anne
Hey Dorothea, it's just
Hey Dorothea, it's just crazy to start apologizing for computer stuff! As we all know, computers (and computer software) are wonderful things... when they work!
24 hours later I was staying up all night working on my wiki entry just because it was so fun. I am going to try to not write in the blog until at least 20 minutes after reaching the frustration point! One more thing, I think the process of learning is very frustrating, and have always tried to learn something new every summer just to keep me close to that frustration so I can empathize when working with kids. I believe too many teachers have forgotten that frustration. I'm just not used to having it in the middle of a school year!
H
Dell Bayer Technical
Dell Bayer Technical Library, Sandia National Labs jabayer@sandia.gov
I too had access problems for the webcast yesterday (Tues 2/13). I was not sure whether or not to blame my computer / wireless internet provider (working from home at the time). I could see that Holly and later Beth were in the Auditorium, but the tool would just not let me in. I will try again on Thurs and see if I have better luck. I will be at work then and have a faster better internet connection. If only the corporate firewall does not prevent access. Ayyy!! Technology ... :-)
Make sure you go to our
Make sure you go to our webcast room and not the Auditorium. If you need the link (this goes for everyone!), email your group leader or ask during your weekly chat.
In case others may be
In case others may be interested in the answer to your first question - Duck Soup was the name of the specific blog and it was suggested by my boss as a way of making it more approachable to our staff.
Karen R. Harker
Web Developer Librarian
UT Southwestern Medical Center
5323 Harry Hines Blvd.
Dallas, TX 75390-9049
214-648-8946
karen.harker@utsouthwestern.edu