5 weeks to a social library

I participated in this free course aimed at librarians. The session I helped with is in Week 5 and is called "Library 2.0? No, thank you! Obstacle to Creating a Social Library" with Melissa Prescott and Plamen Miltenoff.

Go to: http://www.sociallibraries.com/course/

Description: "Five Weeks to a Social Library is the first free, grassroots, completely online course devoted to teaching librarians about social software and how to use it in their libraries. It was developed to provide a free, comprehensive, and social online learning opportunity for librarians who do not otherwise have access to conferences or continuing education and who would benefit greatly from learning about social software. The course will be taught using a variety of social software tools so that the participants acquire experience using the tools while they are taking part in the class. It will make use of synchronous online communication, with one or two weekly Webcasts and many small group IM chat sessions made available to participants each week. By the end of the course, each student will develop a proposal for implementing a specific social software tool in their library. "

ALA on MySpace-Holy Cow!

Check it out! http://www.myspace.com/atyourlibrary

Awards for Technology Collaboration

"The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded $650,000 in prizes to ten not-for- profit institutions in the first annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC). The Mellon Awards honor not-for-profit organizations for leadership in the collaborative development of open source software tools with particular application to higher education and not-for-profit activities. More information on the awards ceremony, including podcast interviews with some of the recipients, will be available at www.cni.org beginning 5 December 2006.


The awards were presented December 4, 2006, at the Fall Task Force meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information by Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and the inventor of the World Wide Web. The ten recipients were selected from among more than 200 nominees by the MATC Award Committee, which included Berners-Lee, Mitchell Baker (CEO, Mozilla Corporation), John Seely Brown (former Chief Scientist, Xerox Corp.), Vinton G. Cerf (Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google, Inc.), John Gage (Chief Researcher and Director of the Science Office, Sun Microsystems, Inc.), and Tim O¡¦Reilly (Founder and CEO, O¡¦Reilly Media)."

https://mail2.cni.org/Lists/CNI-ANNOUNCE/Message/113143.html

Sakai: Open Source Course Management system

New evolution in Course Management Software
"Sakai is an online Collaboration and Learning Environment. Many users of Sakai deploy it to support teaching and learning, ad hoc group collaboration, support for portfolios and research collaboration.
Sakai is a free and open source product that is built and maintained by the Sakai community. Sakai's development model is called "Community Source" because many of the developers creating Sakai are drawn from the "community" of organizations that have adopted and are using Sakai."
http://sakaiproject.org/

8 Mashups

"While this is a simplified model (one must ask who checks the work every time to make sure it’s right, how is the code maintained over time, and so on), it’s also one of the significant motivations behind the drive for end-user mashups; applying this very same concept of task automation to daily work and life."

"How many routine tasks could we get out of our way if we had powerful task automation tools that almost anyone could use? How many one-off tasks could be automated that couldn’t possibly justify the expense of custom software development? These problem areas — automating repetitive work, and automating complex, collaborative problem solving (the tacit interactions I tend to cite so much) — are potentially ripe for enabling low-barrier tools that let us assemble solutions out of the rich landscape of services that are beginning to flourish in our organizations. This world of available services is already a vibrant ecosystem on the Web."
Read more at: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=63

HLA Conference 2006

I just returned from the Hawaii Library Association Conference (http://ohana.chaminade.edu/hla/index.html).
The conference was great--good speakers, beautiful scenery, very very well run and lots of web 2.0.

I presented on using blogs, myspace, and IM for library outreach. We did an pre-conference so it included a hands-on portion--that unfortunately turned out to be too short but I was interesting to see librarians use some of these technologies for the first time. I think the transition from content provider to content creator is fundamental--and often under appreciated as we move the Library 2.0...

a Librarian's 2.0 Manifesto

World Usability Day

"Make yourself useful on the 14th of November 2006. Celebrate usability around the world."

http://worldusabilityday.org/

A truely under appreciated holiday....day off anyone?

Web Science

"The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton in Britain plan to announce today that they are starting a joint research program in Web science.

Web science, the researchers say, has social and engineering dimensions. It extends well beyond traditional computer science, they say, to include the emerging research in social networks and the social sciences that is being used to study how people behave on the Web. And Web science, they add, shifts the center of gravity in engineering research from how a single computer works to how huge decentralized Web systems work."

“The Web isn’t about what you can do with computers,” Mr. Berners-Lee said. “It’s people and, yes, they are connected by computers. But computer science, as the study of what happens in a computer, doesn’t tell you about what happens on the Web.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/02/technology/02compute.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Web 2.0 Survey