ECU Library blog goes live

Finally, after much effort behind the scenes, the new ECU Library blog will go live next week.

The blog's tag line is "Keeping you up-to-date with information about the library, resources and happenings..."

Ten Good Reasons for Finishing Learning 2.0

We are getting close to the Grande Finale and I know some of you are struggling to find the time and to stay on target.

So I thought up Ten Good Reasons for Finishing Learning 2.0.




1. You will learn to speak like a geek and throw in words like "wiki", "blog" into everyday conversation


2. You will amaze your kids at how up to date you are


3. You will be given permission to watch YouTube in WORK time


4. You will make new friends, discover new social networks and see how creative some of you colleagues are


5. You will amaze yourself at how addictive the web 2.0 technologies can be


6. You will be rewarded with a cute doggie Web2.0 certificate...yeah!!


7. With your new found skills you may just get that dream job ... (sad for us ...)


8. Using your new skills you will be able to provide great help to our students and be in touch with their approach to study


9. You will be able to influence the future library online presence


10. You will expand you mind in the lifelong learning journey

Getting your head around RSS

A really kooky little video clip to help you get your head around RSS is RSS in Plain English. There are others in the "in plain english" series and they are all terrific!

Keeping up with everyone's blogs

Now that lots of new ECU bloggers are coming on board, keeping up with everyone's blogs could be a chore. But, there's a solution! It's called RSS and will be covered in Week 3. Read Web Wiz's blog post on Easy Reading which will explain more.

P.S. Western Australia is the Banksia capital of the World and the Mt Barker Banksia Farm is the place to see them all.

Deja vu all over again

It feels like Deja vu all over again.
This week we are launching the ECU Learning 2.0 program with a series of seminars on each campus. For those just coming on board you'll learn some useful skills, like setting up a blog. And you'll also some fun with stuff like Image Generators, eg: this one

Perth Unconference on Library 2.0

Last Friday (Aug 3) a few of us from ECU attended the very first “Unconference” at the State Library. The idea is a open and fairly unstructured day to share information between colleagues. The topic was Library2.0 and the whole day was fun, stimulating, and a free sharing of ideas, (and pizza) between fellow librarians from all sectors.

Presenters were very professional. Some new technologies were demonstrated. Con and Kathryn even ad-libbed in a session called “Karaoke Powerpoint” from some PowerPoints sent that morning from the US!

One amazing aspect was that the whole event was organised via the Unconference Wiki and no face to face meetings took place prior to the day. To get a feel for what the day was like have a look around the Wiki. How do we find the time to learn about emerging technologies? Check out the practical tips on Kathryn’s wiki.

Grande Finale

As a reward for completing ECU Learning I’m giving myself a Web2.0 certificate. You can have one too when you get through all the 23 Things!


Well it’s been a terrific journey and I’ve learned heaps.

My responses to the questions posted on #23 are:

What have you personally learned from this program?

I have picked up some useful skills and have connected all the dots so understand how this all fits together. By the time you get to the end of this program you realise how important the tagging is as it enables you to really connect with others. Having a My Space to gather all your feeds is a great idea and helps you to organise the information flow.

What have you learned about yourself, others and the organisation in which you work?

It’s been terrific working though this with a great bunch of staff in the Pilot Group learning from one another. Now we know who the experts are, so you can’t hide any more! I like the idea of starting this with a pilot group, so that when it is rolled out to all the staff there will be a willing group to spread the word.

Discovery learning is an appropriate methodology for such a program since many of these technologies you need to USE, before you really understand them. Through the program I have made many connections outside the ECU Library, with instructional designers, professional development staff, academic staff.

What was the most important skill you have learned and why?

I would have to say Blogging was a useful skill. I had blogged before through Bloglines and through the trial of the Blackboard blog . Those two interfaces are not as friendly as Blogger. The whole set up of Blogger is superior to either of the others and actually makes the whole journey fun. But blogging is a bit of a sole pastime, so unless you use social tagging you may be blogging into the never-never.

What action will you now take if any?

Start a library blog aimed at the faculty.
Investigate providing faculty subject guides for students using Wetpaint.
Commit time to a library blog to be aimed at students

Would students use these technologies as part of the library’s online environment?

Absolutely. The Wiki subject guides would be focused on students. There have been discussions about starting a library blog to be aimed at students, to promote the library and respond toe students’ queries. Podcasts, YouTube, the lot is student NetGen territory and we need to meet them where they congregate.

Is there some specific technology that you would like to see the library adopt ?

Start a library blog
Use Wikis to replace some of the collaborative work currently done via email
Develop our podcasts more.
Come to an agreement re tagging and tags to use corporately.

I look forward to sharing more ideas with the Pilot Group when we have our Focus Group and Wind-up as there’s NOTHING that can replace face to face. Let’s all wear our Just Ask @ Your Library T-shirts and rest on our laurels for a while..

Web 2.0 Awards

The Web 2.0 Awards site was a revelation. In the subject categories I first of all checked out Hosted Wikis. They rated Wetpaint ahead of PBWiki. Now that we have some experience of the Wiki in Blackboard this provides a nice comparison. I found Wetpaint more straight forward than PBWiki. I found the peanut butter in PBWiki a bit too corny!

ECU Library should investigate using Wetpaint to develop a Wiki. It provides a pleasant looking interface and is easy to master.

Then, under the caterory of Books I looked at LibraryThing and joined this. The introduction says its purpose is to “Connect with people who read similar books to you, and get suggestions as to what you should read next”. Joined added my book which only 7 others had added, as its quite a new Australian novel.

I then discovered the Australian LibraryThingers. "A group for everyone who connects with Australia (residents, expats, lovers of Australian literature) and who are part of the LibraryThing collective". So that was a good find, as the rest of LibraryThing is quite US oriented. I'll explore more when I have some more time. (famous last words!)

Learning 2.0 around the world

Helene Blowers has placed a Google map on her blog showing all the libraries around the world that are into Learning 2.0.

She’s also launched a follow up called Learning 2.1. Read all about it on her blog. Makes sense as the technolgy is moving so fast and the original Learning 2.0 is about a year old now. So if you want to keep going.....

There are now quite a few universities running Learning 2.0 including some in Canada, and the Queensland State Library too.

You Tube and Podcasting

I tried searching the terms “library education” in the YouTube and found one that is pretty quirky. It’s Richard Sly is the coolest librarian talking about Databases. (This was a project for the USF Tampa Library). I really like the use of humour and it’s been well rated and watched with 776 Views and 4 and a half star rating

Rsblg helped me to Master the embedding part, as I was looking in the wrong place for the link. Thanks! That's what I like about this project.
This video takes about 6 minutes to watch and has quite a few credits at the end, but the overall idea is sound. Coupled with a follow up with more details on how to access and sue the databases would be helpful.
The ECU podcasts are a great start, but with the Camtasia software we will be able to do much more now. jmcg

Social Tagging, what's it all about?

Social Tagging
I think it’s interesting to see what social tagging is all about. Tagging and visual display indlcating promience are growing in importance. del.icio.us tags link into Flikr as well. The concept of tagging and folksonomies certainly fits with the ways librarians work and think. Tagging is “the glue that holds learning 2.0 together”, according to Helene Blowers.

As I wrote before, at the start of the Jimmy Wales seminar participants were invited to use the tag "eduausem2007", if they were blogging about the seminar. This tag will then ensure that everything about the seminar would be captured on Flikr, Technorati, or del.icio.us.?

The 12 minute tutorial podcast is worth checking out. Good for building reading lists. Why would you use this, rather than Endnote. I think it is a bit like sharing your endnote library on a broader front. You could use both? Managing information and helping our users do this.

To use del.icio.us, you need to install two buttons into your browser. They recommend that Internet Explorer users install a simple del.icio.us extension You probably can’t do this via the SOE.

But del.icio.us is useful as a search engine to get good results and see where the action is. I did a search of under “second life” and found this site was the most highly tagged is of course is THE second life site.

Is there a down side? You may miss things that are not highly bookmarked, new sites. And what about the good stuff that doesn’t get found?

Technorati
They say it’s the best for searching for Blogs. As it happens we are looking for resources for our students on government policy and Singapore families. A really good blog would be worth finding. The search turned up some good blogs from Singapore government ministers on policy issues. I recommended Technorati to an academic staff member and he was really impressed.

Second Life

This whole area of Second Life is so dynamic and changing, I think we need to keep an open mind. If ECU does take out a claim in this new Virtual world then I think the library needs to be in there. We can create our own environment in SL and maybe fashion a new library meeting place for our students?

Some ECU academic staff are working with students doing Second Life explorations in the Education context. There is a lot of interest in SL from the Drama and New Media people and also from Information Science people.

There’s an active international SL Research community. An Aussie group of interested SLers has now been set up. Go to http://ausslers.com/

I’ve found that on YouTube you can do a search on “NMC Campus Seriously Engaging” to find a short video on Second Life which gives you an idea of what a university campus would look like. There is a university library in NMC as well. Good to see this, as I have not quite got the nerve to download the software and give it a bash!

I’ve also found a wonderful SL satirical site which is food for a laugh. It’s called “getafirstlife.com” http://www.getafirstlife.com/

We can create our own environment in SL. I don’t really know where this is all headed, but it certainly stretches the imagination!

Image generators

Looking for some fun image generators? Then have a look at this blog on image generators, for some ideas on how they are used. JMCG
http://generatorblog.blogspot.com/

Post to your blog via email

Did you know you can post to your blog direct from
email. It's a basic text format and won't include
images, but will help if you want to put a quick post
up, rather than going into the Blogger website.

The instructions are on the Blogger website if you
hunt around.

Go into Settings, then Email, then you need to set up
a Mail-to-Blogger address @blogger.com

The system sets up the first bit, eg jstudent1 and you
put the middle bit. So the address could be something
like: jstudent.study@blogger.com
Then tick Publish, and Save Settings

This is an email address by which you can post to your
blog. You just send the message to that email and the
email subject line will become the post heading.

If you can read this blog posting then it works! Good
luck, jmcg.

Photos and images, Flickr

I uploaded a few images of my photos of birds (albatrosses) and put them on the Flickr site. I was all pretty easy, and Flickr has a link to Yahoo, so I was able to use my Yahoo login, which was great as I’m finding all these logins are getting hard to keep track of. This was all really cool and I realize now I could have done this ages ago. Instead I built my own site for my bird images.

The images are tagged “eculibraryweb”. You don’t have to do that in “quotes”. I then changed the tags and added some more information.

NOTE. Your account can take up to two weeks to review. This is so they check you out and make sure you are not uploading inappropriate images. Until you account is reviewed you will not pick up your images in a search by the tags.

I got a bit lost with Masups, but at least I understand now how they work. I tried Explore and then I also had a look at tags and how you can search the tags in Flickr. The bigger the tag the more images there are, for example WEDDINGS is extremely popular. I clicked on Spain and found some great photos there.

I noticed too that you can link from Flickr to del.icio.us. But in order to save an item, you need to have an account with del.icio.us.

I read this and then I went back and tagged my photos with “mappr”
If you're not sure that the places you take your photos are well-known enough to be caught in our recurring sweeps of Flickr's photo database, and you would like to ensure that your future photos are added to Mappr, tag them with "mappr" or "mappr:include" when you first import them into Flickr. We check these tags frequently, and automatically import any photos we find.

Jimmy Wales seminar

We attend the Jimmy Wales seminar Challenging How Knowledge is Created at the Burswood on Tuesday 24th April.

At the start of the seminar participants were invited to use the tag "eduausem2007", if they were blogging about the seminar. This tag will then ensure that everything about the seminar would be captured on flickr, technorati, or del.icio.us. It occurred to me that before embarking on ECU Library Learning 2.0, I would not have really understood what they were on about.

Jimmy Wales is the founder of online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. He believes firmly in the ‘democratisation’ of knowledge, and is taking the Wikipedia phenomenon around the globe. The Wikipedia movement is dedicated to addressing the digital divide by providing free access to a range of educational products. In addition to the encyclopedia they are now working towards open access online journals and books.

This was very pertinent to the whole Web2.0 area. Wikipedia sits firmly in the Web2.0 environment as it is not about software, but about learning and knowledge creation in a social environment.

Jimmy Wales sees us moving from the “gatekeeper model” to the “accountability model” This has impact on libraries which have traditionally had a type of gatekeeper role. We need to rethink this.

Jimmy answered some of the Wikipedia critics. In a recent nature article it was found that a Encyclopedia Britannica article on science had 3 mistakes and one in Wikipedia had 4 mistakes.

Mark Pescy’s presentation really got to the nitty gritty of the seminar topic on knowledge creation and “peer produced technologies”. He sees wiki knowledge creation as centred around truth, trust, and authority. Authority is distributed, and the wiki community has the knowledge. Truth comes with trust, for example trust that the source is reliable. I think this links well with information literacy where we teach students about the evaluation of information found on websites and elsewhere.

There was some discussion on implementing wikis in the workplace. For a wiki to succeed you only need a core of about 5 people who regularly contribute.
It was interesting to compare the functions of blogs and wikis and we felt that wikis would be really useful in the ECU Library context as we tend to work collaboratively anyway. Blogs tend to be a more individualistic form of communication.

A range of people attended the all day seminar, including teachers, people from media, librarians, educators from the TAFE and university areas.

The seminar was sponsored by a number of groups including ALIA, Education.au and EDNA. You can view some of the online forum that ensued at this EDNA spot

Take me to your Wiki

I found the resource What is a Wiki? Really useful and the diagram there illustrates exactly the difference between the often misuse of email and how a Library Wiki could be very helpful.

It’s from: The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web

Wikis provide more of a level playing field. I see application internally in helping to get input from a cross section of staff, eg in getting ideas together re for example: new building refurbishment, new catalogue re-design, website redesign. It would depend on the subject and situation, of course. Some things obviously would need a face to face solution.

Wikis can also be useful as a way of providing subject guides for students and keeping them up to date. This would be worth trying. The St. Joseph County Public Library's Subject Guides are amazing . Very appealing and full of dynamic links that can be created easily without knowing HTML. Our guides are currently very traditional and print based. This approach would open them up more and provide additional features.

The MYECU Blackboard approach to collaborative wiki is one that can be explored further after this 23 Things program is finished.

BTW the :Wiki Sandbox" term I discovered is the name for the area on the wiki where you can play around. Makes sense!

Speaking of Wikis, I went to the Jimmy Wales seminar last week and will post on that separately. Jimmy is the founder of Wikipedia.

RSS

RSS seems like a great solution for alerts and current awareness, but ECU has not yet got a really simple way to display RSS feeds.

I did finally manage to set up an alert and placed the feed in Bloglines. See the image here under feeds. There are several feeds I've set up, mainly book reviews but also a feed called Ebsco ERIC Action research alert. Now whenever more citation come into Ebsco ERIC with these search terms they will be added to the feed.

I had to first set up a Bloglines account to do this. This seems a bit annoying to have all these different accounts for different things.

You need to be signed into EBSCOhost and create an alert. You then receive a this confirmation from EBSCOhost

To:
Subject: EBSCOhost Alert Notification

An Alert was created by Joe BLOGGS on 03/25/2007 04:29:39 AM.

Alert Run Date: 03/25/2007 04:29:39 AM
Alert Name: jbloggs
Database: ERIC
Run Alert For: One Year
Search Strategy: (((SU "Higher Education" and action research)) AND (PT "Journal Articles")) and Publication Type: Journal Articles
Frequency: Monthly
RSS Feed:
http://rss.epnet.com/AlertSyndicationService/Syndication.asmx/GetFeed?guid=1021038

You paste the RSS Feed in your Bloglines using Add feed. ,

What did I learn? I had a chance to explore RSS using the Bloglines feeder and finally got it to work, something I have been struggling with for ages! Great! Now I can pass this info on to academic staff who have been asking about this. Shame it's not "really simple"...yet.

Some of the others have been setting up RSS feeds in My Google. This is something I will now explore too.

Welcome to my blog

I've set up this blog to track my learning through the 23 Things discovery exercises in the ECU Library Learning 2.0 Program.
So I've got this far in setting up the blog, which is Week 2's exercise. I didn't find it too daunting. Initially I did not use my Gmail account to log in. You don't have to I discovered, but if you wish to put a comment on the blog you do need a Gmail account.
You can set up different option for comments, allow all, allow only certain people.
What did I learn?
Setting up a blog is a bit like setting up a website where all the templates are provided. You can make it as fancy as you want and add pictures, links and other cool stuff. You can change the colours, fonts and add extra elements down the side with Blogger.
When you post a new blog it appears at the top, which takes a bit of getting used to. But then you can go to Archives to flip back to earlier work.
The picture on the top right is in the template. You can also put pictures in your actual blog, in which case the text wraps around them depending on the placement option you select.

Note about Cookies
To login to Blogger your browser needs to accept cookies, or you may get an access denied type message. This has only happened to me once, but just in case you get a problem with Cookies. Your browser needs to accept cookies. Many browsers have a simple choice in the Options or Preferences that will let you choose to either accept or reject cookies. In Internet Explorer you go to Tools > Internet Options > Privacy you will find a sliding scale. If it is set to High or Block All, Blogger will not be able to set the cookies it needs to log you in. A setting of Medium-High or lower will work.