• What were your favorite experiences in the course?

My favorite experience in the course was the Wednesday chat.  We had a great group-covered serious topics, answered questions, and had a fair bit of fun banter. 

• What technology did you find most interesting for your personal use? What technology did you think would be most useful professionally?

I found Flickr surprisingly interesting and fun (I had thought I wouldn't).  I actually see ideas for both personal and professional use.  I liked stumbling around with Wiki and REALLY appreciate the easy to use pbwiki platform.  I can see real potential for wiki in school settings.  Finally blogging might prove very useful in student input sites.

• Were there any unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?

Not really, because I went into it expecting to be surprised.  I liked learning wiki.  I'm still messing around with RSS.  And I'm still thinking about de.lici.ous...

• What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?

No specific ideas.  I liked a lot about the format.  My only difficulty was an inability to access live broadcasts aired during worktimes (daytime).  Evenings were easy though!

• If there is anything else you'd like to tell us about your experiences in this course, please feel free to do so.

No, but I'd recommend it to other librarians--some teachers also would enjoy it...

Reading over and considering the class materials on "selling social software," I've noticed that many librarians run up against resistance to new technology from involved staff.  This can definitely be the case in school settings (where the concerns about safety and security for students is paramount) but I also find that teachers are often very interested in new technology.  I find that most teachers at my high school are always on the lookout for technology that might do the following: grab students attention, add another dimension to the learning experience, be easy to use, save some time!, jazz up the class experience, etc.  

Intro: I am the sponsor for a student book club at UHS. Participants in the book club have repeatedly expressed a desire to have a place online where members could interact and post comments relating to the book we are reading at any given time.

I have used the Google-owned blogging service Blogger to create a blog for the book club at my high school. The UHS book club blog can be viewed by clicking here. It is linked on the web site for the book club is on the web site for my library.

I just watched the Mingle Mingle presentation. Pretty intriguing uses of MySpace by libraries.  Being a high school librarian, I'm aware that - at least in our district - MySpace is a banned site for users of school computers.  I think there's a lot of worries about exploitation, inappropriate photos, and cyber bullying.  Any other school librarians out there use Myspace?  

I also thought it was fascinating to think of this being a very early time in the life of social networking and to think about where it will be in a few years and where libraries will fit into that....

I really appreciated the Flickr presentation last night.  Made me think that I might create a flckr set offering a visual tour of our school library and offer a link to it on our home page.  Had be wondering how and where to do such a thing...now I've got some ideas.

Spent some time today poking around in Flickr.  If you search location "Urbana" you'll find some really lovely shots of Urbana, IL.  Was pleased to find that I actually knew a couple of the people who had posted Urbana shots.  One was a guy who does a great radio show in town called "Media Geek."  Search that on Google for a look at what he does: it's a smart and interesting show.

All right, I will just have to get a Flickr account at some point and put my little camera back to work.

All right I went back and reviewed the Webcasts of Chad Boeninger and Starr Hoffman.  I'm not sure why, but the second time around a few lights went on!  Maybe, it's because since listening to them last week, I've begun work on a rudimentary Wiki using PBWiki.  Anyway, Boeninger's examples got me to realizing that at some point, my school library could really use a wiki for showing students how to use the catalog, databases etc.  I also thought that a wiki of library policies would be a great asset (and could be easily linked from the main library web page). 

Now just to figure if remote hosting will pass the security concerns of the schools or if our tech folks will want to base it on our server.  Also TIME! is needed.

I'm not sure why, but blogs seem more comfortable to me than wikis.  I've decided to try to create/use a blog for my YA book club as part of my proposal.  However, I've gone ahead and set up a wiki for my own personal/political interests.  I went ahead and used PBwiki which was very easy to get started with. We'll see how that goes!

Also went back and tried Google Reader for RSS instead of Bloglines...haven't decided which I like best, but several in my chat group suggested Google so I'm trying it out.

I notice other posters noting how there is so much material and so little time!  I agree.  I appreciate being pushed into using Bloglines and Delicious.  I know that as time passes I'll get better at intergrating them into my library's web page.  Will probably have to wait until summer though.  Just too busy right now.

In addition to professional use, a lot of the information in this course will be helpful for personal use.  

BTW, I'm really looking forward to learning about Wikis this week.

So far I'm enjoying the course.  The presentation on Blogs was helpful as far as thinking about possible uses in the library.  I've been doing my own political-media critique blog for about nine months (unrelated to librarianship) so I didn't learn all that much about the basics--BUT the next couple weeks will move into new territory where I'll learn a lot of new basics.

I've also used current events blogs to stay informed and have found some of them really great (e.g. Informed Comment www.juancole.com, justworldnews.org, and cursor.org (kind of a news-blog-digest).