Do I have to pick one?  My favorite part of this course is the variety of ways to learn.  To read an article, listen to a webcast, experiment with the technology and then chat about it - what a great combo.  Each part built on the others to help deepen my understanding.  Also, it was great being assigned to a specific group.  That helped me to feel that I had some more personal collaborators.  My group really fueled my thoughts with new approaches and helped me expand my ideas of the possibilities for using these technologies.  Great encouragement too. 

So I just wanted to tell you all that I have had my first small victoy in selling a social software change to my management team.  I have officially been given to go ahead to recruit student workers to contribute to our blog.  It's still under discussion, but I am hopeful that we will be opening up the blog for moderated comments as well.  Now I'm getting really excited about presenting my project proposal.  WooHoo!!!

It was a ton of fun exploring these technologies.  However, I have to say I think implementing them in our library is a long shot a best.  My colleagues immediate response to the mention of MySpace or Facebook is that those are already on the way out.  I do think Flikr would be a great place to store our many library and events pictures.  Hopefully I can make some headway there.  MMOGs and Second Life are also viewed very much as belonging to the public library world - not for us.  Still, I get agreement that it is important for us (read good if I do it) to keep up with these trends.  So I'll just have to keep making baby steps.

I loved all of the examples of library wikis we got to explore this week.  Seeing so many different ones really helped open up my mind to the different possibilities for using wikis in my library.  My original goal in joining this class was to find better ways to serve our distance students.  A wiki seems a natural solution for allowing geographically dispersed students to work together.  In my online classes when I was in library school, we did our group projects via chat and e-mail.  How great it would have been to use a wiki to put our projects together.  It can also be nice form for presentation.

I have been using RSS feeds for a while to keep up with blogs I like to follow.  But it was really fun to play more with the organizational features.  I also hope to advertise a little more to our faculty some of the uses of RSS to replace things like our old table of contents delivery service. 

Social bookmarking was harder for me to get my head around.  At first it just seemed like one more favorites page.  I did like the idea of having your favorites available from whatever computer or location I might have to be.  As I have played with it more however, I am coming to see that this really organizes so much better.  Instead of creating multiple folders, etc. to keep things in, I can add as many descriptors as I want and then at the point of need pull a list based on my descriptors – or combinations thereof!  A dynamic organization system.  Even as an old cataloger I can’t help but love that.  I expect I will find this more and more useful as I get used to using it. 

I so enjoyed Nanette's presentation on Next Steps: Taking Your Library’s Blog from So-So to Superb .  We started a blog last fall and it has all too quickly become a "chore" to update.  I think now that part of the difficulty is that only the "librarians" have been invited to contribute.  There are only three of us so we dry up pretty quickly.  I know a couple of our student workers would bring some great perspectives and the rest of our staff as well.  I'm also going to approach the rest of the team about allowing moderated comments.  I know our users could open our eyes to all kinds of ways to better serve them if they were given the opportunity.  What a great way to remind them that this is their library.

A belated hello from Dickinson, North Dakota!  Today it is a balmy 7 degrees (that's a heat wave after last week)!  I am the Technical Services Librarian at Stoxen Library, Dickinson State University.  We are a very small academic library.  So, technical services means collection development / acquisitions, catalging, systems librarian, serials / electronic resources, reference, and everyone's favorite "other duties as assigned".  Last week we finished moving our entire serials collection for the 3rd time this year, 7th time in the 5 1/2 years I have been here.  We have reached the phase in our remodeling / reorganization where these things are finally in their "permanent" home.  So from now until the end of March, my only "other duty as assigned" will be this course.  Hurrah!!!  I am very fortunate to have a director who actively supports professional development and really will let me make this my focus.  So I am getting up to speed with the rest of you as fast as I can.

Is there anyone out there who would be willing to switch time slots for the chats?  Only evening slots are still available and I have childcare issues that make an evening chat difficult for me to commit to.  If anyone can help me out with this I will really appreciate it!!!  Thanks.

Rita Ennen