Woohoo! The end is near. Everyone is thinking about their proposals and how they can change the world. I mean change your library! Right? Rachel Kinkaid gets the gold star of the week for being the very first to post her proposal. Proposals should be submitted in the format of your choosing with a link or content on the wiki space provided.

This week contained all kinds of fun technologies and some very fact filled presentations. Steve Lawson and Michael Porter started the week off right with their unique personalities and a discussion on Flickr. Second Life and the world of online gaming was revealed to us through the duo of Kelly Czarnecki and Matt Gullet. Lauren Pressley filled our ears with the tale of how we can use Flickr for training and Mathew Stuckings discussed social software initiatives at the National Library of Austrailia. The screencast by Beth Evans discussed her library's very successful venture with MySpace.

Some of you have reported problems logging in this week. There is a simple fix for this: Simply go into you internet browser and delete your cookies and history. That seems to be working, but if your problems persist, please let us know.

Week Three: Wikis Galore is almost over. Amazingly enough, this also means that Five Weeks is more then halfway over. As far as this leader and moderator knows, no one has been lost at see or in the internet tubes. Some people have been feeling overwhelmed and there has been quite a lot of new information flying through your screen. I hope you all take some time to digest and relax this weekend.

We only had one live webcast this week, but it was filled with two great presenters: Chad Boeninger and Starr Hoffman. Everyone had lots of great questions and Chad and Starr gave everyone a lot to think about. If you missed this webcast, you need to listen to it to get all the juicy details.

Week Two is almost over! Can you believe we have only been doing this crazy course for two weeks?

This week we talked about RSS and Social Bookmarking. Michele Mizejewski gave a wonderful webcast on RSS feeds and Jason Griffey showed us all of the possibilities del.icio.us can offer in the second webcast of the week. The screencast from Melissa Rethlefsen was packed with ideas for RSS feeds and Gabriel Lundeen's screencast managed to be both informative and quite hilarious.

I just wanted to tell all of you how wonderful it is to be working with all of you on this project. You may feel overwhelmed or excited by the information being tossed around. You may think that no one is paying attention to what we are doing, but they are, and we are all a part of something very cool.

Every time I read a new post on this blog, I think about how each of you is proving that online learning can be free and can be done well. I wrote a post for ALA TechSource about Five Weeks and I wanted to be sure that you all got a chance to read it. Even if the planning group made this class and it had good content, it would not be successful without participation, communication, and passion. Each of you have an abundance of these three things. (and we are only in week 2!)

Whew! Week One is almost done and I think that we made it with little pain or mass hysteria. There were a few technical glitches, but they were small and we dealt with them.

This week, we talked blogs. Blogs all day, all the time. Rebecca Hedreen and Nanette Donohue presented us with some excellent webcasts that taught us what a blog is, what it can do, and how to sustain them with your workforce. There were three informative screencasts by Karen Harker, Anne Welsh, and Jami Schwarzwalder covering some unique uses of blogs and how millenials think.

I thought it would be nice to start gathering two different kinds of information on the wiki: links to the communities that are springing up around Five Weeks and links to the test pages that we or you set up as we practice with different technology.

I set up a section on the wiki called "The Community and the Playgrounds." If you set up a test or practice on some software, please share it so we can all learn from your forays into the the jungle gym. Likewise, if you run across groups, like the Social Library Lurkers Wiki, add it to the Communities of Practice section.

One of the great things about the Internet is its ability to link people together. This course is bigger then the 40 people taking part in it. We built it for ourselves to prove that we could, we built it for the 40 students because we wanted you to learn, and we built it for everyone because, as librarians, we share knowledge with the world.

As a preview to next week, I thought I would post this PC World review of what they believe to be the top five blog platforms. I thought about posting this in the readings section of next week, but then decided this was more supplimentary to the suppliments.

My favorite, and current tool, WordPress came in second to Blogger.

With this crazy ride about to start, I thought that some of you reflective learners would like to know the product you are working towards. If you are more like me, then you hate directions, will have to force yourself to read them carefully, and will wait another three weeks to do so.

The Final Project outline is here and you can also find it in the left menu below Week 5.

You will notice that it is detailed yet vague as we want this to be a proposal that fits your library and situation. The final proposal can be on the wiki, on your blog, or another form of your chosing as long as we can all see it and give feedback.

One of the tenets of Library 2.0 and Web 2.0 is the Open Conversation. A conversation is open when anyone can participate, when anyone can read it, when people are honest, and when people respond to others' honesty.

Five Weeks to a Social Library is a rider of the Cluetrain. We want to be a good example of the Open Conversation. This is a learning experience for everyone, the participants, the presenters, the watchers and commenters from afar, and especially the planners.

We may be steering this adventure, but we by no means have all the answers. If there is something you hate about the course, software you would like to critique that we use in the course, or any other comments you would like to put in this space, somewhere else, or simply send an email, please do it. Five Weeks to a Social Library will only be successful if we all learn from each other and strive to build something better in the future.