Reasons for taking this class....

Hi!

I'm the librarian at Mahnomen Public Schools and The White Earth Tribal and Community College in a Mahnomen, Minnesota. I am the k-12 librarian during the day and I am the part -time librarian at the college for four evenings a week. The two jobs are very different and I enjoy them both, so I'll continue in both roles as long as possible.

By taking this course, I hope to have a better understanding of social technology. I am very interested in learning how to use RSS feeds; both the procedure and effective ways they can be used in educational settings. I'd like to develop the ability to construct wikis and blogs, but first, I have to be convinced they are worth while. Who has time to blog? Heck, I can't even write in a journal consistantly! Seriously, I haven't found a blog that I have returned to after my initial reading, even if I thought it was wonderful. Pod casts? Lots of the students would use them, I think. I’m hoping to come out of this with a long list of usable ideas and applications that my staff members at both schools will find irresistible.

I am a member of the Tribal College and University Librarian Association. Our organization meets only once a year because of the geographical distances involved. Our main source of communication is a list-serv, but I’m also hoping to use some of the things I learn in this course to open up even more effective lines of communication.

One of the major disadvantages of working in a remote location is that you are often are doing the work of more than one person and you rarely have the time to keep current with your profession and the technological advances that are being made. Frankly, I don’t know enough about the social technologies to even imagine what we’ll be able to do! Will I be able to set up web pages so the instructors will have interactive but secure sites? Understand, that some of these teachers are complete luddites, and I’ll have to set it up so it’s so user-friendly, anyone could use that page. How can students use Flickr to bring new dimensions into their student projects? I’m hoping to help both staff and students use the computers and the technology available today to become more effective educators and learners.

And after all is said and done, if I ever have any time, after all the library possibilities have been explored, I would really like to set up a wiki for middle-aged female motorcycle riders! I want to call it "Hotflash biker" and it will be a forum to discuss products that we have discovered that work especially well for women our age. (i.e. clothes that are actually designed for women for reasonable prices or motorcycles tough enough for long-range biking that even a 5'2 person could sit on with her feet flat on the gournd ("flat footing" the bike)) I THINK a wiki would work better than a regular webpage format. Hope I can tell you for sure by the end of this project.

I'm really excited about this and can't wait to get started!