My Proposal: Room to Play
Submitted by alisiawygant on Tue, 2007-03-13 04:07.
Well, Squeaking in at 3 minutes till midnight (Eastern time with daylight savings), my final project is on the wiki.
I went through a lot of territory--using del.icio.us at the reference desk, giving our internal wiki or flagging reference blog a boost with all the new information I've learned here, creating a reference chat model with meebo... But finally I realized that what I really would like to do is to share all of this social goodness with the other people in the library. I was finally convinced last week when, during a strategic planning meeting someone said, "Slow down, we're talking about how important all these things are, and a lot of these terms I've never heard before today!" It's very true--I'm all for pushing the limits of what we can do in libraries with social software, but for now, I'd be content with letting more people get a chance to play in the sandbox and learn about the fundamentals of the "2.0 revolution" that we all seem to agree is important to libraries and their users. So, using what we've got, I'm trying for a sort of emerging-technologies-group lite relying on a wiki to take up some of the strain of our small and hard-working staff.
Ok, off my podium now. Please discuss: good, bad, ugly. See a huge pitfall? See a missed opportunity? Whatever.
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I'm doing a similar thing
I'm doing a similar thing with an Emerging Services Learning Lab (this coming Friday afternoon - yikes!). This first lab is intended to show folks a little bit of everything - an orientation of sorts - enough to highlight what we can do with these tools, generate discussion, and provide some hands-on experience. I agree with you that we should "share the goodness" and allow others who also have expertise to teach the rest of us. I think feedback from participants (like what the moderators of our course have requested) will be key in figuring out what direction the sharing could take.
I'd like to hear more about your reference model using meebo. Meebo seems to be the way to go with IM these days...?
This sounds like a great
This sounds like a great idea! I've read a couple other proposals that integrate staff training, and I think it is a wonderful first step to allow people to dip their toe into the waters of the social library. I really do believe that, once people get the terms down and play a little, they will realize that these tools can actually make our lives easier-- and we won't need to get computer science degrees to do it.
This sounds like a fun way
This sounds like a fun way to introduce the social software to your library while also having a practical application.