LIBR 246-13 Building the Social Library Online

I have always been fascinated by social software tools, but I had used them mostly for my personal use. This class helped me to start thinking about ways these tools can be used at my library. I learned that though I can be adverse to learning new technology sometimes, most of these tools were very easy to use and implement. I am excited about finding creative ways to implement some of them in my library.

Although I embrace learning new things and enjoy new experiences, I was definitely out of my comfort zone in the beginning of this class. At first I was very uncomfortable with using Drupal. The good old blackboard seemed so right, so comfy and so familiar. But now I see Drupal as different and even better way to engage with the instructor and other students especially since our focus is social networking. Now, having to go back to blackboard just seems wrong. One of the biggest benefits of Drupal was the RSS feeds.

Tuesday evening's the big night for you all!

If you feel like you want to practice your presentation for the group project in Elluminate before our session next week, you can contact our Elluminate assistant Michele Martin who said she'd be glad to do one-on-one practice sessions. Her email address is listed on this forum page.

Hope the group project planning is going well and feel free to email me if you have any questions.

Short and Sweet – that’s how I would describe the screencast I created. Needless to say this experience reminds me of why I did not go into the teaching field. I’m not great at teaching. But I’m glad to have used screencast in this class. I very much doubt I would have tried it otherwise.

I have been using blip.tv to upload Shockwave Flash .swf screencasts for a few years. Just recently, apparently, they stopped allowing for the uploading of these files. As a result, anyone who is using a tool that only creates a .swf file as the final product is not going to be able to upload their screencast to blip.tv (this includes Captivate and Jing, Camtasia has multiple output formats). Instead, you will need to create an account at Screencast.com and upload your video there.

By now, everyone should have gotten their graded papers back. If you haven't received anything from me, please let me know and I'll send it again. I found all of your papers really fascinating; there were a lot of really interesting analyses of social software tools and their uses in different contexts.

What I learned: Aside from recording an interview for another class, I had not used any of the recording equipment or created mp3 files. I didn’t think that there was much to creating a podcast. Well after putting a lot of thought to what I wanted to create and having to face putting my voice “out there”, I was able to really come away with something that I plan to use this summer. I had the idea of creating book talks for our teen website and highlighting either book club selections or specials displays.

I decided to test out Axl Wise rather than Second Life because at this point in time, Second Life does not really appeal to me.  I think it is because it seems to have no purpose for me right now.  If I had something to do or accomplish, then I might be more willing to explore.  But I know myself, and I think that this is one of those applications I know I probably would not come back to for awhile.  Some of the reasons for this include the fact that it would take me a longer amount of time to figure out how second life works than I'm willing to spend figuring it out.&nb

I added some information to the assignment page for the Social Software Dynamics paper. The first is about the number of references needed for your paper. You should have five references at a minimum for a paper of this size. If for some reason you have fewer, please let me know why you didn't need (or couldn't get) five references. There is certainly no maximum number of references -- use as many as you feel you need.