LIBR 246-13 Building the Social Library Online

I'm really amazed that the class is over. It went much more quickly than I'd expected. I know I've said it before, but I really couldn't have asked for a better group of students. Your enthusiasm was inspiring to me and your reflections helped me to see many of these tools and ideas in new ways. Yes, teachers can learn from their students. :)

Are you going to ALA?

Sorry folks! I just noticed that I put the wrong dates for Week 15, which probably led to a bunch of you scrambling to finish your final reflection blog post. Please note that that last blog post is not due until NEXT Tuesday (the 13th), though obviously if you just want to be done, you can certainly write it up now. The same goes for your Experience Report from the Final Project. While I'd like to get it from you sooner than later, you can take until Tuesday to get it done. You can just send the experience report to me in the body of an email. It definitely doesn't need to be formal.

Here's my last post for this course. It seems like it has been a long time since Haikus and Top-Ten Lists, but as in my favorite style, I've included some bullet point lists and summaries. Happy reading!

Tuesday evening's the big night for you all!

For those of you who may not already know, there is a SLISsers wiki for SJSU's LIS program where students can share knowledge about the program. It's so great for online learners to have a community like this where newbies can benefit from the knowledge of seasoned veterans like you. :)

I wanted to highlight Melissa's excellent post about some of the barriers many of us have and will likely face when we try to "sell" social software in our library. She brings up some of the common objections people have to social software tools in a work setting and how to combat them.

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.

Greg Notess, author of the LibCasting blog, wrote up a terrific comparison of the free screencasting/hosting tools which could definitely be useful for those of you who have not yet chosen the recording tool you want to use. Feel free to host the screencast outside of blip.tv as long as you provide the URL of your screencast on your blog.

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.