LIBR 246-04/13 Web 2.0 (Spring 2010)

Welcome to your classroom! By now you should hopefully already have an email from me with instructions on creating your account (if not, please email me immediately). Once you've done that, you should feel free to start completing the introductory activities for the course. You have until the end of Week 1 to complete these activities, but eager folks may want to get a jump on it. The introductory activities and instructions can be found on the page Introduction to Class Expectations and Technologies.

Description: For the final project, the class will be broken up into six groups to accomplish the following:

1. Create a proposal to implement a specific social software tool (or suite of tools) for a specific purpose in a specific type of library.

2. Create a proof of concept, working model or or detailed prototype of the proposed social software implementation.

Description: For this assignment, you will examine some aspect of community dynamics; basically the "how" and "why" of participation in one or more social tools. You can examine the participation dynamics of a specific community, how community forms using a specific type of technology, or how some other aspect of online communities (moderation, lurkers, flamewars, etc.) impacts participation.

Topic examples include:

1. Motivations of Wikipedians

Description: For this assignment, you will choose a library that has an online presence beyond its website (blog, Facebook page, MySpace page, Twitter feed, etc. -- the more they have, the better) and you will critique the effectiveness of their marketing/outreach/branding efforts. Please address all of the following points as well as anything other aspects you'd like to discuss:

February 9 - 15

This week's exercise will give you experience creating an instructional screencast.

1. Create a narrated screencast demonstrating for your classmates the use of one of your favorite social software sites (as if we'd never used it before). It should be approximately 2 - 4 minutes in length (don't worry about going over or under a little). Use one of the screencasting tools listed on our class page. You can get trial copies of many of the for-pay screencasting software options.

In this final exercise, you will develop a collaborative guide to social software best practices on the class wiki. Each of you will contribute tips and ideas to the guide and all of you will need to work to organize it in such a way that it will seem cohesive and readable.

Your best practices can be tips on specific tools or general tips on implementing social software.

Here are two examples of appropriate tips:

The goal of this exercise is to give you experience using and following others on Twitter.

1. Create an account on Twitter.

2. Subscribe to the following Twitter users (as well as anyone else you might be interested in):

This exercise will give you the opportunity to contribute to a wiki community.

1. Add content to a thriving wiki community. Think of a topic that you know something about and find a wiki community to contribute to. Possible communities include:

1. Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki