Learning 2.0

I attended Helene Blowers' session on Core
Competencies and Learning 2.0 at Computers in
Libraries. Much of the material was the same as the
SirsiDynix Institute presentation. A brief summary:

The public services technology director of a large
public library system needed to bring 550 employees
up-to-speed on emerging technologies. She had
previously read Steve Abrams' article about "43
things" in which he had listed a number of
technologies that he hoped to explore over the next
year. She & her team created a program, relying on
life-long learning principles to motivate and
encourage staff to spend time exploring a set of
technologies, and to self-report and track their
progress.

The "Learning 2.0" blog, with the "23 things" set up
for the Public Library of Charlotte Mecklenberg County
It also includes links to other libraries that have
adapted the "Learning 2.0" model for their own staff
development needs.

A slide show "7 1/2 habits of highly successful
lifelong learners" is posted at:
http://www.plcmc.org/public/learning/player.html

Helene Blowers' blog, which includes her Computers in
Libraries slides and links to other useful sites:
http://www.librarybytes.com/

What was that word...

I'm just back from Computers in Libraries in windy,
rainy Washington.

I particularly enjoyed Mary Ellen Bates' presentation
"30 tips in 45 minutes" - about searching the
Internet. I thought I was a reasonably good Internet
searcher (I use advanced Google) but I had not tried
any of the 30 sites she presented.

Here's one -
http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml
This reverse dictionary helps when you know there's a
word that means (whatever), and it's on the tip of
your tongue, but you can't come up with it - you can
enter a definition and the site offers a list of
possible terms. Pick a word from the list, and it
offers links to a dozen online dictionaries so you can
check the definition and make sure it's the one you
want.

Find more about this dynamic presenter at
www.batesinfo.com - which includes free articles &
white papers - and also at her blogsite "Librarian of
Fortune" at http://www.librarianoffortune.com/ , which
includes a recent item about data mining PubMed.

shermanlib4

shermanlib4
Originally uploaded by Sandy Swanson.

Blogga Huma

http://www.laughinglibrarian.com/bd_blogga.htm

About.com about...blogs

Free stock photos is just one of the resources at the About.com site, which also includes information about copyright for bloggers.

MLA conference presentation: "Top Tech Trends"

I attended a pretty interesting session at the Michigan Lib. Assoc. conference today -- thanks to GMR/MHSLA for sending me as part of the MHSLA exhibitors group.
The session was: Top Tech Trends, presented by Sheryl C. Knox, Technology Director, Capital Area District Library. You will be able to see the PowerPoint slides after a while at the MLA Library Technology Division webpage at http://www.cmpl.org/mla/ltd/ but in the meantime, my summary report:
This year's "tech facts" from the Pew Internet & American Life Project report by Susannah Fox titled Digital Divisions:

• 68% of American adults are online.
  
• Demographic gaps: those least likely to be connected are over 65 (in particular, over 70); African Americans; Less educated.
  
• "Newbies" (of less than 1 year experience on the Internet) are rare. I think it was about 5-6% of Internet users who were "newbies."
  
• Rural rates are lower, i.e., fewer rural residents are Internet users.
  
• Rural use patterns are different; they're more likely to rely on other people's connections (such as the public library) instead of having Internet connections in their own homes.
  
• 53% of home Internet users have high-speed connections. Broadband is less available in rural areas. With broadband availability, instead of "haves" and "have-nots" the users are "haves" , "have-nots" and "have-mores."
  
• Broadband changes online activities. Broadband users are more likely to use more services such as making online purchases and doing online banking.
  

Tech trends(the directions technology is going) as identified by Sheryl Knox:

1. Smaller & portable. Examples: change from floppy disks to flash drives. Change from VHS tapes to DVDs (less shelf space required). Remember transistor radios? Now we have iPods & Nanos.
   
2. Immediacy. Users want to have it when & where they want it, no waiting. Prefer self-service because it's faster. Examples: cell phones & instant messaging (immediate connection to other people). According to "millenials" (the teens now entering adulthood) -- are you ready for this -- "EMAIL IS DEAD." Too slow, too static, they can't stand it.
   
3. Convergence. Devices that do more than 1 thing, such as phones that take pictures.
   
4. Wireless, in general, not just WiFi. Example: RFID (radiofrequency barcodes)
   
5. Web as conversation, not publication. Example: Wikis, Blogs.
   
6. Ascendancy & legitimacy of Audio Visual information. We need new skills to provide access & indexing for visuals, audio, etc.; our cataloging & indexing is oriented toward text. We had an interesting aside here to discuss a handheld text-to-speech scanner, with a very prosaic example of its usefulness to the blind -- reading soup cans, so you can tell whether you're selecting tomato or cream of mushroom from your kitchen cupboard.
   
7. Growing public sphere. People are sharing everything on the web -- consider personal blogs. Less division between public and private.
   
8. Everything is social. Millenials & even those a little older have grown up doing group projects; cooperative learning is the order of the day. On a tech note, more programs/tech can talk to each other. Example: library catalogs that can hook into the Syndetics site (by subscription) to provide book reviews & book cover images, using the ISBN as a "hook" between the two, transparently to the user.
   
9. Broadband access
   
10. Digital media not in a fixed format, i.e., no physical form. Examples: debit cards vs. cash; audio download on demand vs. CD; VHS going away in favor of digital delivery (DVD or movie download) ; no shelf space required.
    

Technologies to think about :

1. Broadband over power lines (BPL)
2. iPods & other portable digital audio players
3. Books (portable, high resolution, batteries never fail!)
4. Downloadable audio books.
5. Podcasts (Audio blogs) -- more content out there, such as congressional testimony, NPR, student radio
6. RSS
7. Library Elf (http://www.blogger.com/www.libraryelf.com) "keeping tabs on your library material" -- check it out.
8. Wikis
9. RFID
10. Smart phones

Sheryl referred several times to a great website: http://www.howstuffworks.com/ . She referred to the "Computer stuff" and "Electronics stuff" pages, but there's lots more if you have time to explore.

We covered a lot in an hour and a half... Very worthwhile presentation.

ACR's new blog

Association of College & Research Libraries' new
"ACRlog": http://acrlblog.org/

Usability for weblogs

Jakob Nielsen's usability rules for weblogs --

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/weblogs.html

Well, will you all know me from my photo?

RSS & blog tools

From DMOZ Open Directory Projects, lists & links to:

• News readers
  
• RSS tools


• Blog publishing software & sites

From Ask Jeeves:

• News Aggregators (RSS feed readers)
  

Search for blogs on a topic:

• BlogPulse


• Google BlogSearch