Monday, December 10, 2007

Brown bag lunch

Irene and I are talking about our travels on Tuesday 18th at 1pm and I wanted a spot to place some useful links.

The events I visited were:

The presentations I gave were:

Bits and pieces I picked up:

Overall theme from all events - libraries are trying to use the tools that users are already using, (eg. google docs, CE6 ) and integrate library content into these.

QULOC and TAFE followed similar format - presentations to everyone before lunch, break into smaller groups after lunch. QULOC's focus on hands on workshops was great. The unconference was less formal than the WA unconference, with many sessions being "sit around and talk" sessions. Like WA, it was a useful sharing of information across library sectors.

QUT Creative Industries have use delicious tag cloud embedded into a web page as subject guide - and have embedded this into Blackboard / CE6 Learning Management System

Yarra Plenty Library System incorporates LibraryThing tags in its catalogue. See this example for Tim Winton's Cloudstreet.

QULOC

University of New England - received funding to create a social network for students, but beginning to conclude that it is not necessarily a case of "If you build it they will come". May be better to use an Open Source network or to tap into something pre-exisiting like Facebook - especially by making widgets to tap into this. Cameron Barne's presentation slides are here,:

Gina Velli is a young librarian working in legal deposit at the State Library of Queensland. She gave a presentation about MySpace / Facebook and concluded that MySpace is not what it once was and Facebook is preferred by more mature library users.

Andrew Bennett from UQ talked about using Web 2.0 tools as part of the IT Standard Operating Environment, citing the advantages of single sign-on, standardisation of tools, "light-weight accesss to heavy weight tools". Disadvantages - bakups and repository, scalability. **. Focussed on Zoho and Google docs.

Unconference

I went to those sessions I was most unfamiliar with at the unconference - so learned about how to offer services to youth, and a bit more about using chat reference.

TAFE -

Deb and Pim also presented about the Learning Common.

UWA Library have integrated their information literacy into Blackboard / CE6, but wanted to ensure their course content was more portable. At the moment it is very hard to reuse material from course to course. They are experimenting with using HIVE to store learning objects that can be access from different learning modules.

Kay Schneider's igoogle presentation was excellent.

Jody ex-Curtin's "start with google" information literacy classes. Demonstrated a search on google giving tips about using the + and site: operators. Then took same search to google scholar. Then went from google scholar into library databases...all the time talking about accessability, search strategies and academic validity of the sources.

IRENE
The event she attended and presented about at the Brown Bag Lunch is the Learning Futures Symposium .

Thursday, December 6, 2007

Here's a meebo chat box

Here's a meebo chat box as an example of how it can be embedded in any web page. I'm sometimes logged into meebo to access the Library Society of the World chat room, but more often am offline.

The chat box won't show up in an RSS reader. I have also embedded one into the sidebar of this blog


Tuesday, December 4, 2007

My other blog nominated for an Edublog Award


My other blog, Librarians Matter, has been nominated for “Best Librarian/Library Blog” in the 2008 Edublog awards.

To vote for me, click here, Best library / librarian blog 2007. Or, you may prefer to vote for one of the other nominees:


Previous library blog winners have been:
Library Stuff - 2004
Joyce Valenza’s NeverEnding Search - 2005
Hey Jude - 2006


I’m chuffed to see that West Australian Sue Water’s blog, Mobile Technology in TAFE has been nominated for three separate awards, and that Australian Jo Kay’s Second Life Island, Jokaydia, has been nominated for Best Educational Use of a Virtual World .

I'm hoping to attend the awards ceremony on 8th December in Second Life.

Friday, November 30, 2007

Blogs in Plain English

Yes, it's another Commoncraft explanation - this time about blogs. Did you realise you were creating alternative news sources and community just by blogging?

Blogs in Plain English - when I looked at it on Friday at about 9:30pm, I was the 78th person to view it. Would love to know where it was at when you looked (you'll need to click through to YouTube see those stats ).


Thursday, November 22, 2007

Social Networking in Plain English

I didn't use this one in the Facebook/ Twitter section of the 23 Things - mainly because I forgot .

It's rather short, and talks about social networks connecting you to a great job or a fantastic partner. I don't use my online social networks for either of these, but every day I use them to get information that I need to do my job better...and to find out about what is happening in Perth and hundreds of quirky little things that make me smile or think.

Here's the CommonCraft video - Social Networking in Plain English

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

CSI 2.0

Okay - a couple of weeks ago CSI set an episode in Second Life and I didn't mention it because I didn't want to seem THAT geeky.

But last night's episode of CSI where they showed Twitter just had me wondering what's going on with them. Quote of the night: "These people don't care about privacy, they value openness".

Has all this stuff become mainstream now? Is US commercial television cutting edge?

Wednesday, November 7, 2007

A place for organisations in Facebook

According to the Facebook blog , they now encourage and have a place for organizations - Facebook Pages.

The "and more" bit mentioned below includes a category called "Library/Public building" that you can select when you create a Facebook Page .

We've launched Facebook Pages, which are distinct, customized profiles designed for businesses, bands, celebrities and more to represent themselves on Facebook. We noticed people wanted to connect with their favorite music, restaurants, and brands; but there was no good place for these types of affiliations to exist. Now, there is a place for them and you can become a fan of whatever pages you choose in order to interact with your passions in new ways. You can post reviews for a local restaurant, buy tickets to a new movie, or be the first to get a heads up about new promotions.