Finishing Up Learning 2.0

With the PLA/QPLA conference upon us, the Learning 2.0 program is also drawing to an end. I'm several light years away from having finished the fourteen "discovery" activities so far posted on the CityLibrariesLearning blog. Time has been the problem. Not nearly enough of it. When each day is a rush to get just the fundamentals accomplished, and you're behind on practically everything you're trying to get done, it's easy to put off this sort of self-paced training because ignorance usually has a negligible short term cost -- no matter how it clobbers you in the long term.

So, still intending to finish the activities but having run out of all other time, it becomes a weekend project.

For purposes of organizing the attack, I'm stealing the approach used by Susan on her weblog : I'll gather all the activities into this single post, recapping the earlier, completed ones, but otherwise just dabbling in the later activities and posting a few thoughts about them.

Discovery 1. Blogging. You're soaking in it. Beginning this blog and maintaining it (if I may be allowed a loose definition of "maintaining") probably counts towards finishing this discovery. I had actually blogged before, and a little more devotedly back then, but this was the first time I'd used the blog for work-related activities.

Blogging is certainly fun, and I imagine I'll continue doing it in some for or another, but in the library context I think it's more useful for those who are promoting particular activities, such as Jodie's book club weblog, or the blog for the PLA/QPLA conference. In my position, I suspect it makes dull and non-informative reading.

Discovery 2. Twitter. Well, I did sign up for Twitter, and Tweeted away for awhile. I'd avoided Twitter for a long time, as I'm one of those people who'd imagined it was just an endless swamp composed of the reeking minutiae of strangers' lives. But it proved not as bad as I'd feared. It's a nice tool for networking with folk of similar interests, and I can imagine it being quite useful within a library context for provision of customer service, and even building relationships with your customer base.

Although I eventually gave up on using Twitter (mostly because of a lack of time), I did think it interesting that, during the initial phase when a few library staff were doing it, there was very distinctly a channel of communication there that was being missed by those who weren't using Twitter.

Discovery 3. Web 2.0 and Library 2.0. Hmm, well, I did work through the information provided in the original discovery post, but didn't end up with time to post, so linked instead.

Giving the subject a paragraph now, I would have to say that I think Web 2.0 is a fascinating inevitability. It's something new under the sun, linking vast numbers of people and giving them tools and skills and information to explore their creativity individually and in groups. Heaven knows what the human race will do with all this.

Library 2.0 seems an equally inevitable development of Web 2.0. If the world is gathering in cyberspace and we don't meet them there, then what's the point of us? Would we even deserve to survive as a service if we didn't try to meet them there? But, happily, we are trying, and I think it makes for very exciting times for the information service industry.

Discovery 4. RSS. Covered, I think, in my original post on the subject. I'd used RSS before, and will continue to use it. It's such an effective way to keep up with news and information.

Discovery 5. Flickr. Now Flickr was one of the web services I just didn't take to -- as I mentioned in the original post on this exercise. At heart, I'm not very image-oriented. Right now, I don't even own a camera that isn't wired into a mobile telephone. I did sign up for an account, and poked around the site, but won't likely spend much time there.

Discovery 6. Mashups. See discovery 5. No matter how much I appreciate a clever or funny mashup created by someone else, it's just not something that engages my creative side. My mashup gene is simply missing.

Discovery 7. Tagging. Already familiar with tagging, of course, as it's built into a lot of the web services already covered in the exercises (and numerous others, such as Amazon and Library Thing). But I did enjoy Wordle -- how could you not? What I like best about tagging is that it tends to be very intuitive. Tags reflect the way people actually think about concepts much more closely than more formal subject categories sometimes do.

Discovery 8. Keeping Track. Bookmarking sites. CityLibrariesLearning covered only two, Delicious and Digg. I did create an account with Delicious, and liked it well enough that I'll continue using it. Web-based bookmarks are universal -- it's great to be able to access you favourites whether you're at home or work -- and Delicious makes it easier by having a couple of Firefox add-ons.

Digg, on the other hand, annoyed me by crashing Firefox when I tried to join, then not working in Internet Explorer when I felt compelled to open that and try again. I'm sure it's great in principle. Maybe one day I'll try again and discover that it's a miracle of modern technology. But I'm not tempted to troubleshoot just for the privilege of joining up, I'm afraid.

Discovery 9. Communicating Online. Instant Messaging, SMS and web conferencing. I've used IM extensively enough. It's a very engaging tool (and a terrible time waster if you're online to do something and a friend happens to come online and IMs you). SMS also. Web conferencing, not so much: I'm one of the last surviving humans who connects to the Internet via dial-up, so you can imagine why.

All three strike me as great library tools: particularly regarding the provision on reference services. If one of the concepts of Library 2.0 is meeting your customers where they are, well, they would seem to accomplish that. Web conferencing, in particular, seems to have a lot of potential for providing lifelong learning services without stressing the library's physical space.

For communication between staff, I think it be very hand, solving the problem of trying to locate staff members who may be anywhere in a multi-branch library system.

Discovery 10. Online Collaboration - Wikis. It's clear wikis enable the relatively rapid pooling of skills and knowledge of numerous people, but have to balance edit-access against reliability. But they have undeniable uses. I love Wikipedia as a first-pass tool when I'm researching something. It gives you the search terms to look elsewhere for more reliable information. In the workplace, I also favour using wikis for things like procedure and policy manuals (for speed and ease of creation and updating).

Discovery 11. Online Collaboration - Online Docs & More. Online applications are pretty terrific. I'd used Google Docs before and completely forgotten about it until logging in and seeing a couple of saved documents. Again, the appeal of these tools is their universality. We get a lot of people in the library wanting to open documents urgently but unable to because they created it in a more up-to-date version of their word processor than we have on our PCs. Online applications may help there.

But I do wonder about the privacy of documents passing backwards and forwards over the web. Also, as a writer, I'm not sure I trust the terms of service of some of these services where intellectual property is concerned. (Paranoia, possibly, but there it is.)

Discovery 12. Web Video. Okay, love YouTube. Love it that people can post video to the web and that it seems to have created a whole underground free entertainment industry. But, as mentioned, last surviving dial-up user, here, so with the best will in the world I'm not able to do much with this activity. I do have a YouTube account, and I've used it, but I have to be pretty motivated to invest the download time.

Of course, it's easy to see how this can be used in libraries. We're already working on a skill database to put people who need skills in touch with people who have them: how much better to have a database of YouTube style videos demonstrating those skills, or teaching them.

Discovery 13. Social Networking. I have a visceral horror of social networking sites. Facebook is my Cthulhu. Still, in the interests of Learning 2.0 I did sign up. Checked out a couple of groups and friended some people before being overcome by the squamous nightmare of it all. Okay, I get it. I get why people sign up, I see that libraries might find it useful for building relationships with their customers. But I'd rather bathe in spiders than use Facebook. Ick. Brr. Ugh. (Added later: I may be mellowing towards Facebook. Time will tell.)

And, unless a new activity materializes next week, lastly... Discovery 14. Online Databases. Used them. Love them. Love everything about them. So much interesting information, free. And alerts, how brilliant are they? It's like subscribing to an infinite number of magazines, but without the delayed gratification of snail mail. Brilliant.

So... that's more or less that.

All up, Learning 2.0 was definitely worth doing, for all the difficulty in finding time to squeeze it in. There were web tools I would never have tried out if not following the program (Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, I'm looking at you). Some of them I'll go on using, others maybe not. There's been the practical benefit that I've been able to help customers with some of these things now, where before I'd have had to apologize and send them on to someone else.

But I am glad to have finished it off. It's no longer a nagging voice at the back of my mind saying, "You're neglecting this... you're letting this slide..."