More reflections on sabbatical leaves....

What a gift this is! A chance to set my own agenda and explore the things that I believe will matter to our students at Pasadena City College (and other community colleges.) In a way, each day is a blank slate where I choose the colors of the palette. The design is mine; the dimensions vary, as I experiment with methods of communication not fully explored...blogs, wikis, rss feeds, and all the variations among them.

It is wonderful to complement my work with the explorations of other colleges, universities, organizations and public libraries. I can take direction from their experiences as I narrow my perspective.

Today I heard back from the Institute of Museum and Library Studies and they indicated a willingness and eagerness to work with me on adapting their technology and digitization readiness survey for the California community colleges. Wonderful! Perhaps down the road, I can broaden the survey through a grant to include a national study... In my self-directed mode, I create...and it is exciting as each day unfolds...

Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet's New Storytellers

Online journals (also called weblogs or blogs) are changing traditional publishing and communication in the world. It is easy, fun and appealing...and most bloggers use it to describe their personal experiences. The infusion of RSS feeds allows users the ability to have their information delivered automatically to their desktops where they opt to read or not.

Pew Internet and American Life Project (www.pewinternet.org) conducted a national phone survey of bloggers and found the following results...
Source: Lenhart, Amanda and Susannah Fox. Bloggers. Washington, DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2006

Bloggers: Summary of Findings at a Glance
Blogging is bringing new voices to the online world.

Telephone surveys capture the most accurate snapshot possible of a small and moving target.

Contrary to the impression created by the press attention on political blogging, just 11% of bloggers say they focus mainly on government or politics.

The blogging population is young, evenly split between women and men, and racially diverse.

Relatively small groups of bloggers view blogging as a public endeavor.

The main reasons for keeping a blog are creative expression and sharing personal experiences.

Only one-third of bloggers see blogging as a form of journalism. Yet many check facts and cite original sources.

Bloggers are avid consumers and creators of online content. They are also heavy users of the internet in general.

Bloggers are major consumers of political news and about half prefer sources without a particular political viewpoint.

Bloggers often utilize community and readership-enhancing features available on their blogs.

For more detailed information on the findings, go to the report:
http://tinyurl.com/lptyp

CCL Survey on blogs, wikis and more...

I am applying for enrollment in a 5 week course called "Five Weeks to a Social Library" and wanted to see what the impact would be as I share this with community college libraries.

I decided to do a quick assessment of library directors in the state of California to see who was blogging, using Wikis, RSS feeds and other social software. I used Surveyanywhere to construct this brief survey (took me about 15 minutes.)

Results can be viewed at http://tinyurl.com/ejl45

Creating Online Orientations for Your Campus (@ONE seminar training)

Creating Online Orientations for Your Campus
with Don Nickel

Don Nickel at De Anza College shares his experiences with the Counseling 100 online orientation course. This course was honored by the CVC for excellence in online instruction.

I was interested in this in a broader perspective, namely that of an introduction to college, not courseware. I had wanted to see if we could adapt this to a general online (free, no credit)orientation and tour of the library. So, the class did not meet my expectations.

Even so, Don takes you through evolution of this WebCT course since it started in Fall 2001. He provides insights from the instructor and student perspective, including navigating through the course design and content including a Student Educational Plan, discussion about the merits and pitfalls of taking an online orientation for first time students, and shows his actual course as well as the new template in Moodle since DeAnza is transitioning away from WebCT and to Moodle this year.
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@ONE serves California Community College faculty and staff by providing workshops and trainings to assist them in using technology to enhance student learning and success.

Funded by the California Community College Chancellor's Office Telecommunication and Technology Infrastructure Program (TTIP).
For more information about @ONE classes: http://www.cccone.org/index.htm

Wikis Seminar with Meredith Farkas (SIRSI/Dynix online seminar)

Sirsi Dynix online semiar on Wikis presented by Meredith Farkas.
The presentation is archived at http://www.sirsidynixinstitute.com/archive.php

Marilyn provides a great introduction to wikis: ease of editing, differences between blogs and wikis, potential problems and issues with spammers, potential uses (community wiki, educational use/courseware, staff collaboration, installation issues, etc.)

She suggested one I am playing with for a Library Tech program wiki glossary:
PBWIKI http://pbwiki.com/(which is free)

EDITME (fee based) thtp://www.editme.com/

Mediawiki(good looking, cascading style sheets)http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

She suggests using one that has a conversation feature threaded comments (available on some but nice!), spamming software (blacklisting or a plug-in) protection, good documentation and a forum for a discussion, permission setting, recent changes and RSS feeds, version conrol (reversing content if hit by spammers),

Referred to www.wikimatrix.com for more information on selection of specific wiki software.

Excellent introductory seminar (thanks to SIRSI it is free!)
Sign up for Meredith's blog through the RSS feed:
http://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/index.php

OCLC Western online training on RSS feeds

Last week I spent a couple hours taking OCLC Western's course on RSS feed. For those of you who do not know about RSS, it is a technology that delivers content on demand to information seekers. For example, I wanted to be notified automatically whenever Lorcan Dempsey (http://orweblog.oclc.org/) updates his blog on library technology. Lorcan has set up a command that I can go to that "feeds" me the information whenever he updates his page. It is then delived to wherever I want it (I use My Yahoo).

This OCLC Western online course took about 2 hours and although it was expensive ($75) it took me through the basics of RSS: definitions (with a nice thesaurus of terms), basic features, functions, and benefits. The next section gave me concrete ideas on how I could use RSS to merket services to the clibrary community. Finally the last section gave me informtion on how to implement it.

Some of the immediate implications I saw were:
Staff development (selected dissemination of timely information, based on an individuals specific area of specialization

PR for library news and activities, asking for feedback from users and notifying them of changes in hours and/or services

Most of all, the Hennepin County Librry gave the best example of how we can use RSS to publicize our resources by subject area and/or collections. Check it out at:
http://www.hclib.org/pub/search/RSS.cfm