25 Technologies in 50 Minutes/Stephen Abram (Sirsi/Dynix Seminar)

"Stephen Abram, SirsiDynix's Vice President of Innovation lists a technology application every 120 seconds in this roller coaster ride of what's out there in LibraryLand and which one's are worth playing with and seeing if they'll be useful to your library and your community of users."
http://sirsidynixinstitute.com/archive.php

If you can handle overload in a compressed fashion, get out your notebooks! (remember, to review it, it is only a click away!)

Stephen does a great job of introducing you to (mostly free) technologies that can change dynamically the services in your libraries and colleges.

Stephen covers:

RSS
Wikis
blogs
photoblogs (Flickr)
Tags
YouTube
MP3
Streaming media
Google office
Instant messaging
Meebo Trilliam and GAIM
visualization
Second Life
Avatars
Retrievr
Podcasts
MySpace
Facebook
Skype
Library thing
Endeca
Virtual Reference
Folksonomies and TagClouds
Blinkx and Singingfish

Although this is only a 50 minute seminar, these overviews set the stage for much further exploration. I loved his idea of 15 minutes a day to play with new technologies...Actually, I would like to see "Free Friday Morning" where library staff could "play" with technologies that will greatly alter how we deliver services to our students and the college community.

Update on IMLS Technology and Digitization Survey

I heard this week that the Institite of Museum and Library Studies has agreed to let me use the Technology and Digitization Survey to administer to the California Community Colleges. The IMLS will be forwarding to me the survey and the instructions to load it on a Cold Fusion Server (which our college has). I will, in turn, report the results of the survey to the IMLS.

I have reviewed the suvey and have adapted it for our community college libraries. I plan to send it to MIS directors as well as library directors and deans.
Great news!

"The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal upport for the nation’s 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. Its mission is
to grow and sustain a “Nation of Learners” because life-long learning is essential to a democratic society and individual success. Through its grant making, convenings, research and publications, the Institute empowers museums and libraries nationwide to provide leadership and services to enhance learning in families and communities, sustain cultural heritage, build twenty-first-century skills, and increase civic participation." [from http://www.imls.gov/about/about.shtm]

Using Podcasting for Teaching: Part 2: Creating and Syndicating Content/Donna Eyestone (@One Seminar)

This seminar provided insight into “how to” techniques for podcasting class lectures including planning a podcast and producing it. Donna uses Audacity to demonstrate the process of producing a podcast: recording, editing, compressing, and publishing your recording/podcast as an RSS feed. Donna actively demonstrates use of the Audacity program while teaching in the online environment as well as mapping the html information for the RSS feed to iTunes.

It was a very effective lesson to see her editing a work in Audacity and iTunes. She also demonstrated the use of Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.org) or “PodsafeAudio” (http://podsafeaudio.com/) to find recorded and/or graphic material to add to podcasts or vidcasts. Note: MAC users can use Garageband instead of Audacity which does a lot more of the work for you). .)

Hint: save your work as an “Audacity project” and then export it as a MP3. She uses Textedit to code the html.

Some of the demonstrations were hard to hear from her desktop and the application sharing kept bombing…so she had to keep reloading it. You can go to iTunes and click on Podcasts (Educational podcasts) or search under Donna Eyestone to find her recent podcasts.