Week 7, Thing 16 and 17

I still feel like I'm getting the hang of Wikis. I guess I like the control and the orderliness of a blog. Blackboard, the online package used by the university just added a wiki tool and I used it with some people I am working with to write a conference proposal and to keep our research notes. I really like the ease of editing and the ability to look at the history of a document - not only what changes were made but who made them. We found that we needed to establish some protocols for working on the wiki when it came close to deadline and folks were adding/editing on top of each other. Some things were getting lost in the shuffle and took work to reinstate.

I enjoyed looking around at several of the wikis for this week's assignment. One thing I noticed was that the wikis that had an architecture that included nested tables of contents were the easiest to navigate around. Does one person have to set that up, or does it also eventually evolve from the work of participants? I've done some reading about wikipedia and it is interesting that some people like to add content, while others enjoy copy editing or making the page look good. So I guess a wiki community might have people taking different roles to maintain the site. I really like the pathfinder type wikis again these utilized some sort of hierarchical architecture that was easy to navigate and intuitive to use.

I've tentatively agreed to participate in a kindergarten math wiki. Participants from all over will post to the wiki monthly and will be able to look at the data from many classrooms. For example the first month we will just count how many cars go by our school in five minutes and post that to the wiki.

I've been thinking that a wiki might be another way to set up our Best Books discussion: Best Books 2006 since it starts to get a bit unwieldy near the end although tags help us to navigate and librarything has been a great additional tool.

I went to the California Web 2.0 Sandbox and easily logged in and added to the blogging page. It is really cool to be in North Carolina adding content to a California site. Thanks California!

Thing 15 continued

I had to jump up and go somewhere and never really wrote about Library 4.0. And now to jump from there to School Library 4.0 and I guess School 4.0. A big part of the question for me about the future of school libraries concerns the future of schools. Let's face it, schools have not really changed in over a century. I mean our picture of a classroom with individual desks and a teacher in the front of the room. Lots is pushing against that including cooperative learning, unschooling & homeschooling, but particularly the students themselves and the workplaces they will one day inhabit. What is school when you have a cell phone (that takes pictures) in your pocket, a laptop in your bookbag, and an ipod with a microphone? Or, more to the point, what is a student whose ability to access, capture, and create knowledge has now been amplified by these tools? And where is equity between that child and the one in the seat next to her who doesn't have those tools? How will schools be relevant to both those students?

I really find myself moving towards a view of education that looks a lot more like a library than a classroom. A salon where people meet and share ideas. Where information is accessible and organized but now augmented by the user. Where the comfort and the interests of the user are taken into consideration. A space that recognizes not all users have equal resources and strives to correct that with free access. Instead of a teacher in the front and in charge, a professional (librarian) who advocates for the user, who builds a collection for the user, who provides access for the user, who guides, who answers questions.

In the meantime, I'm not sure we can take it for granted that others will see the library this way, as the classroom of the future. I think we need to be moving our services outside our physical space, into classrooms and homes, into cyberspace. Our services are needed more than ever but if we do not move away from our shelves and push our services outward, we will be replaced.

Week Six, Things 13, 14, and 15

I have had a personal delicious account:

http://del.icio.us/sckimmel

It's been really handy because I have buttons on my browser bar for My Delicious and Post to My Delicious that allow me to quickly add a site and tag it. It's fairly miscellaneous often representing something I am working on for grad school. I really like the idea of sharing bookmarks and I think it could be useful for a school to create a unique tag for all the relevant curricular websites.

The whole idea of a folksonomy or a classification scheme created by users is really cool. Wouldn't it be interesting if your students could add their tags to books in your library catalog? Of course, the interesting problem with such a classification system is that it bypasses the librarian. Remember we had that class in library school about author and subject authority and why it was important to be consistent in assigning subject headings? So it's interesting to me that tags seem to be somewhere between assigned subject headings and keywords... they offer a greater flexibility than the assigned yet are potentially more accurate than keywords.

I spent considerable time on Technorati performing searches for discourse analysis (I'm attempting for my dissertation) and the movie we just watched "A Peaceful Warrior" to see what people were blogging about both topics. I did find out that a recent issue of Library Quarterly was devoted to discourse and information literacy through someone's blog which was really helpful to me.

I really liked the discussion of library 4.0 http://www.oclc.org/nextspace/002/6.htm and I need to blog more about that later.

Week 5, thing 12

Okay, I spent too much time on Rollyo - I just couldn't get it. It may be because I'm in an elementary school. I would rather just search using Google and work on refining my queries to get more relevant results. For my scholarly work I use the periodicals databases through the university.

So, I'm moving on because tagging and social bookmarking are much more interesting to me.

Week 5, Thing 11

I've really been having fun playing with the various web 2.0 tools this week - in fact, I haven't been able to move on to any other "things." I have especially enjoyed Pandora, a personalized radio station. I'm rarely on my computer now without listening in to the Sarah Maclachlan, Diana Krall, Bonnie Raitt, Enya, Mindi Adair and others mix. It's fun to see what new (and old) music and musicians Pandora selects for me to listen to.

I also set up a Pageflakes page which is a personalized page that allows you to draw in all sorts of Internet content. I have a calendar, the weather, a comic strip a day, and a funny frog who follows my mouse. It's more diverse and fun than a simple bloglines page.

Week 5, Thing 10

I borrowed this great title from:

Meyerson, D. E. (2001). Tempered radicals: how people use difference to inspire change at work. Boston: Harvard Business School Press

A "tempered radical" is someone who belongs and works within an organization, yet has a distinct agenda that differs from the organization and works for change (often small and incremental) either at a personal or organizational level from within. I really like it because I feel like it describes what many of us strive for as we work within schools. We have a difference because we are not classroom teachers and we have an agenda that may counter the current school culture of testing and sorting students.

Week 4, Thing 8 & 9

Okay, I'm back. Actually the weather in D.C. for ALA was perfect! It was a very comfortable temperature - cool and dry. Lots of events were within a walking distance so it was great weather for going on foot!

I think I might have come back sooner but of all the web 2.0 tools I just can't get excited about RSS feed but maybe I just needed to give it a try. I did set up all the blogs listed on my blogroll so now instead of checking eight different sites I can just check one and see if there have been any new posts - kind of cool! If you click "mark all read" on your bloglines then it gives you a blank slate of sorts and you will be alerted of any new posts in the future.

I played around with Feedster and discovered that you can put phrases in quotes so my search for "discourse analysis" was much more productive than the search without the quotes. Somehow, and I think it was Feedster I discovered someone in Ireland who is blogging about his dissertation in education! Along the lines of my post below, I would like to make the process of my dissertation more transparent and public and I would prefer to find a circle of people doing something similar to work with.

A new feed for Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk blog http://doug-johnson.squarespace.com/blue-skunk-blog/ led me to a post about different aggregrators http://doug-johnson.squarespace.com/blue-skunk-blog/ and I think I would like to try Pageflakes.

It's been really fun to read the comments to my blog. Apparently the person whose pic I used (Web 2.0) from flickr posted to my blog.