What a week

For some reason, this week was time-consuming and difficult. I’m not sure if it was trying to do too much to set-up my new social world. And now that I’ve set up these pages, I need to keep using these immediately or I’ll lose my way.

I am looking forward to trying out these new tools with my colleagues. I’d like to implement the 23 (or lessen it to 10) step program in the library, but I’m sure I’ll meet with heavy resistance from some.

I’ll borrow Walter Cronkite’s line for tonight, “and that’s the way it is”.

Social Bookmarking Plan 4 D 2

Social bookmarking is just a wonderful tool for librarians. I have so many bookmarks that my bookmarks have bookmarks (or marklets). I can see so many uses for this both for myself and for my colleagues.

First of all, the reference librarians are always emailing new websites. Just bookmarking what we think will help a class or that should be put on our “Websites by subject” will save us time from reading a number of emails daily. Blogging will not even reduce our time management as social bookmarking. The possibilities are endless. We can send our links to the faculty by subject and they can alert their students to websites that may help their research. We can also use the social bookmarks as links in our online research guides.

Secondly, I’d like to share cataloging and social networking bookmarks with our Technology Coordinator as she shares some of these same professional interests.

Many of my friends are former colleagues who are catalogers, librarians, or in the book world. We could all save so much time if we had a name for ourselves so we could check on our newly added sites.

And, as I look at websites from my colleagues, I’ll be able to spend more time reading these than looking at emails suggesting that I explore a particular website. This is a great way to keep learning.

RSS Resource Page 4 C 1

I have had tremendous fun doing this. I must have spent the last hour figuring out what I want to load on this page and do I dare delete anything (too late, I already deep-sixed photos)? My page is titled “A Peep’s Page”. Here’s the URL: http://www.pageflakes.com/JoansPages/22294847

Life in the not-so-fast lane

It’s been an almost arduous experience trying to learn and use all of this new technology. I’m trying to figure out how to get around the limitations of font, spacing, etc. Also, I fear that as we move from one new “experience” to another, I won’t remember what I’ve just used. In tech services in the library, work never stops; it just keeps piling on. I’ll have to remember to take my tech break and keep messing around with all of this.

Guerrilla Season blog project

Here’s my post from Guerrilla Season. I’m going to take this out from the public library and read along with the class. Maybe this will give me ideas for future projects at MCC. http://guerrillaseason2008.blogspot.com/search/label/week%201 

Looking for student blogging projects

I have spent about 6 hours trying to find student blogging projects and I came up just about empty. Projects involving students who are in elementary, junior high, or high school are obviously protected by the course instructor as to who can post a comment to a student. So I started searching for sites involving college student blog projects so I could write a comment to their post. I was still unsuccessful. I finally decided to return to a site that I found earlier, a project where 8th grade students from South Valley Jr High in Liberty Museum read “Guerrilla Season”, a Civil War story. In order to connect all the classes together in history and english, Eric Langhorst used a blog rather than a book club for weekly theme discussion. You can learn more about this project here     The Guerrilla Season Book Blog Project 2008  looks to be again remarkable in how Langhorst engages the students. Pat Hughes, the author of “Guerilla Season”, is also involved in this project.  I decided since I couldn’t write to a student in the 2008 Project, I would write to Eric about his project and the student results so far in 2008.  Here’s a copy of my letter.      Hi Eric, I’m in a class about social networking. One of our projects is to look at a student blog project and write a comment about this. I am so lucky that I happened upon your project.  I only wish my classes in history and English had been this creative and engaging. I was the least motivated student in history, but after seeing your students discuss Guerrilla Season, I’d like to read the book and comments.I’m a librarian at McHenry County College (MCC) in Crystal Lake, IL. My responsibilities include cataloging, teaching, and collection development. This course will be an incentive for me to bring the library closer to our community.At MCC, we have learning communities that students flock to. The combination of academic disciplines seems to provide our students with a way to learn, research, and write in a way that traditional-type courses can’t seem to address.  Here’s the link to our current learning communities courses: http://www.mchenry.edu/LearningCommunities/classes.aspI’m looking forward to reading the book and blog. Best, Joan Perlman 

Becoming a digital native and not an immigrant

If I want to communicate with students and know how they learn and the resources they use, then I must become a digital native. Technology changes so quickly that I’m almost in crisis mode to catch-up. In fact, I feel like the kid sister who is desperately trying to keep up with her siblings even though she’s years younger–digitally. Once I’m comfortable with social networking, I’d like to use this with information literacy classes and with my other colleagues in the library. I can see uses for blogs in collection development and wikis for procedures. I’d like to use Twitter in reference as traditional age students are all about texting and Myface. I think Myface will become old quickly. I’m not sure what will replace this. So I’m on the fence about personally and/or professionally using Myface. Teaching strategies for information literacy will have to change to keep students motivated. I’ve always believed that teaching involves being one step ahead and being a great actor. Most librarians don’t have time to stay on the edge. Recently, I heard about the 23 steps to engage students, patrons, colleagues, etc. As a profession, we librarians need to take the time to use these social networking skills so we can continue to encourage and motivate our students to learn, think critically, and just have fun looking up information.