LIS 757: Social Software & Libraries

I can hardly believe 14 weeks have come & gone! Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on the ideas I posted, via comments, IM, email, and your blogs — I appreciate them all! I hope you have enjoyed this term as much as I have, it’s been a tremendous experience for me and I thank you all for your energy and enthusiasm.

I know a few of you are graduating this term - congratulations on surviving library school! I wish you all the very best in your job search, and do let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.

I hope our paths cross again soon, either at a conference, or in the land of 2.0!

Happy holidays, everyone!

Over the course of the term, I’ve maintained a list of ideas on “what I would do differently next time”. I thought I’d share some of them here and invite your feedback, so do leave a comment & let me know what you think. And if you have some of your own ideas to share, please do!

• Allow course participants to blog anonymously. I apologize for not making this an option this term - I honestly didn’t think about it until a colleague suggested it to me. Do you think you would have preferred to blog anonymously (or pseudonymously)?
• Create short screencasts for some of the more complex tools (like Feed2JS & RSS2HTML).
• Consider doing a couple of class chats during the term. This term, everyone did a tremendous job with the weekly blogging, and I saw a lot of interesting discussions develop via comments & across blogs, but I’ve been thinking that a couple of synchronous meetings (over IM or Skype) would provide an opportunity to connect in real time that we didn’t have this term.
• Add optional podcasts to the reading list for the auditory learners in the class. There’s a wealth of LIS podcasts out there that we could have made better use of this term.
• Set the due date for the Final Paper Proposal later in the term (I realize that having the Proposal due a week after the Blog Review was a bit much!)
• Send course participants a “progress report” on their blogging half-way through the term. Since I don’t have strict guidelines on what I’m expecting from the weekly blog posts, I thought it would be a good idea to give students an idea of how they’re doing mid-term (something else I thought of too late this term! My apologies).

Thoughts? Comments? Other ideas? I’d love to hear them!

Welcome to the final week of LIS 757! I know you are all busy working on your papers, so we’ll keep things fairly light this week.

Tasks for the week

• I want to hear about your personal experiences with the social software tools we’ve used & looked at this term. Which ones have worked for you, which haven’t? What is your opinion of blogging as a learning tool? Do you plan to continue blogging? Are you hooked on Bloglines or do your RSS subscriptions haunt & torture you? Do you think you’ll continue using del.icio.us (or any other bookmarking/tagging tool)? Let us know!
• I’d like you all to think about the educational journey we’ve been on over the past 13 weeks. How has the distance ed. experience been for you? What could I have done differently to make the learning experience better (be honest, I can take it!)? I’ll be posting my own wrap-up thoughts later this week and invite your feedback on those as well.
• If you haven’t had a chance to add your best (and worst!) practices to our wiki, you have another week to do so. I’m thrilled with the flurry of activity on the wiki, there are some excellent and inspired ideas on there that will prove to be extremely useful!
  If it’s OK with everyone, I’ll make the wiki public at the end of the week so we can share our ideas with the rest of the web world.

And finally, the admin stuff for the week

• Final papers are due this Wednesday, Dec 6th (by midnight).
• No blogging deadline this week!
• Office hours this week are on Tuesday, 8-10 pm EST. I’ll also plan to be online Wednesday evening, in case you have any last minutes questions about your papers. As always, feel free to email me if I’m not online when you are.
• I’ll have your papers and final grades back to you some time during the week of December 18th.

Hi everyone,

A couple of quick notes:

• I’m seeing some activity on the wiki - awesome!
• I thought I made the wiki private (for viewing AND editing) but I just realized that it was public. I’ve changed this for now so that we can use it as a space to really hash out our ideas on best practices. Once we’re happy with our collective efforts, we can open it up for viewing (or take the content and put it on the Library Success Wiki, as I mentioned previously). So, for now, you will have to login to both view and edit the wiki.
• To stay on top of changes to the wiki, you can subscribe to the RSS feed (via the feed button/link at the bottom of the main page).

All for now. Have fun!