Attended a meeting via Twitter yesterday, which was a first for me. Can't say it had quite the same sense of 'being there with others' as meetings I've attended in real or Second Life, but it did at least allow me to be somewhat involved in a meeting that I had no hope of attending in person due to work commitments.
It was also excellent in that it was discussing how librarians and specifically CILIP (1) could make use of web 2.0 tools, and it was doing it by.... making use of web 2.o tools! What a good idea!
The only realistic way I've found of discovering which web 2.0 tools I might have a use for and which I don't is to try them. It's also almost impossibly difficult to convince anyone of their usefulness in the abstract but a demonstration, or better yet opportunity to try them out for real, can be a lot more persuasive. (Hmmm, that probably applies to information skills too!)
Lots of interesting issues were raised but I think the only vaguely useful input I made was to suggest that CILIP might look to the ALA (American Library Association) as a role model. I've since realised - after being reminded by a colleague - that the US SLA (Special Libraries Association) also does a lot of good things.
If you'd like to see how it went here is a Twitter feed transcript and wordle.
(1) Note for any non-librarian or non-UK based readers this is the UK librarians professional body.
Showing posts with label virtual librarianship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label virtual librarianship. Show all posts
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Friday, December 07, 2007
Virtually there
I'm now most of the way through the Intermediate course in Virtual Librarianship I'm doing with the University of Illinois. (Does this mean I'm virtually a virtual librarian?)
It uses Moodle and Second Life for course delivery as well as them being the subject of the course, which makes it an interesting double level of learning. I've found myself behaving in a very 'studentish' way at times. Last week I popped into Moodle at the last possible minute to do a quick stab at the previous week's questions before the next class!
What I found really interesting is the effect of having my avatar present with other avatars in a virtual environment for the two hour weekly classes. There have been some weeks when the subject matter was not of the greatest interest to me personally, but I would have found it surprisingly hard to just wander (or indeed teleport) out of the class once I was 'there'. Almost as hard as it would be to do so in a face to face class. Quite different from logging in briefly to add a few comments to a discussion forum on Moodle.
It uses Moodle and Second Life for course delivery as well as them being the subject of the course, which makes it an interesting double level of learning. I've found myself behaving in a very 'studentish' way at times. Last week I popped into Moodle at the last possible minute to do a quick stab at the previous week's questions before the next class!
What I found really interesting is the effect of having my avatar present with other avatars in a virtual environment for the two hour weekly classes. There have been some weeks when the subject matter was not of the greatest interest to me personally, but I would have found it surprisingly hard to just wander (or indeed teleport) out of the class once I was 'there'. Almost as hard as it would be to do so in a face to face class. Quite different from logging in briefly to add a few comments to a discussion forum on Moodle.
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