Monday, June 11, 2007

Here I am!

I've started this blog as part of the Learning 2.0 program at Sewanee. OK, I've had a little practice since I developed the blog for the program. However, I did it for the first time just a few short weeks ago.

I started getting interested in what was going on with libraries and Web 2.0 just in the past few months. Up until then, I thought blogs were things that teenagers and 20-somethings did to post what they did every day, and wondered why anyone would care, and decided that I didn't have time for that. I knew that some people blogged about politics, and that didn't interest me either. But lately, I have found that there are all kinds of blogs on nearly every topic imaginable, and I began reading some librarian blogs. Since they all quote each other, I soon found a few more, and then I found some directories of blogs, and then I set them up on my RSS reader (which we will cover in Learning 2.0 in week 4.)

I also found a blog written by Tim Goodman, the Television Critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. I started reading him because he wrote articles about episodes of the Sopranos. Not only does he write interesting analyses of the shows, there are lots of users who follow him and write comments. Of course, I didn't find all this until last month, and as you may know, last night was the final episode of the show. I'm going to miss it. Any other Sopranos fans out there? What did you think of last night's "finale?"

Well, getting back to work issues, in reading the things I was finding in these librarian blogs, I learned a great deal about new tools and how people are using them to share information, and I think it's important that we as information technology professionals need to be aware of them. There is a lot more out there than email. In fact, I keep hearing that students don't even read their email any more. So how do we communicate with them? We need to find out!

3 comments:

jess said...

Hi Patricia,

You asked what problems people had setting up their gmail - and I wish I knew. Seems that most did not remember their usernames right after setting up, and then could not log-in. Since they had JUST set up a new account, gmail would lock them out of starting over again....

Other than that, I have no idea what the problems were. I do know that I should have allowed more time for the task, and that most people in the class had VERY LIMITED computer-internet skills - more limited than I anticipated.

I wish you much good luck with your project! Thanks for visiting my blog!

Jessica
aka Cool Librarian

Margaret Ann said...

That last sentence is a great comment about today's students. If they don't read their email, how do they communicate?! I don't know what I would do without email, but there must be something that's got these students hooked. My students (high school) are all into Facebook and My Space and I thought those (and blogs too) were just for exhibitionists and I wasn't interested. In retrospect, I realize that I, too, need to "keep up with the times". I can't believe I'm saying that!

Jansenius said...

Do you thing blogs are better than listserves for information? I value the professional listserves a great deal and find a tremendous amount of information. Folks there just about become family after you communicate with them often. Just curious how you feel.