Thursday, August 14, 2008

Too good not to share:

Running from here to there today, but this was just too good not to share:
This is what 2.0 means

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Thing 6 - Flickr Mashups


Well, this makes me wish I were still a front-line type librarian, because I could make some really awesome promo materials with these toys. In a lucky convergence, I recently discovered that judicious laminating and sizing can slat-wall enabled signage out of just about any piece of paper! But given my current job responsibilities, there are only so many READ posters I can justify printing out on our expensive color copier, particularly since they feature my kid. Though she is awfully cute...
Eventually I have to figure out what the various Creative Commons licences of flickr actually mean, because I may actually use some of these things when building presentations and training materials. Some of the images I'm finding are really useful, but I do want to attribute appropriately.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Will you wiki, or will you won't?

Catching up here, I've been looking through some of the wiki-discovery sites, and boy, do other people do it better than I do! I've tried using a wiki for some of my collaborative work here, and they tend to fall flat.

I think there are a few problems, not with the technology but with how we/I work. Mostly, I think we're so tied to the immediate call/response nature of e-mail that it's hard to step away from that. Remembering to check/work on the wiki seems almost retro, what with the immediate delivery of feed readers and such. The weekly "here's what changed on your wiki" doesn't really seem to work as a trigger to get people involved, either.

In looking for ways to more effectively use wikis in my work situation, I think I need to:
Make sure everyone understands why we're using wiki, i.e. the importance of the collaborative process.
Make sure everyone understands how the technology works.
Share expectations as far as participation and, for lack of a better word, manners.

I think people are still getting used to this kind of collaboration - there's a real reluctance I've seen to edit each other, and some of the resistance to full exploitation of the wiki's usefulness stems (I think) from misplaced politeness. Clarifying the "manners" or mores of how our wiki will be used might alleviate some of that fear.