• info about the course is here
• the preliminary program of stellar presenters is here
• the participant application is here
• the deadline for participant applications is December 1, 2006

Questions? Get in touch with us at sociallibrary AT gmail DOT com!

If you have any practical examples of social tools at work in your library, consider putting in a proposal to share your experience and ideas with others who might be able to benefit from them. More details on what we’re looking for are here. It’s going to be fabulous, you know you want to be involved! Email your ideas to us at sociallibrary AT gmail DOT com.

You might remember Meredith Farkas’ post from some time ago on the topic of access to free, online, educational opportunities. Well, toward the end of that post, Meredith began forming an idea for a free online course, taught by people with expertise, using freely-available software and web-based tools. Well, like a lot of Meredith’s ideas, I loved it instantly, and I fired off an email that said: Meredith, count me in (and she did!). And, also like a lot of Meredith’s ideas, this one was not left wilting on the Pile of Good Blog Ideas Soon Forgotten, she actually pulled together a group of librarians and we’ve been working out the details on a course that will start next February. I am excited and delighted to be working with a bunch of brilliant librarians (Meredith Farkas, Dorothea Salo, Michelle Boule, Ellyssa Kroski, and Karen Coombs) to bring you “Five Weeks to a Social Library”!

While the Planning Committee will most certainly have a hand in content-creation, we wanted to open up participation to anyone else with expertise who would like to be a part of this exciting educational opportunity (we’re hoping to attract both familiar and new voices). Our CFP, below, should fill in all the details on the sort of content we’re looking for (topics, formats), but if you have any questions at all, feel free to contact us at sociallibrary@gmail.com.

Update: Wow, thanks for all your emails expressing interest in signing up for the course! Watch for the Participant Application, coming in October!

CFP: Five Weeks to a Social Library
Location: Online
Dates: February 12 – March 17, 2007
CFP Deadline: September 22, 2006

We are pleased to present Five Weeks to a Social Library , the first free, grassroots, completely online course devoted to teaching librarians about social software and how to use it in their libraries. The course was developed to provide a free, comprehensive, and social online learning opportunity for librarians who do not otherwise have access to conferences or continuing education and who would benefit greatly from learning about social software. The course will take place in Drupal and on a MediaWiki installation, and will also involve a variety of other popular social software tools. The course will make use of synchronous components, with one or two weekly Webcasts and many IM chat sessions being made available to students each week. The course will culminate in each student developing a proposal for implementing a specific social software tool in their library.

The course will take place between February 12 and March 17 and will be limited to forty participants. However, course content will be freely viewable to interested parties and all live Webcasts will be archived for later viewing.

We are currently welcoming proposals for live presentations and course content on the following topics:

• Blogs
• RSS
• Wikis
• Social Networking Software and SecondLife
• Flickr
• Social Bookmarking Software
• Selling Social Software @ Your Library (no live Webcasts on this topic)

We want the presentations to be as practical and useful to as wide a library-related audience as possible. Preference will be given to presentations that 1) are very “nuts-and-bolts” or 2) describe a successful use of the technology that could be replicated in different types of libraries.

We are looking for presentations in the following formats:

• Webcast – a one-hour live online Webcast that will be archived.
• Screencast/Vodcast – no more than 30 minutes (please note: most commercial screencasting software offer a 30-day free trial).
• Podcast – we welcome proposals for podcast presentations, podcast interviews with innovators in the field or podcast discussions between innovators in the field.
• Text presentations – we will accept a very limited number of text presentations, but we greatly prefer presentations that incorporate audio and video.

In addition to developing a presentation, presenters must also make themselves available via AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) for questions from students for one-hour during the week their presentation is shown.

All presentations will be made available under an Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Format of Proposal: 250 – 500 words, written. Proposals are a way for the review team to assess your contribution quickly. Please do not submit full presentations.

Proposals should include the following:

• Full name of presenter
• E-mail address of presenter
• Web-site and/or blog URL of presenter
• IM screenname(s)
• Institutional affiliation
• Brief biographical information (under 150 words)
• Include same personal information as above for any additional presenters after the lead presenter (if applicable)
• Presentation title
• Format(s) you are willing to present in (if you are flexible about the format you are willing to present in, please note that)
• Presentation Abstract (250 – 500 words)

Proposals must be submitted by September 22, 2006 via e-mail to sociallibrary@gmail.com. Any questions about the CFP process can be addressed to the Planning Committee at sociallibrary@gmail.com.

Proposal Review: Proposals will be reviewed by the planning committee.

Planning Committee:

• Michelle Boule
• Karen Coombs
• Amanda Etches-Johnson
• Meredith Farkas
• Ellyssa Kroski
• Dorothea Salo

Key Dates:

• Deadline for Proposals: Friday, September 22, 2006.
• Notification of Acceptance: October 1, 2006.

So, anyway, I’ve been mulling things over in my head (because even if you’ve given yourself “time off”, you never truly check out, do you? I don’t. I feel like I’m constantly thinking about this course, obsessing even) and I thought I’d jot some thoughts down just to stop them from rattling around in my brain. Here they are then, some random thoughts, loosely related to one another, if at all (note: this will make more sense to you if you read the course syllabus first).

To start with, this is a course about technology but it’s not a course about technology. The technology is important, yes, but the focus of the course is public service and how (and why, if, etc.) social software and related technologies can play a role in providing better service to library patrons. OK, good, we’ve got that hammered down. BUT, how much do the students need to know about the actual nuts & bolts technology? I’ve never been fond of the “you don’t have to know how it works, you just need to know how to use it” school of pedagogy when it comes to the under-the-hood technology details (and it’s too easy to fall into that trap with Web 2.0 tools since they are designed to keep you out from under-the-hood!) and, anyway, these are graduate students, so I don’t think they can expect to be let off the hook that easy. Fine. But where to draw the line? For example, yes they need to know about RSS; yes, they need to have a general idea of the XML structure that makes an RSS feed do what it does; but do they need to know the initmate differences between RSS 0.90, 1.0, 2.0, atom, … etc.? That’s just one little example (when issues like these muddy the brain I find myself vacillating between “jeez, a 13-week course” and “jeez, only 13-weeks for this course!”).

So. What’s the best way to get everyone to the same level of understanding when it comes to the technologies? If this was an in-person class, I’d probably be inclined to split the students up into groups and have the groups present a “this is what it is, this is how it works” overview to the rest of the class, allowing everyone to gain a good understanding off all the technolgies and a really in-depth understanding of one of them. BUT, this is an online course. What’s the online equivalent to group presentations? (I know, I know, blogs and wikis. What else? Seriously, I’m actually wondering what else. Because I can’t very well expect a group of students to use a wiki to present their material to the rest of the class three weeks before wikis are covered in the course. Or can I?).

And speaking of wikis, what about the class blog? Or the class blogs (yes, plural). I read a lot of the comments and constructive criticism about the way various technologies were implemented for the ALA L2 bootcamp (sorry, I’m being link-lazy. But this discussion was so well blogged up that you probably know where to find the posts, don’t you? Do let me know if you don’t!) and I have to agree with those who felt that a single class blog made more sense than forcing participants to keep their own blogs (especially when some of those participants already blog in other venues). I’ve had a similar experience myself with the various continuing ed courses I teach on blogging. However, the one key difference between a continuing ed course and a grad course might be on my side here: the grade! If part of your grade rides on your blog posts, I’ll wager that students will blog wherever I tell them to! Of couse, I’m being partly facetious here because I really do want to do whatever provides the best possible learning experience and I’m honestly not sure what that is. I’m leaning towards a single class blog but I don’t know that I have a good reason why. Same goes for the class wiki. And the class del.icio.us account. You get the idea.

These are just a few of the prelim thoughts that have been sucking up brain power over the last few weeks. If you have comments/ideas about any/all of this, if you’ve tried some of these things and they failed miserably/suceeded beyond your wildest expectations – I’d love to hear about it! And I’ll probably keep going with these thought-dump posts as I work out the planning and logistics because the mere act of articulation somehow helps me get the issues straight in my mind! (That’s not too supremely selfish of me, is it?)