Educational Journey

Before this course I had never heard of wikis, only just heard of blogs through another LIS course, never looked at Del.icio.us, nor tagged anything in cyberspace or heard of folksonomies, never heard of Second Life and the virtual world of gaming. (I had a Facebook account but only on a recommendation of my children) It has been an enlightening journey through the world of social software and libraries and and something that I would never or probably never explored had it not been for this course. It has been great to have a 'hands on' practice into the world of blogs, wikis etc and the knowledge I have learnt will be invaluable for future career prospects. I would recommend this course to anyone in the MLIS program as being vital knowledge in the world of libraries be they academic, public, special or anything else. Now that we have learnt this much it is important to keep up with the ever changing virtual world and take advantage of the social software in our future library careers. I will most certainly check back on all of our blogs and especially those of the more prominent writers that we have read over the weeks. I am not sure if I will maintain my blog. I will need to have a theme/goal/subject to pontificate about and will not keep it just for the sake of it. However I will expound the advantages of wikis to anyone that I will be involved with in writing a report, putting together a presentation or just accumulating information on a topic. I have not checked my RSS feeds in a while basically because of time constraints and as this is not especially important to me, I will probably not maintain the Google aggregator. I enjoy visiting a small number of websites and will continue to do so as time permits. There is only so much time that I wish to devote to Internet, virtual and technological interests and that is already taken up with work related tasks, e-mail, MSN and Facebook. However I will pass on the knowledge that I have gained to anyone who is interested in my work or private life. Thanks Amanda for enlightening me to this world of social networking.

Pass the web page please.. and the winner is....

Web 2.0 has been defined as 'transforming the web into a space that allows anyone to create and share information online - a space for collaboration, conversation and interaction; a space that is highly dynamic, flexible and adaptable' (Karen Coombs). The key to this comment is that the space has to be flexible and adaptable. Social software definitely does have a place in library service provision as has been explored throughout this course. Obviously some aspects of social software lend themselves more efficiently and effectively to library service provision such as blogs which are adaptable to whatever information the library is communicating to the community. They can be set up for a purpose, or for a specific duration or as an ongoing part of the library webpages. I think that blogs are probably the low fruit on the tree, be it an apple, pear or cherry tree as they can be that adaptable.

I see wikis as being set up for a specific purpose and of more use internally to a library system than by inviting the community to participate. Wikis are used to amagamate ideas and present them in one place which is accesssible for anyone with the password.

Information organisations can harness the capabilities of tagging and folksonomies. Information can be organised by subject and tagged and be accessible to anyone interested to search for it.
The tagging of websites and information can be done by library staff and then be made accessible to anyone. In this way different aspects of the information is kept in one place with associated subjects and tags.

Online social networks such as MySpace and Facebook do not seem to me to so adaptable for library communities. These are not webspaces that anyone expects library information to appear and I think that they should remain as social networking sites aimed primarily at connecting individuals or specific groups without the parameters such as a library. Some libraries have been using Facebook as promotion for events but I see that these could best be communicated by way of a blog instead. This is clearly libraries using the social software networking sites just because they can.

I like the idea of Second Life and the library community that has been established there. However I am not sure how much of this is 'playing' or 'educational' or both (which is fine) but it must take a considerable amount of time to participate in this to the extent whereby something is gained..and how much of the virtual world translates into the real world? or is that an irrelevant and not a very important question or concern? This type of software will only be accessed by a small minority of those that know how, have time to and feel there is a benefit to doing so.

My votes for social software and libraries goes to blogs primarily as being an online extensions of newsletters to the community which allow immediate feedback, can be continually updated and can communicate any kind of information and be accessed by a larger number of patrons.