Week 5: Wikis

Watch this videoclip for an introduction to the concept of wikis or have a look at the Library Success Wiki overview. You might like to look at both of these.

Wikis are built by their contributors - readers who add, remove and edit content. This typically goes one of two ways - an open model where anyone (and we mean anyone) is invited to contribute or a closed model where a select group are invited to contribute. Either way, it is an exercise in collaboration and trust - whomever contributes is expected to meet certain standards of quality and accuracy and should expect, should they not reach these standards, that another participant will edit their contributions. The goal is to use a wiki to create a collaborative piece of information, sharing the knowledge of all contributors.

The collective Wikipedia is the best known example of a wiki - anyone can participate in contributing and editing entries. Wikipedia does, however, employ staff who will freeze a topic if foul play is reported by readers. Errors and obvious fakeries are often (though, not always) corrected very quickly.

But if anyone can edit an entry how reliable is the information? A recent survey by the major German language newspaper Stern found that the German language version of Wikipedia was more accurate than the leading German language encyclopedia, Brockhaus. “The study reviewed articles for accuracy, completeness, up-to-date information, and ease of reading. In 43 out of the 50 articles, the German Wikipedia came out on top.”

Communities of interest
Wikis can be used for sharing knowledge in a community of interest, for example :

• Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki


• Benjamin Franklin: In Search of a Better World Traveling Exhibition Wiki


• Blogging libraries wiki

Workplace applications
Wikis can also be used in the workplace, for example the CIA developed Intellipedia - a collaborative intranet tool.

Some libraries have adopted intranet based wikis for their procedure manuals. Here is an example from Antioch University, New England. Please note many wikis like this one would be hosted on an intranet for staff only access

Government
Some governments are using wikis as ways of consulting with the community or for interdepartmental collaboration. The New Zealand Police Act review wiki is an example of a wiki being used for a legislative review.

Discover:
Take a look at at least 3 of the below:

• SJCPL Subject Guides wiki


• Wisconsin Heritage Wiki (hint – follow the link to "Explore other collections")


• Mint Museums, North Carolina use a wiki to highlight their objects


• Book Lovers Wiki at the Princeton Public Library


• Montana History Wiki (hint - follow the link to the subject guides)


• or some of these library wiki examples
  

Create a blog post about your findings. What did you find interesting? What types of applications within libraries might work well with a wiki?

Explore:

Search for the State Library of New South Wales entry in Wikipedia How could it be improved? Create a blog post about your ideas.

Adventure:
Still another variation in the world of wikis is where your wiki lives - you can install wiki software on a server at your institution (like we do with our website and email) or you can use a service that hosts the wiki for you. For today's exercise, we'll be doing the latter - our Visitors guide to the State Library of New South Wales wiki was set up with a service called PB Wiki. Look at the PB Wiki tour.

Once you have viewed the PB wiki tour add information or edit an entry in the Visitors guide to the State Library of New South Wales wiki. [Hint: PB wiki works best using Firefox as a browser. ]

Week 4: RSS

RSS or Real Simple Syndication. You may have heard the term before, but did you know what the letters stood for? RSS is a powerful tool that can help bring information to you. Take a look at this YouTube introduction to RSS.

The video mentions the following RSS aggregators or feed readers

• Google reader
• Bloglines
• My Yahoo
• NewsGator

You should already have a gmail account. You will be using it in the following activity.

Discover: Go to Bloglines and create a free account. Once your account is created, add at least 5 RSS feeds to your account. Make sure that one of them is the Powerhouse Museum’s picture of the day blog.

Some others you might consider are
ABS for librarians
Fine books
Librarian in black
Victoria and Albert Museum blog

Hint: To search for blogs use blogs or rss in the search term, or use Google blog search to find blogs on your favourite topic

Explore: In your blog, create an entry that reflects on what you searched for and what you found. If you are stuck, you can use these questions to help start you out:

What do you like about RSS and newsreaders?

What sites did you select for your RSS reader?

How do you think you might be able to use this technology in your work?
How can libraries use RSS or take advantage of this new technology?

Did you find any good examples of other library blogs? Remember to take a moment and share your thoughts and comments on someone else’s blog.

Adventure: - (remember this is an OPTIONAL activity) Follow the tutorial on Yahoo pipes and create a Pipe and share it. This is a difficult challenge and may take an additional 20-30 minutes of time.

Week 3: Sharing Images

There are a number of photo sharing communities online. These include Photobucket, Smugmug and Snapfish to name a few. In this lesson we will focus on the one which is perhaps the best known, Flickr.

Watch Online photosharing in plain English (from our friends at Commoncraft)

Flickr is a website that allows users to upload digital pictures from their computer and share them with just their friends or the whole entire planet. Users can “tag” an image with key words that describe the picture. This allows people to search Flickr for pictures that interest them by entering tag words into the search window.

Discover: Go to Flickr. Type State Library of NSW into the search box at the top of the screen and take a look at the pictures that have been tagged with State Library of NSW. What do you think about what you find? Please comment in your blog.

You have looked for some work stuff; now let’s look for fun stuff. How about trying the Sydney Festival? Also try looking for Matthew Flinders, lamington, vegemite – you get the idea, try some of your own key words (tags).

The National Library of Australia is using Flickr as a way of engaging people around the country in building the collection – see Our town example - scroll down to read the tagging guidelines. Look at the advanced search option of Picture Australia you can search for Flickr images here.

Look at Flickr’s FAQ page on tags. And, if for no other reason that it's so well done, take a look at the image below - it was posted by Flickr user cambodia4kidsorg.

This photo illustrates the beauty of tags - there are many many ways to describe whatever it is you are looking at in a photo (in this case: Pen, Marker, Sharpie, Purple). Why not include them all as tags?

Flickr also makes use of groups. Groups are communities of like minded photo posters. And, yes, there are quite a few groups with a library theme. Let Flickr fill in the rest of the blanks - take a look at their FAQ page on groups.

Creative Commons

How you would feel if someone took your photo and made a poster out of it and sold it? Not too happy we would guess, and rightfully so. To help protect the artist’s rights, Creative Commons was created to provide artists the ability to put work out into cyber space but still have control of how their work is consumed by the public. Here is more info about Creative Commons from Wikipedia.

Examples of websites that use Creative Commons to protect their work:

Public Library of Science – scroll to the very bottom of the page and click the "Creative Commons Attribution License" link to see how they use CC.

Flickr – look at this picture that we took. If you look to the right of the pic, under Additional Information, you will see two small icons and the link “some rights reserved”. Click the link to see how we used Creative Commons to both protect and share our work. We even put our picture on a map.

Learning 2.0
The original version of Learning 2.0 was created by the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County. They licensed the course so that other libraries could use it. By agreeing to their licenses terms in Creative Commons, we also agree to allow others to use this content. We have permission to build on the work of Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County, King County Library System and Orange County Library Service . You can see our license on the right hand side of the screen.

Photo posting etiquette
When posting identifiable photos of other people (especially minors) is it advisable to get the person's permission before posting their photo in a publicly accessible place like Flickr. Never upload pictures that weren't taken by you unless you have the photographer's consent and always give credit when you include photos taken by someone else in your blog (as we have above in the case of cambodia4kidsorg).

Explore: have a good look around Flickr and discover an interesting image. Blog about it and be sure to include either a link to the image or a copy of the image itself in your blog posting. For the latter, you can either use Blogger's photo upload tool or Flickr's blogging tool (you'll need to set up a Flickr account for this).

Adventure: Take some digital pictures around the library, upload the pics to your Flickr account, tag with "slnsw2008" and share. Make sure the pictures are public, or we won’t be able to see them. Please respect the privacy of our clients - no pictures of kids or adult faces.

Note: for your images to be able to be searched by their tag (subject) you will need to upload five or more pictures.

Have a look at some pictures taken by our colleagues in King County when they did this exercise - click on photostream.

If you need a bit of help here is a video tutorial about Flickr.

Week 2: Introduction to blogs

What is a blog?
A blog is a shortened form of the word "weblog." A blog is a different form of website. A blog's content and purpose varies. Some are simply personal diaries, some focus on a specific subject such as politics or travel, and some are primarily "newsy" and informational. Also, links to other sites on the web are common. The main features of a blog which make it different from a regular website include:

• Content is presented in an ongoing series of data entries or posts-kind of like a diary or journal
• Typically displayed in reverse chronological order with the most recent entry on top
• Latest news or information is easy to identify
• Allows for comments regarding a specific post from the readers
• For the nontechnical person-no knowledge of HTML or uploading files is necessary. Source

Now to the big question - what use could a blog be in the State Library environment? Here are some examples of how other cultural institutions are using blogs ~ please take a look at each of them:

• Library of Congress blog


• Australian War Memorial exhibition blog


• Powerhouse Museum blog

As you can see blogs can be used to highlight collections, events and exhibitions and to contribute to professional knowledge sharing just for starters!

This week you will set up your very own personal blog - this is where you'll record your thoughts on Learning 2.0 discoveries and the exercises you take part in. Your Learning 2.0 Blog will be set up using Blogger, a popular free online blog hosting service that is extremely easy to use. How easy? It's so easy that the Learning 2.0 Team figured it out - this blog you're looking at is also on Blogger (look at the blog URL - it starts with http://slnswlearning20.blogspot.com/).

What about the SLNSW code of conduct?
Remember that what you put on a blog [either one you create or one you post to] is out there for everyone to see. Our code of conduct applies to all work related blogging. For general information about blogging etiquette it's worth reading the guidelines that IBM provides for their employees.

Discover: Watch this videoclip which shows step by step how to set up a blog using Blogger. Blogger: How to start a blog

Explore: Follow these steps to create a blog for yourself and start blogging
1. Create a Gmail account [if you already have one you can use it]


2. Go to the Blogger website: http://www.blogger.com/Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on'Create Your Blog Now'

This is what you'll see: [hint: Your display name does not have to be your real name - yes, you can be anonymous. The Learning 2.0 Team are the only staff members who need to know your true identity and we'll ask for it later]













3. Name your blog. This is what you'll see:




[hint: Your blog title? Be as creative as you like - remember, no one but the Learning 2.0 Team will know who you are unless you give yourself away. Your blog URL? The easier to remember, the better. And WRITE THIS DOWN... ]

4. Select a Template. There are plenty of options and you can change your template at any time.
5. Write and publish your first blog posting. This is the fun part - just click on the 'start posting' link and go...

What do you write about?
Try something on the theme of Learning 2.0. What do you hope to learn from the program? What do you think about Lifelong Learning? What other blogs have you discovered? What do you like about them? Remember this is out there on the web and may be read by anyone so keep the code of conduct in mind. Can you see a use for blogs inside the Library? How about blogging for a client audience? Comments are the fuel that blogs run on. Feel free to comment on your colleagues blogs – see the Test Pilots Blogroll on the right of this screen.

How much do you write?
The recommended minimum is 150 words The Learning 2.0 Team will be reading your blogs regularly.

Blog registration
Creating a blog is a requirement for completing the course. Click here to log your blog
WARNING If you skip this step you will not receive feedback, or any acknowledgement for completing the program. If you need more assistance contact the Learning 2.0 team

How do you get back to your blog, to add future postings?

1. Go to your blog(we, for example, go to http://slnswlearning20.blogspot.com/)
   
2. Look to the top right corner of the screen and click on the 'Sign In' link (If you've forgotten your blog URL, head to www.blogger.com and continue with the next step)
   
3. Look to the top right corner of the screen and click on the 'New Blogger' link
4. Log in with your Username and Password (these will be tied to the Google account you set up a few minutes ago)
5. Find your blog on the 'Dashboard' and click on it's 'New Post' link
6. Blog away...

Once you've logged in you'll also be able to change your blog settings - there's a series of 'Manage' links in your 'Dashboard.'

Should you run into problems and/or would like more information about blogs and using Blogger , take a look at Blogger’s Quick Tutorial - just keep clicking on the 'continue' buttons at the end of next screen to keep going...

Adventure: Search for other library related blogs using Technorati. Share your discoveries in your own blog. [Remember, this is an optional activity.]

Next week: Sharing images

Week 1: Let’s get started

Welcome to the State Library of NSW Learning 2.0 program. Learning 2.0 is an online program to learn more about emerging technologies on the web that are changing the way people, society and libraries access information and communicate with each other.

Watch: this short video clip Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us illustrates the rapid development of web based communication and information tools and the way they encourage collaboration. [hint: to enlarge the YouTube screen look for a small button at the bottom righthand corner]

Over the course of the next twelve weeks, this website will highlight a selection of these technologies with Discovery, Exploration and Adventure exercises to help you become familiar with blogging, RSS news feeds, tagging, wikis, podcasting, online applications, and video and image hosting sites. A new post will appear each week.

Each lesson will introduce a technology or application. There will be three exercises for you to complete

• Discover ~ what is it and what can it do?
• Explore ~ using the technology and commenting on it
• Adventure [optional] ~ a fun exercise to learn even more

You should be able to complete the program by spending 15 minutes a day working through these activities. If you need help with any activity please contact Ellen or Mylee, or work with your fellow test pilots.

To familiarize yourself with this project, be sure to read the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page. These FAQs should answer most of your questions about this program. And if you don't see your question answered just add it to the FAQ page as a blog comment.

Before we embark on this new online learning and discovery journey lets take a few minutes to review the Seven and 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners as identified by Helene Blowers who created the original Learning 2.0 program.

• Habit 1 – Begin with the end in mind
• Habit 2 – Accept responsibility for your own learning
• Habit 3 – View problems as challenges
• Habit 4 – Have confidence in yourself as a competent, effective learner
• Habit 5 – Create your own learning toolbox
• Habit 6 – Use technology to your advantage
• Habit 7 – Teach and mentor others
• Habit 7 ½ – PLAY!

Discover: Follow this link for a Wikipedia definition of Lifelong Learning

Explore: watch actor Stephen Fry discuss Web 2.0.

So fasten your seat belts, grab your mouse and get ready for a discovery adventure… Be sure to tune in every Monday, for the next "thing" or discovery item ... or better yet, subscribe to the RSS feed. [Don’t panic we’ll cover RSS in week 4.]

Adventure: –We will have our first Adventure activity next week.

Next Week: Creating your blog so you can begin tracking your journey.