Web 2.0 Tools for Educators

Another workshop that was one screen shot of a web 2.0 application after another, this time in SL for 2 hours. Done at Iste in sl voice.

Hope showed me the Lady Liberty sim and told me of her plans for a Sept. 11 event there. She wants to give September Project in SL a featured place in it. I hope I can pull this off.

CARL North Conference - Mashup the Library

A very intense day at Santa Clara University. Began with a presentation about the Horizon Project and their annual report that profiles important new technologies. Raymond Yee explained mashups and how they are created. Then came several workshops that showed screen shots of the websites of various web 2.0 mashup creation devices or websites that use mashups.

One of the most interesting features was an unplanned discussion of Encore, a web catalog add-on that provides a tag cloud to search on. The cloud for each item consists of a) every keyword in the title and lcsh 2) User-defined tags. The users must provide their university id and/or library card number in order to contribute tags, which essentially eliminates frivilous tags. You can drill down by selecting an item, selecting its tags, and following the trail. This provides a sort of boolean search capability. Also met Agnesa Cappalini, whom I have known on sl for some time.

Educause Round Table - Libraries in SecondLife

Attended the Educause Round Table because Loreli Junot was speaking about libraries in SL. Unfortunately, the people at the meeting preferred to talk about their own ideas rather than listen to Loreli. Rather sad to hear people saying "What we need is...." when it was often something already available from ALS or elsewhere.

However, I think Loreli, DaisyBlue and Krull were able to get the idea across that ALS has some awesome services to offer and it would be an advantage for university libraries to join their cooperative reference project. Krull passed out a free search tool that looks very useful. Saw Sheila Y there.

Poster Session at ALA

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Just got back from Los Angeles. The American Library Association conference was at Disneyland. (No joke.) JJ Drinkwater and I did two poster sessions about the Steelhead Public Library and the Caledon Library. Very well received - talked to many people who knew a little about SecondLife and a few who were actually using it.

I also had the opportunity to meet someone I had known inworld for sometime. That was a mavelous experience, and I hope I'll get to meet more of my sl friends as time goes on.