The Librain

As we have recently had a lot of new members over on the Ning, I just want to write something more about it. First of all, it has not been made as a result of recent controversies over on SLN, but was created by Yin Doran (a.k.a. Elfin) after the fantastic online course that I blogged about ealier in the year.

I want to make this clear, because Yin has been generous enough to make me a fellow administrator, to help her with the Ning. My role, as I see it, is to support the development of it and assist new members to the Ning, if I can.

SLNers – A Network for school librarians in the UK

Membership

The Ning is owned by its members and they set the terms of who can join. All that has been said so far is that we do not want spammers or commercial members, so Yin and I ask prospective members to tell us something about themselves before we “approve” membership.

If anyone were to ask to join who we weren’t sure about, we would then ask the existing members to decide. We are not trying to be an elitist or exclusive club, but just protecting the Ning from spammers in the main.

Activities

Ning allows us to add discussions, groups and resources to be shared with members. Again, the entire membership will decide what they want on the Ning, but the general feeling so far is that, without being boring and humourless, we want to discuss and share things that will help us learn and develop as librarians.

So far, we have shared quite a lot of helpful things, such as Web2.0 tools, books that we enjoy, links with university libraries and book trailers. Members have uploaded photos and videos.

The US TeacherLibrarian Ning is a great example to follow – let’s enjoy learning together!

I have watched the presentation about Social Bookmarking – nice to have another one with a voice narrating. I think that I learn a lot from this kind. I really like VoiceThread in particular as the commenting is nice!

Anyway, back to the presentation. Again, I don’t think that I found out a lot of new stuff as I have been using both Delicious and Diigo for some time. But it did remind me of some things and introduced me to some new terms. I have favourited it on SlideShare and will return to it at a later date to think about it some more. I was interested in the RISAL project and will certainly explore that more when I have the time.

The second presentation : “The Os of Web 2.0: Openness, Originality and Others” is in PDf format and I have downloaded it and printed it out to read. I find it difficult to read long articles like this these days as they take a lot of concentration and I don’t really get the space and time for that – at school, everything is very busy; at home – well, mayhem would be a good word! Also, I am not used to it – I think that I am out of practise these days.

Anyway, I have begun a bubbl.us to show my learning network (I have used this before to create a sitemap for my Library Online site – although this needs updating).

I have been having great fun over the last couple of days getting to know Facebook. For ages, I just had a page with nothing on it, but the other night I was feeling a bit low and decided to play about with it. But then I got really into it, trying to find people that I know. At first I just looked for people that I work with, then I tried to find some friends from the past. However, the trouble is that maybe my old friends, as they are my age, are not really into all of this kind of stuff. But I did find some younger members of my family – which was great!

So… what to make of this interesting phenomenon? It poses quite a dilemma for a professional kind of person.

On the one hand, I could just have fun and put all kinds of silly apps on my page. And I have started doing this a bit.

But… I have read a lot about how employers are looking up people. They are not going to be impressed by some of the very silly things on some people’s pages.

So… I read in Cilip Update magazine today about Judi Sohn’s “12 Ways to Use Facebook Professionally“. I plan to read this and think some more about how I want to use Facebook.

I will post some more on here when I have thought some more.