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!

This time I am looking at the Web2.0 tools that I use for collaboration. To focus myself, I am going to concentrate on those I use to connect with colleagues, rather than how I use Web2.0 with students. Those of you who know my work situation will be aware that I am not currently in the position to develop very much on the teaching side – but I am saving up loads of ideas for the Autumn Term onwards!

I talked about the use of Twitter in the previous post on this subject, in terms of communication. But a really amazing example of collaboration happened yesterday!  Using Twitter, around 150 librarians joined together to discuss the use of Web2.0 by our professional body, CILIP. We were able to follow, to some extent, the meeting that was taking place at CILIP’s headquarters in London and discuss amongst ourselves. By using the tag #cilip2 in all of our tweets, it was then possible to follow what was going on. I used Twitterfall to track the tweets really easily. If you want another way of seeing part of the discussion then look here.

#cilip2 – Twitter Search

It felt very exciting  and groundbreaking to be able to take part – and I have found a lot of colleagues from other sectors to follow on Twitter. In fact, I am beginning to feel that my Twitter community is becoming my first “port of call” for professional development and information these days – there are so many brilliant people out there! And I am developing a Twitter addiction!

Here is a Wordle based on the #CILIP2 tweets:

From Dave & Bry on Flickr

That leads me on to the second Web2.0 tool that I want to talk about here. Some years ago, when I still ran Strongest Links (for those of you who don’t know, that was a site I ran to support UK school librarians), I heard about wikis. I thought that a wiki would be a great tool for school librarians to use to share information and ideas. So, I set up a wiki and loads of people signed up – but, very few people actually put on any content. I think that it was a bit before its time.

SLNers – A Network for school librarians in the UK

Recently, a group of us took part in an online course (mentioned in previous posts) and, as a result, one librarian, Yin Doran, set up a Ning for us. Now – that is beginning to take off! I think that she chose the right technology at the right time – key to success! We can discuss things on the Ning and add files, photos and videos. I think that it enables a greater depth of discussion than can be achieved on a large mailing list like SLN. Also, so far, it has tended to attract librarians who are trying to work at a level beyond the basic stuff. Yes, we are all at different places in our learning curves, but we are trying to lift our eyes above the daily, mundane tasks, which we all have to do, and push things forward. I have also started a discussion on the Ning called “Twitter Helpdesk” to support colleagues finding their way on to Twitter.

Please, no Dewey questions!

An interesting training opportunity is taking place from the 20th February to the 1st March. A group of us from SLN (School Librarians’ Network) are joining an international group on an online course – “21st Century Learning : Professional development to transform school libraries with Web 2.0“.

I remember many years ago a lot of school librarians doing online ICT training (can someone remind me what it was called?). This, however, is a huge step further as we are taking part alongside school librarians, teachers, ICT specialists and many others from across the globe. Exciting times!

First of all, we need to get to grips with Sosius – an online collaboration tool. I am feeling my way around this and have made contact with most of the participants in the course. Also, I have now posted a few comments to discussions.

I will be blogging here, hopefully on a daily basis, throughout the course to show the progress that I am making!