Nebraska Learns 2.0: My Favorite Posts

Reflecting on last night's post, I realized I ought to have listed all of my favorite Nebraska Learns 2.0 blog posts, if only for my own future reference. Some blogs merited more than one post in my list, because sometimes people say good things on a lot of subjects.

For Thing #11 (on technology):

Clywdshire offers a some cautionary advice on technology and cites several interesting articles and books.

Rayma's Genealogy Blog talked about using Facebook to help identify unclaimed bodies. This blew me away. What an amazing and brilliant use of a technology for something that its creators probably never envisioned. This is technology at its best--generating creative and unexpected solutions to problems.

Susan's experiments in Library Land makes some fantastic points about the fleeting and migratory nature of social technology, the proliferation of IDs and passwords, and inconsistent corporate IT policies.

Upward & Onward may be getting in touch with her inner Luddite, but she makes an eerie point with her example of the emotionless texters in the crowd at a football game.

For Thing #13 (Twitter):

Learning As I Go cited an excellent article, "Is Twitter TOO good?" by Kathy Sierra, in addition to making some good points of her (?) own.

Upward & Onward cited another excellent article, "Twitter Nation: Nobody cares what you're doing," by Helen Popkin. And I love the use of Mr. Hyde Tweety.

For Thing #15 (SlideShare):

Clwydshire posted a beautiful slideshow of paper art.

For Thing #16 (on Web 2.0 and Library 2.0):

The Antiquarian Librarian reminds us not to get lost in the technology, but to stay focused on having meaningful interactions with people. Social networking sites are just another means to that end, and are in addition to, not in replacement of, face-to-face interactions both inside and outside the library. He talks about the library's role not only in preserving culture but in creating it.

Books and More synthesized one short, sweet, salient point from all the articles: the idea that we can not hope to teach all of our users how to use our systems, so we must change our systems to make them so intuitive our users don't need help.

Prairie Prose wrote, "I need to recreate my role in a world that thinks 'it's all on the internet,' but doesn't know how to find and evaluate what is there." Teaching how to evaluate sources, and building tools that help users do it themselves, seems to be a growing part of librarianship.

Susan's experiments in Library Land lifted up key points from several of the readings.

TheCorey may be right about "web 2.0" and "library 2.0" having devolved into meaningless terms that get slapped on various lousy projects to make them seem more trendy.

Upward & Onward leads with a cartoon that I think nearly everyone can identify with, then makes the excellent point that while we're considering what the library will be in the future, we must also consider what it will not be.

For Thing #19 (web-based productivity software):

Learning As I Go explored Google Documents in great detail. I was glad to learn about the ease of including special characters, which I had not discovered on my own. (For some reason, I was unable to post comments on this blog.)

For Thing #21 (YouTube):

In spite of his well-thought qualms about the bandwidth issue of YouTube, The Troglodyte Librarian provided some excellent examples of how his library is using it well for summer reading promos and might use it in the future for tutorials.

Addendum 1/26/2008 -- All of these have now been added to the Nebraska Learns 2.0 Favorite Posts wiki page.