Category: 23 Things Kansas

Week Ten: Video on the Web

I am attempting to get caught up on 23 Things Kansas slowly. I had every intention of participating week-by-week, but between work at NEKLS, maintaing the project site, answering questions on the site by email and by  chat, and helping write two lessons, I’ve admittedly (and not surprisingly) gotten way behind. As tempted as I am to do what Liz did (although it was ingenious, and I’m jealous), I’m still trying to get in the habit of blogging at least a few days a week, and will try to do each lesson as an individual post (although they probably WILL NOT be in week order). Which leads me to this week’s lesson on Video on the Web, led by David Lee King.

I love online video and as the semi-millenial that I am, it’s where I consume most of my media content these days. I lose too much time on YouTube (became a huge Wicked fan, thanks to YouTube clips alone of the musical). In fact, I lose many hours on YouTube, watching different musical clips and the Logan Show. I watch my favorite TV shows online for free, through Hulu and other sites, as I don’t have cable, and until recently, didn’t even have a working antenna. I bought an antenna during the Winter Olympics, when I couldn’t find places to watch them online live, and I wasn’t about to miss the ice skating! I also utilize a NetFlix subscription, and watch funny cat videos, and videos that challenge my thinking.

My favorite one of those ice skating videos? (I linked to four of my favorites above) Todd Eldredge’s “First Knight” free skate at the 1996 World Championships:

I’ve also recorded, edited, and shot a lot of video over the past 12 or so years, starting clear back in high school (yes, I just dated myself). I created a couple of videos last year, for a presentation at the Computers in Libraries conference. Here’s one that’s a quick “tour” of all the KLOW sites (from March 2009).

Finally, I’ve starting shooting more videos with my own video camera, since getting a new iPhone with video capabilities last summer. Most are of my niece and nephew. Having the iPhone has made it very easy to quickly grab and shoot small videos on the fly. Here’s one no family member should yell at me too much for posting:

I love video of all kinds; it’s a way entertain, educate, or to tell a story, even if it’s just through text.

Pivot Points for Change: Libraries and Librarians Blog Posting

I thought you all might be interested in a new blog post by Bobbi Newman. Some of you might be familiar with Bobbi; she is now the digital branch manager at the Chattahoochee Valley Regional Library System. Bobbi will be speaking at the KLA Conference on Thursday, April 8, at 10am-11:30am as the Beta Phi Mu speaker, presenting on Libraries and Transliteracy.

Bobbi blogged this morning about a recent staff day at her library where Buffy Hamilton (who will be speaking at the ESU SLIM Summer Institute for School Librarians) spoke about 9 pivot points of change in libraries. I’m going to post the first five here; many of them fit in very neatly with what we’ve been covering so far in 23 Things Kansas and will be covering in the weeks to come. Check out Bobbi’s blog for the other points as well as the slides from Buffy’s presentation.

The fabulous Buffy Hamilton gave her Pivot Points of Change presentation at my library’s Staff Day last week. The points were inspired by post from Seth Godin in which he states changing everything is too difficult. Buffy applied this to libraries and librarians for the 9 pivot points of change. This is a slightly modified version of her original 9 pivot points of change for school librarians.

  1. Instead of thinking you can only participate in face to face conferences, consider how you can participate virtually
  2. Keep your traditional means of connecting with patrons and colleagues, but innovate at every possible touch point through social media and social networking
  3. Keep reading your print journals, but use a feed aggregator or information portal to access and organize your favorite blogs, journals, podcasts, youtube videos, and twitter rss feeds to stay on the cutting edge
  4. Keep networking with colleagues face to face, but cultivate a personal learning network to broaden your PLN (Personal Learning Network) to include librarians and other professionals from around the world who can inform your thinking, practice, and philosophy
  5. Keep your traditional productivity tools, but use cloud computing to encourage collaboration and information sharing

For those 23 Things Kansas participants who started using Twitter last week, I hope you remember to check in from time to time and keep the conversation going there, and find new resources. I try to remember to cross-post good articles and links I come across to my Delicious account, but I’m pretty forgetful. I usually just end tweeting these articles.

Please let me know if you still have questions about Twitter or about how it might work for you. The pivot point of change #4 mentioned above is a huge reason why I use Twitter so much in my daily professional life. The people I communicate with around the country (librarians and educators) shape my thinking and the tools that I use on a regular basis.

Also, coming up in April, even if you won’t be able to attend the KLA conference in Wichita, you’ll be able to follow from home, through the Twitter hashtag that will be used to track everyone’s tweets relating to the conference. I believe that hashtag will be #kla2010. I’ll post more information about how to do this in the coming weeks.

NPR on Facebook and Social Media Cards

I posted this to the 23 Things Kansas listserv tonight, but loved the resources so much, I’m going to cross-blog them here.

I was quickly skimming through several blogs today and remember someone’s blog post for this week’s lesson on online communities (posted at the 23 Things Kansas website) mentioning an NPR story on Facebook as the reason she finally joined Facebook. Intrigued, I stumbled upon a couple of NPR stories from last year and thought I’d share them with you all; I don’t know if it was what she was looking for, but maybe one of these was it:

  1. Five Years of Facebook
  2. On Point with Tom Ashbrook: Facebook Culture

Also, I posted a link to this third article on the 23 Things Kansas Facebook fan page, but thought it wouldn’t hurt to re-post here:
Social Media Cards: A 2.0 Type of Business Card

Here’s a couple of paragraphs from it:

“You probably know someone just like Juli, because librarians are great at establishing relationships. Talking to patrons, figuring out what they like, helping them find exactly what they need—not a problem. But when it comes to social media, librarians struggle. There should be a policy, a schedule, someone assigned to tweet/facebook/wave for the library—right?

Not quite. The online librarian-patron relationship should be an extension of interpersonal communication. After all, the whole purpose behind social media is to aid in relationships.

Am I saying your library shouldn’t have a Facebook fan page or a Twitter account? Absolutely not. In fact, if you don’t have one now, why not? Online communities are growing, and your library needs a presence on those sites.

But let me ask you this: who do you listen to? An institution or a person you know? Without even realizing it, we ask our friends where they bought their car, if they know a good babysitter, and who cut their hair. Social media serves as a place to enhance our relationships. Since we’ve already established trust-worthy relationships with our patrons inside the library, it’s only natural that we use social media enhance our relationships with patrons virtually.” (end excerpt)

I’ve really enjoyed the comments on the 23 Things Kansas Facebook fan page about how all of you are using Facebook (click on the Facebook icon on the 23 Things Kansas website up at the top or visit http://www.facebook.com/23thingskansas). If you have a Facebook fan page or even a library website with comments enabled, have any of you been able to engage your patrons online and start conversations with them?

How do I use Facebook?

This post is for part of the lesson that Janelle Mercer and I co-authored for the 23 Things Kansas lesson on Online Communities. We are both blogging about how we use Facebook, to give examples to 23 Things Kansas participants.

I’m “old” in Facebook age, joining the network back in its infancy in May 2005 when my college received access to Facebook. That was back in the day when only college students (or alums with college emails) were allowed on Facebook. In the almost five years since, my use of Facebook has drastically evolved. What originally was simply a way to stay in touch with college friends has turned into a way to connect and re-connect with friends and family that are all over the world. We can quickly see what’s going on in each others lives with just a few seconds of looking at each others’ profiles. I love it when my 3-year-old nephew has a new “Logan Show” video posted.

I also use Facebook to connect with library colleagues, getting to know them better, and share resources there. I share lots of tech resources on Facebook, although some other friends think it’s Greek most of the time! I manage the NEKLS Facebook Page for NEKLS libraries, which many of our librarians love, because NEKLS news from our various websites is fed to them right through Facebook.

Site under beta and coding challenge

I’m currently working on tweaking this blog’s appearance and organization. 23 Things Kansas has definitely challenged me to work on developing my coding skills. That link was this week’s challenge: to find a way to quickly and easily deploy a list of links to all the participants’ blogs, a sortable, filterable, searchable solution. I think it worked! We’ll see.

In the process of tweaking this blog (in its perpetual beta), I’ve managed to briefly completely break it three or four times in the last 24 hours! Thankfully, due to great WordPress documentation and Google searching, I’ve resolved most of the issues each time. If things look weird, or bizarre, or nothing is displayed, please bear with me. Blogs are sometimes a work in progress.

One thing I’ve partially accomplished, but not completely yet, is I’ve removed my Twitter Digest posts from appearing on the homepage everyday.  I hope that helps clean this up. I set that up, so the people that are interested in what I have to say on Twitter each day, but aren’t Twitter users, might be able to follow the stream. You can still see those posts under the Twitter category. I hope that helps! More changes to come.