On the side (ha!) for the past 3 years I have been supporting my local NPR station through service as a Community Advisory Board member. In the past this has required little more than volunteering for major fundraising events (=free admission! and a nonfinancial way to support the station when broke!) as well as quarterly meeting attendance.
Recently, however, our participation has been upped. And I have Wiki technology to thank for keeping the time commitment and stress levels down! We are (the station, and coincedentally, me too) marking our 30th years this year, and developing a community wide 18 month long celebration. Without revealing our top secret :) plans, suffice it to say, the CAB members will have to be much more involved over the next year and a half than we have in the past. In comes the Wiki.
We meet so infrequently that we can't make decisions or have meaningful discussions and expect tangible results in decent amount of time. So, I suggested a Wiki. I have since built us one, and we offered quick tutorials and words of encouragement for those who feel frightened by technology. I used PBWiki and am just tickled with how user friendly the interface is. I told my less than tech board members (a few of whom were rightfully vocal about their apprehensions) that the application would be as easy to manipulate as any other online tool- like email and so on. They didn't trust that, but at this point, I can see that they have all been to our Wiki and many have contributed.
The one regret that I have with this experience is that I knew little about the Wiki format (other than by word of mouth) before I created ours and understand from friends who are spending an entire semester creating one that the capabilities and long term effectiveness could be much greater than the one I built overnight! But at least I got us going, I guess!
Sunday, March 9, 2008
All About the Tech
So, moving on to further discuss my experiences with the technology, I can say that at first it was a bit overwhelming. Like many newcomers to the plethora of ever-expanding 2.0 technologies, my mind was boggled by the possibilities. Once I set about narrowing my scope, however, is when I found that the virtues of blogging sing.
Having said that, I must sing the praises of the RSS feeds, though confess that I never enabled them for my intended purpose. I had meant to use the tool to track my fellow coworker's blogs, rather than looking each of them up every few days or so. When I set up my Google REader, however, I enabled the feed for Boing Boing, a truly fabulous site endorsed by the technorati. I had no idea what I was getting into. I remember opening my reader to find that Boing Boing had hundreds of feed updates on my account. These people are great, but way to prolific for my habits!
To narrow my RSS experience/complaints, I imagine would be showing my own inabilities, as surely these kinks can be worked out (or already have been addressed- if only I had set things up appropriately). Basically, I would be total RSS convert if I could get my Yahoo - where I already live- email to accept the feed and sort it for me. I never moved my recreational email over to Google reader and thus even opening the account was just another extra step that I didn't get used to taking. Thus, Boing Boing inundated me with their cool techno/eco/artistic posts because I checked in too rarely and I quickly fell out of love.
And to this day, when I find a site I wish to subscribe to, the subscription process is halted by the incompatibility with my Yahoo. Silly, maybe. But seems possible to fix (knowing quite little about how it all really works, just thinking that surely, Yahoo wants to play, too!;)
Having said that, I must sing the praises of the RSS feeds, though confess that I never enabled them for my intended purpose. I had meant to use the tool to track my fellow coworker's blogs, rather than looking each of them up every few days or so. When I set up my Google REader, however, I enabled the feed for Boing Boing, a truly fabulous site endorsed by the technorati. I had no idea what I was getting into. I remember opening my reader to find that Boing Boing had hundreds of feed updates on my account. These people are great, but way to prolific for my habits!
To narrow my RSS experience/complaints, I imagine would be showing my own inabilities, as surely these kinks can be worked out (or already have been addressed- if only I had set things up appropriately). Basically, I would be total RSS convert if I could get my Yahoo - where I already live- email to accept the feed and sort it for me. I never moved my recreational email over to Google reader and thus even opening the account was just another extra step that I didn't get used to taking. Thus, Boing Boing inundated me with their cool techno/eco/artistic posts because I checked in too rarely and I quickly fell out of love.
And to this day, when I find a site I wish to subscribe to, the subscription process is halted by the incompatibility with my Yahoo. Silly, maybe. But seems possible to fix (knowing quite little about how it all really works, just thinking that surely, Yahoo wants to play, too!;)
Start Your Engines
So, here we go.
Looks like I was supposed to be blogging throughout the week, but since I only had this morning to actually dive in, here goes.
Through ACPL's Library 2.0 initiative, I have been blogging before. I like this assignment in that it allows me to focus on some of the library blogs of interest that I haven't made time for in the past. I will need to add the Shifted Librarian to my Google Reader (more on that later) and keep a del.icio.us on Library Grrrls just for fun (and candid advice).
A personal note on blogging is in order. During my library's 2.0 initiative, I was going through a painful divorce. I started my blog and found I had little to say, I was so emotionally consumed with my personal life. So, alas, I did something I never thought I would- with astonishing results. I posted a library journal - with a strict personal vow not to bash my husband, who I still very much wanted to be married to- but rather to air my grievances, and frankly, get it out of my head.
Confessions were not over the top, and the blog was mostly read by my internal colleagues, who were by that time long friends who witnessed the growth of my family. I found this experience incredibly lifting. Just getting it out allowed me so much freedom of thought to carry on with what I needed to do day-to-day. The support I received, the "oh yeah," "me too"s that I got all buoyed me on. I felt, for the first time, like a real part of the fabric of my public library. Eventually, and quite quickly, really, the format and I parted ways. It helped me through a difficult time and I so enjoyed sharing (and learning to!).
Looks like I was supposed to be blogging throughout the week, but since I only had this morning to actually dive in, here goes.
Through ACPL's Library 2.0 initiative, I have been blogging before. I like this assignment in that it allows me to focus on some of the library blogs of interest that I haven't made time for in the past. I will need to add the Shifted Librarian to my Google Reader (more on that later) and keep a del.icio.us on Library Grrrls just for fun (and candid advice).
A personal note on blogging is in order. During my library's 2.0 initiative, I was going through a painful divorce. I started my blog and found I had little to say, I was so emotionally consumed with my personal life. So, alas, I did something I never thought I would- with astonishing results. I posted a library journal - with a strict personal vow not to bash my husband, who I still very much wanted to be married to- but rather to air my grievances, and frankly, get it out of my head.
Confessions were not over the top, and the blog was mostly read by my internal colleagues, who were by that time long friends who witnessed the growth of my family. I found this experience incredibly lifting. Just getting it out allowed me so much freedom of thought to carry on with what I needed to do day-to-day. The support I received, the "oh yeah," "me too"s that I got all buoyed me on. I felt, for the first time, like a real part of the fabric of my public library. Eventually, and quite quickly, really, the format and I parted ways. It helped me through a difficult time and I so enjoyed sharing (and learning to!).
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