Been away

A recent bereavement has meant I have been away from the University quite a bit. Anyway, hopefully this week I can post here the beginnings of a list of the various Web 2.0 technologies/services and some outline notes on 'brands' we have tried etc.
Had some good news in that I am now a member of the JISC Community of Practice which I hope will increase our knowledge of what's going on (there's so much !!).
Last weekend we had a successful Web 2.0 workshop with 'young men with short hair' (they haven't decided yet on their collective noun - it's much easier with moshers, goths, etc). I would post a picture but haven't mastered the well-known Blogger problem of photos changing the line-spacing of the message.

Welcome

In the UK there has been relatively little take up so far of Web 2.0 in libraries, archives, community groups, adult education, etc. There are leading UK technology evangelists (eg Brian Kelly who has helped me a lot) but in the USA and Canada there has been much more examination of the potential. These early Web 2.0 adopters (like with the Open Source movement) are enthusiastic and show a desire to help others. University of Teesside Library & Information Services (L&IS) has benefited tremendously from such buddying from the USA and Canada as it has started to use Web 2.0 in its Aimhigher and MLA North East funded work with young people and groups in the Redcar & Cleveland area of the Tees Valley. L&IS has started to buddy other libraries etc in turn (eg using Skype). However, sometimes enthusiasts can seem off-putting to organisations who are concerned about how to get started.

Also, the new ideas, the software and the brand names can change very often. Fashions amongst users (especially young people) can change rapidly also. For all these reasons L&IS has coordinated the idea of Web 2.tees as a structure to allow an alliance of libraries, schools and community organisations based round Redcar & Cleveland to experiment with using the various technologies in a collective way that allows mutual support, capturing of good ideas / materials / instructions and an organisational / evaluation underpinning from L&IS.

The main early thrust of the project involved developing a standard evaluation template for comparing available services (especially for ease-of-use, peer perceptions and commercial sustainability). Other one-off highlights so far in the project include a new scheme (sponsored by MLA North East) that financially rewards learners who identify new possible ‘cool technologies’ and this has introduced us, for example, to ArtPad which has proved very useful and popular for learners to produce and send simple graphics and to The Cloak for anonymous searching. The use of wikis with school groups (eg http://aimhigher.pbwiki.com/) has also been popular.

This blog (although maybe it could have been better as a wiki !!) is to be the place where local schools and libraries will further develop a list of all the main Web 2.0 technologies and within each technology there will be our current thoughts/preferences for different services. For example:

• a local University of the Third Age group preferred gather.com to MySpace or Bebo although we have had concerns about Gather's occasional bandwidth problems before today's transition to a new datacenter
  
• why our schools group chose pbwiki.com
• our use of Google (Writely) for collaborative authoring but recent interest in 37signals.com
• our current comparison with a community group of flickr with Our Story
  

Paul M
IM: paul_mayes@hotmail.com
Skype: paulmayes