A short week

This is a message that, if nothing, else shows this blog is live and well. I'm away on holiday from Thursday night so there will be a break till 10th April.

In amongst writing the inspiring and inciteful paper for MLA North East, we've now finished for a while all our workshops with Year 11s. I was just writing up an evaluation on their use of web-based IM when I saw a nice BBC summary of Meebo at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6498223.stm . It is always good to have something readable in the 'resources' part of the evaluation notes.

I wonder if any of my many readers is interested in a buddying session on ThinkFree ? We have some notes from a first contact session with a local school but it would be nice to develop some more detailed notes.

Twitter

In amongst our more serious joined-up activities, one of our partner libraries asked us for a 'first contact' session on Twitter . We did this earlier this week. I wonder if any of the many readers of this blog have looked at Twitter? It did very well on the 'cool' rating (9/10) although this was noted as "massive waste of spare time" cool (especially in the Twittervision mode) rather than "useful" cool.

However, other first contact ratings were poor (2/10 for ease of registering; 2/10 for ease of use as rated by group relying on product / site information; 6/10 for ease of use as rated by group relying on first contact guidance notes produced locally for session; 3/10 for speed of operation / changes). Colleagues also separately trialled two plug-ins Twitteroo (3/10 overall feel) and Twitteriffic (7/10). If Twitter survives [ how Web 2.0 !!] and our partner library detects continuing use, then we will take it to 'established contact' level and ask Ian Hay if we could hire him as a 'mentor buddy'. He has already kindly commented on recent sustainability / outage concerns.

Useful sources

Whilst working away this week on the document for MLA North East and on our 'chavnet' project with local short-haired Year 11s, I revisited two very useful sources and found another. The first two are the Demos report Their Space and Paul Anderson's JISC report What is Web2.0 . New to me is the excellent article On the Road Again (on the next e-innovations for public libraries) by Linda Berube.

MLA North East

I am helping Neil Bowerbank of MLA North East and a focus group of NE librarians to look at the 'risks' of Web 2.0. A final document will enable librarians to be to counteract any misconceptions that IT managers may have. The first draft of a risk assessment list can be seen at http://www.freewebs.com/paulmayes

Wikis

Tomorrow we are having another workshop with some Year 11s (supported by outreach funding from MLA North East). This workshop is mostly about just engaging them in 'communicating' but we have decided to run a trial of PBWiki (currently the web-based service most liked by both our young people and older community groups) versus the Tiddlywiki-based web service Tiddlyspot. A sample Tiddlyspot site we did this morning is at http://paulmayes.tiddlyspot.com/ . The big possible advantage to us of a Tiddlywiki is the seeming ease of being able to use a downloaded version of the wiki on a memory stick. We very much believe in the power of web-based services but it's nice sometimes to be able to give a learner an off-line version.