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.

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