abject learning

This morning I had the pleasure of giving a fairly standard overview of weblogs and RSS to a group of librarians. Nice sized group, and the response was gratifying… This is the second time I’ve addressed members of the profession lately, and both occasions have been a blast.

I’ve always had a warm spot in my heart for librarians. I admire their erudition, breadth of knowledge, and the vital service they provide to civil society. And it’s no secret that librarians have embraced weblogs and RSS (though most of today’s attendees said they were new to the subject)… which just makes them even groovier in my eyes. My office at UBC has recently moved out of our Main Library (due to renovations) into more spacious digs, and I’m still in withdrawal. I miss that crazy old building with 7-foot ceilings, and the smart friendly people who worked in it.

I’ve been trying to get my partner to attend library school for years — just so I could experience living with a librarian — but she won’t go for it.

Weblog postings from theInternet Librarian 2003 Conference have been collected.

[Given the sporadic posting schedule here, it’s doubtful that anybody noticed… but I apologise for the technical difficulties last week.]

Last Wednesday was my first delivery of Blogshop @ UBC. My sincere thanks to my co-facillitator Jim Sibley, and to Trish Rosseel from the UBC Library for setting up the event.

To the surprise of nobody who knows me, Alan Levine’s influence is all over this event. A cynic might accuse me of shamelessly looting a superior original version… I’d prefer to think of it as reusing and repurposing educational multimedia. Walking the talk, as it were…

We had an eager and clever group of participants, and though I will make some changes in future iterations — make it shorter, for one — I was pleased with the outcome. The true test, of course, is how many of these fledgling webloggers feel sufficiently informed and supported to take flight with their own weblogs.

A few weeks back it was my privilege to take part in British Columbia’s Educational Technology Users Group’s recent Blogtalk conference. Scott Leslie, the mastermind behind the mighty EdTechPost invited myself and a handful of BC blogger-types to lead an experimental ongoing discussion on weblogs and their educational applications. We were a diverse group, and it quickly became clear we each had very distinctive visions on what the form could and should be about… Scott performed heroically herding us cats into contributing to what I thought was a very successful event. Getting responses from such a wide range of participants, many of whom had only the dimmest sense of what weblogs were about, was also an amazing learning experience for me.

Scott has just posted an archived copy of the event, for which I’m grateful. Jim Sibley and I are presently preparing UBC’s first weblog workshop, and the Blogtalk event was both a good dry run and source of useful material. (Scott’s matrix is a particularly groovy piece of work.)