Thing #17: Shared Calendars in MS Outlook

I use online calendars a lot. A ton. Almost constantly, to tell the truth. At my old job as a teacher-librarian I was juggling so many balls that without my calendar (and the old catalog cards on which I kept a constantly-updated set of to-do lists) I would have been utterly lost.

These days, I use Microsoft Outlook for my work calendar and Google Calendar to coordinate my schedule at home: my spouse, my daughter, and I each have a different complex and variable schedule that could change at a moment's notice, so we finally jettisoned our paper calendar and rely on Google to keep track of our work schedules and auxiliary shifts and PAC meetings and childcare needs and birthday parties and piano lessons and...and...and...I'm sure I'm forgetting something; let me check my calendar ;-)

So inviting people to meetings isn't new for me, but I'd never known about shared exchange calendars, so it was neat to poke my virtual head into the LV Board Room and see what's going on there.

One caveat/funny story about using Outlook to schedule meetings: five or six years ago, at my old job, I was scheduled to go into a classroom to teach some information skill or online database. I made myself an Outlook appointment so I'd remember it, and invited the classroom teacher as well. I set the pop-up reminder to two days ahead of time, so that I'd remember to prep and make handouts for the lesson.

Little did I know that this meant that the classroom teacher would also get a pop-up reminder two days early. Being something of a technological novice, she couldn't figure out how to make it stop popping up-- I think she was setting it to "snooze" so it kept showing up every ten or fifteen minutes--and eventually she came over to the library to complain and ask me to please stop constantly emailing to remind her about the session!

After that, I stopped setting reminders ahead of time when inviting others to a meeting; instead, I made myself a separate meeting or task at the same time and put the reminder on that. Complicated, but it worked.

Thing #16: Email and Phishing

I read up on email etiquette, which I'm mostly familiar with, and on phishing, about which I thought I was pretty savvy.

Then I took the SonicWALL Phishing and Spam IQ quiz. And I only got 6 out of 10! How embarrassing!

Fortunately, the results page includes a "Why?" link for each question, pointing out clues that should give you a good idea of whether the email in question is phishing or legit. After studying the questions I got wrong, I now have a better idea of what to look for: a message that addresses me by name, an actual link address that matches the address listed in the message, and a cut-and-paste option if the message instructs me to go to a certain website to take action.

OK, then. Good to know.

Thing # 15: Sandbox!

Well, that was fun. I logged into the NVDPL Sandbox Wiki and added my travels to the general list (Can it really be that I'm the only one here who's been to Wales? That seems unlikely, somehow), as well as my favorite book and movie, and a cute kid story from when I was on the LV Children's desk this morning.

Then I noticed that the "Favourite Movies" category, though it was linked in the narrative text on the home page, wasn't listed along with the other sections in the sidebar. I thought, "Hey, this is a wiki, I can add it myself! I am empowered!" So I did.

When I clicked "Save" on my sidebar edit, I got this message:

This page, 'SideBar', gets special handling on PBwiki — its contents will be shown as part of the sidebar drawn on all standard pages. By deleting this page you can remove the sidebar display. If all 3 special pages (SideBar, QuickStart, RecentActivity) are deleted or otherwise don't exist, the sidebar is not shown. In addition, the sidebar is not shown when viewing these pages themselves, like you are doing now.

And I thought, "Gosh, I could delete the whole sidebar right now if I wanted to! In fact, I could delete all the content, including everyone's travels and favorite books! I'm empowered!"

But I didn't.

Anyone else could, though. Such is the double-edged sword of wikis.

Thing #14: The Wackiness of Wikis

I read the Wiki articles listed under Thing #14, and was particularly intrigued by the comments on this post. Amazing how many commenters didn't know that anyone can edit a wiki. I was also surprised at how many commenters, on learning this, were ready to immediately dismiss wikis as an information source.

Like many teachers and librarians, I have my share of tongue-clucking kids-[and teachers]-today-with-their-ignorant-reliance-on-Wikipedia anecdotes. But I have to admit to using Wikipedia A LOT myself, though when I'm doing research for someone else I always try to back it up with a second source--often from a website cited in the relevant Wikipedia article. I think the breadth and collaborative aspect of Wikipedia is one of the wonders of the post-Internet world.

And Wikipedia's unreliability serves as an excellent reminder that all sources--even the blandest of print encyclopedias--have the potential to be unreliable and biased, and that it's always useful to ask the question "Who wrote this, and why?"

Thing #13: Library 2.0...version 1.0

Well. I have a LOT to say about Library 2.0. Maybe too much to fit in a blog post. I read the articles listed on the 23 Things page, and clicked over to a few of the links, and eventually found this 2006 article by Walt Crowley, in which he attempts to sort through all the writing and thinking and discussions on the topic. His survey is pretty impressive, and he seems to come away from it with the sense that people are using the term "Library 2.0" to mean pretty much whatever they want, but that overall it has to do with use of social networking software and how that affects libraries.

I tend to be skeptical when people talk about impending sweeping changes to any widespread institution, like libraries or schools. It's not that I don't like change, or that I don't recognize that it happens; it's more that change of the kind the Library 2.0 pundits are writing about is usually limited by the budget and human resources of the institution: people--both employees and the public--are not going to adapt to an entire new set of skills or attitudes instantaneously, and change, when it comes, tends to sort of creep up on you until you turn around and realize that things are quite different than they were a generation ago.

Here's an example, from the last wave of the technological revolution: when I started working in libraries, in 1990, I was a clerk (like an LAII). One of my jobs was to place holds for people: if they wanted to reserve a book, they had to look it up in the online catalogue, write down some information about the title and themselves on a Reserve Slip, and then I entered it into the computer for them. When the hold arrived at the library, they'd get an automated phone call or a computer-generated notice in the mail. (This system had been implemented before I started, but there were many employees who remembered having to phone each patron to let them know their holds were in.) When the patron came to pick up their hold, we would pull it from the Hold Shelf and check it out for them.

I remember when the online system was upgraded to allow patrons to place their own holds on the public computers. Suddenly, we needed twice as many hold shelves! People placed many more holds when they were empowered to do it themselves.

A few years later, by the time I started library school in 1995, the library had its own website, and patrons could place holds from their home computers, receive email notices, pick up their own books from the hold shelves, and check them out themselves from self-checkout terminals. Much more autonomy for the patrons, much less need for intervention or assistance from library employees. And yet there was still plenty of work: since so many people had such open access to the library, they were placing even more holds than before.

There was lots of anxiety among library people around that time: would libraries as we knew them become obsolete? Were we library-school students being trained for a profession that had no future? Were we the buggy-whip makers of the late 20th century?

As it turned out, no. The Internet revolution happened, sure, and it swept libraries along with it. But the basic shape of libraries has remained the same, despite predictions to the contrary. As with the book reserves example above, the shape of what we do has changed in some ways-- less calling to notify patrons and entering hold information for them, and more database instruction, printer troubleshooting, and handing out of temporary Internet slips--but what library users want from us is pretty much the same: help finding stuff, and suggestions about good things to read (and listen to, and watch) and ways to search for information.

I don't see that changing much in the face of Web 2.0. We'll respond to its demands as patron interest and library resources dictate, whether that be a library presence in Second Life, classes in blogging and Flickr, more responsive online catalogue software (that would be my vote!), and/or other methods that haven't even appeared on the horizon yet. But though the shape of the library may stretch and change, I don't think it's going to be demolished and rebuilt anytime soon.

Thing #12: Facebook, or How I Learned to Love Throwing Sheep

Facebook is reputed to be the social networking tool of the young and hip, but most of the Facebook users I know are middle-aged like me. In Facebook, as in the rest of life, people of similar age and interests tend to clump together, and so it is that without much active effort I have accumulated a gaggle of Facebook friends in their 30's, 40's, and 50's, who are interested in books, our families, and assorted random goofiness.

Actually I have two Facebook pages-- a personal one and a professional one. I set up the professional page so I could start a Facebook group for teens interested in library events and updates.

I set up the personal page so I could throw sheep at my friends.

Seriously. Most of my Facebook friends--the ones who are actual, you know, FRIENDS, but also some of those who are friends mainly in that we have (here it goes, noun-into-verb alert, wait for it...wait for it...) FRIENDED each other on Facebook--anyway, most of those people who I connected with because our our deep interest in words, books, deep thoughts about life, etc.--well, mainly what we do on Facebook is throw sheep at each other, via a silly little Facebook application called SuperPoke.

I know, I know, you can do all kinds of useful things on Facebook, like sending out mass invitations and updates, and letting people know about your recent blog posts, and putting up photos of your family and friends, and all that cool stuff.

But really you can do much of that stuff via e-mail and blog posts and such, while there is no comparable substitute for a good sheep-throwing free-for-all. And when you get tired of throwing sheep, there are lots of variants, like sending flowers, tripping peole, and even seasonal options such as throwing pumpkin pies, throwing Santa, and throwing Hillary Clinton. It's fun, builds community, and is highly theraputic, too.

So, duck! (Baaaaaaaa!)

Thing #11: Technorati

Maybe it's the season sneaking up on me, but for some reason I have the urge to sing the word "Technorati" to the tune of the Hallelujah chorus:

TECH-no-rati!
TECH-no-rati!
Technorati! Technorati!
Tech-NO-ra-TI!

No? Okay, maybe not.

So, as suggested, I checked out Technorati and learned more about how tags work. As I've mentioned before, I'm a terrible and pathetic tagger, and really have mixed feelings about tagging as a useful tool on a large scale; the universe of natural language is just too big and varied.

But I had fun looking at Technorati's tag clouds, and checking out what's popular and rising these days. Seems to me that Technorati would be an extremely useful tool for writers or pundits who want to keep their finger on the pulse of what's being talked about, and it is helpful if you want to see who's linked to your blog or website lately (I did a few vanity searches and found that some surprising people have linked to a couple of things I've written, so that was neat).

As suggested, I did try searching on "Learning 2.0", and found 7,007 posts that mentioned the term, but only 531 with the "Learning 2.0" tag. Which suggests that many other people are just as lazy about tagging as I am. Good to know!