Encore Encore

Well it's been two weeks since I wrote my last post and finished the 'blog' portion of Learning 2.0 (she says gloatingly) but my involvement didn't end there.

Since then I've been 'mentoring' (bribing, bullying, threatening, cajoling - you get the picture) people into starting, continuing, or finishing the program.

It's interesting to see the effect that Learning 2.0 has had on people.


I'ts been called narcissistic (I like to blog - so sue me);

some have embraced it with an almost religious fervour;

others are doing the minimum amount possible (to stop me from nagging them, I guess)


Many people (myself included) suffered from a mid-program slump where the blogs remained untouched for a couple of weeks before finishing strongly with the proverbial 'wet sail'.

Some are finding it very hard going - convinced that it is all too hard for them.

I listened to the podcast of Stephen Abram's talk at the State Library earlier this year - he talked about the hardest thing we've had to learn in the past few years is to double click (actually he said freakin' double click - but you get the picture).

It seems that many people still have a fear of computers and computing despite having used pcs at work for over 15 years - is that the reason people didn't want to web 2.0?

I loved exploring the different tools and thinking about how I'd use them - and not always in a work sense.

Some of the tools I played with in learning 2.0 have become part of everyday life (bloglines, del.icio.us, youtube), others I want to explore more (rollyo).

Perhaps (inhouse) we could look at 'modulising' web 2.0 a bit - instead of completing all 23 things people could opt to complete a youtube module, or a bloglines module - and relate it directly to their library or their position.

Would people find it less confronting if they could complete 4 or 5 tasks, involving say Bloglines, at their own pace and then move onto something else?

Back to Library 2.0 though...I guess what I'm wondering is how can we get library staff to try something that they're convinced they can't do, are sure they don't want to do, and are convinced will bring about the downfall of the free world (and libraries) as they know it?

(Something about you can lead a librarian to a computer but you can't make them blog...)

Roll on Learning 3.0!