Learning 2.0

Howdy, sorry I'm late (it took until now to get all of the sites that we'll be using in this course unblocked on the network).

I'm probably coming to this course from a different perspective than most. I've never worked in a library before I took on my current role, and the work that I do is only loosely library-related. For a while now I've been interested in web 2.0 technologies like blogs, Flickr, etc, and I've used them quite a bit from the user perspective, but I haven't done too much from the content creation side of things.

I'd like to learn a bit more about how these technologies can be useful from a marketing perspective - a library can be forgotten by the rest of the department while they're working through their normal work weeks, but if you can create interesting, relevant content that's easily accessible, you've suddenly created more interest. It will be interesting to see what others come up with as a result of doing this course.

One of the major difficulties I can foresee is actually being able to access the sites to make use of these technologies. Some departments are more restrictive than others about what sites can and cannot be visited. If your department blocks every URL with the word "blog" in the title, it's going to be difficult to implement a lot of the ideas that we'd learn about and get excited about here. It's understandable from the department's point of view, but I think there will be some work ahead of us to make the case that sites like blogger, flickr and youtube can be useful and should be allowed in some cases.