The Web 2.0 Winnowing

So I was researching a potential program I want to do on Science Projects and Graphing and came across an excellent site that makes it fairly easy for anyone to make a graph (it's much easier than Excel, but still requires a minimal understanding of how graphs work).

I was multitasking to see whether the last few of the 23 Things had been published while also looking for data to test the graphing software with. I decided it might be fun to graph participation in the 23 Things activities over the course of the nine weeks, using the numbers from the now updated 23 Things Progress Reports.

Below is the graph. We don't have any data (at least that a cursory exam could find) for Weeks 1 and 2 and Week 5 is absent because it was a Play week, so no data was collected. I did expect a downtrend just based on anecdotal evidence here at the branch, but I didn't expect the great purge. We've lost almost 3/4 of the participants! The steady downtrend makes me wonder whether it was something about the program itself, the way it was administered, or the difficulty of trying to squeeze this in to our daily schedules that lead to the decline. The big drop that occured presumably during week 5 also begs the question, What the heck happened there? Again from anecdotal evidence I am hearing that it was a combination of those factors along with simple information overload. People with next to no computer knowledge were overwhelmed by the number of things they felt expected to learn in such a short period of time.

Currently Reading: Goblin Quest, Goblin Hero, and Goblin War

Just a quick note about Jig. Jig is an accidentally brave little (okay runtish) goblin who over the course of his three books so far has had to deal with dragons, necromancers, pixies (multiple times!), and multiple gods! This is a smart, funny fantasy series that still feels fresh three books in. Highly recommended for snarky teens, adults, and fantasy aficionados throughout the kingdom.

Goblin Quest, by Jim C. Hines
Goblin Hero, by Jim C. Hines
Goblin War, by Jim C. Hines

Magically Del.icio.us and the Technocrati Library 2.0

The best thing about this entire weeks exercise from my point of view was the discovery of Del.icio.us and the ...in Plain English series of webcasts on youtube.

Delicious lets me keep track of all the websites and especially blog and webcomics that I mean to read regularly, but never seem to remember to. I created my own delicious page (linked earlier) after adding a few links to the PBCLS Delicious site. (I can't believe no one had added Unshelved yet!)

I looked through Technocrati, and the idea seems to be that it is a highly specialized search engine that indexes blogs and social media and is driven through tag searching rather than more traditional keyword searches. It'll be a good tool to have at my disposal if I ever need to search blogs, but as a library student I'm a bit of a stickler for good sourcing and finding out what Joe Schmoe thinks about something seems of limited usefulness to me. I guess if I wanted to keep up on the buzz surrouding an event and get the unvarnished "man on the street" opinion it would be a good source for it.

The idea of Library 2.0 seems great, but I'm not sure whether our system is ready for it. We're doing the 23 things and we've got a new webmaster that seems to be making some strides (kudos on the incremental improvements of the homepage, though I would have probably taken it to formula and started fresh), but what I hear again and again from my peers is that at every level innovation is looked upon skeptically. From minor changes in shelving materials in the workroom to major rethinking of library policies, my friends in the system only seem to hear one word. "No." I think because the collaborative everyone's-ideas-matter nature of Library 2.0 is so counter to the way our system is run some retraining is going to be needed. We'll get to Library 2.0 eventually, we just need to get some Librarians 2.0 first.