I’m definitely having a little too much fun with all this. Here’s my trading card created using 2 different graphic generators. I used Face Your Manga to create a fun avatar that doesn’t look at all like me. And then fd’s flickr toys to put that image on a trading card.

This could be a fun project for kids and staff. I was talking to a school librarian in a class earlier this week and she was thinking about having students use these cards as a way to present key information for reports on states, countries, biographies, etc. Also as “get to know you” cards at the beginning of the school year. Great ideas!

Flickr is my all time favorite online place. I love photography and what better place to indulge that interest than a site built by photographers from all over the world. It’s just amazing to me how easily we can share the experiences of someone else’s life through their photos.

At it’s simplest, it’s just a really easy way to share photos with friends, family or your library community.  But what I’ve come to appreciate most has been the sense of community here. Through comments left on photos, people make connections and share the events in their lives and communities. And sometimes those connections spill over wonderfully into ‘real life’. And what do flickr friends do when they meet up? Take pictures of course!

Since I’ve been using flickr for a long time now, I used the time for this “thing” to look for features I hadn’t noticed before. Being a travel addict, it was fun to discover the PLACES feature. Here you’ll find pages for places all over the world, places big and small. Each page includes a map, selected photos, featured photographers and flickr groups about that place. What a terrific way to explore new destinations or our own back yards.

And being able to open the wiki up for editing by class participants and other instructors is so handy. During the “taste of 2.0″ class that I teach, each participant creates a wiki page to get a feel for how they work and how easy it is to edit. They’re also welcome to add to and edit the other pages on the wiki. That’s a kind of trust that I wouldn’t have imagined having 10 years ago.

Wikis are easy to create, but do take a fair bit of tending! Mine is very much like my garden: a bit sprawling, a bit out of control, weeds here and there and gems that get hidden.  I would advise anyone starting a wiki to think through what they want the wiki to accomplish, who will be contributing to it and who will be the “master gardeners” taking responsibility for keeping it from getting too disorganized.

It’s also important to set up some initial structure to help contributors and readers find their way around the wiki. Even if you just put up some pages with headings and subheadings suggesting what might be added and where, that will help your contributors overcome that ‘blank page-itis’ that we all suffer from now and then.

One of my favorite library wiki projects is from the Ipswich Library in Queensland, Australia.  Remember When : Memories of Ipswich is “a collaborative, web based story writing project by Ipswich seniors in partnership with the Ipswich Library”.  Such a wonderful  way to for the library and participants to create on online collection of  memories, stories and photos from the town’s past.

Anyways, I’m determined to catch up! And even if a topic is already familiar to me, I’m going to take advantage of the learning time to explore new things about that “thing” and will consider this time my own personal indulgence time. Anything I learn can only help me with the teaching I do. And understanding what others are going through when they participate in a Learning 2.0 project will help me adminster similar programs.

For one thing, it makes it so easy to get all the news and info that I want to keep up with, constantly feeding into my Google Reader account. It keeps me ’stuck’ to all those sources without ever having to seem them out.

Nifty RSS tools (like feed2js) make it possible to ‘paste’ constantly updated information on our web sites. Little boxes full of the latest news headlines, book reviews, blog posts, events, etc. – all automatically updating without our help. Nice.

And how about the ability for us to get our library info out into the community?
RSS feeds of library booklists, events, blogs, topical information – we can use RSS to paste that content on our town web sites, on the pages of community organizations, businesses, schools, into library customer’s RSS readers and so on. That keeps those people and organizations constantly glued to our content and info.

And along those same lines, one of my favorite use of RSS – getting content out of our library magazine databases and into the hands of users. Students doing research can paste RSS feeds for subject searches into their own NetVibes (Pageflakes, iGoogle, Google Reader…) accounts and get frequent updates on the latest articles on their topics. Or use subject searches from databases to put something like the lastest consumer research articles on a subject guide page on your library web site. I call it “exposing your databases”! (the photo shows results from a database search showing up on a web page.)

RSS = magic = better connections

I’m hoping some of the school library folks I work with will take advantage of this terrific opportunity and join in this learning 2.0 project.

We’re also hoping to run a similar project for one of my clients sometime soon, so I thought this would be a fun way to get a feel for how the program works from the learner’s point of view.

Cheers!