Blogs and Nings for Classes

Michael Stephens

In response to Michael Stephen’s Tweet during our More Than Books presentation, here are some brainstorming on blogs or Ning social networks for academic courses.

For Michael Stephen’s current course blog for the class, each student has their own blog, similar to mine, where we post our own assignments that are located on the course blog along with syllabus information, readings, videos, and blog communication. We were given instruction on how to use an RSS feed to see updates on the course blog and on our peers’ new posts on their individual course blogs. The only difficulty I have with this is that I rarely remember to check my RSS feed and I don’t currently know if there is a way to send update notifications as an email message, but I check the syllabus blog every week because of assignments. I understand that I am in a social networking class, and it is natural for us to learn how to make a blog, but I also think it is good for all students to develop blogging skills and think about creating content that is professional and able to be searched on the internet. More and more leadership positions are asking for examples of web identities or content to supplement resumes. Students can keep the blog going if they choose and use it as a professional extension of their portfolio.

Here is an example I found of how Ning can be used to conduct a class social network (there are many more, search for “course” or “class” on the Ning search page): Kienzle’s English course

You can’t explore the features here without becoming a member of the group, but you can see how he organizes course content on his main page. The Ning format can be moved around to fit your needs, and you can add as many or as little features as you’d like. It can get junked up pretty quickly if you add everything, though.

Here is a site that has most of the available options, to get a better idea of how things can be adjusted: Library 2.0

My suggestion would be to set up a new account and play with the features and set up, or join a group to explore when you’re ready. Its free, no strings attached.

Looking at the English course Ning site example, you could have a listing of assignments or full syllabus on this page, or have a document of the syllabus like he does, or you could even provide a link to your syllabus blog in the style of Micheal Stephen’s for our Library 2.0 class if you want to keep them clean and separate. From here, you can have your students add their own profiles and post their assignments in forums, share ideas with blogging, and they receive email notifications when new content is added. You can post events, too, and add a function that shows your delicious updates if you choose to get a delicious account for your class up and going. To keep the assignments manageable on this kind of setup, I think making a forum for each assignment then having your students post responses there will keep the grading easier so you don’t have a pool of constant blogging that you have to sort out. What’s great about Ning is that every student can participate with each other and you, so there is very open communication. You can always have papers sent to your email for privacy on some assignments if you’d like. A possible downside is that they won’t have a personal blog to add to their portfolio after this class, but they can definitely add social networking skills to their professional bag.

Brand Monitoring: Following Brooklyn Museum’s Blazing 2.0 Trail

It was easy finding the virtual talk around the web about Brooklyn Museum and their innovative social networking membership 1stfans. There is rich conversation to, from, and about Brooklyn Museum’s membership program on platforms all over the Internet. Mostly because they started it. Through developing a presence on Twitter and Facebook, posting content to sites like Flickr and Youtube, and creating the 1stfans blog and vodcast, they have started up a conversation with their community that has sprawled out into an ongoing web of discussion, creation, and feedback. Follow the links below to see how conversations have blossomed into interweaving, inspirational inter-connectivity.

A search for “1stfans” on Twitter brings up a mesh of museum-goer, museum-generated, and featured artists’ creative content, opinions, and conversations. Among the first of my discoveries was the web around 1stfans featured artist of the month of January 2009, An Xiao. You can follow an interview by critic Hrag Vartanian with artist An Xiao, see links to reactionary photographs on flickr by Random Thoughts, a viewer who experienced the exhibit, and read feedback from the interviewer Hrag to to Random Thoughts for their participation. Artist An Xiao thanks blogger “! info:bubble. heavybubble makes me happy!” for writing about her work on his blog, where he posted the vodcast by Brooklyn Museum that was created by them and posted on their blog and on Youtube, where director Andrea Blythe gave the artist a complimentary comment. Wow. That was just some of the buzz around one artist.

Other exchanges are made over the 1stfans artist talk with Matt Held this month for Target First Saturdays, a free event hosted by the museum every first Saturday of the month, open to the entire community. Great emphasis is made to connect the virtual social networking world of 1stfans with monthly face-to-face events where online friends can meet in person and stay connected on the web until the next event. Friendships are made, bonds are strengthened, and people become more devoted to attending Brooklyn Museum events to engage with their community. Fans thank Matt for his talk and the artist thanks them back. One 1stfan member, azita99, is bummed that she missed out on her first 1stfan meet, and posts a link to a 1stfan blog writeup from the event that made her long that she could attend even more. She wasn’t even there and she is still sharing about it. That’s the power of networking.

Searching the site for “1stfans” brings up tagged photographs of museum events taken by the museum and participants tagging their own photos. Brooklyn Museum documents a tour of Matt Held’s studio posted to hype up his arrival. Other photographs advertises a printing event that invited visitors to bring in found paper for Swoon Studio to screen print on for free, along with tons of pics from the event taken by happy campers holding up their souvenirs. There were photos of the work and program by the Conservation Department on Animal Mummy Research taken by all, and other photos capturing experiences on a puruse through the rest of the museum. The brand name 1stfans is easy to tag and share captured moments with others searching for content and conversation around the museum events. The Brooklyn Museum photostream documents installations, events, interviews, studio visits, and gives expanations in captions about the event with tags for searching. Viewers give feedback to the museum directly through comments on the photographs.

A search for “1stfans” on Technorati holds news and reviews around 1stfan membership and activities. There are blogs advertising upcoming events, documenting those past, and sharing the successes and sometimes criticism of the program. Some use 1stfans as a model of how social networking tools can help connect other museums with their communities.

Reviews of 1stfans:

Brooklyn Museum Adds the “Social” to Their “Social Media” Campaigns at Great Dance, Art Charities Turn to Online Techniques at Charity Navigator Blog, and Art on Twitter: Yes, but is it Twart at guardian.co.uk review 1stfans activities, some relating it to other social networking experiences.

Blogs on the An Xiao experience:

Artist An Xiao on Twitter as a Medium at http://maryanndevine.typepad.com, My Interview with An Xiao This Wednesday and Two Tweeters & a Tweety Bird: @thatwaszen & @hrag’s Chat by Hrag Vartanian

Blogs on Matt Held: 1stfans Meetup For March 2009: Artist Matt Held by Brooklyn Museum Kudos, Brooklyn Museum, on your 1stfans membership program and your successes in reaching out to your community in open, two-way conversation.

I expect to see more museums, schools and libraries follow this model of utilizing social networking tools to bring people from remote locations into the institutions that have showed their appreciation by listening, acting, and openly sharing with their supporters. Way to go Brooklyn Museum!

Logo citations: 1stfans logo, http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/join/. Twitter logo, http://twitter.com/home. Flickr logo, http://www.flickr.com/. Technorati logo, http://vectorlogo.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html.

Ning Exploration

I just started a Ning community with a group for this class, so I decided to explore the existing Ning community Library 2.0 to learn how librarians are using the social networking site over time.

Immediately, I noticed a feature on the Library 2.0 site that I would like to add to our site, More Than Books. On the main page, there is a welcome message that stays at the top of the page, giving an overview of how to use the site. This will be very helpful in a site that is open to the public to make people feel welcome and incorporate them into the community. The site requests that people go to the Introduction Forum to introduce themselves to the group as their first post. This encourages welcoming behavior from the rest of the community. What I did not find welcoming was the threat of deleting inappropriate material as one of the first things new members see. I understand adding this to the site somewhere, but it makes me feel like there will be heavy policing. It makes me realize that I may have to be responsible for removing inappropriate content, but I will explore other options for dealing with those problems when they happen.

I was also attracted to the organization of the site. The design allows the features like blogs, forums, and photos to have their own page rather than crowd only a select few, or a few too many, all onto the main page. I want to have the ability to include events, blogs, forums, and chat all with equal availability, but do not want to a messy layout. I will play with our design to create pages for our content and clean up our main page.

I explored each feature to see what gets the most involvement from site participants. Library 2.0’s site has heavy activity in some forums, while other posts within the forum remain unanswered. Some groups have many members with busy forums of their own, while other groups seemed to have trouble recruiting members with little to no content. The important thing is that some groups and forums survive, thrive, even, and the community will participate if the topic is right. If a forum doesn’t catch on right away, I might try rephrasing, or move the discussion to a group that might have more interest in the topic. Many of the groups with very few members had no content. I think it is important to learn from this. The content on the site must always be updated, evolving, and nurtured to keep the interest and involvement of the community. If things start feeling stagnant, I will try making a few waves of my own rather than waiting for someone else to do it.

The notes and events pages on Library 2.0 were completely blank. I do not know what the history of traffic on these features is, but I might consider dropping features that remain unused on More Than Books, or add guidance or content of my own to encourage using those features if I decided to keep them. The Photos/Media feature was not functioning when I tried to open the page. I found it very valuable to study other social networking communities while building a community of my own to learn how to make More Than Books a valuable site for sharing and networking. The audience of More Than Books is much the same of the librarian audience of Library 2.0, making the observations of this particular site extremely helpful in building a successful site.

Come visit us at www.morethanbooks.ning.com/!

Review: Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, expanded edition

by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

Wikinomics deeply explores the profound effects of mass collaboration enabled by the “blogosphere” of wikis, blogs, chat rooms and personal broadcasting by presenting their research on how the world is now doing business (p. 1).  The term “wikinomics” is defined as the “art and science… based on four powerful new ideas: openness, peering, sharing , and acting globally” (p. 20).  Tapscott and Williams give the inside story on example after example of businesses and communities who have taken the plunge into these four ideas, giving the good, the bad, and the arguments for each.  Though their bias is purely for preponderance of these revolutionary models and opposing views are often argued, the authors are quick to mention areas that are struggling with the transition.  The field of science and medicine, for example, has utilized public databases to harness mass collaboration to encourage new research in the race to make scientific discoveries public domain.  This prevents crippling copyrights that may endanger the future of innovation by making it impossible for many contributors to improve on existing technology (p. 166).  The years of research and millions of dollars that have to be invested in new drug development, however, keeps the newest research in this area of the field highly guarded, and as a result, is unable to fully reap the benefits of mass collaboration (p. 171).  There is an acknowledgment that the new systems have flaws of their own, and the authors use the forum of their book as a call to action to solve these challenges in the future.

Wikinomics allowed an inside view to businesses like Amazon.com, networking sites like Second Life, and peer production communities like the creators of the open source operating system Linux.  I benefited the most from gathering an understanding of how these open source models created by teams of volunteers profit.  Wikinomics wrote heavily to counter the fears of this new movement, that it wreaks havoc on capitalism, exploits free labor, that group contributions promote medicracy without expert gatekeepers of our former systems.  This book presents an abundance of examples of how companies, communities, and individuals benefit not only monetarily, but by personal reputation and opportunity, by enjoying ever-improving products, and by providing opportunities to lend a helping hand to communities in need.   Mass collaboration helped families find each other post Katrina (185-188).  It promotes research to fight neglected diseases that affect underdeveloped countries (p. 172).  It helps neighborhoods fight pollution, improve community programs, and stand up to governmental neglect (p. 199-205).  I see mass collaboration over and over bringing out the best in people, all the while allowing its contributors and communities to prosper and grow.

The book covers so many topics and business models that I found myself losing interest from the number of examples that were driving home the same point.  There are so many applications, arguments, and tools that vary so greatly, I understand the unwillingness to leave anything out.  I found myself wanting to share portions of the book with certain people, but would not suggest most to digest all three-hundred-some pages.  Although I do, in retrospect, feel like I personally benefited from reading about industries that I may have not looked into on my own.  I will leave it up to you to read or flip through.  A bit of a warning, though, if you are a skeptic of the power of wikinomics, digestion of this book in its entirety may just make you a believer.

Myspace was, and always will be, my first

Being asked to describe my first experience in a virtual community made me realize how completely disinterested in them I used to be. I had to move away from my friends and family to start using ichat after realizing I needed a communication alternative to my skyrocketing phone bill. I never participated in chat rooms. I favored the concise summary of information in an article and tended to tune out comments and online conversations. It was not until I joined Myspace when I started to enjoy online conversation and information sharing. I found myself surfing for hours reading some of the most repetitive, pointless comments and conversations, mad at myself for wasting so much time rather than writing my paper or, say, leaving the house that day. Why was I doing this? I don’t know, I know these people, I guess. I care to get to know my old classmates and new acquaintances better through their interests, silly comments, and photo sharing. Its addicting. I can see so much of a person in their online profile that I may have never seen any other way. And my curiosity keeps me looking.

Realizing that I guiltily spent my time snooping, reading, and quietly judging others online made me afraid that others were doing the same to me. I spent so much time writing, rewriting, changing my pics, worried about what the world would think of me. Is my headline funny enough? Are my music picks pretentious enough? Are my films picks too pretentious? I also freaked out about privacy from time to time. I even canceled my account once after too many embarrassing tidbits about my life kept coming in from my friends, things that I did not want to share but could not control. (My rash actions do not surprise me, I used to burn my journals, and I was the only one who read those. I can’t even share with myself sometimes). I joined again shortly after, making my friends list more selective and my account private. I promised myself I would keep my account. I needed to get over this.

So I still have my Myspace account. My profile is no longer private. I now have a Facebook account. I also have a Flickr!, a Twitter, a Delicious, and a group blog. I got used to it. Well, I’m getting used to it. I still freak out a bit when ridiculous pictures of me pop up, but I know the only way I can control that is to control myself when the camera is out. (I have a “no more video” rule at parties now. The stories may be funny, but the video is always painful). I allow myself to post my own ridiculous pictures, to write my opinions more freely, and to not get up in the middle of the night to edit when I second guess my dumb tag line. I also have signed on to listening to discussions from communities that I am not familiar with. I am still selective, as I tend to skim over heated personal debates that tend to pop up, and find filtering through personal comments like, “Great blog Susie!” a bit laborious. I recognize the power of the group, especially when it comes to things that tend to have a bias, and am applying my social behaviors to my information gathering.

David Lee’s member roles model from his Learning Circuits Blog describes four roles people play in virtual communities, and I have seen myself participate in every role. It took me a long time before I even started “linking,” but after Myspace, my user behaviors changed, and I now regularly link to new online communities, shopping for new virtual homes to gather information from, and possibly contribute to. Most of the time, I am “lurking,” viewing activities from afar, but never adding my own piece. I enjoy the information, but do not feel it necessary to contribute for one reason or another. I tend to only be in the “learning” role with friends, giving feedback to their blog or sharing links with people I know and care about. I found myself “leading” when I started a group blog, reaching out to my art community of friends and asking them to share in a space that I hoped would become “ours.” I have plans to continue “leading,” creating new spaces for information sharing in my professional community. I do not see my social behaviors changing drastically any time soon, but maybe one day I will become more of a “learner,” evolving as my online social sphere widens. But for now, looking back, I am pretty content with my progress. Thanks for listening and getting to know me better. What’s your first time story?

Social networks: Way back in the day

I feel like I have been floating in the middle of a generational digital divide all my life. In sixth grade, it was important enough for my class to learn to type on Comadore 64s, but not yet in the budget to have a computer in every classroom. The world wide web connected some of my friends from their homes, but not me from mine. My parents, like many others at the time, did not understand how computers had become an integral part of our education until I had graduated from high school. My sister, seven years my younger, reaps the benefits of two personal computers and internet connections at home, in school, even from her phone, giving her access to libraries, the ability to send and receive homework assignments through email, and allowing her take off running with social networking as a natural extension of her communication. Tools at her disposal were in still in development or even nonexistent to my generation and generations before me. I felt for a long time that I was too far on the cusp of this new digital generation to fully participate. Over the last year or so, my attitude on my future possibilities in a digital world has taken a turn for the better.

A few years ago, I started social networking on MySpace, using instant messaging to connect with friends and family, and did most of my school and business communication through email. I started experimenting with tools like Delicious and Twitter, and began following blogs to see what was going on in art communities all over the country. Last year, I was inspired to start my own blog with friends in my own art community. The tools have become increasingly user friendly. The anxiety of being technically inept began to fade. I started researching new job opportunities and directions for my future, putting what I had been learning to work. I started thinking, “I can do this.” Last semester I wrote a paper on incorporating Web 2.0 technologies into a museum environment, and sold myself on the idea from researching the many fascinating ways museums and art communities are embracing Web 2.0 to connect with communities, manage their collections, and create content through participatory services. I started thinking, “I need to do this…”

One weekend into the social networking class and the gears in my head were already furiously turning on how I could apply what I was learning to my current environment. I was especially inspired by Michael Casey and Laura Savastinuk’s “Open Letter to Library Directors.” This is a ten point letter suggesting ways to improve management using Library 2.0 (Casey and Savastinuk, 40-44). I have been a manager for seven years, and from my experience have developed the opinion that the more open upper management is to a two-way-street of communication, from staff and from customers, the better the company climate will be. The readings from this class have helped me to brainstorm ways in which Web 2.0 tools can help me to inspire people around me to start implementing new ideas on managing and communication into their work environments. I am excited. I am thinking. I am learning something new every day with Web 2.0 tools. I am ready to apply these tools to better support the arts and build community. I hope this blog is a good start.

Casey, Michael E., and Laura C. Savastinuk. Library 2.0: A Guide to Participatory Library Service. Medford, New Jersey: Information Today, Inc., 2007.

My life social networking

Hello everyone!

I am a superfan of social networking and of learning new ways to connect. Some of these blogs, like this one, were originally a product of Michael Stephen’s class assignments for Library 2.0. I learned so much from this experience and I am eager to utilize these tools to make a difference in my professional sphere. I am currently looking for opportunities to explore marketing and community involvement for festivals, programs, workshops, and other activities in the film, music, or art scene in Chicago.

I currently work at Chicago Film Archives where spent most of my time creating inspection reports for 8mm, Super 8mm, and 16mm films. I catalog films from the collection that have been digitized for their eventual home in a future online digital collection. The archive was started about five years ago when Nancy Watrous took on the challenge of creating a home for the large collection of films the Chicago Public Library was discarding. The CFA has since evolved into a rich moving history of Chicago and the midwestern region. Check out their website and events. Don’t miss an opportunity to see rare or forgotten films on the big screen!

I also work in the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries’ art and architecture archive. I work mostly with helping patrons find images and manuscripts for their projects and publications, providing them with digital files and usage licenses. We make use of new technologies to make the reference process and file exchanges quicker than ever, although I still love the patrons who still have a special place in their hearts for letter writing. Ryerson has an internal blog, a prescence on MySpace and Facebook, and created a Wikipedia page. They are in the process of starting some exciting new initiatives to create a Flickr collection of archival images and will be conducting training sessions to inspire museum staff to use social networking tools to for education and outreach. We have yet to see any participatory functions on the website, but I hope I can be part of the move towards these features in the future.

Thanks for reading, and comments are so encouraged!