Planning on the wiki

[Joyce Valenza]

Hi folks,
Here is our wiki for building the midwinter agenda and our plans for the coming couple of years.
http://aasl20taskforce.wikispaces.com/

It is just beginning. I will paste major ideas in and begin pages for any developing projects. Let's dream big.

joyce

[Karen Tukua]

Hi all,
I hope everyone had a restful holiday season. We are waiting for a new baby to be born.

My first encounter wth 2.0 was at AASL this past October. Since then, Joyce was gracious enough to allow me to be a part of this group, even though my experiences do not hold a candle to the rest of you. I have been taking a wonderful free tutorial on the CSLA (California School Library Association) website. Its called 2.0 winter fun. I am only about half way through. I have been learning about blogs, bloglines, RSS, news feeds, avatars, Wiki, and many other things. I'm having a ball!

The reality in our district:
I work in a school district that has 35 librarians, which serves elementary through high school. I am the only one who knows anything about any of this 2.0 stuff, and I am learning more each day. I must be at .01! I talked it up with some of my elementary librarian friends. I have been asked to do a staff development for our elementary librarians at our next meeting in February. Its always better to start with friends and work out from there and spread throughout the district.

Obstacls:
Awareness
Buy-in
Filtering

Part of the solution:
I would like to see this task force develop a similar program that gives support and encouragement along the way, as our colleagues learn new skills.
If we want to see a AASL 2.0 presence, it is imperative that school librarians be aware of the opportunities for training, if they do not have the skills, and the many possible applications this new technology can bring to their libraries and schools. They need to realize that this is fun, and not something extra they have to learn.

The other big obstacle, as I see it, is TIS. I am lucky, I have a good working relationship with the head of our district's TIS. I have asked him to unblock several sites, including this one. I have found, when they are given reasonable requests, they do try to accommodate. Unfortunately, our filtering service is purchased through a company in San Diego, who make blanket decisions that may or may not be workable in school environments. They just need to be educated.

In conclusion, I find this time very exciting. I look forward to learning as much as I can, and sharing with my colleagues. Its very difficult to manipulate the technolgy to meet my needs and participate, until I have the skills, background exploration, and the self discovery in place.

[Robin Williams]

I looked at the Wiki and everything you have on the top 2 Sections, like the professional development can be linked to from a virtual site. I have a location for us at ALA Island that we can use. It should be very quick and easy to do. In addition to linking out to web resources, we could do an in-world survey of web 2.0 library use in school libraries.

The very easiest thing to do is to make displays, much like poster sessions in real life, you take graphics that open a web page when touched, or give a virtual handout. I could set up as many of these as you'd like in a few minutes. The next step beyond that could be in-world quizzes, web 2.0 trivia contests, surveys or any number of things. A list of educator resources for using web 2.0 like Atomic Learning and the Flickr edu collections would be great to link to. Lisa and I will meet soon and I can do a mockup and then modify/add as we'd like.

[Robin Williams]

I would like to feed a blog into the Second Life site but the official AASL Blog isn't RSS. Is there any RSS feed that you would like to see fed in?