Social Intelligence

After reading the readings for this week I realized that I wanted to write about the act of blogging itself. I am learning about this world at what feels like the speed of light and it is entertaining to read about other people’s adventures in the blogosphere, internet community.

I am learning that for me the fastest and most efficient way to learn about new technology is to have a lesson in Plain English. Plain text teaching online is a little video that combines audio and visual as well as words and pictures on a board with the all important arrows to teach a topic. This teaching style is particularly nice since it is friendly to people with a variety of learning styles and means that for me as a student with attention deficit if I miss the auditory clues or the visual ones I will get a second chance to attain the missed information. This makes for a more successful learning experience. The glossary of  blog terminology was also a hit as it meant that I could check terms that Iam hearing and seeing both in the course of our chats and my colleagues blogs as well as out in the wider blogosphere.

What libraries and corporations appear to be slowly learning is that people like to hear about the personalities behind the institution and the personality of the institution itself. An example of this is Bill Marriott’s blog sharing what his organization is doing for the community and what he does for his employees. I enjoyed reading about the corporation wide blanket making bees for children in hospitals and his trip to Florida to support his Haitian employees.

I also enjoyed Kansas State University’s table of contents of various blogs as it was easy to navigate and separate blogs meant that I could pick and choose what I wanted to read. I enjoyed a post about the university’s ghostly inhabitants and wondered whether Western has a similiar collection of ghostly inhabitants that someone familiar with them could write about. I also enjoyed the quilting blog with the pictures and posts about projects as well as the patchwork of poetry from various sources that had been shared.

I think I may pass links to a couple of the book critique blogs on to some friends who both share my reading interests and have other interests.