Introduction
Since I’m up ridiculously early this morning, I will dive right in and be the first one in the course to set up a blog.
Good morning, my name is Sandra and I’m in my third (and last) semester here at Western. A little about me: I have a background in history (BA and MA), business (MBA and 4 years of work in retail management and marketing) and teaching (BEd and 6 years of teaching high school in Malaysia and Toronto).
I have a little experience with social software which comes from a course I took last semester called Digital History (HIS9808). Most people don’t know that you are allowed to take two external courses (from another department at Western or from another university) during your MLIS, and I chose to do this Digital History class because it looked so interesting and applicable. What an eye-opener it was for me! We looked at topics such as open access, Wikipedia, information trapping, folksonomies, markup, HTML and CSS (even created a little page myself), mashups, data mining, collective intelligence and we tried out social software tools such as blogs (we were required to set up a blog – here’s mine) and microblogging (we also had to have a Twitter account). I followed my classmates’ blogs through an aggregator (I use Bloglines) and that lead me down the rabbit hole and into the ‘blogosphere’: I started following library blogs, history blogs, design blogs, book review feeds (New York Times and the Guardian), tribal art blogs and photography blogs.
I hope that in this class I can delve more deeply into the social software tools that I don’t know much about and find out how all these tools can be used in libraries (the theory) and how to actually create and make them relevant (the practice). I hope to explore current best practices and look to the future with a creative eye.