Wikis

I found Wikis also to be of benefit to both personal and professional sense. It can be used as a tool for social networking, such as planning a surprise birthday party or working with a group of people geographically separated to plan a conference; and also for building knowledge in a certain area such as a personal interest or hobby area such as land kite buggying or children and young people's program planning ideas after an event or conference.

We could organise our work end of year function through a wiki and we could also use this tool to work collectively on our program overview document. The downside to this is that the author of the changes may not be so easily identifiable as the tracked changes in word, however this would save embarrassing oversights of leaving tracked changes on final or printed documents. What I would like to further investigate is how you define you wiki group and whether it is fully in the public domain.

Online photo sharing

Photo sharing was an eye opener both personally and professionally. Personally I think that I will start to use this to save my photos in a relatively safe environment as I have often worried about losing my digital photos and have considered an external hard-drive but have never got around to purchasing one. Now I can upload and share my photos in the comfort of my own home.
In the professional arena, I found in my exploration of flickr that often you can access a better visual concept of a project than the website originated by the project. I have included the link below of a company that I am interested in. When I searched via google I couldn't even find the companies own website. However a search in flickr revealed a plethora of photos on various projects. I found so many great images on my favourite company from France, Royale de Luxe, posted by members of the crowd:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=royale%20de%20luxe&w=all&s=int
This is what I find so fascinating that if you have an idea that caputures the imagination then others will be compelled to contribute. This is social networking at its best - instant feedback!
A quick search on children in flickr revealed this fabulous photo:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/urbantiki/3554532896/in/set-72157602964706372/

KA's number one blog

Taking the road of least resistance for my first blog entry, I have chosen to answer the form questions. Feel free to yawn now.

• What do you hope to learn from the program?

I would like to get a good overview of social networking tools to understand them from a programming perspective

• What do you think about Lifelong Learning?

Lifelong learning is fundamental to the work we do at SLQ in children's and young peoples programs. There are many learning styles and our learners of the future will be users of digital culture so as a subscriber to life long learning it is important to be aware of trends that are influencing the way information is found and shared.

• What other blogs have you discovered? What do you like about them?

The Corner blog is an excellent resource for our casual staff to share ideas and strategies. It is also a great way for our team to get inspired and for CYPP staff to give feedback, ideas and further research directions. This then informs future programming and operations. As a communcation tool for this purpose it is excellent.

• Can you see a use for blogs inside the Library?

We could expand this idea to our programming and create more opportunities for individual project blogs, as well as creating more links to other blogs, e.g. JOL Blog for Amazing Displays could link to a Summer Holiday Blog etc. The only limit is resourcing this idea. It would be great to profile our programs to a wider audience.

• How about blogging for a client audience?

We already have programs that use blogging in some of our programs, but there is possible more scope to expand this.