The 6 Questions: and Their Proposed/Supposed Answers
1. My school is a small girls' boarding school. The total community including faculty and staff is about 275 people. We live together in the country, four miles from the thriving mini-metropolis of Middleburg, Va (Pop:980). My users are 200 teenage girls in grades 9-12. They come from all over the country and all over the world and we live together in Virginia Horse country to put together a learning experience roughly equivalent to completing a high school diploma. 99% go to college. The students spend a major portion of their free time on the web. About half have lap tops, the others use the school computers. Most students are very familiar with the part of the internet that they frequent (Facebook, ITunes, YouTube, and they are far too trusting of anything they find on a website. Currently, they may not have/use their cell phones, etc. during the academic day or during study hall in the evening (7:30-9:45). They are pretty facile at uploading files even video from their computers. Yet, they often don't think about the implications of what they are doing although we do a multi-part, continuing discussion-based series on the importance of privacy, plagiarism, and ethical questions having to do with both the use of information from the web and acting ethically toward others. We have adapted some of the principles of Rushworth Kidder's Ethical Fitness to our efforts to raise awareness of appropriate actions online. We have had a few students disciplined for posting inappropriate info/images on the web. Our faculty is relatively young, average age is around 35. They are regular internet users. The science department is launching a new online learning management module and is using Haiku Learning Management System which we will eventually adopt across the school. Faculty vary in their net savvy although most would love to have more info about how to use resources effectively and navigate more easily. This blog should be helpful in that category. The library is a large physical space on three levels with a book collection over 40,000 volumes, about 30 subscription databases, wireless internet access, and multiple av formats. It sits as a separate building at the center of the school. We work to have it function that way as well. I see the "Culls and Crunches" blog appealing to both faculty and students. I am hoping to get participation from both.
2. My goals in establishing this communication tool focusing on information and assorted other "stuff" that will be useful for both life and school are to establish the library as a key source for electronic information and to continue to build the link between student/faculty and the information professionals and our hub which is available 24/7. We really do see our students frequently in the library, now we need to wire them as well. Also, the best information is vetted information. I am hoping to have some real dialog about books and about what users like and don't like about particular sites, assignments, and searches.
3. A blog is the best tool to use to accomplish my goal of frequently communicating some information, encouraging interaction, and then offering further contact or help with readers advisory or course development collaboration. The ability to add photos and video, to provide links and let this group respond to each other as well as to library staff seems made to order for what I would like to accomplish. In terms of the classroom wiki project. I have used blogs before in classes to advance responses to prompts concerning specific texts. The wiki form seems to lend itself more readily to group composition. Since this will be our first "getting acquainted" exercise, I expect it to produce results that will be greater than the sum of their parts, in that, the four final essays will integrate multiple points of view and yet require agreement on the nature of the finished form of the essay and the necessity to include all of the required topics. I chose Blogger for this project. While I was predisposed to Blogger (since I've used it since it was Blogspot), I did also look at three others. My brief thoughts on these three: VOX: seems very "personal blog" oriented and I was put off by one of the featured blogs being "Locker Fuck." That wouldn't be a good way for me to attract my administration to participate. MOVEABLE TYPE: lots of capability to create websites/blogs. I downloaded to software to play with. WORD PRESS: Seems usable and has lots of options. Looked at Martha Stewart's blog and it had a # of neat features (Martha's Photo Album, Collecting (lots of stuff here- did I say this woman is a machine), MyPets (includes a link to her French Bulldog's blog "The Daily Wag" Really Martha!) If I had a staff to do this stuff, I would use Word Press. I did download free software and would like to play around with it in relation to Moveable Type. I assume I can get better and more sophisticated in blogging. So because I know it (and there's still alot I haven't used) and I can get this launched in an attractive and usable form- I'm sticking with Blogger.
4. Only the Associate Librarian and myself will have posting authority. Comments will be open to any registered Google user. Capcha will be used to screen out spam.Inappropriate posters will be warned. Since I have never had a problem with this, I am not expecting it. If problems developed,I would limit the participation to a set group identified by email. We would not allow copyrighted information to be posted unless permission had been granted since we are republishing it. We would ask that comments be appropriate to the subject of the blog and not about other aspects of school, community, or national life. I will share these "rules" or "assumptions" with our Academic Dean, who has actually encouraged me to do this. We would assess the blog in January and determine how effective it has been in broadening awareness of library resources, useful weblinks, and new features for databases for our users. My goal would be to ultimately put a student or group of students in charge of the blog or at least in an active advisory capacity and work with them to identify what would be of interest and to help with the timing of special "hints' about resources that would be especially helpful for current assignments
5. Having had some experience with Blogger, I am relatively confident that opening it up will be okay. I have had a little spam (people trying to sell stuff) but nothing off color or disruptive. My biggest concern is how to orchestrate buy-in by the community. Our settings on our internet only restrict pornography and gambling, so they are relatively mild. Administrative attitudes about the web are cautious because we operate in loco parentis and have responsibility for minor teens, but slowly the understanding is building that this can be a positive and productive environment, and I see this blog as an example of expanding our educational mission which is based on the motto "Sound Mind, Sound Body."
For the wiki,I would limit participation to just the members of the class,thus I don't see there being problems with inappropriate use of the tool. However, I am concerned and actually intrigued about how this will work when they are required to depend on each other, collaborate, and accept a document that they are both totally responsible for and yet have only a partial voice in what it looks like in the end. There will be frustration and compromise as part of the process. I am hoping that this will encourage creativity and provide lots of possibilities for interaction and increasing awareness of new viewpoints, and serve as a catalyst for deeper and more meaningful discussions (and arguments) about the works.
6. I will launch the blog at our Morning Meeting (all school and in the library) which happens three times a week, and I will probably come up with a contest about the best book you read this summer or the best new site you found. You must post it as a comment to win! I am also going to promote RSS feed, since I am now a major devotee. ( I am up to 44 feeds and growing). It would be optimum to be Facebook enabled, but I will wait to promote that since there is a great deal of sensitivity and skittishness about Facebook and its uses (and abuses). I will need to post 4 or 5 times a week to make this work. I am already stockpiling ideas and will add to the list and then choose an overall topic for each post and make it current at the time of the post. My real challenge will be to make each post short,crisp, and eye-popping and to encourage comments. From my answers to these questions (remember- there are no answers, only questions! so these are just musings that raise more questions), I will have to work on the brevity part.
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