Social Software, libraries & e-learning

Christmas cat taken by altemark and available under Creative Commons on Flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/altemark/77508401/

Happy Christmas everyone and best wishes for the New Year! I’ve been a bit under the weather, so LASSIE’s case studies are going to be published in early January. The updated literature review and final report will follow shortly afterwards. I’ve almost finished all the case studies, so thanks to everyone from the Steering Group for all your input in the last few days. I’ll be enjoying a well earned rest from blogging until the New Year!

We had the final LASSIE Project Steering group yesterday where the volume of work I still have to complete hit me! We’ve got four draft case studies almost ready and I have spent today working on the final case study about Facebook and libraries. However, I have still to update my literature review and work on the project final report for our funders, the Centre for Distance Education. We’ve agreed that several project outputs will be published in January, so watch this space! One of the problems with doing research in this area is 1) the need to continuously try to keep up to date (RSS is invaluable - but I still need to find the time to read stuff!) 2) Because the project was so timely, people have invited me to attend conferences, to write papers etc. so it’s eaten into research time. But I can’t complain!

I didn’t go to Online this year partly because I’ve been so busy recently, although I know several people who did. Gwyenth might want to post her thoughts as she was there and attended the session by OCLC on social networking. Peter Godwin also has posted about Online on his blog as has Dave Pattern. By the way there is an interesting article in Next Space (the OCLC newsletter) about Libraries and Social Networking .

I’ll be posting on the blog until at least February 2008 as we’re having a review meeting then, so do keep reading!

Tomorrow I’ll be heading up to Coventry with Jeni, LSE’s IT Training Manager. We were really pleased to hear the Training Portal project has been short-listed for an award by the Institute of IT Training and have to give a presentation to the judges tomorrow. The training portal wasn’t developed as part of LASSIE, but it does use web 2.0 technologies and I have mentioned in several presentations as a great example of how RSS technologies can be employed. It pulls together training events from several different providers across LSE, using RSS to present a combined list of training via the portal. However, we also re-use the feed to present training information for staff in the institutional portal (LSEforYou) and information for students in the VLE, Moodle. Students can subscribe to the feed, but even if they don’t plasma screens around the campus regularly update with a list of next week’s training pulled from the portal.

The winner of the awards is announced at a dinner at the Dorchester Hotel in February, so fingers crossed for tomorrow’s presentation!