WOW! Something else from Doug Johnson’s pre-conference. EDUCAUSE and their 7 things you should know about series. There is quick tip sheet on everything…Nings, Flickr, Twitter. Whoa. I know where I can put these to use…wonderful resource: http://www.educause.edu/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAboutSeries/7495
VBF
Categories: Learning
Going through a notebook of “to do’s” today and finding things I want to post to the blog, for no other reason than just to throw them out there and say that I liked ‘em and I bet you will too. Here’s the first, more to follow, probably.
Doug Johnson talked about this in the pre-conference I attended at ALA:
Stages of Personal Learning Networks Adoption by Jeff Utecht
http://www.thethinkingstick.com/?p=652
Stage 1 Immersion: Immerse yourself into networks. Create any and all networks you can find where there are people and ideas to connect to. Collaboration and connections take off.
Stage 2 Evaluation: Evaluate your networks and start to focus in on which networks you really want to focus your time on. You begin feeling a sense of urgency and try to figure out a way to “Know it all.”
Stage 3 Know it all: Find that you are spending many hours trying to learn everything you can. Realize there is much you do not know and feel like you can’t disconnect. This usually comes with spending every waking minutes trying to be connected to the point that you give up sleep and contact with others around you to be connected to your networks of knowledge.
Stage 4 Perspective: Start to put your life into perspective. Usually comes when you are forced to leave the network for awhile and spend time with family and friends who are not connected (a vacation to a hotel that does not offer a wireless connection, or visiting friends or family who do not have an Internet connection).
Stage 5 Balance: Try and find that balance between learning and living. Understanding that you can not know it all, and begin to understand that you can rely on your network to learn and store knowledge for you. A sense of calm begins as you understand that you can learn when you need to learn and you do not need to know it all right now.
So true! I feel like I’m somewhere between stages 1 and 2. Still. Even though I’ve been putzing around with this Web 2.0 stuff for awhile now. I have gotten to the point where if there is a new one around that I want to try, I drop one. For example, I had a MySpace and Facebook page. Now, I have just Facebook. I cannot keep up with it all and still actually TALK face to face with friends, my husband, my animals. Anytime I venture to my social networks, hours and hours seem to slip by and I haven’t done anything but look at the MySpace pages of people I graduated from high school with and don’t even talk to anymore…so, I have to leave one to accept one, if that makes sense. What’s hard is deciding which one to leave. Oh Web 2.0, you are breaking my heart!
I posted the PLN stages with this permission: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ Haven’t really learned to “cite” that sort of thing, so hope that covers it 
VBF
I’m so bad with blogging in a timely manner…if I had a regular size laptop and not a ginormous laptop (what was I thinking?? 19 inch screen?! Come on!) I might be better at it, but this is what I have to deal with.
Annette Lamb’s session was WONDERFUL. I really wish I could see her sessions when she is at SCASL. I learned so much…not that I had never heard of what she talked about (LibraryThing, for example) but the way she suggests using resources was new to me (use LibraryThing to catalog a classroom collection or to keep a reading log for each student). She has a lot of energy and talks fast, but the ideas you leave with are many…I do plan to take one of her online classes sometime.
I love to read Our Librarian Won’t Tell Us Anything by Toni Buzzeo, in fact, I’m reading it to all of my 4th graders right now to kick off some very traditional library lessons (alphabetical order, using the dictionary, using the phone book, etc.). Since I love the book, I spotted a session that was presented by Diane Skorupski…that is the librarian’s name in Our Librarian Won’t Tell Us Anything and I always thought it was a made up character….because Skorupski (like Score-up-ski) sounds like it was made to be silly and clever and we all know good library media programs raise scores. Long story short, I thought Toni Buzzeo would have something to do with the session because it was about collaboration…I walk in. No Buzzeo. First thing the presentors do is introduce themselves and one of them really is named Diane Skorupski! I was so suprised, but the more I sat there I was thinking she must be wonderful and the book must really be based on her and I was getting really excited to have found out this was a real person. She even wears crazy earrings like me. Anyway, long story short…the next evening was the Closing Night Gala at the National Automobile Museum. I see Diane there, introduce myself, and she was so fabulous! She gave me earrings and her business card and said that if I ever start feeling frustrated to email her. I even got her picture…I have a new friend and to think I thought she was a made up character only a week ago!
I also attended another 2.0 session, which was okay. One thing I learned about was Spell it with Flickr…very cool!
I will blog more tomorrow….or Thursday….gosh, who knows…I’ll get on a regular schedule at some point…but, I do want to tell you about the Konnecting with Kindergarten session I went to and the Books, Boxes, and Fun Things to Make session I went to.
Cathy kicked my butt in gear and said I should keep folks posted on what’s happening in Reno. Thanks, Cathy! I need reminders every now and then (and by “kicked my butt in gear,” I mean gently suggested I post twitters).
AASL Conference really kicks up today. Yesterday, I registered and went to a First Timer’s Celebration Reception. I also visited the Explortorium, which was great. I thought it would be a little bigger, but still, I walked away with lots of great ideas and figured out what I want my xmas gift to be~a tablet computer. Not related to my xmas gift, but a great idea is to purchase 5 or 6 ipods for the library, purchase audiobooks from itunes, and loan them out to students, like regular library books. The person doing it is in a middle school and she hasn’t had any problems…the students have to sign a contract that states they will pay for anything they break…I think I could do that in my elementary school. I’m sure there are other sorts of mp3 players I could use that maybe aren’t as fragile as the ipod. Or, just get ipod shuffles…I might try it!
After that, my husband and I drove to Lake Tahoe…so pretty! When we came back to Reno, we had dinner at a mexican restaurant Marty had heard of from TripAdvisor.com…very shady area of town, but very good food. Then it was a night of walking around catching the sights with our friend Kristen (LMS from my district).
Right now, I’m getting ready to see Annette Lamb. She is doing a session here that she will be doing at the SCASL conference. Since I will not be able to see any sessions at SCASL, I thought I would visit, introduce myself, and get a sneak preview!
Pictures and links to be added soon…time to meet Kristen in the lobby!
Valerie
PS-I LOVE seeing all of these “famous” people-Alice Yucht, Joyce Valenza…it’s so rad.
Categories: Learning
Tagged: AASL07, Conferences, librarians, Reno
I’m testing flock…see if I like it!
Blogged with Flock
Categories: Learning
I love reality television and am always somewhat surprised when I see something about Spring Break and what teens and college students do for Spring Break: lots of drinking, dancing, and other things that teachers and parents want to know nothing about. Do these events resemble what I have done for my Spring Break this year? Unless you count watching it on television….no. So, what have I done?
I made my husband drive me to the upstate to see Jimmy Wales. The wikipedia guy. Yes, I am a nerd.
It was very interesting. I expected to be mad at him after listening to him speak. I expected that he would go on and on about how great of a source wikipedia is. But, he wasn’t like that at all. He knows and explained to the audience that wikipedia is a free encyclopedia for anyone to edit and therefore you are going to have incorrect information on there. He made an excellent point: Wikipedia is a great starting point for research, but not the only place to go for research. Start there, check your source, visit the other sources that wikipedia suggests. Take the information you find there with a grain of salt. Good job, Jimmy. You earned my respect.
VBF
Categories: Learning
