Blog o' Randomness

Monday, October 17, 2011

Learning for Life Online at the Boston PL
Jennifer Koerber, Web Services Librarian, Boston Public Library

-Choosing a structure

Blog? What if people join then abandon their blogs? Tons of dead blogs. Wiki? Chaos. Ning – ad based, closed. Moodle – would work well as part of an overall training program. Lot of work to set up.

Take a few tools, put them together to create the platform. WordPress site, Facebook page – that’s where people already are, wouldn’t have to come up with a whole new blog. Twitter – another convenient tool for pushing the lessons out. In person events at branches, off site, other conferences – trainings, social meetups, unconferences.

NTIA grant – laptop lending program and training.

Decided to wait until laptop program started to launch Learning for Life Online.

Each entry - Intro, what is it? How is it useful? Suggestions for trying it out, helpful resources.

No formal registration – drop in program, no way to scale it to a large city if having to register.

Track outcomes – Google analytics, Facebook shares, followers, Twitter stats.

Colorado Public Computer Centers
Jaimie Hollier, Project Coordinator, Colorado Public Computer Centers, Colorado State Library

BTOP – 80+ new and enhanced Public Computer Centers. And trainings – how and why they need to be online. Jan-June – trained over 3000 people.

Lessons learned:

-Digital literacy is a functional building block toward transliteracy.

-Partnerships are paramount to success. Too much to do, too many people to reach, too little funds.

-Step back and take a look at the big picture. Instead of ‘we’re teaching email’, should be ‘ we’re teaching people how to connect to their families’, teach something that means something to the people, otherwise they won’t remember it.

-Follow and inform national policy. People care that libraries have a place, tell people.

Digital Core – FCC. Working with IMLS, Microsoft and E-rate. Getting people out training on digital literacy.

Digital Promise. How do we make learning better thru technology?

Digital Literacy.gov – not fulfilling the need it was supposed to be for, NTIA knows that. So they’re working on it, keep an eye on it.