Yesterday, Nicole from What I Learned Today and Rich from Fractalblog presented at our annual summer program.  Nicole presented Intranet 2.0: Fostering Collaboration, based on her work with the Jenkins Law Library intranet.  She has also written an article based on this work which appears in the May/June issue of Online Magazine.  Rich presented Blogging the Night Away: Encouraging Student Online Participation.

Both speakers were well-received by our librarians, and the librarians visiting from St. Joseph's University and Villanova University.  Nicole impressed the crowd with the intranet she designed from scratch to help solve the communication, e-mail clutter, and document distribution issues at her workplace.  Working in PHP, she created a workspace which utilizes both blog and wiki technologies.  The only areas of the workspace she did not write are the calendar (open source software which she has significantly modyfied) and the help desk tracking program (third party software).  Her intranet is particularly impressive because she only has the help of one parttime assistant.

Rich showed the blog he uses for his class.  Originally he had a site in Blogger, but has recently switched his site to Squarespace.  You can look at the posts from the spring semester (Jan – May 2006) and see how effective using a blog for class participation is.  His students frequently posted and often commented on the posts.  And the posts are insightful.  Using a blog gives students time to think before they post and relieves the pressure of speaking in class.  I certainly need to find a way to get my writing students to participate more and be more thoughtful and using a blog just may be the way to go.  Certainly, I have had plenty of interested and invested students in my class, but using a blog may pull in those who are reluctant to speak in class.  And if students can work with some ideas in the blog before coming to class, they may be more comfortable speaking up.

Rich ended the presentation by having everyone start a blog using the free Blogger site.  Many of the participants had never used a blog before, but I overhead several people say they would like to keep up with the blogs they created.

One of the more satisfying aspects of the workshop for me was that I was the one who arranged for Nicole to come speak.  One of the benefits of going to conferences is meeting other professionals.  I had met Nicole at Computers in Libraries 2005 and found out that she worked nearby.  When the time came to find a speaker for our summer presentation, I recommended Nicole because I knew she was very enthusiastic about her intranet project and knew that enthusiasm would carry over into her presentation, which certainly turned out to be the case.