cac.ophony.org

The article “Public Library Geeks Take Web 2.0 to the Stacks” on Wired.com describes a program where hundreds of staff members at North Carolina public libraries were asked to explore Web 2.0 in ways by trying out 23 things that were simple, yet meaningful and useful.

The result: Learning 2.0.

The impetus was the need for staff to know about Web 2.0 technologies:

When the IT director at North Carolina’s Charlotte & Mecklenburg County public library began training staff in the latest web technologies, she lured reluctant participants with bribes — a free MP3 player and the chance to win a laptop.

Six months later, the program they developed is the real prize. Learning 2.0., developed by public services technology director Helene Blowers, has become a surprise grassroots hit, available for free on the web and adopted by dozens of other libraries around the globe.

“The last thing we want is for people to come into our libraries and ask about Flickr or Second Life and be met with a blank look,” said Christine MacKensie, director of the Yarra Plenty Regional Library in Melbourne, Australia, which just finished a four-month version of Learning 2.0. “And they certainly won’t now.”

The program is inexpensive to run, but is fun and engaging. Hundreds of staff members signed on.

Recognizing that librarians need to know how to participate in the new media mix if libraries are to remain relevant, Blowers challenged her 550 staffers to become more web savvy. Using free web tools, she designed the program and gave staff members three months to do 23 things.

They created blogs and podcasts, tried out Flickr, set up RSS feeds, learned about wikis, uploaded video to YouTube, played with image generators and Rollyo, and explored Technorati, tagging and folksonomies.

“Librarian avatars were popping up all over the blogs,” said Blowers.

In the end, the library system found that they’d just trained their staff in new media with very little financial output (save some blog hosting and the mp3 incentives), without going to the trouble and expense of bringing in staff training, or forcing people to sit through classes.

Although her original goals for Learning 2.0 were touchy-feely “E’s” — exposing staff to new tools, encouraging play, empowering individuals, expanding the knowledge toolbox, eliminating fear — the effects were both practical and financial.

“We don’t have to wait for some training company to come along and say, ‘For $20,000 we’ll show you how this stuff works,’” said Michael Stephens, who wrote Web 2.0 and Libraries: Best Practices for Social Software. “Helene put it on the web so anyone can use that program.”

Libraries all over the world are doing just that — moving the entire Learning 2.0 program to their own websites. The program has been duplicated by university and community library systems in Sweden, Australia, Canada and Denmark. In the United States, programs are underway in South Carolina, Florida, Maryland and California. Even the Combined Arms Research Library, a military repository, is trying it.

It’s no surprise that now the 23 Things idea is spreading beyond libraries, to two realms cac.ophony.org readers are much more familiar with: higher education, and business.

Now Blowers’ program is spreading beyond libraries (even virtual ones, like the teen library in Second Life teen library in Second Life): A public relations firm wants to set up a Learning 2.0 program for its staff, and several universities and an elementary school want to use the system to educate teachers, she said.

Several years ago, I taught a semester-long course and some weekend workshops with Paul Allison and Ken Stein of the New York City Writing Project. We walked participants (mostly high school teachers, but also some CUNY and SUNY college faculty) through various experiences, from setting up a blog, editing a wiki, to using bloglines, del.icio.us and tags (this is a few years ago, mind you, when bloglines, del.icio.us, and podcasts were “new” new, or at least a newer new, not old hat, as they are now). Then, as now, new stuff was coming out every week.

The New York City Writing Project was interested in giving teachers a chance to blog, so they’d see if, and how, blogs might be useful for their students. They ended up finding out how blogs, flickr, podcasting, WiKis and all kinds of other web 2.0 applications could be useful in teaching literacy and communication skills, and they ended up using these, and other aspects of Web 2.0, in their classrooms. The 23 Things idea is very similar, though the 23 things could easily be tweaked to include the newest useful Web 2.0 technology, since good new stuff comes out all the time.

Perhaps the best thing about Web 2.0, and Learning 2.0 is that so many resources that work, like the 23 Things program, are free to use and free to build on.