thanks, David!

Flickr refinished

I had to get a Yahoo account for something else entirely, so it seemed foolish not to set up a Flickr account too. Have a look at my photos. Here's a place I'd like to be right now:

certified 2.0 genius

Got my certificate, button, MP3 player. But stopping now would invalidate the learning, right? Let me recommend Halting State by Charles Stross. Set about 10 years into the future, it is a mashup of IT security risks, infowar espionage, and ARGs. Imagine that people participating in a sort of role-playing game are being used unwittingly as tools by a foreign government.

The book got me thinking about other possible uses of ARGs, so I did some surfing and found World Without Oil. Don't know how I missed this last year. But maybe before Learning 2.0 I wouldn't have appreciated it? Anyway, it integrates many of the tools from L2 to create a simulation of a social policy crisis and invites everyone to play along. It calls this wisdom of crowds but I think it is closer to civic engagement. I think the wisdom of crowds is simply Adam Smith's invisible hand - the cumulative effect of the self-interest of many. World Without Oil, however, invites imaginative participation with no advantage to self interest - in other words, what's good for the community. I am thinking this may be a better model for civic engagement in the future than sitting around in deliberation groups, National Issues Forum style. It seems like there ought to be some sort of game that would cultivate information skeptics as well.

freebees for working groups

I read Michele Boule's "Changing the Way We Work" in Library Technology Reports. It was less than I'd hoped for. All her examples are software/applications development workgroups. She does review some interesting free applications.

One of the case studies is http://about.scriblio.net/ "open source OPAC with faceted searching and browsing features based on WordPress." See http://tamworthlibrary.org/ for a public library application.

http://www.dimdim.com/ claims to be "web conferencing service which is free to consumers and extremely easy to use, as there is no software to download or maintain." More web comferencing hosts are http://www.yugma.com/, http://www.zoho.com/ and http://vyew.com/site/.

http://www.37signals.com/ has free project management tools: Basecamp, Campfire group chat, Backpack, and Whiteboard.

In addition to pbwiki and wetpaint, she reviews http://www.seedwiki.com/. A booktalk use is http://www.seedwiki.com/wiki/hallahan_library_book_talk/hallahan_library_book_talk.