MAC - Part 3 "Awesome Desserts"

My favorite part (desserts are the best part of any meal) of MAC or at least the part where I learned the most was actually on two different days.

On Wednesday, October 10, 2007, Bart Ragon and colleagues from the University of Virginia presented a paper entitled: When a Blog is Not a Blog. Basically, it involved using blog software for other uses. I immediately thought of the Digital Forsyth (www.digitalforsyth.org) website in Wordpress software. Mr. Ragon gave examples of using blog software as an information aggregator, for a room/equipment self-booking system as well as a place for medical students to comment.

Thursday morning, October 11 found me again listening to Mr. Ragon as part of the panel discussion on Web 2.0 technologies. In this panel, Mr. Ragon discussed collaborative tools, such as blogs, wikis and specifically Google Presentation, Zoho online and Sakai - a free, open source product. He also talked about Social Networking like the use of Facebook and Ning by the American Library Association. Perhaps the most interesting names were Moodle and Sloodle which are course management software programs.

The other panelists were Michelle Kraft, newly appointed senior health librarain at the Cleveland Clinic and author of the blog: http://kraftylibrarian.com/, who discussed mash-ups and sharing photographs; and Max Anderson with SOLINET who talked about changing the of colleagues and patrons attitude toward technology as well as obtaining information services support in a larger institution.

I was intrigued the most by Mr. Ragon's comments so I e-mailed him for his PowerPoint presentations which I have placed in the Shared Documents section of Carpetner Library's Sharepoint. I'm sure you could contact Ms. Kraft and Mr. Anderson about their presentations. Meanwhile, enjoy your desserts compliments of Mr. Ragon!