Neologism “Networked Lifestyle” works for me. Perhaps at some point my people might network on you people’s wiki -that would be swinging!

I entirely agree with you that the attention to these tools is a two front concern: teaching and learning (sure) but also outreach like networking with alums, public access to information, and a more general connection between and amongst organizations of any given community. I find with UMW Blogs I know a lot more about what’s going on in our community than I ever have before, and it changes the way a appreciate this place dramatically.

BTW thanks for the kind words, it’s kinda of strange to think a defunct b-movie blog is aiding a tech conversation in New Hampshire, especially given that town also has the likes of you and Jon Udell. These are strange days indeed

@Jamie,

Have you seen this yet? http://apps.facebook.com/unclibraries/

Just saw this today and it actually brings a library search portal into Facebook, but it doesn’t do the very cool thing the site you pointed me to does. Namely, put a person with the advice and afford them a space to narrate their processes and help others search effectively, but more importantly reflect on the act of searching.

There is no question in my mind that WPMu can do this! Wanna give it a test-drive? It would work wonderfully for all the cool work you and Charlotte have already done for searching techniques and database overviews. I think it’s a great idea for the libraries to experiment with.

Let’s take it beyond faculty and staff personal pages for a sec. A website/blog hybrid (the customizability of a website with some of the blog functionality and ease of setup), which is how I read what you and Cathy are working on, would have some awesome library uses. Check out the Research Guides at Northeastern Illinois: http://libguides.neiu.edu/. They run on something called LibGuides from Springshare, but I think it could be done with WPMU. I want to do something like this!

Part of what we’re hashing around here is how the web 2.0/social web push has to not be only from the pedagogical side. You and I “get” the Web 2.0 because we use it to do our jobs better. The amount of headache we’ve avoided by reading your blog is substantial, the efficiencies we’ve gained are enormous, and the formulation of a coherent rhetoric around the effort irreplaceable.

So it’s important to remember that we believe in this because it has solved OUR problems.

(Faculty, it’s worth noting, often believe in Blackboard because it has solved their problems. It’s not a bad impulse, it’s just turned inside out)

So one key to this is to show faculty how they can advance their careers and scholarly work by embracing the Networked Lifestyle. (wow, did I just coin that phrase? Sounds swinging!