Jenny blogs about our travels here.
Last week, I joined Jenny Levine for a trip to Holland and the Ticer Digital Libraries à la Carte: New Choices for the Future program. We taught a day-long hands on workshop. Jenny covered blogs and RSS in the am and I took the participants through IM in the afternoon. I tried something a bit different this time. Taking a cue from our Web 2.0 discussions, Learning 2.0 initiatives, and such, I offered the group what I called an “immersive, experiential and playful” exercise in using IM and thinking about IM in libraries. I think it went well. Instead of a set of “trivia questions” and step by step IM instructions, I gave them some general guidelines, a few hints and a list of very general types of queries one might get to an IM refeference service. We were using MSN messenger, so we tried that, Trillian and Meebo to further the experience. We debriefed each section and wound up with a discussion about how it felt to dive in to this type of tool.
Thanks to the great group of participants, and to the organizers of the Institute. I was honored to be a part of it!