[Baynet] Infopeople's "Web 2.0: Searching Innovations Online" online learning

Thu Sep 27 13:21:22 PDT 2007

Since some people who may be interested in 
participating might not receive this notice 
directly, we would appreciate it if you would 
print and post or route this announcement to staff and colleagues. Thanks!

Title: Web 2.0: Searching Innovations Online (online learning)

Date:  November 6, 2007 - December 18, 2007
(break Nov. 20-26 for Thanksgiving)

To register for this workshop:  Use the online registration form at
http://infopeople.org/workshop/354

Fee: This first session of this online course is 
free to those in the California library community 
and is not open to those outside California. 
Depending on the availability of future grant 
funding, additional future sessions of this 
course may or may not be free to those in the California library community.

With the 2.0 revolution, almost everything on the 
web seems to have become social, shared, 
collaborative, and focused on fun. For many of us 
in libraries, this shift to user-built content 
and trusting the wisdom of crowds seems chaotic, 
out-of-control, and threatening to our values for 
quality information and manageable services.

--Do you wonder where is 2.0 taking the web and the world of information?
--Do you know how to sift the worthwhile 2.0 content from the trivial?
--Do the wikisphere and the blogosphere seem 
promising, but you aren't sure how to find what's reliable and useful?
--Are you curious how Google is changing and where Google is going?
--Do you know the unique search strengths of 
Ask.com and other alternatives to Google?
--Do you wonder if there are ways to include 
social sharing sites into web searching?
--Have you discovered the most time-saving uses 
for tags, RSS feeds, and other new web tools?
--Are you concerned how to keep up with it all?

In this course, you will explore the questions 
above and others in practical everyday 
applications. You will become acquainted with the 
major 2.0 media spaces and how to search their 
content effectively. You will learn to use and 
find customized meta-search engines to drill 
vertically into almost any topic with a web 
presence. You will harness the convenience of RSS 
feeds to help you keep current.

Workshop Description: This five-week online 
learning course offers much of the same 
cutting-edge, rapidly-evolving content as the 
recent on-ground workshop with the same name. 
Through readings, individual exercises, quizzes, 
and discussion forums, participants will get a 
solid grasp of the usefulness of finding 
information using the best of the Web 2.0. The 
instructor will provide cheat sheets and a 
webliography that will help you apply what you learn and keep up to date.

Preliminary Course Outline: Using your web 
browser and your Internet connection, you will 
log in to the Infopeople online learning site and 
complete the following learning modules:

Module One: The Energy and Power of Web 2.0 for Finding Information
--Trends, values, tools, practical applications of Web 2.0
--How tags work and the do's and don'ts of tagging
--Using tags in del.icio.us to organize and find quality websites

Module Two: Web Search Innovation Trends
--What's new and what's not in Google, Ask, and other search engines
--Finding and using Customized Search Engines for focused topics

Module Three: Blogs and Wikis as Rich Information Resources
--When to turn to blogs and wikis
--Finding quality blogs
--Finding quality wikis

Module Four: RSS Feeds: Trapping What You Need to Keep Up With
--When RSS feeds are useful, where they occur
--Finding RSS feeds
--Optional activity: Bloglines as your RSS feed reader

Module Five: Finding Within Participation Sites
--Finding unique content in sites like Flickr, 
YouTube, Ning, LibraryThing, Yahoo Podcasts
--Where does Web 2.0 seem to be heading in the future?

Instructor:   Joe Barker.  Joe worked as a 
reference and instruction librarian at the 
University of California, Berkeley, in the Doe 
library and the Moffitt undergraduate library. 
Developing instructional aids and promoting the 
confidence and research skills of library users 
through reference was the major thrust of his 
work at UCB. He also maintains an online web 
searching tutorial which remains worldwide one of 
the most heavily used resources for finding and 
evaluating information on the web.

Pre-workshop Assignment: We ask that everyone who 
registers for this course create their own 
del.icio.us and Bloglines accounts before the 
course start date. Instructions for creating the 
accounts can be found at http://infopeople.org/workshop/354

Online Learning Details:
This five-week course will be taught online using 
the web. We will take a break Nov. 20-26 for 
Thanksgiving. When you register, you will receive 
a registration confirmation which will include 
the URL to get to the course, as well as a username and password.

Every student proceeds through the online 
learning modules at his or her own pace. Students 
should expect to commit to spending a minimum of 
2 to 2 ½ hours per week on this course in order 
to be successful. You can work on each module at 
your own pace, at any hour of the day or night. 
However, you will be expected to log in to the 
course each week to do that week's assignment. We 
ask that you log in sometime during the first 
week of the course to begin the course work.

Your instructor will be available for limited 
consultation support for two weeks after the 
official end date of a course, and the course 
material will stay up for an additional two weeks 
after that, to give those who have fallen behind 
time to work independently on the course. 
However, you will be expected to accomplish the 
majority of the course in synchronization with 
your peers during the first five weeks.

Who Should Take This Course: Anyone from the 
California library community with an interest in 
keeping up with or finding quality information in the new 2.0 web.

Prerequisites:
This course is taught over the web. You must:

--Have an Internet connection and Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher.
--Be able to save Microsoft Word .doc or Adobe 
.pdf files to your computer and print them out. 
(For .doc files, a free Word Viewer is available 
at 
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/search.aspx?displaylang=en. 
Search for "Word Viewer." For .pdf files, a free 
Adobe Acrobat Reader is available at 
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/main.html).
--Be comfortable navigating on the web and 
navigating back and forward on a website that uses frames.

System Requirements: The online learning product 
that Infopeople uses is called Angel. The 
following are minimum system requirements for 
using Angel. You will need access to a computer 
that has at least these specifications to participate in an online course:

Windows:
--Internet Explorer 6.0 and above, Netscape 7.1 
and above, or Firefox 1.5 and above

Macintosh:
--Mozilla 1.4 and above (which is the same engine 
as Netscape 7.1), Safari 2.0 and above, or Firefox 1.5 and above
--OS X and above (OS 9 will NOT work with our online learning product)

To be successful in this course, you should also 
be familiar with basic web searching.

If you are not comfortable with any of the above, 
please consider taking this course with a 
colleague who does meet these requirements.

To view a complete list of Infopeople workshops 
and for general information about Infopeople 
training opportunities, go to the main Infopeople 
Workshops page at http://infopeople.org/workshop

If you have questions about registration or 
scheduling of workshops, please contact Linda 
Rodenspiel, the Infopeople Project Assistant, at 
assist at infopeople.org or by phone at 650-578-9685.