Oh, the tangled webs we weave.
Every two years our organization holds a summer workshop for educators. In our case, these tend to be excellent educators, but not necessarily web-savvy or technologically driven people. Two years ago, in fact, there was nothing in the curriculum that dealt with the web, despite the fact that we are a web-only archive. We created a special website to support the group, who found it too much trouble to use. (Note to self: creating websites with unique logins that will be visited at infrequent intervals is unlikely to work. Who remembers the URL, login, or password? Who wants to be responsible for remembering it?)
We decided that this group would have more web experience up front.
This year, there will be several sessions in which the workshop participants roam our site, getting a feel for what is there, what it looks like, and building up some hand/brain memory.
So, when the workshop presenters rolled the agenda past us this week, they felt like they had made some good progress. Heck, there was even a Facebook group to support the event and group.
"Well, wait," someone offered. "Shouldn’t they be saving their bookmarks on del.icio.us so that they can find them afterwards?" A short discussion about teaching people to use del.icio.us was ended when one of our least tech savvy managers said, "well, it only took me about three minutes! Sheesh!" We subsequently found and passed around the three minute video from common craft about del.icio.us and agreed to use it to help introduce social bookmarking and del.icio.us .
Further discussion raised the question of how participants would find photos and podcasts of the event, and there was a short round of preparation after the walkthrough, uploading a first image onto flickr, and bookmarking some first links on del.icio.us. If we do some video podcasts, as we intend, they will be on both flickr and youtube. The tag, designed for all services, is "jwaeducators2008". Check it out next month and see what’s online!
Events aren’t trapped inside individual people’s memories and accumulated paper, any more. We can stay connected more easily, continue to share more easily, and it doesn’t involve a heap of programming, either. We’re not an entirely web 2.0 organization yet, but I guess we’re making progress.
Now, if we can just figure out this Semantic Web stuff and catch up to the next wave….
July 11th, 2008 08:21
semantic web… please don’t make me think. It’s the end of the day. I’m just waiting for the “translation” apps
seriously, we’re going through some of the same things at work, and will have some much bigger issues in a couple of months, when we invite the public to come in and play along. We’re already discussing how to set up training courses so that some of our older visitors can get a hands-on tutorial. Not exactly part of our mission, but we hope that it will help bring them along as we shift gears into a more digital/interactive environment.
July 12th, 2008 03:20
Heh! It was at an Abbe Don installation at your museum, the Magnes, that I first confirmed that technology isn’t as intuitive as we had hoped. She had this wonderful “We Make Memories” exhibit that relied, in part, on using a mouse to navigate a computer. Watching many of the exhibit-goers, I was reminded of the scene in one of the Star Trek movies where the crew goes back in time to rescue a couple of humpbacked whales. Along the way they encounter 1980s technology and one of them tries to figure out what a mouse is for….
But people did learn, and that =was= a wonderful exhibit. Good, short tutorials are a good thing, and many older folks haven’t stopped learning or being curious.