"Five Weeks to a Social Library" and me

I am pleased to say that I will be presenting on Flickr at the free-as-in-beer, free-as-in-freedom, Five Weeks to a Social Library course, which is, as you no doubt already know, being organized by Meredith Farkas and five other excellent library bloggers. You can take a look at the entire preliminary program if you’d like to see what will be taught and who will be teaching it.

I am even more pleased to say that I will be presenting with Michael “Libraryman” Porter. Michael and I didn’t plan a joint presentation, but we both submitted proposals on Flickr, and since they were both half-baked so fabulous, they asked us to present together. Besides, they needed some token men. (That’s a joke; it never once occurred to me that my proposal wouldn’t be welcome, or given fair consideration.)

Michael and I met at last year’s Internet Librarian conference (where I was once mistaken for Libraryman) and had just been lamenting (via Facebook messages, no less! We walk the social software talk!) that we wouldn’t have the chance to hang out this year, since I’m not going to IL06.

So we still don’t get to hang out, but we do get to work together on this presentation. Michael says it will make us famous. And I believe him.

“Five Weeks to a Social Library” and you

So what is a course without participants? Forty people will be able to take the course, participating in the live webcasts, chats, and the other live, social aspects of the course. And everyone on the Internets will be able to view the course content, and archives of the live events.

If you want to be one of those forty people fully enrolled in the course, get on over to the participant application. I’m not privy to the selection process, but it is my understanding that special consideration will be given to people who have little or no monetary support for professional development from their workplace.

I think this whole thing is very exciting. It has the potential to be a great experience for everyone. It could very well crash and burn. But Meredith, Amanda Etches-Johnson, Dorothea Salo, Ellyssa Kroski, Karen Coombs, and Michelle Boule have my thanks and admiration for dreaming this up and getting it going.

(Just an aside: do we have a tag for this yet? Or at least a shorthand way to refer to the course? ‘Cuz I’m not feeling “fiveweekstoasociallibrary” as a tag. For now, I’m going to go with “sociallibraries” since that is the domain name of the course site.)

Tags: , ,