 Hello, and welcome to Encompass Live. I am Krista Burns, your host. Encompass Live is the Nebraska Library Commission's weekly online event that we do. We cover all sorts of NLC activities, library topics presented by NLC staff and guest speakers. We do these every Wednesday at 10 a.m. central time. They're free for one-hour sessions. And we'll make sure of all sorts of different kinds of presentations that we do. Book reviews, interviews, tours of things, a little mini-training sessions, whatever we can come up with. This morning, we are doing Nebraska Learners 2.0 wrap-up. Gonna go over this most recent Learn 2.0 program that we did and see how it all went. Joining me today are the four of us that actually did work in charge of running the program, I guess. Myself, Michael Sowers, Elena Novotny, and Susan Nizely. So the four of us are all here to go through this with you to this morning. I don't even know how to start. Does someone wanna do the little intro of what it was? Okay, for the benefit of the recording, people might be listening to this on the podcast. Just wanted to know quick review of what the program was. Most of the people who are in the session today were participants. Nebraska Learners 2.0 was based on the 23 things model of online learning that was created a few years ago. We ran it, we created 23 different things ranging from lifelong learning to blogging to RSS to podcasts to YouTube to Flickr, several other topics. The program lasted 16 weeks. So it was October, November, December, and January. If I remember that correctly, if anybody speak up. Those who completed it on time and will have some of those statistics in a few minutes, we offered 15 continuing education credit hours. And so a lot of people earned a lot of credit for this. And at the end of the session, we will actually be drawing names from those who completed to win one of nine MP3 players that we actually have sitting here in front of us. The URL at the bottom of this slide is for where the website was. I'll read that real quick for those that are just listening to an audio only recording. It's l2ne.blogspot.com. And from there, what you would just do is click on the About the Program link and that will get you kind of into the beginning of it there. So that's kind of the overview. It seemed like everybody pretty much enjoyed themselves. And I think we got some statistics to share with you next. Go ahead, it's not doing well. Oh, I'll keep going. Okay. Sure. Okay. All right, if I put the numbers together, I'll read them. Total number of participants, what we did was we gave the number of people that told us, hey, I've created a blog, which was steps three and four of the program. We ended up with 165 participants, which I think was well above what we all expected. I was kind of going for a hundred people. So 165 was really wonderful to see. We had people who took all six to eight weeks to do it. We have at least one person, I think we did the whole thing in a weekend, as I recall. More kudos to you. I don't know how you slept, or if you slept, but you did that. The rest of these, some of these numbers are maybe not 100% accurate. They're as close as we could. The number of blog posts for all the participants, I've got two numbers there. That first number, 2,383. That was the number of posts that we could find an account for when the program ended. So on the, what was it? January 30th. January 30th, that Monday morning, we went through, and the number we had was 2,383. The second number there in parentheses, 2406, that was the number of posts as of about three o'clock yesterday afternoon. So what we're showing there is some folks are actually still posting to their blog. Some of them might be trying to finish up some of the last things, but we do know that some folks have actually just continued with their blog and are writing about things that had nothing to do with the program. They're actually keeping up with their blog. So we wanna give a little applause to those folks also. The number of comments left on the blog for the program itself, 2,257. That is also as of January 30th. This number, I think, is a little low because we've sent a bunch of email amongst ourselves in the last couple of days, but just between the four of us, that number is probably more like 400 emails that we started shipping back and forth based on, okay, I'm a little too loud, I'll be back after a little bit, based on just how do we do this? How do we wanna deal with this problem? How do we wanna answer this person's question? So a lot of email came through with us. And then a number of people who actually finished on time and actually have their name into the drawing and will be earning the 15s to the hours is 83. So we had about a 50% completion rate. Yes, congratulations to everybody. As I mentioned, some folks are still working on it, but again, that was a very good completion rate. 50% might not sound high, but considering the amount of work that you needed to actually do all of this, quite an impressive number. Sure, I just wanted to toss this slide in here. I found it interesting. For those of you that took part in the program, you might remember thing 14 was about delicious. And one of the things we asked you to do was what tags would you assign to the Nebraska Access website? So I just put together all the tags that I had collected into a tag cloud and you can see genealogy is the clear winner of the group with 13 folks doing that tag, followed closely behind by databases, magazines, Nebraska Access reference. So I just found it interesting to see how folks would take Nebraska Access and this just kind of shows you what happened. Social networking at work there. Very true. Okay, now what we've done ourselves here, the four of us is we've been attempting to keep up with all of those 160 semi-blogs and people that finished and pulled out some quotes that we thought were very interesting, fun, whatever, from various blogs. So we're just gonna read through these and talk a little bit about just the kind of things that people were doing. I think this one is yours. Yeah, okay, the first two are mine again. We're gonna kind of break their rule of don't read the slides, but these are worth it, especially since we are recording this. This first one was from the blog to the library beyond and this was, I recall, one of the final ones, what you think of the program, give us your feedback. And so this discovery program also forced me to try things that I would have never used before. I tweeted it, I added to a wiki. I was at a library board meeting two weeks ago and we were discussing slideshow presentations for some reason. One of our board members said that slideshow presentations were so hard to transport from computer to computer because they take up so much space, blah, blah, blah. And I laughed at that because I've been a library board member. And she said, I told them about slideshare. So this is a great example of showing that one of the purposes we had here was to kind of, in some cases, force people to try some things that they probably wouldn't have tried on their own. And then she gave this great example of how just in her job, just even if she's not going to use slideshare personally, she was able to break me up in conversation and actually educate somebody else because of something that should be loaded in this program forever. That's awesome. The other one that caught my eye, and this was earlier on in the program, and I've actually now used this slide in a couple of presentations, was from Dawn and Gordon. And she said, I know of an 80-year-old retired veterinarian who bought a Kindle. He loves it and is proud of his tech suave-ness. He downloads everything he reads, even though he can't download here in Gordon and must drive about West, 20 miles to get reception. A lot of people have complained in Nebraska about the Kindle and the fact that pretty much if you don't live in Lincoln, Omaha, or on my AD within about two miles, the sprint service that the Kindle works with won't work. And then other people are generalized that the older folks, you know, they're not gonna grab onto this technology and we serve a lot of older people, so should we focus on that? And here we've got a perfect example of somebody who got a Kindle, loved it, and actually just to download content onto it drives 20 miles just to do it. And I think that's amazing. She shows that we can't necessarily assume what technology or what service any of our patrons might actually cling onto. Yeah, this is Alana. The next three quotes are ones that I have pulled and I have to say, trying to limit myself to such few quotes was almost impossible. There was just so many great comments and statements made not only in the blogs, but even when in all the IM chats I took a part in, so I loved it all. The first two on the slide here are actually both dealing with education and I thought this was great. And she said, it's gotten me thinking about going back to school and getting an MLS. I don't know for certain that I'm ready to make that leap yet, but I feel much closer to it than ever before. So I think that's just wonderful. And then the Breska Bookworm made a comment along the same lines. Now, after completing the program, I'm thinking about taking more classes, maybe even going back to school. So, again, great. Yeah, it's just cool that people are getting back into the whole studying and learning something new, who, you know, idea of this gets them doing it. The next one, Denise's learning experience, she made this in reference to, she was doing her thing about YouTube and was talking to a 13-year-old telling them that they were what she was doing. And this is sort of what the 13-year-old told her. I just briefly mentioned this to one of my 13-year-olds who asked me what I was doing. His immediate response was, it would be perfect for the library because there are so many how-to YouTubes, ones that explain all the kinds of ways to make things and how things work in experiments that you can learn from. I just think that's really great to see that the 13-year-old gets it. As reading over all the blog posts and stuff, it was easy to see that some people were able to see how these things would exactly relate to the libraries and other times. People were struggling a little bit to see how they could use it in a library, but this is a great example of a 13-year-old that gets it. And I can tell you, two things I've learned from YouTube is how to make a glow-in-the-dark melting to do. And what happens when you put Mentos in Diet Coke? I think that those are the things I've learned the most from YouTube. I see the glow-in-the-dark, I'm doing it. Put that one up. That one's pretty cool. It's not drinkable anymore, but it's glow-in-the-dark. That's good to know that it's not drinking water. And then the last quote I used, I just think this was great because I can just imagine myself sitting from watching TV and this kind of like films to me. This is from, okay, books are great. Books are great, thank you. We didn't have a lead-speak thing. I think we're gonna need to do that. And now when watching TV, rather than sisters last week, when they mentioned Twitter, I can actually say, I have done that. I just think that's great that we're able to take what you've played with, tried, learned, and to have these moments in other parts of your life and say, oh yeah, I know what that is now. I understand the vocabulary. I get the jokes they may be making on TV, the comments, how they're relevant, since you've actually had a chance to play with and experience these different tools. But those are the three I picked. Like I said, it was really hard. A lot more I couldn't have chose. This is Susan and the next two slides have some of my favorite quotes. And these are just sort of samples of many quotes that convey the same sort of thinking and experience. And one thing that I found really gratifying is I read through people's blog posts, was that people were really gaining a sense of confidence and their ability to try out some of these new technologies. I thought it was great when people would talk about a specific tool and ideas that they had about how they could use that specific tool. But even more so, just the fact that people felt like they could try out things that they never thought they could try out before they had more confidence in their ability to figure it out, I thought. And so I'll just quickly, for the sake of the recording, read these two quotes that I pulled out. This is, books are great again. And he or she wrote, I can't even begin to explain the amount of confidence you have given me in the world of technology. What a great outcome. And then on VC's blog, VC wrote, when I first started this class, I was really nervous. Upon completing each thing, my confidence grew. Before long, I could hardly wait to learn the next thing. Next slide. And then the other theme that really makes me feel like I'm just sort of a sappy and sentimental, but anytime people were talking about the sense of community they felt, I just thought that it was so wonderful and so neat to witness. He started out as all of these individual people participating in this program. And by the time we got to the end of it, people were commenting on each other's blogs. They were talking about, they were using the pronoun we as in we are doing this, we are learning this. People were posting, you know, posting things that they found and saving. I thought other participants might like to see this. So there was a real sense that people, people felt like they had a sense of community. It was like a learning community. People had the sense that they had an audience. And I think that is a real important takeaway. We didn't have a social network before we started this program and now we do. And here are a couple of quotes. I really enjoyed the feeling of community we created here. That was to the library and beyond. Dancing Thoughts from Crane Farm said, tackling the question of takeaways. Wow, I feel more connected to other library people through reading their blog posts, profiles, et cetera. I wanted to meet some of these bloggers that I only know through their blog names. And then finally, HPL meanderings wrote, as a learning tool, this has been awesome. I have seen so much interaction and mutual assistance among my staff during our journey to thing number 23. This just makes me feel so great. And again, I feel sort of sappy and sentimental, but here at the library commission, I'm really lucky I have my colleagues here and we can learn from each other. But I know that some people are out there in one-person libraries, two-person libraries, and they don't always have that experience. And I think it's neat if we can virtually sort of create that experience for other people. That's sort of my two cents. I want to interject here, the story about knowing somebody only through their blog names. I go to like national conferences and somebody will say, oh, I'm so-and-so, nice to meet you. And we kind of look at each other like maybe we know each other and finally someone will say, well, my blog is. And then we'll suddenly go, oh yeah, I read you. You know, we almost have to start putting blog names on name tags after real names. Oh, sure, yeah. Oh, this is mine, Mrs. Krista. This is just one quote that I pulled out. We had a lot of people doing, learning lots of new things here and just their kind of overview at the end. This is the other one from the thing 23, I believe, vision racer, one of our bloggers. Web technology, as far as software is concerned, is becoming fascinating for me. The more I learn, the more I want to learn. Once I'm homebound, these technologies will allow me to communicate in another way other than just the telephone. Taking this course was probably one of my wife's better ideas. That was just a nice little, not do the wife, obviously. And planning for the future. Yes, and realizing that this isn't just, you know, like Elena was saying, you can use this in other areas of your life and not just in your library, but you know, that's what we're hoping that you use a lot of these things, but there's more to it than just doing it in your job. And a lot of people's blogs too mentioned, I am in with their parents, or I am in with their kids and how it's so much better now communicating with them, using the instant messaging services or just other things that they've used in other parts of their life too. So that I can just open up a whole bunch of new things for you. I think just another comment about this quote. This person, I believe his wife is a librarian and she participated, and then she talked him into participating. I just think from conversations I've had with her, I think he has some health issues and some disability issues. So when he talks about being homebound, I think that's a real concern for him that he's not going to be able to get out and communicate as much as he'd like to. But now that he's discovered that it's not, that it won't necessarily happen. Yeah. And I have learned people raise pigeons. No idea. We just learned a lot. Yeah, some people went with big themes on their blogs, which is great. Everything they were looking for in YouTube or in a slide chair or anywhere was on a certain theme. So yeah, you learn a lot from reading other people's ideas and research. So now we've told you some of the things that we thought about the program, things that just came up. We want to know now, open up the floor to you guys. This is your turn to talk. What did you all think of Nebraska Learners 2.0, our program? How did it go? How did it not go? Anything you want to share? We do know that some of you who are here did actually participate in the program, and we know who you are. All right. I didn't have a show of hands, or yes, this for who participated. Yeah, actually that'd be good. We could then it'll be here in the recording. If you did participate in our Nebraska Learners 2.0, can you check your little, raise your hand, or okay, that's what we're gonna do. Yeah, there we go, six so far. I know you did, damn it. I see you there. There's a little hand raise at the top there. That's a little more than half. Yeah, a little more than half of people here today participated, which is about our internal worker actually starting and finishing the whole thing too. Well, I specifically emailed Pam yesterday. I know you're out there, you raised your hand. And I'm hoping you have a microphone. I'd kind of like to, if you do have a mic, put you on the spot just a little bit. Not everybody might know how you guys handled this to your library, and maybe just sharing that experience and how it turned out for you from your point of view. And for those of you who don't know, you can turn on your mic by holding down the control key, and I think we'll clear the raising of the hands too. There you are. I just saw you do something there, Pam. Okay, can you hear me? Yes, step back a little bit from the microphone, I think. Okay, is that better? Yes. It's kind of weird because I can hear myself. We're gonna turn off our... All right, go ahead. I think the way we did it, I actually challenged all of my staff to participate in the LERNs 2.0, and I think 14 of us finished, and which was great, out of a total, we have a total of, excuse me, we have a total of 20 staff and that includes secretaries and everybody, so not everybody chose to participate and that was okay, I didn't browbeat people too much. But again, I think the thing that was so wonderful for us was that whole sense of community, even though we're in the same building, most of us have our own little things that we work on most of the time. This gave us common things that we could work on and work together and play with together, and it was just great. And we used these as discussion starters at staff meetings. We talked about ways that we could use the different tools in our work every day, either internally or externally as services for our patrons, and we shared things at staff meetings so that the whole group could see what people had created using some of the web tools and it was just fantastic. Great, thanks, yeah, I'm glad to hear that the sense of community happened. Many people might not know this, we kind of did a pilot program of this with our staff here too, before we sent it out to everybody in the state and that did happen here too. And larger population of people and employees and three floors and I'm not sure I could name everybody in the building, honestly, I'm bad with names anyways. And so yeah, that did kind of pull together that community a little bit. Does anybody else have things they wanna share? Things we maybe should have done differently, things you thought we did well, things you do, any other suggestions or comments? Carol? If you don't have a microphone, Carol, you can use the text chat to type. Are you having a mic? Okay, go ahead, Carol. Keep holding it for when you're talking. Okay, I'll turn my mic on. I'm a one-person school librarian at in the Panhandle and I didn't have any other workers to share this with. And so one thing I was thinking is we could form smaller communities of the 150 that were taking the class and have a group within this group to talk with. The person that made that comment in your blog and we were actually talking about that before our session started that that seemed like a good idea. People did start commenting on each other's blogs but there were so many people participating, many more than we anticipated that I think that wasn't intimidating to try to keep track of everybody's blog. So that seemed like a really good idea to maybe group people into a little bit smaller communities not that they couldn't read everybody's blog but that they did have a group where they would maybe feel more, be able to have more conversations back and forth and they wouldn't get overwhelmed by their number of blogs to follow. Anybody else want to share something that they learned or what they did or comment on how it went for them? I, oh, Pam again, go ahead Pam. I just wanted to say that one of the things that I was really impressed with this as a training model, we have a horrible time trying to figure out how to do training with our entire staff because nobody's here at the same time and those kinds of issues that everybody has. And I know this was a lot of work on you guys' part but I just think as a training model this was wonderful and it really solved some problems that we face when we're trying to train our staff on common skills or common tools. Made common, similar to that Pam, a lot of people talked about how nice it was to not have to travel, to be able to work from home at their own pace and hopefully it was nice because it wasn't just, even though you were working on it alone at home or at your library, there was a sense of community. One other person, I don't know Dan if you have a microphone or not but I know that you blogged a lot and you were really participating a lot and I have a sense that maybe you've done quite a bit of online interacting before this program started but you really seem to have a lot of insights. I just wondered if you could comment a little bit about your experience with the program. I think it was really a good program. I enjoyed it. I really think that the social networking is the way people do get together today because you can sort through and find people who have your interests and it was just, it was a lot of fun and I think for me in marketing, I think libraries have to be on this edge of doing this and not only putting out your stuff but going out as a librarian on the social network just like you would in your community and getting to know as many of the people as you can and getting to know other librarians and find out what other libraries are doing. Those were some of the things I really enjoyed. This is Susan again. That was one of the things that I really enjoyed and reading about in your blog but it really spoke to me was you talked a lot about the marketing potential of some of these tools and I know at the end you really sort of zeroed in on who are different people that we try to communicate with who are audiences and which of these audiences can we reach through these tools and that included younger people who do use these sorts of online tools and then people who aren't necessarily in your community but are thinking of moving to your community and I thought that was a really, not everybody always thinks of those people as potential audiences but I think that is a good reminder. Yeah, that's, go ahead. Oh, yeah, that's one of the things we always look at and what we do at South Sioux is not just what's going to help today as far as our local people but how is our library imaged in the rest of the area. So it's good to think about, yes, definitely. We actually have a comment on our text chat too. Judy Karanstaff says, here in RVLS for the Public and Valley Library System, the Breskelerns 2.0 is a constant source of conversation at any gathering. We share and laugh and complain and identify ourselves. I like the complain part. Yeah. I like the identify part. I like that. But that seemed to who you are. Confessing, yes, we confess. That's good, that's that any time people are getting together they're talking about this program and talking about it amongst themselves, whether you did comment on each other's blog, you can also comment to each other in person too, which is great when you just have your other meetings. And Laura Hess at Stanton Public Library is also saying in the text chat, Carol and I are the only two here and we like that we did not have to travel and take time off from our busy schedules to learn new things. That was great. That was kind of the point of doing it all online, being able to do it together or with your other staff members at your library that are in your library, in your area. That's great. I think many people expressed that in your 23th, the last thing that they liked not having to travel. No, it's something else that Dan was talking about, the way that social, some of these social networking tools, some of these tools out there that you interact with not only people in your community but other librarians locally. But one thing that I think, I know I think it was one of the Hastings Public Library folks happened to mention a book that they had in their collection on RSS or something. And the author of the book actually commented on the blog post and I thought that was such a great reminder that how easy it is to really sort of enter these conversations and become part of a larger community. So I thought that was really neat. Yeah, and I'll throw in a little tech behind that because some people might wonder, well, how the heck did the author ever find that? You get a little further in RSS and searching, you can set up feeds on like your own name or the ego searches or vanity searches. And I do that a lot being published and things like that. So I've seen a Twitter of somebody saying I just put Michael's book on hold at the library or I just ordered it from Amazon. And I Twittered him back and I said, hey, I hope you enjoy the book. And they was like, this is cool. So my guess is in that situation, you mentioned the title and mentioned the author. The author had some sort of search set up and saw it and responded. So even if you haven't necessarily told people about your blog, if it's out there, Google's gonna index it. Everybody else is gonna index it. And people will find it whether you thought they were going to or not. You've become part of the larger community beyond just Nebraska librarians doing 2.0. Any other comments, questions, anything, anybody wants to share about their experience with our learning 2.0 program? Nobody here wants to encourage you. I know there's a delay with typing and stuff. Right. Raising opinions to you. Yeah, Jean, can we put you on the spot? Sure. Wow. I don't know. I think one of my favorite things was probably the one where I think it was number 20, where you had all the different things that you could, these are some things. We've done all these, but here's a lot more. That was kind of neat, even though it was 23 things, you know that there's another, how many more things out there. And so that was kind of fun for me. And it also forced me to kind of catch up with certain things, but I found myself getting lost in certain things, like going to Flickr and putting pitchers up there and I'm going, hey, I need to do more pitchers and more pitchers, and then I had to keep pushing myself to get back on track, otherwise I would have never finished the 23 things. And I also think it's a great tool for all the tools are great for libraries and I've actually used quite a few that I hadn't used before. So when people come into the library, they're going, well, I need to do this or I need to do that. Have you ever seen this? And I'm going, hey, I just learned that in 23 things. That's great. And that's what we're hoping that this isn't just going to be an end that you just did the thing and you're done, that you continue using them, either for yourself personally or for the library, whichever works for you. And I can relate to the Flickr thing as someone who was just uploading 500 plus photos from Las Vegas last night. So, you know, titling and tagging, all those are real fun. Never ending. Yeah. Anybody else wanna? Anybody else got a comment they want to make before we move on to our last couple of things? Cause I know some of you want to know if you want an MP3 player or not. All right, you want to move on? All right. Now we also learned some stuff on our own side. I think you had some notes. Yeah, I took some notes here and two, I just wrote down some things we didn't necessarily anticipate, these first two, and I'm not sure there's anything we can really do about them, but I noticed the large number of people at schools saying I have to do this at home because the stuff you're trying to show me is blocked at school, you know, especially when we got to YouTube and was a big one in Twitter and things like that. I noticed that too, yeah. So, yeah, there was a large number of people who, even if the boss supported doing it at work, they kind of had to do it at home, but then looking at it from the complete opposite, and then Carol will let you in here for a sec. We had one library that had a union issue that wasn't allowing their librarians to do it at home because it was a work-related thing and they weren't supposed to do work from home. So, you know, it's one of those situations where you're never going to make it perfect for everybody. Somebody's always going to have a problem. Carol, you have a comment? I just wanted to add that I can't even access the blogs at school, so I had to do it at home. So, in your case, blogger was blocked? Yes, that's correct. Yeah, I mean, that would be another presentation, I guess. But, you know, that's, yeah, I'm not going to go there. That's another matter, it's a play, yes. Although, having gone through these many things, as Michael was talking about, the school's been blocked, I mean, thinking while I was sitting here, this showing that now that you've learned that what is out there and what it can be used for and what other people are using it for, a lot of these things are blocked, I think, out of just by tech people, IT people, I'm just not knowing what they're really for and what they can be used for. This may be a chance for you to now show them, look, I've needed to go, I wanted to go to the site to do this and here's this course that I could have taken or here's this YouTube video that I could have used to teach our students how to do this research project or whatever and because you're blocking it, just outright blocking it, I couldn't use this sort. So it might be some way to open up a conversation about, do these things really need to be blocked? Is there ways that we can teach the students how to properly and appropriately use them at the schools? You know, use it as a stepping point to get some of these things opened up because really, a lot of the blocking has done out of fear of what the little kids will find. But there's so much that you've now learned that it's out there that isn't a problem. It's a good stepping point possibly to help work on some more of that. Then also just a couple of other things of, you know, if we were to do it all again, what might we do differently? The one thing we didn't have anybody do was actually register to do this as you normally would register for, well, as you register for this session or as you would register for any other live class that we would do. And unfortunately, through not doing that, we then didn't have everybody's email addresses all upfront and we didn't necessarily have a way to email everybody all at once who was participating. So we ended up emailing everybody in the state even if you weren't participating. So we would probably do that differently again in the future. Also, one thing in Blogger that we probably should have pointed out, but specifically that we didn't, is you can actually set a setting so that if somebody leaves a comment on your blog, you get a copy of it in your email, which is really handy, you know, I'll get comments left on posts that I wrote two years ago. And if I didn't have those comments coming into my inbox, I wouldn't even know that they happened. So if you are going to continue your blog, you might want to go into your blog settings and find that. I think it's under your email, actually, it might be the tab. I don't remember exactly what it is in there. The third one we had, and this is kind of an observation, we're still discussing amongst ourselves how we feel about it, but we noticed some people wrote long, beautiful essays and some people wrote, I did think 12 today. Everybody's getting the CD credit. And maybe if anybody has an opinion on this one, you could share one of those, but should we, if we were to do it in the future, set a minimum length for a blog post, for example. This is kind of the only quote-unquote solution we've come up with. I know some of the folks on here were more, the folks who wrote more elegant posts and more longer posts, but it's something we're thinking about and it's something we're open to suggestions. Should anybody have them either now or via email in the future? Does anybody else have? I think so, is that pretty much it? Oh, Pam has the comment. Go ahead, Pam. I just would like to comment on behalf of some of my staff. I did a lot of mine at home and so I had more time, but I know some of my staff who were trying to complete these at work because either they didn't have access to them at home or they just wanted to get them done at work, which was fine, that's what we intended for people to do this part of their work time. But they might only have an hour to actually work on something when they weren't at the desk. And so they would spend 50 minutes actually doing the thing and then it came time to do the, then they had to do the blog post real fast so they didn't get a lot written. So I think sometimes you have to assume that people have spent the majority of their time actually doing the thing rather than writing the blog post. We are definitely making that assumption. I don't want anybody to think we're criticizing. We do understand the situation, but we did get some comments from people who wrote longer posts saying, but other people, it looks like they didn't. So we're not sure we're gonna impose the minimum length. Should we continue with this? We're just, it's something that needs to be considered and see where we wanna go with it from here. But thank you Pam for your input that does explain in some situations what's going on. Another way of possibly, we're dealing with it that I just thought of was when we do see someone who just said, I did thing 12. And we could then respond to them with a comment on their blog saying, that's great, can you tell me what you thought about it? I'm just trying to entice them a little so they don't have to do it at that sitting when the blog post, they can get a discussion going in their comments. And that would definitely be acceptable and appropriate of showing a little bit more in depth discussion that was going on about it. Did you like this part or how about that part? Anything like that that could get a discussion going with them. Do you wanna move on to our last one since Judy just left a comment in a segment? Yeah, Judy just commented in the text chat that actually is related to our next slide in point of discussion is future plans. Are we gonna do this again? What are we gonna do? We've had lots of people say that they, it's one part of their thing 23 was just asking if we did this again, would you want to do it? And I think most people are pretty much saying, sure, yeah, in any way, I'd love to do it again. So that is in our minds of doing something. We're not sure what yet. We might need to break on our side from reading a hundred so much blogs every day. But thinking about it, Judy says in the text chat, let's do it again, but in smaller increments. I spent most Sunday evenings working on the things, but it was a pleasant breaking from regular life, I think. And I think Judy, sometimes you were asked we do it very early Monday morning and timestamps were accurate. I don't know if that's the answer. I don't know if that's one of the ideas we've had for future. One of the ideas we've had is actually a little, maybe different from the way other organizations have done this. What other organizations that are starting to do it again have kind of taken a year off and then done another 23 things. One of the suggestions that had been put to us and I want to stress it, none of this is written in stone. We're still discussing amongst ourselves if we want to do this exactly how. But to have sort of an ongoing things so that maybe one or two topics a month continuously so that for these two weeks, here's the new topic. If you want to do it, you've got these two or three weeks, go ahead and do it. You can get the credit for it. If the next thing you don't have this time you're not interested in, you don't have to do that one. So instead of a specific timeframe with a specific number of things, more of a continual number of things. Each thing is its own individual level. Right, each thing is its own program in and of itself. We've got Nicole left the comments in the text chats. I'll read that out here, I'm just eyeballing it. I wanted to add my two cents worth here. I'm a younger library director and I really like the fact that most of these teachings have allowed some of my older coworkers familiarity in the reach of new technologies where most of them tend to be lacking. And yes, because most of the smaller libraries are unable to travel without closing the library. Stalent teachings were a very cool program that taught all of us, even those who considered themselves rather tax-happy. Thank you. This, I hope I speak for all of us. In fact, I'm sure I do. This was a lot of work in our end. I mean, it was fun. Don't get us wrong, but yeah, we might need to take that a little bit of a break. I did notice that the people that think of themselves as being tax-happy, I didn't notice and I'll let some people's blogs, certain posts were a lot more quickly written and kind of just, oh, I've been using YouTube for three years. My kids have showed me all the time. Oh yeah, I already have Flickr account. But then there'd be the thing that they'd never heard of before too that comes up like two weeks later. So even if you are, yeah, a tax-happy person, one of these learning two point out programs, you may learn something new. And if we do decide to do a future one, keep an eye on what the new things coming up are, it might be something you've done and you might explore and discover something new about that thing or it might be something you've never heard of. And if it's something you already do, you don't know what to do at all. So I'm glad that we did get a lot, a range of people using it. And I did discover, as I was reading some blogs backwards, 23 things, how people did seem to change with how they're posting, beginning being much more, and this goes into the confidence thing that Susan was talking about, or much more hesitant with their blogging and what they're doing and that they didn't finally get, you can see their posts become longer and more in depth and they're, you know, getting into it a lot more as the time went on. And my coworkers are still complaining I don't log into IM enough. So, you know, not everybody does everything that we've talked about in this program. I'm there every day if you'd like to chat with me. This is the land of my life. And I think it's important to know that not every, just like, what's that quote? Somebody did read Ranga Nathan's. Oh, every book, every person has a book, or has a book or something. The same thing goes with technology. Not all of us here, like each and every one has to be the same, but, you know, some of us like blogging and writing and some of us don't. Some of us like IM, some of us don't. And I think it was kind of interesting. Most people were not very sure of Twitter, but we had a couple of people who actually participated in the program who are now prolific tweeters. That's kind of interesting. I would be, we're gonna do the prizes next, but I just, Robin, you just logged in and you were the other person that I had specifically requested, try to make it and I wanna thank you for doing that. Is there any chance that we could put you on the spot for like two minutes to just get some feedback from you of what you thought of the program, what you liked, didn't like, what we maybe could have done differently? And if you have a microphone, just hold down your control key and that'll turn on your mic and just hold it down while you're speaking. Oh, there, can you hear me now? Yeah, we can hear you. Okay, good. I really enjoyed the program. I have to say that I'm a little silly today because I'm on mountain time and so... That's why I'm not here, I just realized you guys are on central time. Go ahead with any comments or anything you wanna say. We still have some time here. I really enjoyed the program as a fairly new library, Nebraska librarian. I really learned a lot. I don't know how to put this. It really made me think about how I could incorporate some of these tools into not only my personal life, like some of them, like I never used RSS feeds before this class and now I use them every day and not just for personal weird non-library related stuff but I listen to a lot of professional things and I find a lot of professional things like articles and blogs to read which kind of helps me to be connected when I'm out here in Western Nebraska, kind of in the middle of nowhere. Great, thanks. Yeah, RSS has completely changed the way I can get information so I'm glad to hear that others have caught on to that too. All right, we're gonna go ahead and do prizes. We were gonna do this on video but you'll just have to trust us that this is fair. We have everybody who completed, got their name in their library on a slip of paper. We have nine of these creatives and MP3 players to give away. They're nice, they're sitting here right in front of us and I kind of wish I had one. They even play FM radio, so there you go. So we're just gonna kind of go around the table here and draw out names, so I'm gonna go ahead and reach in first and I've got this slip of paper here and we've got Mary Boynton of Hastings Public Library you have one and MP3 player. And it's good, I've got Kathy Nelson, Strasburg Public Library, you are a second winner. Yay. Don Webber, Gordon Westfield Elementary School. All right. Melissa, this is Susan, I have Melissa Nielsen from Johns Dahl Library in West Point and I think she was actually a board member. All right, great. And I've got somebody who's actually on the call right now. Pam, I have drawn your name at Hastings Public Library, so I think Hastings people are gonna like me after today. So we're gonna be sent to you. She's flooding. Yeah, there you go, all right. I have another Hastings Public Library one. Elizabeth Hangey, Hedgeney. Hedgeney, okay. Next one is Linda Reisinger at Orchard Public. Her name, Tobias, at Filter Public Library. Filter Public Library, I always have to make a list of names at the moment. Okay, and then we have last one here. Laura Lofgren of Wayne Public Library. So those are our nine winners. Yay. Yay. Thank you, all right. You definitely want to thank the people who like, the groups that donated the prizes. Yes, Aitart Nima and NLA, thank you very much. They donated the funds to purchase these things. So thank you very much. Definitely want to thank them. Yes. And possibly wouldn't have wanted to thank them. We will be contacting anyone who isn't here today on Flip and Note, although they have one and it's sending these out in the mail sometime like within the next week. Yeah, probably today or tomorrow actually. Yeah. So we'll get that. Everybody whose name is Orange on the list is getting 15 CE. We'll be submitting those names to the appropriate people here at the commission. So that would be Laura. Laura Johnson. So if you have any questions about that, I would say give it a week or two just to make sure all the paperwork gets done. But then if you've got any questions about the CE after that, go ahead and give Laura a call and she can confirm or deny the fact that you have gotten 15 CE credits. And so at this point, we're done. Does anybody else have anything they want to say? And while we're doing that, I'll read Judy's comment in the text which is congratulations to all of us for joining in the journey and reaching the beginning of the new one. So yes, I'm not sure I could put it that better myself. And we will definitely keep thinking of ways to carry on from this and keep the momentum going and looking for ways to keep that community alive one way or another. Yeah, and if you have any ideas, please go ahead and send them and one of us or emails out there on the screen. Robin, I see you have your hand written. Well, yeah, since I am silly and didn't come till the end, I wanted to say that besides all of the technology related things that I learned, one of the best things, and you guys may have discussed this before I got here, but one of the best things about this class was the fact that I got to interact with so many of the other librarians across the state, which again is kind of hard for me being out here in Western Nebraska. And I think I learned a lot just by reading other people's posts and kind of the reaction. So I think that this was a great program and that we should definitely, definitely do it again. And obviously not the same program, but you know. Pam, you have a comment? Go ahead. Well, I just wanted to say thank you to you guys because I know it was a lot of work on your end. And I just appreciate so much the fact that the commission gave you guys the go ahead to do this and allowed you the work time to get it all put together and monitor it and all those things you had to do to make it work. So thank you all very much. It's a great experience for all of us. It was fun meeting everybody. It was fun getting to see Annie with everybody. I feel like I know you guys better. Definitely true. And maybe one or two, if I know too much about now. Kidding. Okay, any other final comments? Anybody else to wrap up with? Lots of applause and laughing. Yes, we all had a good time. It'll be keeping in touch with everyone. If you keep up your blogs, that's great. I've got you all, then, my RSS leaders, so if you post something out of it. Yes, we do. And you can keep an eye on each other's blogs as well. Okay, thank you very much for attending. This session has been recorded and will be posted up to sometime this afternoon for future reference. Thanks so much. Bye. Thanks, bye.