 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live, the first Encompass Live of 2013. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event where we cover any activities maybe of interest to librarians across the state and across the country. We do these shows live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time but they are recorded so if you aren't able to join us during Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You can always watch all of our recordings. We are now in our beginning of our, this is the beginning of our fifth year. Oh my God. Yeah, we started in January 2009 with this. So you can watch our all four years previous of recordings if you want to on our website. We do bring in guest speakers to do presentations here on the show but we also do things with just our own staff and that's what we've got this morning. I am myself and Michael Sauer sitting next to me who is the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Library Commission. We are your presenters this morning and we are going to be talking to you about a program we've been doing here through the Library Commission since, when did we start, doesn't it, the first time? I think so. I don't know, we'll get to that. Yeah, it's in the slide in here somewhere. It's in the notes, yes. So what we're talking about here this morning is 23 Things, the next generation of 23 Things programs. Now I know that I've done this presentation, we've done this presentation for a couple of years now in various incarnations, at various conferences or online and some people have been through these kind of programs. I know that some of you have done them, some of you have been through it yourself or seen or read about other people, other organizations doing it, but I know also from these presentations you've done that many people don't have a clue, have not heard of them yet, it's new to them. There's always something that's new to somebody, you know that, or that some people might not just want to express your own what they were, what they're all about, how maybe you can get one of these programs going in your organization. So we're going to give you a little, some background on where they all started, where these 23 Things programs came from, and then get into what we've been doing here and some other ones going on across the country and other areas of the world actually. It's not just us. So the basics here about new technologies. The reason these 23 Things programs, which we'll get into the details of in a second, problem with all these new technologies is there's so many of them. There's new things coming out every day, new technologies, new resources, new tools you can use, and some people may think that they are missing the train or getting hit by the train in some cases. Hopefully that's not the case, but sometimes there's just too many things to keep up with. You don't know what is the newest thing, how am I supposed to learn this? And is this something new that I've got to keep up with now and something new I've got to do in my job, something extra? Honestly, it's not. Just have to keep in mind this is a part of lifelong learning. That's another phrase you hear a lot related to 23 Things programs. We're always learning new things in our personal life, in our professional life. You just don't really sometimes think about it as I am learning something. I need to take a class on something. I have to teach myself something. You're always learning something new. As Michelangelo said, when he was at age 87 in 1562, I am still learning. So there's always new things coming up that you'll learn about, and this is just another part of that. I just need to make it something that you do part of your life, and these programs can help. For example, here is this is the 23 Things program, just an example of doing lifelong learning. This is at the Tacoma Park Maryland Library. They actually specifically have a senior room. There's computer stations where the minimum age to use them is 55, and they are full constantly. And many people use them are much older. You can see everyone here is older in this photo of people using it. So this is just an ongoing thing that your patrons, your users, your students, faculty, whoever are your users at your libraries and institutions are. They are doing this as well. So people are always trying to learn. You need to learn. Your users are going to be trying to learn these things. What can you do? With a structured program that we can use to help our staff, students, colleagues, whoever, keep up with and be aware of all these new technologies and resources. So that's kind of a background of this whole lifelong learning idea and what is going on. And hopefully with 23 Things, these types of programs can help people keep up better and be less stressed about it. Now I want to know if that guy in the back of the photo there is either watching a funny cat video or knows he's being photographed. I don't know. But he is enjoying whatever he is doing there, definitely. So what is 23 Things? The original 23 Things program or Learning 2.0, we've got a screenshot here. It was originally designed by Helen Blowers at the Public Library of Charlotte Mecklenburg County. Did I get that right? They don't call it the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library. The name has changed since this was done. And she read an article by Stephen Abram, who many of you may be familiar with. And if you're not, you probably should be. He wrote a blog post called 43 Things I or You Might Want to Do This Year. And that was back in 2006, I believe, something like that. Or maybe even 2005. Yes, 2006. So that was one of those, you know, it's the new year. What might you want to be looking at? And she looked at that article and thought, you know, this is a really great thing. It pointed to a 43things.com website. And she said, okay, but 43 might be a little much. So she turned it around and kind of chopped it down to 23 things and created a program for her staff, for the staff at the library, not her staff per se. That was a nine-week program and basically broke down things into lessons or, well, each item into a thing, which was its own lesson. And you would read about it. Things would come out. You would do a little exercise based on whatever tool that was and finish that up. I think they have things like prizes and things like that. At the end, she kind of encouraged participation from the librarians on that staff. So this was kind of the very first program using this format. And one of the things that they worked into this that she kind of put together was this seven-and-a-half habits of highly successful lifelong learners. That was this, Helen put this together or she found this? I think she found this. I'm not sure it says that she came up with it. Oh, okay, okay. We'll give Helen the credit. I'm sure there's research about lifelong learning that went into it and that kind of thing. And so in putting together this program, she kind of took these seven things, begin with them in the mind, accept responsibility for your own learning, view problems as challenges. I try to live by that one as much as I can. Have confidence in yourself. Create your own toolbox of learning. Use technology to your advantage. Teach a mentor others. And that 7.5 there, seven-and-a-half is play. As you look at these programs, especially that last one, I like to say, they really kind of pull all of these things together. And even in our program that we're doing, we have people watch a little video about these seven-and-a-half habits to try to get the participants to internalize these things as they're going through the program itself. I had someone ask me once and I did this presentation last year sometime, why is play seven-and-a-half? I think it should be the full eight. It should be a full one-on-one. Well, this is just how they go. Well, I think I'll try to say... Play, explore. It's playing upon these seven habits of highly affected people. So if you change it to eight, you kind of lose the attention. Next time we see how it will have to ask her. Why shouldn't you play a full point? So we heard about these programs. And Chris and I kind of got together here at the commission and said, hey, I think we should probably do some sort of program like this. So where would we start? We decided to start with our staff because putting together one of these programs is a bit much. So back in 2008, from February through April of 2008, we ran our own Learning 2.0 23 Things program here for the staff. They were our guinea pigs. Yes, yes. We didn't think about doing this for... We didn't want to somehow get this out to librarians and library staff in the state, but we weren't comfortable jumping right into that to begin with. Let's try something to see how this works. Can we even pull it off? How does it actually work in the process? I mean, the original program we heard was for a library staff. How do you scale it up to a whole state? So we said, let's start with our staff. See what works. See what doesn't work. Can we write good instructions that people can understand? Have we chosen the right tools? Most of these programs you'll see are licensed under some sort of Creative Commons license. So you are free to borrow and reuse and modify. So we did not write around from scratch. We took the original Charlotte Mecklenburg one and kind of adjusted it. I think we included at least one or two Nebraska specific resources that they wouldn't have ever included and things like that. So we ran this program over nine weeks. This program is still archived online if you ever at some point want to go back to it. When we show you the current site, I believe there's links back to the original. Participation on staff was voluntary. We had at the time 49 people on staff. I'm going to throw some numbers at you now. 25 people started. So that was a 50% participation rate. And nine people completed, which was a 36% completion rate. Now these bumpers may not sound great, but really they are. Well, 36%, we didn't think it was just that. That's good. Yes. Getting 36% of the people who started to actually finish one of these projects. If you look at other people who maybe have done research and anyone who's done this, they'll say, oh my God, you've got that many to do it. Well, it is work. I mean, they had to set aside time each week from their regular job to read the post, investigate, play with the system, come up with some sort of end product, write a blog post about their experience. So it does take some time. And we did make sure that this was vetted out through the supervisors and heads of the departments. So they were involved as well in doing it and participating themselves as much as they can and encouraging and giving their staff the time to do it. So getting management on board and invested in it made a difference. Yeah, Kristen and I just didn't put this together and said, okay, everybody, you want to do this? No. I mean, top down, everybody had to have some buy-in. Ran for nine weeks. It was self-reporting. We kind of checked off when people did things, but that was about it there. Everybody who completed was entered into a prize, which were provided by staff, purchased some prizes, some of the management purchased prizes. We weren't using any tax money for that. They used it for somebody to purchase the... And there was some MP3 players were the prizes there. And then on April 15th of 2008 on Library Worker Appreciation Day, we kind of held a little finale and we had a little party anyways, but we kind of attached this to it, drew for prizes, got people's feedback. And overall, success, I would say. We did it. We did it. And we didn't look at it and go, oh, we're never doing this again. In fact, we've been doing it ever since. So what we then did with that information was that fall, we opened it up to the state of Nebraska. So this is kind of version 2.0 of Nebraska Learns 2.0. Or actually, it's version one of Nebraska Learns 2.0 because the other one was just for staff. And so that ran from October of 2008 through January of 2009, which a pod reflection may not have been the best time to run it. In fall, we had a state conference. You have the holidays coming up there. But I mean, it worked. But maybe if I was going to do it again, October to January might not have been the best time to do it. For the state conference, we were able to use that to help promote it. True. In the first place, we were able to push it at our October conference where we handed out business cards that talked about 23 things. 16 weeks. You could earn 15 CE credits. Yes. So we did have some MP3 player giveaways that were purchased by Itart, which is the technology roundtable of NLA and NEMA, which is now Encelad, the school librarians group, and NLA themselves. So we kind of got like three MP3 players from each, I believe. We had nine to give out. And then if you completed it, now it's an all or nothing. You didn't get like one CE credit per thing. If you completed the whole program, you got 15 CE credits. Now, not to get into too much detail about how CE works here in Nebraska, but that was about three years worth of CE credits. It could be. You could do this program and get your accreditation for a couple of years covered right from here. So the MP3 players were nice, but I think the CE credit really pushed a lot of people into participating. We included in our continuing education coordinator in the planning for this that she was on board as well with doing it. So throwing a few more numbers at you. We had 165 participants across the state of Nebraska. They wrote a total of over 2,300 blog posts as a result of this. There were over 2,200 comments left back on this blog here that was running the program itself. The four staff that were running the program, me, Chris, Delana, and Susan sent over about 350 emails back and forth. We kind of counted how many emails just during that nine weeks. A lot of coordination among the people needing to put out a program. And we had 83 completions. So out of 165, we had a 50% completion rate. That is amazing. Yeah, everybody we've talked to who's run one of these programs has just said, how the heck did you get a 50% completion rate? We think it was the CE credit. I mean it really was because some folks have a harder time earning that CE credit by doing things. And they went, hey, here's a program. I can do this. It's a limited time period. I can just get it done and get all that CE. And it was wonderful. We did a wrap-up program on Encompass Live, which back in 2009, which I'm sure is still out in the archive. And we drew our prizes from that and got a lot of great feedback from people. So stage one was staff. Stage two was the state. And one of the biggest comments that we got in the end from the final post. We asked people to kind of say, okay, what do you think of the program? We'll reflect on it, whatever. The single greatest comment we got was, or the single most often comment we got was, keep it going. Are you going to do it again? Are you going to do more? They're sad that it was ending. Yeah. Are you going to have any more lessons to learn, things to do? So we decided at the end of January, when it was all over, to breathe. Take a break for a couple of months and decide what we wanted to do next. And so we did some research to see what had been done, if organizations had done one of these programs, did they do any follow-up? So many of them did. They did a nine-week, 23-things program. And then the next year did it again. And then the next year did it again. So very short burst of information. And we thought that was cool. That was something good. But we decided to try and do something a little different with it. So then we hadn't seen. I think I only know it's one other place doing something more like this. I mean, it was in Maryland, but I can't remember. We decided to go with a, do something different and ongoing 23-things program. Meaning not just a short period of time, but a lot of things you do. And then it's over. This is a program where we do one thing per month that people can go and look at the lesson and do it. And they, for that one thing, they get one CE credit for completing it during that month. They can work with other people on it. Just like the longer, the program, we did something each week, do the whole month to do this thing. And we started this in April 2009. And we're still doing it, actually. So this has been going on for years. This month is thing 64. 60 something. Yeah. So we had a few things. We've mixed up a little bit in there. But so this is our current ongoing program. We announced it in April 2009. So the other one ended in January. So by April, we had this one arranged and ready to go. The first thing was in May. So the first thing that they could do is May of 2009. At the start, 47 people set up blogs and told us they were doing it. Only 18 of those 47 were from the first program. We got 29 new people to join in with this ongoing one. So that was something very interesting, I thought, that not everyone from the original one jumped in. It was just those people. There was new people who maybe that timeframe, we did it, as Michael said, October to January, maybe wasn't the best time if people were busy with conferences and holidays and whatnot. But with the new one, we announced, hey, we're going to do an ongoing thing. Once a month, you can learn something. Once a month, you can practice something. You have a whole month to work on it. We got 29 new people to join in. We had them do a prerequisite where they had to watch the video and about the seven-half habits of highly successful learners and set up their blog. And they did that. They do not have to do everything every month. They can see what the thing is for the upcoming month and decide to do it if it's not something that they're interested in or something they don't think they can use or something they already know about and don't want to. They can just skip that month and see what comes up the next month. It is not planned out ahead of time like the 23 Things program you know. These are the 23 things that we'll learn in the next hour or many weeks. It's not that way. Each month, one of us would come up with the item to learn about that month. There were four of us originally running the program. Now it's Michael and I running it. So we take turns creating them. So each month you just have to wait and see what it was going to be. But you had the whole month to do it. So that was okay. You had plenty of time to figure it out if it was something you wanted to do. Did you have the time? Whatever. All the things are still left up on the page. You can always go back and do previous ones for your own learning and knowledge. But you only earned the CE credit if you did it during the month that it was first for. Yeah. And the idea behind that is we're trying to get... We're trying to get multiple people to be doing all working on the same thing at the same time. Hence that's why we say if you do it that month you get the CE credit. Now when we look at numbers how well that's working is maybe questionable a little bit. But the idea is that we want to encourage as many people who are going to do a particular thing to do it at the same time. So they can work together. So they can work together and get some discussion going, things like that. We also have some people who are doing the things even though they don't actually earn CE credit from us. Academic librarians, our CE credit is pretty much public libraries. But we do have some academic librarians across the state who will do the things just because they want to learn how to do it. And they will participate even though they're not actually getting anything from us or just doing it for themselves. The program is open to any Nebraska library staff. Whether you're a board member, trustee, actual staff person, and if you're an academic, special, public, whatever, everyone is welcome to do it. Although if you want to do our things and you don't live in Nebraska you're free to do them. Well, we can't give you CE credit. We just can't give you CE credit. Right, exactly. Talk to your own people in your own state and they might be able to, but we can't do that. In January of 2012, we moved the blog in-house. The library commission was at the same time working on doing a WordPress install here for our own in-house blogs that we do. And so we brought, previous we were at Blogger. Blogger, Blogspot. And it's still out there. The site is still out there. Later on in the presentation are the links for all of these as well. But we brought it in-house and so we have the new website. Looks like this. This is one we're currently on. All of the content and comments from the original blog was copied over into the new site for continuity's sake. So you can just go to this new blog, the new URL, and get everything going back to the beginning of when we started doing the ongoing program. But the old site is still there in case people do have links to that one or we're linking out to it instead. But there is awesome information there saying we've moved over to here now. So we are just now at a new URL. And we added something new also right after we moved. So about a year ago, so this would have been January of 2012, I started looking, well, planned it in January 2012. So in January 2012, probably none of you have ever seen my office, but I might be the tech guy, but I've got books piled on the floor of books that I need to be reading and whatnot. I'm pointing over there like this is my office, this is actually Krista's office. So and a lot of these books have direct ties to libraries, technology, marketing, whether, you know, directly or kind of indirectly a little bit. So I started talking with our, Laura, our C person, our continuing education person, and I talked to Krista about learning 2.0 and I thought well, what if it's not just having a thing that you can do online each month, why not we also have a book thing, a book that you can read each month and then reflect upon in your blog and earn some CE credit. Now the real reason I had to talk to Laura in this case was we have one CE credit for a technology thing, but the book might take you, you know, six, eight hours just to read, let alone then read a blog post to reflect on where a web thing might take an hour or two and you're done. So what we've basically done is the number of CE credits in this case are flexible kind of based on the length of the book. So usually two, sometimes three. I have yet to do like a six or seven hundred page book. I don't want to intimidate people. I try to keep them between 200 and 300 pages long. And so for a year now, Book Thing 12 just came out the other day here, we have had one book a month ranging from the January one here is the filter bubble about one view of search technology that people have thought about. We've done the clue train manifesto. The one I've already got scheduled for February is the thank you economy, which is a little more of a marketing sort of thing, but I think could have some really interesting applications to libraries. So we've integrated this in. So now there are two things each month. One is a book and one is kind of a web tool or some piece of technology that's available. And really we're the only ones doing this that I'm aware of this Book Thing. There really isn't another one. And I will say too that this was inspired by Michael Stevens who you'll hear again Crystal talk about in a little bit. At San Jose State where he was having his students read books and report on them. And so that's what gave me the idea to pull this into our program. So and you may have noticed too across the previous versions of our banner there, it's Carhenge. Crystal you take this. Well you may have noticed that there has been a theme to all of our blogs that we have done at the top of our banners and all of them have been these pictures of these cars. And as anybody know what this is but you just gave it away. I gave it away. Has anybody out there seen this before? Does anybody know where we were when we were taking all of these photos? Go ahead and type into the question section of your go-to web on our interface. I know at least two people listening. I know some people know, yeah. Yes it's Nebraska. It says in Western Nebraska it is a place called Carhenge which is actually, and you can see it a little better here on this photo, cars that have been arranged in the exact same locations and dimensions as the original Stonehenge in England. It's all accurate to the same positions and everything there and it's just Carhenge. They tourist attraction out in Western Nebraska and this is myself and a couple of their staff, Susan Nisley and Shana White who are actually a couple of the original creators of the program worked on it in the original ones. And so we just took it on as our theme for Nebraska. It was something that was different and specific to us. So that's why you see all those cars at the top. We aren't all into cars but we are all into Nebraska in Carhenge. So we started our ongoing program Resculance 2.0 in May of 2009 and we started out with Gangbusters. It was great. We had all those libraries joined up. Blogs created right in the beginning and people started doing their things and we just kept putting up the posts every month and as you can see from these statistics they went down. Over time people there are less things done no more new blogs were created. It was just the same people coming back and doing it or even less and less every month. So our statistics were not very nice and we were wondering well what did we do? Well we realized we dropped the ball. We put this out there we announced the program we said we're going to do it it's going to be there and we assumed because of such a great number of people jumping on board right away and how everyone said we want to continue this we want to keep doing something but they would keep doing it. That didn't work out in real life. They needed to be reminded that this program was still out there and that was something we forgot about was the ongoing promotion not just the initial promotion but the ongoing. So we decided we need to step back and redo how we're going to promote and support this program. So now we do blog posts every month for the new ones. We post on Twitter we have a Facebook page now I'm going to show you all this we have mailing lists in the state where we mail out every month and announce that these are coming up and we are committed to doing each other's things the original as I said there was four of us on the team and we tried to and it didn't work out every month but we did attempt to try and actually support each other's things that came up with by actually us doing them as well if we had the time to do it and it helped definitely. So here we have So what we do is as a thing as each month's things get posted become available sometimes it's we aim for the first of the month or the first weekday of the month or even the first day of the month because you know in WordPress blog or whatever you can schedule your posts out success varies but usually we're within the first week you know holidays so in this case I was here last week so the book thing got put up on the first the thing which Christa is doing this month will be up later today because she was out last week she's okay by the end of the week so we do that once both things are up then we do several things to do the promotion one is on the Encompass blog which is the blog for the library commission we do put up a post giving kind of a brief description and links to the new things each month trying to entice people to participate so this was the one for December that went up so we had Tag Xedo I guess is how you say that and then the book was yeah word clouds pretty cool word cloud service and then the book thing for December was blown together by Sherry Turkle a great book highly recommended this text also goes out to our statewide mailing list so we do that so we have templates set up for this stuff we kind of pop in the new information usually when it's my turn to send this out I get most of the new information right sometimes I forget to change March to April things like that but you know I'm getting better at it then also what we'll do is on our commission news twitter account the things will go out and basically that's just the link back to the blog post saying hey the new thing is out here is what we're talking about go ahead and do that one.usa.gov that's what Twitter okay sorry I'm getting sidetracked I'm going to have to look into that okay so they use a shortener for oh interesting okay hadn't noticed that and then Nebraska was 2.0 also has a facebook page that Krista pretty much runs in this case she's more of a facebook person than I am and so we link to the blog posts there saying hey the new things are out like us we have 56 likes as of today on today's screenshot so facebook.com slash the master learns anybody can do that so if you are a big facebook user this is how you can also learn about what the upcoming thing will be for the next month sure so let's look at our revised statistics as we go through here and you'll notice the scale from the last one has changed the high number there is 8 what was thing 40 we should go back and look that up that one was pretty popular what we can say successfully is that each month well yeah A our promotions worked be every month we have had at least one person do one of the things whether it was just the thing or a year ago we started book thing for example in December we just got the numbers in one person read the book nobody did the thing but you know it's December too so I'm actually impressed this is also statistics of people who actually went onto our blog and reported yes I did the thing for the month and as everyone knows when you do these kind of open programs just because the number of people that tell you they're doing it is not the same as the number of people that are doing it I had people say oh yeah that was a cool thing and I did it and I was like well that's nice you could have told us but that's okay you know statistics wise we know this means in reality there are more people than that actually looking at it and possibly using it so the fact that we're hearing from at least one person every month and sometimes more is great and this is awesome statistics they actually go up and down they're not flatlining like they were before they really put more into the regular monthly promotion of the program and if you're looking at these numbers and going ooh you had one person do it or two keep in mind a couple of things one we're Nebraska we're not exactly the most populous state in the country you know we have a low level population so the number of librarians that might participate is going to be significantly lower than a lot of other states you know not California or New York for example two we basically have no travel budget anymore so you're participating in this show this is one of the ways we try to get it out and so if we have four of you on the line right now it's actually I think about six that may not seem like a lot but then we recorded we put it out there and at least twice as many people watch it and so the kind of return on investment for the amount of time we put in you know Chris and I might spend a total of an hour putting together the lesson for the month and if three people do it we just seem to have lost our audio so I'm going to vamp here for a moment attempting to reconnect now don't know what to do connection lost connection lost please check your network connection the internet has hello can anybody hear us if you can hear us okay network connection can you hear us now spotty Roy says now I can okay all right looks like we're back sorry we briefly apparently lost our connection completely to the to the go-to-web network so let me back up a sentence talking about low population in Nebraska the other one is return on investment the amount of time that Chris and or I spend on this each month compared to the number of people who do it we might spend an hour if two or three people completed it was we still view it was an hour well spent yes we would like bigger numbers but as long as we're getting somebody we feel like the time we're putting into it is actually well worth it and and we're getting something out there instead of people going hey what is the commission done for us lately now it's we've done this for you you need to now you need to participate so our we started this program our promotion stunk yes we admit that we did a bad job we dropped the ball we picked back up and we went forward and now that we've been actually promoting it properly this it's going great so that's one thing lesson learned about this program is that you do have to it is need does need ongoing maintenance constant but not constant maintenance we're talking end of a month we work on trading the thing for the next month beginning of the month we get it forward out and then you just sit back and wait and see who does it comment back and forth on them it is not now as I said there's two of us doing it when we originally had four people doing it it's been pretty good not a problem to keep up with it really we've also brought in some guest bloggers a couple of times who started doing that trying to encourage other staff from libraries in the state just to share things they've learned or new tools they found that they want to so we've gotten so we've reached out to do that kind of thing as well and if any commission staff ever wants to come to one of our doors and say hey I want to write next next month's thing we'll let you know that we have done that once or twice yes yeah so so it's going great now this is what we've been doing as an ongoing program and as we said it's our current one but we're not the only ones doing ongoing as I said there were other ones out there the original program that they did at Charlton Necklinburg actually did a second run of it they called it learning 2.1 explore discover play where they just went through and did they did a continuation of the original one some of the original items were on there and tossed in some updating of some new things so they did a whole second running through of it you can find their information on their site out there as well if you want to and some other people have kind of taken it and modified it for other purposes there's another event called the 23 things for professional development which is actually run by some librarians in Cambridge England where they've done it they did it in 2010 2011 and 12 they did it in two runs of this now where things are specifically geared to our librarians doing professional development how to do your resume how to get yourself out there not just random things like how to use Twitter and how to use Flickr but things specifically geared to our professional development we actually jumped in on this in the first one we actually took a break from doing a thing a month and had our people join this one and believe we had 15, 16 of our staff complete completely their 23 things program I mean another 15 continuing education credits so that's another way that they've just taken the original 22 things program and tweaked it for a different purpose and this is this was actually a worldwide event this one they invited it was not specific to their library or their group of people in England it was open to anyone in the world who wanted to participate and they've done that twice now so that was really amazing being able to see people all over the world participating in the same program and learning together another program done kind of going the opposite direction is at Boston Public Library they're doing a thing called learning for life online which is actually a program one particular specifically for their patrons so they do a new thing a self-guided program just like the traditional 23 things program and it's an ongoing thing though it does not have a limited time frame I think it's every month it's yeah it's Jennifer Korber friend of ours at Boston Public who's running it and it is we talked about kind of the lack of promotion that we were doing we saw the numbers drop they have kind of intentionally not really promoted it all that much she has presented about it she knows we talk about it things like that so they do have a low level of participation by the general public at this time that's kind of intentional because as far as we know nobody else has ever tried to do this for the public before it's mostly been for staff it's mostly been for staff where you have kind of a higher level of control over how people participate when they participate when it's staff is opposed to the public so she's still working on it you can follow it we'll supply the URL she's got a Facebook page where they put the new things up every time and we've used some of her things and I think she's used some of our things so we've got to cross pollinate in that way also and another new thing that I just learned about this past fall and these are not the only programs out there these are just a few we're highlighting 17 things to soak up this is where a school actually did this for their staff at high school this is Kerry Turner who's from Westside High School up in Omaha did this for her staff she had seen another school another person had a presentation of another school that had done this for their staff where they bring it down to even fewer 17 things not even 23 so the teachers wouldn't be so overwhelmed by it and they did it for the high school staff to try and get that same reason as we were we had to get them up to speed on all these new technologies out there so they did a school based one and the website for it is available for you to go and look at and see how they tweaked it for the teachers at the school so this is something not for librarians and not for users but for teachers at a school so this is just another example of how it's been done out there and like I said this is not the only ones out of this just a few that we know of that we're highlighting just to show that it is being done it is being done successfully and a lot of people are still coming up with new ways to use this format of learning these small bits of information small lessons once a week you learn something new to try and just get yourself up to speed and get into that mode of learning now there has not been a lot of research and these things have been going on for years I said the one in Charlotte Mecklenburg is what 2006 the original not a lot of research has been done yet on the topic but it is starting to be done Helen herself did a survey actually in 2008-9 where she actually went back to see to contact the program coordinators who had done this and she found 62 programs August 2008 she did a survey that's what it was and 62 programs that have been done using her 23 things format that she had come up with and just ask them how it went and there were some really good research and information she got out of this survey this is where we're surveying the people running the programs not necessarily people participating in the programs there are four main top outcomes that she learned from this increased knowledge and comfort level with social media was what they felt they had in any sort of 2.0 tools increased confidence in one's own ability as a competent learner that goes along with the 7.5 habits of taking ownership of your learning your own personal learning team building among coworkers we talked about that during that one month when we're doing a thing that's when you get the credit because hopefully you'll communicate with other people and you'll work together I know that when we did it here in our house we had staff running around from office to office saying someone help me figure this out we're like great go keep doing that work together and as a result of having this new learning there were new and improved going back to Helen's research new and improved enhancements to customer services so it did affect how the people the staff who took the programs did their work in the end something that also we mentioned here at the commission active management participant patient was a key defining factor in creating a successful learning program you can't just go out and say I'm the web person I'm the learning person I'm just going to create this you need to talk to the people in charge make sure they are either participating or definitely encouraging their staff make sure your people are on board with the fact that online lifelong learning is important personal professional development is important we all know that that's true but having the active active management participation was key to this being a success share a story here I will not name that was going to participate in one of these I won't even say if it was ours or not so we won't narrow it down too much and the management said you know staff please go ahead and do this please participate we'd like you to do that but then two things happened one they didn't really give them any work time in which to do it but then rules were also that you aren't supposed to be doing work if you're not actually on work time so they then discouraged them also from doing it from home because it was a work supported thing so yeah it kind of caused this we're not going to give you work time but please don't do work because we consider this work please don't do it from home either like they don't this library doesn't want people checking working email from home it's kind of against the rules you're supposed to be working when you work so we there was very little participation from that library in the end despite the support being kind of officially given so just kind of watch for things like that you know if management is going to support it you really do need to support it and not kind of create those problems and not give people time to do it and we must have other libraries where the management was totally on board with it and oh yes Pam yes I can't really elaborate who she was on board she did it she did all the things as well so not just encouraging but also doing it themselves so having your supervisors your staff your director whoever is you know above definitely be involved made a difference and that's what Helen learned from her study and what we've learned anecdotally from our own as Michael was just saying also Michael Siemens who mentioned earlier he has finally started doing some research recently he spent some time in Australia actually learning about the effect of learning 2.0 programs in Australian public libraries how have they been doing it there he did he worked with libraries there and did a national web-based survey for participants in the program so this is different from what Helen did she talked to the people who ran the programs like us we weren't in that particular studies we hadn't done that she did but that's the type of people she talked to the one that Michael Siemens has done he actually did a web-survey of the participants themselves to asking them how did this affect you what was this like the national survey had 384 people respond and they came up with a lot of the same exact things that Helen's survey came up with from the coordinator side that increased confidence moved to using emerging technologies as part of library service so just by doing this separate program they think it's just something they were doing for themselves to learn something actually took it and then put it into the libraries programs became part of library services that really helped improve and increase that in a lot of the things that we do we actually ask in our blog posts how could you use this in the library can you see a way of using this tool to provide library services and some people say yes and talk about how they could and some people say no I mean it can be either way that's what we like the discussion but we do get them to think about this isn't just for you it can be and that's sometimes a good way to start it use it yourself personally and then transfer into how can I get use this for the library as well so he's done some great research in his art he's done article his PDF of his articles available for free if anyone wants to read the entire results of what he did he also has just recently been awarded a grant to explore it in the United States so he is now currently working on this don't know where he's at yet he's in the midst of the study at the moment where he's now been given a grant to study it in in our country to see how it's going here now he's got his basis in Australia he's working on that so definitely be interested to see if things turn out the same way here as we have thought they have heard as Helen Bowers research showed so he's going to hopefully something soon we'll be hearing we keep waiting for that phone call from Michael okay I'm putting my survey together because we really want to answer his questions we've done this for a while now so any questions we haven't seen anything come up as we've been talking we're about to the end of our session here anybody have any comments questions you want to ask about anything that we've talked about any of the programs we've done any of the programs that we told you about you can use the questions section of your interface to ask questions if you want to or if you have a microphone just let us know and I can unmute you oh how do you choose your topics yes how do you choose well do you want me to go first sure well yeah the answer is it depends I kind of a lie to every time Chris and I talk about doing this show people are always like how do you come up with something to do every single week so now we're getting the question is how do you come up with something to do every single month I do do the book thing every month and basically I literally look at my bookshelves and the pile of books on my floor behind my desk and say okay what book do I think would be interesting now we've done some newer books we've done some older books I kind of want them to be available paperback but sometimes there's just a new book that's really regret I think everybody should read so we try to do that as for the technology things that varies sometimes are coming up with them at the last minute sometimes I actually just started writing February this morning because I got an idea I was looking at just kind of going through some bookmarks and some things I as I'm surfing I go oh this might make a good thing and usually nothing comes up a lot of it but this morning I was taking a photo for a time lapse video that I'm going to be creating for a completely different project and I asked myself well are there any online services that will allow you to create time lapse videos in other words nothing you have to download and install and so I found one and I went oh this is cool and so that's going to be February's thing is how to create time lapse videos so it's kind of planning ahead and spur the moment all at the same time. Yeah it varies sometimes you we just as you know you're always seeing these new things come up that oh here's a cool new tool you know if you follow any of these kind of techie blogs or even just library blogs and sites or anything out there there's always new things coming up and you just got to if you're in the middle of running one of these programs look at them and say could this be something we could make a lesson out of could this do that. Sometimes we look at other sites as well like the Boston one and the and anyone else doing it and borrow from them like as Michael said most of these just like ours it's all creative commons licensed the ones we've come across so we can borrow and tweak we do let them know and do give credit where credit is due but sometimes it's just like that looking around and seeing what other places have done in these kind of programs or just coming across something and just you know saving a little draft post in the WordPress for future use we have a bunch of those as well. Yeah there was I was looking at one draft this morning going what is this I mean I could I I created the draft I don't even remember what it was I created it months ago but you know I mean we've done everything from Flickr to online chat to Ubuntu the operating system I mean and a lot of things too as just that you just mentioned Flickr we've been doing this one since 2009 and we have our previous ones we've also done some updates so we've redone some which is necessarily just a rehash but these products that people have been using for a long time they get updated they get changed so you've done some let's go back and look at how Flickr is now if you want to use it because we did our thing two years ago it ran differently so we've done some updates as well so we've done the same thing repeatedly just to give a newer version we've done you know go check your privacy settings and all these different services you know I mean it's and we're always taking suggestions yes we've had some suggestions from staff from people here who say here's something that might be good and we've taken that on as well it comes from everywhere so links and we will put these in the show notes and whatever so you don't need to write these all down right now but if you want to see the original staff program our original statewide program the first version of the ongoing which has been completely supplanted by the second version the Nebraska.gov version so actually if you go to the Nebraska.gov one that includes everything that's in the blog spot one from before that we just imported everything in and said but we've moved it over here so we brought that in so all of this is available if you want to kind of watch the progression of the programs and then here are some links to some of the other programs that we mentioned the two versions from Charlotte Mecklenburg the professional development one I can say I really like the professional development one I really kind of got into it with the folks that created that because we pulled in Nebraska and I think I ended up the first time around creating the completion certificates for everybody across the world we completed them because it was just a really different angle you know we try to say okay here's something you may use but how might you use it for your library this was really this is for you as a librarian point of view so if you're really looking for a different one that would be one I would say check out definitely the Boston Public one of the 17 things to soak up so all those links are there and I believe on the next slide is the links to the research that Kristen was talking about so again don't try to write all these down we'll put them in the show notes and that will be the URL where they will be in the delicious account there they're not there yet but they will be later today so I think that's that's about it really I would say if you can if you have one available participate I mean for those of you in Nebraska please join in for those of you not in Nebraska you're welcome to follow along do them anyways because it would be good for you have your CE person talk to our CE person and maybe you can get CE credit from your state organization we just can only give it to Nebraska librarians we'll distress that or if you are not here in Nebraska start your own program Royce I'm looking at you or at least I'm looking at your name on the screen I think doing one for university staff might be kind of interesting I don't know of one being done by academics they're out there there are so many of these programs I'm sure there are Royce that was the reason he's here Helen Blowers has in her delicious links she just tracks every time new ones come up so she's got a lot if you look from her website she has links to where she's got hundreds and hundreds of different anything that is vaguely a 23 things type program so does anybody have any last minute questions comments anything you want to know more about from us and Royce if you do this you don't steal liberally just give us credit that's all we ask really of course thank you nothing's come in you can also of course feel we contact us if you do want to know a little more about how we did anything particular part about it our emails are right there and we'll definitely be willing to share with you how all this worked out for us so that will wrap it up for this week's Encompass Live thank you very much for attending I and it was recorded with that little bit in the bill where we lost but it should all be here and the recording will be up shortly I hope you'll join us next week when our episode is on internships called fitting Nebraska's future librarians where we have our 21st century librarian internship grant program here in Nebraska so if you're interested in what we've been doing here to get new librarians into the field definitely check in with next week's show and as we just mentioned that Nebraska learns 2.0 is Encompass Live is also on Facebook so if you do want to follow us on there and see what kind of things we are doing here every week when we have a new show coming up we tell us tell you what will be coming up we remind you that you can join us right now to join to do it when the recordings are done and we announce them on the web page here on the Facebook page as well so if you are a big Facebook user feel free to like us on Facebook so other than that thank you very much for attending and we will see you next week on Encompass Live thanks bye bye