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Google Bingo

Google Bingo

As part of my job this year, I have taken on the task of delivering six emerging tech sessions for library staff between October and March, one a month. The purpose of these sessions nominally to introduce the staff to interesting applications or uses of applications on the web, and then talk about them. I want to make these sessions part of the solution rather than part of the problem; it’s really easy for people to get overwhelmed and intimidated by the galaxy of web 2.0 flash and dazzle, so I’m going out of my way to make these sessions easy and fun. The idea is to create some awareness, some understanding of the new directions the web is taking, and keep that knowledge in your back pocket as you go about the rest of your work day. The best stuff we do around here as training gets us together, playing with something, laughing, and generally having a good time. The series is called P.L.O.T.: Playing and Learning Online Together.

Today I delivered the fourth in the series: Google Bingo. I’ve been asked a lot of questions about this on Twitter, and since I can’t adequately describe it in 140 characters, I’ll describe it here.

The point of the session is to create some awareness about how to do advanced searching in a standard Google search bar, and to point out some neat additional features. Rather than stand up and lecture about it, I created 10 short (~1 minute) videos. Each video contains a pink square with a bingo word on it. I scattered these videos on workstations throughout the library. I created a map of these stations, and created a set of bingo cards containing the words from the videos. Instructions to staff are to follow their own path through the map as they see fit, with a friend or on their own, watch each video and look for the bingo word. Once they see the bingo word, they can cross it off on their bingo card and move on. Once they finished, we all met back up to talk about the experience.

This went extraordinarily well. Everyone reported learning things they hadn’t known about google services or google search, and they all had a good time wandering around through the library. Unfortunately I spent so much time thinking about the details of this (finding the computers to do this, making videos and maps and bingo cards, making sure computers didn’t fall asleep on me, etc.) that I failed to think AT ALL about how to spur discussion afterward. I do each session twice, so that’s a lesson learned. We had some fun reports about ways to use things or things people wished they’d known earlier, so it wasn’t a disaster, but I wish I had thought of offering a bit more at the end.

I’ll be posting all the videos tomorrow, if you’re curious. There’s far more I could have done, I just thought 10 was probably more than enough. I had no idea how long it would take everyone to get through it, but it only took about 30 minutes for everyone to make it all the way through, not the 45 minutes I had allotted. But they didn’t get bored, there was lots of discovery along the way, and I’ve gotten lots of great feedback.

So that’s Google Bingo!

#librarydayinthelife: Tuesday

#librarydayinthelife: Tuesday

The Library day in the Life project collects the activities of library staff for a single week. The idea is to help prospective librarians and library staff get a sense of what life is like in particular roles. Here’s Tuesday’s activities:

9:30am

  • Check email. Congratulate our Finance Librarian on his new baby girl.
  • Agree to meet with a faculty member re: blogging options for her class in the fall.
  • Start work on a controlled vocabulary of tags for our new library blogs.
  • Update colleagues on status: need to wait for carpet cleaners.

10:30am

  • Still working on controlled vocabulary. Established conceptual categories, including audience, subjects, technology, special portfolios, and facilities & services.
  • Added tags to a Google doc.

11:30am

  • Still modifying tags. Went through spreadsheet that lists all webpages set to be created on the new website; applied tags to each page, based on what content should appear there.
  • Shared Google doc with colleagues, with long description/introduction.
  • Realized that I had left my phone in my office. IMed colleague, got her to fish out my phone and check my messages. She called the carpet cleaner and arranged for him to meet me. Went and met the carpet cleaner, led him to my condo.

12:30pm

  • Kept working on tags; removed “audience” category as it just was not functional across multiple tags. Added (student) and (faculty) to a couple of categories instead.
  • Carpet cleaner blew a fuse. Ran across the street to the Canadian Tire to get new ones. Current fuses made by company called “FUSETRON”, with labels clearly printed in the late 60s. New fuses not nearly as awesome-looking.
  • Got email about status of current library construction. Immediately related it to website/digital signage content. Emailed facilities manager to ask him how he’d feel about making that kind of content public on the website/digital signage via Twitter. He’s intrigued. Set meeting with him for next week to talk it out.

1:30pm

  • Carpet cleaner still cleaning my carpets. This is what happens when you have a white carpet and a big fluffy orange cat.
  • Shared tags with one of the reference staff; got some feedback, brainstormed around how to manage “reference” as a service and the blogs. Separate, or really just another part of every other service? Reference is really a flexible service.
  • Rethinking the need for two different chat services that really are just going to go to the same person. Need to label the reference widget with a line that encourages students to use it to report noise problems in the building, perhaps? I still like the idea of having a special widget just for noise reports.

2:00pm

  • Looked over our test site (minus design) and the design screenshot. Discovered a few weird things.
  • Composed email to developer’s Project Manager (Barbara) about weird things (all minor). Sent it. Forgot to copy colleagues. Forwarded sent mail to colleagues.

3:00pm

  • Carpet Cleaner finished. Let him out of my condo (it’s all twisty.)
  • Got ready to go to work. Realized I have lost my keys (again).
  • Decided my time would be better spent working on my various documents rather than trying to find my keys and travelling to work.

3:30pm

  • Got corrected on one of the weird things on the test site; new development. Having two versions of one page based on audience. Only second time that’s happened on our website (so far). Sent the news (do nothing! It’s fine!) to Barbara.

4:00pm

  • Got a skype call from Barbara to talk about some design questions; got 5 minutes in and Barbara lost her connection.
  • Waited for her to come back.
  • Kept picking at tags. Feel confident that I’ve covered enough for the first round.

8:00pm

  • Barbara gets her internet connection back and calls me. We talk about various design issues, answers to questions we asked on Monday.
  • Made some executive decisions based one two things: 1) not spending more money, 2) getting the website finished sooner. Executive decisions all extremely minor with no huge impact on the user experience (library staff content creation experience or the student experience).
  • Questions about hosting; things I don’t know enough about.
  • I realize I’m going to miss Barbara when we’re done; I quite like her. She’s a Stargate Atlantis fan.

8:30pm

  • Write up details of my conversation with Barbara and send it to colleagues, including our graphic designer.
  • Scrounge dinner.
#librarydayinthelife: Monday

#librarydayinthelife: Monday

The Library day in the Life project collects the activities of library staff for a single week. The idea is to help prospective librarians and library staff get a sense of what life is like in particular roles. This is a rather strange and strangled week for me, but here goes Monday.

9:30am

  • Check email.
  • Discussing new website design with our graphic designer. Ask for permission to include her in our skype meeting with dev.
  • Saw girl in the bathroom curling her hair with a curling iron while talking on her cellphone.
  • Got permission from everyone to include graphic designer on our call.

10:30am

  • Got into an email discussion about how we intend to use Twitter on the library’s digital signage. Announced decision to set up a second Twitter account, tentatively UTMLtraffic. That way we’d have an announcements feed and a traffic feed; announcements for the Big Things that are happening on campus, and traffic feed to help students work out whether there’s room in the library for them to come study here.

11:30am

  • Comparing meebo and digsby chat widgets. Leaning toward digsby, but meebo looks cleaner on a site.
  • Discussing meebo and digsby with FLC tech. If you need students to log into the service from multiple locations, web-based is preferable to client-based.
  • Got a phone call from campus staff asking for clarification about how Blackboard manages survey results. Lots of confusion about a note on the website that makes it look like something changed in the upgrade when actually it’s just that a lot of people misundersood surveys to start with. You don’t get know who said what with a survey. They are anonymized. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve had to break that to an instructor when it was FAR too late.

12:30pm

  • Forwarding a message from a mailing list to two colleagues; had moment of terror thinking I had sent reply to the list.
  • Thinking about what angle to take in an article proposal relating to our new website project. Project management? Creating (or trying to create) a digital culture? Both?
  • Emailed dev about bringing graphic design person into our skype call this aft; now reading LITAblog http://bit.ly/19PHGP

1:30pm

  • Chatting with FLC tech about new website, schedule for creating pages, etc.
  • Played with FLC tech’s new iPod Touch: decided to suggest we use library iPod Touches to have students update library twitter accounts. (Specifically: one on traffic flow in the library.)
  • Got a delighted reception to the idea of having students use our 2 ipod touches to update library twitter feeds. Discovered ipod Touches are out of the library, and thus cannot begin setting them up and testing them.

2:00pm

  • Call with developer’s Project Manager (Barbara) on Skype. No word yet on how I can manage my desire for mutiple blogs, tags, and categories.
  • Design looks good. Minor changes proposed and accepted. Colours finalized. Hosting situation discussed.

3:00pm

  • Finished call with the developer. Need to mod hours php file. Added to to-do list. Brain not quite ready to fix code today.
  • Discover yet more evidence that the “net generation” isn’t all that hip to the interwebs. http://is.gd/1Pglf

3:30pm

  • Brain slowly going numb from the sound of the construction going on, seemingly directly over my head.
  • Created new Twitter account for traffic reports in the library. UTMLtraffic it is.
  • Help reference desk show an instructor how to graft multiple lecture sections into one course website. That felt weird. Normally I do those things myself, now I just hear about other people doing it. :/

4:00pm

  • Still don’t understand why so many girls want to spend quality time hanging out in library bathrooms.
  • Briefly discussed GIS/Data website with GIS tech.
  • Have headache.
  • Construction noises have stopped.

4:30pm

  • Post day’s tweets and assorted happenings to blog.
  • Going home!
  • Get call from developer’s Project Manager (Barbara) about blogs and what’s possible
  • Blogs the way I want them appear to be doable. Yay!

5:14pm

  • Now: actually going home!