Obligatory blog day post complete with related ramblings

Apparently it is blog day. For this exercise, I have chosen to share six blogs that I think my readers might find interesting. Given that the majority of my readers are librarians, the first few are more tech oriented blogs that might be off their radar.

  • Unit Structures by Fred Stutzman — Regular readers might recognize this site as I have pointed to his posts numerous times. Fred, a PhD student here at UNC and a co-founder of claimid.com, focuses his research on identity and social networking. He has done some fascinating research on Facebook usage at UNC and has developed some valuable theories (Situational Relavance, The Network Effect Multiplier, etc.) concerning social networking. Anyone interested in how social software fits into the university life should check out Fred’s writings. One recent post of interest that I don’t believe I have yet pointed out is Orientation 2.0.
  • FactoryCity by Chris Messina — Chris is an “Independent Open Source Ambassador at Large and co-founder of Citizen Agency.” I met Chris at BarCampRDU where I attended his sesson on social browsing. He is heavily involved in all things open. He is currently devoting a lot of time to microformats (highly relevant to libraries), BarCamps, which he helped start (the precursor to Library Camps), and a number of other projects. While his writings aren’t directly related to what we do, Chris is a prolific and experienced blogger who is working on some cool stuff.

They are both also involved in OpenID, which is something librarians should be looking at as it would provide our users with a single logon. We should be pressuring both our vendors and universities to look into this. To find out more about OpenID, check out the summary I wrote of Fred’s social software session and Chris’s social browsing session here.

The next few blogs I wish to share are related to educational technology:

  • I only found I am Matthew Williams and You are Not last week, but it is already one of my favorite blogs. He is a writing instructor at the University of Minnesota who writes on a range of topics including collaborative learning and social software. His posts are frequent, long, insightful, and, not surprisingly, exceptionally well written. This blog truly is a gem and I highly reccommend checking it out.
  • heyjude: Making fortunate discoveries – Web 2.0, Library 2.0, and more ¦ by Judy O’Connell – Judy is an experienced teacher, school librarian. I have found her blog to offer a great deal of practical advice into how to teach others about Web 2.0, Library 2.0, social software and more. She also offers a great deal of practical ways to use software for teaching. I often find that her writing helps me stay grounded and to see things from new perspectives. Pretty much everything she writes is related to the topics of my blog so I am not going to point out any specific posts. I encourage you to go explore.

Okay now for two library blogs:

  • Life as I Know It by Jennifer Macaulay – Jennifer is both a student at Southern Connecticut State and a systems librarian. I have found her writings about her classwork to be quite valuable. She also points out lots of valuable biblioblogosphere stuff that I might otherwise miss. I also found out about blog day from her.
  • The Library Rebooted: Unwrapped – Blog about Technologies Visited in MLC™s 2006/2007 Special Program Series: The Library Rebooted – This blog just went live a few days ago, and will feature contributions from participants, presenters, and other L2 voices. I am very excited to announce that I myself will be contributing some posts to the blog (thanks Evette!). The program and the blog both have a lot of potential and I look forward to watching them develop.

5 thoughts on “Obligatory blog day post complete with related ramblings”

  1. Hi Michael, thanks for rating me in your “blog day ramblings”. Seems our ideas compliment each other well – you help me focus on ‘blue-print’ thinking – something I need to do in order to make the best connection with those that I am teaching or with my professional peers. I run another blog in blogger that has a different focus altogether – the balance is nice.

    By the way, your work is great and an inspiration.

  2. Thanks for the mention Michael — I’m happy that you find me useful for your readers!

    Also awesome to see that you’re proposing that librarians look to OpenID and microformats — completely brilliant and necessary.

  3. Chris,

    Your quite welcome. Librarians think about single logons alot. It would be great to see universities or public libraries implementing OpenID. Given librarians’ traditional concerns about privacy, I can’t think of anyone (except Fred and Terrell of course) who I would rather trust to host my identity. Even with the Patiot Act, I know they aren’t going to sell my data.

    I still use my email address from undergraduate because it has been a constant part of my identity for my adult life. Were I able to keep my university webspace, that would be a handy URL for my OpenID compared to a commercial service (again claimid excluded).

    This said, both Fred and you are much more eloquent and knowledgable about the value of OpenID and microformats, so I hope my readers take a look at what is being said on your blogs and by the identity community in general.

    -Michael

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