It was interesting to check out the list of blogging libraries. I’m most impressed by the reader advisory blogs (like WRL’s Blogging for a Good Book) that regularly share solid, detailed content with a touch of eye-candy. Apppealing entries seem to bubble effortlessly from a reservoir of dedicated competence and attention to the value of reader advisory. Not to mention an apparent stockpile of good annotations!

I’m less enthused by blogs that appear to be groping their way through. Constant naked beta is not a pretty sight!

I’m also impressed by some of the library director/administrator blogs, like this one http://gathernodust.blogspot.com/ by an intrepid Arizona library manager. It’s a powerful investment in community dialogue when a key library administrator engages his staff and public in an ongoing conversation about principle, direction and development. In many locations, I can imagine an enlightening exchange on the purpose and value of self-checkout; customers routinely question whether it is a service improvement or draconian precursor to staff cuts. At the very least, a good administrator blog might generate valuable feedback to supplement service surveys.

We’re asked to declare which of the Habits of Successful Learners are, respectively, easiest and  most challenging. I embrace them with equal ease; they are tried, true, lifelong “homies.” An alternative,  more user-centered, less confessional (and equally enlightening) feedback request might be “Which of the Habits of Successful Learners are most important? Choose 2 and explain why you selected them.”

I would choose Habits #3 and #7.5 because they offset each other nicely. Where learning is an intensely serious activity that actualizes human potential, and breaks chains of individual and societal ignorance, play, through its power to energize and mellow, forms a critical ballast. 

Still weaving up the down staircase: blog posts are not sanctioned until Week 3. But I’m trusting the momentum of my inner learner, and blogging as the discoveries present.

2 memorable discussions this week: one office-mate confessed how strange it seemed to transmute the web-formatted instructions and resources into printouts to be perused as if they’d come from a mid-twentieth century typewriter. Why not digest the ideas in their presenting format? Another colleague joined me in a satisfying chorus of concern regarding the purported wisdom of the crowd. By what alchemy does collected opinion crystallize into veritable wisdom?

Both discussions reminded me of the Youtube clips, Web 2.0: An Intro in 5 Minutes, and What is Web 2.0? Talk about dystopian…saints Orwell and Huxley preserve us! What a chilling sleight of hand, when first we are teaching the machine with each click we register, then in a few brief minutes’ time, we are obliged to begin rethinking our privacy, our aesthetics, our ethics, our identity–in short, all that makes us human. Strike that last term, for the one fast-moving show informs us that we have become identical with the machine. The other clip soberly proclaims the result of our participation in the social web; we “end users” become subsumed within the application’s data, prepped and fit to be leveraged.

We looked at a series of articles, entitled Web 2.0: Where will the next generation Web take libraries? My thoughts percolated over Dr. Wendy Schultz’s response, “To A Temporary Place in Time.” Schultz traces the library parallel for an economic chain of meaning, from commodity to product, to service to experience. Library 1.0 was the commodity (akin to coffee beans), while Library 4.0 will be the experience (akin to Starbucks). In between lies the buzz-crowned 2.0, a mere waystation in flux. I like the analogy. I do believe the social experience folk are crowing over is a Platonic shadow of the experience humans crave, a virtual substitute for direct, genuine interaction. Genuine interaction tilts to a spiritual level; it is transcendent. Virtual interaction leans to a shadowy plane; it is mutative. Participants are leveraged and commodified.

A problem with Schultz’s end-state library Shangri-la: it, too, is economics-driven. It is unlikely that disadvantaged segments of society will find easy access to the luxurious thought-salons so delightfully described, especially as those hyper-refined settings will rely heavily on the largesse of  private partners. Makes a good case for revisiting the Maxwell House, or whole grain Library 1.5.

Week One of our Learning 2.0 adventure featured an overview of the characteristics of lifelong learning, and the habits of successful learners. Striking for me was the primacy–in the literature– of the individual learner, and the acknowledgement that the learner will determine his goal, path and process. Our communal exercise stumbled a bit in this regard; the initial pathways were narrow and constrained, the starting gaits (not gates) jerky and counterintuitive. I would have liked to have seen more radical trust in the efficacy of the learner, to choose wisely (whether to register or defer, bruit or conceal enrollment) and to proceed appropriately (eschewing labyrinthine launch-pads for a more logical learning sequence). Learning 2.0 embodies interesting tensions; highlighting those tensions is a laudable goal for the professional information navigator.

Day dawns on a new blog, and a new vista of learning. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be trekking alone and with colleagues, surveying the contours of Learning 2.0, through the prism of library service in a brave new world of virtual community and digitized humanity.