“The last thing we want is for people to come into our libraries and ask about Flickr or Second Life and be met with a blank look,” says Christine MacKensie, director of the Yarra Plenty Regional Library in Melbourne, Australia, to a reporter for Wired News. That’s why Ms. MacKensie’s library, like many others, put employees through a training process called Learning 2.0.
The project, a primer on interactive Web tools conceived by a public-library official in North Carolina’s Charlotte & Mecklenburg County, gives library staffers a list of 23 tasks to complete over a period of about nine weeks. Learning 2.0 starts by teaching participants how to create blogs, and it then asks trainees to use those blogs to record their thoughts on a bunch of other tech tools — like folksonomies, wikis, and podcasts — that they also try out.
The primer was designed with public libraries in mind, but a decent share of college libraries have also used it, according to Wired News. For librarians wondering how Web 2.0 will alter information-literacy training, it’s worth a look, at the very least. —Brock Read
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