Never Fail to Communicate

“Conversation, Community, Connections, and Collaboration: Practical, New Technologies for User-Centered Services" was a workshop presented in Darien last week by Michael Stephens of TametheWeb.com and Dominican University and Jenny Levine of ALA, both of the generation who never sat home alone by the telephone, who never waited a week to get their photos developed, and who will never have to ask a librarian for a reference book. They are people who will never have a failure to communicate.
Blogs, RSS, wikis, instant messaging, FLICR, webinars, gaming--these are all two way streets. (Except for my blog, which is so one-way because it really is a column that I post to my friends.) With RSS, you can set up a feed from all your friends' blogs, or from your library's catalog, to have one place to check to be apprised when something new comes along. And how about those wikis? Forget the abomination of students using Wikipedia as the source of all knowledge. Think about what a great way a wiki is to work collaboratively with colleagues across the hall or across the country. And IM isn't just the communication of choice for the teenagers who tie up all of the library's computers chatting with the people sitting next to them. IM is minimized on everybody's desktop at Deloite & Touche. (You don't think those accountants trust their tax tips to email, do you?) Could FLICR, etc. mean that you will never again have to flip through a wedding album emitting the requisite oohs and aahs? At the least, it is a great way to live vicariously, flipping through your friends' vacation pictures while you're sitting at your desk listening to your voice mail. And I love those webinars--not that we all don't love meetings, but sometimes when you just can't get away, a webinar will do. At CLC we love using them for database demos and for those "long tail" workshops that are of interest to just a few people. With a webinar, those few people, or one person, can have a two-way with the presenters without ever leaving their desk, (and we at CLC don't have to set up a workshop for fifty that only five will attend.) Finally, maybe it's just Xbox to you, but I listened when Jenny said that people who game know how to try something, and then if it doesn't work, to try something else. Not that this would ever be a problem for some of us, but the message is that we don't have to know it all before we get started.
So start. Go to bloglines and set up a feed. Hey, it's summer, go to FLICR and post your own vacation pictures!