Back in February, I presented at the TCCTA annual meeting and talked about some of the steps that we had taken at HCC in our efforts to get to our distance students. Afterwards, a handful of folks stuck around and asked some questions. Several of the questions revolved around two very important words - "free" and "easy." The folks there seemed to be waiting for me to start adding qualifiers - like, "free when you buy now!"  - like those "free" magazine subscriptions you get when you drop a hundred bucks on some near worthless product. But that just wasn't the case. We had managed to cobble together a moderately impressive library DE program - not on a small budget, but on no budget (unless you count the rum cakes and coffee that fueled our meetings!), and with modest tech skills. I mentioned to the folks in that vast audience that I'd be more than happy to talk to them about this stuff further, and even said I'd be willing to visit. Judging by Cristie's happy surprise at my easy "yes" response when she asked me to come out here for this meeting, I don't think they believed me... But here I am! Today I want to share with you folks some of the same info that I shared back in February, but I want to go a little bit further, too.

As our colleges keep expanding and our DE programs are getting bigger and bigger, we're finding that our old service models just aren't cutting the mustard like they used to. In the olden days, back in our little red school houses - say, 10 years ago! - we managed to get, comparatively, a lot of face time with our students. Either their smarter instructors would bring them in for a face to face library orientation or instruction session, or our students would find their way to our reference desks where we were able to spend some quality one on one time with them, addressing their research needs in depth. But... what happens when the student is unlikely to ever lay eyes on their instructor? Much less, their librarians? And when they live a hundred miles from our reference desks?

As those opportunities for real interaction become fewer and further between, we need to find alternatives - ways to place ourselves right in the line of sight of even our most remote students. Happily, there are some amazing - and amazingly easy and free - tools out there for us to use, and there are some really interesting ways they can be used to try to forge connections with students that otherwise we might never interact with. So I guess I'm here today to prove to y'all that yes - this stuff is free AND easy!

So, with that in mind - this is our plan for today, and I have to confess that it is just a possible plan. Given everything that we'll be covering, i suspect there's a decent chance that we'll get derailed by some interesting tangents, but this is what I've got in mind for today.

First I'm going to tell you about the projects that we've implemented over time at HCC to reach out to our distance students. The first incarnation of our library DE program was called The Virtual Librarian Program. That was incredibly successful, but ultimately unsustainable given the size of HCC, with our 50,000+ students and rapidly expanding DE programs. But a similar approach may be workable for a smaller college, and so Cristie asked me to explain how that worked for you all. Next up, I'll tell you folks about RSS and blogs, the technology that we turned to when we realized we weren't going to be able to keep the VL program up and running as it stood. That's basically the technobabble portion of the program - but I promise not to get too techy on you, but to really get at the value of this stuff, you'll want to understand the underpinnings of blogs and blogging - and that includes RSS which is sort of the magic "ingredient X" that makes blogs different from other webpages. That will segue into a discussion of Lib Line, the hccs library blog, and how we've used that to replace the Virtual Librarian program.

By that point, I fully expect you folks will be way done listening to me, so we'll spend the rest of the morning actually doing some hands-on work. We'll walk through building a blog that you can either continue to use for your college or you can delete it at the end of the day.

As for this afternoon, I was thinking we could play it by ear, and we could talk about your particular situations - I'd love to learn more about what you guys are doing, and answer any questions you might have about things we're doing at HCC. Or, if you folks are not sick of listening to me talk, I was thinking I could spend about 10 or 15 minutes talking about some free tools you can use to deliver real-time online chat, and show you some of the ways you can use your blog.

Okay - then! Into the wayback machine! When we first started really reaching out to our DE students back in 2003, we did so via a program called the Virtual Library Program. That program, started by Jean Northington, allowed librarians to work with DE students right in their Web CT Classes. At the beginning of each semester, we would send out emails to the DE faculty, asking them if they wanted to participate. If they opted in, all they had to do was add us to their class as a student, and add a discussion topic called "the Virtual Library." The librarian would take it from there. Let's go ahead and take a look.

• Once class was underway, the librarian would post to that discussion area a sequence of pre-fabricated messages giving small, easily digestible bits of instructional info to our students. Those tidbits covered some very basic things - like how to get a library barcode or how to use our Ask a Librarian service, as well as some other higher level skills such as database searching and webpage evaluation.
• These messages often included links to more robust instructional resources, too, things like online tutorials and more in-depth coverage of certain topics.

So that was how we communicated to the students, but of course, built into WebCT were ways that our students could initiate contact, too.

• Posting to discussion area
• Email

So that's how it worked - and it worked well. Some of the pros here were that our interaction with the students was very personalized and very localized. By that I mean that the librarians, since we were embedded in the course, were very familiar with the course content. We knew what texts were being used, we could read the assignments ourselves, we could work easily and closely with the instructors.  In addition, it was hard for students not to notice us. you know when you first log in to a Web CT course you see those little indicators that tell you what new stuff has been added?  Every time we posted something new, our students would see that, and until they clicked on our discussion thread, those posts would show up as "unread."  Whether or not they read it was of course up to them (as is all of their reading!), but at least they would see us! 

And so the program was a success, and in a sense, we were victims of our own success. The number of classes participating grew from 4 in 2003 to over 70 the last semester we ran that program in the spring of 2005. Growth was rapid, and it wasn't showing signs of letting up. We did our best to recruit and train as many librarians as possible, and we got to the point where we had something like 13 librarians participating. The catch was that many of them were taking just one class each semester, while those suckers in the group - people like me - were taking on as many 10 or more classes a semester. Talk about burnout! On top of that, while Jean did what she could to simplify the whole process, with the way it was designed, some basic HTML skills were required, and that proved to be a bit of a challenge for many of our librarians. Add to that that that since the content of those pre-fab messages didn't change much from one class to the next - not only was it labor intensive - but we were all doing the exact same work. I would be posting the exact same message to ENG 2328 as my colleague might be posting to HIST 1312.

 

 

So, what we had here was a situation in which upwards of ten librarians were sending out the same 8 or so messages 75 different times over the course of a semester. At HCC there is no distance education listserv that all DE students are on, or any other way for us to automatically send messages to all our students. Still, we figured there had to be some way to consolidate what we were doing. We were looking for a way to re-imagine this program that would allow one or two librarians to assume responsibility for it and do the bulk of the work. We were running into this challenge right around the time that discussion of a thing called RSS seemed to be all over the place. After figuring out what RSS was, it didn't take us long to figure out how it could help us accomplish what we were hoping for.

So this is where we hit the Techno Babble portion of things. What, exactly, IS this RSS thing? And as promised, I'm not going to get scary techy on you. Think of this more like driver's ed than auto shop - we'll figure out the basics, but we're not going under the hood. First of all, RSS stands for "real simple syndication." It's XML code, but really, that's not that important - what's most interesting is what it does. Check this page out. How many of you use something like this - My MSN maybe or My Yahoo? This is my personal google homepage, and portals like this are pretty familiar examples of RSS in action. On here, i've got all sorts of handy info. But most importantly, check out the stuff on the left. This is a collection of the 2 most recent headlines from some of my favorite news sources. Many of them you'll recognize - The Economist, NPR, Major League Baseball, etc. Notice that the headlines are very recent - some from this morning. If we come back and visit this page in a few hours, the headlines displayed will be updated if any of these sites have published new content in that time. Now, there isn't a webguy at Google scanning all of my selected sources and rewriting this page for me when that happens. What's happening here is that all of these sources publish what are called RSS Feeds, and this page is built to read those feeds, and that allows it to rewrite itself, automatically, when updates are made to the information sources.

RSS feeds are built into a variety of web-based tools and their presence allows the content from those tools to be syndicated and sent out to other websites.

My favorite analogy for this is that of radio. We all have a general idea of how radio works, right? A DJ plays a song in one place, the radio station, and that station then broadcasts the song being played over radio waves. Then, throughout the city, anybody can hear that song by tuning into that radio station.

RSS works in a similar fashion, but now the information being sent is not a song (or at least, not usually, though in podcasting, it often is!). It's usually a discrete chunk of info (like a blog posting or a baseball score or a news headline). The "transmitter" is no longer a radio tower, but the webpage where that info originated. The radio waves are now RSS feeds. And then you have tools like my Google personal homepage that can capture those feeds and display those chunks of content.

When we're talking about RSS there are two primary types of tools. Sticking with the radio analogy, you've got broadcasters of feeds, and receivers. Broadcasters can be things like news sites, blogs, and journals. In addition, tools that we've been using in libraries for years are now starting to be packaged with RSS feeds. For example, at HCC we have RSS feeds that update whenever new titles are added to the catalog. In addition some of our big database vendors are starting to play with RSS in some interesting ways, and I'll show you that in a minute.

This is a mockup of a blog that I did for Panola College, and this is its RSS feed - pretty scary looking stuff, hm? But we'll see in a minute what it looks like through a receiver.

As for receivers, these too can be of a variety of types. We've already touched on portal sites, things like My Google or My Yahoo. There are also small programs or web-based services called aggregators whose primary function is to aggregate many different RSS feeds into one manageable interface. My Bloglines account, for example, will show you most of the RSS feeds that I keep up with. I don't have to visit all 68 websites daily - I can just go to my aggregator and let it tell me what's new at each site. I can then click through to read that, if there is something there of interest to me. Using any of a number of other free tools, you can also read RSS feeds via email.You can turn pretty much any webpage into an RSS receiver as well. Take a look at this. This is another mockup that I did, this one of the panola library website. Notice that here in the right hand column, what I've done is harness the RSS feed coming out of the panola blog. Now whenever I add something to that blog, this list of headlines will update automatically to reflect that.

And, the motherlode in terms of DE, is that Web CT can be used as an aggregator, too! More on that in a minute.

All right - now I've been doing presentations on this stuff for a couple of years now, and this is usually about the point where someone in the group finally gets the courage to ask a question that many people are also curious about. What, exactly, IS a blog? And why is it different from any other kind of webpage? It's a good question, and one that deserves a clear answer.

Much like all squares are rhombuses, but not all rhombuses are squares, all blogs are webpages, but not all webpages are blogs. Blogs are webpages with a few unique features:

• The content is often journal-like or diary-like. Blogs allow for frequent articles, called "posts" - and while those posts can be of any length, they're often relatively brief when compared to your average webpage.
• The posts are usually listed in reverse chronological order, with the newest posts listed at the top so that visitors to the site can see those most readily. Older posts are neatly archived for future reference.
• In addition, and one of the more unique features, blogs are almost all interactive in that they allow for visitors to make comments on posts.
• Most blogging tools come packaged with RSS, too, so you don't have to know how to build RSS feeds - just how to take advantage of them (driver's ed, remember? not autoshop!)
• And most importantly, the blogging tools available make publishing to the web an easy-as-pie operation. All you really have to have is a basic understanding of the Web and the ability to type. My mother, who can barely operate a microwave, has a blog.

So, with a basic understanding of RSS and a love of the easy functionality of blogs, we boldly marched foward! We realized that we could consolidate our efforts by taking those pre-fab messages from the VL program, and using them as blog posts, instead of message board posts. We could then use the power of RSS to push those posts out to various locations.

We had some lengthy discussions about what blogware to use, some debates about where to host it, etc. We decided to go with the WordPress open source package for a handful of reasons. It's a robust package that allows for a wide-range of functionality. We had the capacity to host it ourselves and some basic HTML and CSS skills, which meant that it was endlessly configurable for us. It's important to note, though, that many blogware packages do not require you to host the blog yourself, nor do they require anything but the most basic HTML skills - if any!

Which blogging tool you choose will depend on your comfort level with HTML and CSS, and whether or not you have direct access to a web server at your college and the set up of that particular server. In the notebox on your handout about wordpress, there is a URL for a page that does a decent job of comparing a few different blogging tools.

And now I'm able to sound really impressive because I now do the work of 13 librarians!

 

 

 

So we built our blog. But we also acknowledge that getting DE students to visit this website is about as easy as getting our campus students to visit the library - and we can't even use free pizza as a bribe online.

This is really the biggest dilemma we faced. One of the advantages of the original incarnation of the VL program was that it was pretty intrusive. We were, effectively, pulling up a chair in our students' classes and interjecting library related info throughout the semester. They pretty much had to listen to us. Now, however, we were asking them to visit us where we lived.  We decided we had to find a way to get this info into WebCT or directly to our students.  We found ways to do that with a couple of tools that I'm going to show you here in a minute. And we had to make this all as easy as possible - on students AND faculty. And of course, we had to market the changes.

One of the tools that we decided to use is called rssfwd - which allows our students and faculty to subscribe to our blog via email. Every time a new post is made, a signal goes out over the RSS feed, and rssfwd generates an email and sends it to all subscribers. Notice that there is an unsubscribe option, as well.

We knew that moving out of WebCT would take us out of the line of sight of our students - so we had to find our way back into the classroom. That's where RSS comes in. Check this out. link into webct Using the power of RSS, we can deliver our library content straight into the classroom again - but this time, with a consolidated delivery. Now, at the beginning of each semester, instead of asking faculty to add US to their WebCT classes, we give them a few lines of code, and ask them to add that to their classes. We try to make things easy by making the whole thing a copy and paste affair for faculty. On the libline site itself, we have a page set aside for faculty that has all the code they need to make any of those possibilities happen, along with some instruction on how to make it happen.

 

Notes

A little Q&A, then, and a quick break, and then we'll spend the rest of the morning walking through building a blog!

• Build a random blog
• and then walk through it with them, step by step.

When we moved to the LibLine approach, one thing that we wanted to make sure of was that we made all possible efforts to allow students to contact us. In WebCT, they could email us or ask us questions on the discussion board. Now that option was gone, so we needed to create alternatives. We have, for years, had an email-based ask a librarian service, but we wanted to take it a step further.

How many of you folks have used instant messaging? Or have an idea of what it is, perhaps seen it in action? Basically, it's a tool that allows for synchronous internet communication. Instant messaging is to email what telephone is to telegraph. In fact, a lot of students now say that they rarely check their email, and that they much prefer using IM or text messaging - because, get this, email is too slow. IM is free - in fact, if you have an email acct at Yahoo, AOL, or MSN/Hotmail, you can start IMing right now!

Get an audience member to login to meebo and login to my own meebo - do a demo.

In instant messaging, there are 3 big contenders: Yahoo, AOL, and MSN/Hotmail, and Google, of course, is starting to move in on the scene too with GTalk. The problem is that generally speaking, if you're on yahoo! you can't talk to someone on MSN. To get around that, there are some tools called aggregators that allow you to login to all three services via one interface.  So, like on that meebo page, I can log in to yahoo, AIM, and MSN all at once. So if Lisa is using AIM and Wendy is using MSN, they can't IM each other, but they can both IM me, because I'm logged in to both. The three big aggregators are - Meebo of course, and Trillian and GAIM. Meebo is web-based, and Trilllian and GAIM are both small programs that can be downloaded for free.

Of course, many of our students are IMing, but not all of them, and we wanted to provide a way from even those that weren't on the IM bandwagon to be able to visit us, as well. To that end, we sought out a way to embed a chat window into our library web pages. We found Chatango, which is what you see here on the LibLine page.  All a student has to do is visit this page, or any other page where we've embedded the window, and start typing!

*chat with jenn via libline

Now chatango has its strengths, but frankly?  Meebo is where it's at! They've recently launched MeeboMe and it's all around a better product. It allows you to combine both your embedded window and your IM accounts into one easy to manage web-based interface, instead of managing a chat window and IM separately.

Demo both chatmaster and student sides - chatting with Lib at USM and then logging into shellyd acct at meebo and allow a visitor at panola blog to chat.

Notes