About 26.2 Things in Boston

The 26.2 Things in Boston program is a self-directed independent study course in social web tools and technologies. Every week, participants are asked to try out 2 to 3 Things, each one a different piece of the 2.0 world -- blogs, wikis, RSS, photo & video tools, comments, tagging, online applications and more. Upon completing the 26.2 Things, staff will receive a Creative Labs ZEN multimedia player an in-person Finish Line celebration.

The objectives of this program are to:

• offer library staff a starting place to explore the ever-increasing number of tools available on the web
• give participants a structure in which they can play with these tools supported by their peers
• support local library missions of improved customer service by helping staff become more familiar with the web tools their patrons use
• reward staff participation for self-directed learning

This site will serve as an information archive for administrative notices, detailed instructions and other extra bits linked to from the main program blog as needed.

26.2 Things is modeled on the Learning 2.0 Program from the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenberg County. Please see the original site for examples of similar programs.

The design of this online program was completely built on Web 2.0 technologies that are freely available on the Internet. These sites include: Blogger, Google, Flickr, YouTube, PBWiki & Bloglines.

A note about the date on this post: Blogs are designed to display entries in reverse chronological order, with the most recent entry on top. I wanted to make sure that this About post was the first thing that visitors to this site read, so I set the date for 2010. With luck, by the time PLA Annual comes to Boston, there'll be several successful runs of this course to see!