Seminars and Webinars: A Week of Enlightenment!

This is one of the slides from my webinar on transliteracy.

This has been an exciting week of new skills and information for me. On Monday I spent the day at a seminar on podcasting, and what an exciting day that was. Our library system (over ... libraries) was awarded a grant, and eight member libraries were given the opportunity participate. My library was one of them. Selected teens from our community will be interviewing seniors, and will tell their stories through film, podcasts, and written media. I still don't know all the details of the project, but I'm really excited to be participating in the project!! You can listen to my podcast, the little project I made in class on Monday. I have never had the slightest idea how to put together audio, edit, add music and fun effects, and then broadcast. I have so many ideas now for podcasts for the library, maybe I'll put together some for my blog if I'm really ambitious!

Tuesday I attended a webinar on "Harnessing the Power of Twitter for Professional Networking." It was put on by the The Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI) and I learned all you would ever care to know about Twitter! Again my little peabrain is working overtime with ideas of how to use Twitter and all sorts of social networking tools to benefit the library, make new contacts for my MT career, and to enhance my blogger experience as well. I wish I had more time to work on integrating all the exciting technologies and social networking platforms into my life, but right now my job is mommy and student, teacher, and housewife and employee. All the rest of it is fun stuff for leisure time!

Wednesday's seminar was all about Transliteracy, hosted by the Georgia Public Library Service and the Georgia Library Association. Here's the blurb, doesn't this sound awesome?

The skills needed to be an active participant in today's society are
rapidly evolving. Literacy is changing, more is needed than the ability to
read and write. Digital literacy, media literacy, information literacy,
21st century literacy and other new literacies are all included in
transliteracy. Some are fortunate enough to learn these skills in a classroom
but in many cases peole are looking to libraries, all libraries for the
instruction they need. This session will cover the imporatnce of
transliteracy, the roles libraries play in educating patrons, and what we can do
to ensure our staff and patrons are transliterate.

So, this is a really exciting week for me. Lots of new ideas to get my brain working on all the possibilities of technologies I'm only beginning to understand. I intend to make some time to report on these innovative and/or educational projects as they unfold. As a little teaser, Bobbi Newman, presenter of my Wednesday webinar on transliteracy made a comment about how the education system is becoming outdated (oh yea, I'm a 13-year-veteran homeschool parent, that is like preaching to the choir!!) and she used a really fascinating example. Years ago (like way back when I was a kid) a measure of learning was how much you could remember, and we had to remember things like the list of US Presidents. Nowadays, we needn't remember that, we have Google to tell us in less than five seconds. What do we need to know today? How to write hacker proof passwords, how to be safe on the internet, how to find the information we need, where to go to get the tax forms, renew our driver's license, or get social services (ALL online now!!).

To be literate today we must be transliterate. That is for another post!!