Sweeping away the Cobwebs of Web 2.0

In order to educate ourselves in the best ways to use the Web to communicate, we decided to call together some of the smartest people in the area to host an informal information-sharing session. We're bringing our laptops, coming together, and using Human 1.0 (face-to-face, f2f interaction, ie reallivehumanprewe live in a welter of words. Too Much Information . . . how to communicate amidst it all?

Here's our schedule.

Blogging
Guest speaker, Pam Spaulding, of Pam’s House Blend blog www.pamshouseblend.com Pam's House Blend has won the LGBT "Best Blog" award more than once. It's an amazing look at the world, at sexuality, at race, at politics. She's perfected the direct blog style (oh, I envy that!) that makes you feel that she is talking to you, one to one, not one to many.

Podcasting and audio activism
Discussion leader: Brian Russell, www.yesh.com/blog Brian joined us earlier for one of our Podcast Symposia sponsored by Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS). Brian uses audio, video, flash. Smart and funny. (I wish I weren't so addicted to print . . . I hope to learn a lot from him.)

Second Life (and Virtual Environments)
Discussion leader: Evan Donahue Evan is our intern at the Franklin Center this summer, working with the New Media specialists here, and showing all of us a thing or two, three, four. He does tricks in Second Life that we can barely dream of. He's 18, a native informant. It will be great to hear what he thinks about everyone else's presentation today.

Listservs
Discussion leader: Christina Chia. Chris chairs something we call the "Humanicators" at Duke---communications point people throughout departments and centers who pool their information and publicize one another's work as a way of giving a bigger picture of humanities events at Duke. She's the queen of the Listservs.

Multi-player games
Discussion leader: Victoria Szabo. Vic is the Admin Dir of ISIS and a gamer (a rower, too, but that's in First Life).

Large-scale collaboration (open source, Wikipedia)
Discussion leader: Paolo Mangiafico. Paolo is a digital curator at Perkins Library and we were in the Interface Seminar together all year. He knows some great knowledge-aggregating sites and is an elegant theorist of the digital.

I'm packing up my laptop and heading to the Franklin Center and maybe even will have some future blogs with pictures in them (I doubt it), snappier style (sigh), maybe video (not in this lifetime). Well, my blogs will probably continue to be as intellectual and stodgy and texty as before, but I will KNOW a lot more about how to do it other ways.