Do you question or wonder what the role of social media is in learning? Do you really wonder if it is an effective way to teach students, or library patrons about information literacy, how to use the library and other things important for librarians and for life-long information skills?

The Social Learning Handbook is here to help. This website offers a wealth of information and testimonials as well as experiences from other librarians and educators on how to use and how they have used social media in learning.

In addition here are a few ideas on how to make social media useful for learning:

1. Find ways to use social media sites such as facebook to teach your students or other patrons how to search library databases, find books in your library catalog, understand what information literacy is and other things important for them to know.

2. Incorporate social media aspects into your everyday library activities and information literacy presentations.

3. Consider offering mini-courses on various aspects of social media and how to use it for learning or marketing purposes.

4. Invite your patrons to ask you questions about social media.

5. Stay up to date with learning about social media yourself.

What other ideas do you have for how social media plays a role in learning and how it will play a role in the future?

1. In library literacy sessions in classes. You could use one for each group of 4-5 students and ask students to complete a project on it. This would be particularly useful when presenting in a non-computer lab classroom.

2. You could go into the student commons or anywhere else where students or your library patrons hang out and ask if you can give them a brief demonstration on something such as how to locate ebooks, how to find articles in a certain database or how to search the library catalog.

3. You could have a limited number available for in library use only for a limited time period.

4. You could use them to teach a library mini-course in a group study room or other library room that does not have computers.

5. You could have one of the members of your library staff stand in a high traffic area away from your reference desk carrying an ipad and offer to help patrons as they wonder through the stacks.

6. You could load some ebooks on them and check them out since unlike the kindle this is probably allowed. Although you would need to have the patron sign their life away, in order to be able to use one.

7. You could consider having your staff use ipads instead of your regular computers. This may or may not work but if you could make it work, you may be able to say a lot of money.

8. Find some library related websites, ebooks or other content and upload them onto a few ipads and leave these out on your library displays for patrons to use inside the library.

9. Get rid of all or some of your library computers and replace them with ipads for your patrons to use instead.

10. Give away an ipad as a prize for a library contest. Make your patrons complete some kind of a survey to be entered to win.

Ebooks are all the rage. Between the kindle, new ipad, iphone applications, the Nook, the Sony Reader and all of the other gadets for reading ebooks, there is no doubt that ebooks will continue to be popular. However, how do you get ebooks that you can read without spending a fortune to do it? Even though the individual prices for ebooks are inexpensive, by the time you by lots of them you can end up broke. There is a huge list of 100 places where you can find ebooks at Online College. While you won’t find any of the new releases or other extremely popular titles there, you will find an impressive list of other ebook titles for your enjoyment and for free.

A-active, in order for your library patrons to view you as being serious about your social networking and for it to work for you and your library, you need to use it on a regular basis.

B- Blog, does your library have a blog. This is a great way for you to offer value and content for your library and it has become the standard for libraries to have one.

C-Content- just like businesses have to offer valuable content in order to market their businesses, your library needs to offer valuable content that your patrons will read and appreciate.

Direction- What are you planning to accomplish for your library with social networking?

Ebooks- You can share these on social networking to increase their exposure.

F-Facebook, having a presence on facebook with a fan page or a group is a must. Facebook is so popular now that it is expected.

G-Good Reads, Do your patrons need some ideas of what to read? Help them out with Good Reads.

H-Help- relying on only one or two people to build your library’s social networking presence will not work. It needs to be a whole team effort on behalf of your entire library staff.

I-Interesting- Are your library’s social networking profiles and content interesting? They had better be if you want them to work for you.

J-Joomla- an open source web design program that can make editing your library website and adding in social networking features much easier.

K-Koha the best open source program for your library catalog, you can also integrate social networking into this tool.

L-Library Thing- use this great site to share your library collections with others.

M- Mobile, more and more your library’s social networking needs to be able to be accessed via mobile devices. There are also more options than ever for making this a reality.

N-Ning this free social networking site allows you to create a social networking specifically for your library.

O-Open Source- use these programs and tools to enhance your social networking experience and to help your library save money.

P-Podcasting- this is a great way to share interviews and valuable audio tips with your library’s audience.

R-Reference- you may think that offering reference services via social networking is impossible but the reality is that so many of your patrons use facebook, twitter and youtube that you can offer the answers to frequently asked questions as a form of reference services on these sites.

S-Slideshare, this heavy traffic and awesome social networking site lets you share power point presentations. Use this site to embed your presentations and promote them on other sites as well.

T-Text messaging- Is your library using it yet?

U-Ustream- use this program to broadcast live to your library patrons.

V-Video whether on youtube or elsewhere, use video to enhance and engage with your users via social networking.

W-Widgets- many database vendors provide these and you can use them in many ways to promote your library resources.

Y- Youth- using social networking allows you to connect on a deeper level with young people.

Z-zeal, is your library staff exciting about the possibilities that social networking can offer your library? If not, you will struggle to make it work for you.

Do you have a facebook fan page? If not, you really should create one. In any case, why limit your facebook fan page to information about the library, photos, and announcements? Your facebook fan page for your library is a great place to offer and teach library literacy to your patrons, students, staff and faculty. Here are some ways you can do this with a facebook fan page.

1. Post polls as mentioned in number one and then share the results of the poll via a note with comments.
2. Post notes that offer library literacy tips.
3. Create videos that highlight one library literacy tip in each one.
4. Use the widgets offered by many library database providers.
5. Ask questions and take note of who answers them and respond back.
6. Post podcast or audio files with tips.
7. Post a survey and offer a prize to those who reply.

Why not use facebook in a library class presentation? While that may seem a bit outrageous, there are actually several ways that you can incorporate facebook into a library literacy class presentation. Here are some ideas of how to do this:
1. See part I with polls and ask students to answer questions by responding to polls during a class presentation.
2. Post a note on your facebook fan page asking a question and then have students answer the question during your library literacy presentation.
3. Create a group or a fan page for the topic or the class where you are presenting, add some content and then have students complete some or part of their library literacy project or assignment inside facebook.

Using facebook in the classroom as a teaching tool has been presented as an idea by many people in recent months. Most college students are already on there and so instead of fighting against it and trying to get them to go elsewhere, why not just use facebook as a library literacy tool? If you have used facebook a lot then you may realize that this site offers a myriad of applications and tools many of which can be used for educational purposes. If however, you have not used facebook very much then this may be news to you. One tool that has great potential for teaching library literacy is the poll application. This application allows you to post a poll on your profile, in groups or on any facebook page for which you are an administrator. For example, you could post a poll on your library’s facebook fan page and ask students to choose the best answer regarding a basic definition of library literacy. You could do this either in general and see who responds or you could ask for answers during a classroom library literacy session. You could also take this a step further by posting a question as a note on your fan page or in a group and asking students to respond. You could then have the students vote on who wrote the best answer by using the poll application. This is just the tip of the iceberg as there are many ways to use this application for library literacy.

Are you using facebook for library literacy and if so, how is it working for you? If not, what do you think of this idea?

What do you think about the idea of a community virtual library? I recently found this and I found the idea interesting. With the increase in the number of electronic resources more and more of the “library” is now available for access via the internet, in electronic format.

So what about the concept that your public library or community library is now online? While it may be more convenient and it may work for some people, will it really work for everyone? What about the people who have little or no technology skills and what about the community interaction available only via a physical library? What do you think about this concept?

Creating a better library blog requires you to increase the amount of readers who read your blog on a regular basis. Here are some ideas on how to do this:

1. Make sure you follow the ideas in part 2 to offer the kind of content that will attract more readers.

2. Make sure that the RSS button for people to subscribe to your feed is in a visible location.

3. Consider offering library newsletters or other information via email on your blog and encouraging people to sign up. That way you can also remind people about new content on your blog.

4. Import the feed for your library blog into your library’s facebook fan page.

5. Put a blog widget with a link to your library blog on your web page.

6. Encourage comments and sharing of posts. You can use a tweetmeme widget for twitter or a sharethis or a socialable widget for other social networks.

What other ideas do you have for promoting your library blog?