Web 2.0 librarians in Norway

at Bibliotekssentralen in Oslo, Niels Damgaard runs an intensive web 2.0 workshop for librarians all over Norway. They can choose to pay for one or more sessions, up to ten in one year. For the last of these sessions, I was invited this Monday to speak about The social and collegial learning environment in the electronic village online, in a synchronous online session. As these courses are made for money, the content is protected and I am not allowed to share the wikispace and the recorded slides with my speak and the final discussion with Niels). We talked about the cascade effect developed over the years by Webheads, and how the good blend of old and new citizens in the electronic village helps to develop a true community of practice where novices and less experienced can benefit from the rich tradtion for knowledge sharing and collabroation experiments, and how those who are really showing their enthusiast energy, can advance and take more responsibilities as co-moderators with access to peer mentoring and hands on practicum. This all happened in my first language, Danish, and as Norwegian is our next neighbour language and country, I suppose that the participants were able to understand my words, written as well as spoken. At least they did not ask for any clarification, but I was also warned on beforehand, that this was their after lunch lesson and that they would probably be quite silent. Oh - and one more thing that we also talked about was how to reach the critical mass of participants in the online context where lurking is such a well known fact; for 10 visibly active heads you would usually expect to find 90 silent peripheral participants who are just reaing along and learning by vicarious observation, or not.

We can't know for sure - not until they may decide for delurking. But that's another story, which I forgot to mention as we ran short of time, so the frequent case of delurkers popping up into the open community space did not paint the picture in my presentation this time, just a memo to self about the paper that I'm preparing as a result from this session.