Semester-break tasks/Progress

Most of our library staff has gone on leave since this is the long vacation period until early August.I may not be as busy as I am during semester time but there are a lot of things I have to accomplish, most of which I have managed to accomplish. These are

• general maintenance and housekeeping for all library machines
• backup of all important business documents and files for the library
• Ms O ffice skills and online collaboration training for library staff
• Implementation of the time management system (Prebook server) for the library
• Training of library staff on using Prebook
  

I am however still working on

• creating podcasts which may be used for orientation and maybe by lecturers
• the Millennium backup issue
  
• writing a script(cron job) for backing up the Millennium database
• Adding students to the Prebook PostGre database
• Completing my CCNA2 course(am yet to write the Practice skills exams)

It is interesting that I have added the use of call and chatwith Skype and I am getting suggestions from the users I support to please make a request for headsets so that they won't have to call me on my phone when they have a problem, they want to call me on skype(now that is new). I am more intersted in using chat so that we can go thruogh a problem together without me having to leave my office or them having to wait for some time because I will be busy attending to someone else. I am still considering this and may try it out with one of them so0n.

Iam so much looking forward to going on leave and spending some quality time with my children , the twins, my husband and my whole family. In order for me to completely enjoy this break have to complete all my tasks and be " work-free" for the whole period.

Progress........

Today I have posted instructions on how to

• create anew page
• edit an existing page
• create links from oe wiki page to another

I have also created alinkl to my inbox so that the librarians can contact me from the wiki if they have any problems following the instructions on the wiki.

It is a good thing that some of them are very proactive and have already posted their profiles to the wiki as cooments. Iam taking this as a sign that they are very interested. Even though they couldn't create pages containing their own profiles, they still persevered and wer motivated and interested enough to posrt something.

I think we are off to a very good headstart. We need to keep this up and i need to find some topics that we can discuss to follow up this exercise.

I also got a thumbs up from the Head of the library. Feather in my cap hey??

Online collaboration

Today I have just introduced the users to onlinne collaboration tools. Even though these tools have been vailable for a long time, they have rarely been used for productive purposes.

Ususally when people have something to discuss or share, a meeting is called and this may result in one person taking centre stage with no contribution whatsoever from the rest of the attendees. I am saying attendeees because these people simply attend the meeting , there is little or no interactivity.

Online collaboration tools on the other hand allow

• participation in discussions from all team members
• contributions by shy members or those who are not so well groomed in public speaking without taking away anything from their contributions.
• participation in a dscussion without leaving your place of work which means you can multi-task, you save on transport costs and travelling time
• continuation of a discussion even after the meeting is officially over
• members who were not present during the actual meeting to participate and have their contributions taken into consideration.

These benefits are not exhaustive. Various tools for online collaboration include blogs, wikis, e-mail(I love the features that are on Outlook). Webinars, podcasts and webcasts are even more useful for collaboration as they allow for storage of a discussion, seminar or meeting for later use or reference.

I am going to create a blog for the library staff that I trained and with the enthusiasm they showed, this is going to be an interesting development not only in their professional life, but also their personals lives as they use blogs to

• get ideas from others
• communicate and collaborate
• improve their ICT skills.

The way forward now is to encourage the use of these tools for the benefits i have outlined above.

Another use will be for training purposes, eg training/orientation/communication/information dissemination between library staff and students using a webinar, podcasts, wikis and blogs.

I am also encouraging the use of RSS feeds, particularly for Faculty librarians to keep abreast of current trends and information available on specific subject matters that are relevant to their work.
I am really enjoying these training sessions as they have taught me to never take for granted the skills that I have as others do not have them. i have also learnt to never assume that because someone uses a computer everyday, they have the core skills to achieve their tasks.

To think that for over a year now I have assumed that people have the skills, only to realise the need for training later on is quite staggering.

My task now is to find ways of maintaining the skills that I have imparted and the current levels of enthusiasm.

I wonder how I will achieve that............................

Intro

Hello. This is my first blog and i am going to introduce myself.

I graduated form University with a B.Sc Hons in Computer Science and have worked as a Computer Science teacher , for about ten months.I now work as technician providing support for a variety of hardware and various operating systems.


Besides being a techie, I believe I am a full time mother (round the clock)to two lovely daughters (twins),wife, daughter, sister, sister-in-law, friend and soon, aunt. yes i can't wait to be an aunt.


As a techie , a female techie , I have met a lot of challenges that had everything to do with me being a "female techie". No, I am not going to dwell on that, but sinceI cannot take out the female part of "female techie", even though the keyword is techie, it is going to keep coming up. Yes I am a techie, but it is also important to note that I am a female techie.