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Meme: You own best posts of the past

July 6, 2009 It may come as no surprise that I am not particularly fond of everything I write in the space.  Sometimes it makes me happy to watch my unremarkable posts bury themselves as newer posts cover them up.  On the other hand, I find it kinda sad that my favorite posts seem forever buried.
 
I started playing with the notion of buried blog treasure.  Sitting at dinner with Scott, Doug, Wes. Jon, after a long day at NECC, and later at the Meet-up, several of us fleshed out an idea for a meme.  

What if we bloggers unearthed and reshared those posts of which we are proudest?  And what if we collected these gems with tags?  This doesn't necessarily mean those posts that got the most visits or comments or Tweet references.  We may choose those posts we loved that went relatively unnoticed.

So how about a meme? What if we selected our favorite past posts in a few categories, perhaps, 4 Rs? 

Meme rules:

1. Scan your posts for your own personal favorites. 
2. Choose one post in any/each of the four categories:

• Rants
• Resources
• Reflections
• Revelations

I leave it to you folks to define these terms, but my instinct is that we could treat these loosely. You are welcome to suggest new categories if these don't fit.

3. In a blog post, list those posts and very briefly describe

• why it was important,
• why it had lasting value or impact,
• how you would update it for today.

4. Select five (or so) other bloggers to tap with this meme.

5. Tag all of your post with #postsofthepast

I see the potential for a wonderful anthology coming out of this!

Care to join me in this meme?

Scott McLeod
Steve Dembo
Doug Johnson
Wes Fryer
Vinnie Vrotny
Jon Becker
Liz Davis
Lisa Thumann
David Warlick

Here are my own choices, ghosts of postings past from NeverEnding Search

Rant:

• Wake up, for real: The laptops have hit the fan  I hoped that this post would serve as a wake-up call to librarians in our state who chose not to prepare for ubiquity.  I'd been talking about this for a while and I suspect the post may have inspired some training efforts in our state.  If I were to update this today, in light of reduced school budgets, I'd consider the situation even more urgent. Librarians need to redefine their roles for new information landscapes.  Some of these issues surfaced again in our recent conversation on librarians as social media specialists.

• Streaming and backchanneling AASL09?  I was frustrated by the one-way nature of our library conference and wished that our own conferences could be as interactive and conversational as NECC and BLC08.  The post helped to generate a fabulous list of volunteers for our upcoming national conference.  I'll report back on our progress in November.

Resources:

When YouTube is blocked (way more than eight ways around) This post seemed to really hit a nerve.  The comments and responses summarized the need for teachers to access this increasingly valuable portal and the issues surrounding its availabilty and fair use.

Reflection:

• 2.0 is an intellectual freedom issue. In this post it occurred to me that we needed to reframe the 2.0 filtering battle for the library profession. This is an opportunity for leadership.  I wanted the library profession to see that 2.0 is worth fighting about, not only because of its potential for engaging learners and creating authentic opportunities to build knowledge and collaborate, it is a library mandate.
  While most of us out there in the trenches will fight to keep important on our shelves, protecting the rights of our whole learning communities to read, many of us are not fighting the same good fight in other areas of our practice.  

Revelations: 

• PowerPoint Reform: a first chapter.  It really worked!  Our attempts to reform presentations in our school worked when we completely deconstructed PowerPoint--banning bullets, slide design, clipart, backgrounds--and focused instead on storytelling.
• Fair Use and Transformativeness--It may just shake your world!  I returned from a focus group with Peter Jaszi and Renee Hobbs, who were preparing the new Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Media Literacy Education, completely transformed myself:
  I am no longer sure that anything I learned, or anything I regularly share relating to fair use, is either helpful or relevant.  As a gatekeeper, I've been far too conservative.  See these wikis for updates: Cost of Copyright Confusion, Fair Use and InfoEthicsWiki

You don't need an official invitation to join in this meme.  Select your own favorite posts and let's work on unearthing buried treasure all over the edu/biblioblogosphere.  

Posted by Joyce Valenza Ph.D on July 6, 2009 | Comments (1)