23 Things Kansas 2010 is history.  23 Things Kansas – the blog is open and ready for anyone to use and learn by.   For 23 Things Kansas the numbers tell the story of the program.  We started with the numbers and hit Kansas like a “twister.”  Now you can use the numbers to judge our success.  (We already see it in the work of our learning pioneers.)  Take a gander and add your observations in the comments.

16 Mentors:
Heather Braum, regional library system*
Rebecca Brown, NNLM
Patti Butcher, State Library
LaDonna Clark, regional library system
Eric Gustafson, small public library director
Cindi Hickey, State Library
Brenda Hough, regional library system
Erin Downey Howerton, school liaison for a large, urban public library
David Lee King, digital branch manager for a large, urban public library
Royce Kitts, small public library director
Amanda McConnell, circulation coordinator for a medium sized, urban library
Janelle Mercer, regional library system
Sharon Moreland, regional library system
Chris Rippel, regional library system
Kim Rutter, regional library system
Diana Weaver, director of a small public library

*5 of the 7 regional library systems participated in the development of 23 Things Kansas.

14 Lessons
+
2 Wrap-up Webinars (44 participants)

584 program registrations

391 registered participant blogs!

106 pioneers completed the program.  Each earned 30 hours of CE credit for a total of 3,180 hours of CE credit awarded by the State Library for 23 Things Kansas.

Plus 3 colorful fLip cameras were awarded from a drawing of a pool of participants who completed the program.

We had fun, we learned and we made new friends along the way!

Other photo that illustrates this situation: Put Chocloate Pudding on the Top Shelf !!

Heather Braum, NEKLS technology librarian and 23 Things Kansas Mentor supreme received the 2010 KLA Presidential Award for New Professionals.  Heather was cited for her work on 23 Things Kansas and a host of other work she has done for Kansas libraries and librarians.  Heather received the award at the Kansas Library Association annual conference held in Wichita in early April.

Congratulations, Heather!

Heather is shown below with her proud parents and her award.

Two webinars will be held in the WebJunction Kansas, Ad Astra Wimba room.  Go here to access a link to the room, as well as further information about logging in.  (Or click on the “Webinar Login Info” button in the tool bar above.)

The webinars will be held on Wednesday, April 28, 10am-11:30am (the Wimba room will open at 9:30am) and Thursday, April 29, 7pm-8:30pm (the Wimba room will open at 6:30pm).

Also, everyone who registered for the program has until May 28 at midnight to complete all the weekly assignments to be eligible for the prize drawings, as well as receive the 30 hours of continuing education credit. The drawing for the fLip video cameras (3) will be held on June 3.

Please join us on April 28th and/or 29th to celebrate your accomplishments and talk about the future for 23 Things Kansas!

Hope that helps those of you who are unable to attend conference in Wichita, but would like to follow along. I will be tweeting (as always) here, @hbraum.

Last week was filled with lots of chatter in lots of different IM and chat venues thanks to Liz.

Take a minute this week to Tweet, blog, IM, chat or video a thank you message to Liz!

I’m not sure why that doesn’t work. I did a quick Google search, and found out this from Twitter help:

As late as 02/08/10 – “We are still in the process of improving our Find People search. We hope to release these improvements soon.”

Update 3/2: Twitter supposedly will have the Find People feature fixed this week. Here’s a screenshot of the information. (thanks @Twitter_Tips for the tip!)

Instead, to add people that I already have Twitter usernames for, I just go directly to people’s timelines to click the follow button there. (Here’s my timeline, for example.). Here’s some more information on how to find people to follow on Twitter.

I’ll admit, I have never used the Find People on Twitter function. Instead, as I started following people when I began my Twitter account three years ago, I’d look at other people’s followers’ lists and who they were “talking to” (@ replies) and who they were retweeting information from. If someone looked interesting, had the same interests as me, or posted helpful information, I’d follow them. I also look at people’s lists. Remember, I linked to several lists in the Twitter lesson that I had set up of different librarians and other topic areas. Let me know if you have more questions about this.

Hope these tips help!

• What to do When There is Phishing on Twitter
• What’s phishing? (pronounced fishing)? Check out this video
• How to identify Spam and what to do on Twitter
• The Blocking Function in Twitter
• Keep your Twitter account safe & What to do if your account does get phished or hacked

If you think one of your Twitter friends have been phished or their account hacked it’s always a good idea to send them a nice Direct Message letting them know their account may have been compromised. If this is someone you followed knowingly or actually know, most likely they aren’t doing this maliciously. You should only report people as Spam if they seem to be using Twitter in an intentional malicious way.

Another way to protect yourself from immediately getting followed by these spammers or unwanted types of Twitter users, is to make your account private. How you do this after setting up your account is this: login into your Twitter account and click on Settings in the top right of the screen. Then down at the bottom of the Settings screen (under the Account tab, the first one), look for Tweet Privacy:. Check the box next to Protect my tweets. Checking this box will make your tweets only visible to those you allow to follow you on Twitter; it also allows you to accept or deny any new followers.

Finally, here is a great article about how to protect yourself from phishing in Facebook. The tips can be applied to any social
networking site or website.

Again, the Internet is a great place to network and learn and find information, as you’ve been finding out in 23 Things Kansas, but it’s not perfect. Just like computers have anti-virus software on them, you have to know how to protect your online accounts from these problems.

Please don’t hestitate to ask Janelle or Heather if you have any further questions about this, or leave a comment on this post.

Have a great weekend!

I know I’m excited to be “meeting” many of you and “re-meeting” many others I’ve met over my past three years in the Kansas library community. Many of my library friends are those I’ve established “online” friendships with: I never see them face-to-face (some I’ve never even met before in real life!), but we connect online all the time. I hope many of you have the same thing happen to you. With that said, here’s a few important notes:

1. The deadline to register to receive continuing education credit was at 5pm today. We are very close to having 600 members of the Kansas Library Community registered! WOW! The final count will be coming soon.
2. Please continue to register your blog address as you set your blog up during the first week’s lesson. The registration form for that can be found here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dHhjMGJMVGh5RmtmYlFyRzkzYXhtZVE6MA.
3. Note: When submitting the URL, remember to use the following format:
   1. Blogger URLs will look like this: http://fermentedlibrarian.blogspot.com/ (fermentedlibrarian is the username — I love this name!)
   2. WordPress URLs will look like this: http://lisajoco.wordpress.com (lisajoco is the username)
   3. Posterous URLs will look like this: http://katewise.posterous.com/ (katewise is the username)
   4. Tumblr URLs will look like this: http://longislandlibrary.tumblr.com (longislandlibrary is the username)
   5. Typepad URLs will look like this: http://lw23things.typepad.com/ (lw23things is the username)
   6. Edublogs URLS will look like this: http://beccablog.edublogs.org/ (beccablog is the username)
4. I hope many of you have had a chance to look at the new blog listing page. From the comments we’ve heard, people are really liking the functionality of it! It is supposed to now work with all current versions of common Web browsers (Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 7 & 8, Safari, and Firefox).
5. Finally, I hope the first week of 23 Things Kansas ends well for all of you. Feel free to continue to use this email discussion list to send out your questions, comments, and other discussion topics. Send the emails to 23thingsks@googlegroups.com. Each day you’ll then get a single, digest email of all the messages sent to the discussion list at 6:30 a.m. on the next day. It may be a bit slower response time, but we set it up that way so you’re not all inundated with lots and lots of emails. If you would like to receive each individual email from this discussion list, let Cindi Hickey know at chickey at kslib dot info and she can change your settings. You are welcome to view the archive at any time. The informational footer on the listserv messages has been fixed, so all the links that were there should now be working. That was an oversight on my part and it should now be corrected.

Have a great Friday and weekend!

Go find new blogs to comment on!

Update: If you haven’t yet submitted your blog website address (URL) after setting up your new blog in Lesson 1, here’s the link to the form to do that. You must submit your blog website address (URL) on the form, in order for your blog to show up on the blog listing. If you don’t see your name on the new blog listing, you didn’t submit your blog website address yet. FYI: I am updating the data every couple of hours, so your blog may or may not immediately appear. Leave comments here if you have more questions!