Thanks to a retired archivist from UBC Library, I was able to borrow a laptop to use in a Web 2.0 workshop at the Archives Association of British Columbia Conference on April 24, 02009 at UBC. A laptop is mandatory and mine wasn't up to the task since a wireless connection was required and my laptop's wireless was temporarily broken.
The workshop was presented by techie Jethro Taylor who works for the Nisga'a Nation school district. After a quick definition of Web 2.0, he showed an interesting video by Kansas State University Professor Dr. Michael Wesch on digitalethnography. He pointed out that the video kept coming back to the importance of metadata.
Some of the Web 2.0 tools he described were blogs, wikis, RSS, tags, and crowdsourcing. He had us use Google Reader to subscribe to a RSS feed. I learned through Google Reader that I have at least 202 subscribers to the current iteration of The Ten Thousand Year Blog, which I consider pretty remarkable considering that people had to make a conscious effort to subscribe. This took some time because the UBC wireless connection went down more than once. He wanted us to set up a blog but ran out of time. He talked about wikis and pointed out a sandbox wiki he set up at http://archivist.wikispaces.com. Heck, I set up my own because Wikispaces participates in OpenID so I was able to use my WordPress.com ID to get into Wikispaces and create http://digitalarchivist.wikispaces.com.
Because of the wireless problems we were all experiencing, the workshop didn't go as smoothly as it could have.
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