Group Project: Teen Tribe Blog

Group Members:  Joanna, Sarah, Lesile, and Kristy

Our project began on the dry erase board in Parmer 003 as the “social catalog.” Based on our class brainstorming session, the “social catalog” group was inspired by those library catalogs (Darien Library, Hennepin) that allow users to write and post reviews items as well as apply “tags” or natural language descriptors of an item’s content.  What drew me to this topic was the idea making an essential library tool, the library catalog, more participatory and open to patron content and control. 

After our groups were decided, my group members and I weren’t really sure in which direction to take the project, due to limited resources and an actual catalog to play with, we narrowed our pursuits to a particular type of library (public library),  a particular audience (teens), and a particular medium for delivery (a blog).   After our first meeting in January we decided to look at other library’s review blogs and other sites/blogs/wikis that allowed for user comments, ratings, and tags.  Between meetings we posted our favorite blogs and sites to our individual del.i.cious accounts, the feeds for which appeared our individual blogs.  During the first day of our second weekend, we shared what we liked and disliked about the models we looked at independently. The next day, we decided on a particular blog (through blogger.com), set up a gmail account for the group (teentribe@gmail.com), and created a collaborative Google Document with our original brainstorming ideas and notes about what we would each contribute during the coming weeks.  During our second day, we added various widgets to the sidebar of our blog that we felt had particular “teen” appeal. Our assignment for the coming weeks was to make our prototype look as “complete” as possible. In order to do so, we each posted between 5-6 posts of items (books, CDs, magazines, etc) for a teen audience.  Each post would contain an image, review, tags, and a link to the SWAN Library catalog. After about 3 weeks, we opened the blog up to our friends and classmates, inviting them to “follow” our blog or even e-mail reviews to be posted. During the last two weeks, we have been e-mailing heavily and communicating about the final presentation on Sunday and what each of us wanted to share with our classmates.

I echo Sarah and Lesile’s sentiments insofar as this has been an incredibly positive group experience, probably the most positive experience I’ve had thus far in this program.  I think that the use of technology made this project possible, the ease of sharing ideas and having conversations through gmail and google documents kept everyone updated and informed on what fellow members were thinking about.  Come to think of it, we didn’t even exchange phone numbers!  I enjoyed this project immensely, not only because of the content of our blog, but because of how my fellow group members came together and worked 100% in an online environment.  

Post Updated 3/28/09 – My contribution to the Teen Tribe blog included posting 6 reviews and adding the Meebo Widget and Poll Widget. Truthfully, I think this group did an excellent job dividing  up the work in terms of creating the prototype and deciding what to share with our classmates for the presentation.