I was going to make a comment, but I don’t think my resume is impressive enough to allow me to have an opinion. It’s strange–the L2.0 crowd will fall all over themselves praising us anonymous cowards when we’re editing Wikipedia (“traditional notions of authority have changed!”), but start frothing at the mouth when we dare to criticize anything L2.0 related.”

OMG, I love you. Perfect.

In other words, who ever said you have to have solutions in order to anonymously gripe on a blog?? I wish we COULD hold the entire internet to that standard, but alas…

Do I set out to fail? Do I set out to make lousy product? No. I try to get as much input as possible during the “creation” process so that it turns out the best, but a lot of times, I release things into the world, and THEN figure out by patron/colleague response what was effective and what wasn’t. And trust me–those failures are valuable learning experiences. Letting kids hate on books via YouTube? Wildly successful–kids think VERY critically when they’re telling you why the book they’re reading in English is awful.

Letting teenagers use glitter in crafts projects?? Not so successful. While someone else would have seen that one coming a mile away, I missed it.

I’ve had some failures in trying new things in librarianship, and I’ve had some successes. But I’d have never known if I wouldn’t have at least put forth the effort, and put MYSELF out there, and my product out there to be criticized.

I guess that’s one thing I bring from my arts background–the ability to release a product into the “wild” and allow it to fail or succeed on its own, and take the criticism coming to it, no hard feelings. Should these guys be heartbroken and give up New Media just because this video is particularly awful? I don’t think so. I’m sure they learned a lot in the making of the video about production values and process. I’m hopeful they’ve learned things via the reaction of their patrons and their colleagues.

I think librarians are obligated to use our time and resources wisely and not take uncalculated risks. However, I don’t think librarians (or any professionals) are obligated to be RIGHT and SUCCESSFUL all the time. That’s a heck of a lot of pressure to put on anyone, and I don’t think ANYONE is capable of living up to that. If we learn more from our failures than our successes, then we’re missing out on valuable learning opportunities by immobilizing ourselves with the fear of failure.

As for this video–we don’t always see if we’re succeeding. We see what we MEANT to do with a project, and not necessarily what we actually accomplished. We need the feedback of our patrons and peers. I think it’s fair to talk about THE WORK. But we don’t need to imply that these people are idiots for trying and not succeeding.

The AL should have moved on to a new topic, however, I suppose it was too hard to resist stoking a fire that so many people (on all sides) were still warming their hands around.

Pop-culture reference there is a decade-and-a-half old, but I appreciate it.

that’s cool, huh-huh. huh.