23 Things I'm Learning

Week #9 Podcasts, Video & Downloadable audio

2009-01-21T10:29:00.000-08:00

This week, one of the things I'm exploring is YouTube. I've actually searched and found many interesting things on this site, including instructional videos, old television shows and videos of various humorous things. I think the worst thing about the website is the sheer amount of stuff on it, a lot of which has no value. It can be time consuming to sort through the chaff. Also, I find the comments for most videos to be devoid of meaningful conversation. Still, there is a wealth of entertainment and education to be found on YouTube and I could see it being a great tool to advertise or record events at a library as well as for instructional purposes.

As part of this exercise, I chose to display Obama's inspirational and historical Inauguration speech in this post.

The link to the exercise for podcasting is broken, but I will comment that I already download and listen to several podcasts relating to hobbies of mine.

For the audiobooks exercise, I looked around the Librivox website. I'm a big fan of Charles Dickens and a lot of his work is available for download there. I plan on checking it out when I have the time.

Week #8 Online Applications & Tools

2009-01-19T09:01:00.000-08:00

I normally use Microsoft Word on my computer for writing documents and so I haven't paid attention to similar applications out on the web. I can see how having a common place for multiple authors to add and edit documents and spreadsheets can be a powerful tool. I'm writing this part of the blog entry using Zoho Writer. It was pretty easy to use although I'm so used to Word that I'll probably stick to that for now.

The second exercise this week was to chose a site or tool from the Web 2.0 Award Nominees and write about it. Naturally, I chose one in the "Books" category. Biblio.com was the second place winner and is a website where you can search for and purchase used books, including those that are out-of-print. I've actually shopped at a similar website, Alibris. The neat thing is that it collects the inventory of over 5500 used bookstores from around the country in one location for customers to search. You are actually purchasing them from the individual stores. So, it is a very powerful tool for locating an out-of-print book. I could see how this could be valuable resource for libraries to replace lost or damaged out-of-print books.

Week #7 Wikis

2009-01-18T21:20:00.000-08:00

I've been aware and have used Wikipedia for a long time now, so my impression of wikis has been that they are a sort of a living encyclopedia where people can add or update information. I didn't realize the other sorts of things for which they can be used, particularly as a way to organize an event. The first library wiki that I looked at was used in this way, organizing and providing information about a symposium.

This next wiki is more of the encyclopedic sort but is more about useful ideas from a large number of contributors than it is about facts. There is such a wealth of good ideas here that I bookmarked it for future reference - Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki.

I saw many library wikis with information about specific programs as well as an ALA one to develop a legislative agenda - National Library Agenda. Given the number of wikis I saw in my exploration, they appear to be an application that is already being used in several ways quite successfully by libraries.

For the last exercise, I added my blog to Favorite Blogs on CTLS 23 Things Favorites wiki. It was very easy to use.

Week #6 Tagging and Folksonomies

2009-01-18T16:59:00.000-08:00

Unlike last week's exercises, these are going to be tougher for me as I'll be sailing into mostly unknown waters.

For the first exercise, I created a Del.icio.us account and watched the tutorial. Then I went to kamcevoy's page and explored the various things one can do by clicking on all the different options. It seems like a very powerful tool to do research by using the tags. I also like the idea of being able to access your bookmarks from another computer. I'm definitely going to have to explore this website further. I'm not very comfortable using it yet and I feel like I've only scratched the surface of what it can do for me.

I found the Technorati site to be rather overwhelming and my exploration of it was hindered by the fact the it was very slow loading pages. It's hard to believe how many blogs are out there and it was rather interesting to see what were the most popular searches. Apparently, a lot of people still find Paris Hilton to be fascinating.

The last exercise for this week required me to read some perspectives on Library 2.0 and blog my thoughts. As a new employee without a background in libraries (other than as a patron), this whole concept was totally new to me. My initial reaction to learning about it was one of excitement and enthusiasm. Incorporating some of this new technology seems like a good way to update and keep libraries on the leading edge and draw in the people that use Web 2.0 all the time in their daily lives, such as teens. However, I came across this article which gives a different perspective and takes a more cautious approach to Library 2.0. The ensuing discussion in the comments section is very good and gave me a lot to think about. Perhaps there needs to be more careful thought about how and what should be incorporated into libraries instead of just trying to force a fit of the latest hot technology on the web.

Week #5 Play Week

2009-01-18T12:58:00.001-08:00

This is going to be one of those entries that practically writes itself because online chatting and gaming are things that have been a part of my online life for a very long time. In fact, I spend way too much time gaming online!

The first activity involves instant messaging and chat. I don't have and have no interest in getting a Gmail account so I can't use GoogleTalk. I also never seem to catch a CTLS person online to chat in the MeeBoMe box for the other option for this activity. However, I do have an AIM account and use this daily to chat with my husband at work or with my mother. I also sometimes chat with my friends on Facebook.

Social networking is another topic that I'm very familiar with as I've had a Facebook account for a while now and I've added many friends and applications. Here is my profile page. I've sent a friend request to CTLS and posted on my Notes for this activity.

Now we get to the part of this week's exercises that is the one most near and dear to my heart - online gaming. I've played all the different types of games listed but I'll just talk about two to fulfill the requirements of the exercise.

The first game would fall under the "competitive" category. There are numerous websites that take popular European boardgames and make web-based versions of them. The way they usually work is that you get an account at the website and either join a game our create your own for people to join. Some sites let you create a game and just invite friends. Some sites send you an email when it is your turn and for others you just have to check periodically to see if it is your turn. These games can be played over a period of days or even weeks, depending on how quickly the players make their moves. One of my favorite such websites is MaBiWeb and one of the games I played recently was In the Shadow of the Emperor.

My very favorite online games falls under the category of a "virtual world." This is the popular game, World of WarCaft. For this game, you have to purchase and install software on your computer and pay a monthly fee. It is a very involved and immersive fantasy world in which you create and play with a character. I am a member of a guild in the game and I meet once a week with fellow guild members to play online together. These are all friends of mine that are scattered across the country. We use Skype during our gaming sessions to talk, as in a conference phone call, so it's a very fun, social experience. I love it, although it can be very addictive and take up too much time.

Week #4 RSS and newsreaders

2009-01-14T12:43:00.000-08:00

This is going to be an easy activity for me as I've been using a newsreader for a long time. Back when I started following a lot of blogs, I found it time consuming to visit them each day to see if they had been updated. Since many bloggers only post to their blogs sporadically, I was wasting too much time. A newsreader solved this problem, neatly categorizing my favorite blogs and letting me know when they had been updated.

So, rather than use Google Reader as this week's activity suggest, I'll just share with you the software that I use - SharpReader. It is free and I've been very happy with it.

I did use Google Reader's search function to find some interesting library related blogs to follow. These all look like popular and active blogs. I added them to SharpReader:

http://www.librarystuff.net/

http://theshiftedlibrarian.com/

This last one is just for fun - looks humorous:

http://www.unshelved.com/

I found the Google search tool to be pretty useful. However, many of my feeds have been found simply from links from a related blog. If I find a blog I really like, I always check to see if they have a links page. Technorati seems useful as well. Google seemed to be a little simpler, but both were easy to use.

More fun with Flickr

2009-01-11T12:21:00.000-08:00

Now I'm playing with mashups for Flickr. I created my name from Flickr images here.

Here's another mashup called Montager that I liked. It takes a tag (I used "Australian shepherd puppy") and makes a mosaic out of Flickr photos. You can view mine here.

Finally, for the last exercise, I played around with some image generators. These were really fun. I took my avatar and put it on the cover of a magazine at this website. Unfortunately, the picture is not as sharp as I'd like.

Create Fake Magazine Covers with your own picture at MagMyPic.com

Week #3 Flickr

2009-01-11T11:56:00.001-08:00

Little Tucker (3)
Originally uploaded by piotr m

This week, I'm exploring the photo sharing website, Flickr. While I've viewed friends' albums at this site after they sent me their links, I'd never looked around it much. I had no idea that you could do so many things with your photos here. I'm not much of a photographer, so I'm not sure how much I'd use it, but I could spend hours just searching for groups that interest me and perusing the photos. There are some pretty amazing photos of just about anything or place that you can think of. The map feature showing where photos were taken is really cool. I did create an account under the user name "SusanRoz" so that I could use the tool to upload photos to this blog.

For this week's exercise, I searched for pictures of Australian Shepherd puppies. I found "Tucker" so adorable that I chose his photo to post here.

Week #2

2008-12-26T22:19:00.000-08:00

This week's activities are setting up a blog and learning to add an avatar to it. Well, as you can see, I was able to accomplish both. I found Blogger to be very easy to use. A Google search on "free avatars" yielded numerous websites and it was easy to download a few and add one to this blog. For some reason, I've always liked crows (maybe because I'm a fan of Edgar Allen Poe's stories?) so I chose one for my avatar.

One of the activities this week is to make a post about which habit from the 7 1/2 lifelong learning habits I find to be hardest and which one I find to be easiest. So, here are mine:

The hardest habit for me is probably #7 - teaching and mentoring others. Not only am I rather introverted, I can also be a rather impatient teacher. Having kids has helped me become a lot better with these issues, but I still shy away from situations that put me in a position of teaching something to someone.

The easiest habit by far for me is # 7 1/2 - play! I can and do spend hours on the Internet exploring, reading and playing online games. I belong to numerous social websites. I'll be writing about these for week #5's activity.

Week #1

2008-12-26T21:54:00.000-08:00

For this weeks exercise, I familiarized myself with the program and read the FAQ page. Happily, I am already familiar with many of the activities that I'll be doing. However, others will be quite a challenge since I'm not nearly as comfortable with computers as I should be, a fact often pointed out to me by my computer-savvy kids!

I then watched and listened to a tutorial called the Seven and 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners and thought about which of the habits came easiest to me and which were the hardest. I'll be writing more about this in a later post.

Finally, I explored Google a bit and was astounded with all the things offered there. I'd had an account there for quite a while and have used a few of their applications, but I had not poked around there much to see what else was offered - a lot! I even set up an iGoogle page.

Getting Started

2008-12-22T10:40:00.000-08:00

As a lifelong lover of books, I was thrilled to recently become an employee of my town's public library. On the other side of the checkout desk now, I am learning how libraries are run and about all the services they provide the community. One of the interesting concepts that I'm learning about is that of Library 2.0, a way in which some libraries are adapting to and using the emerging technologies of Web 2.0. In order to learn more about some of the tools out there on the web, I'm participating in the CTLS 23 Things program. This blog will be used not only a place to record my thoughts as I go along, but also as a learning tool.