Week #2

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

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

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.