Week 9, Thing 23: Summary of Thoughts

Woo hoo: The last thing!! Didn't think I'd get here so soon. It has been quite an adventure: difficult and frustrating at times, but also fun, addicting, and interesting.
I think my favorite things that I learned during this experience were: creating the blog itself, flickr, rss feeds, Library Thing, and YouTube. These are all things I will definitely use again, and continue to use in the future. Things that I don't think I will have much use for are: Del.icio.us, Technorati, and Rollyo-although it was interesting to learn about what they are.This program has assisted me in my lifelong learning goals in many ways. I have learned about things out there on the internet that I had no idea existed. I now know how to use alot of these new, cool "things." I also have alot more confidence in performing many other skills on the computer that I wasn't very good at before, like copying and pasting urls from site to site. Going through this program has given me the confidence that I could go through another program online, and succeed at it. Maybe I'll decide to take a course or two online in the future.

As far as improving on this program, I think the content was very good, but almost too much to squeeze into 9 weeks. Starting out, we all had the impression that we would be able to finish each week's activity in 30 minutes to 1 hour a week. That turned out to be far from the truth-at least for me. I probably spent 1 hour or more on each thing-not on each week. And from what I've heard other people say, I think that is the going consensus. I ended up doing the majority of the work for my blog at home, mainly because there is not enough time to do it at work, and there have been bandwidth problems at work that made doing some of the exercises difficult. Therefore, I think the program could have easily run for 4-5 months.

If another program like this were offered in the future, I most likely would want to participate. It has really been a valuable learning experience, despite some of the frustrations and difficulties I had working by myself in a self-paced program. But I feel very accomplished, alot more knowledgeable of Web 2.0, and proud that I finished the program!

Week 9, Thing 22: Learn About Downloadable Books

I explored Overdrive for this exercise (I see that our library is going to be dropping Recording Books NetLibrary soon). There are a multitude of titles you can download: apparently over 2,000! I found that there are limited copies of each title, but you can go on a waiting list when your title isn't available. Our library has a 21 day loan period, and no fines: very good!
Overdrive is arranged in a manner that is easy to search. Categories are divided up into Browse collections, Browse Fiction, and Non-fiction, and Browse Video. I liked that under the category of Browse Collections, they list categories as "most popular" and "recently returned". I had no trouble locating most titles I searched for. They even have graphic novels available to download! I did find a few titles that I may be interested in downloading in the near future: The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly, and High Noon by Nora Roberts. It is an excellent site and a great service to offer to library customers.

Twiggy the Water Skiing Squirrel

Week 9, Thing 21: Locating Podcasts

There certainly are podcasts available on every topic imaginable! I checked out quite a few on Podcast.net, and some on Yahoo Podcasts. I subscribed to a few: Alternative Health Options Podcast (I like hearing and reading about current health topics), Canine Campus, and Hound TV: A Video Podcast for Dogs & Their Owners (as you can tell, I love dogs!) I also subscribed to The Library Channel as my library news site. These sites are all of interest to me, and I will enjoy checking them out. I really liked the "Ask a Ninja" podcast: very funny!

Super Squirrel to the rescue! Or not...

Week 9, Thing 20: YouTube

YouTube is really alot of fun! It wasn't too difficult to figure out how to upload a video-once I signed up my blog on the YouTube site. There are so many videos to choose from. I can't believe some of the things people post on that site: some are really just weird! I chose the squirrel video because I love feeding squirrels and watching their antics in our yard. They are quite the little comics! I think the producer of this video is quite creative, and spent alot of time filming her "actors." YouTube could be useful for library websites in a way similar to podcasts: used to teach various skills to patrons using the library databases, or just navigating through the catalog. A fun and interesting experience!

Squirrel Crime

A grape thief is caught while the other suspect is distracted with nuts!

Week 8, Thing 19: Web 2.0 Awards List

I chose the health topic from the 2.0 awards list, and I selected Medstory, which is a very good site (http://www.medstory.com/). It is a search engine for all things health-related. It lets you search for any health topic, and then refine your search by drugs, disorders, studies, etc. I searched coronary artery disease. I initially got many useful websites on this subject. I then refined the search to stents and coronary artery disease, which brought up even more interesting featured articles, plus a whole lot more websites. I thought the whole search engine was quite good and informative. It would be very helpful for library use for patrons looking up any health-related topic.
On a different topic, I found the site www.cocktailbuilder.com to be alot of fun! You just tell this site what kind of liquor you have available in your house, and it will tell you what kind of cocktails you can make. This could come in very handy!
I will have to spend alot more time playing around with the multitude of sites listed as award-winners. I can't believe how many there are: amazing!

Week 8, Thing 18: Online Productivity Tools

So I opened an account with Zoho Writer, and it seems to be a very useful site. I created a test document on the Zoho Wiki page: how interesting! I can see how this could be a great tool. As I said in my test document, you can share your document online with others. You can export your files or email them as a word document. And, you can use Zoho like a text editor, and move it to your blog. It is especially nice that you can access this document from everywhere, and you don't have to carry a diskette around with you all of the time.

Week 7, thing 17: Learning 2.0 Sandbox Wiki

This was a fun activity, although a bit frustrating in that I could not create an active link to my blog from the Maryland Libraries Sandbox favorite blogs page. I followed all of the instructions: listed my blog name, highlighted it, pulled up the edit box, and listed the url. But when I tried to click on okay and then save, nothing happened. Someone said that there was an error as of yesterday, and they were working on it, so I guess that's what happened. It does seem like it would be easy if it worked! So- my blog name is listed in the list, but it doesn't actually take you to my blog.
Anyway, I had fun creating a wiki under "What I Am Reading". I wrote up a review for Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult. It was fun and easy to do, and that did get entered in the list of wikis that everyone else has written. Cool!


7/23/07- Today I went back and created an active link to my blog. Yeah: it finally worked!

Week 7, Thing 16: Wikis

I had heard about wikis, but now I have a much better understanding about what they really are: a collaborative website and authoring tool that allows people to add, remove and edit content very easily. I learned that wiki means "quick" in Hawaiian. You don't have to be an html expert to make changes to the wiki either: simple syntax will do just fine. And there are some disadvantages to wikis: they could be too open, disorganized, and they could be victims of vandalism and spam. Libraries can use wikis in many ways. They could be used to create a subject guide-which could be edited by anyone. People could add to the collection of useful resources and take out dead links. They can be used to annotate a catalog, or as a community wiki-in which people could write all kinds of information about their community that may be of interest to others. And librarians working on a document could use a wiki because they could make changes very easily without having to e-mail each other back and forth. Wikis could also be used as an intranet within libraries. I took a look at Book Lovers Wikis-which is a great site in which people post online book reviews in all different categories. Library 2.0 in 15 Minutes a Day presents lots of tips in doing a 2.0 program. And ALA 2006 New Orleans Wiki shows a great use of making a wiki which people can constantly add and edit info. about a conference. Very interesting!

Beagle Boy

Beagle Boy
Originally uploaded by Liyamu

Is it time to leave for the beach yet?

"The Battery" Charleston, SC

"The Battery" Charleston, SC
Originally uploaded by Reellady

Looking forward to summer vacation!

Beach Sunset, Isle of Palms

CRW_2520
Originally uploaded by Harry Davis

Heading to Isle of Palms in August. Can't wait!

Week 6, Thing 15: Perspectives on Web, Library 2.0

I loved the video "The Machine is Us/ing Us" by Michael Wesch. It was excellent, and very thought provoking. It really made me think about how far we have come from the beginning of the internet to where we are today.

Away From Icebergs, by Rick Anderson, presented 3 things that are threatening our existence as libraries today: The "Just in Case" collection- Patrons will expect access to everything from us, and not just a print collection of what we think they need. Reliance on User Education- Libraries are not equipped or staffed for teaching. We need to focus efforts not on teaching research skills, but on eliminating the barriers that exist between patrons and the info. they need, and the "Come-to-us" model of library service- We used to hold a monopoly in the info. marketplace, but not anymore. These were 3 good points that Rick Anderson made. If we don't keep an open mind and try to adapt our services to today's and tomorrow's patrons, we will not survive.

I liked the points made in the article, Into a New World of Librarianship: Librarians 2.0 need to plan for their users, base all planning and proposals for services, materials, and outreach on user needs and wants, embrace Web 2.o tools, and never stop dreaming about the best library services. All of these articles really make you think that we better be adaptable and open to change and learning new web-based technology now and in the future, because the world will keep changing, and so will patrons' needs and demands.

Week 6, Thing 14: Exploring Technoratti and Tags

I never really thought about any way in which blogs could be organized, bookmarked, searched, etc. This is certainly an eye opener! I checked out Learning 2.0 in blog posts, tags, and the directory. You get different results in each search. There is so much information out there! You really can get a good idea of what this program is all about from everything on Technorati about it. I can't believe they track 50 million blogs-including photos and video. Incredible! I really enjoyed looking at the top favorite blogs and top searches. It was not surprising that youtube, myspace, and facebook are a few of the top ones, but I'd never heard of some other ones like skyblog and naruto. More stuff to explore in our free time: ha, ha!

Week 6, Thing 13: Tagging and Del.icio.us

Well, this is a very neat bookmarking site! I had never heard of del.icio.us, but I can see it has alot of potential for helping you do research, and to be able to access your bookmarks anywhere.
You can build a shared reading list and a syllabus. You can check out the most popular tags on subjects, and you can view the tag options as a cloud: very helpful! I looked at the Podcast and RSS tag from Orange County Public Library. It had been saved by 8 other people. The site gives good info. on these subjects. I also looked at the cloud terms under tag options, and found many other interesting, and useful related topics. Cool!