Tuesday, May 12, 2009

#23 Congratulations!

What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
Personally I thikn learning about del.ico.us. was the most helpful tool for me personally. I have tried out all the sites, resources and tools in this course. Many of them I will use. Delicous, however, is a tool that I immediatlly integrated into tools that I use frequently. have a large number of links that i can access quite easily and the list of sites continues to grow.


How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?
As far as lifelong goals I think this course gave me new tools in which to examine our world, not only as a librarian, but also through the eyes of patrons. How will they use these tools?


Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?
I was suprised at the number of tools covered in the course that I was already familair with. In many case my understanding of them was deepened through the course.

What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?

If we offered another program like this in the future, would you choose to participate?
I would most certainly be very interested in knowing of any suich program and believe that I would most likely particpate

#22 Social Networking

From loking at the many websites listed under Social Networking Software " I saw a wide range of pratices that I believe could work in almost any library. Who are te friends in these friend lists? Mostly patrons, but definatly staff and administration. Also among the friends are other instiutions and organizations, thus on facebook or myspace all of these entities are on the same page literally and figurtivly.

The crowd that is the target group is teens. These facebook and other pages seem to be geared towards the younger crowd, with many libraries having their own sepearte YA blog or facebook page . Othwer pages try to appeal to all patrons. New books, library news, book group news, special events, andother information is shared with the friends of the library.

I don't believe that at this point facebook will overtake all your prominatinal needs, but it can make it much easier. Less paper perhaps. There is also an interative element to these pages. Pictures acan be posted, dissusions carried on and comments made.

#21 Microblogging & Mashups

I thought the idea behind Twitterholic was interesting at rating the top of the tweets. I guess essentially it is a popularity contest , but it is important to see who is popular

Twittervision to me seems interesting, however I do not see any practical application for this web site. It's sister site Flcker vision is interesting as it shows what is going on in the world at any given moment. It also seems to lack a practical application.

Do you Tweet? I do not Tweet although I do have an account. I find that facebook reneders twitter useless to me as I can see what my friends are up to that way. I do not follow celebrities so I do not have much interest in clebrties as I see it is important to some to follow that sort of thing. I follow blogs more than anything as there is much more substance there.

Microblogging seems to be for people who are "mobile" which I am not. Microblogging does not seem like something I would be interested in either professional or personally.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

#20 Explore Twitter

I have explored twitter. I have used the feature to check what people are talking about. I have entered the name of a few baseball players and all I have recieved is a bunch of people making less than interesting comments as well as comments that are similair to other people. I find twitter rather boring. I find that people on twitter have little to say and are most times boring or complaining.

#19 Explore eBooks and Audio Books

Exploring the World eBook was interesting. I was suprised that they covered so many genres and topics. It seems that many of the books are older books that are rare and the information was nopt readily avaible. These type of books include history and geneology books that existed only on dussty shelves in some university. There were also children's books.

The library that I am part of has many E-books and audiobooks. I personally download audio books for personal use often. There is always a catch . After the two weeks expires the audiobook will erase itself off of the computer. Old practices apply such as holds and limits to the number of books you can have at one time. They also require software installation

Which is more valuable. This is a very difficult question. Are print books backup or vice versa. BOth are vulnerable. Ebooks can be erased, whereas print books wear over time.

#18 Discover some useful search tools for locating podcasts

Take a look at one or two of the podcast directories listed (or iTunes) and see if you can find a podcast that interests you. See if you can find some interesting library related podcasts here like book review podcasts or library news.
Add the RSS feed for a podcast to your blog reader account.
Create a blog post about your discovery process. Did you find anything useful here?

I choose to check out the NPR podcast page, becausr I had never visited before. I think the most helpful thing to find on this particular library of podcasts is book reviews. I subscribed to a book review podcast called NPR Books. What is great about this podcast is that they review books and talk to authors about books. This will be a good podcast to pass on to the patrons as they can can listen to a review before (or even after) thy read the books. It would also help for book clubs to gain more information about the book to make the discussion more interesting.

* #17 Discover YouTube and a few sites that allow users to upload and share videos



I typed in "library" and this is what I got. This video is from the official Sesame STREET YOU Tube site. There are tons and tons of official videos on You Tube. There are also tons of copyright infringement. Someone is policing it because many clips end up with the message "This video was removed due the insistence of such and such company. What vcan libraries use You tube for? There are a ton of instructional videos on everything from cooking computers. Linking to them mght be helpful. You can also upload to You Tube and perhaps record a few activities the library has done to generate interest

* #16 Explore any site from the Web 2.0 awards list, play with it and write a blog post about your findings

Google Earth

To begin with Google Earth one must know that they do have to download a good portion of the program for free.
What Google Earth does that is unique, and mind blowing is that you start with the globe. You use the controls to zoom in. You can zoom in virtual anywjere on earth. For emample I entererd my home address . The POV zoomed from outer space right down to the point where it showed my house. I could see the car in the driveway and the rhododendron bushes. You can move in any direction and see the neighbors house. You can longitude and latitude to get to specfic points.
It has many of the feature of Google Maps. You can get driving directions. With google earth you enter your start point anf inal destination. You can have Google Earth play a video of what your drive will looklike from many angles including a bird's eyeview. On certain major roads you can click an adress abd see a 360 view photograph of wheree you are. This is handy as it shows the buidlings to the right and left to you so you see where you are going before you get there.
You can literally stick a pin in the map and save it as a point. For Example: My House, MY High School, Gramma's house. There are already so many of these saved points that you can look at fascinating points from around the globe. Just for fun I found the following places just to have a look: Fenway Park, the Gaza Strip, the Garden of Gethsemane, and Quebec. There are so many features to google ewarth that I have not had the time to fully explore it.

And id that was not amazing enough there is google Mars,


I think people in the library can use Google Earth for a variety of reasons. Travel planning appears to be themost appropriate. One can literally see their trip before they go. They can familairize themselves with not only street names but images. Googl Earth has great potential for students studying geography. There are features on Googl Earth that can show street names, famous places, political boundries and so much more.

Friday, May 1, 2009

#15 Take a look at some online productivity (wordprocessing, spreadsheet) tools

How does the application you chose compare to word processing software you’re familiar with? What features did you like/dislike the most? Can you think of any ways the application you chose would be useful to you?

I think this would come in handy in I was ever cauht somplace without my computer. The best thing is you can access it from anywhere. However you cannot do any presentation more than 10mb. That is kind of small compared with some of the things I do . Google docs is basically Microsoft Office without the frills. If you are just trying to make a simple document or spreadsheet thats fine. One thing that really impreessed me was the form that you can set up and send to whomever. I have tried making forms with plenty otrher softwre and found it confusing.