Afterthoughts

Wow 10 weeks has gone by. I have enjoyed this learning process and learnt a lot. Some things I use in my day to day activities anyway but some things were totally new to me. So it was good to learn new things and new possibilities. I also enjoyed learning of alternative ways of doing things, alternative sites to use. Some things I am unlikely to use but it was fun learning about them anyway. But other things I have already started using. And as I write this I'm listening to Garrison Keillor reading News from A Prairie Home Companion one of the podcasts I subscribed to in Week 10.
Another good thing has been that this exercise has forced me to think about how Web 2.0 can be used in the library environment. I wonder if a similar ning could be useful for Computer Savvy Seniors. Either as a training tool for volunteers or for cofident "graduates".

Many thanks to the team who put this together. Activities were interesting and instructions were always clear and easy to follow. Now for some practise in the holidays...

Week 10 : Podcasts Part B

Here are a couple of my sons' faves....










I think YouTube is really useful as well as fun. We have watched old tv shows like Get Smart, cartoons like Bugs Bunny and Road Runner or just plain silly and funny stuff. But we also use it as an instruction manual. Eg. when we got a new camera we went to YouTube for instructions on use. So its application in a library could be, as someone else suggested, for storytimes but also to show people how to use equipment, what they'll find in the meeting room, how to use a projector etc Perhaps it could also be used for book club.

Week 10 : Podcasts Part A

Went to Podcast Alley and subscribed to A Prairie Home Companion's News from Lake Wobegone, The Graham Norton Show video podcast and ABC National Late Night Live. In addition itunes top 25 songs seems to have found its way there but I don't remember subscribing to it.

Week 9 continued

Week 9 : Books and reading

Librarything is fantastic. I doubt I'd use it for my personal library but I wish I'd known about it when I catalogued the kindergarten books. It would have saved me an enormous amount of time and it would have been easy for the kinder staff to use. Because you can add tags you can search for books in your collection by those tags. For the kindergarten simple subjects or tags like bears, animals, pirates, cars etc could be used then teachers or parents could find books on that subject. Wow. And to think I used a clunky excel database. For this exercise I added some books we have at home and tagged them with simple tags like the ones mentioned above. Then I created a widget.

Week 8 : Productivity

As I'm already familiar with Google docs, Google reader and I already have an iGoogle page set up I thought I'd explore Eventbrite and Zamzar. I converted a personal doc file to pdf. It seems pretty straight forward. Just follow steps 1,2,3 etc. Having to go to my email to receive the converted files seemed a little tedious but otherwise it was easy to use and could be useful. I also followed their instructions and coverted a copy of the Magna Carta. But best of all I coverted a Youtube video and it wasn't difficult at all.
Next i looked at Eventbrite because although I was aware of it because of the children's holiday programs I had never used it. I did a search for library events in Boroondara but only got Sandringham and Hobsons Bay (2 pages of Hobson Bay events!). Where are the Boroondara events??? From a customer point of view it's easy to use.
Finally I chose to look at Lulu from the Web 2.0 award categories. It seemed like a great self publishing tool and at first I thought Great we could do library brochures but then realized there are costs involved so don't know how relevant this site is. So I looked at Biblio. Got a bit excited and looked up nursery rhymes. Found zero! Then refined the search and bingo found heaps. Got a bit frustrated. When I tried to sort the list (by price or author) I kept getting the following message "unable to find any books matching your criteria" which clearly wasn't true. Very frustrating, however I can see it could be a useful tool for finding those out of print books etc. There are probably better sites.

Week 7 : Tagging, Technorati and del.icio.us

Joined Delicious. Had a bit of trouble initially as I just signed in with my Yahoo login and managed to get myself all tied in knots. After some mucking around I finally managed to login do some searches. I love it. I did a search on books + literature and bookmarked Gutenberg Project; What should I read next? (a great site which I will use to help my son find books) and Australian Children's Literature Alliance. I then searched Cooking + recipes + cakes + chocolate and found lots of yummy sites. It's great being able to add tags bit by bit. I really like Delicious and I think I will use it, it seems useful. I'm not so sure about the analogy of peering into someone else filing cabinet tho, why would you want to?
Had a look at Technorati. A very quick look. Too many ads flashing about all over the place. I got the hell out of there.

Week 6 : Fun Stuff

Playing with Stumbleupon - what fun. So many weird and wonderful sites. Could waste hours just seeing where it takes me. Bit like a game of chance,roll the dice or spin the wheel, and see where it takes you. Can't say I found anything really useful or lifechanging but it was fun.
Really loved Last.fm. Found it really useful - lots of biographical info, discography, as well as recommendations.
Seomoz.org/web2.0 was interesting. Interesting to see how sites are ranked and rated. I found it quite useful especially as a way of suggesting alternative sites to some I cuurently use.
Rolyo I'm still not sure about - I will have to play around a bit more. Tried doing a search for public domain e books on humour and found heaps of books. One of the sites it searches, Project Gutenberg, I'm already familiar with. Don't know if I'm likely to use Rolyo but I'll go back and check it out again.
Lolcat - well what can I say? Many of the pictures and captions aren't even funny. How many cute/funny cats can one take? The dogs just look like dogs, hard to make a funny caption there. And the celebreties just aren't funny. And some of the look alikes...

Week 5 : more photos continued...

Kuching, Sarawak. More holiday snaps of our Borneo adventure at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bookwoman2000/
You can see us washing baby elephants in the river.

Week 5: Flickr. Young women enjoying a day at the beach at Southport, 1940

Young women enjoying a day at the beach at Southport, 1940
Originally uploaded by State Library of Queensland, Australia

I really liked this photo. It reminded me of my mother. She would have been about their age. She got married in 1941 at seventeen years of age.

Week 4 : RSS feeds

Listened to the podcast. Unlike many colleagues I had no problems with it. Set up a Bloglines account. Found it a bit awkward to use but got there in the end. It appears I've been ussing RSS feeds already without really knowing it. Like others I have various news and other RSS feeds on my igoogle page. More convenient and handy for me. i'm sure bloglines is probably quite good if you have a lots of professioal reading to do or lots of blogs or whatever. One thing I have noticed doing all this learning is how time consuming it all is and how bad my memory is! I spent over half an hour the other day trying to login to bloglines. nothing worked. Tried different passwords etc. finally I realized I must have signed up with a different email address. Jeeezzz.

Week 3 Social networking - Facebook, twitter

Have fallen a little behind because I 've been indulging in reading. Not just bed time reading but flopping on the couch and being absorbed in my book all day long. A delicious and decadent experience. So I have a little catching up to do. Had a look at facebook. Can see that it could be useful for staying in touch with family and friends especially if you're travelling but mostly it seems full of very self centred stuff. I can see people getting excited for about five minutes until the next thing comes along...which maybe at the at moment is twitter. Not really sure I want to know all this minutiae. Do I really need to know that someone is tired? Or that it's early in the morning? Or that they're in Glenferrie Rd?I'm just not interested in this. On the other hand I have been following some ?sites/tweets and getting updates is good. For example, I just found out that the museum is extending the Star Wars exhibition - must ask the kids if they want to go one more time. Is twitter's use like a noticeboard? I quite like blogs though.
I have gone back to look at twitter several more times and I can see why people become addicted to it. Of course that doesn't necessarily make it a good thing. I think I will persevere with it and see where it leads.

Week 2 Blogs/Wikis/Nings and Setting up Your Own Blog

Well it's week 2 and I've created a blog.