Thursday, August 16, 2007

If you're finished and you know it, shout hooray! HOORAY!

If you're finished and you know it shout hooray! Hooray!
If you're finished and you know it shout hooray! Hooray!
If you're finished and you know it, then your face will definitely show it,
If you're finished and you know it shout hooray! HOORAY!

#23, Summary

In the end, I'm glad I took this journey. It was incredibly time-consuming, but that's because much of it was new to me. These sites are second nature to a lot of patrons, though, so it's important for us to keep our techno-know-how relevent.

I think, though, that we need to remember that technology is supposed to free us, not enslave us. Before posting this last post, I visited the 43 things websites, and quite a few of the "what I want to do..." require shutting off the computer and going out of the house.

I am particularly pleased to have learned about photo-sharing. The old days of film photography are fading away, making learning about digital photography another relevant skill. And these photo sharing sites provide so many ideas!

I also find myself going to YouTube more than even just a couple months ago. There is a growing volume of "how to's" on that site, as well as entertainment. And I was surprised by how much I like the podcasts. I can see the features I liked playing a role in my lifelong learning. I would also be likely to participate in future activities of this nature, too, as time allowed.

I'm not a fan of tagging, yet, though, and didn't really like Technorati or del.icio.us (I especially disliked typing that word!). Sometimes I found it frustrating that a "thing" would have so many activities to complete. I took to calling this 23 to the exponent things. Some of it seemed a bit dated, too. The web's always morphing, transforming, and an exercise designed to experience that should be more fluid, too.

I can't believe I'm done!! And within the 9 week period!

#22, Online books

Online audio was more of a new phenomena a year or so ago when I went through LATI. Downloading and "reading" one was one of the LATI assignments. We also spent some time discussing e-books in my grad. class.

I have downloaded both e-books and audio, though I don't do either often. What I particularly find the e-library useful for is when I am working at home on a children's program, and I want to review a book I don't have. If it's at Overdrive, I don't have to wait till I get back to the library.

I went to Project Gutenberg tonight, and that's an interesting site to explore. I actually skipped past the audio and looked at some illustrations from Alice in Wonderland.

These uses of the web are not as sexy as MySpace or YouTube, but I think they are infinitely more valuable.

#21, Podcasts

I think podcasts could be dangerous for me because I could find exploring them eating up a lot of time I don't have. I found LibVibe, a library news podcast, to be very interesting, and that is the one I put on bloglines. I liked hearing about an Iraq library and was amused by residents in one library district who didn't like the weeding going on in their libraries, so they checked out hundreds of books. The library is expecting $300,000 in new materials, and has to make room, to the residents chagrin. And ask me what bibliomula is!

#20, YouTube

This was a YouTube video that showed up on a lot of the grad. school listserves. It's amusing, especially with the music, but as many library students point out, once you know what you are doing, searching isn't that convoluted. The title of the video is "Finding Time in the Penn State Libraries" (Time magazine, that is).

It's interesting to note that YouTube used to have a rep. as the place to see clips of shows or cheesy stuff, but it seems to be morphing into a "how to" site. I definitely see more use for this site than Technorati.

#19, web 2.0 award winners

Scrolling through all of winners, sometimes clicking on them, I felt some of these web 2.0 features are for those with no home or work life, just a sit in front of the Internet life. But some of them are indeed useful. One that looked particularly interesting, from a market the library perspective, is www.conduit.com, where you can make a toolbar for your customers (patrons) to add to their browser. Wouldn't it be cool if CCPL's website were just a click away on everyone's browsers?