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?

ZOHO Experiment

 

Dear Blog,

 

With time and use, this could become a useful feature.  Actually, I may experiment with it more until I get my own desk and computer.  Right now, I just about get set up with my USB key when the traditional "owner" of the computer returns to the their desk.  At least with ZOHO I can just save online.

 

Some features need to be explored more.  For instance, I tried to change both the font and the size of the font, but couldn't, only one or the other.  But other features are similiar to MS Word.

 

Ah, well, one more down, a few more to 23.

#17, Sandbox

Registering,

Signing In,

Doing All The Tasks!

Oh What Fun It Is To Make

Another Online Account!

Registering,

Signing In,

Doing All The Tasks!

Oh What Fun It Is To Make

Another Online Account! Hey!

I really think Big Relative 23's idea of fun and mine are not alike! I thought, oh! A Sandbox! Big Relative 23 realizes we need a break, so we're going to go to a virtual sandbox. We'll make virtual sandcastles surrounded by virtual moats that fill and collapse as virtual waves caress the castle with crushing passion. Oh, what fun! But (picture SNL's John Belushi) Noooooooooooo! Another sign in, create an account, do this, do that, do this that this. See? Wasn't that fun?

What it was, was time-consuming. Again.

#16, Wikis

My oldest son put together a wiki when he was getting married. He was living in Prince George's County, his now wife was living in Towson, her family lives in York, PA, we were up here in Cecil, and most of the people invited to the wedding lived out of state. It was an easy way to keep the wedding planning on track and keep everyone informed.

His wiki was private, he had to approve membership for anyone who wanted to view it. I see this as a great use for wikis. Using them to coordinate conferences, like the ALA conference, or using them on inTRAnets, makes wikis helpful and beneficial.

Open wikis, though, like the behemoth Wikipedia, are problematic. Stephen Colbert has been banned from Wikipedia for showing his viewers how to contribute to its "truthiness". This link will take you to an op/ed story by someone who was the victim of deliberate - and damaging - false information posted on Wikipedia, for 132 days, while Wikipedia dodged responsibility and took its time correcting the entry.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-11-29-wikipedia-edit_x.htm

Another concern is writer bias skewing the information, possibly away from objective truth. More and more educational entities are not accepting wikipedia as a reference resource on research papers because of the fluidity and potential bias of the information.

I think wikis have great potential as private resources, but are problematic as open venues on the World Wide Web.

#15, Library 2.0

I'd seen that cool video early on, linking to it from the Harford County Public Library blogspot. That video merges technology with art in a kinda wistful way.

Again, web 2.0 was a frequent discussion topic in my grad class. I came away from the class readings and discussions with the same attitude expressed in Thing 15's reading.

Web 2.0/Library 2.0 is here, however briefly! Younger patrons take it for granted. If libraries are going to stay relevant to them, librarians have to be up to speed on the technology too - and prepared to keep keeping up as the technology morphs and changes and takes off in user driven directions.

It's important, though, to balance the technology with old fashioned customer service skills. Provide the technology more and more patrons are using, but also be ready to serve the patron who doesn't like/understand technology - as well as the patron who needs adaptive technology to access information. Rick Anderson writes in "Away from the Icebergs":

"We need to focus our efforts not on teaching research skills but on eliminating the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need, so they can spend as little time as possible wrestling with lousy search interfaces and as much time as possible actually reading and learning."

The key phrase is "eliminating the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need". Sometimes the barrier to be removed is inefficient technology, sometimes it's inaccessible technology, but sometimes it's too much technology. Balancing the old and the new is key to removing barriers.

#14, Technorati

I've tried to get past this "thing" several times. Each time I go to Technorati, expecting to explore, discover, post. Each time I've been underwhelmed. This time, I told myself, "well, just post that you don't like Technorati."

I don't like Technorati.

I think the concept has merit, but, again, not everyone experimenting with web 2.0 is looking to harness the power of the web to learn. Lots of people are just playing or griping or exploiting or summarizing a ho-hum day. Technorati seems to feature these groups' blogs.

I suspect if I could set aside my dislike of Technorati's surface I might discover treasures lying beneath, but I just don't want to invest the time on a website that highlights trash and nothingness.

Relevent article

Saw this article on my customized Googlenews homepage. Couldn't be more relevent!

http://allafrica.com/stories/200708131728.html

#13, Tagging and Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us pages are too cluttered, too busy, for me to want to spend a lot of time using the features. It would be helpful to have favorites accessible everywhere, IF you bookmark lots of sites.

Tagging is a complex issue we discussed in my grad. course on Intro. to Computers and Info. Science.

For librarians, a plus to tagging is the lack of structure, of hierarchy, means unskilled users will be relying on librarians to sift through the ever increasing amount of "stuff" to find what the user really wants.


A strong negative is that unscrupulous people can use popular tags to increase traffic to their websites. People already do crazy things to manipulate website rankings on search engines or to attract unsuspecting users to porn sites.

One of my assignments for my class was to fine-tune search engine searches to get the results below 100 hits, then analyze the results. One of these 100 hits was actually a porn site that had also scanned an encyclopedia, so Google picked up the legitimate words, but they were deliberately tricking the user to a porn site.


So, tagging is a reality, sure, but not a happy, happy, joy, joy one. It's like this scene in the Indie film Me and You and Everyone We Know, where a single father congratulates himself for using the "it takes a village to raise a child" philosophy to get his sick older son home from school without having to leave work. A co-worker asks how the younger son will get home from school now without the older one to walk him home, and dad panics and tears off to the school to pick up the younger child. The co-worker says:


"Yeah, see, this is why you don't want a village raising your kid...because there's sketchy parts of the village... and some of the villagers are junkies and child molesters."


Tagging is presented here as a really neat feature, but not everyone doing the tagging is a well intentioned, research trained librarian....

Rollyo, #12

Rollyo has more potential for someone who regularly searches specific sites for a specific type of information than for someone who searches for different types of information or info for which retrieval may increase the broader the search. For this assignment I used Rollyo's "need inspiration" to create the sites to search, and searched for library grand openings. Here is the link:

http://www.rollyo.com/editroll.html?sid=306786

This link will take you to search results, including one for Berkeley Public Library's musical opening gala:

http://www.rollyo.com/search.html?prevsid=306786&q=library+grand+opening&sid=306786

That was then, web 2.0 is now.

Found this on one of my feeds on bloglines. Somehow it seems appropriate.


http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/08/dayintech_0807

Library Thing

This is the link to my Library Thing catalog: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Cjestme
This excites me with its potential. In LATI, Michael Gannon talked to us about Readers' Advisories and gave us notebooks to record what we read. Here, you can list what you read AND easily search, with tags you create yourself. As time allows, I'd like to build up a Library Thing library of titles to recommend to patrons, using tags that relate to typical queries. I think I'm gonna like this one!

Sometimes we get lost in the everyday, everyday, routine. Now and then, it's nice to pause and take in the effect the library has on the community and on literacy.

Thing 9

The link to my bloglines is in the previous post. Like others have posted, this is time consuming, just setting up the feeds. Trying to keep up with the feeds is going to be even more time consuming!

I found the easiest, quickest way to subscribe to feeds was to copy the URL and paste it in the search browser at blogline, then choose from the drop-down menu "subscribe to URL."

I didn't like, though, that one URL could end up with a half dozen or more feeds, with no description to tell you which feed would be of more interest. Still, if this is the hardest part of 23 things, I didn't find it all that hard, so guess that's a good thing.

RSS feed link

This links to my RSS feeds:

http://www.bloglines.com/public/Cjestme

F.Y.I.

I went exploring today, checking out some of the other participants. Harford County has some great YouTube videos clearly illuminating Web 2.0, RSS and WIKIs.

Week 4

RSS, Merlin, etc.

As a kid back in the dark ages before computers were common, I thought it would be neat to have a ham radio and be able to hear broadcasts from around the world. Now, a couple clicks and I can get anything from anywhere, instantly updated.

I am dutifully waiting for MERLIN to approve my account, but meanwhile I have set up RSS feeds on the blogline. One of my feeds is the Daily Show. I love the Daily Show and the Colbert Report!

Week 3 Photos, etc.

Week 3 Photos and Images:

Part of me likes playing with this photo technology and part of me wonders if maybe there are more important things to do. I'm reminded of a cartoon I had posted near my home computer for years. It was of kids excitedly drawing a snowman scene on their computer...while snow fell on a snowy landscape outside.

This photo technology is amazing - in a mere matter of minutes, I took photos from a disk we bought from Atlantis Submarine Tours in Hawaii, downloaded them to my computer, uploaded them to Flickr, found a link from Flickr to a photo activity page, created the activity, downloaded it to my computer and uploaded it to this blog. It's fun, and the results are great. But instead of interacting with a computer program, maybe it would be healthier to interact in the real, physical world by going for a walk and taking note of Nature's world.

BTW, the Atlantis Submarine Tour takes you 100' below the Pacific, to a coral reef. It was one of many highlights from the trip, and instead of just selling you your photo, they sell you a CD loaded with fun stuff, including a lots of photos. (Sneaks is hiding in my bag. He got to ride in the sub, but seating was too tight to take his picture.)

My avatar

What can I say, not a very exotic avatar! My husband and I love to travel and and enjoy seeing the country (USA and Canada) via camping. We have "touched wheel" in 41 states and many Canadian provinces. P.S., I like how thin the avatar is!

Weeks 1-3 Intro, Blogging, Flickr

Hi!

How is everyone progressing with 23 Things?

Of course Week 1's highlight was Thing 2 (reminds me of Dr. Seuss' Thing 1 and Thing 2!), the 7 1/2 habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners.

Probably the easiest habit for me is the second one: Accept Responsibility for Your Own Learning. I've always enjoyed learning new things, and luckily married someone who also enjoys learning. When our kids were in school, we praised their grades, but emphasized understanding the concepts they were learning rather than just completing the assignments for a grade.

Habit 1 is probably the challenging one, only not so much keeping the end in mind as breaking that ending image into goals. For instance, if I'm organizing a storage space, I'm motivated throughout the project by a very mindful image of the end result. I can "see" how to make best use of the space, how the space will function once organized, and how to proceed. I encounter obstacles when it comes to setting incremental goals toward the end.

The same challenge applies to learning. I can, for example, "see" the end of the 23 Things project. I know that this project will enhance existing skills while creating new ones. I'm eager to learn all that is offered, and I can easily determine obstacles and how to overcome them, toolbox needs, etc. Setting a goal, however, for the Learning Contract, is a bit harder. I'll probably decide to go for a broader goal rather than a specific one.

The result of Week 2 Thing 3 is what you are reading. I think it is easier to set up the blog than to write in it regularly, but I will try. Week 2 Thing 4 has been done, though on a Friday night so I won't know for a few days if the registration went through. I've also downloaded the 23 Things Tracking Log to my memory stick so I can carry it to/from work and home, ELK/POR, and whatever computer is available in Childrens. I think the instructions for filling in the Tracking Log are as clear as mud. This seems odd; directions you have to read through a few times to make sense of them is a deterrent for a project designed to encourage us to explore new technology.

More fun was flirting with Week 3's activities. Flickr features amazing photographs! I only just started exploring the site, and I look forward to completing the week's activities.

Take care, and have fun!

Week 3, playing with Flickr/if you see a typo

Hi,

This isn't my cat, it is an image from Flicr, but it is what my cat likes to do. I thought I should tell you that ASAP in the event there are typos in any of my posts, or, worse, really strange posts. Incomplete posts, or those with lots of letters, dashes, dots, etc., are most likely the result of my cat.

My cat's name is Princess, a most appropriate name. She is the last survivor of a trio of cats adopted as kittens from the SPCA years ago, when my 3 kids were small. The other two, who were so close in color markings that they were probably siblings, died within months of each other. Princess enjoyed more than a decade of cuddling up with one or two other cats, and after their passing, she adopted me as their replacement.

As soon as I get home, she is next to me, hovering until I am ready to go to my room, an oversized MBR that includes my study area. She'll sleep on my desk - if I am lucky! When she wants attention, she'll walk across the keyboard and plop down on the mouse. Sometimes I have to shut her out of the room so I can finish a project. Sometimes, she is successful at so interfering with whatever I am typing that I have to start over or, to her delight, quit. So, if any of these posts seem strange, blame Princess!

Ode to a Blog

Week number one
Is almost done.
Now I'm in a fog
About this new blog.

I know what is this thing called blog,
I've not been sleeping like a log.
Just, what can I construe
Of interest to you?

I wish I may,
I wish I might,
Think of some way
Clever to write!

Or, maybe, type,
Something without hype.
Refreshing, witty, pensive too,
That's how I wish I blogged for you!

Ah well, the blog will proceed,
With 23 Things as the seed.
Words will come, whatever they be,
As we journey together, you and me.