Week 12: Wrap up; social networks and catch up

Helpful, informative, amusing and somtimes down right boring. I have taken sooooo long to do this thing because i got fed up after 3 weeks. But i have persisted and now it is finished. I hope people enjoyed it, i both liked, loved and hated it. In regards to social networking i use it all the time to keep in touch with friends and loved ones. I share pictures, thoughts and silly moments. At first i thought Facbook was pointless but over time i have come around. Anyway have fun.

P.S. I absolutely hate blogger.

Week 11: Online applications and tools

A good way to have access to free applications without having to spend a fortune. Its also a wonderful way to share your work with colleagues and friends.

Week 10: Mashups

Mashups are cute. Good for advertising the library and great for adding extra info. I loved Star Viewer by Keir Clarke and how it linked to a youtube video. Google maps is also a great thing. Not only does it give useful map info, its also a good talking point. I've also added a mash up of my son, Finn.

Week 9: Podcasts and Audio

Podcasting is a great way to catch up on your favourite books, movies or just to listen to the ABC drive show that you missed. I use it with my itunes and when i open up the app it downloads all the sessions that i've missed. Excellent. I even travel with it. I spent three days on a train last year with nothing to do but to listen to my ipod and my podcasts. It is also a great way to get info out about yourself that people can take with them. We are thinking of podcasting our childrens storytime on our website sometime next year and with in that podcaste will be info about other services that our library provides for children and youth. Cool

Week 8: Answer boards and social searching

Very cool way to find out info for hard to find things. I've used answer boards in the past for info from computer questions to random science questions. There are so interesting people out there that come in very handy. It will be interesting to see what people answer to my question.

Week 7: Tagging, folksonomies, del.icio.us and LibraryThing

Interesting networking device for teams and for finding links for like minded people.. folksonomies is an interesting name for tagging. I didn't like the del.icio.us website... too busy. I must say i hate the cloud option, it looks messy and totally random. It uses less room than the list option but really....

Video

It's a bit weak, the application to link video to blogger, not happy with the lack of control. Videos from Youtube very entertaining.

Wiki

Just added an entry to the library 2.0 wiki. Interesting. Lots of people who love their jobs, just a little too sweet for me. All that "i love my job" stuff. Don't get me wrong i love my job as well :) but i found it too over whelming.

Other blogs

I've just had a look around at the other blogs that are on show....... wow. It seems everyone is having a fun, if confusing at times, time. It's interesting to see the different pictures that people have put on their blogs, from pictures of cats, bikes or panoramic mind blowing scenery.

It seems we're all starting to experiment more now with our blogs too.

RSS feeds

Well this was interesting.

I'm up to week 4 of learning 2.0 . This weeks activity was about RSS feeds. It was explained as a way for you to receive info from your favourite blogs without all the searching, there was a nice YouTube video.

Then we were to go and sign up for Bloglines and subscribe to various RSS feeds. Once you sign on you get a confirmation email and once you confirm Bloglines gives you a list of other sites to which you can subscribe to. I ended up subscribing to 12, which included CNN, Dilbert, Wire, Rotten tomatoes and the shifted librarian, through this method.

I then subscribed to the Powerhouse museum - photo of the day site through the search option of Bloglines, the search isn't a keyword search so if you miss spell or have the phrase wrong you will not get any hits.

I joined the Gmail reader several months ago and the difference between the two are interesting. At this point i'm not sure as to which i prefer.

Law Library (Winter) by dgermony

Just walking around flickr and spotted this photo by dgermony . I thought the different textures of the photo were pretty. The warm glow of the law library with the harsh white glare from the outside light and the reaching branches of the trees form a pleasing aspect. It give me a feeling of warmth and interest, wanting to know what is on the other side of the window while still wanting to walk in the snow and enjoy the trees.

Blogger

So...... the info that was provided to open your own account with blogger was easy and helpful, with pictures and warnings in bright red, the hardest thing was to be creative with title and url information. :)

The clips of Stephen Fry were good, just a bit frustrating, they appeared to come in bursts and didn't buffer any more video, other than a few seconds, so it was a bit jerky. It could have been our link, i wouldn't be surprised, but other staff tried these video clips at other times of the day with similar results.

I can see that doing this program will take longer than 15 minutes a day, with the added links to other wikis you could effectivly be sitting going from one link to another and before you know it hours have flown by. All interesting stuff.

First post

Ok this is my first post. It's for learning 2.0 run through the state library. I just spent time reading about the project and watching various video clips that were recommended to be watched, least ones that our IT department have allowed use to use. Yah


So far so good. We're running a week behind due to the vigilance of our IT department again, we don't receive any emails that have the word blog in it.


So what can i say so far. The idea is a very interesting one, i would assume that the volume of the written word is equally balanced by that of multimedia. Interesting links to Wikis and video clips. Plenty of feedback from other participants.


Strange thing that happened with the self assessment survey. It states that you should fill in the survey before you either read on or when you have finished but as soon as you fill in the survey it wants to shut your browser down, so you have to back track to continue on.