no really

no no, thank you

what i really think

it really does seem like the 27things went by fast. some were fun, good ideas, others not so much.
as far as helping me reach my lifelong learning goals, i guess it helped me learn some new things, although they were not necessarily things at the top of my list. (like learning how to write a haiku.) but it did inspire me to focus on learning new things.
my favorites were the flickr mash-ups, and the silly animation ones. anything silly and useless is what i like best, i suppose. i was surprised by some of the choices, like rss feeds, as well as by how many different tools there are out there that you have to have a login and password for.
i didn't really need help with anything, but we did have several discussions about learning 2.0 where we talked about different ways of blogging that we'd tried. so there was some collaboration. i would definitely like to see any new technologies that come up that would be related to what we do at the library. i think this was a little bit too broad at times, and then too specific at others. if we had just one specific thing we were looking at, that had just been released or we had just begun to use, that might be more useful.
and i would definitely do it again. whatever frustrations i had were not insurmountable, and were not even close to what some people had. i enjoyed it, and i would tell myself that participating was worth it. (especially once i get that mp3 player.)

you tube

here is the promised youtube post.
i like youtube, and i suppose it could be useful for libraries. videos of events are fun, and storytimes, etc. would we really need youtube in order to broadcast those sorts of videos though? is there someway we could upload them ourselves? i honestly don't know, but i think that might be better. or do both, maybe, so that people can find library videos if they do a search on youtube.
on my personal blog i don't really have a way to embed videos, so i'm excited to try it with blogger. and this video has absolutely nothing to do with the library or even learning 2.0. i just wanted to post it because i found it amusing. so enjoy. wait a second . . . i have to log in on youtube to get the html to post it?? but i don't want to create another login!! and you can't make me!!!

podcasts

i know i skipped one, but i'll get back to check out youtube later.
podcast.net was a cool search engine. i looked for library in the keywords search and came up with some interesting things. some were specifically about technical library stuff for library staff. some were book reviews. one was a teen book review podcast, which sounds like a totally cool idea. and there were even podcasts of audiobooks. i didn't actually look at the site itself, so i'm not sure if they're free. but it seems like a good idea.
libraries could use podcasts for all of these things, but i think it would be fun to have updates of events and that sort of thing as well. an audio event calender maybe. and kids and teens doing their own book reviews. those would be fun podcasts to listen to.

web 2.0 awards

i was a little disappointed with the first thing that i searched for on the awards. they didn't have enough book sites to give awards out? how is that possible? well, anyways, i still like librarything best out of the ones they had listed. and i liked the fact that digg won at least second place for newssites, although i don't remember if /. was listed. it's funny how sometimes when you know about something and like it, you don't want to check out new things. i know about those sites and use them, so they're my favorite, and i'm irritated when i don't see them in these kind of listings. i'm sure the learning 2.0 team is suggesting many things that they are familiar with and like, because you think they're the best. it's just the way we are. but it's good to have someplace to go to find new stuff, if we ever want to.

google labs

this was a fun exercise. i love google, and i wasn't even aware of some of this stuff. google trends was cool, but i'm not really sure how useful it would be. google transit is a great idea; hopefully they'll get more cities involved in that, and maybe find a way to interconnect different services.
i don't even notice half the time if things are in beta or not. everything that's available to use usually works smoothly enough. the beta's that i enjoy are mmorpg betas that other people can't get in to. of course they're even buggier than some of the sites we've looked at, but that's the point.

online software

as a google user, i of course prefer the google documents. zoho uses the same format, it looks like. i didn't really look that much, i'll admit, because i didn't feel like creating another account for something. but google documents really is very easy to use. i use it to transfer stuff from my computer at home (on which i use open office software) to school or work computers (which use microsoft word). since the two are not compatible, google documents is a good transition for me. i've never used the collaborative features, but i can see how useful they would be. and i may be trying those out with my research partner this quarter!

greater victoria public library

this is not learning 2.0 related - well, it's not part of the activities that i am actually behind on. but it is library related. i spent the weekend in victoria, and while i was there, i checked out the greater victoria public library. here's a picture of the main branch in downtown victoria:


the main differences i noticed in the way they run things were related to their use of millenium. the first thing i noticed was that they use hand-written hold slips. i can't imagine how long that must take! i thought that maybe they used some other software, but then i actually saw millenium on their screens. my husband and i got temporary library cards to use the computer. for that they used a patron-on-the-fly application that i didn't even know existed. they gave us an actual library card (which we gave back) to use one time.
it's just interesting to see how different libraries address the same problems.

library 2.0

these articles were interesting, although it's true that some of it is just semantics. i think that kcls does a good job keeping up with our patrons needs, and i disagree with some of the authors who say that we should thin the collection, because people no longer need books as much. i agree that having books in digital and audio formats is extremely useful for many patrons, and should be available for as many books as possible. but i love books. i love libraries. i love reading books that many others have read before me, and then passing those books on to be used by the next person. and i know many people who feel the same way as i do. we need books in our collection, as well as a virtual collection.
i thought dr. wendy schultz's article was interesting, although it went in a few strange directions. is anybody really talking about library 3d? or library 4.0? these seem further in the future than we need to consider. if we're still arguing about library 2.0, who knows what the next form will look like?

personalized search engines

wow, rollyo is really lame. i saw the warning about ads, but still. i did a search for game programs, and not only did it not really come up with anything useful, but the first ad at the top was for the full sail school for video game programming. full sail is like the worst game programming school. i think you'd be better off just going in at the bottom level and working your way up then getting a degree from there. so anyways, rollyo did not impress me.
obviously i liked google a lot better. it actually came up with relevant results from the sites is was searching. i got four or five results that were directly related to game programs.
so, naturally, i used google to create my own search engine. i can see how this would be useful, but honestly, having to just come up with one off the top of my head wasn't very good. if i needed one for something, it would be different. but i don't, so i just made something up, which i probably won't go back to. but now i know that it exists if i ever do want to use such a thing.

fun and games

these image and text generators are fairly amusing. i did both the simpsons and south park characters, so now the challenge is in getting them posted correctly. the simpsons wasn't diverse enough for me. i couldn't deal with the way the female bodies looked so i went for a more male-looking, or androgynous one.

okay, so there's that. now let's try the south park one.

put those together (somehow) and i guess you get me! yay.

resistance is futile

phew! that exercise was more difficult than i thought it would be. i guess that's what i get for doing it without reading the directions thoroughly and carefully. but now it's done right. i missed the step involving choosing "link type", and that just threw me all off. and now i have successfully joined the collective.

wikis

i liked the examples of wikis that were shown in this post. i've used wikis before, and of course i use wikipedia all the time. i liked the idea of posting helpful suggestions on a wiki, for everyone to use. and the book suggestions wiki is a great idea.
i found wikis very helpful, when they were used for sign-ups for school presentations. we also used a wiki to sign up for teacher conferences. it was much easier than a paper sign-up sheet, and made it so we didn't have to be at school to sign up.
one thing about accuracy in wikis: i have an acquaintance who finds it amusing to alter wikipedia in incredibly obnoxious ways. i don't know how fast they usually change it back, but he's done it a couple of different times. i'm not sure if he changes his login information or what, but it's good to know that someone checks up on that sort of thing. his history of the fall of the roman empire was certainly not accurate.

library thing

good times. i love this site. of course i already have one, as i mentioned before, so i checked out the other two sites. shelfari sure is fancy. i think i'll stick with what i have, but it certainly looks flashier than library thing. i'm glad that you included how to link your books to your blog. i'm sure there are some people who are technical enough to figure that out. here's my link. like i said in my other post, i'm fairly far behind in updating it. maybe one day i'll get all my books on there.

technorati

i have never used technorati before, so this was fun to learn about. in the discovery exercise i actually found an awesome kcls learning 2.0 blog. awesome mainly because of its title : "i for one welcome our new librarian overlords". simpson's quotes are always my favorites. i found that one when i did the search for learning 2.0. strangely, the search for kcls27things was much less fruitful. it came up with only four blogs, and not all of them were even blogger blogs.
my personal blog apparantly does not come up at all, which makes sense, since only family and friends know about it, and it's not a blogger blog. so now i have to decide if i want to register it. i already get all kinds of comment spam. don't know if i really want to open myself up to more abuse. we'll see.

delicious . . .

del.icio.us is an interesting site. i used to use furl to do pretty much the same thing. furl adds a widget (or something) to your computer, and when you run across a site you like and want to save, you have a "furl it" button you can click. i don't think that i ever saw a "furl it" link on any article, the way you see links to del.icio.us. i am sure that as a social networking tool, del.icio.us is much more useful because of its seeming ubiquitous-ness these days. i haven't looked at my furl account in ages. i may set up an account with del.icio.us at some point, but since i don't use furl really anymore, i can't see that i would use it that often.
i am super excited for the library thing post. everyone should know about that. my brother-in-law bought me a lifetime account since i obviously have more than 200 books. it is in sad need of an update, but i'll get to that eventually. be sure to mention the widgets that let you link "books in my library" to your blog. i'm going to go set that up for this blog right now. that's one of the best parts about library thing. (now i won't have anything to say for the library thing post, but oh well. :p)

myspace

i think that myspace is entirely relevant to libraries, especially because it is so relevant to our patrons. i think it's a great idea for kcls to have a myspace account, as well as separate accounts created by the teen librarians for individual libraries. facebook is different. even though high schools (and other groups) have been getting in, i think it is mostly still a school related site. it makes sense for it to be different from myspace in some way or another, and if that limits who can make accounts, than that is better.
i actually like facebook better. these different social networking sites remind me of free email accounts; you have an account for a little while, and then you start getting a bunch of spam. so far, my facebook account has been relatively spam-free. so hopefully it will remain that way. myspace seems incredibly juvenile compared to facebook, and i think it's because facebook tried for so long to be selective about who could create accounts.
i did not create a new myspace account for this, just browsed some of the features on mine. i haven't looked at it in quite some time. so that was entertaining. :P

more rss fun

i added four more rss feeds to my bloglines today. i found that the actual bloglines search engine worked a lot better than the other ones suggested. the others that i looked at were just a little bit difficult, counterintuitive. the bloglines one is super straightforward and easy.
so now i actually subscribed to slashdot, librarian.net, unshelved, and one about climate change. so if i remember to check them, that will be good!

rss feeds etc

wow. i can definitely see that we have the potential to lose a lot of participants on this week's lesson. that was more steps than i was expecting to have to go through. i already use google to provide rss feeds for all of the sites that i am interested in, but i did find some new ones today. the shifted librarian looks particularly interesting, i'll have to remember to keep an eye on that one.
it will be difficult for me to remember to check bloglines to get these feeds. is there a way to link it to my google homepage? i'll have to figure that out.
rss feeds are interesting and useful. i feel like bloglines are a little bit unwieldy. it's a lot easier to set up a yahoo or google homepage, and then just get all your feeds there. google is the best.

mash-ups

wow! mash-ups are fun. i didn't realize that they were third party, so i was having a hard time figuring out how to get there from flickr's site. this one is cool. i'm going to explore some more.
well, i really wanted to include the actual picture, but i couldn't figure out how. so here's the link: 0006663 - Sprite on Flickr - Photo Sharing! i found it doing the color thing. that is a handy tool. flickr is so much fun.

flickr - week # 3

i'll admit, i kind of cheated on this one. i already have a flickr account, and i did not want to create a new one, so i just stuck with my old one. i had a cool (in my opinion) picture posted already, so i tagged that. it has the nancy pearl action figure, so i think it pertains to the library. :)
i'm curious to learn about mash-ups in the next lesson. that is something that i don't know much about.

learning 2.0

i have to admit that this is not my first blog. i am already well-versed in the art of blogging. but i wanted to do this for learning 2.0, because i am looking forward to seeing what we'll be doing with it. i am married to a programmer, so i am very familiar with many of the things that we are covering, but it will be interesting to see what we'll be learning. i honestly can't come up with 27 different things that i am involved with online, so i know i'll be learning some new stuff.
and who wouldn't want an mp3 player?