Thing #23.....Finally!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

1. My favorite exercises involved the various sites that allowed you to play with images. I had a great time decorating my blog. I guess the best discovery I made was how to create a link using the link icon. I'd been ignorant about that little piece of chain and what function it performed until now.

2. How has this program affected my lifelong learning goals? I guess it's made me more aware of not only what's out there on the Internet, but given me a better sense of what might be coming along down the pike. Which is...just about anything! I think it's gotten my radar into a long-range scan mode now.

3. I guess the biggest take-away has to do with flickr and the generators. I discovered how easy it is to use flickr and image-related generators. I've opened my own flickr account and posted the pics from my recent trip to Rome. Unfortunately, unless I pay money, I am limited in the number of photos I can post per month. Ah, well. I'll just wait until September. And October.

4. As far as improving the program, I would ask the designers to do a little more demographic research before cobbling together another program like this. Customers vary from region to region. Where I work, basically none of the 23 Things will help me when dealing with folks who walk through the door. I would like to see a program that has been tailored to fit the population a given library system serves. The ways in which a population thinks, works, and lives influence how the Internet gets used. Based on that influence, I would like to see a program that outlines a population's web needs and suggests how we can, as librarians, meet those needs using the Internet tools that are out there.

5. I was not offered a choice. Participation was mandatory. If another program was "offered" I would participate if I thought the content was relevant to my job.

6. I don't know that I have any words to help promote the program. The time needed to complete the program took me away from other duties that were more pressing. Various "things" were frustrating to complete and left me with a sense of irritation rather than accomplishment.

Thing #22 Audiobooks

I actually like the Playaways more than the downloadable audio books. One, I still have dial-up at home so it would take FOREVER to download a book. Two, I don't own an iPod or some other similar piece of equipment to transfer a book to and make it portable. "Convenience" for me still applies to what is physically on-hand in the library.

Thing #21 PodBlasts!

I added to my Bloglines the RSS feed for Art of the Drink. A very important podcast series for those Friday nights after work when everybody and their brother has just spent the day rushing to the library for the all-important DVDs that will tide the kiddies and adults over until Monday. Art of the Drink has step by step recipes for common and not-so-common alcoholic beverages. I highly recommend it. I did find most of the directories for podcasts cumbersome and difficult to search, though. The ones I found most interesting I simply stumbled over.

#20 YouTube: The Swear Jar

I think YouTube is great, especially since so much that is on TV these days is drek. Lots of innovation going on here. And the videos that are funny...well, they can be downright hilarious, such as the one I've posted here. It's a nice way for amateur videographers to gain exposure. It has also been a way for a few of them to get noticed and offered jobs, as directors, writers, voice-over artists, etc. I think the library could use this avenue for advertising itself. It would be nice to have some animation on the library web page. Having a video blurb might be just the thing.

#19 Yelp

Looking over the Web 2.0 list I settled on Yelp, one of the sites that is a city guide. Very nice tool. Takes you to a lot of big cities and lists their finer points (good hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, etc.), and contains reviews from visitors who have been to the various sights listed. I went to Baltimore's Yelp to see if it mentioned one of my favorite places of all time, Louie's, a combination bookstore and restaurant. Sure enough, it was there. But it has closed! Yikes! Yelp! I had no idea! At any rate, Yelp has a lot going for it. Would be a useful site to direct new library customers to, ones who are just getting acquainted with our area. I would like to see Yelp expand and become an international Yelp for people like me who like to travel outside the country.

#18 Addendum

Using the "publish" feature of Zoho Writer doesn't work as smoothly as I would like. I had to go in and edit the post after the document was published to my blog (and still couldn't get it to look exactly as I'd originally typed it). It is nice that you can save your documents in a variety of formats, but you can do that as well with a downloadable program such as OpenOffice, another free alternative to Microsoft. I'm not sure I would ever have a need for an online word processor (or spreadsheet, or power point, or...etc.). Also, here is another instance of having to create yet another account, username, password.... I feel like I'm having to spread myself all over the Internet in a public way for Learning 2.0 and I don't appreciate that.

#18 Test Of Online Writing Program

This is a test of the emergency online writing program. It is only a test. Please stand by for the next sixty seconds while we conduct our test....

booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

ooooooooooooooooooo....

Thank you. This has been a test of the emergency online writing program. Had this been an actual emergency, more important stuff would have been written here.

#17 Playing With My Wiki

I don't understand why after all the wiki information they threw at us they didn't ask us to create our own wiki, not just add a page to sandbox. I went ahead and created a wiki anyway to just try things out and put the link to the page in the sandbox. It's also posted below.

Librarians On The Move

Wanna Wanna Wiki #16

Maybe it's just me, but the wikis I looked at seemed more like regular web pages or blogs. I didn't look at everything, but with the ones I explored I didn't see that you could alter or add information the way you can in Wikipedia. I thought the idea behind wikis was that you could do that. I thought the information provided on some of the library ones was kind of cool, such as the one where patrons could review books, but exactly how does that make them a wiki?

Thing #15

I think a lot of this technology will not be of much practical use in the library, considering most customers who want computer assistance need staff to do things such as help them print out store coupons.

#14 Technowhati?

People have way too much time on their hands.

#13 Tag You're It

I really didn't find much benefit to tagging as opposed to bookmarking.

Rolling Thing #12

I didn't find much use for Rollyo. Although I think it would make a good name for a cereal. My Rollyo search roll is at the bottom of the right column. Learn everything you want about the Curta Calculator, the most boring, manual calculating machine ever invented. I think the inventor is probably more interesting than the machine he came up with. Curt Herzstark designed it while he was a prisoner in Buchenwald concentration camp during World War II.

Thing #11

Library Thing was kind of interesting. Here's my book shelf link:

My Book Shelf

Although my book shelf is displayed to your right if you scroll down.

Thing # 10

The generators were fun. I really wanted to export my Simpson's avatar but couldn't find a way to do it. If anybody has a solution to that problem I'd appreciate hearing about it! I ended up using Flashpix Generator. They seem to imply you can only save what you create to a MySpace account but I had no problem exporting it to my blog. Cheers~!

Thing #9

Feedster seemed to be the easiest site to use. Topix didn't have any real "my town" news to display. Syndic8 was very busy looking. Technorati I didn't find very user friendly. I did have fun looking at the Meez link offered on the Merlin site. Created my own funky avatar for my profile.

#8 RSS

I don't have much use for RSS. I don't spend that much time on the computer. I'm a Big Mac kind of news consumer. I get my news on the run. Google News to go. With a side of fries. The exercise was interesting, though.

Here's my URL for extra credit:

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

Thing #7 - Flash Drives

Convenient but fragile, flash drives (thumb drives, etc.)promise much. Transportable, easy to install, can contain a lot of bytes. But buyer beware. I have had five flash drives turn to toast on me because I plugged them into USB ports that belonged to older computers. This has made me reluctant to keep anything of value on a flash drive without having backed the information up elsewhere. And now, when I want to use my drive on a foreign computer, I always hold my breath that my Corsair won't crash and burn yet once more.

My Trading Card

Flickr certainly has a lot to offer. However, I found the Flickr site very busy and not very user friendly. Also, the FAQ answers contained incomplete information. BTW, having to create accounts, link accounts, account accounts, etc. is getting old fast.

The Kiss

The Kiss, originally uploaded by creativity+.

My first Flickr post. Random picture selection. I hope it is not too erotic for the library.

7 1/2 Habits

I was not impressed with the 7 1/2 Habits as covered in Thing #2. Everything seemed fairly intuitive. The Learning Contract strikes me as yet another one of those ways to narrowly formalize something that everybody does naturally in their own way. It seems redundant. If you're working in a library you better already know how to set goals and achieve them. In fact, if you're older than 21 years of age you should know how to follow the steps you need in whatever endeavor you're pursuing.

Managed to Create My Blog

I guess I jumped over activity 1 and 2 and went straight to activity 3, but that's what comes from not reading all the instructions first. So far so good.