#23 Is this really the end? Or just the beginning...

Well, true to form here I am at the last moment finishing off. I just had to dig around at home for the last 30 minutes trying to find my learning contract amongst the assorted paraphernalia that has landed on our dining table during my displacement...it revealed that my goal was "to become proficient in using the new technologies offered by the Learning 2.0 program", and the obstacles I anticipated were time (well, no surprise there!) and relocating to another branch. One that I hadn't anticipated was my 3 going on 4 year old becoming overly excited by YouTube and every time he heard a noise coming out of the speakers would fly into the room demanding to see a Thomas video! Obstacles aside here I am about to complete my "things" merely an hour until it is officially Monday!

For the most part I have really enjoyed this program, and more often than not spent much more time than I should have completing the "things" & now I know more about many of these things than my IT qualified sibling - to be fair he no longer works in the field, but go me anyway! It was great to have a little tour through all these new and exciting applications and having the best parts pointed out. Almost every one had potential for personal use and often I had to remind myself to think about how they could be used in a library environment.

My stand out favourites were LibraryThing which I will definitely be returning to later to finish cataloguing my bookshelf, Image Generators, because they were so much fun and Flickr, who can believe what some people take photos of? I really warmed up to Del.icio.us and have found myself selling the benefits of this site to my Dad. Actually, the only "thing" I never really warmed to was Rollyo - this just didn't do it for me! The one that wins hands down as far as being useful in our library service right now would have to be Zoho and I would never have known of its existence had it not been for this program.

Like I said earlier mostly I enjoyed using these sites and applications for personal reasons, but what better way to learn and then be able to pass on your knowledge and experience to others? I appreciate the opportunity to participate in this program and look forward to seeing how our library becomes part of the Library 2.0 revolution.

Thanks to GRLC, the State Library and also to Lynette & Leslie for plowing through all of our blogs! Is this the end?? No way! Lifelong learning baby! Look out!

Would you believe I just discovered how to change the colour on my posts? Good timing!

More of something scary...

#22 Audiobooks (or "The end is in sight")

I must admit that personally I have never been the biggest fan of audiobooks, listening to them when we had to check for reported faults always made me nod off a bit. Once upon a time I did borrow one to try in my car but that was no good either! Personal opinion aside I can definitely see their place in the library service and for the more tech savvy patrons eAudiobooks would be a saviour. I particularly like the thought of them being automatically returned to the collection when finished and I am sure the library being "open" 24 hours a day, 365 days a year would be appealing to many.

I had a listen to Rumplestiltskin which was quite nice to listen to as the reader characterized the voices and told the story well.

I feel sleeeeeeeeeeeepy!

#21 Take 2 - still with the Podcasts.

I had another bash at this when I got home today and I still can't manage to hear anything from the Childrens Book Radio podcasts, so I had a look on Yahoo Podcasts Directory and found another childrens book related podcast Just one more book and had a listen. I have subscribed to both in my Bloglines account.

#21 Podcasts, Smodcasts!

As with many of the other "things" along this journey it takes a lot of time to actually find something that warrants being added to my blog to share with others. In this case I apprceiated the everyman's english used by Rob@podCast411 in his explanation of podcasts. I particularly liked his definition of "Flashing 12s", I think we all know someone like this.

I had a look at a couple of the podcast directories and found a podcast for Childrens Book Radio which sounds good but alas I couldn't listen to it on the pc I am using so I will try again at home, and besides, bloglines remembers me there! (yes, the issue of multiple accounts & passwords has caught up with me too!)

#20 You too can YouTube.

How to lose a whole lot of time?? Browse YouTube trying to find a clever clip that you haven't seen on anyone else's blog. This one cracked me up! How could I resist a song including lyrics like "librarians are often sexy"?



I was already familiar with YouTube, but hadn't used it for much other than occasionally receiving or emailing funny clips. There is so much to choose from and look at which is one of the problems with this site, so much to wade through to find something worthwhile. It could be used in library website in the context of instructional videos, I would hesitate recommending it to patrons unless I knew exactly where to find something, again due to the volume of material available.

#19 Discovering Web 2.0 tools.

It's hardly surprising that their would be awards for all these new Web 2.0 technologies, the sheer amount of them is incredible. I have spent quite a lot of time looking at various nominated sites but could not choose one that I liked more than the ones we have already looked at through the course of this program, or ones I was already familiar with. Question & Answer sites would probably be useful in the library environment but I still think that Zoho has the most potential in our library service given the number of times we are asked for word processing.

You really have to applaud all these people who come up with these things to make life more fun, interesting, easier, exciting & more organised for the rest of us.

Posting to blog from Zoho

Christmas is coming,

Santa Claus is coming,

The countdown is underway!

28 days to go...

 

#18 Web-based apps : They're not just for desktops.

Like many before me I was prepared to looooove Zoho, but I had a few teething problems. Firstly I the confirmation email disappeared into Internet yonder yonder land & then twice it signed me into someone else's accounts. Once I resent the confirmation email and went through that process it was all smooth sailing. I really liked the user friendly toolbar, no more crusing from menu to menu trying to find something!

Obviously knowing about this application will be a boon for our patrons who have been knocked back for word processing facilities in our library since time began. The ability to have your documents saved online and access them somewhere else entirely is great - no more emailing all over the place to be able to work on something from another pc.

I'm sure Zoho has many more joys to discover, but alas time is short and I will have to leave it at that & investigate more later. Knowledge is power as they say!

#17 Playing around with PBWiki.

I must admit I wonder how all these funny little names for these new gadgets come about...sandbox, wiki etc. I was amazed at how easy this "thing" was. Very impressed by the use of normal formatting instead of having to know html. The tour link didn't work but I did watch all the videos to try and get a good grasp of exactly how this all worked. Added my blog to the favourites page - aren't there a lot of people who have been through this experience! At the suggestion of one of my colleagues I added a new page for Favourite wines and put on my current favourite. My only issue is that it does tend to get quite messy. When I had a look at the Favourite Books page it seemed to have very little order and I found it frustrating to look through. After all, I think every library worker does enjoy a sense of order!!

Time for another picture...

Finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow...

#16 So what's in a wiki?

Having heard about wikis before but not really knowing anything about them I found the reading for this "thing" very interesting. I liked Library Success : a best practices wiki and thought their philosophy of using other people's success so that noone needed to "reinivent the wheel" very appealing.

Being known as being a little bit anal I had to have a laugh when looking through "Wikis : a beginner's look" and at the bottom of one page is a little line, "if control is really important to you, then a wiki probably isn't the right tool". I love the idea of patrons being able to add reviews on the OPAC but wonder at how this would be controlled, moderators would obviously be required and how can we use this tool without opening the whole catalogue up to the world? I did notice that many of the wikis used as examples now require you to sign in, some stating vandalism etc is the reason behind this. It is such a pity that there is always a downside to such a great tool.

Creating a community hub that extends to information on restuarants etc is a really cool idea, especially as many people expect that we already know everything about everything, and with the help of the community using a tool like this we will!

#15 On Library 2.0 & Web 2.0

As a person who has generally embraced technology and run with it I really like the idea of libraries becoming more user-centric and collaborative as a way of encouraging user participation and engaging the younger "millenial" generation. Witnessing the difficulties in training patrons to use our new technology over the past 20 or so years that we have been automated has shown it to be a frustrating exercise, and it will continue to be with many of our older patrons. However, having the ability to use technology that already exists and is accessible for many people, including young and upcoming library users will help us keep in touch with them and give ourselves credibility in their eyes.

The statistics used in Rick Anderson's article "Away from the Icebergs" were really frightening - a 55% drop in circulation stats really is unfathonable. Coming from a library that has been underfunded as long as I can remember the thought of a drop in circulation like this makes me wonder about the implication of this new technology on our funding. How would we be able to prove people were still using the library service without the turnover statistics that form the basis of much of our funding? We have already seen a move away from print materials where our reference queries are concerned, with it often being easier and more up to date to source information from online databases. As Rick Andersons pointed out printed material is often "difficult, exensive and slow to distribute", much of it is out of date before t even hits the shelves.

All that said I do believe that their will always be a place in the world for a traditional library service - their is nothing really as nice as curling up with a good book! I like Dr Wendy Schultz's way of looking at things when she says that new library technology will not replace the old library but merely absorb it.

#14 Getting not-so-technical with Technorati

Amazing! So many new blogs in so little time. It is mind boggling to think of all those people adding posts to their blogs every time a new one popped up. I managed to successfully claim my blog, so now the little Technorati spiders will be crawling all over me. Luckiy they aren't the kind of spiders you need to be afraid of, or are they? I tried the manual ping thing and tried to change my settings to allow for automatic pinging but I think that was the default setting in any case. It's pretty cool & doubles up on some of the features offered by some of these other new technologies, but I can see myself keeping my eye on this one.

Must be time for a picture...

Two weeks ago I was waking up to this...if only I was waking up to it tomorrow! Goodnight!

#13 Part 2

Okay, okay, so I am a little bit anal and need a good description for my brain to get into gear sometimes, and maybe I was breaking my resolution! I have revisited del.icio.us and had a read through their "about" & "get started" sections which provided me with the information I needed to understand this concept better...and what do you know...I like it! Password annoyance forgiven as I have just been adding my favorite sites and tagging away and having a curious little look at what like-minded individuals have in their bookmarks.

The fact that you can now access your bookmarks from any pc is of great value as there is always something I have seen at home and can't remember when I am at work - like The World Clock and sometimes I even forget which folder it is in, so being able to create a tag for this and locating it this way makes it much easier.

For assistance with research I think this tool has great potential, and the various ways you can use it are a great example - for instance adding notes when you are creating a tag etc.

I still think the site is rather ugly, but hey, you can't have everything - right?

#13 Tagging, folksonomies & social bookmarking in Del.icio.us

At first the point of this social bookmarking manager escaped me, and I must admit having a name like Del.icio.us I expected that it was going to be lovely to look at - but I really think it is rather UGLY. I had a little look around using the PLCMCL2 account and thought I may as well sign up myself and see the site in it's full context. Well, talk about needing to be up for the challenge...for some reason it thought my username and what I wanted to use as my password were too similar! Can you see the similarities between bespectacledblonde and thunder1?? Me either, and don't worry, I eventually was accepted with a totally different and loooooooooooong password. Hopefully future adventures on this site won't be such a challenge. Let's wait and see.

#12 Roll your own search engine with Rollyo

I must admit I wasn't all that impressed with this "thing". One, because I was at work and at a loss when trying to think of my favorite sites and two, I am a bit of a google girl. I did add the search thingamywhatsit to my blog and will have another look somewhere down the track and see if I can discover any redeeming features. There must be some people out there somewhere that benefit from this though!

#11 All about LibraryThing

Hmmm, I thought I would have a "quick" look at this site and come back to it later! No hope of that - I am completely addicted and found myself lugging armfuls of books upstairs to my study so that I could add them to my catalogue. I found it particularly cool that adding an ISBN automatically generated a cover, and that so much could be achieved without much effort at all.

I also really like the random books from my library "widget" - check it out on the sidebar!

#10 Play around with image generators.

Well, this has been a lot of fun! I have played with many image generators but have found the site that is my absolute standout favourite! Imagechef has loads to choose from - there are animated images and so much more. I particularly liked this beach one, and used the birthday cake one to send to my brother! (You can change the numbers and message on the cake - love it!) This site was a standout to me because it allows you to post directly (and very easily) to your blog, or email the image to someone if you join first. Very user friendly and fun.

And now for something scary...

#9 Finding feeds

Lots of not much...I have spent a lot of time looking around the sites for RSS feeds and found heaps of stuff, but because I wasn't searching for anything in particular found myself trawling through loads of sites and blogs. Every now and again I would get sidetracked and quite often found myself landing on other participants blogs. I am starting to enjoy checking bloglines, and understand its value when I can see at one glance what is new. Look out, I am watching some of you!! I also signed up with Library Elf to see what all the fuss was about, and find it amazing, and a little bit scary that it can access the library's database and tell me what's what with my membership. That's all for now...looking forward to playing with the devices in the next thing, they look like fun!

A little in-between-the-things-fun!

This is me - not a surprise for anyone who knows me really!!

You Are Totally Anal Retentive

Yup, you're so uptight - people definitely have called you "anal."You're the type of person who's so OCD you organize your M&Ms before eating them.You have so many rules and rituals, it's hard for you to let loose and enjoy life.So go ahead and mix up your alphabetized CD collection. Live a little!

Give it a try, you know you want to -

http://www.blogthings.com/areyouanalretentivequiz/

#8 Part 2

Well, I'm very glad that finally worked and is supposed to be the most difficult "thing" because I nearly tore all my hair out during the many times I had to edit that post until it worked.

#8 Make life "really simple" with RSS & a newsreader

Well, I don't know about really simple, it has taken me a bit of toggling between sites to get some of this sorted out. The signing up and subscribing part was easy, but when it came to sharing I still don't know if I have it figured out. So, fingers crossed you should be able to find my public RSS feeds here -
http://www.bloglines.com/public/bespectacledblonde

#7 Technology

I have given a lot of thought to this post about technology as I was going to write about my favourite new technology, but I can’t decide! The Internet has certainly made a huge impact on my personal and work life - the convenience of online banking and paying bills, messenger and the newly discovered photo sharing sites, not to mention email have changed my life forever. If I think about it too much my brain hurts! But, what about my mobile phone? I can still remember when my Dad gave me my first phone after my car had broken down after work one day, and I’ve never looked back. That thing was almost the size of a house brick and just as heavy, even this technology has come along in leaps and bounds since then and I am rather partial to my shiny little flip phone these days. But alas…I am a bit of a photo buff and the development of digital photography has saved many a heartache. Gone are the days of being disappointed when picking up newly developed photos when the opportunity has long since gone to re shoot. One look at the back of the camera and you can see straight away if the photo is dodgy and have another go, or ten! Oh, and I do love my new plasma hdtv! See what I mean? Too much to choose from!

#6 More Flickr Fun

Geelong West Library Mural, originally uploaded by bespectacled blonde.

Well, I must say that using FD Toys was getting highly addictive, and rather amusing. My blogging was restricted by my reluctance to put faces in at this stage, although I am sure that I might relax a little bit as so many of those "toys" are a lot of fun! I have decided to use the advice in one of the tutorials when uploading photos, that is making photos with faces private, for family and friends only. I liked the framing tool but found the choice limited. I did also have a play with mappr and have placed one of my Flickr photos on a map. Playing and learning, I like it!

#5 Discover Flickr

Junior library, originally uploaded by bespectacled blonde.

Wow, I have had a wonderful time exploring Flickr. I created my own account, added photos, looked at other people's photos & sent photos to Flickr from my mobile. I decided to add my own photo to my blog - this is the entrance to the Junior Library at Geelong West library, and as the branch is closing on Saturday for redevelopment this mural hasn't got long to live. Sometimes you need to take a step back from what you work with to appreciate its beauty. (YES, I know it is peeling!!) Now it has immortality in the world of Flickr!

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Oh dear

I've been playing & now I have little spanners all over the place - anyone have any ideas??

Success

Wow - hooray- I guess this is what learning is all about.