Week 8 - Answer Boards & Social Searching

This was a really easy lesson, but interesting none-the-less.

I preffered the WikiAnswers to the Yahoo!7Answers - the layout and colours were more easy on the eye, for me, and I thought the content was of a much higher quality than the Yahoo one.

We should have some of those librarian sayings stuck around our libraries - they were great!

I think the rating thing is a good idea. Would go well on our Readers in the Mist reviews for people who have been inspired to read the books from the postings.

The question I answered in Yahoo!7Answers for the Adventure exercise was "What is your favourite food?". (answer was Jambalya, curries and hot salami).

I also posted a question - What is the English translation to the opera song - "Song to the moon". It'll be interesting to see if anyone posts an answer as it is something I have had great difficulty finding the answer to using web searching or the traditional reference tools we have available.

Week 7 - The Yummy bit, the Techno bit and the Library Thingy

What a great lesson this one was! Up there as one of my favourite weeks so far - along with FlickR.

As a self confessed food-a-holic, I must say that I launched into the Delicious part salivating. What a disapointment to find out that Delicious in the Web 2.0 context has nothing whatsoever to do with food! Oh, well....

Despite this major flaw, it is none-the-less a very useful concept for resource sharing whatever the topic may be.

Had a quick look at Technorati and did the searches for bookmobiles - got 31 with both the standard and advanced search, and tried to do the nswpln2008 but was unsuccessful.

The Library Thing section was really interesting. I made a list of books I have enjoyed over the years - had to stop at 8 - could have kept on addind and adding. I've added a link to my list over on the left hand side of the blog.


Can't wait to launch into Week 8!

Week 6 - Videos online

Week 6 completed. I loved the lego clips!


I found some beautiful clips on Monet's garden in France. Am about to try putting a particularly beautiful one into this blog. Wish me luck. (if it doesn't work, check it out on U-tube for yourself. It is called "Monet's Gardens at Giverny with music, version II) .........


Nope, couldn't work out how to do it, sorry. It is worth looking at though if you are ever browsing through You-tube. Turn off the music though, I don't think it suits the clip.

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=9obJvg6F9pQ


Just going to try again. It's Saturday night and I am at home and have looked up a really useful article in Google which gives step by step instructions on how to do this, so here goes..... again....




Yes !!!!It worked!!!!!

Hope to visit this and many other beautiful gardens sometime in the future. In the meantime, there is always the video to watch - next best thing to being there.

Week 5 - Wikkis

What an interesting lesson this week!

I looked through everything as suggested and found out just how versitile Wikis can be.

I was really interested in the subject Wiki by the SJCPL. It was really good to find more than just a list of books under the topics - you are presented with an integrated page which can take you to the loan status of a particular book under the topic with just a click of the mouse. How great!

The Book Lover's Wiki was great also - a really good reader's advisory tool.

We have our library procedure manual on a Wiki now and it is really easy to navigate to find what you need to know.

I took the PB Wiki tour and also looked at the Wiki especially set up for this lesson, although I have to admit, I did not make a posting on it. I found the comments posted under the Technical Services section very interesting to read.

Bring on Week 6!

Week 4 - RSS feeds

Well, this lesson went alot more smoothly than the previous ones have.

I completed the prescribed excersises and have added blogs and RSS feeds to my blog. I used the Google Reader tool as this one seemed to be quite straight forward and I did not want to create yet another account and another set of passwords, etc. Not all the feeds in my Google Reader are in the Blog as I had a little bit of trouble with a few of them. On the Reader I put the ABC news, SBS news, our library manager's blog, our reader's assistance blog and the photo of the day one from the Power House Museum.

These feed things sure are handy if you are wanting to keep up with the latest news about anything and share with other people's knowledge and experiences.

What is lesson 5 going to teach us?

Week 3 completed - at last!

Well, I have created a FlickR account, put photos into it, tagged them and placed a couple of them on a map - all with the help our our resident Web 2.o expert. We took photos of significant buildings and monuments which are situated close to the library as well as some lovely photos of flowers.

Let's see if I can put a photo into this blog, then I can claim success at last with this lesson (only took me 2 very long weeks and many, many, many attempts at signing in to the various accounts).

Looks like it worked!.

These are photos my very helpful afore mentioned colleague taught me how to take on the library's digital camera (I can't claim credit for the photo of the Grevelia - my colleague took that one... but I downloaded (Uploaded??????) it. So, I learnt how to take digital photos as well in this lesson and how to crop them. What a learning curve. I could get quite adicted to this phototaking and FlickRing.

What's in store for lesson 4. I wonder?

Almost gave up, but..... I'm back!

Well, Week 3 of our Web 2.0 training started out promising - all about Flickr. I did all the background reading and played with looking up photos in Flickr. I found some beautiful photos of gardens and then looked up photos of bulbs ( got light bulbs as well - should have been a bit more specific in my search term) and tulips. Once again, I found some beautiful photos.



Then, it all went down hill very very quickly. It took over an hour to try to sign up for a Yahoo account in order to set up a Flickr account - failed at that, so no flickr account.



Next, when I tried to get in here to admit that I had failed to even master setting up a Yahoo account, I couldn't get into this blog - I tried every permutation of every password I have ever used for anything and still no success in logging in.



I quit.



Today, almost a week later, I have decided to try again. I am determined not to let all this technology beat me! - even though I am proud to confess to being technologically incompetant and somewhat of a sceptic about all this Web stuff.



With a little help from a very patient colleague, I now know which user name and password I should have been using.



So, here goes. Now, I can try the Yahoo and Flickr bit again.



Wish me luck.