Week 12 - Wrap up, Social Networks and catch-up

Wow, what a journey this has been for this self confessed technophobe. Just imagine me now with a Blog, having used FlickR, Wikkis, etc etc, etc...... no-one would believe it of me, even if I showed them!.

When we first started doing this course for work, I must admit to some scepticism as to the relevance of all these teenagerish things we were going to learn about. Boy, have I had my eyes opened. This old fuddy duddy had great fun and now feels quite the hip and happening thing. I am going to miss doing these lessons.

Our library has a bit of catching up to do compared to some of the libraries we have learnt about, but we are heading in the right direction. The American and British libraries are certainly way ahead of us Aussies, but I am sure we can catch up. I really loved the Rotorua Library's Bebo profile we explored in this week's lesson was fantastic! What a great library service they appear have - benchmark for us to aspire to, I think.

Thankyou to the State Library for giving us access to such an great course, all without having the arduous journey down to the big, bad, smelly city. I now feel confident enough to actually add book reviews to our library blog and make comments on our staff blog.

It's been great!

This is techno Rose signing off.

Week 11 - Online Applications

Another interesting lesson. What will they think of next?

At first, as I sat reading the information and viewing the video lesson, I was thinking to myself, "So, how is this different? What's so great about this? Isn't this what a Wikki is supposed to do?....."

I stand corrected. My most humble appologies. Please forgive my ignorance. How could I have been such a sceptic? (I am down on my hands and knees while typing this, you know)

Although I don't think the document - a true masterpeice of creativity and ingenuity - I created for the excersice actually worked, I can see that Google Doc is a great way for people who can't get together to create documents, presentations etc. And, yes, I can now see that it is different from what a Wikki does.

Week 10 - Mashups

Great news! This week has nothing what-so-ever to do with potatoes! Believe me, for a potato hater, this discovery was a huge relief - here I was imagining we would have to download potato recipes from the web, or swap recipes and then try them out - PHEW!

It was such a fun week!!!!!!!!!! Of course, I did all the serious background reading etc, but I spent most of my time playing with FlickR Vision and the jigsaw puzzle mashup tool in Big huge labs.

FlickR Vision is absolutely amazing - you should check it out! Wow. Up come people's photos that they are posting on, or have recently posted on FlickR and they are put onto the world map at their posting location. It was really interesting, not only to see what photos people were putting on, but I found it really fun being whisked from place to place on the map - a great geography lesson.

The 3D view was even better!!!!!!!!. The world map became a globe which rotated as each photo was posted. Unbelievable what technology can do.

I played with Twitter Vision as well - sort of like the FlickR version, but the postings were people's written comments, not photos. Not quite as fun or interesting.

Then, I got to the Big Huge Labs excercise. I have to admit, I went straight to the jigsaw mashup tool and played and played and played. It was such fun. Probably a good thing my credit card was not handy at the time as I was very tempted to order the photos I made into puzzles. A bit too pricey though - $50.00 US dollars for a 252 peice puzzle - not good value as you can get a commercial 1000 peice puzzle for half the price in aussie dollars - would be a great unique gift idea though.

Couldn't quite get the puzzles to sit where I wanted, but who cares? It was great fun making them.

Hope the next lesson is as great as this one was! Looking forward to it.

Week 9 - Podcasts & Audio

Well, I have to admit confusion over this week's lesson. Yes, the idea of Podcasts seems to be a great way to keep up with things such as radio programmes, maybe even tv programs (? - didn't understand if this podcasting extends to tv). I was not so sure about the library podcasts from America telling about library news - might be a very limited adience for them if they keep their information so dry.

Was unable to access all of the recommended bits to listen to/play with - that might just be a work security issue - who knows.

An interesting week, but nothing that I got overly excited by as in some of the previous lessons.

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.

Lesson 2 in Web 2.0 training for work

Success!!!!


Yes, everyone out there in Blogland, I, the most technologically incompetent person I know, has made a Blog. I can't believe it. It only took all afternoon to create this simple one - that is after taking half an hour to set up a gmail account. Time to call it a day.

Not sure if this sort of stuff is really my niche, however, it will be intersting to see what else we learn as part of this work course in Web 2.0 that we are currently undertaking.