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.