The 23rd thing!

I definitely have a sense of achievement at making it to the 23rd thing. And tackling the projects one at a time is less overwhelming. Great format, the discovery projects pointed in the right direction, but still let you do your own thing at your own pace. Thanks Robyn!

Discovering tags and their many uses: delicious bookmarks, flickr, LibraryThing etc was great. As a Library person, I love the idea of cross-referencing, and tags do it in a constantly evolving way: keeping up with current jargon and reflecting user needs and points of view.

I'll take with me the RSS feeds I've subscribed to, groups I've joined, and I am using delicious to make my own trail of crumbs through the Online Forest. My vantage point to the world of information is now that bit higher: I can see more!

Can't wait to do the next 23!

Online Communities

I joined the TAFE Qld Library group at Edna. I found it easy to join, and loaded my avatar from an earlier 23Things session as my photo. I suppose like most interactions of a social nature, it will take time to develop a network of online 'friends'. While I see that online communities are extremely popular for those with shared interests, for keeping up with people over long distances and time zones, and for professional networking, it is not a process that I find easy or will jump into enthusiastically. For me, there are many issues relating to personal privacy that I don't feel are adequately protected in online communication.

But I can certainly see the uses for an organisation like TAFE with institutes over the entire state, not to mention branches of the individual institute. A fresh way to network and share information with colleagues.

Podcasts

I really thought the application of podcasts to the educational environment was excellent. People have different learning styles, so audio may be a preferred option for some. Podcasts are also a useful application for people with a visual impairment, or with a lower literacy level. Plus, when learning a new language, isn't it better to HEAR someone pronounce words?

Check it out yourself:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/LearnFrenchWithDailyfrenchpod

Dailymotion

I looked at the Dailymotion Great Britain site. Lots of advertising, and content I would not choose to view: but what's the difference between Dailymotion and TV? Only another form of media.

Has a lot in common with other web2.0 sites: tagging, interactivity, cross-pollination from other sources (RSS feeds, blogs etc).

The user profiles I looked at were interesting: well presented, lots of room for self-expression.

I selected the following video:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1u563_thehours_creation

I enjoyed the book and the movie: The Hours. I liked the clips in this movie, especially the ones of Virginia Woolf, and the repetitive theme of the book cover.

Applying this format to the TAFE library: teachers could put up short movies of lectures or even practical demonstrations. How many students would prefer to SEE how to find a motor part / mix a sauce / connect electrical cable etc than to read how to do it?

Listdump

I had a look at Listdump, a community generated list site:
http://www.listdump.com/
I'll let Listdump describe itself for you:
Listdump is a community list generator based on the simple fact that everybody loves a good list. Create a list of the best how-to sites, or download sites ... Hey, you can even create a list of your personal life goals and let others help you prioritize them by voting. Anyone who's a registered member can contribute to a list, tag, comment or vote on a list. The top rated lists show up on the front page. There is also a page for new lists.
Create Lists
Create a list of the best how-to sites
Create a list of the top 10 best movies in 1987
Create a customized list
Add links to any item within any list
Put in your 2 cents and help tag a list
Keep track of your favorite lists

I liked the front page design: you can see what is most popular, most recent at a glance. There is also a tag cloud on this page, a useful browsing point. Each entry is also well-defined. You have an image (for aesthetics), title, and vital statistics. Listdump was easy to use.

What could a library do with this?
So much. Users can compile their own lists of resources. Others can rate these lists. An informal way of keeping track on what is being used, what is most popular, what information resources need developing.
The social aspects could also make it appealing to students: they could also rate other things on campus: the cafeteria, parking spaces etc.

Online word processing

What is the word about online word processing?

A useful tool. Has many nice features: little emotion buttons, can insert and edit images, use different fonts. You can also tag documents and add comments to them - great to help group items and also to find items. There are also some personal touches as well - can change the colour scheme etc.

Of course, there aren't as many types of font or format styles as a standard word processer. But I'm sure that these tools will continue to develop as their popularity increases.

Being able to share documents is great as well, saves all that e-mailing back and forth, and forgetting which version you've saved where.

However, it is still a brand new program and as such will take you a while to learn how to use it effectively. I suppose that because it looks like Word, we think that it will operate the same way. It doesn't. And that is because it is a different program. So you'll have to set aside some time to go through tutorials and learn how to do what you want.

The following is a document I created in Zoho word processor. I posted it directly to my blog. The only thing is, the document I created in Zoho did not fit my blog page, so I had to edit the post in Blogger. Something else to think about.

CHILD

STUDIES

Childcare / Children's Services Course Info. 3817 3020

Childcare Centre 3816 3296

Teachers:

/

Kylie Horrsfall / Angela Jones

/ /

Pam Joseph / Anne Taylor / Alison Underwood

Wiki-d!

Working my way through the 23 things, here come the wikis. Having already been a fan of Wikipedia for some time, this was a fairly easy task.

I looked at a few different wikis:
St. Joseph County Public Library system - I really liked their set-up. Lots of information, well organised and the main pages in each subject area were great. You had the list of articles, links to further resources, searching etc.... The pages are only able to be edited by staff, understandable, especially about things like class times etc. Could be more user involvement however: book reviews etc.
Book Lovers Wiki - summer reading program at Princeton Library. A small wiki, but one which serves its purpose, for a group of people involved in a summer reading program. These people were the only ones allowed to edit, but fair enough, it was for a specific event. Great test drive for bigger projects!
Library Success: a best practices wiki - Lots of interesting stuff for library people. Have addressed the vandalism problem by only allowing editing by users who create a login (must have e-mail address).

What could we do with wikis?
Why not a staff wiki: events coming up, things happening today, popular resources, how-to-fix that problem, circ. desk information sharing.
Even the staff intranet could go wiki: how many times have you noticed a staff phone number is no longer correct or contact details need updating?

Something to think about.

Library 2.0

Some great things in this series of articles on Library2.0.
http://www.oclc.org/nextspace/002/1.htm

I enjoyed Rick Anderson's article, 'Away from the icebergs'. These comments about user training were insightful: "We need to focus our efforts not on teaching research skills but on eliminating the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need, so they can spend as little time as possible wrestling with lousy search interfaces and as much time as possible actually reading and learning."

Recognizing how libraries can use technology to INCREASE user participation by 'finding new ways to bring our services to patrons rather than insisting that they come to us—whether physically or virtually. At a minimum, this means placing library services and content in the user’s preferred environment (i.e., the Web); even better, it means integrating our services into their daily patterns of work, study and play.'

However, my favourite article was by John J. Riemer, Head, UCLA Library Cataloging & Metadata Center: To better bibliographic services. Great practical suggestions. Using federated searching from your library catalogue makes your catalogue a one-stop-shop.

The comments on broadening relevance ranking open up so many possibilities of user choice: 'Relevance ranking techniques should be driven by much more than the mere prevalence of keywords in the bibliographic record and be fed by a wider range of metadata, such as circulation activity, placement of materials on class reserve lists, sales data, and clicks to download, print, and capture citations.'

There were other points I also enjoyed on the future of libraries: as an experience from Dr Wendy Schultz's article 'To a temporary place in time...' Cant wait to visit the neo-library 'knowledge spa'. With a flat white of course...

PLCMCL2 & Technorati

Had a cruise around Technorati. I searched “Learning 2.0” and "PLCMCL2"in Blog posts, in tags and in the Blog Directory. Are the results different? Yes.

Blog posts had the most number of hits. If you just wanted to browse, then this is the search tool for you. Of course, the more specific the term you use, the smaller the results will be. Nevertheless, using "PLCMCL2", I got thousands of hits.

The Blog Directory had a much more concentrated focus. These were blogs specifically about the search term used. A good starting point if you don't want a lot of random information.

Using Tags as the search term got the smallest hits of all. Just one page. I expect that this will increase as the popularity of tagging increases. So don't write it off yet.

Del.icio.us Tagging

Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow the yellow-brick road of tags!

I enjoyed looking at the PLCMCL2 account as well as the Bremer's Horticulture pages. An excellent way to look at research done by others = time-saving (that's always a good thing). Then you can also build on what you find to suit yourself.

You can see the application for teachers and students or even groups of students for sharing information. And by using an RSS feed to keep you up to date on the latest additions to del.icio.us pages you won't miss out. And the good part of this is the accessability. So you can continue your research anywhere, anytime!

Found an interesting quote from Library Techtonics (off the PLCMCL2 pages) http://www.librarytechtonics.info/archives/2005/10/tagging_on_flic.html:
So, social bookmarking and tagging:
Are nifty, patron-centric ways of getting at what patrons really mean.
Create an easy-share, already built infrastructure on which to create a collaborative information-sharing environment.
Create an excellent way for patrons (and librarians) to add *supplemental* metadata to content and collections.

Roll your own

Search engine, that is (not cigarette). I liked Rollyo quite a bit. You can create engines for various needs: study, hobbies etc; and you can edit them which is necessary due to the state of flux that is about the only constant of the internet. I created a cookery themed search engine. The software was easy to use, and I've done a couple of searches to make sure it works! This could be useful for students to check sites they frequently use/cite, especially government/public service/academic sites. Also useful for checking airline fares etc!

I created my search engine before I created an account. It is on the home page of the Rollyo site. It's called 'Cook with me!'. Just select 'Cook with me!' from the list and then enter your search terms. I've used ABC net, Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, Stephanie Alexander and some Italian sites. These are cookery sites I look at all the time.

http://www.rollyo.com/

Do a search!

Library Thing

What could be more fun for someone who works in a library than to have a catalogue of your own library? I actually did this when I was in primary school, catalogued and labelled all my books.

Library thing has some great interactive elements, I also liked viewing the book cover photos in my own catalogue. Check it out at: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/23things

Image Generators

Fun, fun, fun. That is what image generators are. Anyone can be an artist! I really liked the Generator Blog. Links to anything that you could want to do, and examples of image generators as well. I tried Doppel me, where you create an avatar, or web based picture version of you. This is fun, you can be a princess, or try and be realistic. You can also include your avatar as part of your signature for emails etc. Check it out at: http://www.doppelme.com/

I also liked the Cooltext graphics generator, this has a lot of free fonts and gifs. You can also create a logo - although the free trial is pretty basic. http://cooltext.com/

And just for fun - the Image mosaic generator. You upload an image and it changes it into an image mosaic, check out the examples to see what that means! http://imagemosaicgenerator.click42.com/

Over and out.

Finding Feeds

For this post, I think I'll just review the following sites:
Feedster: I didn't really like this one. I seemed to get too much random information with each search I did. You really have to plough through it to find something you actually want. Just too time-consuming I thought.
Topix: This one was easier to use for me, a bit more organised. I liked the structure of the site with different categories according to subject area eg: World News, Most Recent etc. It still manages to maintain the interactive feature so beloved of bloggers.
Syndic8: The home page is quite interesting with various categories on it: 10 random headlines, 5 newest site features & Fixes, Site statistics etc. The tool bar across the top is also well designed: Feeds, Podcasts, Tags, Documents, Categories etc. The Documents link had some useful items in it: various help-type topics. The whole site could do with a snappier design/graphics however.
Technorati: Again, a lot of random information came up with the searches I did. At least it has categories, however. The search results display was the best of the four: easy on the eye. The list of search terms and tags on the right hand side of the home page was useful - gives search ideas.

To me, a big issue with using these tools are search terms. Using a broad search term usually unearths daunting amounts of hits, and getting too specialised means a zero result. The interactive nature of these tools also means that search terms are quite subjective: everyone searches with different terms. This means you find some, and not others. It also means that you have to keep checking tags and keep up with the lingo.

Feed me!!!

Suffering from slight information overload, left eye twitching... However, it is great to see how libraries have harnessed syndication. There is so much out there aimed at the library community, and I have subscribed to a number of feeds.

I am loving tags!! Ever since I saw them used so effectively in Flickr, and now I am chuffed that Google Feed Reader has this facility as well. Just need to sit there and use them.

On that note, congratulations to Bremer TAFE for seeing the need to familiarise staff with Library 2.0 technology. Till now, it is one of those things that we all think we will do when we have the time. But we need to MAKE time.

As library staff in an academic environment, we need to be up to speed with new ways of communicating with our primary users : students and staff, and presenting the information we have in the most user-friendly way.

To see items in my shared RSS folder, check the link below:
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/15192322568384191284

Blog about Technology

I found out something interesting about RSS feeds or aggregators. When you search one of these, you are doing a FEDERATED SEARCH. I saw this term used, and looked it up in Wikipedia for the explanation. A federated search is when you use an interface to search multiple online databases.

Hope you find this interesting - I did. I like to find the meaning of terms I haven't used before.
I love learning!

Mash-ups

Librarian trading cards....hmmm. Do you think these may become collectables like baseball trading cards or Tazos? Only time will tell. However, a much more hip way of displaying staff contact details than the usual.

I also liked the custom name badge for any occasion on Big Huge Labs site. Why not make things a little more quirky at your next meeting?

The Flickr Map Organizer has a number of interesting applications. You could take photos of various locations in your library and attach them to a map, with the link describing how to.. etc.
For example, a photo of someone using the printer, with a link to printing information etc. Students would love it.

Flickr fun

I really enjoyed this week's task: exploring Flickr.

I thought the use of tags as keywords is an excellent idea, especially as users can add their own as well as use existing ones. Language is constantly changing, especially colloquialisms, and I think these tags will help users overcome some of those barriers.

When it came to selecting an image, I went with this shot of Huntington Beach Pier. Huntington Beach is five minutes from where my father-in-law lives in Los Angeles. Wish I was there!!

Lifelong learning

Hello out there! Can anyone hear me? Just one little voice in cyberspace. However, here is what I gleaned from the 7 1/2 habits of lifelong learners.

The habit I thought was the easiest for me personally was:
Create your own learning toolbox.
When you are interested in something it is easy to have a learning toolbox because you want to be competent and creative in what you are doing. Plus, I love shopping!

The habit I thought was the hardest was:
View problems as challenges.
Sometimes it is difficult to view a problem as an opportunity to learn. This can be most challenging when the problem is something that has a negative and ongoing effect on your life.

As a naturally curious person, I feel as if life-long learning is something I have already embraced. I look forward to the 23 things I will be learning over the next months.

Cheers,
Rebekah