#23 Summary of thoughts

The challenge of Learning 2.0 was a decisive moment for me as I neared retirement. Either I could take the easy option and ignore new developments and drift along to retirement, or I could embrace modern technology with open arms and run with it. Luckily I made the right decision. What a buzz it has been - a truly great learning experience! Staff-members at our branch have had many interesting tea-room discussions and debates on what we have learned, and we have a whole new shared vocabulary. The Stephen Abram lecture was inspirational. Following the point Stephen made about sharing information I have added all the sites from the training to our Favourites on the Information Desk so that it is accessible to everyone. This will enable us to have a quick refresher in spare moments and have the sites at our fingertips when we are demonstrating their usefulness to the public. I have already suggested to a patron that he should become a contributor to Wikipedia in his particular field of interest, as I have done myself, and that Google Alerts are a really useful way of keeping in touch with current information. The learning continues...

#22 Audiobooks and World eBook fair

This just gets better and better. I have discovered that libraries can purchase audio files to allow library members to download them onto their MP3 players. What a great extension of our existing free library service! I have had a look at the range of titles available, and, being a Youth Services Librarian, was quite impressed with the range of wonderful children's stories.

#15 On Library 2.0 and Web 2.0

The greatest thing about all these new developments is the way they facilitate the sharing of knowledge. The Open WorldCat project is a great example of what can be achieved by co-operative effort. RSS feeds and FRBR searches where results can be clustered in eclectic ways by individual searchers are powerful new tools available to everyone.

RSS Feed from podcast

I have managed to remember how to add an RSS feed to my Bloglines account, and have just successfully done so with a podcast!

#21 Podcasting

My daughter sorted me out with ITunes recently and it is really handy to be able to have a wide selection of music on my Ipod. For the current exercise I looked at podcast.net and tried a few unusual subjects, with no success, so went for some more common ones such as Storytelling and Book Reviews, with more luck. I also had some success looking up authors such as Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope. I also discovered that there are volunteers out there who do podcasts of full-text public domain books. There is Audiobooks with Annie, where Annie reads aloud from quite a few classic titles. There is also a site called babblebooks, which I'm just about to look at, which has dozens of free audiobooks. This would be a great thing to promote among our library patrons.

#20 Youtube

I subscribed to Youtube some weeks ago but couldn't see how I'd use it. It is becoming clearer with practice. The examples I looked at in the practice exercise were the 1970s commercial (especially the Ty D Bol toilet cleaner with the man in the boat sailing in a toilet), and the Johnny Depp one. I had to switch Johnny off, though, because it sounded a bit flippant and lighthearted for the office.

#19 Web 2.0 awards

I had a look at the Web 2.0 awards for Mashups, and really liked the winner, www.ning.com. If I was about 30 years younger, this is the one I would go for. Really lively and interesting.

#18 Web-based applications

Google Docs is great. I've put something on for retrieval on my home computer - or, in fact, anywhere I happen to be. What a breakthrough!

#17 PBWiki

I have added my blog to the site, after some difficulty. It only lets one person at a time on, apparently, and I had to wait until someone else had finished.I have made a note of the various wiki tools, and will look at them all later. The others besides PBWiki are www.wetpaint.com and www.wikispaces.com.

#16 Wikis

In a flush of enthusiasm I enrolled as a contributor to Wikipedia, and that great resource was really all I knew about wikis until this week. I am now starting to see the many applications for wikis within our own library service. We have many enthusiastic library patrons who are widely-read and would love to pass on their knowledge. This is evident whenever we have book talks in the library. If these enthusiasts could add book-reviews to a library wiki, it would really add to the whole library experience and give patrons a greater sense of partnership and pride in the service. Subject-guides are also a great idea, with obsolete links removable by users.

Del.icio.us

#13 Tagging #14 Technorati

I have made a start on learning Technorati and really like using Del.icio.us - a wonderful way to share information. The Youtube presentation on Del.icio.us is a good way to start. Pauline

#10 Image Generator

Image generator is great fun. I have had a go with doing anagrams. There is even a French one, and the results are sometimes very funny. Also the Sudoku one and a nickname or "handles" one. Pauline

Week 5 - Rollyo again

Having great fun with Rollyo, and have managed to customise it quite well. When I checked my Sustainable Buildings heading and searched under Brunswick, all the relevant entries were shown. Note that advertising sites appear as well, though. They are identified at a glance by green lettering in the entry. Pauline

# 12 Rollyo - week 5

Great fun with Rollyo - especially when my Sustainable Buildings entry came up as a "recently added" item, available to everyone. Have added Rollyo to my blog, but have done something wrong, as it will only do a subject-search on my own blog! I'll try again. Pauline

# 11 LibraryThing (Week 5)

I have worked out how to use LibraryThing and have added it to my blog. Coming on! Pauline

igoogle and google alerts

I have just customised igoogle to give personalised features such as local weather reports and a selection of other information and services. Last week I registered to receive Google alerts on specific topics. The first batch of alerts arrived in my email today. You can get daily alerts, or alerts as they happen, or weekly, which is what I selected. Just go to www.google.com/alerts to register. Pauline

Stephen Abram lecture

It was quite an experience to hear Stephen Abram yesterday. I took some notes but he talked so fast that I had trouble keeping up. Here is the gist of it.

Stephen Abram

SirsiDynix

Notes from lecture on 1/10/07

Ref: Out Front with Stephen Abram; a guide for information leaders.

Stephen’s blog: http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com.

Canadians are “unarmed Americans with health insurance”

It is important to try things. You don’t know if you don’t try.

Instant messaging is conversation.

The library catalogue is nothing more than an inventory management tool.

Librarians are restrained by:

1. Budget-driven innovation.
2. A culture of victimisation in libraries.
3. Excuses over reasons.
4. Absence of critical thinking.
5. A lack of true relationships with other community organizations.
6. A Servant not Service ethic.
7. A focus on perfection.

Global Change. The US National Debt affects everyone. The US has borrowed a trillion dollars from China, intending to pay it by getting oil from Iraq.

The huge developments taking place in India, China and EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa).

Generations “turtle” driving user behaviour changes. (I don’t know what this means)

Learning sharing. Collaborative knowledge.

Mergers – Reuters, Dow Jones, Gale, MS, Yahoo.There has been a big increase in the Information sector. Multi-type consortia – these will increase. New Standards (XML, JSR 168, etc) drive portalisation and personalisation of the Web.RSS cut and paste uses JSR 168 (the international Standard)

Technology can facilitate close relationships with local schools and other organizations. Personalised web-links.

Ref: Pew 2020 Predictions. http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/188/report_display.asp

Some of these predictions:

1. Low-cost, ubiquitous, fast global network..
2. “Smart agents”
3. Virtual reality. By 2012 80% of Internet users will be using an Avatar.
4. Problems with “technology addiction”.
5. 5. Technology “refuseniks” will emerge as a group.
6. Privacy levels will be chosen by users.

Ref. Peter Kaufman on predictions. Check.

Content, not context is king.

Points for strategic focus in libraries:

1. Real goals.
2. Community vision.
3. Cultural preservation and use/re-use.
4. Learning, scholarship, recommendations.
5. Bridging the divide. Blocking access is bad. We have no right to do it.
6. Entertainment is not trivial.
7. Discovery, Creativity, Invention.

Ref. Library dominoes (a video)

Intellectual access and not just physical access, is already here.

The emerging generation has very little fact-based knowledge.Ways of learning have changed radically.

Ref: Richard Sweeney – Millennials.

Ref: Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning styles.

Ref: a sirsiDynix program set up for Kent State Ohio – School Rooms; a learning portal for the K-12 Community. This gives an excellent picture of the future role of technology to enhance learning. http://www.schoolrooms.net/Students/tested.php

Boston Public Library has held Scanning parties to get their collection on-line. http://blog.bpl.org/brls/?cat=22

At this point, Stephen was talking so fast that I just managed to write key words to look up later. Central repository. Metadata. AOL Instant Messenger. Meebo and Trillion. Shared pictures. LibraryThing. Open Content Alliance. Bebo, YouTube. MySpace. Facebook. Wikipedia.

**Note that Free in this context means Unfettered, not necessarily free of charge.

Another list:

Bloglines. Twitter. Ning. Media Wiki. Wordpress(?). Zotero. Skype.Del-icio-us http://del.icio.us/. Second Life, Library e-books. My Bloglog. NowPublic http://www.nowpublic.com/

Prediction: Google search engines will default to local withing 18 months.

MySpace http://www.myspace.com/ A sustainable social network for life. **Librarians must be there!**

Check Wikipedia for an entry for your own library service. Anyone can put one there.

Yarra Plenty was the second library in the world to do the 23 Things.

Note: View the next generation positively.

Someone else’s notes from one of Stephen’s lectures. http://allaboutthe2.blogspot.com/2007/09/steven-abrams-8-am-presentation.html

Pauline M. 3/10/07

#8 Make life "really simple"

I have now discovered RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, and have set up a Bloglines account. The Palinet tutorial has really helpful explanations. I have discovered that there is a feed reader on my Firefox browser, so I'll have a look at that next.

#6 Third-party Flickr Apps.

I have just had a go at Trip Planner, by Yahoo! Travel. This site enables you to plan a whole travel itinerary to assist on the journey and then you can create a photo set of your trip using Flickr.
I have also had a look at fd's Flickr Toys, and made an ID badge with my photograph on it. Coming on!

Template changes

At last I'm over the "blind panic" stage in dealing with all this technology. I've started to relax and work out how to get the results I want. I've just given my blog a nice template to improve its appearance.

#5 Discover Flickr; Trading Card Maker

I have just managed to work out how to use Trading Card Maker, and have put my picture on a card. I can't really see why I would want to use it, although one suggestion is to make cards with pictures of your friends, to embarrass them. I'm a bit old for that sort of caper, though.

#5 Discover Flickr

I'm glad the pace of the training is reasonably slow. It takes a while to feel comfortable with the procedures. I seem to be improving with practice, though, and have managed to work out how to use Flickr. I have put a picture on my blog, after several attempts. I thought I had done something wrong, but it just takes ages to upload.

#7 Blog about Technology; virtual-world modelling

I have just read an article in New Scientist (24 Feb 2007) about the possibility of scientists researching human behaviour by studying game-playing strategies in virtual worlds. In the computer game World of Warcraft, which is played by more than 7.5 million people around the world, adventurers encountered a deadly plague virus that spread rapidly, with devastating effects. Nina Fefferman of Tufts University, Boston, saw it as an opportunity to study how each of thousands of people would respond to the outbreak, to see if it held lessons for real-world disease control. Critics, however, say that in virtual worlds, human behaviours don't really correspond to the real world. In virtual worlds there is nothing at stake; you die and then can be re-born at the click of a mouse. Even so, World of Warcraft's virtual plague has suggested the possibility of a whole new approach to disease-modelling, and further developments may yet help to save lives.

Moving along....

Two steps forward and one backward this week, with the training. Pauline

Week 2 training

Getting better at it, and at least remembering my password this week.

Learning 2.0

First day of training. Of the list of seven, the most difficult for me is no. 6. Using technology to my advantage. That's the one I'll be working on. Pauline

libsmart

Book Talk at Nunawading on Wed. 19 Sept. I'll be recommending several stylish and sophisticated mysteries, and have prepared an additional list.