Saturday, March 24, 2007

Week 9, Thing 23 - My Thoughts on the 23 Things

I really enjoyed Learning 2.0. It is so awesome that San Jose Library has offered this for staff. I did many of the exercises at home because I'm geeky that way (and love playing on the internet during free time anyway). So to answer the last question here first, YES, I would choose to participate in any future discovery program like this.


 

My favorite things from the 23 things (that I was not previously aware of) were Bloglines and Library Thing. Bloglines is really useful in organizing and viewing news feeds and blogs. I can quickly skim through 45 feeds about once a day and catch up with all the important news and information I might otherwise miss (because it can be cumbersome to visit site after site for new information). Library Thing is fun. I've found a few interesting recommendations of books based on my Library Thing catalog.

 
An unexpected outcome I've had through Learning 2.0 is further developing my knowledge of 2.0 resources that I was 'already familiar with.' It can be kind of easy to skim through the list of the 23 Things and think "I already know about that." In my case, I was familiar with podcasts but I hadn't really explored the scope of what types of podcasts are out there. It's so cool that there are podcasts out there to help people
learn a language, or learn Photoshop tricks.

 

 

 

One more great thing about the 23 Things ... I've found that Zohowriter is a handy tool for resizing or stretching images to put in a blog post. The above picture are pistachio shell frogs that I made a while back. I wanted to see if I could shrink the image a bit from one of my online albums and add it to a post. It worked! Another great tool that's easy to use!

 

While I've completed the 23 Things, I am confident I will continue pursue lifelong learning of web 2.0 resources because 1. it's increasingly becoming part of daily life, and 2. I love the internet.  

 

(posted from Zohowriter)

Monday, March 19, 2007

Week 9, Thing 22 - eBooks and audio eBooks

I check out eBooks fairly often, especially the audio eBooks. It's EXTREMELY convenient. I'm surprised at how many titles we have in our collection!! Lots of variety, too! While I have checked out pdf eBooks (and read segments of books from the Gutenberg Project), I'll be honest... those books I'd use as a reference only. It's hard to read a 300+ page book on a computer screen. Anyway, the access is fantastic. I've always been a proponent of various formats for materials in libraries. The more the merrier!

For the purposes of this exercise, I decided to explore SJ library's audio ebook collection a bit deeper and I picked a title that I wouldn't normally pick. I checked out "Don't Look Down" by Jennifer Cruise. I also checked out "Alpha and Oranges" by Atomic Opera from the Overdrive music collection. The World eBook Fair doesn't seem to be offering free downloads at this time, but it appears that they will again in October. It's alright, we have plenty of good stuff in our own collection. Enough to keep me busy for years. :)

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Week 9, Thing 21 - Podcasts

I subscribe to several podcasts through iTunes on my home computer, including the awesome Coverville, Acapodcast, MAKE Magazine's podcast, KQED's Gallery Crawl, NPR's Most Emailed stories, and Tim Gunn's Project Runway podcast. Podcasts are fantastic. I am often on the lookout for more podcasts to subscribe to. Therefore, I was delighted to use Podcast.net, Podcast Alley, and Yahoo podcasts to find more great podcasts. I'm currently trying to learn Spanish and I found several podcasts that are mini Spanish lessons, such as Insta Spanish. I'm also very interested in local government, so I subscribed to a few 'San Jose' podcasts. The podcasts that I found through the tools in this exercise are in my Bloglines feeds here.

Monday, February 26, 2007

Week 9, Thing 20 - Youtube

Check out this cool song about web 2.0 on you YouTube:


David Lee King is a librarian!!

I've been a YouTube watcher for well over a year (it turns out that YouTube is now 2 years old). I love it. There is some really great stuff on YouTube!

(Here's another fun video.)

Saturday, February 24, 2007

Week 8, Thing 19 - LibraryThing

I love LibraryThing! I started adding my favorite books to my LibraryThing library a few weeks ago:


A lot of my favorite books are classics, and those were the most popular in LibraryThing from my library. There are some discussions on the classics titles.

The LibrarySuggester gave me some interesting ideas of books that are similar to those in my library. I think I had more fun playing with the LibraryUnsuggester, though. You give it the name of a book, and it gives you titles that are least likely to be in the same library.

Week 8, Thing 18 - Zoho Writer

ZohoWriter is pretty nifty!

It's very easy to format a document (and I'm

making this one kinda obnoxious on purpose, just for fun!)

 

 



I posted the above document from Zoho Writer, it was really quick and easy to do! I'm editing the post now in Blogger just to comment on how easy it was to post from Zoho Writer. I see a lot of posibilities for using Zoho Writer.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Week 7, Things 16 and 17 - Wikis

Wikis are a very handy tool for collaborating, sharing information, and learning from others. I think they have great potential for libraries. For instance, Princeton Public Library's BookLovers Wiki is a great tool for reader's advisory. The Library Success Best Practices Wiki demonstrates how a wiki can be used for professional development and sharing ideas. I also like the wikis that were developed for specific events, such as the ALA 2006 New Orleans wiki. That wiki appears to have a lot of useful information for conference attendees!


For Thing 17, I added my blog to the SJLibrary sandbox wiki and I added one of my favorite books, Candyfreak, to the "Favorite books" page.