Thing #23 -- Summary

I really enjoyed this learning program! The hands-on self-discovery was fun and I learned a lot more about 'things' that I had heard about but never experienced on my own. I really appreciate knowing how to operate Flickr, as this is something I can use personally, sharing important events like weddings with my far-flung family. Library Thing was a lot of fun to play with, as was online productivity. Whether I use them personally or not, tagging and blogging and rss feeds have become standard means of communication in today's world, and my goal is to continue to learn and keep aware of new trends in technology. The online community has clout! And they are affecting and changing the way libraries serve their public.
In the future, I would like to see more in-depth classes for some of these 'things'. Sometimes I felt a little lost, alone in the great sea of cyberstuff :) I would love to gain more experience and confidence in the use of things like digital music, podcasting, and digital video. There's only so much I can figure out on my own, but time spent in a class or with other co-workers with more experience, would help me a lot. So please do continue to offer discovery programs like '23 things' -- this is just what we need to keep up with our patrons! And its a lot of fun. Thanks for offering this for us -- and thanks for the MP3 player!!

Thing #22 -- Podcasts

Akin to video hosting sites such as YouTube, Podcasts enable people to share their views and/or expertise with the online world. It was difficult for me to find a podcast that worked on my computer, likely because I'm missing some linking software but I was able to find some interesting sites. 'Great Books' is a site that reads a chapter a day of a classic or famous novel. I linked to the reading of Chapter 2 of 'The Scarlet Letter.' It did work, and was very clear. The SirsiDynix Institute has a podcast for library professional development. It will be easy to keep up with these as they are now in my list of rss feeds on bloglines. The directories are not all that well indexed; I had to scroll a lot and do a lot of rabbit trails to find anything that interested me. The Podcast.net worked a little better for me than the PodcastAlley.com site. And again I tried Yahoo and found it too busy with advertising to bother with. But I found the Great Books site under Arts, then Books and Poetry, then scrolling down to # 26 on the list in Podcasts. What's nice is I don't actually have to download anything, I can click on the button to 'listen now' and it works.

thing #21 -- Online Video

The task today is to find a video worth sharing...I'm off to find one, be back later--probably much later...OK here's a cute one called "I Love the Library." This was created by McKracken County Public Library, Padukah, Kentucky.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3z7VGJSrQ4

(I tried to upload the whole thing but it didn't work.)

I'm a bit leery of just browsing around in You Tube, (although Wierd Al Yankovich's EBay song is pretty funny.) Still, to find one to paste in my blog, I typed in a 'books' and 'libraries' search. This brought me to quite a few library and reading promotional videos. What a great way to promote the library --perhaps kdl could produce a creative promotional video--why not?! I think using online video technology for things like this is fun. Even teen library groups could produce something cool. I'm all for using technology for helpful and educational and, yes, even fun things. Perhaps libraries can help be a positive presence on the web.

Thing #20 -- Special Treat

Wow. That's my initial reaction to Professor Walsh's "The Machine is Us/ing Us" -- a crash course, indeed, it covered just about everything we've been looking at in this '23 Things' course. Actually, what I thought about the first time I watched it was, 'amazing, I understand what they're talking about!' And that is due to the Technology 101 class I took at Wayne State, which covered html and xml, as well as the ground we've covered in '23 Things.'
Is this for a general audience? Sure, it's on youtube, after all. But the main point I think is about education. I rabbit-trailed into the ethnography blogs and viewed the video about students and learning, which is also very popular in the 'blogosphere.' I agree that 19th century teaching procedures just don't work with 21st century students and life. I fully agree that education needs to reinvent itself to teach students how to learn, not just how to parrot the teacher.
The file sharing questions in the last 'thing' apply here, as well, as net 2.0 challenges us to redefine copyright, privacy, and commerce, and therefore the laws that currently govern them.
Perhaps I may presume to disagree on a minor point--at the very end of the video, Walsh et al was suggesting we redefine everything, including family and ourselves. Frankly, some things don't change, regardless of the technology. I am me apart from my machine! And the nuclear family is still the cornerstone of civilization, regardless of opinions to the contrary. Technology has been changing and upgrading since the discovery of fire and the invention of the spearhead, but people are still people.

Thing #19 -- Digital Music

Digital Radio? Yes! I've been using it for years. It's so handy to be able to play music at my work computer that's close & quiet and not disturb other people in the room. The problem with audio streaming is that it is not always consistent. It's a few seconds behind the actual station, which sounds odd if the radio and the computer 'edition' happen to be on at the same time. Worse, it just stops every once in awhile and I have to wait while it buffers up once again. If the computer I am working on doesn't have quality speakers, or, more likely, no speakers at all, the sound quality can be pretty poor.
Still, I can listen to my favorite station, or easily find a station with nice background music, with no need to purchase or take up space with other CD players or radios.
I was entranced by Pandora; I only needed to type in one name, and it played beautiful music for me for as long as I wanted! The Yahoo site is just a mess, sorry. There's too much stuff to have to sort through to find the one thing on the page that I'm looking for. Then when I finally found it, it didn't support Firefox. No thanks! Pandora was much nicer, ie simple, user-friendly.
A few years ago I did download a few songs from iTunes, when they had a free Pepsi promotion going on. I felt pretty geeky that I was able to do it successfully! I would really like to learn more about this, because there are a lot of songs on the radio that I would like to have, but I don't feel like I know enough about the whole digital music download world. There's so many possibilities! I want to be better informed! I need a whole class just on this topic :)
The only kind of file sharing I'm interested in is the legal kind. My brother wrote a book and made it available for downloading, so I was able to put it on a cd. There are other sites for authors where you can post a poem or short story with no copyright restrictions attached. This is the sort of file sharing that I am familiar with. I do agree that future laws need to take changing technology into account.

Thing # 18 -- Social Networking

Seems to me the internet world is redefining the word 'social'. Social used to require human contact in the form of 3-D experience, real-life encounters with actual in-the-room people. Now 'social' networking is happening with people isolated in private rooms, staring at a 2-D screen. I'm getting that eerie sci-fi music playing in my head...I've read this book!! Futuristic fiction is now, thanks to machines taking over our social lives... OK enough cynicism.
On the positive side, people are more globally in touch personally than ever before possible. Does this impact information distribution? Are you serious??!! We've got way more information available through these kinds of sites than we need or care about!
I'm a bit surprised that the common assumption is that these sites are 'for' teens, are 'their' space, that 'we' would be invading 'their' space by building a presence. Why?? It looks to me like anyone can put a profile out there, even presidential candidates, and why not? Personally, I have a big why not, it's personal privacy, but I realize that's so last-century...
I think it would be a great idea to put some sort of intelligent, useful 'library' stuff out there along with the wierdness, just for balance...

Thing # 17 -- Wikis

Wiki is an interesting concept in use of the web to provide information. It allows collaboration, editing, and linking, which any user can modify at will. (almost) Wikipedia figures it's easier to fix bad content than to try and prevent it. Other wiki sites have limited which users can modify data in order to help prevent contamination. Wikis are especially useful for in-house collaboration, intranets, etc., as they can operate safely behind firewalls.
I think it would be a good idea for a library homepage to include a wiki for a community bulletin board service. Any local organization could add a note about an upcoming event and it would be an easy way for users to find local services.
I liked the St. Joseph library's wiki subject guide (limited to librarian editing only). As my daughter is planning a wedding, I searched the 'wedding celebration' link and found a cool book about making wedding flowers. I hope I can find this book locally! The site gave me the call number, keyword tags, a color pic of the front cover, and links to more information about the book. It was visually easy to read, pretty graphics, and flowed naturally. Excellent!
The Princeton book lover's wiki was more print oriented, but the 5-star reviews that I searched gave me some interesting ideas for the next book to read.
The Library Success site had all kinds of great information. This wiki also has restricted its access due to vandalism. I checked out some links under Readers Advisory which suggested good books for a discussion group. The procedures link had more rabbit trails of links. I scanned a few about materials weeding. They looked authoritative and practical.
It's so good to know about sites like this, and the ability to collaborate with other librarians like this is win-win all the way.
Wiki=quick (and good)

Thing #16 -- Technorati

What Del.icio.us does for websites, Technorati does for Blog sites. If you want to know what a blogger has to say about a subject, Technorati does the subject search for you. Using the advanced search tool gives more Boolean options. When I searched Learning 2.0 by URL, the results came up with 627 posts, marked by authority numbers.
Surprise, there's several libraries across the country who are doing this same program, and a few post a video of their awards drawing.
Using the tag search function brought about 560 hits, but seemed to focus on more of the academic aspects of learning technology, also showing authority numbers. Sorry, but I didn't see much of a difference between these two searches.
Using the directory function resulted in 774 blogs, and these showed fan numbers rather than authority numbers. The fan numbers were not impressively large :)
Other blogs I found were indeed interesting. A site about the San Diego fires showed how some people were able to make virtual maps of the evacuation sites, and they learned to do that by 'playing' with the technology--much like we are doing with this project!