Exercise 23

I have really enjoyed doing this programme. The absolute highlight has been Bloglines. I have various feeds that in the evening I regularly click on. I know there are many more on this subject so I'm trying not to add them or less time for my study! I would recommend Frugal Hacks, Stacking Pennies, Working for Rachel. Plenty more if you want to know. So -finding these blogs I guess has meant there is an online community that I am now part of but yet to contribute to. Librarything is great to and maybe in the summer I will have time to put all my books in there. So - what a great experience it has been and hopefully my increased knowledge will add to others increased knowledge.

Social Networking

I enjoyed reading "Your space or my space." I think its good to target the students through MySpace. I think the writer makes an important point though that it is more than just giving out information. It's about responding to the questions asked and reading between the lines when doing this. So, finding out what it is that the student wants to know. I also think the "paralysis by analysis" comment has some truth to it. Yes, there are risks with libraries social networking but there are enormous gains to be had.

Exercise 21

I enjoyed looking at Bebo. Particlarly the Rotorua and Auckland sites. All the comments and friends and funny photos. It was good to see Auckland City Libraries are a friend of Rotorua Public library. In Facebook I typed in peoples names but it brought up hundreds. In myspace Matt Damon versus Sarah Palin was interesting and also looking at celebrity sites. I like myspace and Bebo best. They seemed immediately accesible and looked like a fun way to spend some time.

ebooks

On Project Gutenberg I found an ebook of Jane Eyre. It wasn't difficult to find and the print was easy to read. On Google Book search I found extracts from Pilgrims Progress. The book looked very old with illustrations. On Librivox the audio of Jane Eyre I found . I did find the voice a bit boring. I was surprised how many free ebooks are available.

Podcasts

I found these podcast sites quite hard to get into. Many required a membership. Podcastpickle was the easiest to access. It was good for children's podcasts. I listened for a short time to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I have added this podcast feed to my Bloglines account
http://feeds.thisamericanlife.org/talpodcast

YouTube

I have looked on videos alot at YouTube, particularly music ones. I've looked at Paula Yate's old ones with the Big Breakfast show. Also a recent interview with Slash, ex Guns and Roses. Some videos aon the site are quite grainy and of course there is the slowness of the upload but well worth it. It would be fun to put some of the library ones on our website as customers might enjoy the humour.

Craigslist

This is a popular site. I enjoyed Craigslist which was foirst place in classified and directory. It covers different states in America as well as other places like London. I mainly looked at New York- whats for sale, for rent, and up for discussion. I had heard of this site from a friend in NY who raved about it. I think this is extremely useful especially if you were new in a place. Lots of courses as well advertised. As for the Library a great place to advertise library services, vacancies, events!

Zoho Writer

I found this a good site. It did take me awhile to work out how to save the templates. I created a document from a speech writing template which was quite helpful. Also I saved to templates a word document and some business documents. Some of the templates would be useful if you were starting your own business like the invoice template.

Rollyo

It is quite useful to be able to store web addresses under your own user name. I called my Rollyo budgetqueen for budget websites. http://rollyo.com/jasperwhite/
It was easy to sign up and I might set one up again

Librarything

Librarything is great. I was surprised how many people had my books. It's really good you can put 200 books on and see other peoples lists. I've recommended it to a friend who was really pleased I told her about it. She has hundreds of books so I will be surprised if she is not a paying member soon
http://www.librarything.com/home/JasperWhite

Image Generators

I enjoyed using glowtext to create this image. With assistance I have uploaded it to my blog. I found The Generator Blog easy to navigate around and it was fun to play with one part called "cat"where you type in cats names and cats names are repeatedly flashed on the screen.

http://glowtxt.com/

Tha above is how you get to the glowtext image generator which I got from the Generator Blog http://generatorblog.blogspot.com/

NSL Learning 2.0 Sandbox Wiki

I added my blog to favourite blogs. However I did have some trouble with the previously added blog suddenly joining mine due to where I clicked. Thankfully the edit key solved that problem so both blogs are accessible again!

Wikis

These I am familiar with particularly looking up the New Zealand Wikipedia. Quite often a word will arise that I'm interested in or a TV person and I find this has useful information. It's great everyone can contribute if they wish to. The Princeton Book Lovers Wiki was full of good recommendations. For libraries there are so many uses like the library being the hub of the community in a Wiki, Conference Information hubs and internet subject guide wikis.

Library 2.0

Into a new world of librarianship was very affirming. Librarian 2.0 embraces web tools. I couldn't agree more with Michael Stephens. Utilising the web tools supports NSL vision in particular with access and learning for life.

Technorati

I found Technorati interesting in that one can search on so many blogs. I wish I had time to explore it more as I found the searching methods a bit confusing. I found advanced searching useful. In searching for tags and url I found 400 posts for "Learning 2.0" With blogposts I found 9,746. Searching popular blogs was interesting. I was surprised Jennifer Garner was so popular still.

Del.icio.us

I found this a great tool. I looked at study and saw many people had bookmarked various sites and there were lots of notes. I'm sure this tool will be useful for many purposes. I also enjoyed looking at some psychology bookmarks.