Week 12: Wrap up; social networks and catch up

Social Networking is a great tool, I am a member of Facebook and log on daily to see what my Friends and Family have been up to. Social Networking is becoming so popular that it would be a great idea for libraries to be out there, a great way for marketing and publicity of the library. Our Library is definately going to in the near future be on MySpace. I am also a member of SecondLife, I did a conference on Second Life once about literature and there was alot of problems which I guess made me not like SecondLife too much, it is very difficult to work out and very time consuming, it is very liable also for libraries to get on Second Life to remind Internet users of our great services, I just hope if our library ever decides to sign up to Second Life I am not the one to do it because I really don't like it at all. So having finished the Learning 2.0 course I am happy that I have completed it, I didn't think there would be anything to learn for me but I am very surprised as I came away learning quite a lot, maybe I had already used most of these things before but I also learnt there relevance in Libraries and how my own Library can use them. Looking forward to putting into place some of the things we learnt on the Course. Feel free to contact me about anything I blogged about at kharris@singleton.nsw.gov.au

Thanks for a great learning experience.

Week 11: Online applications and tools

I had heard of GoogleDocs before but didnt ever investigate to see what it actually was. GoogleDocs is a great idea, I myself don't really create documents that more than one person collaborates on but if I ever do in the future I will definately be using GoogleDocs, it would be great for anyone writting new policies that need to be send to managers or others for approval and change. GoogleDocs obviously has very limited capabilities in comparison with Microsoft Word but for simple documents it is such a wonderful application, and its Free :D I also tried Zoho and found it nowhere near as easy to operate as GoogleDocs but definately for Slideshows or Speadsheets it would be a good thing.

Week 10: Mashups

As I talked about previously the Library held a competition during Readers Week to create a motivational reading poster and we used Huge Big Labs so I have used Mashups before, you can create some pretty cool ones and I created two really quick ones so imagine what you could do if you actually spent some time to make them. They could be great promotional material for the library. There are also some great possibilities for Local Studies content. I love http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr/ so interesting.

New Books in the Library

Just a fun one I made

Week 9: Podcasts and Audio

I have used Podcasts in the past and I regularly listen to radio shows that I miss while at work, I have them set up on my iTunes and they download automatically to my iPhone for me and I can then listen to them whenever I feel like it, I love listening to them whilst cleaning the house. I think Podcasts would be great for the Library, our Library is currently in the early stages of setting up "Living Libraries" and it would be a great feature to be able to offer them on our website to housebound and remote users not able to come to the library. They could also be great for Teen webcasts, storytime, book reviews, poetry readings, author talks, celebration of special events, interviews and library newscasts... the possibilities are endless. They would also be great for recording any staff meetings we have that people are unable to attend, they would be able to listen to them at a later date and not miss out on anything, because it isnt quite the same to just read the notes from a meeting.

Week 8: Answer boards and social searching

I am totally addicted to Yahoo Answers and have participated in Slam the Boards before, it is a great idea for increasing awareness of Libraries and how we are still relevant. I still answered a few questions in the Books and Authors section mentioning in the source box that I am a Library Technician. My statistics are
Answers
Total answers
133
Best answers
40
30%
Best answer

Which I am pretty proud of as it is the highest percentage of Best Answers I have seen. The Books and Authors section of Yahoo Answers is great for fine tuning Readers Advisory Skills and keeping up to date with what is new and what people still love to read. Overall a pretty quick excercise for me but a very relevant one.

Week 7: Tagging, folksonomies, del.icio.us and LibraryThing

This week I had lots of fun and learnt alot with Social Bookmarking which I had never really used before. I love the idea of delicious and what a cool url, it did take me a few go's to type it in write though. I have now got my own accout and have found some pretty interesting websites from the top tags list on the homepage, I even logged in at home to show my fiance how cool it was and how he should get his own account, it would be a great idea to have a library account setup to add any interesting websites we come across that could help with any reference enquiries, I also found a website on Mouse Tutorials and passed it along to my coworker who does Seniors on the Net Classes. Library Thing was another very interesting website that I enjoyed alot. I added some books from my personal library, it was hard to think of what I had at home so I cheated and added the Tomorrow Series that I own. I love the search options and the tags that lead you to more books, Library Thing recommendations, Member Recommendations and Member Reviews, it would be a great site for Readers Advisory and I would definately direct patrons to it. I managed to add both my LibraryThing Shelf and my Delicious Tags to my blog.

Week 6 : Videos Online

Like I said earlier, I use the internet everyday at home so Online Videos were not new to me in fact I use them daily especially Youtube being the more popular of the two. It's great for listening to new songs before buying an album and getting it home and not liking it. I can see how Online Videos would be a great marketing tool for the Library and would be great fun to make so maybe that might be a possibility in the not to distant future. This week was fun but I didn't actually learn anything new.

Week 5 : Wikis

I of course have used Wikipedia before but have never really used any other Wikis ( or so I thought), in fact now that I think about it, I have looked at lots of Wikis without even knowing it. The big concern I had with Wikipedia and other Wikis was the fact that anyone could edit them and include whatever they feel like writing, it is great however that you can choose the levels of public or private authorship. After some exploring I love Wikis and can see many different uses for them not only in the Library profession but any. I love the idea of being able to share information without sending email after email. Once again its being able to get all the information you need in one place, making life so much simpler. I love the Book Review Wikis I found and as our Library is always trying to improve our Reader's Advisory Skills I think this may be a great idea for us. We have also just set up 3 and in the process of a fourth Book Club so they would also be very interested in Book Reviews and it would be great even for them to review the books they read for others. Our current Intranet is great and constantly updated so we don't need to replace it but I can see how other organisations would definately benefit from an internal Wiki. :D

Week 4 RSS

I have heard about RSS Feeds before but had never used them or completely understood what they were so I guess this week I did actually learn something. RSS Feeds are great and I really enjoyed using them, as they said in the introductory video, why spend hours looking for news or information when you can get it sent to you at a central location, now all I have to do is remember to log in to look at my subscriptions. Once again with each thing we have done so far in this course, the so much information so little time definately comes into it. I can see how I could spend hours reading RSS Feeds I subscribe to and I can definately see how they would benifit not only us working in libraries but any profession and even for leisure. I subscribed to some of the examples and also a few I found myself on the Bloglines website in the top 1000 feeds subscribed to, I only got through the first 100 so I'm sure there would be many others that would interest me and be relevant to my job. I subscribed to the Powerhouse Picture of the Day(of course), The Shifted Librarian, Library Bytes, Librarians Internet Index, PC Magazine, New Urban Legends and Phrase a Week(very interesting). I also added an RSS feed to my Blog for "All Men are Liars" from the Sydney Morning Herald (Haha). Overall very enjoyable but never enough time to explore all the options.

Week 3 Flickr

I used Flickr before for the first time when our Library held a Photo competition using Flickr, we had people take a picture of what reading means to them and create a motivational poster out of it, we had a Youth Night and people participated whilst at Youth Night, we had some very interesting entries, this was the winner:

I have also spent some time searching around Flickr before but the examples helped show me other ways that other Libraries are using Flickr and possibly ways in which our Library could, it would definately be a good tool to share ideas with other libraries. I really love the beach and being beachy weather again I decided to see what I could find by searching beach and found the most beautiful photo;

Learning 2.0 Week 1

I am finally starting the Learning 2.0 Course, I use computers and the Internet at home frequently(everynight) and can spend hours on the computer on my facebook and on an online game called World of Warcraft that I like to play. I think this Course should be really easy for me because I have already used alot of the things we are going to look at. I am hoping to learn something new and learn how these things I use all the time can be used by my library. I have used blogs when I was doing my diploma at Tafe to communicate with the class but other than that I wasn't really interested in making a personal one but I can see how typing out your day to day life could become addicting and I can also see how it could be used in libraries with the links I looked at. Maybe it would be good for trying to reel in the younger people as they seem to be hard to market towards. Looking forward to learning how to implement these ideas into my job aswell.