29 December 2007

Moving Up to Learning 2.1

I must be a glutton for punishment! Annabel, aka Polyxena here in Learning 2.0, has invited me to take up the challenge of Learning 2.1, the extention of these 23 Things. It began in Blogspot and has now transferred to a new blog/wiki platform, Ning. If you are still on a roll with Web 2.0 learning, come and join us! My Ning blog is at: http://explorediscoverplay.ning.com/profile/InfoSleuth

27 November 2007

#23 What I have learned and where to from here

Well, if this was a sample of what "lifelong learning" can be, I think I'm hooked! Not only did I learn about numerous potential tools for the future, I saw great networking develop, not only within my own library but with colleagues in other libraries as well. One of my first impressions was to do with the benefits of attending conferences and it feels now like I have just returned from one of the most successful ones ever!
Of the 23 things the ones I enjoyed the most and will certainly look into further were:

Blogs & Wikis - I want to find out how to create sub-blogs for different topics within my blog, and I want to explore other blogs and wikis to see where the action is. At the micro-level, a reference wiki will certainly aid in communicating information between members of my team and to the rest of the library staff. A few of my colleagues are already getting some up and running;
Rollyo search engines - this was such a neat way to pull together a number of related sites. I can see using these for delivering current awareness information on a number of subjects to our council research officers;
RSS feeds - I still have to do a bit of brain re-wiring to change my methods of receiving news, ditto for social bookmarking which also has exciting possibilities for not only providing information to our users but for them to provide information to us and others. This is a much more effective approach than we have used until now.
LibraryThing - isn't it a magnificent site! It's wonderful to see so many people drawn together to exchange ideas using the love of books as the good oil. I will enjoy searching for other dedicated sites like this where people's enthusiasm keeps everyone on the ball.

But now it's time to take a break and catch up on some lost sleep!
Congratulations to everyone who made this course possible. What a leap into learning it has been. Very 21st Century, too!
Thank You!!

#22 Audio Books

I listened briefly to the computer-read version of Frances Hodgson Burnett's "The Secret Garden". That was painful! I don't quite understand what the purpose of "robot readers" is unless what we are listening to innovation in progress. I MUCH preferred the human reader of that lovely book, and listened to a fair bit more of it as a result. The reader had a wonderful reading voice and captured the satirical slant of the descriptions very well. I don't borrow from our talking book collection, but one of the things I particularly like about the online one is that they don't have to be shelved! And they don't get returned with pieces missing either. I think there is a definite future for subscriptions to online audiobooks.

#21 Podcasts

Of the 3 directories listed I like the ease of use of the Podcast Directory best, and the categories were just right. (I particularly liked "Soliliquies - Soap Box & Rants"!)
I remember when I was young being joyously scared to death listening to suspense plays on the radio, so, just for fun, I checked out the Podcast Directory for 'radio thriller' . Lo and behold! I found "Thriller: Stories to keep you up all night" - not that I've had any problems with that lately with all the new ideas that this course has set spinning in my brain. On a more work-related note I found an interesting series of "City Talks" sponsored by the City of Sydney and have set up an RSS feed for them on this blog. These are similar to our own, Melbourne Conversations, which could possibly be aired in the same way. Certainly within our library service the use of podcasts and videos are already getting people humming with ideas. Podcasts would be particularly useful for delivering services to sight-handicapped users of our website: library announcements, new talking book lists, author readings, etc.

24 November 2007

#20 YouTube - Can't live without it!

This YouTube video that I found combines several elements that are special to me: black & white photography, noir movies, odd angles, reference (detective) work, libraries and a big dash of humour. What fun! Thanks to Nick and his cast and crew for demonstrating how not to conduct a reference interview!

Library Mystery Tour

Last year a useful webpage was created listing examples of YouTube applications in libraries: YouTube and Libraries
Investigate the Possibilites (another noir film!) is a clever way to introduce the library. Political correctors beware!

I've taken to using YouTube for researching music that I'm unfamiliar with. You can check out the latest album by a new or favourite artist/group before you buy. I notice a lot of the online book/music/dvd shops, not just amazon, provide clips like these, too. Embedded video is everywhere these days.

22 November 2007

#19 Web 2.0 Awards

Web 2.0 Awards is a great site for getting a birds-eye view of the way the internet is developing.

How often do you send an email to a friend or colleague saying "Look what I stumbled upon!" followed by one or more hyperlinks to useful and/or amazing sites you've discovered? I seem to do that more often than not, so I was particularly taken with one of the winners in the Social Tagging section, wait for it......StumbledUpon! A recent listing that captured my eye was about landscape photos. I was impressed with the built-in intuitive factor which leads you to other relevant sites based on your rating. I'll give it a more detailed exploration. This could be very useful for project teams to use for gathering relevant information in a particular field.

I was also attracted to the Yahoo! Answers site, 1st prize winner in the Questions & Answers category. There are a lot of questions out there! As tomorrow will be Thanksgiving Day in the USA I was interested in some of the questions that people were asking about Thanksgiving - from "What is the origin?" , "Who's got a good recipe for turkey stuffing?", "Is it a holiday anywhere outside the USA?", to "What are you thankful for?" I wonder how many of the top 'Answerers' are librarians!

16 November 2007

#18 - Zoho Writer: Literary Awards Calendar & Genre Index

This document was created by me originally in Microsoft Word for use by our Reader Development team at Melbourne Library Service. I imported it into Zoho Writer, saved it and then published it here on my blog.

It was very easy, however some of the formating didn't translate quite as I had expected. Nevertheless, it's a pretty neat way to put a large amount of information into your blog that was created elsewhere! Less ambitious formatting may be the way to go in future.

I also created a public Zoho Wiki titled: InfoSleuth Wiki. It is empty at the moment. I think I'll need to think this through a bit more. Perhaps that's what this calendar should be instead. Then I won't be solely responsible for keeping it up to date!
Later: It seems that wiki is already taken on the Wikipedia: Book Awards and Honored Creative Works, so I should become a contributor to it instead. This all begs the question: how much overlap there is in wiki-world?