Thing #23

"And now the time has come...", wait a minute, it ain't over 'til it's over, and it ain't over yet!

Wow, what a ride, what frustration, what enlightenment, what techno savvy-ness and all-in-all what an education!! Thank you so much Howard County Library and Maryland Libraries Learning 2.0 for the opportunity to learn so much in such a short amount of time and to provide this program to assist in my lifelong learning.

Over the past few months, I found myself doing the lessons at home on Saturday mornings during my "quiet time for me" often spending way more time than 30 minutes on a Thing (sorry Jaye, it can't be done in 30 minutes, not with all the links!). I'm kinda' sad that I've finished the task and now won't have anything to do on Saturday mornings, but wait, there's a rumor in cyber-space that another program may be in our future. Well, count me in! (How about offering a free iPod to the finishers of the next program!?)

I really enjoyed learning the Things at my own pace and the podcasts were very helpful in explaining the topics in more detail. Some Things I really enjoy are RSS feeds and OverDrive and some Things that I probably won't use are online image generators and Technorati, but you never know. It's good to know that they are out there.

Thanks again for the opportunity to participate in the program, it still ain't over!!

Thing #22

I've been using OverDrive for quite some time now. I even have a movie on my home computer right now from OverDrive! so, I am pretty familiar with the process. I like to check out obscure things, usually movies, that I normally wouldn't check out of my regular library. It's never anything that I'm really looking for, just something that catches my eye, so, I check it out to see what it's about. I've come to think of OverDrive as my second hand library, because I find the oldest, wierdest things there, but I always enjoy them.

I downloaded an audio book to my MP3 player for the first time and I can see the title in my menu, but I can't get it to play. Can anyone out there help me with this? I will definitely use this feature more (transfer to a portable device) instead of just downloading items to my desktop computer.

Thing #21

I really couldn't find anything of interest to me on the Podcast sites. I did find something on Yahoo Podcasts, but after 20 minutes it still hadn't downloaded to my computer. Forget about it! So, I looked at the MERLIN podcast link and went for the first thing that struck my fancy. The blog about the Australian tv show "The Librarians" looked interesting. Hey, if the US (& England) can have a show called "The Office", I'm all for a show about librarians.

Too bad Yahoo Podcasts is closing after 10/31/07. I found it to be the easiest directory to navigate.

I created a feed for "It's all good" from the MERLIN blog site. A rather eclectic feed for libraries that I'm sure will have interesting info.

Thing #20

What can I say, YouTube is a lot of fun!! If you have some time to spare, this is the place to be. I'm usually very fascinated in what I find to watch, even if it's something very mundane. It's the sitting back and smelling the roses aspect of the videos that is appealing to me and they can also be very entertaining and educational.

I was a little bummed out that I didn't get to see my son's girlfriend do the Thriller dance at the University of Maryland 's halftime show this past weekend (darn you ABC for never showing the halftime shows), but not to worry, it showed up on YouTube! Thanks YouTube!! Enjoy the show, Happy Halloween and Go TERPS!!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz7VGKxnLgM

Thing #19

I looked at many of the award winning sites under various headings (i.e. fun stuff, health, classified and directory, city guides, music, professional networking, and lists & polls). Unfortunately, I didn't find anything that was either good or unique. (My AOL provides a lot of these services just as well as these sites.)

Under the Health category, I was hoping the PEERtrainer would help motivate me in my training, but it really didn't do what I wanted it to do. It could possibly be used by our Get Active group. The Medstory and Healia could possibly be used like our health databases, but I don't think that it really provides any information that our online health databases don't already furnish.

I was glad that our 23 Things had already been selected, since they really seem to be the cream of the crop. Great job Learning 2.0 team!

Thing #18

I explored Google Docs and created and published a spreasheet

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pwEPOBggYNXxCCAxIHgXsMg

I loved the idea of being able to view your documents from any computer. This will help me to edit my spreadsheet no matter where I am, at work, at home, at an on-site interview, etc. This would also help me in scheduling interviewers and interviewees. I can let them know about the site and they can have a feed and then it's up to them to fill in the blanks or leave comments, etc. It would save me a lot of time in preparing the schedules. Yeah!

I also like the idea of the spreadsheets being automatically saved. That's another great time saver and headache eliminator!

The Google calendar looked intriguing, but then I became overwhelmed at all of the places that I have a calendar (i.e. hard copy at home, Palm, Desk Now). I'm not sure that I want to merge all of these into one place, and I definately don't want to take the time to do so. Being able to put a team's schedule and/or concert series on your calendar was neat. Google calendar definately looks cool, so I may come back to it at a later time.

Thing 16 & 17

I enjoyed learning about Wikis, and came to realize that they are only as good as the last person's entry. It's really for people who are team players and enjoy bouncing ideas off of each other and not for people that want to be in charge and have the final say. So, wikis would work for some things and not for others.

One way the library could use Wikis, is to put the book reviews that people write on their Summer Reading Game entries onto the library's catalog. I would find this to be very helpful in deciding whether this book is what I'm truly interested in reading.

I thought that it was interesting that some teachers don't allow their students to use Wikipedia as a source. It's all about facts and not opinions when it comes to research papers.

I went to SI's Wiki and edited the page per Jaye's instructions. One problem that I can see happening in the future with this page is that a long list of edits will appear and no indication of topics. (I.e. Where was Jaye's comment about ______?) It would be like the never ending email replies. You have to read through everything.