Albertarose

Final thoughts

2008-04-11T12:12:00.000-07:00

I wasn't sure I would get to Thing 23 and must confess that I spent less time on some Things than I should have.
My favorite discovery was reading coworkers's blogs and learning a bit more about them. It helped to know that some folks were confused or uncertain about the by some of the same things I was, or liked some of the same stuff. My favorite 2.0 things were
Flickr--will use this for both work and personal stuff.
Blogging--probably won't do a good job of keeping it up. I still struggle with wondering what I could possibly have to say that would be interesting to anybody else
Using bloglines for feeds. I now have waaaay too many feeds and will probably not read them all regularly, but it is great to be able to access them from anywhere.
Library Thing--may be a long time before I get all our stuff in. I have visions of someday having an Iphone or some such and accessing my catalog from a bookstore, to check for gaps in various fantasy or mystery series. And I still buy actual CDs--it would be great to have quick access to the list of what we have. And no, we don't have thousands like Michael!
Del.icio.us --still need to get my favorite bookmarks added since setting up the account.
IM --I'm using it at work and probably won't be doing much personal IM , especially since my techie son has gotten a "real" job and isn't at his home computer with his chat on all day. I'm sure he could do it from work but he probably doesn't want mom bothering him...
YouTube. it's just fun. I'll probably never post anything but should never say never I guess. I think this has a lot of potential for library programming.

Stuff I'm still not so sure about?
Twitter...struggling to find the gold nugget here.
Image Generators... looks like fun but probably won't use much
Rollyo ..didn't quite get the hang of it but can see the utility

Thanks very much to Shannon, Michael, Allana, Christa and Susan for all your help. This was fun and I'd definitely do it again.

Chatting

2008-04-11T10:15:00.000-07:00

I've been chatting using Meebo from the ref. desk. Chat reference has some advantages, the big one being faster service. The downside, obviously, is that we aren't online 24/7, and some questions require more time or away from the desk research to answer. I think I'm getting better at the interview, and most folks are willing to supply an email for later contact if you really can't help them during the chat.

Podcasts thing 21

2008-04-11T09:46:00.000-07:00

I already subscribed to the NLC podcasts.

From NET I subscribed to All about Books. Using one of the search directories and the Environment category I found and subscribed to Living Planet, a podcast from the World Wildlife Federation. NPR is a veritable mother lode of cool stuff and I could have subsribed to many. I limited myself to the hourly news update and Fiona Ritchie's Thistlepod.

The Journal Star podcasts looked mildly interesting but not enough to subscribe.

now to find time to use them! The nice thing about Bloglines is that I will be able to access the non-work stuff from elsewhere.

Piggy Puppets on YouTube--thing 20

2008-04-11T07:57:00.000-07:00

Here's a fun use for YouTube--Edmonton Public Library has posted videos of their puppet shows. Each one is about 5 minutes. Three Little Pigs was performed by Edmonton Public Library staff and produced by Access TV. It has had over 80,000 views. I think this would be great for family home or daycare viewing.

Orange Nanaimo Bars

2008-04-08T13:49:00.001-07:00

The Orange Nanaimo Bar

Ingredients:

    * 2 cups Graham wafer crumbs
    * 1 cup Coconut, unsweetened, flaked
    * 1/2 cup Pecans; toasted, chopped
    * 2/3 cup Butter
    * 1/3 cup Cocoa powder; unsweetened sifted
    * 1/4 cup Sugar, granulated
    * 1 Egg; beaten

***GRAND MARNIER LAYER***

    * 2 cups Icing Sugar
    * 1/4 cup Butter; softened
    * 1/4 cup Grand Marnier;or orange liqueur
    * 1 tablespoon Orange rind; coarsely grated

***CHOCOLATE TOPPING***

* 1 tablespoon Butter
* 4 ounces Semisweet chocolate; melted

Directions:

In bowl, stir together crumbs, coconut and pecans. In small saucepan, gently heat butter, cocoa and sugar until butter melts. Remove from heat; whisk in egg. Blend into crumb mixture. Press into greased 9 inch square cake pan. Bake in 350F oven for 10 minutes. Let cool on rack.

Grand Marnier Layer: In bowl, place half of icing sugar with butter, mix in half of the icing sugar with butter; mix in Grand Marnier, remaining icing sugar and orange rind. Spread over base.

Chocolate Topping: Stir butter into chocolate until melted; spread evenly over Grand Marnier layer. Let cool for 20 minutes in refrigerator; cut into bars. (Bars can be covered, refrigerated up to 2 weeks, or frozen up to 2 months. Let soften slightly before serving.

This recipe for Orange Nanaimo Bars serves/makes 24.

NLC wiki

2008-04-08T11:59:00.000-07:00

Adding to the Favorites wiki was a snap. I want to see more people's favorite books!

Thing 16 Wikis

2008-04-07T13:56:00.000-07:00

Of the Library 2.0 suite of cool stuff, Wikis are among my favorites.

Joe Janes made a good point in his PLA poscast when he said we need to get over being squeamish about using the Wikipedia. If you don't agree with an entry fix it! That's overly optimistic for me, but I agree that we shouldn't reject something out of hand because the content isn't completely controlled. Wikipedia seems to be fairly good at regulating itself.

The wiki examples were really interesting. The St. Joseph County Public Library pathfinders were only editable by library staff--sort of a wiki version of our Best of the Web? http://www.libraryforlife.org/subjectguides/index.php/Main_Page

I see a lot of value in using wikis to track projects that several people work on--so editing would probably be limited to people working on the project. For one open to more people the conference example was good--still limited to registrants to cut down on spam.

Library 2.0

2008-04-04T14:54:00.000-07:00

I looked at several of the posts in the discovery exercise and found valuable insight in all of them.

The three Icebers to steer away from in Away From Icebergs seem like a no brainer http://www.oclc.org/nextspace/002/2.htm We shouldn't be building "just in case" collections (unless we have a mandate to do it, such as our state documents collection). If our way of doing things is so difficult that we have to train our users, we aren't going to have many users. And avoiding the "come to us" is obvious.

This was reinforced for me watching Joe Jane's presentation at PLA today (thanks Lisa for bringing that up for us!). He also talks about needing to take our services to where people are--chatting, emailing, talking in person or on the phone (we even thought about wandering around in Second Life asking people if they needed answers). It was reassuring to hear him say it's OK to do it badly at first--you will get better!

Technorati

2008-04-02T14:57:00.001-07:00

This one was frustrating. I get that it's purpose is to search blogs and find out what the popular conversations out there are. I did the search exercise searching "learning 2.0" in blogs and tags. Couldn't for the life of me figure out how to search the blog directory. The main difference was that retrieval in the tags was more precise, and therefore much smaller (336 posts compared with 2823 posts. Soo...I get that tagging your blog posts is a good thing. Maybe this would be a good way to find blog feeds you want to subscribe to. Or just find out what people are saying about a particular topic.

del.icio.us 13

2008-04-01T13:29:00.000-07:00

As always, our Netserv team came thru and helped me get set up with del.icio.us. I even learned how to put my existing favorites in folders. I got off on a tangent when exploring a couple our Best of the Web links and wound up in Zillow looking at depressing news about Lincoln home values. It would be easy to get lost in a maze of exploring sites others have tagged. Lisa blogged something similar. I may use it to access my home & work favorites.

Rollyo

2008-04-01T11:48:00.001-07:00

I set up a goofy search with web sites about fish--not too successful. Not sure I will use this much.

Library Thing

2008-03-27T09:42:00.001-07:00

This is definitely something I will come back to. I added two of my favorite novels
Delicate Storm by Giles Blunt and Cold Lake by Mary Lawson. Delicate Storm was already in there and Cold Lake wasn't. When I've got more time I will explore more with tagging & commenting & such.

Week 5 image generators

2008-03-25T14:56:00.001-07:00

I didn't spend too much time on this one but had fun checking out a couple of image generators. One converted any word you supplied into nightengale song. Another translated into Parseltongue. Would you believe there is one that creates a Dublin Core record for something you supply? I checked out some totems too. The magazine covers looked a little too daring for me--maybe next week.

Searching for new feeds

2008-03-24T12:36:00.000-07:00

I tried the Blogline search and found one on Shelties. Postings included how to get them to stop barking...good luck with that. Maybe I'll get a few (nonlethal) tips.

Blogline

2008-03-24T11:35:00.000-07:00

OK, after 4 weeks of procrastination, I got Week 4 taken care of. I already subscribed to some RSS feeds, mostly news, Jenny Levine, Michael Stevens, and some other stuff. Susan had told me about using Bloglines and it looked like a neat way to organize them.

I'm a trial and error type, to put it mildly. Remember your teacher telling you to read the instructions all the way through before starting on the test? Nah. So I spent an inordinate amount of time laboriously adding blogs from fellow NLC folks. Then I read down a line in the Learning 2.0 instructions and there it was-- "Do you want to subscribe to all of your co-works' feeds? There is an easy way to do this. See the Extra Stuff section below to learn how."

I also managed to name my blog Beth's Blog instead of what I really wanted to call it--Albertarose to match my Flickr name. I was convinced you can't change the name and even went so far as to set up another blog to use after Learning 2.0 is over. And there is was again--in the settings. Yes you CAN change the name of your blog.

Ah well...it's a learning exercise, right? And will this stop me from doing the trial and error thing? Nah.

I've got around 20 feeds now. I really like Bloglines being able to organize them in folders (does this sound like a librarian or what?). And helpful Susan again came to the rescue and figured out how to edit blog names. I probably won't get to them all every day, much less every week. But it's great fun to learn how to do new things, and this one was really fun!

Fastr on Flickr

2008-02-29T11:00:00.000-08:00

I love the names people come up with for their Flickr applications.

This one could get nearly as addictive as sudoku--a flickr game where you have to guess the tag for a group of randomly generated photos. My score after about 3 minutes? 12.

http://randomchaos.com/games/fastr/

got my docs in

2008-02-29T10:33:00.000-08:00

Got my docs covers into my Flickr account.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/govdoccovers/

Not my Arwen!

2008-02-29T10:21:00.001-08:00

Arwen
Originally uploaded by Pehpsii

It turns out we aren't the only Lord of the Rings fans who are nuts enough to name our dog after an elf. This Flickr picture is NOT my dog. What a pretty tricolor! Mine is a sable and she is anything but the calm etherial Arwen Evenstar of LOTR.

My son knows a girl named Galadriel--now THATS nuts...

Spring IS here, right?

2008-02-29T08:05:00.000-08:00

Is anybody else sick of winter? If it is halfway decent this weekend I'll be outside with a marguerita even if I have to do it with a parka on. There won't be any bugs and we can sit on the deck on the west side of the house, which will be 100 deg. pretty soon and I'll be whining about THAT. If the neighbors see us out there we'll make more and invite them. Don't get me wrong--one a day is plenty for me. I just REALLY want my Sunday 1 to be enjoyed outside.

In school we used to break out the shorts when it hit 50--in Edmonton where I grew up that happens a bit later than here! I rememer sitting in my back yard studying for Grade 12 finals wearing shorts with a tin foil reflector reflecting the sun onto my face. It must have been mid June and it wasn't all that warm. Life at 53° 34' north.

enjoy spring this weekend, even if it doesn't last.

I've got it covered

2008-02-22T09:53:00.000-08:00

One of the fun Flickr groups I learned about lately consists of pix of government document book covers. Who knew there were cool covers for such things? Well I did....Those of us who live and breath docs know that there are some pretty snazzy ones out there, and some hilarious titles too. I've been taking pictures of a few of our Nebraska doc covers, and when we do Flickr week with our Learning 2.0, I will be adding them.

If you've got a favorite Nebraska doc cover, let me know about it so I can come take it's picture.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/govdoccovers/