Week 5, Thing #11 Web 2.0 awards

I found my house's current value on Zillows (down 14% in the last 30 days, no surprise), checked out the social networking sites on Ning (yes, there are librarian groups there!), watched Google's video extolling the virtues of Google Docs, and surveyed the many free widgets from Your Minis
Peer Trainer wants to help me lose weight, and 43 Things wants me to list my life's goals and chart my progress. I notice that all of these sites are very easy to use, simple design, and, being web 2.0, all about collaboration. I did not understand the web design sites, but I do get that people are working together on projects on those sites and sharing information for free. It is very intriguing to see this shift from independent competition to widescale collaboration, and I wonder how long it will be before our political institutions catch up. Serendipity again. Technology and Learning just featured Web 2.0 tools in the February 08 issue, with an emphasis on engaging students through social networking. Check out this issue for links to schools which are using Web 2.0 sites such as Flickr, blogs, wikis, Skype, and Twitter to extend the classroom into cyberspace. Twitter is like sending mini-postcards throughout the day to your online "family" or "group", like, "Hey, I just got off the plane!" or "Found a great pair of shoes." Web 2.0 is all about Connection and Collaboration.

Thing 10 postscript

Postscript to my foray into the land of image generators. It's much easier if you create a folder for images (I cleverly labeled mine "images") to save the files; that way, you can edit them later, decide where to post them, etc. You can see from my cartoon strip that somehow not all of the dialogue made it into the final image. Very fun possibilities here for my library web page!

Week 5, Thing #10 Image Generators

Week 4, #9 Blog feeds

Technorati, Topix, Feedster, GoogleBlogsearch, and Syndic8 all search for blogs using "tags" (what we librarians used to call keywords). A useful link was the School Library blogs , which searches specifically for library blogs. My favorites were Gargoyles loose in the library and Wanderings. Gargoyles has a lot of great pictures and I enjoy seeing what other librarian's days are like. Wanderings is content-rich, with archives of past blogs with clear informative titles. Now that I am aware of and looking for the RSS feed icon, I see that many online newspapers do offer RSS feed subscriptions, and I am astonished at the breadth of information available free. At Topix, I can subscribe to stories about my home town, and in one day found articles and information about an incident last weekend from several different newspapers and syndicated sources that did not appear in our local papers. I doubt I'll ever be asked to be on a jury again.

Week 4, Thing #8 RSS Feeds & Google Reader

My nifty igoogle page in place, with Google Reader embedded in it and RSS feeds from several education, library, political and technology sites in place, the news now comes to me voluminously Another site I need to explore more is Feedster.com, another "aggregator" site. And a "widget" or was it a "gadget" allowed me to share some interesting content on my blog by embedding a link from my Google Reader page to my blog. Wow! I now have a "web presence," and even read an article about "webetiquette" and how to be a "good date" online by using proper language, responding promptly to comments on my blog (I admit I didn't know I could or should, but now that I know I certainly will). Why not encourage students to have their own igoogle page? They could use the calendar to organize their assignments, the Google Reader for research (have an aggregator find articles on their topic for them), and begin collaborating via blogs and wikis. Okay, I admit, I am finally "getting it." Thank you, 2.0 team, for pointing the way!

Dad at his computer

Week 3, Thing 7 : Technology Learning Styles

My 83 year old father has been a guest in my home while he recovers from surgery, and we set up his computer downstairs for him. He spends time every day checking email, then working on learning his new 2007 Microsoft Office Suite programs. We are having fun comparing notes on my learning curve with School Library Learning 2.0, and find the process is similar: get the facts, give it a try, figure out what mistakes were made, and try again. His learning style is a little different than mine, in that he prefers to spend quite a bit of time getting the facts (watching a tutorial, for example) before experimenting. Monday I held a workshop for one of the departments at school showing them some specific features of our research databases they could use with their Special Education students. Some of the obstacles to their learning were very simple -- how to find the library web page, how to use the "tabs" feature in windows to go back and forth between applications, or how to back up a URL. Some preferred to tackle one task at a time and others liked to dabble a bit in all of the options I had demonstrated, confident they could refine their skills later. This afternoon I helped a student in the library who did not have the confidence to type in a password unless I was standing right there next to her! I could adapt the format of this online course of "23 Things" to help new students and new teachers at our school learn about and practice using some of the technology available to them. That would allow some to spend the time they need to "get the facts," others to jump in and learn by doing, and anyone to practice and get feedback online. The Technology Committee would have to help with the feedback, of course, but it's certainly "doable."