REFLECTIONS ON THE 23 THINGS....

The online Web 2.0 learning has been a very worthwhile experience. It has been great to explore so many aspects on the web that I would probably not venture in the normal course of life as a librarian.

I enjoyed the session on e-books and kindle and finding out about websites such as Technoratti that keeps surfers up to date with all the new advances in web technologies. Learning about flicker and having a "play" with some of the programmes where you can "doctor up" photo's to make them look older or give people a "face lift" was a laugh!



Learning how to use RSS feeds to send new postings of articles was very useful but it now is a bit burdensome as you also have to keep up with reading them as they soon pile up quickly!



Exploring the social networking sites was a useful exercise as highlighted the unique features of these sites. So many people come into the library to use "bebo" and I was curious as to the differences between bebo, myspace and facebook as there are different friends of my who use these vehicles to communicate. I have found the "Old Friends" network a useful vehicle in which to catch up with folks but it is limited in ways that bebo and facebook aren't.



Exploring Web 2.0 online tools was one of the most relevant tasks to our field of work . Sites such as Library thing are fantastic. I enjoyed publishing my reading interests and hobies on our blog using widgets. I particularly like the way that the book titles are rotated around so that everytime you log on to the blog you get a different selection - very cool!



YouTube will always be a favourite site as there are limitless vidoclips that you can view! Many young people spend all their time up on the learn.net looking at clips of their favourite hip hop artists. It is also a very easy way to publish movies you've taken from your mobile and "show it to the world." There are lots of "exhibitionists" publishing clips, but there are excellent training videos that we also watched courtesy of youTube. There are some really funny animals clips and "bloopers" that are great to cheer you up on a bad day!

The exercise on wiki's was very informative and it clarified for me that wiki's are a useful way of publishing information on any number of topics. I was interesting to find out how easy it was for anyone to publish infomation and comment on other people's entries. Students comonly use wikipedia to get information for homework tasks and teachers frequently encourage students to use other websites because the information provided can be too "long-winded" or complicated for most students.

The lesson on podcasts was useful as many schools have their own websites and are making podcasts to show their community what they are learning. Many pastors enjoy the convenience of listening to their favourite preachers via podcasts. This technology is rapidly becoming the favoured was for students studying "long distance" so having a knowledge about what's available and some of the most popular sites where you can access podcasts was very helpful.

I found this course of study a novel experience and I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to undertake Web 2.0 training as a reasonably new librarian.

Jesus Freak

e-books

Here we are..... the last lesson for Web 2.0 training. This has been a GREAT experience and it has opened up many new worlds for me to discover. There are still aspects that I am trying to master but I know that I have benefitted from this training and will be able to put a lot of the new learning to good use in the library setting.


I was interested to see on the home page of ebooks.com the book "The Shack" as this was the book that we bought for our pastors and leaders in the church for Christmas. I heard that this book was a #1 New York times best seller, so it must be a good read! (I haven't read it yet!). Apparently there are 130,000 popular, professional and academic ebooks from the world's leading publishers available for the reader to access.

I was quite chuffed when I was successfully able to post an excerpt of this book onto the blog! It was easy to post on my blog as it supplied some straight-forward guidelines about whether to use a small widget and large widget and even the fact that some blogs don't recognise Java script - which was a very useful comment.


I clicked on to Project Guttenburg and decided to investigate the "Top 100 EBooks. What did I discover? On the 2 February 2009, 96,000 odd EBooks were downloaded! WOW!



Top 100 EBooks yesterday - 3rd February 2009 :


The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) by J. Arthur Thomson (955)
Manners, Customs, and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period by P. L. Jacob (676)
Illustrated History of Furniture by Frederick Litchfield (509)
Searchlights on Health by B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols (367)
The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana by Vatsyayana (347)
History of the United States by Charles A. Beard and Mary Ritter Beard (326)
Our Day by William Ambrose Spicer (310)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (307)
Ulysses by James Joyce (274)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (269)
The Beginner's American History by D. H. Montgomery (266)
General Science by Bertha M. Clark (266)
Woman as Decoration by Emily Burbank (258)
The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English by Ray Vaughn Pierce (257)
Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany by Douglas Houghton Campbell (234)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (229)
The Practice and Science of Drawing by Harold Speed (222)
The Mafulu by Robert Wood Williamson (218)
Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome by E.M. Berens (218)
Discoverers and Explorers by Edward R. Shaw (215)



Very interesting to see the types ofbooks people are downloading. There are real "classics" such as Pride and Prejudice, Huckleberry Finn, and Alice in Wonderland, as well as books on American history, science and even the karma sutra! Very interesting!

When it came to the most popular authors it was a closely fought race between Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, followed by Sir Arthur conan Doyle, William Shakespeare and Jane Austen.

Our last optional discovery exercise is to find out about Amazon's kindle. As I am one of the trainers with the "Best Sellers", I am already aware of the features of the Kindle. It is a wonderful gadget that combines the features of a book in terms of it's dimension and shape with the convenience of a computer where you can download a book to read and scroll down the pages. I haven't seen anyone with one in New Zealand yet, but give this invention a few moe years and it may become as popular as the personal computer - who knows!

If you want to check out this new innovation click on the link below:

http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Amazons-Wireless-Reading-Device/dp/B000FI73MA

That's it for now! Signing off.....

Jesus Freak

More Web 2.0 discoveries!

Podcasts

I enjoyed listening to a YouTubevideo on podcasting which I found on ipodder.com from our "friends at commoncraft". I have wondered where the name "podcast" came from, and I now know it means "Personal/On/Demand." A podcast is defined as "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player. There are thousands of podcasts are available at the iTunes Music Store, and websites such as iPodder.com and Podcast.net track thousands more.

When I was exploring podcast alley it was great to see that podcasts are categorised just like books are categorised and you could see the top 10 podcasts downloaded (mostly about sex!) and those that were more recently added to the list. I decided to have a look at the "Religion and Spirituality" genre out of curiosity to see if there were any preachers that I was interested in. There were 2545 to selcet from! WOW! Very impressive. The podcasts were listed by their title. No. 10 on the list sounded interesting and when I clicked on the title a brief descriptor appeared which outlined what the podcast was all about - cool feature! Pray-as-you-go was not a sermon or a bible-study, but provided a framework for your own prayer, combining music, scripture and questions for reflection (10-12 minute prayer session) that you can receive every day. At No. 273 was a "Drive time Devotions" from Saddleback church. Browsing down the list there seemed to be a lot of Catholic based stuff and pagan stuff which doesn't interest me at all.
Podcast.com looked much more appealing and it was neat how they showed a selcetion of podcasts on their homepage as well as an index on the RHS for you to select from e.g "What's in the news " and "digital planet".

I had an enjoyable time viewing the host of sites and RSS feeds that I could select from to fill up all my waking hours! All I need now is the iPod! Now which one will I start with......

Bye for now

Jesus Freak

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Hello there once again to another year full of new opportunities to learn, grow and discover a whole lot of things that I still haven 't yet found out about!

As I mentionned in my last blog, I am looking forward to becoming an "Any Questions" practitioner as it will enable me to assist students more efficiently with their homework questions and also help me assist my own children at their homework! It was funny just the other day I took a call from a young teenager who wanted the number for the NZQA website and it took me less than 2 mins to find the info (they were holding on the phone) and relay it to them! It was like a "practice run" before the practice sessions which take place over the next few days at Botany Library!

Had a GREAT break over the holidays. The highlight was definitely the trip to Melbourne in January. The weather was fantastic and we were staying at a hotel at St Kilda which looked out over the beach. It reminded me of the Napier foreshore, but much better! Getting to understand the tram/bus/train system around the town was a bit of a challenge, however! Some of the places we visited included the Weribee Zoo where we saw lots of African animals - kind of like a real safari; Scienceworks out at Spotswood which was like MOTAT - but heaps better; D.F.O - the shopping outlet store - lot's of good bargains; The Pancake Parlour - very yummy; an authentic Italian restaurant near Flinders Street where I enjoyed a homemade lasagne; and "Luna Park" the funpark just down the street from where we stayed.

It was also great to catch up with lots of friends - 4 Phillipino families who shifted from NZ to Melbourne 2 years ago; Peter & Shirley who work with Asian students in a church in North Melbourne, and Geoff & Glenda who my husband & I met at Bible College who shifted to Melbourne recently.

There were a few things we didn't get to this time around, so we have some good reasons to return, hopefully in the not too distant future!

Signing off for now!

Jesus Freak