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
