Thing 30 - It's Over!

Oh my gosh!!!! I am soooo glad it's over!!!!

Suprisingly, I am taking quite a bit with me as I walk away from this learning experience but considering I just wrote about that below I don't feel the need to type it all again.

The program was over-whelming at times. At one point I quit, there were just too many e-mails coming out about how people were doing it wrong, it was one after another and I wasn't even to that point yet so it freaked me out. Then, one of my supervisors asked me to give it another shot and so I did. I think it was set-up pretty well, except when the links wouldn't work. I give it a 7. =0)

You asked if I would ever do another discovery program like this in the future and I honestly have to say I don't know. It would depend on the circumstances, this was pretty time consuming and being that we are under-staffed here I had to come in on my days off to do the majority of it. Not my favorite thing in the world, I rather enjoy my days off.

Thing 29

Okay, so above all else, through this entire journey, I think that learning about RSS feeds and setting up a bloglines account was by far the most irritiating "Thing" we had to do, it took entirely too long to do, mostly because I had no clue what I was doing and I think it almost brought me to tears out of pure frustration at least three times but in the end it was the best excercise of the whole learning experience. It truly is a time saver, I love it and check it out at least once a week to get updated on the stuff that I want to know about. Best by far!!!!

Before starting Web 2.0 I was a little leary about computers and had no real desire to learn anything, I was happy letting my husband navigate me through technology but now I know that can do it for myself. My learning has not stopped here!!!!

Thing 28

http://rollyo.com/dshook/ , Okay, this is my rollyo account. I personally wouldn't have a need for this site because I just google everything and I do mean everything, I don't really have one specfic thing that I am so dedicated to that I would need a search engine of my very own but it may work for some.

Thing 27

Wow! That was easy! It took less than 10 minutes to set it all up and add 5 books, I love it! So, here's the link, http://www.librarything.com/catalog/dshook .

Thing 26

This is actually the same photo that I used for Thing 20, I got it while exploring Flickr. Anyway, for this I went to www.bighugelabs.com , it was extremely easy! If I had a few more pictures on this computer I could have done more on that site but because I only have this one I decided to keep it simple and turn it into a puzzle.

Thing 25

So, I checked out a few of the podcasts that libraries are using today. It was pretty impressive. One thing I don't think is needed or should be needed is a computer to read to our children. Seriously, let's not take that responsibility from parents, or rather, let's not take that parent-child time from our children. But aside from that, one that I checked out had a "library channel" which was pretty cool, it talked about topics that go along with somethings a person may be studing or already reading about and they also have some podcasts to describe what sounded like explanations of library events. Pretty cool way for people to get information!

Thing 24

For this one I actually had to check out all three of the podcast directories just to be able to do this activity. First, I tried podcast.net and it looked promising but unfortunitely something was wrong with the website today because I was unable to view any podcasts, an error kept coming up. So, then I ventured on to podcastalley, searching for the podcasts was easy here but you couldn't view them without downloading or at least that's what the website told me. Finally, I found myself at Yahoo Podcasts, as you can guess this one was my favorite because I was actually able to not only search for podcasts but view them as well. I then went on to adding the RSS feed for the podcast into my bloglines account and now I'm headed off to try my hand at thing 25.

Thing 23

Whew! This took me forever! I did it though, honestly, I think it was my own fault that this excercise took me so long but I got it in the end and that's all that matters, right? Anyway, this site is pretty cool, it seems to work off of tags, I didn't exactly see that word anywhere on the site but searching was extremely easy, I entered Library and a ton of things came up, so, for the purposes of this excercise I closed my eyes, spun around three times and picked the one my curser landed on. It's a pretty cool one despite my lack of effort, however, it did not get rave reviews amoungst the young folk.

This could be a pretty cool way for a library to add visual appeal to a wiki, myspace account, or website. I'm sure we would have no problem finding youtube vidoes to go along with any of the topics that we could get into in these virtual worlds.

Thing 22

For this excercise I checked out many of the toys available to Flickr participants. My favorites of these were the Trading Card Maker, Spell with Flickr and the Postcard Browser. All three of these are my favorite for one reason and that is because when you went to them there was absolutely no confusion, not even a person like me with a serious fear of technology could get lost within their simplicity. Actually, out of those my absolute favorite was Spell with Flickr.

Thing 21

Okay, one more on Flickr and the importance of tagging. Tagging is extremely important in the socail aspect of Flickr, it always a person to enter a word, a subject, and view all pictures Tagged with that word, not just within your albums but in anyones albums that has set their account to public. Without this feature you probably would have never had the opportunity to view that picture, and then, it's taken a step further and you can comment on that photo, add more taggs to it, and make it a favorite of your own. It truelly is a social photo site.

Do I think that our patrons should be allowed access to Flickr at our library? I know there has to be a way that a minors passcode can prevent them from access to certain sites. If we were to figure out how to do that we wouldn't have to worry about the youngsters seeing a picture that they probably shouldn't. Numerous people come to library to use our computers if we start restricting what they can do on them and the sites they can go to then they may just stop coming. As far as the library using Flickr, I think it's a great idea and an awesome way to keep all of our pictures organized. I remember when I first started at the library and learned how to use my e-mail account, their was e-mail after e-mail from people asking everybody to go in and delete pics because the pics folder was full or something of that nature, that wouldn't happen if we had a Flickr account, and, if someone happens to stumble upon our pictures and sees just how awesome our library is that can be nothing but a good thing.