Avatars

I have heard the kids out on the computers and a few people into gaming talki about Avatars. I never looked anything up about them figuring I'd never use an online "alter ego". But.....you never know. It spent a little time at a couple of sites designing one. But did not save it. None seemed quite what I would want. It was pretty funny at the Simpson site playing with their avatar tools. I will play with avatar stuff some more some time.

Conclusion:Library 2.0

What was my favorite discovery....hmmmm, I had made a blog but had never subscribed to RSS. One could be at their computer 24/7 trying to keep up with what they'd subscribed to. And I had been to YOuTube and Facebook and played with Myfamily.com. I liked playing with LibraryThing. I had been to the site but had not actually started entering my own home collection. I showed it to a couple of local churches that have small libraries of resources. I learned the most on the tagging and social bookmarking. I hadn't known much about Del.icio.us. We have a lot of favorite help websites at the library and now we need to use tags and organize them. I want to do some book review podcasts...or I was thinking of using my movie camera to do live book reviews of the kids this summer and then post them on a library book review blog. And I thought I knew about wikis, but I have a much better understanding now. In fact, I think we are really going to use this one first. We had been going to make some additional webpages for some ongoing information spots...community education and a family resource center. I think we want wikis so all the collaborators can enter their own information. Although the first wiki, I think will be a one-stop Richland County. I was just at a community planning event on Friday and many people wanted one place to go for all kinds of information...kids summer recreation, any county education and training, organizations, etc.

I really liked the hands on. And I liked the time to do and play with each lesson. I liked the links to the webcast that taught the lesson and all the examples really helped. Yes, I would take a class like this again. Sometimes I ran into difficulty so it was good I had other staff that was taking the class., We could figure things out together. And I should have taken the trainers up on their help. I am not sure what could make it better....finding TIME. Or being able to have one of the trainers on staff (:

Lifelong learning is just that....I am going to be doing it the rest of my life....it did exercise my brain which will continue to keep me young!

Do I Wanna......Wiki?

Yes, I wanna wiki along with the rest. I found wonderful projects on many of the example sites. Having a staff wiki to eliminate all the e-mails and projects going on and who is working on what...sounds like a good idea. I had thought earlier that a blog might be the way to go but a wiki might be better. The wiki of the library with thir strategic plan posted so they could get community input and I really liked the Rochester one-stop information page wiki. It is just hard to plan the time and figure out where to start first. I also need to look more at which wiki software to use and whether to have it on our server so your library could have a little more control and more flexibility. I am glad we have all of this information on one spot about library 2.0 so I can go back anytime and review. We currently have a collaborative group working on a Famioly Resource Center and we were going to do a web page.....now I am thinking go with a wiki!

Lesson 8- A DEL.ICIO.US ACCOUNT

I got an account for Del.icio.us account and found a website I was looking at about podcasting. So I bookmarked it and found that over 200 other people had also bookmarked it. Tells you that it probably is a pretty good site. Maybe we could make just a library account and give the password to the account to the entire staff. Then the whole staff could bookmark good library sites. We could set up some agreed upon tags to start with. Then no matter what computer you were at you could access these library sites--one tag might be reference or you could tag by dewey.

LESSON 8 -TAGGING AND SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

I did some comparing between Del.icio.us and the Google bookmark feature. Google also lets you access your bookmarks from any computer. You are also able to give them tags, although Google calls them labels and you can list more than one label. You can also sort your bookmarks by a few different ways; by labels, newest to oldes,etc. Goggle also givce you a place for notes. The one thing it does not do which Del.icio.us does is to do the social part. It doesn't show you the numbers of other people with similar tags/labels or links to other similar websites. I haven't set up an account yet. But I'll probably play around with it later.

YOUTUBE AND OTHER VIDEO SITES

No wonder job productivity can be down....you could watch and watch videos. I agree..some are terrific and some are terrible. The Ninja Librarian ones are funny and did like the magnum PI one. We got a brainstorm for one here at the Library----if we ever get to it. I've thought about the possibilities. Most are the same as I saw of videos on YouTube;showing how to use the card catalog, a tour of the library, storytime, book reviews and clips of programs to be held. We just have to figure out how we are going to sandwich this in our goals and plans.

Someone had told me about the video I picked. So I found it on YouTube. I love it! And any of you moms with kids or grandkids will totally relate.

Big Think was pretty interesting,too. Also there is another video spot called Godtube.com for Christian topics.

"THE MOM" to the WILLIAM TELL OVERTURE