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!