Final thoughts on Learning 2.0

There were some interesting discoveries, but much more for my personal life than my work life. Wickis are the only thing we have actually applied in the work environment. Some of the other sites have been entertaining, but most of what's out there is too superficial to be of much value in lifelong learning. Some of the social networking sites might also be useful, but again, more in my personal life than my work life. With the internet you can still maintain some social contacts even when you live in the middle of nowhere. It may be because of my age, but I still find electronic social interactions vastly inferior to personal ones.
There would have to be a really great prize for me to do this again. It has taken up much more time than I can really afford.

Library 2.0

I have very fixed feelings about all of this. I can see a usefulness for communicating with library users, and perhaps expanding the number of people who use the library, but on the other hand, I think there is too much hype. There seems to be an assumption that all library interactions can be transacted online. I'm afraid that the library as a place will fall by the wayside. Information retrieval on the web still seems to have a long ways to go. I'm confronted too often with browsing long lists, instead of being able to use information retrieval tools that will only give me what I want.

Social networking

It will take me a long time to get over the idea that things like myspace and facebook are not just for people who would consider me to be only slightly younger than the dinosaurs. This sort of stuff might be useful for people who are the only ones doing what they're doing in their organization, have esoteric interests, or want to establish business networks. On a whim, I decided to sign up for facebook. Perhaps even I can "friend".

Podcasts

Some interesting stuff here (things I agree with). Nothing I would feel right about listening to while I was trying to work, though. I have a feeling there's more of interest out there than I was finding. I don't know if the problem is inadequate indexing on the part of the sites, or my not taking enough time to learn how to thoroughly search the sites

Youtube

I didn't find much of interest at youtube; I'm really not at all in to popular culture stuff. Too much of what's there is like looking at someone's home movies (If anyone still does that). In the library setting, this might be useful for short instructional videos, either for users or staff. Having missed the last lunar eclipse, though, I did enjoy looking at the fast forward version I found.

Apps

I tried the Google application, and posted a 1 sentence document to my blog. My life is too boring to need many of these applications, but I see the advantage of having your documents not tied to any one machine. Storage space must be getting really cheap.

This is my text document using Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

Web2.0 Awards

I've spent some time looking at Biblio.com. Lots of interesting books that I would love to have but can't afford. It was fun just looking at the pictures of the books. It was easier to browse the site than to use the advanced search. I tried an author search, but it was "oring" the first and last names rather "anding" so there was lots of extraneous material. I managed to get around it by adding a keyword. This might be a convenient place for libraries looking for out of print or rare books.

Sandbox

I'm glad there were instructions on how to add your blog; the edit page was not at all intuitive. The sandbox was not particularly interesting, I did attempt some changes, however, and spent more time at it than I should have.

Wickis

One advantage of wickis is that everyone knows something that no one else, or very few people know. This can be an advantage in creating things like subject guides. The collective input will result in a greater breadth and depth of coverage than any one person could provide. In our department we are experimenting with a wicki that will include documentation. The feeling is that the people closest to the work should have input into what the documentation says. A downside to wickis is that they assume everyone is going to be cooperative; not always a valid assumption

Technorati

The tag search lead directly the the u-tube broadcast by our illustrious acting Dean (was that on purpose?). The state of... info was interesting, especially the information on growth, and all the various languages being used.

Del.icio.us

What I find most useful about sites like this is the opportunity it provides to interact with people who hold similar interests, especially when you live in an isolated area like SE Ohio. It appears that no matter how esoteric your interests, there are other people out there who hold similar interests. I will sign up for this for that reason.

Weatherunderground link

This one is extra credit. I have been looking at a site called weatherunderground to keep track of the forecast for some time. I recently discovered their online photo gallery where people can contribute photos of a weather, outdoors, wildlife nature. I recently got a fairly decent digital camera for free, and thought it would be fun to contribute some pictures of my own. Other people can rate your pictures on a 1 to 10 scale, and you can receive feedback to improve your photography skills. The weatherunderground link goes to the pictures I have contributed since joining last week.

Rollyo

I can see where this might be useful for librarians. Perhaps I wasn't paying attention, but you seemed to need to know what urls you wanted to enter. Is there a way to search for web sites and then add a link back to your rollyo account?

Library thing

This turned out to be more interesting than I thought it would. Searching on it though, was not easy. This is mainly because I searched for books written between 1450 and 1850. Lots of different editions, and particularly difficult to find the exact edition I had read. I looked for obscure works, but every one was shared by others, any where between 27 and 1204. The descriptive tags were interesting, as well as the automatic recommendations. I found the other places on the web to be less useful.

Image Generation

The image at top right is my contribution to this week's exercise. Most of what I found on the image generation sites was too cutsey or popular culturish for my taste. The logo and button generator site did, however look interesting. I would have like something fancier, but I had already spent more time on this than I can afford

RSS feeds

I may be regarded as uncooperative this week, because I haven't really done as I've been told. I would like to think I'm "taking charge of your own learning", and obeying the spirit of the exercise if not the letter. I will let the Learning 2.0 overlords decide if I should be banished.


My first thought was "oh no, another account to create." This almost made me drop out, but I decided to look for alternatives. After looking around a bit, and doing some RSS exploring, I discovered that the Google account I set up for the blog has a Google Reader option that lets you access RSS feeds. There were some canned options, none of which particularly interested me, but there was a search option for finding feeds. I cheated a bit, because I already knew most of the sites I wanted to access, but I have set up several feeds. I then discovered that Internet Explorer has a feed option. I went back, found several more sites, and can now access those through IE. Some of these should actually be useful in work. I did not add any of the feeds I was supposed to, and I am not going to like to feeds on other person's blogs. My interests are rather esoteric, and the blog linking is too voyeuristic for me.

I am wondering if these things are not just adding to the information overload problem. One could easily spend so much time looking for and reading information, that nothing else is accomplished in the course of the day. We all need information, but how much is enough? While I did find some feeds of interest and usefulness, how much of this do I really need to know to function at work and outside?

Flickr Fun

I found the World in Pictures to be fun. A great way to travel the world from your desktop. It was interesting to key in a particular latitude and longitude and see what came up

Flickr picture

This picture is from R. Hammitt's Howard County Scenes, and is part of this week's Learning 2.0 exercixe

Technology comment #2

A lot of this technology assumes one wants to share every detail of their life with complete strangers anywhere in the world. I don't even share much with my close friends (there are a few), let alone anyone who has web access. Not everyone is nice.

Technology Comment

This is for excerise #7 in the Learning 2.0 assignment. I find technology a lot like driving my car. I appreciate what it can do for me, but I find learning about how it works to be dry as dust.

Cats

We have had 4 cats over the years, but I have always been fascinated the big cats. When I go to the zoo I always look for the cats first. It may be the combination of beauty and danger that interests me. If I have time to dabble, I will add more about cats, especially conservation.

Self Learning

This post is part of the Learning 2.0 exercise. Of the 7 1/2 steps the hardest is begin with the end in mind. It reminds me of school, when the teacher wanted an outline before you wrote the paper. I always did the outline last, because I didn't know what the paper was going to look like until it was done. The easiest is accept responsibility for your own learning. I do not need to be pushed to learn; learning is fun! This explains a lot of why I am doing what I'm doing.

Rationale

I am starting this as part of a learning 2.0 exercise at work. I chose the name cornucopia because I expect this to be a hodgepodge of interests.