working on wrapping up

Well it has taken me awhile to wrap up everything I needed to do to finish this thing up, and I may not be done yet, I keep finding little nooks and crannies to explore. One of the things I did was go back to the bonus exercise on LifeLongLearning and watch the 14 minutes. The easiest part for me is to PLAY, I try to have fun with whatever I am doing and look for ways to make it fun if that is absent. I am not sure I agree with all of the steps that were proposed, I like to go into learning experiences with an open mind and take what comes. This makes setting goals a difficult part of the process, my feeling is that if you are concentrating so much on the goals you will miss some learning opportunities and then what is the point?

I also got help transfering an online image that I generated to my blog. But I was able to go back and create a T-Shirt design, so I am proud of that. Then I took the method of transference and did it myself and got the picture that I added to my blog to show up. I think both items dressed up the blog just abit.

It also came to my attention that I had not explored the search engine assignments fully and so went back and experimented again. Initially I got similar results when I searched Apia, that is all the same, but at the last minute I found his name was spelled Appia and that made just enough difference, though not in Google, Yahoo, or Ask.com, but Rollyo and Mamma and Surfwax and Dogpile each added another choice website that led me further and further into his life and work. Most importantly I remembered why he was so important in theatre history. He was one of the first to pull all elements of a production together to serve the written works, he believed that the elements of design were not seperate displines but each should participate in the theme, lighting was one of the chief elements for him, though he also broke the proscenium by using platforms at different levels. This also included music and motion and he befriended the leader of a movement called Eurythmics designed to keep the actor's motion harmonius and natural even on stage.

On top of all this I had the opportunity to go back and use Google Documents for a number of projects including my latest monthly report. I guess that qualifies it for my most surprising discovery from 2.0, though I did like avatars, youtube, and the rest as well. Even though I definitely had trouble keeping up, I think I would choose to participate again, because I do like learning stuff and if it hadn't been forced on me I probably wouldn't have explored the 20 items in anywhere near the depth we got with these assignments.

feeling alittle game--y

Well I like board games, and video games and even role playing games, so I expected to like this one. I played Hollywood Jumble and it was too easy I had to make mistakes to make it interesting and Wordsense was somewhat better but not much. I tried the burger making thing next because I have a fond memory of a similar video game, but I couldn't get it to do what needed to be done when I did know what needed to be done. This always frustated me about video games, and pinball, and so I guess I may be too picky about my games. If I ever find one that I like, I will be hooked forever, but until then I will just concentrate on the game of life. Oh, I suppose it would be useful in relating to all the gamers who come in search of computers, so it all does have a purpose.

maplovers love

I enjoyed google earthing very much, because I am a maplover and so not only do I recognize the reference uses, but I had a good time. First I guess I have to admit it was not on the computer so I had to install it, which went smoothly. Then I flew to my house and checked it out from above, before moving over to Jetty Island and checking that out as well as the pictures attached. Then I tried the businesses search and it brought up the appropriate libraries (although I do not recall the Everett libraries coming up--but no problem with SIL). My directions test included Victoria, BC to see if it recommended any swimming and it made appropriate use of the Ferry system, and worked just fine. All in all a very pleasant experience.

I played with meez at the very end of my teen librarian days and was not overly impressed with the likeness, tektek got me much closer. I did look at the Second Life videos and just figured it was more than I could handle (I barely manage First Life with any adequacy). So I am not on SL and probably won't be.

online applications google docs +

Google having word processing is a very useful thing and I am sure I will have occasion to recommend it to people at the Information Desk and Zoho was even more impressive. I did share a document with some of my coworkers and contributed to the documents they had shared with me. I must admit it took me some extra time, as I got kicked out of the google docs once and had to go back in.

improving search engines

Well search engines are growing up. It wasn't too long ago I went through a Soaring workshop and they recommended Surfwax as a way to expand searching to get more hits. It was interesting to see that the Berkeley article no longer recommended metasearches (though still having some praise for surfwax). My experimenting brought up most of the same results, whether I did google, yahoo, ask.com, dogpile, or surfwax. I tried searching Mawson and got south-pole.com and coolantarctic.com on all the various engines, thinking this might be aberration, I tried my classic Purple Martin House, bringing up the same sites on each engine again, I also tried Mertz one of Mawson's companions, but that was so generic that it didn't bring up anything on any of the engines until I added other search terms and then I was back to the same results again. My conclusion is that the basics engines have improved so much that the metasearch engines are only sporadically needed. This does go along with the empirical data from the reference desk, because I hardly ever have resorted to surfwax in the last year. Thanks for providing the opportunity to synthesize this thought process, I look forward to testing my hypothesis with desk opportunities.

podcasting for the faint hearted

Well I have been listening to podcasting for years and so this was supposed to be the easy assignment. I regularly keep up on my NPR Weekend edition stuff by listening to podcasts when I can not listen live, I get to catch up with Dan Schorr and Art Thiel regularly and recently found Cokie Roberts and Frank Deford represented as well. I also have listened to Seattle's sports radio station podcasts. So with all this experience, I thought piece of cake, but then I tried to find library related podcasts on the directories and even when I found some they didn't take me directly to the podcasts, in fact I could not find the one I was looking for (this was in Learn Out Loud) and while I eventually got Podcast Alley to work it was not easy, intutitive, or fun).

So I listened to LibVibe, though the one that came up was for June 3 and didn't seem very current. I also listened to Reminences of the Great Depression for the 4th of July weekend talking about struggling to get by. The one of my choosing was the Cokie Roberts analysis of the polictical scene from NPR and what a rough week Obama seemed to be having.

I have heard vague rumblings about SIL podcasts of storytimes and that sounds like a wonderful use of the technology and fun to do the readings of favorite kids books. It is also another source of information when tracking down unusual requests, so I do see reference uses as well.