I have had Firefox on my laptop at home and decided to download it at work as well. What I like best about it was being able to display more than one site in the same window by using multiple tabs. I have had the IE version 7 and downloaded Google toolbar and have found it handy to have on the interface. I have a del.ic.ious tag which I have been using for some time and I love the convenience. Another add-on which I downloaded is Greasemonkey. I am surprised by the number of userscripts which are offered on userscripts.org. One can customize a personal page in the most ingenious ways. I am going to try one that customizes Facebook in McMaster colours. In the meantime, I have downloaded Web developer and see how useful the toolbar is going to be for me for stylesheets, resizing images and much more. I did not know about the bookmarklets for Morris searching and find that downloading one is a super useful tool and cuts down on the time used for searching.
Gaming
April 22, 2007 at 4:31 am (MUSH, Second Life, WoW)
I enjoyed the Gaming session on Tuesday with Kelly. She was super at the DDR demo! I learned something new – IMVU which is a neat messenger and reminded me of SL. I haven’t tried it but will soon. I found MUSH a bit abstract and I need to use it in order to really get a sense of a text-based storytelling game. We saw a demo of WoW through a Utube video and it is graphically advanced and very colourful. I can’t imagine playing in a team of up to 40 players!
I am most excited about virtual worlds such as SL. I feel comfortable with using it now and am really looking forward to providing virtual reference this summer. I love being in SL and experiencing the peaceful atmosphere and being part of a virutual world and observing and learning about what goes on in other institutions in SL.
I have had a bit of experience playing Zelda with my son a while back and before that it was games like Mario Bros. I never really got very clever with Zelda because I didn’t have the persistence to continue till the end. I see gaming as an important part of education in that one develops skills such as thinking, psychological and social strategies in knowing how other people play and how you can perhaps improve over them. Games also encourage a striving towards a goal which is a good discipline to have for any age especially the younger generation. Concentration and persistence learned through games can greatly benefit the outcome in real learning situations. I have learned that many libraries are having Gaming Nights, and it is not a bad idea if we had one in our library.
I have found a great resource which archives collections of games and they are easy to try out. There is a link at the University of Illinois at Urbana’s page to the internet archive page: http://www.archive.org/details/gamevideos . It gives a range of games in many categories and the page is navigable and the games ready to play. Try some out!
Social Studies
April 15, 2007 at 3:04 am (Brooklyn College Library, LinkedIN, MySpace, Uncategorized)
I have not used the word ‘friending’ as a verb before, at least I don’t remember if I have. Friending someone on a network has become an everyday activity. We hear of people finding and making friends on social networks easily and quickly however, many users sense a tension between privacy and wanting to be found by the people you want to be found by. For that reason, looking into privacy settings on Facebook and MySpace and other social neworks is a good idea before you start a profile. Some other grey areas are: it could be problematic if you decide to rank your friends; what do you do when you receive requests from people who you don’t know but who have requested friendship?
I’ve had an account on Facebook since Michael Stephens’ presentation in early February. I enjoy maintaining this profile and knowing what is going on with my Facebook friends who are mostly from the McMaster network. I was also able to hook up with a friend with whom I had lost touch for sometime. I am a member of 8 groups and like to peruse through the profiles and participate in discussion groups. Writing on someone’s wall is a quick way of communicating or commenting and fun.
I checked out MySpace but did not open an account. I found the interface cluttered and not so navigable as Facebook. I noticed that there was a built in blogging feature which is a bonus and that the blogs are ranked daily by popularity.
LinkedIn seems a useful network for those who are in the business world. Many professionals are finding it a useful tool when searching for jobs or just sharing a common interest with someone in another organization. Anyone can join this network but the majority of members are professionals in the business world and the network has major corporations such as Sony amongst its members.
I liked the Brooklyn College Library profile on MySpace. It is informative yet useful and is definitely user friendly and is a good idea for a library to have a presence on a social network. I think it is great for publicity and for feedback from students and is current. It incorporates notices, posters, complaints, comments, blog, music and more on one space and can quickly reach people who are united by the goal of education.
Postmodern?
April 9, 2007 at 1:16 am (Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Snipshot, fd's Flicker Toys)
I have been in a rather pensive mode while learning more about the web-based technologies which we have been asked to examine during these past weeks. In experimenting with various tools and after a read of articles, I couldn’t help but compare the ideas of Library 2.0’s open interpretation of ideas with those of the postmodernist movement which occured in subject areas such as literature, art, architecture, music and film after 1945 as a response to the modern period with its notions of fixed beliefs. Postmodernism had a powerful impact upon every aspect of life. Like Library 2.0 the movement couldn’t be defined with a simple sentence because it had lots of components and directions. First and foremost both are characterized by innovation: the experimental nature of reappropriation of formats and interfaces to create pluralistic applications, is similar to movements within the postmodern era with its liberties with conventional forms and styles and combinations of them in a collage-like fashion. Another lateral comparison is that these newer technologies are user-centered and while some utilize social ranking, others like wikis are collaborative and social networking such as Facebook, blogging and IM are powerful tools of communications. Like postmodernism they strive to accept and respect the differences in perspectives of the user and pave the way for an open interpretation of information with different ways of putting it together.
Now on to the applicatioins which I tried. I had a lot of fun with fd’s Flickr Toys and tried out the Warholizer. That photo can be seen on http://www.flickr.com/photos/bacchusbuffy
Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a useful application to have and is especially welcome as a free tool. I like the fact that it has a spreadsheet built in. I have experienced Wordperfect crash and Word not available so I had recently tried Writely, a collaborative word processor which I find has now been taken over by Google.
Snipshot is a very easy to use tool which allows you to save images in Webshots or Flickr. I like its clean and simple interface. I tried resizing an image and it was easy and fast.
Redkid.net is an excellent example of a site which integrates social networking and collaboration. It is truly a one of a kind site and the teacher who designed it is looking to the future by offering these ingenious ways for the students to communicate with one another, have fun and keep up to date. It has a cool interface and offers tools such as image editors, animation, blogging, haiku and many more… obviously the teacher used student input to create such a user centered site. I loved the creative Potato head activity.
Like the central characteristics of postmodernism, library 2.0 presents us with a radical way of looking at life.
