Technological journeys

Feedback

rebar — Wed, 09 May 2007 20:07:46 +0000

I have enjoyed this course a lot and learned so much in a short time. I would definitely participate in another course. I would like to see an on-line course with synchronous communication. This might be difficult logistically, but our participation would recieve feedback and it would be live and it would be exciting. Perhaps we could use some open source software and make it available to library staff and to the community from other libraries such as Mohawk and Hamilton Public. Alternatively, a course in Second Life would be useful as it would be synchronous. I would also like to see the implementation of a specific tool such as a wiki, to be used for staff communication, brainstorming etc for an upcoming project. While we learned about many different kinds of tools of social networking, other than blogging, I think we need to concentrate on one of those tools and either do a collaborative project or a pilot within the library.

What I have learned from Library 2.0

rebar — Mon, 07 May 2007 03:52:45 +0000

A heck of a lot! After our weekly ”assignments”, I can appreciate what is out there to use and the fact that it is free and fun. What that stands out in my mind is that Library 2.0 exercises didn’t really feel like a formal course because firstly it is user friendly and I felt a certain freedom to blog and comment and it initiated collaboration and user participation in creating wikis. So our efforts were given validity and our contributions recognized. There was a variety of tools to learn, and ample chance to show creativity: it was a user centered environment, controlled by us. I felt good in having my own Facebook account and being able to enjoy it and communicate with my friends. Most of all I liked the fact that I didn’t have to be in the library physically to take advantage of these initiatives. This is especially relevant to my being in Second Life and in virtual reference. The democratization of library methods is in!

Thanks to Amanda and the Emerging Technologies Group for giving their time and skills to help us.

Browser add-ons

rebar — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 02:39:50 +0000

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

rebar — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 04:31:21 +0000

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

rebar — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 03:04:19 +0000

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?

rebar — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 01:16:04 +0000

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.

Explorations

rebar — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 04:33:01 +0000

I have been experimenting with different tools and sites in the last week. We were asked to listen to some podcasts and in doing so I came across a couple of sites on podcasts. The first is a media aggregator called Juice which automatically downloads podcasts and media files to your computer. It is an open source, free software which manages podcasts in multiple media formats and is also cross-platform. I have downloaded it to my laptop. It is useful when you can’t listen to an audio programme when it is scheduled. It has a built-in directory with thousands of podcasts. The second site is Podcast Alley. This site is also a media feed which manages podcasts and lists the ten most popular ones as voted by users for a month at a time. There is a vote button next to the listings. An interesting concept is offered by Gabcast. It is a podcasting and audioblogging platform that offers free service to create and publish your podcast. Once you have made and published your recording (e.g.interview, greetings, lecture) by using a phone or VoIP a feed is generated to your channel. You can use it by embedding a Flash audio player into your website or blog and communicate with your friends, students, cusotomers etc.

Some of the other tools I looked at are Mindpicnic. This is an online e-learning website which is self-directed. It empowers its users to create and learn from user-generated content. You can sign up from a list of courses such as in French, Business, Computer and receive a reading list with assignments. You use flashcards and Mindpicnic keeps track of your progress through “red and green bars”. This is a very tough programme as Mindpicnic thinks that if your score is under 92% you need to read the book again! Sounds very challenging. The courses are rated by its users and tagged. Best of all the courses are free!

Finally, I have come across an application called Mashup which is a term taken from music, meaning a genre of songs made up of parts from other songs. Applying this to web techonology, this term is used when people are creating a hybrid technology using content, feeds, google, yahoo and other web sites, and mixing it all together to create a world wide web of a new dimension and with new problems of expropriation of content and ideas. The mashups are also ocurring in video and podcasts. I think that this innovative use of web technologies is bound to change the way the web is being used by most of us.

Folksonomy

rebar — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 03:14:39 +0000

This coined word is made up of the words ‘folk’ and ‘taxonomy’. It is aptly named for its attributes. It defines a people generated system of classification or tagging which we are asked to examine in this assignment for Library 2.0. I have had an account in del.icio.us and find it a useful way to store favourite sites. It is also useful as a search tool because the tags which people have used can bring on a new meaning to your original search. Sociologically, it is interesting to let your category take on a new meaning because you learn how people think. Mind you, sometimes this can be irritating, as the tags you find are idiosyncratic and meaningless. Some are subjective and very casual and can almost take you away from your initial search when you are trying to focus on a specific search. I also subsribe to digg, another tagging social content site, which is very similar to del-icio.us in that the ranking system of favourite sites is controlled by the users. Both del.icio.us and digg are dependent upon numbers next to the posts on their pages and these are like popularity votes. I haven’t compared the two in great length as yet. I like the button for del.icio.us and have found the convenience of having it on my browser at work and at home and it is a great feature to have and a quick way to bookmark a site.

I use Flickr to view family photos but have never posted on it. Here is a cool photo. It is great to be able to search by tags in Flickr. Apparently you can make scrapbooks using your photos too, by using categories such as events, or by date or subjects and so on. This is an exciting possibility.

Piki wiki

rebar — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 19:00:01 +0000

I dedicate this blog to Sarah…who demonstrated PBWiki and Paintwiki very efficiently and sat with me so I could get away from my multitasking mode and get something written. I thank her for her patience. I had in the past year logged on to a Reference dept page but did not contribute and did not pursue wikis. I did like PBWiki for its point and click feature but did not like it for the templates as I thought they gave a “false” sense of format because I could backspace the given text and change the predetmined style or font. I like Paintwiki better as I felt freer and was able to navigate in it more easily than the PBwiki. (Sorry, Sarah!)

I think it would be a useful mechanism within the department to collaborate on a task or document without having to wonder which version is the most current or having to look at dates when a document such as in Word, was last created. It would also be great for meeting agendas which can change at the last minute. Secure wikis can be used in a team where not everyone can access the same level of information. This is a great form of communication.

Sailing along Library 2.0

rebar — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 17:01:26 +0000

I enjoyed reading participants blogs and it is a great way to keep informed of ideas and thoughts of colleagues with whom you don’t keep in touch with otherwise. As to RSS feeds, I have been generally conservative about adding feeds to my already existing account on Bloglines. My subscriptions are to the ETG, Digital Photo Review, Arts Journal, Wired News and the Google Blog. I have made a subject category and hope it will work. I want to have virtual tours of libraries and keep updated with sites all over the world. It would be nice if we had that in our library, especially a virtual tour of the William Ready Division. I look forward to experimenting more with RSS feeds and see how the Firefox interface compares with Bloglines.