Thing Twenty-two

I hereby resolve:

To practice the "things" I have learned during this project at least once a week. I will print a list of all the 23 things and keep it handy to refer back to occasionally and remind myself of the ways the web 2.0 applications can help me at work, at home and to just have fun online.

Thing Twenty One

Where were these when I was in school? I can definitely see a use for showing these to students. Could also be of use to our "homework helpers." We have a lot of teachers and education students that might find the support materials handy. I don't think I would use either of these for my own projects though. At least not regularly.

Thing Twenty

I am very sure that books will be around for a long, long time. A "paperless" society was speculated about years ago and yet we seem to push around more paper than eve. In thinking about books and why I think they will always exist, I realized that the things that are essential to our lives haven't changed all that much. We need to eat and drink and though styles of forks, knives, spoons, cups and glasses may change; we still use them pretty much as they were originally invented. No one has proposed that we just switch to an IV drip. Or, maybe someone has....hmmm. We need shelter, and houses really haven't changed that much for centuries. I don't know anyone in favor of getting read of musical instruments just because we have taped or digitalized music. It seems as if it's only the things that are not essential to our lives that we stop using, discard or invent something that completely takes its place. I really tried to think of things that have disappeared altogether, but all I can think of are 8 track tapes, Super 8 movie cameras, Beta videoplayers, etc. All technology related--so maybe it's the Kindles and the Sony Readers that we won't be seeing in the future.
I added Visual Bookshelf to my Facebook profile.

Thing Nineteen

Ooooohhhh... I like Ning and Gather. I liked that they are organized around interests and topics and that you don't have to sign up to see what is there. I joined both of them. I did a couple of searches and found some things I'm really interested in. I was already familiar with WebJunction having taken some of the offered courses. It's a really good way to get self-paced information on library topics of interest or that you need to help do your job better.

Fun with Shelfari. I added the widget to my blog.

Thing Eighteen

Finally! Something I'm already familiar with. I have had a facebook account for over a year. At first, I just used it so I would have an account and be able to look at my daughter's pages. Now, I have lots of friends and it's the way I share photos and other information. Our library has a MySpace account and I looked some from other libraries, but somehow I can't see them getting used all that much. Maybe I'm wrong, but you can spend a lot of time on FaceBook and MySpace and I don't think I would go looking for a library to be "friends" with when there's plenty to see and do on your existing friends pages.

Thing Seventeen

This one was super hard for me. I watched Podcasting in Plain English and looked at all the podcast directories (Yahoo gave me a "file not found" message). I liked Podcast.com and found some Aesop's fables to listen to and loaded them to my GoogleReader account. Listening wasn't a problem. It was trying to download a catcher to my computer that was the problem. I used Podcast Alley and tried downloading Roberts Podcatcher because it had 3 stars out of five. None of the podcast downloaders seemd to have more than 3 stars. It downloaded okay, but when I tried to add a podcast it gave a "run time error" message that the file already exists. I couldn't figure out what to do. Finally, I downloaded My Podder, which was easier and figured out how to add the Aesop's fables. Yay! That's as far as I want to go with it. I probably won't listen to podcasts, however, I do want to learn how to make them. I think they would be great for creating storytimes on our website that patrons could subscribe to. Also, our Adult Services staff have been making podcast tutorials for our electronic databases using CaptureFox so I know they can show me how to do it.

Thing Sixteen

I love YouTube, but had never used GoogleVideo. That was a new experience. The problem with these is that it is so easy to start watching and waste sooooo much time.