Learning Web 2.0

I just wanted to say how much I’ve enjoyed learning about the sites we’ve been exploring for the past weeks. I appreciated having the chance to spend time looking around and trying to find out more about each “thing”. The best part of this experience, though, has been that we’ve taken what we’ve learned and applied it to our library. The OPL Children’s Room now has a blog, a twitter feed, a flickr account and a GoodReads account. And – now the library has a Facebook page, which we’ve already used to put in our  special event which is coming up tomorrow. Besides, it’s just been a lot of fun. I’m really glad we did this and I’m looking forward to Part II. Thanks, John!

I just found out that I was tagged for the random thing, so:

Here are the rules for Six Random Things:
1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

Here’s Teresa’s link:

http://teresattyl.wordpress.com/

and here are my random things:

1. My son Sam is playing drums on a Carnival Cruise ship right now.

2. I took oboe lessons from the age of 12 – 22 and never got good at it. I know it’s hard to believe that someone could take lessons on an instrument for 10 years and not be a good player, but trust me on that one.

3. My college had free tuition and was 2 blocks away from my house. (It’s no longer free)

4. I grew up in Brooklyn.

5. I’m a huge Penn State football fan.

6. I love cross-country skiing.

Here are my 6 tags (I’m trying to avoid people who have already been tagged):

http://patrioticny.wordpress.com/

http://roseann-the-librarian.blogspot.com/

http://smallslam.wordpress.com/

http://jamielkay.blogspot.com/

http://hhertzof.wordpress.com/

http://eschirota.wordpress.com/

Have fun everybody!

I’ve worked with wikis before and find them very helpful for collaboration.  At our library we needed to put together some documents with multiple contributors and for a while we had a lot of trouble trying to figure out how to do it. For example, we had a committee that was putting together a library “code of conduct” policy – at first we tried to do it all together in person, but we found that our schedules allowed us to meet very rarely and it was taking forever.  Finally, we ended up using wikispaces to set up the document and add our individual  inputs. You could subscribe to changes in the document, and would be notified by e-mail when a change was made. Then you could see what other people were adding and comment on those changes. It ended up being a very easy and productive process.

In exploring the wikis that were listed in this assignment, I found some really helpful ones. I particularly loved this one:

http://www.itcompany2.com/inforetriever/

What I really would like is a recipe wiki – I’m tired of everything I make for dinner all the time. Any takers???

In my last post I forgot to include the links to our blog, “READ ALL ABOUT IT! News  from the Children’s Room”:  http://oplkids.wordpress.com. Our GoodReads account is on the sidebar of the blog. And our twitter feed: http://twitter.com/oplkids.

As a result of this learning process, we have started an oplkids blog, flickr account, twitter feed and GoodReads account. I hope we keep up with all of them. So far, it’s been really fun. I wouldn’t say we’re techies yet, but, at least we’re not afraid to play with this newfangled stuff anymore!

I started a LibraryThing account even though I’ve had a Shelfari account & a GoodReads account since last spring, and I don’t really use them. I only started the Shelfari & GoodReads accounts because I was “invited” to join them. I put a few books up & promptly forgot about them. I didn’t even remember my user names. But now, since we’re doing this assignment, I decided to really explore each site. These are my conclusions: All three sites are very similar and good for keeping track of your books. Shelfari is definitely the snazziest in terms of appearance. The books sitting on the shelves look great – really colorful & inviting. LibraryThing, on the other hand, seems to be the most comprehensive -you can even find the Dewey or LC #’s if you want. My favorite of the three turned out to be GoodReads, for several reasons. First of all, ease of use. It’s very user-friendly – you can add books, rate them, review them and put them on your “to read”, “currently reading” or “read” shelf in one step. Another reason I like it is because it was relatively easy to add it to the sidebar of my blog. LibraryThing apparently can’t be added to a wordpress blog because the code that you copy into the wordpress widget contains javascript, and they don’t allow that at wordpress (it took about a half hour of trying over & over to add it and reading the support pages before I found that out). I think from now on, I’ll start using GoodReads on a regular basis- when I’m looking for a book to read, I can check my “to read” list to see what to pick up next.  And when someone asks me what book I’ve read recently that I really liked, I can check my “read” list instead of looking at them blankly and saying “Oh I just read something great, what was that again?” My librarything bookshelf is here: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/mmmarci

I keep getting mixed up, calling Twitter, Flitter. Twittering really seems like a silly thing to do, although sort of amusing. Some of the tweets I read in the past couple of days of playing with it really made me laugh, although I don’t do anything entertaining enough myself for anyone to want to keep track of my activities. On the other hand, I can see teen librarians using it to keep kids up-to-date with what’s going on in the teen room. And then, I also thought, maybe we can start a twitter feed for the children’s department, and advertise the twitter feed address on the kid’s webpage - we can ask parents to follow our feed to remind them of programs coming up (Storytime at 2:00 today, etc.) or other things we want to highlight. It might work if we can get parents on board. Here’s my twitter name: mmmarci

One of the things I’ve noticed about learning new technology-related tasks: kids, teens & 20-somethings seem to learn by playing with the new item/device/computer program, whereas “older” people tend to read the instructions & then get stuck when they (we) don’t understand what the instructions are saying. Then they (we) call a kid, teen or 20-something over to show them (us) how to use the thing – the kids promptly close the instuctions, start pushing buttons, typing on the keyboard and 2 minutes later say, “Oh, it’s easy, you just…” Huh? how did you figure that out?