My Yard

My Yard

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Wiki

       I like most people on the web have used Wikipedia a great deal. I use it to look up any stray fact that I might need or in order to win or lose arguments with my friends. I liked seeing the different ways in which libraries are using wikis and think that this is a great way of sharing information about your library with the community and having them be able to share with you as well. The wiki does not have the stigma that some social media sites like Facebook have so you could use it to connect with people in a less controversial way. Wikis are easy to use and are often easily navigated through. You could have people from your community reviewing books they have read on the site so that you can get many more options that you might have had if just librarians and library staff could edit the page. This free form editing may also be a problem for some libraries since wikis invite pranks. I librarian would have to keep up to date on what was on the wiki which may take a great deal of their time. I looked at the Book Lovers Wiki and I liked the reviews feature. I would have liked to see more book reviews and on a greater verity of genres.

Friday, September 23, 2011

YouTube or what I do during the day anyway.

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                                                             This uses Strong Language
     I found more than one video with a library related topic and polled some friends to see which video was the best. This one won... The masses have spoken. I could have overruled them, but including a video with censorship issues may spark a debate on the topic and I believe that the risk is worth it.

     I have spent many hours surfing the internet and watching Youtube videos. This assignment took me away from my usual topics of interest and put me on a more productive course. It is nice to see that some of the uses of Youtube are productive and somewhat enlightening. I found a useful video addressing the reference interview as well as a video with a superhero librarian. The superhero librarian was being used to promote reading to children and the library was giving out free comic books to kids during an event hosted by this powerful librarian heroine. I also could have used this comic book hero to discuss censorship in the 1940 and 50 when comics were banned in many cities and towns in America (many librarians at the time supported the bane), but i did not think this was common knowledge among my classmates. Ray Bradbury and Fahrenheit 451 seemed like a better avenue to approach the topic from. My feelings of doubt about sharing this video also helped me in making the choice, you need a little controversy in order to start a good debate. Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" would not have been as powerful an object had it been an umbrella.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Podcasts

So, I have podcasted before and I will most likely do it again. I enjoyed looking at some of the podcast resources that were not ITunes which is what I usually use to get my podcasts. I didn't find anything of any real interest to me in the directories today but I plan to check back later and see what I can find. They are a good resource for the future and it is good to know about them even if I can not find a use for them today. Today's lesson did however remind me of the existence of "this american life" and I am now catching up with that. The two podcast directories I looked at were Podcastalley.com and Yahoo Podcasts. I tried to look at podcast.net but the link didn't work for me. I found that Podcastalley.com was easier to use then the Yahoo podcasts. I found a podcast on old time radio detectives on Podcastalley.com that looked interesting and that I might listen to in the future. I also found that on Podcastalley.com it is sometimes hard to tell what the podcasts are about and they need better descriptions on some of them. I also am thinking about listening to the Hogwarts Radio podcast, would you consider this library related?

Friday, September 9, 2011

Flickr and photosharing

  I used flickr for the first time in about 4 years today. I haven't been on since the day I created a page with my friends my freshmen year of college. I don't think the site has changed greatly since then. It may be running faster then I remember it but its hard to tell after all this time and I believe almost everything is running faster then it used to. I posted a few pictures of "library stuff" and am waiting to see comments. I am excited to see what other people are posting as well. I can see how flickr would be useful for a library. pictures capture peoples attention a lot quicker then words and you would be less likely to have people take one look at your page and go away because they don't feel they have the time to absorb all of the information properly. People enjoy looking at pictures and rarely equate it with work. Posting your library events with full colour photos would be a much better way to attract people then a black and white filer type e-mail or blog posting.
                                       http://www.flickr.com/photos/greydandelion/

Friday, September 2, 2011

7 1/2 Rules

    The 7 1/2 rules slide show activity in "Learning 2.0 things" was a little to like a self-help book for me, but I did find it somewhat helpful. I enjoyed rule 7 which was teaching others and think that is likely to be a very relevant to this course. Teaching comes naturally to me and I can sometimes be annoying about it when I try to teach someone something that they don't actually care to learn. I believe that I may have trouble with number 3 (viewing problems as challenges) I tend to get frustrated if something does not work the way it is supposed to after a dozen tries. I was one of those kids who after a few hours working on a lego pirate ship and not getting it to work would smash it and leave the room. This of course is not a very good approach to computers, it gets expensive to smash them. Hopefully I will be able to keep this in mind as I go through the class and my personal belongings will remain intact. Rule number 7 1/2 will not be a problem for me as I am very good at playing.