Exercise 23 - THE END!

Can't believe I made it! Has been an up and down time, but really one of the best training tools I've ever used in ACL. Congratulations to you Jayne for getting it up and running. Not too sure how much has stayed in my brain, but now when people talk about 'blogs', 'technorati', 'podcasting', etc., I know that this is not a foreign language. Of course the MP3 player is a great carrot to get us to the end, but there are so many things to be gained by this programme. Now we can help our customers, we can understand our kids' conversation and if we're feeling lonely, we can always go on Facebook and find some friends!

Exercise 22 - E books

Well, I've probably said it before, but this is something I definitely know I wouldn't use! Will I prove myself wrong?? Sorry, reading a book on-line is not my thing. I'm the person who puts on the CD, pours the glass of wine and curls up in the couch with that lovely invention - THE BOOK! But this was a great exercise, as had never looked at Netlibrary and really wouldn't have had a clue how to help customers wanting to do so. So I've at least learnt that much. The only thing I would possibly use are the journals or perhaps material I required for a study purpose, when I couldn't get a hard copy.

Exercise 21 - Podcasts

This seemed to be quite frustrating for us all in the workroom. I tried looking at Podcast.net but really didn't have much success. Kept coming up with this ActiveXcontrol thing. So read the exercise re Bloglines and RSS feeders and thought, how on earth do I do that? Had completely forgotten that exercise. But low and behold, when I went in to my Bloglines account, I remembered it all. Yes, knowledge that is only stored in the brain and never used, is not of much use! On going in to Bloglines, found the 'Using Bloglines To Track Podcasts' article and that simplified the whole exercise. From there I could add an RSS feed for a news podcast to my Bloglines account. I think I'm getting to the point of information overload!

Exercise 20 - Part 2 of my success

Well I had to write another post to say how great I felt actually posting the video. Seemed to be impossible and a lot of fussing around, but success at last!

Exercise 20

Well I started looking at this and thought what a lot of rubbish is out there! It was only when I asked a colleague who uses it regularly, that I struck gold. He explained the benefits of it for music, etc. I did a search on one of my favourite bands, Runrig, who were performing at Loch Lomond in August, soon after our visit to Scotland. And yes, it was great, I could watch the concert or parts of it. So that was exciting. Now I'll have a go at placing the video on my blog. Here I go!!

Exercise 19

Since my passion is travel, I decided to look at the Web 2 awards under the travel area. I looked at Farecast first and found that was just really an American site. Not much point if you're not in the States. This was actually awarded the first place. The airfare predictions were all from US cities, nowhere else. So then had a look at the 3rd placegetter, Real Travel. This looked more interesting from the word go, but then when I tried doing a search on Samoa and accommodation, I could only get the hotel option. So it really seemed like it was geared to travellers doing the more expensive route. Don't think I'd ever use either of these tools. They do include travel planners, but then other sites do that too anyway. Interesting to see Facebook was in first place for the social networking. I think that's a great network to use, but then again, after my initial additions to the site and 'finding' friends, I haven't done much, so feel now I'm a bit anti-social!!

Exercise 18 - Week 8

Well I really liked this. Thought they were great tools. Google Docs is really appealing, so straightforward and easy. I love it when things you need to do are in your face, instead of you having to search and read long complicated instructions. And there is the e-mail link right in front of me. Great! I wrote a document on Zoho Writer and found it easy to 'save' and find again, which is always the key!!

Exercise 17 - Sandbox

This was fun after the initial hassle of the password. Really easy to use and great to see some other favourite restaurants, holiday places. Some of these are a bit thin on the ground, as a lot of people aren't up to this yet, so will definitely have a look later on as well. Yes, definitely an area of the web just to play around in, I guess like the old sandbox of our youth!

Week 7, Exercise 16

Well, it was good to have a short concise sentence on Web2 explaining what a Wiki is! Was interesting looking at the library wiki's and I was wondering how on earth there is any control of what goes on, is edited, etc., when I read at the beginning of the 'Library Success:A Best Practices Wiki', that they now required email addresses because of vandalism problems! I think wiki's could work well (sorry, keep putting the apostrophe, as plural version looks funny otherwise!) within library groups. For example, children's librarians could set up one and post resources, information, etc. I think there needs to be some sort of limit, but then does that mean I'm changing the format and idea anyway and creating something else?