Groundhog World

Week 9 #23

2007-03-29T15:06:00.000-07:00

Whew! I thought I would never get here. It took me so long to do everything that I don't know if I can remember what my favorite Things were.

When I set up my blog I just picked a template and got on with it. You may have noticed (or probably not with so many sites to look at) that I have since gone back and selected what I think is a nicer template for a groundhog. I'm more comfortable playing around with my blog now.

Flicker was pretty cool once I learned how to post an image to my blog. That was so long ago now that I'm not sure I remember how to do it. It was a challenge the first time - as they say, "use it or loose it".

The RSS feeds was sort of cool, but I haven't been back to my account to read the feeds since I set them up.

Now YouTube had me hooked because these are very brief videos and you can just pop in and view one without dedicating much time. I especially like the comedy ones for a quick pick-me-up. No wonder it's such a popular site.

My lifelong learning goal is to actually subscribe to the Internet at home. I can't seem to make a decision about the service provider. I will be forced to eventually when I retire and have no email access. Yikes!

I'm surprised I finished the exercises. There were some tough spots along the way that got me so frustrated I wanted to quit. I am pleased that I was successful with most of the exercises.

I suggest that you have a drop in workshop for each week. I attended them and it forced me to find time for the exercises plus the opportunity to ask questions without feeling I was bothering someone during work.

If you offered another discovery program, I probably would not choose to participate - it would depend on the prize at the end.

Thanks for all your efforts on the learning journey. Bye now.

Week 9 #22

2007-03-28T17:39:00.000-07:00

I'm not a big reader of books at this time in my life. I'm lucky if I read my mail the same day I get it. Not enough time. I don't think this ebook thing would be the way to go if I were reading books. I explored the gutenberg site and broused their top 100. I chose two different titles to see what they were like and was really disappointed. Illustrations were omitted and there was just text on a white page. I cannot imagine reading a whole book at your computer! Call me old fashioned if you must, but give me a book with color and illustrations or something to invite me to read it. I must say though that the site wasn't complicated and the download was quite fast - a "+" in my opinion.

Net Library's greeting says "Welcome to the Welcome to the" - not a good thing for a University site. The ebook icons are not appealiing and neither were the titles.

I realized when I went to Safari that all I was going to find were intellectual or academic type materials. Great that they are available 24/7, but not for me.

Week 9 #21

2007-03-27T19:09:00.000-07:00

I ran into a lot of technical difficulties. Finally got Explorer to play a few podcasts on Podcast.net, but they were just audio lecture things that were boring. Explorer crashed when I was trying to play a Guide podcast I found under libraries. When I clicked play a pop-up for downloading ActiveX control something or other and it froze everything up.

I went to Podcast Alley and wanted to see a podcast with video. Couldn't do that either. After waiting what seemed like forever, I got instructions to load Podcast Aggregator. Back to the drawing board.

Last podcast site, Yahoo podcasts. Another crash. That's it for me. I'm telling you right now that I spent way too much time trying to find something "library" to post here on my blog. One of my most frustrating experiences so far.

Week 9 #20

2007-03-27T17:34:00.000-07:00

A person could spend a lot of time brousing around on YouTube. I listened to a great music clip of two very talented people playing Vivaldi's Summer. Then I thought comedy would be a great thing to add to my blog. I found this on video that had me laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4Y4keqTV6w Hope you get a good laugh out of this too. It's a little slow to start with but wait, it's worth it.

The site is pretty easy to navigate around in but there are so many videos that it's a bit overwhelming. Library work can be a bit intense so I think at least once a day (for health purposes) everyone should view a comedy video and get a good laugh.

Week 8 #19

2007-03-27T16:42:00.000-07:00

I'm afraid I'm going to have so many accounts out there that I will have to cancel when I'm done learning, that I might not get them all cancelled!

I created my library of 5 books http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=lml95123

There was quite a range of popularity, from 0 to 971. What are they trying to say about my taste in reading materials? There were no discussions (conversations) for any of my books. I guess we are all readers, not talkers.

Week 8 #18

2007-03-27T16:24:00.000-07:00

Well I would have never thought a groundhog would be out here in Zoho land writing a wiki. I tried to get on Zoho chat but it wouldn't let me. I looked at the Zoho spreadsheet and it's the familiar Excel format so that would be very easy to use. I popped into Zoho presentations but didn't do anything because I couldn't think of anything. This looks like a fun site.

I wrote my blog entry in Zoho writer because I thought I could link it to my blog. Couldn't figure it out so I guess that would be a no. I kept getting some Java script error message so I just closed out.

Week 7 #17

2007-03-26T19:15:00.000-07:00

Okay, a little instruction might have helped me. I logged in to edit the wiki, but then I didn't know how to add my blog to the Favorite Blogs page. I mucked around; hope I didn't screw anything up.
That's how you'll know I was there :-)

Added my two cents to the favorite TV shows and favorite foods of course.

As far as using a wiki in my work - not a clue.

Week 7 #16

2007-03-26T18:13:00.000-07:00

Wikis - What exactly does that stand for? I've used Wikipedia and thought it was really great until I found out that anybody can write anything making the content rather dubious.

I took a look at SJCPL Subject Guides wiki and thought that was kind of cool, but I don't get why, what or how I would contribute to it.

I got sidetracked to the Davis, CA wiki and thought that was more interesting. If I lived in a relatively small town, I think that would be a great way to share information about the town. A Visitor's Bureau of sorts.

I'm afraid I can't think of anything that the university library could use this for it is were open to ANYBODY to edit. Maybe some collaboration with SJPL type of thing. I'm not very imaginative though, so I'm sure there is something we could use it for.

Week 6 #15

2007-03-26T17:16:00.000-07:00

I read Away from Icebergs, Into a New World of Librarianship, and To a Temporary Place In Iime. I choose Away from Icebergs because Rick is kind of cute and I liked his analogy of a boat as the library profession and avoiding icebergs like the "just in case" collection, reliance on user education, and the "come to us" model of library service.

He states that libraries need to provide user-centric service. As a Web 2.0 reality continues to emerge and develop, our patrons will expect access to everything – digital collections of journals, books, blogs, podcasts, etc.

I found this statement pretty profound: "If our services can’t be used without training, then it’s the services that need to be fixed—not our patrons." You go Rick!

Here's another one: "We have to be a bit more humble in the current environment, and find new ways to bring our services to patrons rather than insisting that they come to us—whether physically or virtually."

I thought he presented the situation clearly and cleverly. Got my attention.

Week 6 #14

2007-03-21T12:35:00.000-07:00

Took a look at Technorati and did a search for Learning 2.0 in blog posts; it brought up over 30,000 blogs. I tried the same search by tags and got only 283. Sensing there is a pattern here, I searched by blog directory and it was even less, 75 blogs. I'm not sure why. Not sure I care.

I checked out "popular" and found several categories: favorited blogs, searches and blogs. Not so interesting ...

I scrolled down and found videos, movies and news. A little more interesting to me so I checked out a Hilary Clinton video. I have to do it again at my own computer with sound because it seemed cool. May even check out a few others.

WEEK 6 #13

2007-03-21T11:57:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking my eyes have gone bad from being in the dark so much. I viewed, if you can call it that, the video on Del.icio.us. The video box was so small I couldn't see what the person was doing. Kind of wasted my time.

Went to SJLibraryLearning2 and broused around a bit. Found a bookmark for an article on folksonomy that had been bookmarked by alot of other users. I clicked on it and found the comments and other user tags. Pretty clever. From a catalogers perspective, tags are like adding subject headings to a bibliographic record.

Week 5 #12 Rollyo

2007-03-09T15:59:00.000-08:00

You probably thought I was hibernating but I've just been busy.

I checked out the Rollyo site and dug my way around. I created a search roll with three travel sites but when I clicked on the create button I had no idea where it went or how to access it. Went to the dashboard and somehow found it. http://www.rollyo.com/index.html to see My Little Engine.

Kind of cool if the sites don't move or disappear. I not clear how much easier it is than just bookmarking a site ...

Week 5 #11

2007-02-27T13:25:00.000-08:00

To brouse the Web2.0 awards list I clicked on the "short list". I selected the music catagoy and broused Last.fm, MusicStrand and Upto11.. Well I wasn't in any of those sites very long because I didn't recognize any of the musical groups they were into. Youngsters I presumed.

Now the video category seemed like it might be fun so I went to Dailymotion.com and viewed a couple of video clips and thought it was pretty entertaining. I think I saw part of "Wii would like to play" on television - sure is clever and entertaining advertising.

Week 5: Play Week #10

2007-02-23T17:01:00.000-08:00

This exercise made me feel like groundhogs should just stay underground. Always touted as easy, the two sites I explored wouldn't let me download my silly picture! Once again I had to seek assistance only to find out that the image had to be jpeg for it to work. I found one, it worked, and I tried to save the image so I could load it into my blog. I have no idea where it went. Let's see if I can find it - there it is! I guess you can tell I used "Frames". This is an example of a retired SJSU librarian (smile).
http://www.bighugelabs.com/flickr/frame.php

Revisiting Week 4 - #9

2007-02-19T14:45:00.000-08:00

I'm back and recovered from exploring Technorati, Feedster, etc. I must say it was a bit overwhelming for someone who doesn't venture out much. I went to the S.J. Mercury site and added the travel section to my bloglines account. Somewhere I picked up a local weather feed and thought that might be handy so I added it to my bloglines account, all with a little navigational help from a coworker. Thank goodness that's done!

Week 4: RSS & Newsreaders #8

2007-02-16T14:52:00.000-08:00

I'm so NOT techno savy it makes me laugh. I set up my blog lines newsreader account, feeling proud because it seemed so easy, and then logged off. I had selected several joke, news, and finance feeds so this week I checked my blog to see if my feeds were coming through (are you with me?) and I couldn't find them. Of course I thought I must have done something wrong but didn't know what so I waited for the workshop. After attending the walk-in workshop Christine informed me that the RSS feeds have nothing to do with my blog.

While playing with the RSS feed search engines I mananged to get confused as to where I was in the Internet world and couldn't back out to reorientate. (still laughing at myself) After that experience I can't tell you that any of those sites were easy for me. Lots of interesting stuff to look at for sure.

I need to pop back into my hole now and meditate. I think I'm over stimulated ... or is that the sugar high from the bake sale?

Revisiting Week 3

2007-02-09T14:12:00.000-08:00

Let me see if I can get a picture of myself and some of my friends up here just for grins and giggles. Looking good!

Week 3, Exercises 5, 6, & 7

2007-01-29T09:55:00.000-08:00

Explored the Flickr site and viewed some pretty awesome photos. Kind of interesting service but I don't think that's something I will use. Maybe if I was retired and had more free time on my hands... I'm still trying to figure out my camera!

New technology seems to be available faster than I can learn and incorporate it into my lifestyle. I got an Ipod last summer and have loaded about 80 songs into it from my personal music collection, but I rarely listen to it. I know there are many features that are available on it but I admit I haven't taken the time to explore them yet. I would like to download a couple of songs from the Internet which I haven't tried yet.

Week 2, Exercises 3 & 4

2007-01-23T16:29:00.000-08:00

Not too frightened at this point to come above ground and set up my own blog. I listened to the podcast about the Learning 2.0 program and read the 7 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners. I admit Habit 4 is going to be a big challenge (as opposed to a big problem that is).
Off I go to register ... Registration acknowledged!