#23- I am done!!

So I am finally finished with the Learning 2.0 exercises! I can't believe how fast the weeks have gone by. I am little sad that it's over. I wasn't going to do it at first because I really thought that I wasn't going to have time to do it but I am glad I did. And yes like a lot of other people I did have to work on it a lot from home but I enjoyed doing it because it didn't really feel like work. It was hard at first because I was the only one at my branch that participated so I was worried that I was going to be on my own. Fortunately one of my coworkers, Sandy(she transferred to another branch) was participating so I was able to call and email her for help which really worked out! The whole project was worth it to me for 2 main reasons. First, I learned many new things. Most of the stuff we worked on I had never heard of before so I am glad I had the opportunity to learn something new. It really was a great experience and many of the exercises we worked on like Flickr, LibraryThing, Bloglines, etc. I am still going to use. Second, my husband pretty much knows everything about computers and the internet but this time I actually knew about things that he had never heard of!

I enjoyed doing most of the discovery exercises but my favorites were: Librarything, Bloglines, Flickr, Netlibrary, and Youtube. I would definitely do this again given the chance because it was nice to have something different to do during the workday. We all usually have the same routine at work everyday and to have something fun to do to change up your day a little was great. And of course, I am always up for a challenge :)

And last but not least, a big thanks to Helene and everyone else who put this project together. You all did an amazing job!

YouTube

Here is my youtube video. I just decided to do one of my favorite band. I liked youtube but there were way to many things to look at. I have been on it for over an hour :) I am not sure how the library can really use it, advertising maybe? I did see a video for one public library system.

Podcasts

I checked out all three websites listed for our podcast exercise and I thought they were all good but I liked Podcast Alley the best. I did the same search for all three and it seemed like more podcasts came up for the Podcast Alley website. I searched for books and libraries and on the Yahoo site I subscribed to the NPR books podcast and put it in my Bloglines account. On the Podcast Alley site there were also some interesting podcasts. For those of you who work with teens, the teen librarian podcast looked like it would be very useful. There was also one called Page Turners which would be good for someone looking for a good book to read :)

Netlibrary

I have decided to skip ahead to Netlibrary b/c I can't decide on what to choose for my youtube video or my podcast yet. For the Netlibrary exercise we are supposed to sign up for an account and then look through all of the downloadable titles. I did sign up and when I was looking through the subjects I found one for languages. It was great because at the branch I work at we have a large hispanic community and I would love to learn some spanish. So now I can download the title I am interested and I don't have to wait for it. Out of everything we have done so far I think that this is the most helpful to our patrons. I have actually had a lot of patrons ask me about Netlibrary and how to sign up for it.

Useful Library feeds/blogs

Okay, I am backtracking a little b/c I missed a couple of exercises/or did not do them right :) When we were setting up our bloglines account we were also supposed to locate some useful library feeds/blogs and I did just that but forgot to blog about them! The three I have on my Bloglines account are: the Shifted Librarian, Unshelved, and the Librarians Internet Index. I really like Unshelved because it's a cartoon about the library and it's funny because it makes fun of situations I think we all have been in. The Shifted Librarian is nice because it has good articles related to library technology. And of course there is always PlCMC's core competencies blog!

Mashups

One of our exercises in playing with Flickr is to discover mashups and 3rd party sites. I chose the color pickr because I love bright colors!

Web 2.0 tools

I decided to pick a Web 2.0 tool from the short list of the Web 2.0 Awards. There were so many to choose from and I did look at a lot of them on the list. The one I chose to explore the most was craigslist. It's a classifieds type website and you can choose a city and look up anything from jobs to people selling/or giving away things, and apartments for rent. It's a good website for the library because I think we can recommend it to patrons that just moved here and need to look for a job or housing. It's even good if you are looking for inexpensive furniture. And, unlike the newspaper classifieds, people will usually post pictures of what they have for sale.

Zoho writer rocks!

I just got through playing around with Zoho writer and I really liked this website. I hate having to keep track of my disks and half the time I always lose them. With Zoho writer I can just save it online. I created a document on there and then I emailed it to myself and I was able to open it up in word. I think that this would be a very useful website to our library patrons because I can't tell you how many times patrons come in and their disks either don't work or their resume was just gone. If they used Zoho writer then they could just access their documents online and from anywhere. I signed up for an account because I will definitely use this site again :)

Sandbox wiki

Can I just tell you guys that I really liked this sandbox wiki exercise because it was really easy for me to figure out! You can see me in the favorite blogs. I also liked seeing everyone's favorites especially the restaurants. I got some good recommendations and I added some of my favorites too.

Wiki!

I have been looking at some of the wikis that are in our discovery exercise and the two that I liked the most were the Book Lover's Wiki and the SJCPL Subject Guide Wiki. I do think that the library can definitely benefit from creating wikis for staff to use as well as our patrons. For Ex. The SJCPL Subject guide is very easy to navigate and I really liked the layout of the site.When you click on the subject it will also give you the links of websites you can go to relating to your subject. I clicked on one of my favorite subjects which is pets and the site gave a list of subjects relating to pets, new books, a librarian's recommendation, pet magazines, links to other websites, and even tips for pet owners. The people that put this website together did a great job because the information is very useful!

On Learning 2.0

What does Learning 2.0 mean to me? To me it's a great opportunity for libraries to grow and be up to date with the new technologies that are constantly emerging. When I first started working for the library as an assistant, I honestly thought that all I would be doing is checking books in and out to people and other tasks related to books. I had no idea how much new technologies and just the internet in general would impact the way we do things. I have to admit it can all be overwhelming at times. I mean I work at a library but I hardly ever get any questions about books! So times are definitely changing and that means we have to change the way we do things too. I just finished reading all of the different perspectives on Library 2.0 and they were all interesting and made a lot of good points. The one that really stood out for me was "Away from the Icebergs". In "Away from the Icebergs" I could see the point Rick Anderson was making about the "come to us" model of library service. We do need to explore different ways of bringing some our services to library patrons. It really does make things easier for our patrons and it does encourage them to use our services if they would rather do so from home or from work. For example, PLCMC does a good job making a patron's account available from home so they can request books if they want to and there is the ability to download audio books at home also. However I don't want everything to be that way because of course I still want people to come in and checkout books, ask us for recommendations, do their homework, or whatever else they need to do :)

Technorati

I just finished exploring Technorati and I really liked the layout of this website. Just like del.cio.us, it is incredibly easy to use and very well organized. I did a search on Learning 2.0 and found some of the blogs of other PLCMC employees which was great. When I searched I looked up the word Learning 2.0 in blogposts, tags and blog directory and I did get some different results. I also looked at some of the most popular blogs such as Boing Boing and I could look at the top books, movies and just the top searches in general. This website is also good if you are reading a lot of blogs because it can keep track of all of them for you.

Del.icio.us

I just finished learning about the website del.icio.us and I thought it was a very useful site. I played around with the site and looked up things that I am interested in. For ex. I typed in shopping and from there you could search by clothes, music, fashion, deals, etc.. I clicked on deals and there were a lot of websites that came up in a list that I have already been to. I can see how del.icio.us can be great for someone that does a lot of research on the internet because you can also search for articles. Just to play around with looking things up, I searched for articles on motivation and a lot of good articles came up. This can be really helpful when I am working at the library because I have had patrons ask me for information on subjects like this where it's kind of hard to find books on a certain subject. Now I can refer this website to people doing research. I also like how if someone has an article tagged that you like, you can also view what other things that person has tagged, so it's a good way to connect with other people. And last but not least the website is pretty easy to navigate which is a very important detail for me :)