Learn n’ Play summary

Overall I think this was very beneficial. I often feel on the other side of the “technology gap” and this has given me encouragment to try new things that I might not have otherwise. Some of the things, such as twitter, rss feeds the bloglines thingy, didn’t really appeal to me but now if a customer asks about them I won’t just give the deer caught in the headlights look, I might actually be able to help a little.

MOLDI

So the site is easy to use and I was able to find a couple that I wouldn’t mind reading. Only problem was it kept popping up an error message about not being able to find permission from something. Maybe since it’s a library computer it doesn’t have permission to do that. Dunno.

Podcasts

Seems like a neat-o idea but it just isn’t as captivating as youtube.

Youtube

Ever since I found youtube I have been a big fan. This is one of the few internet toys that I have used before. The only thing that irks me is some videos are unable to be embedded. It was recommended that I see Steve Martin doing his balloon animal stand up comedy, so I just jumped on youtube, types in a few keywords and here it is:

Make

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Originally uploaded by fragglereader

I was very impressed with the site Make. My favorite DIY projects were the floating books shelf and all the different Halloween costumes. There’s definitely something for everyone here.

My Heritage

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Originally uploaded by fragglereader

I was so excited to see My Heritage on the list of tools to play with. I have used this site in the past to record all of the family history info that I’ve come across. The best part about this site is when it automatically smartmatched me to someone else’s tree. It ended up being a long lost cousin from my Johnson side of the family.

Google Docs

This is super neat-o! The next time a customer asks about saving a document on a floppy or CD rom I’m going to show them this tool. Floppys are unreliable and we don’t have cd writers so this is a tool that can be utilized by basically everyone in any community. It’s never fun when you go to open a document that you’ve emailed to yourself and it turns out to not be compatable with the machine you are currently using.

I want an iPhone?

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Originally uploaded by fragglereader

So this is my post about something technology related. I want an iPhone. The desire started off with just an iPod (I think I’m the only person on the planet without one at this point) and has grown to me needing a nifty gadget that plays my music, checks my email and makes my phone calls. Just one problem… if Santa brings me an iPhone, my T-mobile contract isn’t up for many more months. So I’m still debating if I want to blow my Christmas money on something I can’t use for a while or just settle for this cute little iPod.

wiki sandbox

It was neat to be able to be a contribute to a webpage. I have a hard time understanding the practical purpose of this though. I understand that it’s for the purpose of having fun… sharing information… the collective mind… yada yada… but is it really the best way to find info? Instead of spending time with the info you’re looking for, seems like you’d just be spending time sifting through what people think of the info. Maybe I don’t quite grasp the concept yet. Ever feel like you were born between two generations?

Library 2.0

I guess with Web 2.0 there is now so much content that it seems overwhelming to me. I did enjoy the days when you went to a site, got the info you needed and that was it. Now you have to wade through a whole bunch of junk from just any old body to find the facts. I love myspace and facebook and all those other time killers but when it comes to finding information, I want a clean website that is not bogged down with a lot of junk and oppinions I care nothing about.

As for Library 2.0, here is my favorite quote on the subject taken from Away from Icebergs:

Reliance on user education Libraries are poorly equipped and insufficiently staffed for teaching. Ask yourself what your patron-to-librarian ratio is (at the University of Nevada it’s about 680 to 1) and then ask yourself how you’re going to train all those patrons. We need to focus our efforts not on teaching research skills but on eliminating the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need, so they can spend as little time as possible wrestling with lousy search interfaces and as much time as possible actually reading and learning. Obviously, we’ll help and educate patrons when we can, and when they want us to, and the more we can integrate our services with local curricula, the better. But if our services can’t be used without training, then it’s the services that need to be fixed—not our patrons. One-button commands, such as Flickr’s “Blog This,” and easy-to-use programs like Google Page Creator, offer promising models for this kind of user-centric service.