Week 9 - Thing #20

I'm in the home stretch! Three more things to go!

YouTube is such a huge cultural phenomenon. My teenage niece and nephew would rather watch videos on YouTube than watch something on TV. They visit the site daily and watch everything from scenes of their favorite shows to their school choir performances to those dumb comedy videos.

Pretty much every event that is videotaped winds up on YouTube eventually, and I found a clip of the ALA award winning book cart drill team from Cy-Fair ISD. Here they are for your viewing pleasure...

Thing #18 continued...

The publishing was really easy! All I had to do was choose my blogging service, enter my username and password, and Zoho went out and found my blog. Now, posting to edublogs might be a different story!

Week 8 - Thing #18

Zoho Writer appears to be a very easy to use word processing program. I can see that having access to your files online would be very convenient as long as you have internet access. It seems to have all the bells and whistles that Word has. I do wonder, though, what the space limitations are. I haven't explored enough to find that out, but I'm guessing that if you want more server space, you have to upgrade to a paid account. that seems to be the way most of these storage sites work. (Well, there's one thing that Word does that Zoho doesn't - automatically correct a lowercase letter at the beginning of a sentence!) Now I'm going to try and publish this to my blog. I'll let you know how it goes!

Week 8 - Thing #19

LibraryThing

LibraryThing lets you catalog the books in your library, then lets you share your library with others. It's a neat way to network and communicate with the people who have the same books that you do. I've been on LibraryThing at some time in the past because I already had an account set up, but I had no books in my library. It was very easy to add titles and very addicting - looking at the things other people had and LibraryThing's suggestions based on what I own. As for the popularity of my books, it ran the gamut. I have a copy of The DaVinci Code, the same as 16,000 other people, but I also had one book that wasn't shared with anyone else. Several of my books were mentioned in discussions - one in a discussion about the worst books ever that was pretty interesting. It just goes to show that everyone definitely has different tastes in reading material.

I also experimented with the LT widget and added it to the sidebar of this blog. I also tried to add it to my blog over at Edublogs, but was unsuccessful there. After exploring the FAQs, I found that they don't allow javascript widgets in their sidebars because apparently those open the site up to hackers. That was disappointing. I like how the widget shows random selections from my library in the sidebar over there. I did, however find a LibraryThing badge for my edublogs blog that will link people to my LibraryThing library.

Week 7 - Thing #17

I didn't have to do too much playing in the wiki sandbox, because a lot of my summer was spent using pbwiki to create a wiki for our library policies and procedures. We chose a wiki for this purpose because of the ease in adding new information and editing existing information. It really is easy to use and allows everyone to give input.

WIkis - Week 7 Thing #16

Wikis are great collaborative tools and I loved looking at all the different ways people are using them. My two favorites were the Book Lovers wiki and the Albany County Library Staff wiki where all the staff were able to share tips and tricks for performing the tasks that they do everyday.

I've been creating our own wiki this summer for the MISD Library Policies and Procedures.

It's been so easy and a lot of fun. It is going to be so easy to make changes and much more efficient than updating Word documents, turning them into PDFs and uploading them to DocuShare.

Week 6 Thing #15

Of all the posts on Web 2.0, "Away from the Icebergs" most closely reflected my own views and philosophy of what libraries need to do to be relevant in the future.

In his very perceptive article Rick Anderson writes:

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.

While I don't think we need to abandon the teaching of research skills altogether, I do think that it's important for us to work at eliminating the barriers to locating the information by creating intuitive user interfaces that use natural language instead of "librarian-ese." As Anderson says, it's hard to reach every patron personally, and many of our students and their parents are using our resources at home where there isn't a friendly librarian on hand to help them know where to look. If we can successfully create these intuitive online library environments, our lessons can focus less on location of information and more on the critical thinking skills of using information.

Lastly, Anderson urges librarians to "acknowledge and adapt to radical, fundamental change" that we are seeing in our society today. Earlier this month the National School Board Association released a study about teenagers and their online behaviors. One finding was that

students report that they are spending almost as much time using social networking services and Web sites as they spend watching television. Among teens who use social networking sites, that amounts to about 9 hours a week online, compared to 10 hours a week watching television.

If we don't adapt and change the ways that we relate to these young people, we become irrelevant to their world and left in the dust. The opportunity to be an integral part of our students' online lives is there - are we willing to take it?