Week 23, Summarize your thoughts about this program on your blog and learn about where to go from here.

FIRST, I am glad it's over!!!

I can see how my attitude to this program/assignment gradually changed. First, I was negative and grouchy against this program. Then, it became a thing I have to do as an employee of MCPL. Then, I felt there may be some merit to this program. Now, I feel I learned something that may be useful to my profession and to enrich my personal life, too. Truth is I am still overwhelmed with the information and knowledge what is out there. If I start digging into on a subject covered in this program, I know there is not an end. It is constantly evolving to accommodate user’s needs.

Where to go from here? This question is a little vague. Is this question about Web 2.0 evolves into something else, Web 3.0? Or what am I going to do after learning 23 things from this program? Honestry, I don't know it yet.

Week 22, Take a look at the titles available on Overdrive or NetLibrary or Project Gutenberg and learn about downloadable audiobooks.

What do I know about Overdrive and Net Library? MCPL offer those services to our patrons to access from their homes. They are free to the members of Maryland's Digital eLibrary Consortium. Overdrive books; some titles are always available, but you may have to place holds on others. You can have 4 holds at a time. NetLibrary books; you may have 10 items checked out at one time. Every title is always available. Both offeres popular audio books.

Project Gutenberg is the place where you can download over 30,000 free ebooks, classic books, to read on your PC or other portable device. They are free in the United States because their copyright has expired. In 1980s this project was the only site on the Internet offereing full text books free of charge to anyone. Many libraries linked to this site on their webpage.

Week 21, Discover some useful search tools for locatinsg podcasts

The word podcast is used to refer to a non-musical audio or video broadcast that is distributed over the Internet. This explanation is from Thing 19, 23thingsonastick.blogpost.com, one of my favorite blogs that helped me to complete this assignment. This site gives links on How to Podcast and Create your Own Podcast. Some search tools for locating podcasts are; PodcastDirectory.com, NPR Podcast Directory, EPN Educational Podcast Directory and Podfeed.net. With my accented English, I would not dare try to create my own podcast. Sorry!

Week 20, Discover YouTube and a fewsites that allow users to upload and share videos.

Here I got side tracked. Rather than working on this blog, once I got on YouTube I simply start watching one amazing video after another. It is known as the source of all things video on the Internet; the good, the bad, and the ugly are all there for all to see.

It is very entertaining but also because so many people are carrying a camcorder, they became so portable, and a cell phone with video recording capability, those site, YouTube, Metacafe and Dailymotion are functioning beyond as the entertainment sites. Because of this exercise, I visited those sites for the first time and realized that each website has very different purpose on the Internet. We hear on the news that because of a video clip on those sites some justice was done or a vertict was overturned in some cases. Also, many medias use video clips from these sources.

Week 19, Explore any site from the Web 2.0 awards list, play with it and write a blog post about your findins

Here, out of zillions of web sites, 174 Web 2.0 Sites in 41 Categories were chosen by 21 judges. The first thing I thought was how important to market, network, and need some luck to be chosen here. Like anything else, from Novel Prize down to our Annual Leave Award, you have to be at the right time right place at the right time and know the right people. Am I very cynical with the awards? I agree that they do have some merit; here they are judged by usability, usefulness, UI & design and content quality. At least I got some assurance that some of the web sites I access regularly are included in this list. Thanks to those judges, now, I can compare within each category to use for my purpose or recomend to our patron. All of those sites met certain level of quality requirements.

Week 18, Take a look at some online productivity (word processing, spreadsheet) tools.

Webtools4U2Use offers a difinition of "Online Productivity Tools." This wikispace is developed for school media specialist but useful for us all. A blog that is written for us layman is Thing 13. Online productivity Tools gives enough descriptions and links to get started on the tools. Free Online Productivity Tools From Hassle-Free PC from PC World and Tuesday top ten: Online productivity tools from examiner.com cover variety of services.

Our lives are so intertwined. We live in an electronic technology dominated world, Internet and medias, that also assist our fast pace lives to make a little easier. One category of them is online productivity tools. We librarians use some of them. One uses an online calender to coordinate family schedule, both parent work at different offices and three children attend to different schools. We use document capability to collaborate document.

Week 17, Add an entry to the Learning 2.0 SandBox wiki

Here is my post on Learning 2.0 SandBox wiki.

Week 16, Learn about wikis and discover some innovative ways that libraries are using them.

Here is the definition of Wikis from LisWiki. Wikis are, in general, online content repositories that allow others to contribute and modify entries. The definitions list of Wiki, Wikipedia, MediaWiki, and LisWiki, on this site was very helpful for new comers like me.

Innovative ways that libraries using wikis; Library Success: A Best PracticesWiki. "This was created to be a one-stop shop for great ideas and information for all types of librarians." Of course Learning 2.0 Program is included here. By searching "Wiki and Library," I got numerous hits. It looks like UCLA is very active on Wikis. IMSLP / Petrucci Music Library Wiki got my attention. It states "Our goal is to create a virtual library containing all public domain music scores, as well as scores from composers who are willing to share their music with the world without charge. I realize that wikis and Wikipedia are free of geographical boundaries and have unlimited resources and unlimited knowledge. As long as contributors do not abuse the privilege, they are an enormous asset for our future.

Week 15, Read a few perspectives on Web 2.0, Library 2.0 and the future of Libraries

According to Wikipedia, Web 2.0 is the term used for web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing and user centered design, and collaboration of the WWW. According to the Library and Information Science Wiki Library 2.0 provides new tools to make the library space (both virtual and physical) more interactive, collaborative and driven by community needs. It encourages collaborative, two-way social interactions between library staff and customers. Web 2.0 covers whole Internet and Library 2.0 is a smaller scale to library services but both were developed for a very similar purpose. I have one problem with LisWiki's statement "both virtual and physical." I agree that virtual space offerers increasingly interactive access to our patron but not in phisical space. Can someone explain what this physical space means? They, the yonger generation, have grown up with the Internet, virtual community. They demand participation and usability on the web. Missing those capability on the web sites might loose popularity quickly. Haven't we already see this trend in every direction we turn?

Week 14, Explore Technorati and learn how tags work with blog posts.

Technorati is a company that tracks blogs. Following is the definition of a tag from Technorati. A tag is a keyword or short phrase that writers assign to articles to describe or identify the content: the subject matter, the people involved, the type of article, themes addressed. This helps people searching for a particular type of content to find articles using those tags.

I searched on this site, MCPL and Montgomery County Public Libraries/Library. Both searches resulted in zero hits out of 1,187,463 blogs. This result indicates tagging with too specific a word is not useful. There are personal names such as: aaron, alex, and brian listed on the "Popular tags on Technorati.com over the last month." Thinking about popularity of blogs everywhere, this number seems a bit small. Am I mislead by the media or marketers?

Week 13, Learn about tagging and discover a Del icio.us

Del icio.us and tagging: for this module, I had to read a book titled Social Software in Libraries to clarify their importance in our marketing and research purpose. Here, I classify every organization as a business. Normally, I finish each module without referring to any other resourses than the specific website. I still have a confusing feeling about the value of the popularity of tags and uniqueness of tags. If any organization wants to have an effective presence on the IOnternet, it needs to have a specialist in this field. I am not ready to insert any of Linkrolls, Tagrolls, Network Badges and Blog Posting in my webpage. The reason I developed a web page is simply for fun, not marketing or building a community.

I am glad that I could sign in with Yahoo's login and password. I am tired to create so many sign ups for this assignment. Our lives are controlled by login NAME and PASSWORD. Before we open the door to public we log on to several computers to boot up and open several applications on each computers. Throughout a day we log on and log off to many sites.

Week 12, Roll my own search tool with Rollyo.

This is one of the confusing items on the 23 things. I believe that it is too easy (?) to create, so that some of our staff thought it was not working and some of them thought it was easy and made a link to their own creation on their blog. Here is my Rollyo. I was not successful to insert/introduce this Rollyo search tool to my webpage on iGoogle. Did anyone, among MCPL staff, make such an item that does not look so rudimentary like mine?

Week 11, Take a look at LibraryThings and catalog some of your favorite books.

Okay, this is a nice one since we had the exact assignment a couple of years ago. Does my account still exist? Yes. I also remembered my Login and Password. WOW!!! Last time I accessed my account was in March 2008. At the time, I was creating my catalog on this website. My whole purpose was to finish the assignment. So without asking permission of leaders of of MCPL, I used their trademark. Sorry!!! I did not expect this catalog to stay on the web this long. Do you want me to remove the Readers' Cafe's trademark?

So, lets add some titles to my collection. I learned some more nitty gritty of how to manage my collection on this site.

Among us, librarians, talk about how our blogs are in the public eyes. They aren't.. Some of them put in so much effort and are disappointed with the response. I am afraid that I am adding more clatter to the Internet. It is very hard to find the exact information when we need to find it. It is crowded with lots of junk to satisfy tons of personal and business purposes.

Week 10, Play around with an online image generator.

I have no comment on this lesson.
About using an online image generator, for an old school fogy like me, creative people have already done all the complecated processes. In this Internet Age, everybody's work becomes average, good enough. This experience reminded me about a Talking Point sheet. Every occasion when our administrations feel they are not sure of us, frontline employees, they send us a Talking Point sheet to follow the script. I understand why they send a sheet each time MCPL makes a change in our service or policy. It is very nice of them, but we don't need to think or be creative. This week's blog got a little derailed.

Week 9, Locate a few useful library related blogs and/or news feeds.

First, I must pick our own by MCPL, then, as library related-blogs. Each blog should tie into news or season of their collection/service of a specific area. I found they are interesting to read by themselves. I can see how they worked to built eye catching, atractive blogs but clicking on so many links within a blog is too much for just fun. Should we expect research leads from the blogs?

News feeds; naturally, I pick monthly Book Newsletters and Online Book Clubs by MCPL and PLA News. Then, because of its geographical location, I choose .
Here, I introduce My Page. I created it for fun, not as news feed.

Week 4, Register your blog and track your progress to journey into Learning 2.0 together

Maryland Libraries Learning 2.0, what is it? It is, to me, a credit earning assignment. Hopefully, on the way into Learning 2.0, I will find something interesting to draw me into it. I am tired of "I" centered blog but I have not come up a good third person presentation system on this blog, yet. I believe this assignment does have much learning of technology. It is learning how to express and present our learning process. It requires an artistic and literary talents which I don't have.

Week 8, Learn about RSS feeds and setup your own Bloglines newsreader account.

I have registered my blog in 2009 to MCPL Staff Development and posted several blogs. When I REALIZED THAT I HAVE TO REGISTER TO SEVRAL SERVICES to complete this assignment, I was not very happy and stopped. I am one of those who are paranoid about putting my personal information on the Internet, good or bad. RSS clatters my email accounts more than I want to spend to keep up on major news. Is this a bad artitude as a public library librarian? I know many librarians have been using these functions to enhance their profession.

Bloglines is very much of a disappointment. I felt this site started with big funfair, but once there were many similar resources/alternatives available on the Internet, its popularity decreased. Without those feeds to read, we, librarians, sit in front of a PC for several hours a day.

Week 6, Have some Flickr fun and discover some Flickr mashups & 3rd party sites

Hey Hatchling, are you ready to fly?

Hatchling

uploaded by mcplinfo-helpdesk

I am peeking out at an unknown world of IT. I t seems there is no end to explore. I am afraid that If I engage in an activity of IT, I will be sucked in an endless exploration, can't stop. My eyes all red, watching a computer screen hours at a time in serch of WHAT I can explore in IT. I am uncertain of everything but I better fly out from my confortable nest and join others who feel at home out there. Anyhow, this is a training of Flickr.