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.