23 things for PC Geeks

Thing #23 Final Thoughts

2009-05-27T12:20:00.003-05:00

So Thing #23 is Final Thoughts on the 23 things program. They had a survey to fill out upon completion of 23 things, however since I am finishing so much later than the program ran, the survey has since been closed. They did however leave several final questions to help blog about this final "thing".

* Go back to your thoughts/ideas about Library 2.0. Has anything changed as a result of this experience?

I think a lot has changed, since 23 things, I am now a regular user of a blog, YouTube, and Facebook. I am more open to trying out new Web 2.0 tools and applications.

* What were your favorite Things and discoveries?

I think Flickr was my favorite thing that I got to try out. At some point when I get around to organizing my digitial photo collection, I will be a lot more open to posting them on Flickr.

* How did you connect with others doing the 23 Things On a Stick?

I would discuss 23 things with staff members here at SELCO and occasionally with some of the SELS/SELCO librarians when the subject would come up. Mostly face to face, although some through e-mail and blog posts. I never got into the whole twitter thing, I'm more of a facebook person at this stage.

* Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?

I would say I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed learning about the variety of 2.0 subjects that were presented in the 23 things program.

* What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or content?

I thought the program was very well presented and it was in a format that was easy to follow, I don't really have any changes to recommend.

* If we offered a 23 More Things On a Stick program like this in the future would you participate?

I am definately interested in seeing more 23 things programs.

* How would you describe your learning experience in one word or in one sentence, so we could use your words to promote 23 Things On a Stick learning activities to others?

I found the program to be very informative and entertaining, even some of the things I knew about before taking the program I learned additional things that I wouldn't have without following this program.

So now that 23 things is over I look forward to seeing what Round 2 is all about.

Until next time,

PC Geek signing off.

Thing #22 What Did I Learn Today?

2009-05-27T11:55:00.001-05:00

I'm almost to the end of the 23 things, so how do I plan to keep up with Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 tools, (really they're almost the same thing in my humble opinion.) I'm rather fond of GO2WEB20.net myself. It has a huge list of Web 2.0 tools and applications. I've also been keeping up with various blogs and news sites. I don't plan to spend a lot of time experimenting with every new 2.0 tool or application that comes out, I'd rather pick and choose a few and work my way along from there. As more and more useful 2.0 tools become available for my iPhone that will probably be a driving factor for me. Ok, time to see what Thing 23 is, and finish up this learning program.

Thing #21 Beyond MySpace: Other Social Networks

2009-05-22T11:15:00.003-05:00

Thing #21 was interesting because it included Web Junction, which is I site I have used in the past. I am not a member of that website, however I have used their documentation for the original round of the Minnesota Gates Grant Public Computers. When the Gates Grant website was taken down, all the content was moved to Web Junction. Instructions on how to upgrade the computers from NT to Windows 2000 or Windows XP were very useful in my role supporting public library's computers for public use. Another social network I found useful is Flixster for movie information.

Thing #20 Facebook and MySpace

2009-05-22T10:57:00.002-05:00

I have recently started using Facebook in my personal life, partly due to the fact that several of my friends and family members use it too. I checked out the Library 2.0 Interest Group. That seemed like one of the groups I would be most interested in joining.

I can see why Facebook is considered one of the fastest growing social networks, as I keep adding more friends and joining more groups my own social network grows. It's a very interesting website.

I am not as interested in MySpace, although I do still have an account with that website, I never visit it anymore. Everyone I know that does social networking is on Facebook now.

Thing #19 Podcasts

2009-05-21T16:40:00.002-05:00

I am somewhat new to podcasts, however I have listened to several different radio programs over the internet before and personally I would lump those together as being podcasts. I downloaded the MPR - Minnesota Public Radio app for my iPhone so I could listen to some of their podcasts where ever I happen to go. I listened to one of their new podcasts: All Things Considered. I'm looking forward to using MPR more often now that I don't need to have a radio nearby. This is something I will undoubtedly be using more in my personal life.

Thing #18 YouTube & Other Online Video

2009-05-21T16:34:00.002-05:00

Think #18 online videos, here's something that I know a lot about. I've been an avid user of YouTube and later after Google bought YouTube. It has a nice search function so you can find videos in line with what you want to look at. After you've watched a video it has a nice feature to bring up additional videos on the side of the screen simular to what you just watched in case you might be interested in seeing more. The only thing I don't like is the generally poor quality of the majority of the videos, and you can't download a video to watch at a later time on your computer or in my case on my iPhone using the YouTube application. I'm sure there would be a variety of different ways that YouTube and other video sites could be used to supliment a library's website or blog. Especially things like book and movie reviews, training videos, etc.. This was one of the more fun kinds of things, I'm curious to see what will be next.

Thing #17 ELM Productivity Tools

2009-05-21T16:23:00.002-05:00

Thing 17 is all about ELM or Electronic Library for Minnesota. There is a whole host of tools available there. Several allow you create your own web page which in this age of blogs seems like taking a step backwards. However there are massive databases of magazine articles that look very useful and I may start using them to find more information when I am presented with a challenging problem at work.

Thing #16 Student 2.0 Tools

2009-05-21T16:15:00.003-05:00

I started looking at this again and of course now I see why I got stuck on this thing before. I'm not a student or a teacher, I don't work with students or teachers. That being said, I took at look at the Research Project Calculator - RPC for short. This tool is very in depth but I'll work through the basics. You feed it a start and end date for a research project, you pick a topic and the tool produces a schedule to help you plan the project. Including some very specific steps on Picking and refine your topic, writing a thesis, finding boots and materials, writing a first draft and so forth. This would have been very helpful in my college days. I think with some tweaking it could be useful for managing timelines for library projects. Things like reading programs, fund raising projects and so forth. Next stop, Thing #17.

Thing #15 Online Games and Libraries

2008-04-16T17:12:00.002-05:00

Online Games and Libraries

I decided to take a look at Second Life, and watched the YouTube video of Info Island. Second Life looks like a fun way to wander around in a virtual environment. I liked the tour of Info Island, especially the Mystery section. I thought it was a creative use of the 3D area with the pumpkins, and other creepy looking decorations.

Is there a role for Second Life in libraries?

I could see people using Second Life in libraries, however I usually find more often than not kids are playing games like Runescape and other fantasy adventure type games.

It's also interesting while visiting the many libraries that I do what the local policies are towards gaming. Some are very pro-gaming, and others are somewhat oblivious and some are very anti-gaming. So depending on which library you belong to or patronize, the local policies are all very different, (Your results may vary.)

Thing #14 LibraryThing

2008-04-16T17:05:00.002-05:00

How can you use LibraryThing for your library?

Well I'm not a library staff person, but if I were I could see entering favorite books from my collection into LibraryThing and sharing them so others could see what my titles are.

How else do you share booklists, etc. with library patrons? Would LibraryThing offer an alternative?

Once again I'm not a library person, so I don't really have an answer about sharing booklists. Would it offer an alternative, sure.

I would find LibraryThing much more useful if it wasn't books only. I would consider using something like this personally if I could use it to catalog not only my books, but my CD music and DVD collections.

Thing #13 Online Productivity Tools

2008-04-16T16:50:00.002-05:00

I've used both Google and Yahoo's homepages, and both are quite useful. I like being able to edit what content shows up on my homepage. I use Yahoo more often, so I picked Yahoo! as my favorite. I doubt I'll make it my permanant homepage, however as useful as it is, I may reconsider in the future. Currently I use my work's website as it is also a portal to useful information that I need. Personally I like Google's applications suite more than Yahoo's more limited tools. Basically you get e-mail a full office suite, online storage of your documents and a lot of other things too numerous for the scope of this blog entry.

The Calendar tool in Google I find works a lot better. It's more sharing friendly and allows you to have multiple calendars overlayed on top of each other at once, (a very cool feature considering this is free web based calendaring software.)

Thing #12 Do You Digg?

2008-04-16T15:48:00.001-05:00

Ok so I'm checking out Digg and Mixx for the first time. They're both content sharing and rating systems. Digg appears to be a much better organized site than Mixx. What they really remind me of is a clearing house for all the useless bits on the internet that people liked and thought they should vote on. I find myself spending entirely too much time trying to find something on them that I'm looking for because I have to Digg through the rest of the junk to find a nugget of useful information. If you're looking for random idiotic bits of popular information give them a try. I could easily spend hours sifting through both of those sites to find something I really cared about. I have to say these sites are definately productivity detractors.

Thing #11 Tagging and Del.icio.us

2008-04-16T15:40:00.002-05:00

Tagging is an interesting concept. I liked Del.icio.us and it would be useful to keep my bookmarks and favorites in a central location so that no matter which computer I'm using I have access to them. I decided not to create a user account with Del.icio.us at this time, because I've already got too many userid's and passwords to remember.

Thing #10 Wikis

2008-04-16T14:27:00.003-05:00

I like Wikis, I've used them in the past and continue to do so. However I personally use them for looking up information, and rarely if ever have any reason to add, edit or change information in them.

Regarding teachers banning Wikis as a source of information, I personally thing that is a bad practice on their part. Wikis have valid information, and IMHO are usually much more up to date than most other reference sources in print.

I edited the 23 things wiki, because I didn't find I had anything worthwhile to add to another wiki.

Thing #9 Online Collaboration Tools

2008-04-15T10:10:00.002-05:00

So I'm most familiar with Google Docs, so I decided to just use the one I was familiar with. Zoho Writer looks interesting but it's just one more thing to have to deal with and I like all the other Google tools in addition to Google Docs. I see huge potential for using tools like this in a library environment. Sharing book and movie lists instantly springs to mind.

Regarding what I think the founding fathers would think of tools like this, I think they would be very excited about them, once they figured out how to use a computer that is. ;o)

Thing #8 Share Your Creations

2008-04-15T09:54:00.002-05:00

Thing #8 Share your creations - introduces several new web tools: humbstacks, Zoho Show, Slideshare, Picture Trail, Flicks and eFolio Minnesota among others. I rather liked the interface in Thumbstacks and it seems fairly easy to use. Zoho Show is also quite good, however it has a slightly clunky interface that I didn't care for.

Flicks I thought was pretty cool. You add your photos to it, and it jazzes them up with special "flicks" effects when it switches between the various photos in your slide show.

While all of these tools are quite interesting, I'm not really big on being creative and sharing things for others to see. I don't think I'll be using many of these tools other than just to learn about them for 23 things.

Thing #7 Web 2.0 Communication Tools

2008-04-07T15:30:00.004-05:00

Web 2.0 Communication tools, well that's quite a mouthful of jargon. It's interesting to see how all the communications tools that have been developed over the last few years are all being grouped into Web 2.0. In Thing #7, they talked about E-mail, Instant Messaging, Text (SMS) Messaging, Web Conferencing and Blog Prompts. Thing #7 could nearly be it's own 23 things, and should have been broken up into several "Things" of their own. That being said, I will slog through this massive topic in one blog entry.

Let's start with E-mail... 23 Things list for thing 7 mentions Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Hotmail. I find it tremendously funny that I have one or more accounts with each of these free e-mail providers, plus a separate e-mail account with my internet service provider. I guess you could say I'm a bit of an e-mail addict. Some of these e-mail accounts are no longer in use, and I have stopped using a few of them because they were originally created so I could access other internet services including social internet tools, and to allow me to subscribe to various internet games. So while I currently have 5 personal e-mail accounts, I used to have twice as many. Can you say userid + password nightmare???

Ok, the next topic is Instant Messaging (IM). Being a PC Geek I've tried and used many various instant messaging tools. Yahoo!, Microsoft Messenger, Trillian (which I use to connect to both Yahoo and MSN Messenger), and an older one that I no longer use, Mirabilis ICQ (currently it's www.icq.com). Instant Messaging can be a very useful tool especially if you are communicating with people across town or across the country. It's more interactive than e-mail, but less so than using a telephone.

Text Messaging (SMS--Short Message Service). If you've got a cell phone, chances are you've heard of this or done this before yourself. I've sent a few text messages, and I just can't see what the appeal is. Entering text from a telephone keypad is annoying. However being able to send and receive messages from anywhere I'm sure has it's appeal to some. To each their own I suppose.

Web Conferencing, now here's something I've only lightly used in the past, however since we started using WebEx here at the office, I've been able to use it for training and user support issues. I would imagine this would be more useful for larger group training sessions on various topics.

Anyways to sum up, there are many Web 2.0 communication tools out there, I've used many of them, and for the most part they are all very handy. Just watch out or they'll eat up all your spare time!

Thing #6 Online Image Generators

2008-04-07T15:00:00.003-05:00

Moving right along to Thing 6, we're still working with online images. The first suggestion they have is to go to Big Huge Labs and created a trading card.

I also checked out some image generating tools like this one on ImageChef:

It's amazing all the different image creation tools that are out there to either create something from scratch or to manipulate photos that you already have. I'm looking forward to trying these out some more when I get more time.

Thing #5 More Flickr Fun

2008-04-07T14:48:00.002-05:00

Up to Thing #5, now: More Flickr Fun. I decided to see what "Spell with Flickr" makes my blog handle look like:

They make sharing these things in my blog very easy. Once you design what you want, it's a copy/paste of the HTML and presto, it's in my blog.

As far as sharing photos online, I think it's an interesting idea, and if I took more photos, I would certainly be inclined to share them after tinkering with Flickr.

Thing #4 - Flickr

2008-04-07T10:42:00.004-05:00

So I've been taking a good look around the Flickr site, doing various searches on "Minnesota Library", and I found this really cool photo of the Downtown Minneapolis Library. This photo was uploaded to Flickr by chrisdeba2004. It also appears to be copyrighted by: MinneapolisDailyPhotoBlogspot.Com

I've never been to this library, but now that I've seen this scenic photo of it, I find myself interested in looking it up next time I take a trip to the twin cities.

Thing #3 - RSS

2008-03-27T10:13:00.002-05:00

Ok, so it's been a while since my last post, and I figured I'd take another stab at the 23 things. RSS or Really Simple Syndication. Now this is something I find very useful. Since I am a Gmail user, I gave Google Reader a try. Now I don't have to check my favorite websites and blogs for new content. This makes finding new information very easy and puts it all in one place. I had always seen the orange RSS icons before but never put much thought into what they were, so now I'm thinking why didn't I check this out sooner. :o)

23 Things - Thing #2 Library 2.0

2008-01-31T15:45:00.000-06:00

Ok, so I'm reading through the 23 things site, and trying to wrap my brain around thing #2 which is called: "What is Library 2.0?"

Library's using Web 2.0 tools for information exchange, changing how people think about libraries in general. I keep thinking it's just a fancy catch phrase like Flying Fish was for corporate America a number of years ago. Here you go, here's your new "Library 2.0!" Check it out at your library now! Sounds exciting doesn't it? Well, let's see if Thing #3 is any better.

23 Things - all staff meeting

2008-01-31T15:31:00.001-06:00

Today we had our 23 things on a stick all staff meeting today. We got to do some fun things like "Guess the Avatar" from 11 different staff member's blogs. A few of them were pretty obvious, some not so much, however after they were all revealed most of them made a lot of sense.

While I have used several of the Web 2.0 tools before in my personal life, it will be interesting to see what other new things are out there that 23 things on a stick has the participants explore. Well back to work now.

23 Things for PC Geeks - Thing 1

2008-01-31T14:52:00.000-06:00

Hello fellow and lady bloggers,

Work has the entire staff trying out a new education project called "23 things on a stick." It's basically an introduction to various Web 2.0 applications to introduce them to all the various things Web 2.0 is all about. Thing #1 of course is to create a blog. Well you can stick a fork in this one, because it's done!