WEEK 9 Thing # 23

WEEK 9.....Thing #23.....Amazing , I'm at the end. It's been a little like a roller coaster ride and a little like learning a foreign langage, a lot of ups and downs and certainly some frustration( sometimes a LOT of frustration) like when you just don't get why/how you conjugate a verb as you are learning to speak a new language. I know that I have provided some members of my branch moments of comic relief as I tried to deal with what WASN'T working and it's probably a good thing that I can't easily lift my computer to throw it out of the window because at times that's what I felt like doing. In all fairness some of my frustration was caused by the littlest things like when I wanted to write my posts in color but everytime I clicked to start writing my post after choosing my color the print went back to black and I couldn't figure out what tiny thing I was doing wrong to make this happen. Unlike some participants, I asked a LOT of questions along the way- I have no problem saying that - I imagine I have come from much further back than some people as I had never even copied and pasted before. I spent a lot of time on this from home- I did not find the work room atmosphere conducive to the type of concentration I need to learn something new. Some of this experience was like learning horizon- once you do something a couple of times and find your way around its not too intimidating like when I first wanted to edit a post I had to read on how to go about doing that and that took time, and then the more I did it the easier it got. I would participate in something like this again(maybe during the winter instead of during summer reading??). I particularly liked Flickr. Taking on this project has taught me a few things, about myself and about technology. My gauge of whether or not I have really learned something is if I can teach it to someone else. At this point I could not do that with all of these things BUT I could do it with some of these so that's a great start for me. Sometime in the future I think that I'll go back and go through this program again and see how it goes. Some of these 23 things I may use in the future but some of them I don't see myself ever using , but NEVER say NEVER right????Let me express a sincere thank you to the people who have used their time and patience to help me out, particularly J.

WEEK 3 thing #6

WEEK 3......Thing #6--I liked trying out Flickr Postcard Browser by Airtight Interactive- It pulls up pictures in the form of a postcard, you type in your tag and a series of small postcards appear on the screen and you can click on each individually and make it larger. It's feels kind of like a travel log experience.

WEEK 6... Thing #15

WEEK 6......Thing #15...... I thought that the piece by Rick Anderson was interesting"Away from the Icebergs"........... We need to always be looking to the future and recognize that the "times they are a changing" and adapt our offerings, procedures and focus to adapt to these times. I can relate to this by just looking at how my son does( or doesn't do )research for school. I have numerous books that are terrific that I have bought at book sales, garage sales, church sales through the years thinking that my kids could use them for school later-they would have the info at their fingertips- and my son just wants to use the internet. He's not interested in coming to the library -not when he can find what he wants on the internet. I agree with Mr. Anderson that we have to find ways to remove the blocks that prevent customers from easily accessing information(23 things?)

WEEK 9 ........Thing #21

WEEK 9.....Thing #21......Tried putting podcasts on my Bloglines a few weeks ago and had issues..... who knows why.....(perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I wasn't always keeping the cursor where it was supposed to be -but now I know)but now I think I've got it by george. It REALLY was easy. So for someone who really wants to do the podcast thing it only takes a minute to learn..........NIFTY (i KNOW, HOW CORNY CAN YOU GET?)

WEEK 9 #22

WEEK 9.....Thing #22.....I looked at Project Gutenburg( actually did this quite a while ago, just didn't write it up) after having difficulty with one of the others . It was very easy to use-even though at first I was put off by all the info about formats, encoding and compression which I didn't understand. It lists the most popular 100 books which you can download for free with titles like Huckleberry Finn and Pride and Prejudice. Jane Eyre was listed , one of my alltime favorites. This is a really nice site, although I really like to literally curl up with a good book, not view it across a desk top.

Week 6 thing #14

WEEK 6..... Thing #14 If your keyword search is Learning 2.0 one would see something like 22,695 posts and 659 blogs and who knows how many tags.When I first read about this exercise it seemed to me that I was being asked to tell how many tags there were "connected " to this keyword search and compare that number to the number of posts and blogs- Apparently not, but that kept me a little crazy for a few minutes. Tagging could definitely be useful. The # 1 ranked blog is the blog with the most other distinct blogs linking to it in the last 6 months- Obviously the top ranked blog would have good, "appropriate", popular tags -

Week 5- thing #12

WEEK 5....Thing #12..... Rollyo was kinda fun. I named mine Familybefore- Genealogy focused-what a surprise... and added some search engines that looked good.- It was easy to do. Only issue was that when I was on my search page I figured that I just needed to click on the "circle" and I would be where I needed to go and nothing happened- was my firewall preventing this? I don't know- I'm a little annoyed , But at least it was easy. I can see where it would be useful . Guess I'll find out the answer to why it didn't pan out later.