Wendy’s learning 2.0 blog

I have really enjoyed this project. I have learned about a lot of new technologies as well as brushing up on those that I already had experience with. The length of time we had to complete the course was great (although I almost didn’t finish!) and I feel it was a great learning experience as well as an excellent team-building exercise for the staff in our library. Already out library co-ordinator has included several of these technologies into our library’s services and fuctions, and we have a more interesting and dynamic workplace as a result. Thank you very much!

LibriVox is a fantastic resource, I love being able to download audiobooks a chapter at a time. I will definitely be adding this one to my personal del.icio.us page so that next time there is a long car trip, we have something to listen to. The “best places to get free books” site is marvelous as well – I’ll never be stuck for something to read again!

I don’t like it to be honest, but I can see that it may have some educational applications. I know that a similar 3D world is being used at a medical school to simulate different clinical environments in which (eventual) doctors would operate. I feel that is has the potential to isolate people, especially those who are already socially sidelined, and will become addictive to certain personality types, resulting in family and marital problems and an unbalanced lifestyle. I doubt I’ll ever get on board with this one.

I love being able to catch my favorite radio programs at a time that suits me. I routinely download the ABC’s  Richard Stubbs’ program to listen to at a laterstage, because I always miss it. Podcasts are a great publishing tool for the library and for students alike, and not as difficult to produce as I would have thought! I had never thought of creating and RSS feed for my podcasts, but now that I have a blog *and* an iGoogle page, I definitely will

Youtube is a fantastic time way to kill time as well as being a wonderful resource-sharing tool. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the web 2.0  “The Machine is Us/ing Us” video – it is very clever. The march of the librarians shows just how many librarians are out there! I found a couple of other interesting videos about libraries and web2.0, being used as marketing tools to promote the services offered by various libraries.

There have been mixed feelings at my school about Rollyo, but I think it is a very useful way to get students to search reputable authoritative sites. I created a rollyo search using only online encyclopedias, and it worked very well. It’s straightforward and easy to use. My only frustration was that I had to do it twice because there was no prompt to create a username and password the first time around, and so my search wasn’t saved.

Initially I thought that wikipedia as *the* wiki, and only later did I realise that wikis could be used by anyone for just about anything. Our school has set up an internal procedures manual wiki, which is fabulous because any of us can access it at any time, and gone are the days where only one person knew how to do a particular job. Now we can all update the wiki as appropriate when procedures change or when  we get new equipment.  The fact that it’s editable is fantastic.

Our school has been using Del.icio.us for some time now, as a curriculum resource for internet sites. We have faculty and subject headings, with specialised headings for cerian units of work. It has become a very valuable tool for both staff and students, and as it is continually updated by the library staff, is is always changing and new links appear regularly.

On a personal level, my Del.icio.us has been a real lifesaver. Recently when I lost my windows profile and had to rebuild it, bookmarks was one less thing to worry about!

I think that some of the best things about the library2.0 movement are:

• People can get involved to the extent that suits them, so if they enjoy participating in discussions and are comfortable with technology, they can be very active members of the library community, but for those who prefer to stay on the sidelines, that is fine too.
• The skills that library users can learn if they get involved with the library2.0 techologies are immediately transferable to other aspects of their life which is vey empowering.
• There are no social or geographical boundaries to being involved.

I love my iGoogle home page. I’ve changed my theme a dozen times, and keep updating it with new widgets and rss feeds from various places. It’s great to be able to store all these links and feeds in one place. I think the individuality possible on iGoogle is great. From a social point of view it would be very interesting to look at  the iGoogle pages of a selection of the community and see how much it reflects the owner!

I’ve got tabs for general news, ITC news, professional learning, work related info (including rss feeds form the MPSC blogs that we run internally), and fun stuff. I also have links to wikipedia, dictionaries, etc, so everything can be accessed very quickly and is right at my fingertips.