Well week 12 is complete and with it the course. It would be remiss not to say thankyou to the State library for making the course available and another thankyou to V for her encouragement and incentives. This week I have explored social networking to varying degrees. Could not quite overcome my fundamental need to be cautious about what I put out there. The voyeur in me wanted to sign up to Myspace or Facebook and have a good look around. The real me could not bring myself to do it. Second life – don’t quite know what to say that isn’t clichéd (enough trouble managing my first life etc.). Liked the description of the Communities of practice for local government proposal being an attempt to harness the power of social networking to share problems, ideas and expertise – laughed at the comment in the Daily Telegraph describing Facebook for local government as the grimmest thing imaginable – “lots of bureaucrats swapping tips about how to complete form CG23, or fiddle their expenses”. The ALA’s profile of itself on MySpace was certainly something to aspire to!! From my own personal point of view I am happy to keep pushing myself to discover what is out there and participating in Library programs that use our new found expertise for the benefit of our customers.

• What have I achieved? – I know a whole lot more than I did at Week1 and I am motivated to know more
• Did I enjoy it? – Unexpectedly Yes
• Was it hard to do – At times yes, but worthwhile
• Have I overcome my dislike of that loud, uncontrolled cacophony out there? – No! - but I have mellowed a little.

Week 11

Really liked Google Docs – the edit anywhere anytime approach and the myriad of templates made an impression. I didn’t use ZOHO - what can I say realising I had to create yet another account deterred me somewhat and the training info did state that the core features matched up well with Google Docs. Did my desk shift on the first afternoon after I had looked at Google Docs and recommended the site to a customer who was looking for resume templates. She went away really happy. Slideshow looked interesting, but I still have such reservations about putting any of my “stuff” out there. I only have one picture on Flickr (and that’s of a tree) so you can see what I mean! I’m intrigued to know what Thumbstacks offered, but alas there was no access available and the Slideshow exploration of online tools wouldn’t open either on the occasions I tried. In theory the collaborative options all seem great, but being in the “lap of the gods” in terms of availability a lot of the time makes me really appreciate an in-house network with somebody at the help desk when things go wrong

Week10

Mashups – well had lots of time-consuming fun here and I suppose there are endless possibilities for producing posters, displays, maps with library locations, places of current and historical interest etc. Had a look at Automotivator as my colleague had produced a lovely poster for our door guaranteeing our “friendly service”. As weeks go this wasn’t too demanding. Must say that my head is still in Week 9 as I am so delighted at knowing how to download the podcasts. Went to a seminar in Sydney last Friday and listened on the train to a disc from my current talking book that I had ripped on to my MP3 player and the podcasts I had downloaded from the British Library site - hard to recognise myself although I do recognise that there is so much to learn and I am far from being what could be described as “techno-savvy”

Week 9

Podcasts – enjoyed the exploration of this topic. It would be very easy to spend too much time at it as there are so many interesting podcasts out there. Unlike much of what has gone before I felt I was in a much safer and measured environment. For a change I did not feel that I was standing in the middle of a world where everyone was screaming at each other. There’s a lot to get excited about in terms of application in the library (loved the children’s book readings for instance), but as with a lot of 2.0 we would need to have our IT department on board. Not sure I really have the hang of subscribing yet although I have managed to create a link to the British Library on my blog, save some links to my desktop and load them on to my MP3 player – that’s what I call a success.

Week 8

Have just revisited Week 8 after my sick leave. Thought I must have forgotten something significant, but no – it was just as uninspiring as the first time around. Whilst the librarians slamming the boards are to be commended it is such a miniscule drop in an ocean of uncontrolled, disorganised babble. All I can say about it is that WikiAnswers was slightly more acceptable than Yahoo answers. Maybe commending librarians for participating is wrong after all. Are we condoning and legitimising this cacophony when we know perfectly well how to do it better ourselves. Should we not be promoting things like Ask a Librarian? Is it not a case of build it, promote it and put resources into it and they will come?

Week 7

Definitely social book marking has enormous potential as a reference tool in the library. Looking at the AskNow site and the two library examples was really interesting and indicative of just why the 2.0 course is important in highlighting what is being developed. It must be seen as good alternative to general search engines with the ability for staff to collaborate by identifying useful resources and putting them together. No longer would I have to turn up for my once a week reference shift and not know what resources had been found by other staff for the current school assignments
Do I want to make sure my blog is being tracked by Technorati? I would like to pretend that nobody knows its there
I got the same number of hits for the standard search in Technorati as for their advanced search before trying the tag search as suggested. Had no luck with nswpln2008 until I tried the photo tab. Went back and tried “any authority” where I got 10 hits – certainly the examples were not such that I got a “wow” response to the technology.
LibraryThing – lots of fun – could spend endless hours here. This was a really full week, but finishing with LibraryThing certainly had the potential to lift the satisfaction rating.
Not so keen on the front page quote though – “poised to turn cataloguing into a form of communal recreation”

Week 6 - additional

Ignore my post from yesterday – Success I have embedded a video file – how happy am I, but I’m not going to shout about it: it would not be in keeping with the theme of this page