Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Paper Girl


IMG_6529
Originally uploaded by rogue2408.
Bobbi's got the greatest photos, doesn't she?

Dewey after the Linn Christmas Parade 2006

Dewey Rocks!

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Web 2.0 Search Engines

The Online Education Database has an article up on the top 25 Web 2.0 Search Engines. For those of you who haven't done your search engine lesson yet, you may want to take a look at some of these in addition to (or instead of) the ones that we list on the lesson's post. For those of you who have finished that lesson, you may want to check them out too - you never know when you will find a new gem of a search engine that you will want to use on a regular basis!

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Robin Hastings
robin.hastings@gmail.com

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

New set of posts!

Yeah, that final post? That was the final post for my Learning 2.0 project. I'm going to continue to post cool new Web 2.0ish stuff I find for you all to peruse, though. Keep me in your bloglines account, please!!


This is a quick 4 1/2 minute video that explains Web 2.0 perfectly! Enjoy it!!

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Robin Hastings
robin.hastings@gmail.com

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Week 11 Final Post

Summarize my thoughts on the program, huh? Well, to start off with, I'll have to say that I've been impressed, surprised and delighted by the amount of learning that has gone on due to this program. Everyone who has been participating has been posting like crazy and learning new concepts all the time. That is just plain exciting! I've also been surprised at how many people have jumped in and started working on this thing - we are at over 40% of the staff currently signed up and with blogs. That's pretty cool, too!
I'm always learning new stuff about the Web 2.0 landscape. Just today, I found out about a program called "IMified" that lets you add reminders to your Google Calendar, make notes and todo lists and do a whole bunch more from you Instant Messaging client. This is a fairly cool application, especially for those who have their IM clients open all the time. This is just an example of the sort of thing that is released nearly every day in the Web 2.0 world.
As for what I'd like to see the staff learn... I'm currently reviewing various state lists of "core competencies" for library staff members. I'd like to see a series of training initiatives that cover those competencies - and so, that's what I'm working on next! I hope that we will be able to do many different kinds of training sessions, blog-based tutorials and, possibly, flash and/or video based teaching "modules" for the staff in the future!

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Robin Hastings
robin.hastings@gmail.com

Monday, February 05, 2007

26. Podcasts

Create a blog post about your discovery process. Did you find anything useful here?

Using the Yahoo! podcast search and the search term of "library", (after I had looked for "books" and found pretty much nothing in the first few pages that interested me - lots of comic book podcasts, though!), I found LibVox, a roundup of library news and a link to the OPAL podcasts. I read the LISNews RSS feed pretty much every day for a comprehensive check of the days news about libraries (and I've added it to our staffweb's collection of feeds on the staff web site), but this would be a nice way to catch up on the news while driving to and from work or while doing other things at my desk. The OPAL podcasts were something I'd run across before and not signed up for, but should have. OPAL is a learning initiative from a collective of libraries in Ohio. They offer a lot of great classes as well as quite a few book discussions and interviews.

I currently use iTunes to manage the few podcasts I listen to - namely Science Friday from NPR and Al Franken's show that airs on Air America. I'm pretty bad at taking in information by just listening to it - I'm a VERY visual learner, so podcasts are interesting, but not my favorite way of learning new things... But that's me and others may find podcasts to be the perfect way to help alleviate the information overload that can easily happen when you start discovering way more RSS feeds than you have time to read!
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Robin Hastings
robin.hastings@gmail.com

Monday, January 29, 2007

25 - YouTube



Rita Starnes, a local small business woman, created some videos of her speaking so that I could post them on her website for her. She wanted people who were considering hiring her as a speaker to be able to see her in action. I chose to use YouTube to host and serve the videos for a couple of different reasons. I wanted to be able to use the statistics YouTube offers for their videos to keep track of the number of views she is getting and I wanted to be able to host these rather large files on a server other than her own - since she has limited space to play with!

The video clip above is of Rita giving a speech on gender communications - it's her first try at videography, and I think she did a rather nice job!

I've seen other uses for YouTube that are more specific to the library. St. Joseph public library posted a video that they created for their staff day on YouTube and inspired a LOT of other librarians to use this new tool. Now Denver's public library is having a contest for people to submit videos, via YouTube, to the library where they are encouraging teens to tell the world about how they have fun at the library. These are both great library advertising - and it's getting the word out to people who may be hard to reach in more traditional ways!
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Robin Hastings
robin.hastings@gmail.com