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

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

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

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

24 - Web 2.0 awards

I went to the "short list" of winners - just to cut down on the number of sites I had to choose from! I chose to check out Newsvine - a "peer news production" site. I took the 60 second tour and discovered that Newsvine has "digg-like" qualities. You can vote a news story up or down to indicate how important you feel the story is (digg allows you to do that to websites) and then see what other Newsvine users feel are the most important stories of the day. Commenting and conversation are also encouraged by the Newsvine setup. That gives you even more information on how people feel about the various stories that are submitted. I can see that a determined group of activists could "game" this system into presenting stories that are one-sided, but - like Wikipedia - I would hope that there are enough users to prevent any one group from taking over the service like that!

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Robin Hastings
robin.hastings@gmail.com

23 - Google Labs

I've been hearing amazing things about the new Google RSS reader (similar to the Bloglines application that we've introduced you all to and that I use right now), so I decided to give it a try. After importing my feeds, I clicked around and I think I may like it a lot. One of the big benefits is the same as Gmail - no folders, just tags (though Google Reader calls them folders, but they act like tags - just like the labels in Gmail). This way I can put a librarian blog that is written by a friend (such as Librarian By Day) into both my library blogs folder and my friends folder. That rocks!!
The other tool I decided to write about is the Google Notebook tool. That puts a little notebook on your browser's extension bar (if you are using a good browser - ie. Firefox) and lets you add selected text to a note page in the notebook application. Now, if only they would link up the Notebook and Google Docs & Spreadsheets so I can import my notes into a Google Doc, I'd be in heaven!

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Robin Hastings
robin.hastings@gmail.com

22 - online applications

I have to say that I am a HUGE fan of the online office applications. Michael Howard and I were collaborating on a bit of writing for the River Journal the other day and, despite the fact that we sit 2 feet from one another, we both had the document open on our computers and were making changes to the document while discussing it. That is efficient collaboration! The blog post about this week's lesson has a lot of cool uses for this kind of thing, be sure to read it carefully! One of the coolest (in my opinion) is the multitude of file formats you can save in. To create a PDF using MS Word, you have to buy the Acrobat program ($200+ dollars) and install it. To create a PDF in Docs & Spreadsheets, you just go to File --> Save As PDF and it's done.
Finally, before I go (and according to File --> Count Words I'm just at 153 words, so I'm ready to stop typing...), this application allows you to create spreadsheets that are fully compatible with Excel and can be saved in PDF format as well. That's just cool!!

Update: My title for my document didn't come through!! That could be an issue at times, but this time I just edited this post and added it...