The End

Now that I have come to the end I would like to thank all of the organisers for the opportunity to do this course again. It has been great coming back to it from a position of confidence and i have really enjoyed learning some new tricks. I am keeping up with Facebook most days and have loved catching up with old friends. I am sure that I will be able to use some of these web 2.0 applications when I move into a librarians role in the future.

Week 10 YouTube

You will be very excited to know that I do use YouTube which proves that I do not live in the dark ages completely. I have found it really useful for my daughter and I to listen to recordings of the piano music she is learning. For instance she is starting to learn the Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin and we have found the most amazing pianist who plays ragtime called Chocotiger. We have listened to a number of his performances as Stephanie learnt The Entertainer this year for her grade 3 piano exam. Have a listen he is amazing!!



I have also been using YouTube to listen to and watch the video of Australian Idol winner Stan Walker, as I really loved the song when he sang it on tv.

Week 10 - Podcasting

Well this is my last post for Web 2.0, and I must say it was a good one to finish off with. As you can probably guess I do not listen to Podcasts on a regular basis. I have only listened to them when I have been directed to do so through this course or during my study with CSU. I found them really easy to access through Podcast Alley and I liked the idea of running it through Bloglines which provides a continuous update on the feeds. I accessed a podcast on Doctor Who which went for a couple of hours so I only listened to a little bit. I then subscribed to a Buffy one although the link took me to a blank page (not sure what happened there). I then went a bit more academic and subscribed to Science Times a weekly podcast of science news from the New York Times, quite good if that is your thing. I can't imagine myself sitting at the computer listening to podcasts but it would be really good if you downloaded them to your ipod (of course I don't have one) and then you could listen while walking the dogs etc.

It worked

Well my widget worked. I haven't added many books yet, and yes they are mainly young adult, but that is what I have been studying for the past few months, besides I enjoy reading good children's/young adult fiction along with adult fiction. I often read the same books my daughter Laura (15) is reading, which is nice as we can share our thoughts on what we have read. It also encourages her to keep reading.

Week 9 Books and Reading

This is my widget from LibraryThing hopefully it will work.

Week 8 Productivity

Week 8 offers another batch of useful websites.

Evenbrite has proved to be a great tool for the youth services bookings. I know my husband has found Zamzar useful after I told him about it during the last web 2.0 training session. Google docs sounds a bit like a wiki and could be very useful when you have work colleges in different locations. igoogle is incredibly easy to set up and looks to be a very useful tool. I chose the events category of the seomoz awards and then Upcoming, which allowed me to do a search of upcoming events of all types in Melbourne. Would be a great way of keeping in touch with events which you may not hear about otherwise.

So many sites for the web savvy to choose from!!

Week 7 Tagging, Technocrati and Del.icio.us

I enjoyed this week better than last.

Although I don't follow blogs I was able to easily find a blog on Cavalier King Charles Spaniels through the Tecnoncrati search site. I enjoyed reading about Angle and Bliss through The Spaniel Diaries http://spanieldiaries.blogspot.com/.

I love LibraryThing! The very last assignment (I hope you noticed the VERY LAST bit) for my course involved comparing and contrasting two different genres from the teenage fiction collection using a variety of texts as examples, I choose SF and fantasy. This was followed by another 1500 word case study in which we had to recommend a different genre to a teenager who had read everything in one genre (Fantasy - historical) again using texts for examples. Although I read a bit of teenage fiction I certainly don't have a detailed knowledge of our whole collection. This is where LibrayThing was wonderful. I was able to look up books recommended to me to consider (by the very helpful youth team), as well as books I had read in the past and read multiple book reviews and look at the tags to get an idea (or remind myself) of their plot, suitability etc. GO LibrayThing!!!!!!

I loved librarything so much that I joined it a few weeks ago in order to keep a record of all the books I read on it. I like the fact that I can give them tags in order to find them again as my list grows.

I also really liked del.icio.us. That's 3 out of 3 somewhat of a record for me! I set up an account and used it to find book reviews using tags such as books, teenage, young adult, book reviews. Coming back to it a week later I can see how valuable it is to have a list of sites which I probably would have forgotten all about, waiting for me to access them again. Go Del.icio.us!!!

Week 6 Fun Stuff

I hate to have to admit this but I really didn't get into week 6. I had a look at the different sites suggested but they did not really appeal to me and I can't see myself using them in the future.

Facebook addiction

I am starting to become addicted to Facebook and I hold you the creators of web 2.0 responsible, particularly Anne. Anne asked me to be her facebook friend which was great except for the fact that I had not added any content to my facebook page since May. So I duly added some photos, a few posts and invited some friends. I now have 25 friends (although this is constantly growing) and am checking and adding to my page each day. I managed to find one of my best friends from our time in Whyalla, which lead me to find a whole lot of other friends from Whyalla and I have been chatting to them and finding out about their lives now. It has been really great to catch up with so many people I had lost track of. So really I have to thank Anne for inviting me to be her friend!

Week 5 Flicka

I have spent a bit of time this morning checking out flicka again. I have not used flicka for a while but found it very handy for sharing photos with my group when we did a group assignment. We had to write a strategic plan for the Altona Library Service so I went over there and took a few photos of the different libraries. I have used my new RSS knowledge to subscribe to a couple of flicka feeds from my friends, both of whom are brilliant photographers. Check out my friend Ian's page http://www.flickr.com/photos/7533960@N02/ and my friend Andrea's page http://www.flickr.com/photos/andyspics1/ they are both very talented. My page of photos of the libraries is a lot less exciting but here it is just to prove I did it http://www.flickr.com/photos/14776659@N08/.

Holly and Charlie now

Week 4 RSS Feeds

I have spent the last hour or so playing around with RSS feeds, one aspect of web 2.0 I did not really get the hang of last time I did the course. I feel quite comfortable with it now and opened two RSS feeds one through Bloglines and one through Google reader after a couple of people recommended it in the comments section. I am still a bit unsure if RSS is for me as I don't tend to follow a lot of sites, however I can see the benefit of it and will persist with it for the next few weeks. I signed up to The Age and a couple of international new sites as well as a few local ones.

Charlie

Charlie as a puppy April 2009. Very cute obviously.

Holly on Christmas day last year

I thought my blog looked a bit bland so here are a couple of pictures of my beautiful Cavalier King Charles Spaniels Holly and Charlie (Obviously they are much cuter than the kids).

Week 3 Facebook and twitter

I signed up to facebook earlier in the year so that I would have an idea what it is and how to use it. I must admit however, that I do not keep my posts up to date as it is not my favoured method of communication with friends. I think it would be great if you had family and friends overseas or even interstate or if you were travelling but at this stage in my life none of those particularly apply. I will try and do a bit more with my facebook page in the next few weeks, just to keep up with things.

I also joined twitter a few months ago, again to keep up with technology which people are using, but it is definitely not for me. I simply can't be bothered and am not interested in hearing what people are doing right now.

Week 2 Blogs, Wikis and Nings and finishing study!

I am very happy to let everyone know that I have finally finished my librarianship course. YEAH!!!! I still have to pass the last subject (which I will) and get my piece of paper to prove it but I can now call myself a LIBRARIAN. It has been a long time in coming. Now I just have to find a librarian job.

Anyway, I finally have some head space to get stuck into web 2.0. I enjoyed it last time but felt that I didn't fully grasp some of the applications we looked at. I feel much more comfortable doing the course again and look forward to filling in any blanks.

I am comfortable using blogs and have encouraged my girls to submit book reviews for the library blog - about the books. It's good for them to see their work in print (well on the screen).

I know all about wiki's as we had to set up our own wiki and be assessed on the content for one of the subjects of my course. It was a good project. We had to establish an online library for diabetes researchers based around the country. Including your help page and general information and a list of 20 databases and websites which would be useful to the researchers (Believe it or not I can't remember what else we had to do, but it was a huge project). The wiki was a really good medium for providing this online service.

I have not really used nings but I know all about them from this course. So I think I can safely say that I have week 2 down pat.

Library blogs

I enjoy reading the book reviews on the library blogs and have encouraged my kids to submit articles for "about the books".

Here we go again!

Here I am doing the course for the second time in the hope of learning a few more "things".