I really like the Bloglines software. One of my favorite webcomics, Achewood, has separate blogs for just about every character. I love to read about the daily lives of the characters from their own points of view, as well as that of the artist. Now, I subscribe to all of their blogs via RSS, as well as some feeds that Bloglines picked based on my preferences, like New York Times book reviews. I even added some Epicurious daily recipe feeds linked from the Department Of Fun "Chocolate Chips" link on the course page, as well as the "Technology at OCLS" feed from the library.
As for Grokker, I can easily see how it will become a very useful website. Unfortunately, whether it's because of site issues or just simply still being a beta version, it was too interminably slow for me. The mapping of different categories was useful and easy to understand, just too slow and reliant on longer-loading images to be much use right now. I'm sure as it gets cleaned up, it will run much faster and more reliably, increasing the number of people who prefer its intuitive grouping of results.
The Adventure activity wasn't as hard as I had thought it would be. The tutorial has screenshots and accompanying description, so it was easy to follow. Admittedly, I didn't try to reinvent the wheel with my pipe (just had it aggregate the first 3 Achewood character blogs together in ascending date of publication), but just being able to look at top pipes that other people had created was instructional enough to explore the range of what can be done. I especially like the pipe that takes music from your last.fm account and finds videos for them on YouTube. Similarly, there was one that took the top 10 downloaded songs from ITunes and found videos on YouTube for them. Imagine being able to read Le Monde in English, as one pipe lets you, via a translator. The possibilities are endless and awesome.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Week 2 in Learn 2.0
As much as the "7 1/2 Habits of Lifelong Learners" presentation slowed down my whole process in the Week 1 module (not that I can't see how useful it may be to others, but it just seemed really boring to me), the Adventure activity of this week really spurred my interest.
I really appreciate the blogs that OCLS already uses (especially the Orange Slices on the Orange Peel), and I would love to see us move into an even broader range of links (maybe even making something like Orange Slices available to the public). I feel as though our patrons would like to have access to things we are interested in, the ways in which current technology trends are being incorporated into our website, and so on. While the current public OCLS blogs are great for getting information about what our branches are doing and what the library system is doing as a whole, I would like to see us move in a more casual, "look what else is going on in the world of libraries" direction, too.
Through the Adventure activity, I found the Blatant Berry blog on Library Journal. His journal had an interesting article about the movement towards more and more library jobs being taken from degree holders by employers who move towards giving previously MLS job requirements to non-degree holders. Not having a degree myself, but planning to get one in the future, I find this debate very interesting. I also really liked the Librarian Avenger and the Shifted Librarian. In case you're interested, the Shifted Librarian has a neat link to Myxer involving library-related ringtones, as well as an article concerning a proposed bill to filter all library computers (even staff computers), with a $100-a-day fee for any noncompliance.
All in all, I found Week 2 to be very useful and interesting, and I have high hopes for future modules and the things I can learn from them.
I really appreciate the blogs that OCLS already uses (especially the Orange Slices on the Orange Peel), and I would love to see us move into an even broader range of links (maybe even making something like Orange Slices available to the public). I feel as though our patrons would like to have access to things we are interested in, the ways in which current technology trends are being incorporated into our website, and so on. While the current public OCLS blogs are great for getting information about what our branches are doing and what the library system is doing as a whole, I would like to see us move in a more casual, "look what else is going on in the world of libraries" direction, too.
Through the Adventure activity, I found the Blatant Berry blog on Library Journal. His journal had an interesting article about the movement towards more and more library jobs being taken from degree holders by employers who move towards giving previously MLS job requirements to non-degree holders. Not having a degree myself, but planning to get one in the future, I find this debate very interesting. I also really liked the Librarian Avenger and the Shifted Librarian. In case you're interested, the Shifted Librarian has a neat link to Myxer involving library-related ringtones, as well as an article concerning a proposed bill to filter all library computers (even staff computers), with a $100-a-day fee for any noncompliance.
All in all, I found Week 2 to be very useful and interesting, and I have high hopes for future modules and the things I can learn from them.
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