Week 8 of Learn 2.0

It must be neat to be such a long-time part of a community like Flickr. The people who were meeting for the first time in Hawaii knew each other from their pictures alone, and were so used to the pictures each took that they were even able to do a quiz based on them! Such a close group in cyberspace, it blows my mind the ways that people can find each other from other continents. I am now a member, and I was able to find some really neat pictures (is "The Shifted Librarian" on Flickr the same one who runs the blog, or just someone else who thought the name was cool? Anyway, they had some good OCLS pictures), but I'm not really a photo buff myself, I prefer to see what others take pictures of. It's going to be a little while before I can do the eXplore activity, since I have to wait for my boyfriend to get back from Atlanta so I can use his camera to take pictures at Main.

I had never heard of Creative Commons before, but I can definitely understand that something like it was necessary in this age of increasingly mobile people and ideas. When anyone can find your words and pictures online, it's important to protect them, even if it means just setting boundaries for the ways in which your ideas can be used and shared. And since the Creative Commons website makes it easy to tag and protect your files (the tutorial shows you step by step and it's a very streamlined process), there's no reason not to. Would you want someone else taking credit for your stuff?

I've really enjoyed this course, it's kind of disappointing that it's going to end soon. I look forward to every Tuesday! I haven't been doing this as part of a team, but I have helped several people. Whether it was helping to set up a blog, import a Meez, or add a link list to their Blogger account, I think that I have made a difference in some people's learning. As the weeks wear on, fewer and fewer people have asked for help, which I see as a very good thing! If you take the time to explore a little and experiment, the things that we've approached have not been too difficult. I hope that over the course of this Learn 2.0 voyage, people have become more comfortable and familiar with their own ability to figure things out. But just because we're able to do something on our own doesn't mean that we should be diconnected from those around us, as the Flickr group demonstrated. They didn't just talk to friends and neighbors, but people from all over the world! I hope that this will encourage others to get more involved with the internet and the various new things that are always being created and discovered.

My ProtoPage for the Adventure activity is kind of bland, but it was fun to tool around with it. The setup for the whole thing wasn't very intuitive, so it was a little difficult to figure out how to make it public, and the format isn't exactly what I would want in a webpage, but it's still a cool idea. An easy way for people to create a space for themselves, with their own feeds and widgets that reflect them. Also, you can edit it without having to know any code and change everything around just by dragging it where you want it to be. I have to say, though, I can't figure out how to "tag it with OCLS," as the course page instructed. I looked at everything I thought could help and finally emailed the "feeback" page. If anyone else figures this out before I do, please feel free to share!