Technology Training: July 2007

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

EXERCISE #19

I enjoyed checking out all of these fun Web 2.0 things, it's so easy to waste hours and hours of your precious time on the internet! Of course, I went straight for the games, music and toys. I liked the widgits found at yourminis and I REALLY loved the customized music stations at Pandora.com. On this website, you simply type in the name of one of your favorite music artists and based on your response, Pandora creates a 'radio selection' based on your artist's music 'genome'. I typed in that my favorite artist was 'Alaine' and I ended up with a great selection of new, soca/reggae 'chunes' for my listening pleasure.

EXERCISE #18

I played with Zoho Show to try out the shared presentation features. This allows you to create and share PowerPoint-like presentations completely online. Unfortunately, I found the tool to be clumsy and limited-it would not allow me to cut and paste or at least it didn't make it easy to find this feature. I also ran into quite a few errors while trying to save my work. I can see benefits to using this application but if you have the server space, you might as well upload and save your own PowerPoint files as web pages.

Here's a link to my sad sandbox Zoho Show

PS-I absolutely love these cartoons, check out more at http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/

EXERCISE #17

PBWiki, mmmmmmmm, my favorite! Big ups to the wiki site and its creators:

EXERCISE #16

I love wikis, I think they are an excellent evolution of our collection of shared information. While one must take wiki content with a grain of salt due to authoring, wikis offer limitless potential for sharing knowledge. In 2006, I attended the NECC (National Educational Computing Conference) in San Diego, CA and went to a presentation on wikis. The guest speaker explained how the traditional 'guardians' or 'gatekeepers' of knowledge no longer have complete control over the 'history' or 'facts' that are disseminated to the public. I. e., Encyclopedia Britannica in print form is no longer one of the only options for researching information. I especially love that the common shared version of 'historical fact' is no longer from the perspective of the 'winners'. Wikis, discussion boards and online access to global newspapers has helped us, as humans, to learn to form our own opinions of fact based on our own construction of knowledge (Can you say constructivism?) Here's a link to to Al Jazeera news, in English.

My favorite place to go to make wikis is PBWiki.com, it's free, easy to edit and access.

Monday, July 16, 2007

EXERCISE #15

In the Library 2.0 article, Away from the “Icebergs" by Rick Anderson I was most intrigued by the following statement:

"In my library, we’ve seen a 55 percent drop in circulation rates over the past twelve years, making it harder and harder to justify the continued buildup of a large “just in case” print collection. As a Web 2.0 reality continues to emerge and develop, our patrons will expect access to everything – digital collections of journals, books, blogs, podcasts, etc. You think they can’t have everything? Think again. "

While I don't think that books are going anywhere anytime soon, I do think that more and more resources will become available in digital format. I think that this is a form of human evolution!

EXERCISE #14

Technorati seems useful as well, but I don't see myself using it anytime soon.

EXERCISE #13

De.licio.us is a social bookmarking website that seems mildly interesting but I don't see a need to use this in my personal or work-related life. Can anyone fill me in on how this has made their online life more productive?