What I learned today

Today I "tuned in" to a webinar that Atomic Learning did on Web 2.0 tools. (I can't say I participated very actively, so I used "tuned in." I was a little disappointed in the beginning since it felt like advertising for Atomic Learning. But then they got into the philosophy behind teaching with Web 2.0 tools and it was more interesting.

The two speakers they featured were teachers using many of the read/write web sites that we learned about in 23 Things on a Stick. I could even follow the jargon since I had been introduced to these tools. It sounded like these teachers were out at the forefront in their use of wikis, ning and blogs. Their students they felt were much more engaged and actively learning. It was interesting that one of the teachers has his students teach teachers. What a great learning experience for both.

I couldn't help but notice that both were at high schools that supported one-to-one computing. One teacher has a class of senior that are issued laptops to use their entire senior year! They did say that these ways of teaching could work in a classroom that only has a few computers and students just take their turn during the week. Even that level of technology seems out of my reach right now. We still have labs that teachers schedule and as far as assigning a blog entry, many of our students don't own computers. It makes the digital divide look like it's getting wider.

It seems it still takes some personal experience using these tools to have school board members or teachers really understand what they could mean to their students.

What I learned today

I read in an email from a listserv that the Center for Intellectual Property is having a symposium on "Reimaging Copyright in a World of User Generated Content." Concerns surrounding copyright brought on by Web 2.0 capabilities are coming to the forefront. I'm glad that people are discussing it. It always seems that advances in technology or science are ahead of the discussions of the ethics surrounding those advances.

Thing 23 - Reflection

This was a fast and furious introduction to many cool tools that Web 2.0 offers. Some were very easy to catch on to and incorporate and others I will have to go back and learn again when I have a use for them. The trick will be remembering what’s out there when an opportunity presents itself to apply any of these tools. There are at least two I want to implement in my job right away.

I’m glad I signed up for this or I never would have made the time to investigate these Things. It would be really neat if teachers could go through this and learn about the opportunities the Web provides for integrating technology into their lessons. I suppose we would have to have administrators experience the power of some of these tools first, so we could have a discussion about how much is blocked.

Thank you for a very worthwhile experience. It was a great use of technology to create a self-directed learning opportunity that is perfectly tuned to adult learning theory.

Thing 22 - Keeping up

Participating in the 23 Things on a Stick program brought home to me the importance of keeping current with Web tools. The tools one knows about and uses with facility are only a fraction of the ones out there. They’re a little like products in a grocery store: there are brand name sites (like MySpace and Flickr), but there are tons of other less known sites that do many of the same things. And there’s always someone trying to improve on what’s been done before.

Since striving for improvement is always a worthy goal, I pledge to keep up-to-date with Web tools that can help me be more productive and improve my library. I have plenty of links on the 23 Things on a Stick blog to investigate. I also plan to monitor WebJunction and maybe even post something. I tagged Go2Web in Del.icio.us already. I spent about 45 minutes looking at a few crazy things you can do and want to go back when I have more time. I learned you can use your computer to play guitar chords and sing along to songs (a little like DDR or guitar hero, but more sedentary) on Songsterr.

I wonder what I will learn tomorrow?

Thing 21 - other social networking sites

My kids all have MySpace or Facebook pages and I worry a little about what is public for them. Yet, exploring other social networking sites has made them more familiar to me and not so strange. Their appeal to people is more understandable to me now.

I joined WebJunction when it was fairly new, but have not used it much. I can see I did not take advantage of the opportunity to interact with other library professionals. Now that I understand more how these sites work, I will be more comfortable joining the discussion.

Ning was fairly easy to navigate and use. I am amazed at the number of librarians doing the 23 Things on a Stick program. I don't have to feel so alone in my position. I did have to look a little while to find the badge, but it was easy to add to my blog. I put it on the side at first, but some of the words got cut off, so I moved it to the bottom. I thought about changing the html to adjust the width, but decided it would look funny.

While exploring the Library 2.0 networking site, I discovered a video tutorial on Diigo, another social networking site. It looks very cool, though, as it incorporates a toolbar into your browser that lets you highlight things on webpages, share bookmarks, and email contacts without leaving the webpage you are reading. Many of the things I come across on the web, I intend to send to colleagues for their information. It would make it much easier using this tool.

I'm not totally convinced I need to join a social network, but I am seeing more and more benefits. It can be confusing to remember so many passwords and tools, so it is appealing to have the tools you want to use all in one place. I might check into diigo.com this summer when I have more time.

Thing 20 - Facebook and MySpace

Thank goodness for snowstorms. I’m getting more Things done.

Library sites on MySpace offer the content they think teens will be looking for directly from their MySpace page. It would be interesting to know if they can tell how many use the databases from the link on MySpace. Denver Public Library used warnings about following an external link that seem kind of unnecessary when it opens in another window. Hennepin County Library opened in the same window and only had warnings sometimes. Denver’s links sometimes came up with errors. A library supporting both a webpage and a MySpace page has many links to check and keep up-to-date. The integration of YouTube and Flickr shows exactly what we’ve been learning about in these 23 Things. I also saw plenty of slideshows on pages. The music, videos, and artwork all work together to appeal to that age group in a forum they are apt to use. I noticed, though, that most of the “friends” listed were authors or other library groups.

I only was 20 minutes into investigating MySpace and I stumbled on something exciting: book trailers. Since I have my elementary students giving booktalks every class, I have drawn the parallel to movie trailers and that booktalks are an advertisement. I felt that there must be something like book trailers out there in cyberspace. Now I’ve found some on Book Divas. The video of Jodi Picoult I’m sure would interest my high school students. I just have to figure out how to get them there. This is why Denver Public library has a MySpace page!

I read the article on using Facebook professionally. It still seems that it is something a private person, an introvert, would never feel comfortable using. I guess such a person still might create a profile with limited information. The biggest asset I can see is to organize all those nifty things from the Web in one place to make your life easier. My feeling is, though, that it would be a greater timewaster than any useful purpose it would serve.

Thing 19 - Podcasts

I listened to a few podcasts from NPR. One interesting one was the Grammar Grater, but then linguistics is interesting to me. Podcasts, like magazines, offer a wide variety of subjects for the diverse people that inhabit the world. It was surprising to me that NPR had podcasts in a variety of formats. I noted one that was only available as an MP3 and another played with Real player and still another played with Quicktime. I suppose how it is uploaded depends on the creator’s choice of format and platform.

Some of the directories seemed large and unwieldy. You can see that they are growing since some offer search boxes now. Although I didn't really like Yahoo where it was all searching. Podcast.net was kind of slow. I would guess that has to do with all the files being large. The educational podcast network had large lists that didn’t give a specific enough description to know what you were getting into. Podcastalley was pretty good. It allowed you to search as well as narrow your topic through the directory. Learning a language in short sessions is a neat idea. I wanted to listen to one, but it was only available as a feed and I’m not sure I can keep up with that right now. What a great idea though!

For myself, I found it much faster to read the transcript available (as on NPR’s site) than to listen to the podcast. So a podcast would make more sense if you could listen while you were mobile or doing something else. Having an iPod or MP3 player would make podcasts more usable. Of course, listening to a podcast while working in another window on the computer is also possible, I guess.

As I explored this Thing, many uses for it came to mind. The Media Center could certainly offer a word a day that would link to the podcast from Dictionary.com. Author interviews and book reviews by students could be recorded and available as a podcasts. I’m not sure about rights there, though. Many teachers could incorporate this technology into their assignments and it may make the students take a project more seriously if their work would be publicly available. It also is a way to incorporate primary “documents” into lessons. An interview with an Oklahoma resident on the dust storms is one example I came across. I could use such podcasts in connection with books we read in the library.

Thing 18 - YouTube

You certainly can waste a lot of time watching YouTube videos. We have them blocked at school for that reason. There are also many great videos that would be worthwhile to use in the classroom. I have seen some before (forwarded through email) using the sand pictures. It always amazes me! I found a great one I would love to show students. It's called Read a Book.



I've made use of YouTube one other way personally. My son suggested we make a video for my daughter's birthday since she was studying in Thailand at the time. We sang Happy Birthday and gave her a few short messages and then he uploaded it. Within minutes, she could see it half way around the world!
As with any of these Web 2.0 tools, there are uses and abuses. It will be interesting to see how far the Web takes us. Programmers certainly have made it easy to share and embed videos. I didn't have any trouble at all.

Thing 17 - ELM productivity tools

I did the RSS feeds in Thing 3 with only the blogs and news sites that offered the feed buttons right there. I was lost when I was supposed to subscribe to a feed for my search in InfoTrac and couldn’t find a button. I tried just copying and pasting the URL of my search results, but Google Reader wouldn’t take it. I looked in all the help topics I could think of but never did figure out how to set up a feed that would alert me to new content in the search I did in Student Edition. Normally I like the clean interface of the Student Edition, but this time it frustrated me.

I was glad to see the task to create a webpage in EBSCO. I saw this at the CMLE meeting last fall, but didn’t remember exactly how to do it. It seemed very easy to do. I need to remember to set this up for teachers who could use it with their classes. Proquest has the same feature, too. At first my recent searches got included in the page in Proquest, but then I found how to delete them, so my next emailed results were cleaner. This would be a great boon to saving research. When you click on the articles from somewhere else, though, you still need to enter the password for EBSCO or ProQuest.

The NetLibrary task posed a larger hurdle. I had not used it for some time and didn’t have a clue what the password was any more. The instructions on 23Things on a Stick talk about a free account, but all the directions on NetLibrary mention that your librarian can hook you up. When I am the librarian, I’m stuck. I read a couple of other participants blogs to see if any offered how they did it, but didn’t gain anything that would help. I will have to investigate this at school.

I only batted .500 on this Thing. I know the tools are there, but it is a challenge for me and my students to keep access viable when they are not used often enough. Many of these tools are more appropriate for older high school students and these are the kids I no longer have much contact with as a result of budget cuts.

Thing 16 - Research Project Calculator

The research Project Calculator is a great tool. I had a little experience with it before. Earlier this school year, I told a Senior Comp and Lit teacher about it and encouraged her to look at it. She was busy, of course, and did not get to do much with it. I pulled a couple of great resources from there to use in the introduction I gave to her class. I really liked the “What’s my angle?” graphic organizer.

Both calculators spend a good deal of effort on helping students create a strong thesis. This is a big reason why students have trouble writing papers; they don’t do enough with the thesis to make it control their paper.

The other very helpful suggestion I was impressed with was keeping a record of your searches – databases, keywords, etc. I never took the time to do this as a student, but now as a librarian, I’m always telling students to do this. Luckily, I can also tell them that many databases make it easy. There are so many online tools to help track research.

Very cool for college students! The Research Quickstart actually suggests databases based on the subject area you indicate.

There’s so much information to help students with the process. It’s a shame that most often, students are so focused on the topic that they rarely spend their “precious” time reading these pages of help on the process.

I am a little curious why the Research Project Calculator was constructed with 5 steps when the Big6 has been touted so highly. I suppose it might be a copyright issue.

Thing 15 - Libraries and games

My jaw dropped when I first started reading about Second Life. The more I read, the more incredulous I became.” How can this be fascinating to that many people?” I wondered.

Then I began to consider my son who loves to do funny things with pictures using Photoshop, and my daughter who would create Powerpoints in the summertime to summarize a family vacation. I know my oldest son plays Dungeons and Dragons online. I thought about all the digital natives that do things like these and more as recreation, and it seemed perfectly logical that a virtual world has been created where people go to virtual events and meet people (avatars) and never step outside their house.

I feel kind of weird about the whole thing, like I want to turn and run the other way.

The other thought I had was that buying land and building something in Second Life seems a little like settlers coming to the “New World.” Instead of physically clearing land and building a homestead, people create what they want virtually. The best part is, now when the land runs out, they create more.

Then I read about Ohio University making use of Second Life. They are offering classes “in world.” Now I’m confused! Why do you have to be a librarian in Second Life? Can’t people be themselves and ask librarians questions like they always have – even if it is through IM and email? Why is this distance from themselves necessary?

It’s kind of cool to showcase students’ work in the galleries in Second Life, but again I have to ask, what is there about that experience that is different than putting it on a web page? Watching your avatar teleport to different galleries? Grants are being awarded for the creation of such things in Second Life to disseminate information. I must be missing something. Is this an April Fool's joke?

I think I prefer to entertain myself with word puzzles, sudoku, and novels. I guess I am not a gamer.