Friday 9 September 2011

YouTube

I very much enjoyed watching the YouTube videos that the 23 things team have put up on the 23 things blog.  I think my favourite was the one with the dinosaurs: very educational and bizarre, though perhaps a tad long. When trying to find some more entertaining/educational library YouTube videos, I found a mixture of good ones and dreadful ones.  This highlighted to me that like all of these tools, YouTube can be used for both good and evil.  If used in the right way, YouTube can provide a funny and interesting way of educating students.  If used in the wrong (dry and boring) way, it may put students off from ever watching a library YouTube video ever again (perhaps evil is a bit of a strong word!).

When it comes to information literacy, I think many students don't even realise they need it.  YouTube provides libraries with a useful tool to educate students in the ways of information literacy, though I think this is most effective if the video is short and entertaining, as otherwise, it may be difficult to persuade a student to even watch it.  I think it complements other teaching tools very well, and the more ways a library can use to get the message across the better!  I think for some, a short video can be a more effective way of learning than reading lots of instructions.  I know when it comes to crochet, YouTube has often been my refuge when all my books have befuddled me!

Wednesday 17 August 2011

Delicious

With thanks to Clare Sutton for image used under CC licence

I had never used Delicious before, so had no idea what to expect.  After playing about with it, my main conclusion is that it's ok.  It's not that there's really anything wrong with it, and I can see why it's useful, but I just don't feel that excited.  Maybe it's just because the website itself looks a bit dated, and I like things to be pretty!  I'm glad there are tools available that enable you to share bookmarks, as I can see that it is very useful for some individuals and companies to be able to do this, but I don't think I'll use it much.  Like Twinset & purls, I would be concerned about what would happen to all of my bookmarks if the site broke or was closed down or something.  If there is a website I really like, I'm very old fashioned and I write it down in my diary!


Thursday 4 August 2011

Slideshare

This is the first time I had looked at slideshare.  It seems to have lots of good educational resources on it, as well as a lot of entertaining random things.  I like that so many people are willing to share their work to provide some inspiration for others. Good for the environment too, as it provides an alternative to printing out multiple copies of powerpoints to hand out to people when giving presentations!   Here is a presentation I think is appropriate for me, as I seem to be falling further and further behind in 23 things!  Overcoming Blogger Burnout
View more presentations from Childhood101

I have to say I wasn't expecting to find things like the Ikea catalogue on slideshare, but I thought it was interesting that it was there.  I don't know if it was just the kind of topic I was looking for, but I found quite a lot of advertising content.  I didn't mind; I quite like being advertised at.

Monday 1 August 2011

Nothing really

I found another quotation I like (actually, it found me via my igoogle page):

Borrowers of books--those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
- Charles Lamb
Perhaps this would have been a good (inappropriate?) one for the library wall?  Ha ha haa.

Wednesday 27 July 2011

Prezis, Doodle and Survey Monkey

Overall, I've found that I like prezi very much and will continue to use it in the future.  It's novel to me, as I had not heard of it before I came to City.  I enjoyed playing around with it and experimenting with the different effects you can achieve.  However, I think to really come to grips with it will take me quite a long time, as I didn't find it that intuitive.  I found the tutorials useful and I thought Ned Potter's advice to position your materials sympathetically to avoid motion sickness was particularly wise.  When I watched the first prezi I made (before reading any tutorials), the effect was dizzying and a bit horrible. I haven't included a prezi in this blog post, but will put one up once I have thought of a good topic.

I've also become fond of Doodle.  I have used doodle before as a participant, but I have never created one for an event myself.  I was very pleased with how straightforward it was and I think it is a useful tool that I will continue to use from now on.

Sock monkey photo by Rocketeer made available under the CC BY- NC-ND 2.0 licence

Survey Monkey: why is the 'Seriously Blue' theme grey?  Or have I misunderstood?  Apart from this, I liked survey monkey.  I found it fairly intuitive and straightforward to use.  Again, I haven't included a survey on this post, but will do so sometime in the future when everyone least expects it.

Friday 15 July 2011

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is one of those things that I have never liked, but feel as if I have never given a proper chance.  So I signed up to it for 23 things to double check.  I still feel quite sure I don't like it.  I don't really like the way it looks, I don't like the emails it keeps sending me, and I don't like the way I can never remember my password to get into it.  I still think I am being unfair.  I'm sure it can be a very useful tool, but for some reason, it just makes me feel uncomfortable.  I think it is like Library Apocalypse and Librery Bloggery say; it just feels too 'schmoozy'.

With thanks to Aimee Ray for the 'crowded' image under this licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic  (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Twitter

I'm feeling very happy to have this catch up week, as I was starting to fall behind a bit, and still have several cool things to investigate.

I set up my twitter account last week and so far have been pleasantly suprised.  I never really saw the point before, but now I think I'm starting to get it.  I haven't tweeted anything myself yet, but it's interesting to read what other people think about things that are happening in the world.  I've been following a few famous people, and have been suprised by how different some of them seem in twitter land to how they come across in other media.  Some talk more rubbish than I expected them to! But it makes them seem a bit more human, which is good.

Hen by StevenW. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic  (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Monday 4 July 2011

Badger

I made the most of last week's task by spending much time looking for a picture of a nice badger on flickr.  This picture was taken by Tatterdemalion!, and I have been able to add it under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence.

I have enjoyed learning about Creative Commons this week, and feel that it can only be a good thing to attempt to protect people's rights over their creative works, while at the same time providing a means for others to use pictures without a lurking fear of being caught infringing copyright.  Many people don't seem to worry about it too much, but it used to worry me so much that I would simply go without using images at all rather than use one I wasn't completely sure was legal. But I wonder what happens if you do get caught?  What would happen if I got caught using someone's image on this blog that they didn't want used?  

Like For Your I.A.s Only, I noticed that lots of people on Flickr were using the most restrictive form of the CC licence, but I didn't think that even this was too restrictive really.  I suppose I might find it annoying if I wanted to use an image for a commercial purpose, but I kind of feel if you are going to do that, its best to use your own images anyway!  I had used flickr before a tiny bit, but will definitely use it a lot more now that I know how to do a search only within Creative Commons licensed content.

A tiny Kindle update (I hope I'm not becoming obssesive): Kindle has behaved pretty well this week and there have been no more tantrums.  I'm currently trying to work out how to download audio books, as there are lots of free ones available on Project Gutenberg.  You can actually get Kindle to read any book out to you (if the book has the right permissions and such), but the voice it uses is very robotic and I find myself listening out for the robot's odd pronunciations and pauses in strange places, rather than listening to the actual content.

Friday 24 June 2011

The things of this week

I've managed to finish the things for this week, but only to the bare minimum at the moment.  I think I will need to spend some more time playing with them next week to understand the full potential, especially with Google Reader.  However, I enjoyed finding gadgets to put onto igoogle and ended up with rather a crowded page!  My favourite so far is 'Children's book of the day'.  It's just nice, and I like children's books.  I don't know how to add a screen shot to this blog to show it though?

I'm not sure how I feel about google reader and rss feeds: this is the part I need to look at more closely next week.  For some reason, I have never really taken to rss feeds; I quite like trawling through my favourite websites to find new things. However, from reading other people's blogs, it look like I have been missing out on a useful tool, so I will devote some more time to it and explore.

A quick update on the Kindle:  everything was going smoothly until Wednesday.  I was enchanted with being able to carry around lots of books without ruining my bag (I've lost several bags to carrying books around that were too heavy for them to cope with).  However, on Wednesday evening I was coming towards the end of a book, when disaster struck and the silly kindle froze!  I spent about 15 frustrating minutes trying everything I could think of to unfreeze it.  Eventually, instead of throwing it on the ground and stamping on it (as it deserved), I looked up the Amazon troubleshooting page and managed to solve the problem.  Apparently I had pressed some buttons too quickly and this had confused the kindle.  My print books never get confused when I turn pages too quickly.  Anyway, I have forgiven the kindle for this transgression, but I feel more wary of it than I did before.  If I go on holiday with the kindle, I think I will have to take at least one print book as well, just to be on the safe side.

Friday 17 June 2011

Starting to blog

This is the very first blog I have ever written, partly because I've never found anything particularly compelling to write about before, and partly because I didn't know how.  So far, the experience of setting up the blog has gone smoothly and has been more simple than I thought (although I suspect there must be some sort of pitfalls I haven't noticed yet).  I may attempt to make the design more individual at some point, though at the moment I have no idea how to do this.  I'm hoping (optimistically/naively?) it will be intuitive.  At the moment I have kept everything as simple as possible, using default settings and such, until I feel at bit more confident about how the whole thing works.

In the meantime (on a non blog related topic), I have just ordered an Amazon Kindle and am interested to find out how much it will alter my reading habits.  I'm quite excited about it, at the same time as feeling treacherous and as if I have betrayed the good old printed book.  Even before it's arrived, I've been downloading books, and have become quite preoccupied with trying to think of books I want to read that will be available for free.  At the moment, I only want to download free books, as I feel a bit dubious about the permanence of an ebook.  I'd be dreadfully upset if my whole expensive personal library disappeared one day!  (This is probably an unjustified fear.)  My theory is that I will still read paper books most of the time (because I like them), but will use my kindle when I am travelling about.  I found a nice quotation which I think illustrates some of the advantages of a paper book over an ebook:
 
"A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins"  ~Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia, 1833

I hesitated slightly about the legality of including this quotation, but as the author died more than 70 years ago, I think it should be ok.

http://www.cla.co.uk/copyright_information/copyright_information/