#23 Thoughts about Learning 2.0

Well, here we are - George and me at the end point! So . . . what next? We couldn't resist just a tiny "borrow" of this cartoon from the New Yorker but it's not what we have decided to do. We might continue to blog/bark away happily to ourselves - unworried that amidst the loud and continuing woofing on the web, these two dogs will ever be heard. Most diarising is for oneself after all.

However, we agree that now we are through to the end, we haven't been barking up the wrong tree. And to mix a few more metaphors, it is a case of not drowning, waving after all. We are glad we have done this - maybe we are a long way from being afficionados in this wild world, but we discovered a lot more about a number of new technologies and can see the potential for some of these in the work environment. For example:

• We are already finding a place for wikis
• there's junk on Flickr but gems within it too
• people tagging shows the need for this huge body of information to be organised "somehow" (and as a wayback cataloguer, I am grateful for structures and metadata); but from Zoe's and Kirstie's presentation on the new world of federated search solutions, which includes the tagging concept, it's clearly something that we cannot simply dismiss
• I located some great ABC podcasts and have subscribed to the SLV Creative Fellows ones (and was disappointed to find that Chloe Hooper's talk wasn't there) - I can see how and why people love this.
• I was really impressed by the quick look I had at the Zoho suite of applications - Writer, spreadsheets etc. These must be useful in the reading rooms.
• There are some good library/technology-related blogs out there written by people who have a much sounder grasp (read, intelligently reflective) than I do of which "things" might move or morph into something we need to watch.
  

Other thoughts? It has been more of a marathon than the '23 things' ads would have us believe - the whole exercise was much more than the suggested 20-30 minutes a week. It's stating the bleeding obvious to say that I guess it depends on your knowledge base to start with. So that's one learning - and I can imagine it might have been quite difficult for part-timers to fit this into their working week.

But there are definite opportunities here. I think we have to be thoughtful about the ones we embrace, and be open and recognise that it will continue this way. I'm sure there'll be 23 more thngs any time soon! As a last thought, perhaps next year, we could have some sessions in the training room on things which could be useful to us individually or helpful in the work environment.

#22 eBooks unfavourites

I did not feel relaxed after this experience - though Mr Gutenberg's collection looked impressive enough at first. Having studied a lot of literature in my original university degree, I thought I would listen to one of my favourite Shakespearean sonnets (no. 116 - Let me not to the marriage of true minds) . I am sure Jane Aker (reader) loves her Shakespeare but if I had listened all the way through, she would have killed him for me. To my ears, it was truly awful! Persevered further with another sonnet (different human voice) and with Coleridge's Kubla Khan with same sorry outcome.

I feel enormously grateful that I am sighted and that this is not my only avenue of access to some of this material. If Gutenberg audio was the only way to get to listen to that work of Charles Dickens you could get hold of in no other way, then OK - but the tones, the misplaced inflections etc of the few things I listened to wouldn't encourage me to back here for any other reason. I recognise how beneficial having this large number of audio-book collections online might be for the blind and vision-impaired, but neither the human nor the computer voices were for me.

Good initiative, but for me, I can really only imagine you'd need to have no other way at all to access some of these books . . .

#21 Grumpy old women and podcasts

Yes, well - we looked at Yahoo podcasts and as instructed looked for book reviews. Found Nancy Pearl on National Public Radio but wasn't really in the mood to listen what she had to say. Then found The Wellspring program - episode 44 said it was about Eckhart Tolle's The New Earth, but after listening for 5 minutes and learning that spiders probably began spinning their webs 136 million years ago, I realised there was some kind of dodgy link between the audio and the description so decided that was enough. That web's been around a lot longer than this web.

ABC's Life Matters seemed to offer more, particularly the program called Grumpy Old Women. Here I could take a test to determine via a checklist of behaviours if I was one; the famous "not found" message appeared and I decided that in any case, I didn't need the checklist at all. Feel quite confident that I have reached the GOW status.

#20 YouTube

George and I had some fun looking at YouTube - clips of favourite singers, stuff from TV (Black Books)and this terrific trawl across time - Pachelbel as you've never heard it before. Some sobering stuff too - I tried searches like "Burma" and "uprising", "John Howard", "Kevin Rudd". Found much more than I expected to, but I realise now I shouldn't have been surprised - uploading any kind of file now seems to be so easy. This site alone will provide masses of material for someone's sociology thesis.

And all good dogs digg, don't they?

Well, George was overcome to discover she could go Digg-ing . . . so we did and we added another top web 2.0 thing to our blog. We aren't sure what we'll do with it or if the Digg-ing will be worth it, but we thought . . . this is after all a sandbox, and there's stuff there in spades.

#19 . . . that's number one nine explore (encore encore encore)

Oh no, here we go exploring again! Now the Olympics of Web 2.0 - the top threes (gold, silver, bronze) of every conceivable web 2.0 category.

But wow, we bow . . . bookmarking category, top dog is ma.gnolia. George and I (remember George?) just have to give many wags of tail to any site that can direct us to this one. The essence of life's choices encapsulated in a flowchart. Simple uncomplicated chaps with simple uncomplicated needs . . . Maslow knew what was what. (And it's perfectly upfront in Dogboy's profile - food is good!)

Looked at the top of the pops in a few categories - Flickr again, Rollyo again, Facebook etc. Looked at the Ning thing (another place for creating groups?) , the Xing thing (have no need to discover deals, employees, colleagues using a six degrees of separation principle, though I guess if I wanted to find someone I used to work in New York with . . .? but I guess that's the point?) and a thing called Swivel, which seemed to be a site where bits of data were brought together. For example, I could see in graph form how many people had died on Mt Everest in the last 50 or so years. Not sure when you would want that but from a library perspective, you never know, there could be useful stuff here. . .

But why is Biblio Web 2.0? Where's the mixing/mashing, social networking, "being where the users are" bit? Isn't it just another webpage or is there something fundamental I still don't get here?

#18 word processing and so on

A quick look at the Zoho options suggests that it has potential - created a short document in Zoho Writer, then pasted it back into Word to see if formatting was retained well. It seemed to have many of the useful options for working with a document that you find in Word so I can see how useful it would be in a library (like ours) that doesn't offer proprietary office software. Hopefully assist with managing user disbelief eg "You mean you don't offer Word!!??" The multiple templates could be of use to some I guess - certainly there've been over 1000 downloads of something (can't recall which - maybe the resume) though in the end for the entire English-speaking, web-accessing population, I guess that's probably not much?

I could see that I could use the Zoho productivity suite to create a spreadsheet, a presentation, to get organised, create a wiki, manage a project, build a database. A taste of Bill Gates plus the wiki option - and given that there are plugins for Word and Excel, you have to like it - a flexible, convenient, interoperable kinda package.