What Would I Add?

I think I would have learned more and enjoyed it more (hard to believe I could have done that!) if I had interacted with other participants in a more formal way than just inviting friends to My Space. Maybe a buddy for the course. It's always more fun with a friend.

What a Long Fun Trip It's Been!

To paraphrase Robert Hunter it's been very fun and I have learned to do so much that I thought I would never do: My Space, Flickr, Bloglines, Podcasts and so on. I got so excited by learning how to do podcasts I bought an MP3 player and downloaded some casts as well copied some of my favorite music. This program offered me the impetus I needed to learn some technological things that I otherwise might not have found time for. Now I want to keep learning! My favorite parts of the exercise was RSS, Library Thing, Flickr and ebooks. I was surprised that most of the exercises (after a bumpy couple!) were easily completed. When I got stuck I talked to my colleagues and we figured it out together - that helped all of us! I think the program as it is worked very well; I can't think of how it could be improved. Yes, yes, yes, more training like this would be wonderful and of great benefit to me and to my patrons! If I could go back in time I would tell myself - go - go - go - you'll have so much fun and learn so much! One of my favorite things about the program is reading other people's blogs. Wow we have some very talented people on our staff! And funny!

Overdrive to the MP3 Player

There are so many books I want to put on my MP3 player but I'll have to wait until I can download them here at the library. I had dial-up at home so it's impossible to download a book to it. I installed the software but when I looked at the size of the book I knew it would be impossible to download a book. But soon...!

Podcasts

Oh, I love Radio Open Source, so it was hard not to just dig around in there! I added a RSS feed to Bloglines account about Harry Potter. It's produced by a group of people who love HP. Who could resist a podcast detailed: "Listen to the latest Harry Potter talk and unwind while listening most unsystematic conversations ever." Too cool.

Our Tube

It is certainly true that you can waste tremendous amounts of time on You Tube! Where to start? Gardens, Italy, food, gardens in Italy, food in Italy. So many choices! I settled on Monterosso on the Cinque Terre where we stayed for two nights last month. Now I can show everyone one of the shops we went in! It was hard to stop at looking at just a few videos. I think You Tube would be great to show the Global Reading Challenges that we have around the county. We could have the final challenge in each region and then the grand challenge. Teachers could show it to students who were interested in the program and drum up even more excitement than before. I don't know about the whole issue of kids being filmed and their images appearing on You Tube. Maybe we could give them a special password? Not sure how that works, but it's an idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C6zhFTfkNo

Web 2.0 Award Nominees

I chose to use this site and picked Biblio.com to explore. What a great site! I looked for a couple of children's books that were out of print as well as a few gardening books. The books were easy to search for and I liked the extra information listed about the book as well as sometimes information from the publisher. I also liked the sidebar options for ways to search for books I didn't know I wanted!

Google Labs

Oh, this was fun! I struck out comparing organic gardening and conventional gardening; Patricia Wells and Lidia Bastianich; dendrobium and cymbidium orchids. All of these searches had such low volume of traffic there wasn't a graph available to track them. I finally found a good match with Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali. Lots of articles and traffic about both of them. I really liked the regions part of the graph where it showed that Batali had the most trend history in the US, particularly New York city. I liked the way I could see the search volume and the news reference volume and explore the articles that were highlighted with letters. A very useful tool for comparisons but not much use if your search terms don't register enough traffic for a graph.