Week 9, Thing # 23 On To The Next Summit

What an adventure! This learning experience was excellent in covering such a vast field of new technology. I feel that at least I now grasp the idea behind Web 2.0 and Library 2.0. They are no longer ambiguous concepts used in the literature and news.

While I found it necessary difficult to find time for this investigation, I wanted to find out about the topics. There is no way that I would have done this on my own.

The carefully designed and thought out exercises and commentary is what made learning happen. Participants should be thankful to the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County, North Carolina for sharing this with their fellow librarians. I look forward to more training opportunities like this one.

I understand they are continuing to explore with a Learning 2.1 program. (http://explorediscoverplay.blogspot.com/) I hope to be able to look into those as well.

It just points out that library staff must keep up with the social and technological trends in the communities and put in use by the public they serve. Now I keep thinking about what impact these technologies will have in the workplace as well as on information and service provision in the library over the next few years.

Week 9, Thing #22 Downloadable Audio Books

I thought I was familiar with Project Gutenberg! I did not realize that they had downloadable audio books and even a limited selection of digitized sheet music and downloadable sound music and spoken word recordings.

Week 9, Thing # 21 Podcasts

I was amazed at the many topics covered by podcasts although some were quite dated and of uneven quality. While I didn’t take the time to evaluate them, I was impressed with the number of podcasts for learning languages, including less well-known languages, and basic overviews of topics, such as Finances 101.

Initially, I had difficulty figuring out how to get my podcasts into Bloglines. It took quite some trial and error but it seems to have worked! Nancy Pearl Book Reviews, Denver Public’s podcasts of children’s stories and the Diane Rehm Show on NPR now are in my Bloglines feeds. At least one of them was updated today. Triumph!

Week 9, Thing #20 YouTube

I have seen this site before but had never thought about using it with customers. In searching I found some TV commercials and programs from my childhood. I'm thinking back to those questions I had for words to a commercial jingle or pictures (where videos may have helped)which were difficult or impossible to track down.

While tagging helps, the search capability is very uneven. Sometimes I was amazed at what came up and other times I had no results through keywords or tags. Sometimes it meant scanning a broad category like 50s TV which could prove very time consuming.

Our customers may find it interesting to have some of our library storyhours, author visits and programs available on video.

Week 8, Thing #19 Interesting Online Tools

I found some tools for my personal use. In fact, I spent too much time checking out all those links. The categories of City Guides and Reviews and Travel held me the longest. Guess I must need a vacation!

Yelp.com and Yahoo Local both presented excellent information about my immediate neighborhood. Which could be helpful for those travel questions. Under Travel the Farecast site is being added to my watchlist. How good are they at predicting when is it a good time to purchase that airline ticket or hotel room.

I think for library use some of the applications could assist in committee work with being able to share documents and the knowledge that some of these applications and tools exist to help our customers is beneficial.

Zoho Writer Attempt 3

This is my third and final attempt at creating a document using Zoho Writer. I hope that I can use some of the features. My attempt to use styles and headings was quite frustrating. Text colors changed without my asking. I couldn't seem to find away to change my line spacing between bulleted items. Let me try again.

• I did manage to change text color and size of font.
• I created a table with 2 rows and 3 columns but could not figure out any way to add a 3rd row to the original table. NOTE: The image of the emoticon did not cross over from Zoho and I couldn't seem to get it into my image file. Also for some reason the second row of the table is not appearing.

Name	Address	Phone

• I used the background feature and the center justification.
• Obviously I created a bulleted list.
• This time line justification worked. Let me try it again.
• Yes it worked.
• Now for headings. This is the highlight style.

Monday

Morning

Back to normal

Evening

Tuesday

PS: Obviously when doing formatting to post to a blog you need to keep in mind what will work on your blog background. For example, the borders of the table and the background colors of the table don't work on this blog design.

Week 8, Thing #18 Zoho Writer

I did not find this as intuitive as I expected. My first attempt went badly as a result of what were apparently connectivity problems at my end. My second attempt went better but there were several things that I had difficulty with in formatting. After creating a table I could find no way to insert an additional row or delete a row. Something I frequently have to do. Also, I couldn't quite figure out styles. The only one I managed to do was highlight a sentence. But when I tried to erase the highlighting for a portion of the sentence I couldn't seem to do that. It was either undo the whole thing (assuming it was my last action) and rehighlight the appropriate area. The Style drop down also doesn't appear to be a toggle of either highlight or not. Obviously more time will be spent with this if I decide to use it.