Here is a quick summary from my feeback sheet:
Comment on overall time given for pilot:
I think that no matter how much time you give people it will never be enough. Although I was pressed for time (having been on holidays for 2 weeks at the beginning) I would still be as rushed if I had more time. so the time was just about right. I always get more motivated when I have a deadline.
Comment on relevance of tools:
Some of the tools I know that I will probably never look at again - ie. twitter, technorati. I can see the relevance for work of using RSS feeds, Wikis, Bloglines - the other tools were probably more of a personal nature.
Comment on specific difficulties:
Some of the links from the library link http://uqlibrary.blogspot.com/ didn't work - to get the instructions for some activities I had to go back to a previous activity and use the sidebar links (which usually worked)
Most Useful: RSS feeds, although I will be forever grateful to Del.icio.us. where I found the site www.seeqpod.com and now every member of the family can have their own saveable playlist playing when they are on the computer.
Most fun: librivox, youtube
Most difficult to use: Twitter, Second Life
MOST ANNOYING (HENCE THE CAPITALS):
The most annoying thing was having to create accounts and logins with google and yahoo and every other program - I realise that if you want to participate and store info you need to login but sometimes it would be nice to just browse without joining.
Overall View of the Program
I thought this was a very worthwhile experience - great to be given time to play around and familiarise myself with these new tools. As with anything it was just the tip of the iceberg and we will need to keep using some of these tools to keep our knowledge fresh. As much as we (I) might complain that I don't have much time and that the training impinges on my workload, the reality is that working in a library - this is our workload. The kids coming into this university will be very familiar with a lot of this technology and we can't really claim to be "cutting edge" if we can't talk on their terms. At least we won't look completely out of touch if we know the vocabulary. I will probably go back and revisit a lot of the tools here now that I have had a basic introduction.
I really enjoyed reading other the blogs from the other pilot members - shows what a diverse group we have working here.
Suggestions:
Look at Picasa (I prefer to Flickr) and Facebook or Myspace
Friday, October 31, 2008
Task 22: Second Life
Need I say I've hardly time to do what I want to do in my first life (enough of my rant). Seriously, the Star Wars application that the 6 year old narrator of one of the discovery resources mentioned looked interesting if I felt like escaping to a galaxy far, far away. I am sure that for the creative types out there it offers a whole range of applications. I'm just wondering what sort of Avatar I'd give myself - mind boggles really.
I read the article that rockchicklibrarian mentioned (thanks!) and you really have to wonder what people are doing spending 6 hours a night pretending to be someone that they are not - is it a way of hiding from the mundane aspect of real life - but who am I to criticise - some people would probably think that escaping into fiction and living vicariously through other people's lives (ie. fiction) is a form of escapism as well. I have to ask the question though from that article - if you are married in second life and married in real life - are you a bigamist?
From a university point of view, I have heard people bandying around ideas about this for quite a while but have yet to see anything fabulous. Perhaps there will be great potential. When I read this article in UQ News and read that it cost (gulp!) $30 000 to set this up I had to wonder. I honestly believe that in a cosmopolitan city like Brisbane it is not an expensive trip to see a Taoist temple - many schools who teach Study of Religion in years 11 and 12 have been taking their students to visit mosques, churches, temples etc for years without great expense or disruption to the worshippers. I can see it could be useful for remote students but you're not going to get to smell the incense via your computer (unless of course it comes with smellevision!)
I read the article that rockchicklibrarian mentioned (thanks!) and you really have to wonder what people are doing spending 6 hours a night pretending to be someone that they are not - is it a way of hiding from the mundane aspect of real life - but who am I to criticise - some people would probably think that escaping into fiction and living vicariously through other people's lives (ie. fiction) is a form of escapism as well. I have to ask the question though from that article - if you are married in second life and married in real life - are you a bigamist?
From a university point of view, I have heard people bandying around ideas about this for quite a while but have yet to see anything fabulous. Perhaps there will be great potential. When I read this article in UQ News and read that it cost (gulp!) $30 000 to set this up I had to wonder. I honestly believe that in a cosmopolitan city like Brisbane it is not an expensive trip to see a Taoist temple - many schools who teach Study of Religion in years 11 and 12 have been taking their students to visit mosques, churches, temples etc for years without great expense or disruption to the worshippers. I can see it could be useful for remote students but you're not going to get to smell the incense via your computer (unless of course it comes with smellevision!)
Task 21: Twitter - why oh, why
One of the minor frustrations of this 23 things is having to join up for all these applications - why do you need to be a member to search blogs? When it asked me if I wanted to check my friends and I clicked skip - it got irritated with me. I also didn't want to give it my mobile number and I couldn't go any further. When I tried to search by name or locations I received this message "This feature is temporarily disabled. Thanks for your patience while we work to restore it." Sorry, all out of patience so will come back and look another day!
Task 20: Podcasts, Smodcasts
This was a relatively easy task as I had already set up a podcast as an RSS feed into my bloglines account (which by the way I keep forgetting to look at)in task 8. The podcast I have chosen to listen to is The Conversation Hour with Richard Fidler. When I am driving around in my car, if I'm not at work, I usually try to listen to this program. I find it very useful to look over the guests for the week and find out to whom I want to listen and listen to their stories at my leisure. My brother-in-law downloads this podcast onto his ipod and listens to these on the way to work on the train (exciting fellow!).
On a work note, I think it has great applications when running conferences for interstate or regional attendees - they can look at a slide presentation etc whilst listening to the podcast (means that rural/regional clients are not disadvantaged) - lots of good applications for what we do for our clients in the part of the library that I work in.
On a work note, I think it has great applications when running conferences for interstate or regional attendees - they can look at a slide presentation etc whilst listening to the podcast (means that rural/regional clients are not disadvantaged) - lots of good applications for what we do for our clients in the part of the library that I work in.
Task 19: YouTube to take over the world
I love YouTube - I think that it is amazing that I can revisit many shows from my youth. Who would have thought that you can find original video clips of David Cassidy, Shaun Cassidy, Bay City Rollers, Leif Garret, Andy Gibb, David Essex - hours of laughter ahead! What is also interesting is the quality of the transmission. For example, sometime I like to look at movie trailers - often the quality through the hosted trailer site eg universal, warner bros, summit or apple.com is dubious - jilted, sound out of sync with the picture but usually quality is pretty good with YouTube. I know that YouTube is the scourge of schools - lots of great stuff but only teachers have access to it as the kids just chew through the bandwidth.
I selected two of my favourite examples - the first is very sobering but should be compulsory viewing for Australians (IMHO) - it is called Teenage Affluenza and is a promotion for 40 hour famine in 2007
And now for something more humorous. One of my favourite shows growing up (okay, I lived in the country and we only had two channels) was Sunday afternoon "Banana Splits" and now I feel terribly clever that I have learnt to embed these!
I selected two of my favourite examples - the first is very sobering but should be compulsory viewing for Australians (IMHO) - it is called Teenage Affluenza and is a promotion for 40 hour famine in 2007
And now for something more humorous. One of my favourite shows growing up (okay, I lived in the country and we only had two channels) was Sunday afternoon "Banana Splits" and now I feel terribly clever that I have learnt to embed these!
Task 18: iGoogle - I do!
This was an easy task for me because I have had iGoogle set up at home for quite a long time - I have a link to the asx and associated companies with updated daily prices (just so I can be depressed each time I open up my home page). I have also customised it to show time and weather for Brisbane, Vancouver, Boston and Amsterdam, quote of the day, my individual starsign and news headlines. I find this to be a very useful homepage. I have used other homepages such as msn and optusnet but find them to be too cluttered - even when you customise them. I like the simplicity of the layout of iGoogle but agree with some of the other bloggers that it can be a bit basic and would not work for everyone's needs. I did have a look at Pageflakes and Netvibe as suggested but won't bother changing as I am all set up now.
Task 17: Google Maps
I really like Google Maps. I used to use Whereis.com until recently it keeps telling me that my address doesn't exist (at first I was perplexed, I tried changing my suburb as I live near the border of two suburbs but no matter how often I try to tweak it, it keeps telling me that I am delusional and that there is no such address. Funnily enough, I can see my street on the map but it will not give directions from my house!) Google maps on the other hand - works every time.
It does show a picture of my house but I wonder how old the images are. It shows that my nextdoor neighbour has a very large watertank on their front footpath - so I am assuming that this photo is nearly 12 months old. The very large watertank is now under their new pool that was completed in January of this year - interesting!!!
Google docs would have many applications - I hadn't used it before but would be great for people who need to work whilst travelling but do not have access to their documents.
It does show a picture of my house but I wonder how old the images are. It shows that my nextdoor neighbour has a very large watertank on their front footpath - so I am assuming that this photo is nearly 12 months old. The very large watertank is now under their new pool that was completed in January of this year - interesting!!!
Google docs would have many applications - I hadn't used it before but would be great for people who need to work whilst travelling but do not have access to their documents.
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