Summary of Learning 2.0

I have enjoyed the opportunity to learn about these tools in a systematic way and hopoe that other such opportunities will present themselves to stay abreast of new tools as they become available. Congratulations to the creators of this program.

Gutenberg Project

An interesting project but restrictive in its applicability to public libraries if the only books in the project are out of copyright i.e. classics. There is a limited audience for classics anyway, and plenty of competition as they are cheaply and widely available everywhere in ye olde paper form. The computer audio recording I listened to of David Copperfield sounded awful - I can't imagine anyone wanting to listen to that. The human voice audio recording of The Little Matchgirl though was very good.

About YouTube

YouTube seems to be a very easy site to use, and as usual, appears to be a place you could spend hours in if you chose. I was impressed with how easily I was able to find a particular video I was looking for through the simple search bar. The related video sites are also useful. It was easy to post the video to my blog.

YouTube: Mona and the Children

Care2

I checked out Care2, which won the SEAmoz first prize for the philanthropy category in the Learning 2.0 awards. Its an interesting site that looks to me rather like what we used to call a portal, but I suppose more interactive. I had a closer look at the GLBT site in particular and can see that I could spend all day just browsing from one link to the other there. Very useful if you are particularly passionate about that cause I guess, but I still wonder how people find enough hours in the day to browse and use all these sites and tools.

Untitled

Oh rose thou art sick

The invisible worm

That flies in the night

In the howling storm

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

 

William Blake

 

Wikis

My initial impression of wikis, based on Wikipedia, is that they were a free-for-all and therefore totally unreliable as sources of credible information. However I notice that Wikipedia requires a no. of sources to be listed for each article or it will be pulled because not considered reliable. In checking the Princeton and St Joseph's County Public Library wikis I also saw that membership is restricted to a certain community of people; in other words, not free-for-alls at all. Now the basic impression I have of a wiki is that it is a space in which a community of people can create some kind of work together (almost like a more sophisticated version of the "track changes" tool available with Word).

In general my impression of all the tools we are learning about in Learning 2.0 is that they are trying to carve out a space on the internet where "ordinary people" can create as they please i.e. without having to do a course in html first! It reminds me of a discussion I had with a colleague in the very early days of the internet, in which he expressed to me that the internet was a sort of "virtual wild west" where anything goes. Over time increasing amounts of law and order have inevitably crept in and this new generation of blogs and wikis appears to be an attempt to carve out a new "wild west" sector in the virtual world. However once again we see that some kind of regulation becomes inevitable; for example, the "Library Success" wiki now requires email verification because of vandalism problems.

Its great though, that these tools are being made available to laymen like myself, so that I am empowered to participate in this online world.