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.

#13 Del.icio.us

This seems to be essentially keyword creation. I can't help thinking that the complete freedom with which you first start adding tags would eventually have to give way to some kind of thesaurus, at the very least, once you start to get a lot of sites bookmarked, otherwise your search tool would become meaningless. It strikes me as a useful adjunct to the hierarchical ordering of a browser favourites folder, but not as a replacement for it. The "social" part of tagging made me a little uneasy, due to the lack of privacy.

My Library

automotivator picture

automotivator picture, originally uploaded by cjmiltonau.

Created using Automotivatr: http://wigflip.com/automotivator/

#8 RSS

At first I wasn't sure how an RSS feed is more efficient than the favourites folder on your internet browser. I do see possibilities for Feedster though, if you are trying to keep up with information on a particular subject. Unfortunatately the subject I chose - Baha'is in Iran - had so many information links I still don't know when I could possibly have found time to read them all. I also wonder about how to distinguish sites with integrity from less reliable sites, since Feedster just seems to grab them all. My home browser is also apparently a bit too old as the Feedster site didn't load with an rss link.

#7 Blog about technology

Personally I like the whole Harry Potter take on technology. You know, its that stuff Muggles do because they can't do magic. If only I had a wand like Harry (or perhaps like Hermione) I could just wave it a couple of times and then all my Flickr stuff would be done in the twinkling of an eye and it would look really professional too (I WILL get over how long it took to upload those photos eventually...)

Imagine if the fellowhip of the ring had had mobile phone technology with email? Merry and Pippin could have left a voice message for Aragorn and the others to let them know they were safe and sound with Treebeard. Frodo and Sam could have let Gandalf and Aragorn know just where they were in Mordor. In fact, if this technology had been around in Middle Earth, Gondor wouldn't need to light beacon fires to call for aid; it could just send text messages. And Saruman wouldn't have had to mess around with palantirs to contact Sauron...

Seriously, the best thing about emails, blogs and the like is the way they enable muggles to stay in touch with one another. Since a no. of my friends live overseas, I really value the way it helps me stay connected to them. Its hard to remember how much slower communication was before we had email.

Still waiting! (for my photos to upload onto Flickr - see previous post)

My creation, originally uploaded by cjmiltonau.

IMG_0142

IMG_0142, originally uploaded by cjmiltonau.

Frodo (and the ring) go to China. Where is Gollum?

Don't upload too many photos onto Flickr at one time. I had time to travel from Hobbiton to Mordor, dispose of the ring, return to Hobbiton and knife Saruman while waiting for my 12 photos of China to upload.