Lifetime learning

Student sites

2008-01-24T13:58:00.000-08:00

I like this weeks sites. This is a practical use week. I created an account on Zoho and did a test page on the wordprocessor. There was a problem saving it so I couldn't email it to see how it worked but I will keep playing with it. This could be the answer to those patrons who want to email out resumes from the library but can't because our internet computers don't have word processors. I'm looking forward to offering this to our patrons.

I also checked out the myschoolog site. I didn't create an account but looked through what they offer. My sons liked the ability to change languages by clicking the flags on top. We read the page in Norwegian, and English and tried to decipher the French page.

In the coming days I plan on exploring a few more of these sites.

twitter the time away

2008-01-19T12:45:00.000-08:00

Twitter may be great for those with time to be enquiring minds. I posted my "tweet" to the krltwitter page. I think this one is more just for fun and entertainment then practical use in the library though.

FACEBOOK

2008-01-18T12:42:00.000-08:00

I read the facebook blog by Ms. Farkas, and I did the site tour. I don't really have any feelings one way or the other about these social networking sites. I don't see any use for them for myself. However, limiting patrons use of these sites seems ridiculous. I think there are alot of sites that patrons use that don't serve any "educational" value, but that isn't our sole purpose. If we offer interenet services we shouldn't be judging what people are doing, anymore than we judge the books they read.

Wiki Week 2

2008-01-17T06:53:00.000-08:00

I put a link to a Reader's Advisory page up for my branch. I just posted a few of my favorite books. It was extremely simple to do. Fortunately I remembered in time to take off the books that the library doesn't have. Now that I have seen how easy it is to work with a wiki page, I'm not sure its a practical thing to open up to public use. I can see room for abuse and headache for whomever is managing the site.

wiki week 1

2008-01-12T18:54:00.000-08:00

For the most part I'm not real impressed with wiki week. The only use I can think of would be the opportunity for patrons to review or rate books. I'll have to finish next week and see if my opinion of this improves at all.

Youtube

2008-01-04T06:42:00.000-08:00

Great job on the library fish video! That fish was huge!
I use youtube periodically for entertainment or keeping up to speed with family. A great aunt sent us a link to Chase Livingston (cousin) playing and singing his own composition. We were really impressed with his talent.

Youtube makes it easy to share those home movies with family or friends on the other side of the world.

Library records!

2008-01-04T06:38:00.000-08:00

I like library thing. It does what several patrons and myself have wished for: a way to keep track of what I read a year ago. It is very easy to just enter a book to my library when I start reading it. When I want to read it again but can't remember the author or title, I can log on and voila! This is a useful tool.

Childhood memories

2007-12-20T06:40:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid my parents used to take us to the Canadian Gulf Islands for a couple of weeks in the summer on a small sailboat. I thought I'd see if I could find any pictures of familiar places on Flickr so I typed in Portland Island. Portland is one of the smaller islands and also one of my favorites.
Snorri Gunnarson is a photographer who has covered some of the same ground I did as a kid. He has beautiful pictures of Portland Island, Barkley sound, Victoria and more on his Flickr page. I really enjoyed reliving some of that time through his pictures.

Really Simple?

2007-12-12T06:15:00.000-08:00

It is fairly simple to subscribe to all these great sites. The great difficulty? Who has time to sit at the computer and keep up on reading all these things. It will cut into the time I have to sit in the yard eating dirt with this funny fellow.

I've got NPR and the New York Times Education site added to my subscriptions, as well as the Homer Library site from Matt's presentation. I will probably make time to read anything new on my fellow KRL bloggers' pages first, however. Other people are making their blogs really fun.

On to the next week. If it stays cold outside maybe I will catch up with the program!

delicious

2007-12-05T12:44:00.000-08:00

I have my delicious bookmark set up finally. The first time I did it seemed to work great for a day or two. A week later though I logged in and it was gone. I'm not quite sure what I did. This time it seems to be working better. I have Abebooks and Barnes and Noble sites saved as bookreference. This is for those times a patron is certain they have the title accurate for a book they want but we don't have. I have KUOW posted for updates on weather, storms, etc. We've had a few of those lately! It will be nice to access these favorites from work. I wish we could add the buttons onto the library computers. That would make things easier still.

Back to work

2007-11-10T20:20:00.000-08:00

I took a couple weeks off. Now that the projects require me to work from my home computer its harder to make the time to do them. Free time at home is worth more than gold. Its hard to squeeze anything extra in. Hopefully I will have a "delicious" posting in a couple days.

2007-10-20T13:51:00.000-07:00

For library 2pt0 I read the article "43 things I might want to learn this year" and "20 reasons why learning emerging technology is part of every librarian's job". They were interesting and informative. This technology is really very user friendly.

Create your own reality: turn off your TV

2007-10-20T13:12:00.000-07:00

All these technological things to play with online are great for slow times at work.

The computers were down the last two days apparently, so we spent this morning catching up. Now we're catching our breath. Technology is great but dangerous to get dependant on. I'm one of those crazy people who refuse to buy into something I don't really need. Therefore no cell phone, pda, etc. Life is much simpler without it.

Here's a list of low-cost, tech-free ways to enjoy life:

1. Bake something ( with chocolate preferrably).
2. Take your teenager for a long walk. They start talking to you after the first 1/2 mile, you might learn all kinds of things.
3. Sit at the beach and watch the waves come in.
4. The easiest of all--- Read a book.