#23 Is this really the end?

• What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
  
  YouTube
  LibraryThing
  
  
  
• How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?
  
  It made me realise how little undisturbed, unscheduled time I really have.
  
  
• Were there any take-aways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?
  
  not really
  
  
• What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?
  
  One of the aspects of Web2.0 that is likely to be causing us a great deal of trouble is the legal and taxation aspects of Web2.0 transactions. An example is this ABC transcript
  
  
  And last but not least…
  
  
• If we offered another discovery program like this in the future, would you again chose to participate?
  
  I'd consider it..
  

#22 Audiobooks

huh.. this takes me back. I used to have to rip the tracks off the audiobook CDs at the public library to get them on my MP3 player. Nice to know that you can download them direct these days. However the PLCMC website I couldn't find how to register online, so I can't access Net Library.

When I used to buy AV stock, there was a huge divide in the clientele between the unedited narrative, and the audio play. I can imagine the that division still exists.

#21 Podcasts, Smodcasts

I like the idea of podcasts, but I found my usual problem flicking through Yahoo! Podcasts. Generally speaking, I have trouble sitting long enough to get through an entire podcast. For example, I downloaded a 41 minute Podcast, and it took 35 seconds for me to be interrupted, and 2 minutes and 31 seconds for the TV to be turned on over the top.

So between kids, family and work, it is almost inconceivable to have that much listening time. About the only time I can listen to stuff is commuting, and generally I prefer music. For this I use an iPod, which even as we speak is downloading my podcast subscriptions, but even then it's hard to find time to watch/listen to them. I currently have 18 unwatched episodes of Chaser's War on Everything to watch on my iPod.

In principle fabulous, in practice not as good as a book, since I can generally quickly re-read the last sentence to get back on track.

#20 You too can YouTube

Video worth viewing - the entire Chad Vader series. Excellent stuff.

Library Dominos - please reshelve after your fun..

YouTube is probably the single most influential piece of Web2.0 around. It is redefining the the political debate, it challenges advertising censorship (e.g the banned Bondi Blonde Beer ad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWGGMWRfhQs ), music videos from all manner of bands totally circumventing the recording industry, and at it's darkest the release of amateur video from school fights , the gang rapes, firefights in Iraq.

So I think what impresses me about YouTube is less the technology, because really transferring movie file around is not the revolutionary, and if you go into the dark side of the net you can get plenty of video from the file sharing networks, but their rather brazen editorial policy of pushing the legal edges of copyright, censorship and government control, not to mention good taste. It is heartening that in the age of media mega-corporations, independant media is still valued and sought after. In that sense, YouTube reflects the values that Librarians are championing in their professional value statements of challenging censorship.

#19 Discovering Web 2.0

I chose Facebook, because I'd heard about it and it won the Social Networking category.
According to Facebook I have no Friends, and there is something called "the Wall" which in Sydney is a place in Darlinghurst where you can rent a young male friend.

Maybe I'm obtuse.. but a thread called "Would you lick the person above you in this thread?" seems perhaps not the best use of current technology. On the other hand, the one on Atheism was kind of interesting. The strange thing is that it was pretty much the same collection of posters on both threads. Fundamentally, I don't see these as much different to the old Bulletin Boards that have been around for years.

For me, Facebook isn't going to replace the current themed Forums and Bulletin Boards I currently use, and will continue to use in a subject orientated way. I guess I'm not looking for a date, but if I was I use a dating website. Facebook seems just too broad to have any real use beyond posting opinions on odd topics (presuming you have the time for that).

#18 Online productivity

Well having spend 45 minutes fiddling with Zohowriter and being dumped out 3 times, I'm not so impressed with the productivity. Also the writer itself seemed like a tiny little apperture to write in, and the concept of saving my personal documents leaves me cold. If I left business documents online I'd be sacked.. not kidding. ATO takes confidentiality very seriously.

If I was desperate I'd use this.. but I can't imagine being that desperate.

Dose of the Flu, and a week's leave

First 2 weeks of July have flown by. I was knocked down by the flu in the first week, and then spent a week off with he kids home from school. So not much Learning done those weeks, at least not here.

Now back to the mill..

#15 On Library 2.0 & Web 2.0 ...

So it seems to me that this is the usual philosophical agonising that Librarians undertake about 'the role of the library' and 'the image of the librarian' in a slightly modified form.

My background is public libraries, where generally speaking we were so busy we didn't have time for this, so generally we just left this kind of soul searching and image making to those within the field plenty of free time on their hands. Frankly, the image that librarians were either supposed to have or wanted to have seemed a million miles from my reality then. I seemed to spend all my time sorting out staffing, sorting out complaints, ejecting the unruly, fixing up building and computer problems, squeezing the very last cent out of the book budget, and generally trying to make the library budget perform miracles. Most shifts had acustomer to staff ratio of 50:1, so reference work was a matter of squeezing one query around another, do a bit and leave them with it, do another query, come back to check up. On and on, so that after several hours you brain was just spinning.

So I'm now hardened into the "I don't care about the image/purpose/values" camp, with a general expectation that working under a blazing hail of customer suggestions, demands and anti-social behaviours, you will get the message about what works & doesn't work, what the customers want (and that's a bottomless pit) and do, and battling with the funding body to actually get it for them. I've never had any problem identifying customer desires, the trick is rolling it out to them within the budget and staff workloads. So Web 2.0 (orLibrary 2.0) better be Cost Effective 2.0, with Time Effective 2.0 thrown in, or it ain't going to work.

#17 Playing around with PBWiki

OK, I played around with it, added this Blog to the Favourite Blog's list (UBUTL).

I think there is a lot of potential in Wikis, but can't let the password drift into the wrong hands. Put simply, I think Wikis are the best thing to happen on the Web in quite few years.

Kind of odd trying to remember how to put in HTML code again, I haven't done that in years. MS FrontPage did it all for me, and I forgot the format. You kind of forget just how much formatting goes into these websites.

Now, where is #15.. I think I got distracted out of that by my children. I once wrote down every interruption as I was writing an email. It was frightening, every sentence almost was some distraction. A 5-6 sentence paragraph took me 20 minutes to write.

#16 Wikis..

I have to say I like Wikipedia, primarily because it does a reasonable job of sourcing Web references. We are creatures of our culture, so even the same sentence read by two different people will be taken with different assumptions & interpretations. So really everything is subjective (except maths). However, Wikipedia seems to me to try and go directly to first hand sources and reputable commentary, and kudos to them for that.

However, Im always wary of anonymous or pseudonym publications. If someone is prepared to put their name and reputation on their opinion, I can gauge my respect for that.

Folksonomy

'Folksonomy' tops most irritating list

I'm not surprised. I do like the way English is unregulated and uncontrolled in it's use. New words are simply made up, they rise and fall. But truly there are times when geeks and marketing people should be chained up and beaten with the Oxford Dictionary.

#14 Technorati

Clearly I just don't get this..
After the explosion in junk mail I got from signing up to Flickr and Blogger, I'm a bit wary of signing onto anything else.

However, searching Technorati seems .. well like voyerism.
For example, a search for Hurstville produces (amongst others) http://dorcashan.blogspot.com/2007/06/out-of-ordinary.html

and

http://simply-natalie.livejournal.com/1328.html

why do I ever need to know that.. why do people even write this rubbish.. it is like a consciousness dump. It isn't even well written!

For me, Technorati is really GarbageDumpati.. a search tool for rubbish. Might be a great search tool, but if the entire range of results is rubbish.. well it finds rubbish.

#13 Tagging and del.icio.us

Words that just chill the spine..

"Install buttons now >>"

err.. no thanks. I have enough crap in my registry already.

#12 Rollyo

Fallen a bit behind here, since I've been a triffle unwell this past week. Some sort of gastric thing sucking the energy out of me.

So I started up Rollyo and registered. I got as far as getting a search complilation on 'Hurstville' running, but for the life of me I couldn't get the search to refine the results down to a useful list. I had more trouble trying to limit the results than getting results, and adding extra websites just exacerbated that. An exercise in quantity over relevance..

The GIMP image editior

Looking at all things graphical, this is a freeware image editor that is supposed to be the equal of PhotoShop. I don't know, I haven't tried it.

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

http://www.gimp.org/

#11 LibraryThing

Stuck a widget into the sidebar showing 5 books I've read/attempted to read in recent times.
I need to spend a bit more time exploring this, because I may have some uses for this sort of thing..LibraryThing I should say.

Panic Button

And the Button generator, and what is more required than this! http://www.mycoolbutton.com/#

#10 Back tattoo

This is way cooler.. http://www.imagechef.com/ic/make.jsp?tid=Tattoo+Back

#10 Image Generators

Lolcats.. - basically adds a top and bottom text line to photos.. this is better than Photoshop how?

#9 RSS Feeding frenzy

What the heck.. more feeds
went to http://www.rssfeeds.com/ to pick out a new feed or two..

Library Link of the Day
&
Bills Digests

#8 RSS feeds

Kind of jumped into this already, and put up the ATO, News.com and Learning 2.0 RSS feeds earlier.

3 very different stories
ATO Feed has a couple per day, and generally works pretty well, if unspeakably boring.
News.com rushes by without any hope of comprehensive coverage. It's a glimpse feeder, and if you happen to spot an item of interest, click quick!
Learning 2.0 seems to have stopped. Last post was 13th Jan 2007.

I was intending to put the DEWR feed on today, since the Media Releases out of the Department of Employment & Workplace Relations seem to me to take civil service impartiality to a whole new level! Headlines like "Labor on AWAs Nothing More Than a Political Stunt" and "Hypocrisy of Union Bosses Exposed" are obviously the new neutrality of the public service, and certainly not a publicly funded outlet for Joe Hockey's political statements.

However, DEWR doesn't have any RSS feeds, so let's just hope there is some money put aside in the billion dollar advertising campaign that the government has planned to let us, the tax paying and voting population, know what issues are of concern to us. Is there an adult in this country that is NOT aware of WorkChoices?

Oddly, I've been reading of Athenian democracy in classical Greece. Democracy here was a far more participative affair, where the citizens voted directly on the issues, and attendance of voting citizens was compulsory, (mind you voting citizens was a minority of the population, about 5-10,000 of a city of 40-50,000). Coming from a background of local government, citizen participation in democratic institutions interests me (call me strange).

Even in classical times, voting blocks would form, but there was never any reference to the need to inform the citizenry of the issues. Indeed the issues frequently developed right there in the forum, in sometimes lethal ways. Politicians had to convince a majority of each issue, not every 3-4 years. After many years in local government I have become disenchanted by party politics, and politicians. Liberal, Labor or independant, there are remarkably few who wouldn't sell their mother for a superannuation package, and even fewer that remain trustworthy.

I've digressed, but my point being, do we really need to spend money on informing citizens of the issues they should be voting on (and lets remember none of us voted for WorkChoices, it came out only after the last election), or should we be looking at ways to more directly vote on issues and participate in government. If technology allowed up to vote directly on bills in parliament, I suspect politicians would do a much better job of keeping us informed on why we should vote for or against it, rather than the need for a spending spree at the end to attempt to influence the electorate. What possible justification is there for a democratic government telling the demos what to think and vote on, surely it should be the other way.

#7 Creating Content in your Blog

To a cetain extent that is what the visual tour is entended to do, to try and give a new staff member a visual guide to the library, though I have to say I have had better editing tools to get the picture & text sync'd. I uploaded the pictures to Flickr, but I never seemed to get them to load properly from there.

I had a look at Mosaicr and Mapr, which I found pretty useless really. Why I would want to turn a picture into a mosaic I can't imagine, what purpose does it serve? Mapr could be good if you can upload your own maps, and then add graphics on top of the map, but I'm pretty sure photoshop can do the job better if that was your desire. It would be a good floorplan design tool if you could insert photos of furnishings into a blueprint for fitout purposes. On the other hand, the architects fittings codes work well anyway!

So this brings me to the main point, to what purpose is some technology? Blogging in particular seems to be the re-iteration or linkage of other net published material, interspersed with personal opinions like this one. Perhaps there are some useful collections of materials and thought, but they seem few and far between.

So whilst there is a fun factor here, one has to ask how useful it really is? Things like Feeds just come through so fast it is more glimpse technology than any serious research tool. Generally I'd regard Forum pages as a better place for discourse and the sharing and critique of ideas. Blogs seems kind of shallow..

Visual Tour of Hurstville Library Pt 2

Back Right corner, where we keep the Newspaper archives.






The back corridor with the work area on the right hand side by the window, and my workstation at the far corner.














The work area for the Library staff, and the occasional visitor.










My workstation, filled with paperwork and child's artwork. Note the window views!










My view out southwards. Look hard and you can see a tiny stretch of blue, my water view of Georges River! Must be high tide.

View out over Hurstville Grove/Penshurst. I live just over the first ridgeline in the photo, about a click out.

Visual Tour of Hurstville Library Pt 1

The welcoming steel grey exterior of the office shows that the ATO really is trying to overcome it's image as the most feared organisation is Australia. Note the grey block in the bottom right corner, that used to have the organisation name on it, but it has been removed.

Lift to Level 2, turn left and left again. The Library entry













On your right as you enter. The Front Desk of the Library, for Issues, Enquiries and Returns. The public face of the Library.


Same counter, but oblique views into the public access areas.
















To the left of the entry, the reading area for current newspapers and journals












Oblique left view, into the shelves of Primary legal material, journals and books of taxation and tax law.

#5 FLICKR

Huh.. good old Norton Blocks Flickr.com because it contains sex/personal images.

So I used Photobucket (www.photobucket.com) instead!

After meeting some anonomous disapproval on Friday, I thought to find some innoculous image, and what could be more innoculous than a fluffy pink bunny? So a quick search on bunny revealed that Photobucket also has images that could best be described as raunchy, and since Norton doesn't block them, Flickr must have some pretty hard boiled stuff indeed!

Anyway, here is a rather cute image along the general kitty theme!

edited content

some one complained.. guess my sense of perversity crosses the line.
Add a Feed, don't comment on it..

Remember the password

Must remember my password, must remember my password, must remember.. ohh look, shiny object..

So after forgetting my password for 3 days and deciding to create a new blog, I then recalled the old password as I was making the new one.. go figure. New Technology.. old brain.. need RAM upgrade.

Busy couple of days anyway.

First Blog

OK, so I may as well start off by confessing I have a poor attitude about Blogs. Mostly it seems like just people's diary entries online into the public domain, and I'm not really interested in doing that myself, nor in reading other people's thoughts. Call me anti-social..

However, I'm going to claim that the two recalcitrants below are my children, whom I may have to later explain about. Of course they might just be any old image I found off the internet, but I don't want to see their heads Photoshopped onto animals or worse..


Since this blog is a learning tool, I'm just going to fool around with the tools for a bit. So if it seems like nonsense, that's because it is.