Peter Bromberg's Presentation

I'm glad I got the chance to see Peter Bromberg's lecture about staying relevant in changing times. He is an excellent speaker and I found the material very relevant to what we are learning in 550.

I especially enjoyed the piece about the exponential speed of change. I had never thought of the pace of technology in terms like that before, but it's absolutely true. The speed at which technology is changing the world is incredible. Certain technologies are going from current to obsolete in no time at all. Of course this poses certain issues for a library trying to stay on top of the latest technological trends. Having the introduction to Web 2.0 in the class was great, but there is still a lot more that I feel I should be familiar with. Also, while being familiar with all this is great, Web 2.0 is so dynamic that even in 6 months, it will be different than it is now.

Which brings me to the main lesson taken from Peter Bromberg's talk. Change will happen, and the library needs to be able to stay on top of it. Bromberg talked about how libraries need to reinvent themselves and change the way they are perceived by the public. The stereotypes that surround the library now, as a place for storing books with the librarians being the "gatekeepers" of information, are outdated and no longer needed in today's society. As librarians, we need to be creative in finding new roles in our communities. Yes, we will still have books and be able to help patrons find information, but we need to do more than that. Becoming a center for social and learning events and the community is the future of the library, whether it is offering classes on the newest technologies, creating gaming competitions or events, or just having knitting or book clubs. People are looking for interaction and connection to their communities. They want to be involved, to be able to share, and be a part of something. That's is the direction we are moving in, and we need to not be afraid to get there.

Final Thoughts on Learning 2.0

Overall, I liked the Learning 2.0 project. I think it's a great way to expose people to all the aspects of Web 2.0 and ways these can be applied in the library setting. As I said in the beginning of this project, I was really unfamiliar with a lot of Web 2.0 tools and I'm glad I got the chance to learn about them.

Questions:
What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
I think my favorites are librarything, flickr, delicious... I really thought everything fun for the most part and definitely good to be familiar with. I really like the advantages for group collaboration in googledocs and zoho writer. My biggest complaint with Web 2.0 is only that I feel like I don't have enough time to take advantage of all of it, because I think there are so many useful tools out there.

How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?
I wanted to learn more about Web 2.0 and I think that this program has given me a great overview. There are a few things I would like to explore further, like Bloglines and Wikis. And I know that the websites offered in this project are just some examples of the 2.0 sites out there. I would like to become more familiar with some of the others one day too.

Were there any take-aways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?
I had know idea how expansive Web 2.0 really is. I had no idea that half of these even existed, like Librarything or Rollyo. I also hadn't known much about how any of the Web 2.0 tools could be applied in the library setting, and I'm glad we got to explore that aspect.

What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?
As I mentioned above, this program was a great overview of the various Web 2.0 tools. The only thing I noticed missing was social networking sites, and not just Facebook and MySpace, but also the professional networking sites. I'm already familiar with so this didn't bother me. But it would be good to include them for other people not as familiar with these.

Overall, I'm very glad that this class gave me a chance to learn more about Web 2.0. I will defiantly will be using some of these tools in the future.

Audiobooks

Audiobooks aren't really my thing. I find I have a hard time listening to books and staying focused on them. But I can see where others would really like them. They seem really great for long road trips. I think that having access to audiobooks, ebooks, kindles, etc are important for the library. I've never actually used a Kindle before and I'm hesitant because I really do enjoy the idea of having an actual book and being able to physically turn the pages, it's part of the experience for me. I'm sure Kindles offer a different type of experience, and who is to say that its not just as good in a different way. I think having a lot of books available on a single reader is really convenient, especially for taking on a plane. I like the ability to download books from anywhere and being able to access newspaper articles too. Having music on the kindle for background sound is a cool idea as well as having access to simple web browsing like wikipedia. However, I would always be worrying about dropping, losing, forgetting, spilling coffee on or otherwise ruining a kindle (I tend to abuse my reading materials). And I would never remember to charge it. I'm not sure where the Kindle will fit in the future. I would love to get one if I had the money, but I would probably use it as a suppliment to my book collection, not instead of it.

I went a little off topic there, so back to audiobooks. These are important for libraries to offer to their patrons. I also read an article about the benefits of audiobooks in teaching to kids who are struggling with reading literacy. By "hearing" the book, they are more likely to understand the context of the story. I took a look at Netlibrary.com though I couldn't make an account. I thought they had a good selection and easy navigation throughout the site. Looking through this, I think that I would probably like audiobooks for non fiction materials. I can listen to non fiction better than I can read it.

YouTube

I didn't spent too much time on YouTube until this year (and even now, unfortunately I really don't spend too much time on it). Before then, I just thought it was a website for funny video clips with video clips copying the video clips. My friends would send me various links, I would watch them and then not really look at much else. Then a friend of mine suggested using youTube to view knitting tutorials (I think someone else in out class has mentioned this on their blog as well). That's when I really started to use youTube. I found it to be easy to use and a great resource for online tutorials about anything. I've looked up wine making tutorials as well and my job is thinking of creating and posting videos in the future. I'd never noticed the use of channels to narrow down or browse before. I also didn't know that you could actually subscribe to video users and follow their video posts. I can't see myself really getting into subscribing and browsing too much. Mostly I would go to youTube with a goal in mind and just use the search box. It's worked great so far!

I decided to look around at some library videos. I found this one that focused on libraries using future technologies. There are some really cool concepts in here, ideally, of course, for libraries with big budgets. I especially liked the "Ifloor" which allowed library patrons to post questions on a screen on the floor and allow other patrons to read the questions and try to answer them.

Podcasts

I've never really caught onto the podcast thing, so this gave me a chance to look into it a little bit. Podcasts can be equated to am radio on the web. Anyone can post an audio clip about anything, sort of like audio blogging. There are different degrees of podcasting from amateur to some very professional sounding clips I heard on podcastalley.com. The really cool thing about podcasts is that you can subscribe to have them downloaded automatically for mp3 players, similar to RSS feeds.

I saw a lot of libraries using podcasts to promote upcoming events, books, service announcements, etc. I think this is a great idea for libraries. Podcasts appear to be easy enough to set up and use, I think they will become even more popular in libraries in the future. I found a good list of library pobcasts at :http://www.libraryspot.com/podcast/othercasts.htm (in addition to their podcast at: http://www.libraryspot.com/podcast).

Web 2.0 Awards

I looked at the winners for the Visual Arts. I though the first place winner: http://colorblender.com/ was pretty awesome. It's a really simple concept, basically you scroll through colors using an RGB slider and the site picks out complimentary color swatches for you. Or you can choose to edit each swatch individually. These swatches can then be downloaded into photoshop or as .eps files to use from your computer. This is a great tool for designers or anyone struggling with color ideas or just for fun.

The second place winner was http://www.swivel.com/. It looks like a site where you can upload your charts and graphs and make them look more visually appealing. I guess I can see where this would be a good source to liven up projects or presentations. Nothing on there really stood out to me as anything really exciting, though.

The third place site was http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/ which "specializes in 'the visualization of complex networks.'" This site had beautiful designs based on things like subway maps, time lines, music notes, graphs, etc. It is all abstract and based on a specific data material and turned into a piece of artwork. Anyone can make a design and upload. I found this one on the site for a piece of artwork based on the dewey decimal system:

Zoho Writer

Zoho writer appears to be very similar to googledocs (which I thought was a great way to share and collaborate on an assignment).

I'm testing this out and will try to send this directly to my blog. I'm hoping it works! I'm going to test this the text editing to see the similarities to this and something like Microsoft. The text selection is limited but that makes sense. As an online application, it needs to consider only universal fonts available on all computers (besides, I don't think people are using something like this to design anything extravagant).
I like the color selector better than in Microsoft already!

I like how user-friendly this and googledocs are. The tools and interface is similar enough to microsoft that it is easy to figure out. Something like this is a perfect way to collaborate online because of it's ease of use and open access to everyone with an internet connection. It's hard to say whether something like this will ever take over for Microsoft anytime soon, but online applications are definitely taking a chunk out of the Microsoft market. I think some people are wary of keeping important docs on the web, especially anything with personal information, for security risks. But technology is changing and I think people and companies will start to turn to op line applications for day to day document use because they are free, easy to use and more versatile than microsoft in the way of sharing, exporting to the web, etc. This is also great for creating backups of work already started in Microsoft.

I personally would stick to googledocs because most everything else I have is google (blog, email, rss feed, etc) though Zoho writer is just about the same and I have no real preference to either.

*note: I had to cut and paste this entry in from Zoho because it would not let me publish to the blog. The settings were off. Aside from that, I have no complaints about Zoho.