#23 Thank you folks

I learned lots about my own nature as a learner. It has taken willpower to front up to sites that won’t load, that are full of computer geek speak that I blanked out on. I hated having to do stuff over and over till I got it right and got a decent post published. But then I also hated having to finish posts when I really needed to spend hours more on each topic to really satisfy my desire to understand it all properly.

Learned that finding sites I enjoy visiting, can relate to and feel I can trust on the net is not easy even with the help of learning 2.0. It’s a whole new language and mindset out there and in general sites in which the influence of a ‘literate’ web author are obvious seem to work better for me.

Learned that given the slightest excuse I will spend far too long sitting at the computer.

Am totally excited about getting a wiki going in my local community, don’t care who starts it but just know we are computer literate enough now to produced a great event together. Am thinking about using a blog and Flickr for my next “what I did in my holidays “ composition.

Am not quite so confident that I will revisit all the sites I think should without the impetus of a deadline looming up. Ands that about sums Learning 2.0 up for me. I had known about most of this stuff before but this fabulous program walked me up to these amazing places and gave me the tools to get inside and play.

Thanks

#22 Audiobooks

Well the only question here is when will we get downloadable audiobooks in our own library!

Every now and then I visit audible books sites the commercial homes of downloadable audio books and decide once again that it is just too expensive for me. Besides the content is heavily skewed to America and I happen to want a lot of UK books.

I've tried noncommercial sites too, once a book is out of copywrite it is fair game. Free audio books I have found tend to be fairly dated. Even poetry sometimes comes with problems of having to listen through a whole lot of guff that accompanies every individual poem you download
I like the poetry archive though and Project Gutenberg has some new titles since last I looked but even so ...I hope our library consortia roll out Audible.com for us soon.

However I do have some old favourites in my itunes library and enjoy them...far easier than loading in audio books on CD.

#21 Podcast paradise

At long last something I feel fairly competent to write about. Podcasts. Listen to them. Love them. Highly recommend them to anyone with an ipod!!!!

While I too have trawled through podcast directories in my time my favourite podcasts emanate from those quality providers the ABC and the BBC . Its so easy. My itunes is set up with subscriptions to the radio shows I love and then I download a whole batch to my itunes library ...generally speaking I save them up for visits to the gym and car trips as a change to music and audio books. The ABC doesn't keep back programs for very long so it is important to download stuff fairly regularly. Imagine the Health Report or Philospher's Zone, Lingua Franca,; whatever to listen to when and where you want.

Podcast directories are great if you have the patience to sift through a lot of commercial content poorly disguised as regular podcasts. There are gems there but they sure are hard to find. I had a couple of podcasts in the original RSS feeds and will add more later. Using Podcast.net or whatever takes you to unmoderated lists of podcasts. I found it easier to search for 'ten best type lists' or recommendations by bloggers whom I trust when looking for podcasts other than radio ones.

#20 YouTube (Muffled)

#19 Finding a friend on facebook

One of the nice aspects of browsing through the catalogue of 200 Web 2.0 sites was that I was pleasantly surprised to see that I recognized so many of them.

Admittedly most were from this program: technocrati, librarything , flickr, rollyo, del.icio.us but others were things i had stumbled on (qv) before

• biblio.com
• googlemaps
• stumbleupon
• picassa
• podcasts
  

And although it is above and beyond the call of duty I am actually using the zoho app to construct this post.(I apologize for the dogsbreakfast of colour and fonts but Zoho is such a nice small and easy to use as a writing program that I am hooked. No wonder they recommend it for blogposts.

I browsed through a few sites that seemed interesting, ColourBlend, Arcade games, Wayfarer and Widgets but though they all looked enticing slow download speeds tonight mean that I need more patience than I possess to actually use them. Bother!

So instead of any of them I joined facebook. My kids had taken me on a tour of it ages ago. It looked to be fascinating but maybe too much of a time waster to risk; but here was the perfect excuse so off I went. Surprisingly easy to join and equally easy to use, great fun but not sure of what value! No doubt when I see them next they will tell me exactly why!

# 18 zoho trial

This is a fairly friendly sort of a place. Look colours already, italics even, and poorly spelled words fixed upp instantter.

I  will go back to basic black and concentrate on the text. It is surely nicer than the web based email that I am stuck with at work. A real live spell checker for a start! You shouls have seen the typos tht I did not choose to keep. The naughty  unAmerican spelling is there deliberately too!

post 17	tricky
post 18	zoho is slow	easy to use

You have just missed out on an uploaded photo of my nephew as a Harry Potter during WA book week. Totally cute but I cannot wait for ever. Zoho is slow.

Publish
Technorati Tags     zoho,trial,learning

#17 scrabbling around in the sandbox

All I did for the first 10 minutes was to stumble over an invisible button in the PLCMS sandbox.
It said right there on the page "just (oh! how I hate that word) click on 'edit' on the top of the page and I couldn't find the word could I.

So battered and bruised I hopped out, checked what others had found, and then tiptoed back in, must have done something different and managed to add my blog to the honour roll.

Second time round was easier and I managed to tell the world about Gardens of the Sun a great bit of polemical garden writing by Trevor Nottle. (Free plug for a great book)

Took a look at PBwiki and think we might manage one for Beaufort..who will help me persuade Norman to have a go?

#16 wiki wonderland

Drilling deep down in the Davis community wiki there is a gossy little session focussed on what happened when the manager of a local thrift shop shifted the rack of mens clothes!. This is real village pump stuff and coexists happily with the pages of opening hours, attractions, resources and other good community info people are contributing to the Davis wiki page. The potential wikis have forlocal community houses and other development groups seems fabulous. Visitor information centres too... no annoyingly out of date information, multiple contributors.
Some other guys can focus on libraries wikis seem to be just what our community needs for web presence.

I wonder how hard it is to set one up?

#15 Library 2.0

I just read the OCLC Newsletter and I got even more excited than the next person; because I was looking at what it didn’t say as much as what it did. Where was a mention of picture books or westerns or even sci-fi for heaven’s sake?

Will they make 'print on demand' books in a comfy to hold, pleasant to turn the pages of, small size format? Who has seen one that does not look like a spiral bound A4 computer manual? Guarantee me a book as a well designed object as well as an information source and I will be a convert.

What about kids who read screens not books? I can only flip between four screens at a time on my machine. Researching just about anything I can have dozens of open books and bookmarked (old style) books within arms reach. (True confession time I even printed out all the 23 things to make the activities easier).

I’ve got this fossil feeling and I don’t like it very much. What does a really ' up there and with it' library hold on its shelves in the way of fiction. I just can’t imagine it. I can see the reference collections going but are we suggesting that our book collections will no longer be in demand as patrons positively choose e-books and audio books and other rich web based activities as substitute activities for old fashioned reading. If that is the case I will shut up right now. Is it? Help me out folks.

Lost…the plot…lets hurry up and get on to wikis …I dig wikis!

#14 Technorati tour

Took the look, did the keyword search and was not surprised in the least.

There is so much on the web that it is not surprising that changing one mini aspect of a search filter changes the results.. look at this whizzy little Technorati graph that showshow many posts each day mention 2.0. Searching the blog directory seemed to produce a more general overview style of blog whilst a post search was almost as bad as a google groups search. Bother thing 14 was almost like work!

English posts that contain "learning 2.0" per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

#13 Tagging & Social Bookmarking

Its funny but while I can see lots of use for tagging, and am feeling my way into useful tags for my posts to this blog, my pictures in flickr and especially in the books I am adding to my library thing using it for book marks does not excite me right now.

I think it is because wiki and google searching is just so good that I am not using my own bookmarks very much anymore. I used to rely on them so much for navigating but now with more experience at keyword searching, the replacement of the old AltaVista style search engines by gorgeous google and RSS feeds they just sit up there in the tool bar all unloved.

What do you use your first generation bookmarks for? 2.0 social book marking is a totally different ball game. It just lead me to GoodReads and that looks fun but has to be postponed till the due date work first and fun after 1st December. So does a proper read of the seven habits of highly effective bookmarkers

Sitting at a library conference Wednesday one thought bounced round my brain about adding tagging to Dewey.
What if we could open up one entry in a Marc record as an open input tagging entry.

Cataloguers would do the Dewey and subject entry thing and then we readers add tags.
Any congruence between reader tags and Dewey would be nice. Differences enlightening.

Maybe readers do want to tag books as long, short, gentle, coarse, blokey, chicks, crude, nice, red or blue

Wouldn’t it be fun to look at our books via those lovely tag clouds?

#12 rollyo

This one was a little easier. I already had the makings of the rollyo, my bookmarks folder of all the sites I have found that are good on pseudoscience, on scams and hoaxes and nutter theories of just about everything.

The elegant rollyo solution to the problem of having to search either the whole web or just one site is a treat to install and use.

Next time some one sends me an email warning me to beware the latest spam, scam, or urban horror I will be able to quite quickly check it though. I know it is awful of me but it is fun to try and enlighten the well meaning.

I have lost one of my favourites, it shows a gruesome photo of a woman's breast, affected by some nasty thing...and is actually clever superimposition of a breast on the seed pod of the lotus flower...ghastly! Did that one reach you? Remember the year 2000 scare?

#11 at last library land

I have wanted to do this for so long, thank heavens I never did begin the database I had promised myself to create one day. Fancy procrastination being as much of a virtue as patience!...although I could wish I had begun my association with library thing years ago.



my library thing is too small to view now...... BUT JUST YOU WAIT

As you can see per instructions there is a widget and a search box BUt in keeping with my pattern of not quite getting it right that search box appears to search group libraries bsed on the books in my librry BUT that is not what I wanted. Maybe when i add more titles. Please of mythical beholder of this blog enlighten me...why group libaries...it is bound up in the widget.

#10 its not just your imagin-ator

Did you hang around long enough to see my halo flicking on and off?

What about that stretched out photo taken at sunset on the old Andado track.

What i wanted to do was have that as the background to the title bar but they wouldn't let me!

You read the HTML code and tellme why not!!







the little gif that is there is 300x56 pixels and 56575 bytes

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_w9CrAHGOxCc/RzF_qcWb44I/AAAAAAAAABE/Uu89NJb34cI/s1600/cooltextused70433957.gif



Only two other 'plays' worth posting.

I had a bit of a go at jelly muffin but the shape was all wrong for a title bar and then again on image generator as well as the three in #8 but I don't need a funny picture right now andI really want to spend all my time on #11 I cheated and had a peek ages ago and i want my very own library thing going now.

near old Andado

My creation
Originally uploaded by elizabeththurgood

#9 shuffling through sh.t!

I hate it, exploring pages of search results in this case for newsfeed items that I can actually understand. My criteria for judging a search successful were obviously too high.

• I did not want an advertisement or product guide disguised as a blog.
• It had to be a topic of interest to me
• I had to be able to understand the posts
• Technical stuff that I am desperate to know about had to be pitched at my level
• Australian content is a bonus point
• It had to come across as if written by a real person

Using Topix and Google Blogs a search for embroidery blogs took me to pages of unloved ads disguised as blogs. Searching for Ipod blogs got me lost in a maze of largely illiterate posters with weird pod problems or apple news stories. Any gentle musings about how to get the best out of your ipod might have been there but were buried pages down.

Technorati was better, its list of the most popular turned up more blogs of the 'I would like to try when I have time type' (after the 24th thing).

I had another go using the tags concept that works so well for web pictures. I wanted tags like 'well written' or 'for the older blogger' BUT of course you actually need to work with tags that bloggers already use. Off I went to find a list of tags that will define the blog of my dreams. Technocrati had the top 100 tags ,but none quite did it for me.

Bother, am back to the old 'who you know' style search. My golden oldie bookmarks. I liked Bleeding Edge and he is still writing a blog, the Better Days page looks good. My absolute favourite Marylaine Block, let me down though; she doesn't blog.

Her many pages don't have cute little RSS buttons. A quote from a google search page reads " exchanged e-mail with Marylaine about this, and she admitted feeling guilty about not having the time to develop some expertise with RSS and news .."

I am looking for a blog that reviews blogs and that search will have to wait for a while.

So thats almost it on newsfeed search tools except to say my EBSCO journals of interest got as far as my bloglines account but died the death when I needed passwords and logins i did not have to actually read them. One to many hoop to jump through. But I did master the link on the toolbar so something achieved.

#8 more kiss than r(i)ss

At long last...I never knew how easy it is when you find some instructions and follow them.

The really long posting in Betterdays blog walked me right through the maze and the end result is the list of feeds you can see pinned in the top right corner of my blog. Am I happy! I knew something like Bloglines was available but I never quite got all the bits of the puzzle together and Betterdays laid it out so simply that the ratio of false starts to actually getting it right was not totally disheartening. Mind you knowing why RSS is a good thing for me helped keep me ploughing on.

If anyone involved with the project reads this thank you very much!
My feeds can be found at
http://www.bloglines.com/public/busylizzie

#7 blog about technology

Yesterday I bought a new mobile phone... Next G...they are so cheap to make that the salesman threw in a GPS for free... the very next holiday gadget that we were treating ourselves with. This year I had to wait till we got into range of a town to use the mobile phone to contact everyone. Two years ago it was queueing up to use the telecard at a call box. Next year and Next G if we choose the right bit of bush for a campsite we will be emailing, surfing (on the web not at the beach)as well as phoning. Unreal!

That GPS unit... it could be the saving of our marriage. Navigating in an unfamiliar town, now I have reached the stage of life when my glasses have to be off to read the map, but back on to see the street signs can be fairly fraught! That is an unexpected side benefit!

The best of the photos I take can be uploaded to my flickr account and tagged with the map references. In 1? 2? 3? years time when I need a new camera it will probably have a built in GPS and map references will be part of the metadata for each photo.

So what..well, somewhere near the Davenport Ranges this August we found some stone chippings of the kind associated with the making of spearheads. We were were fairly hazy about where we actually were... but with a GPS not only would we have known that we were within 10 km of the track we were looking for but we could have pinned the location of the artifacts. I'm sold already!

#6 flicker fun

My creation
Originally uploaded by elizabeththurgood

Since I began this post I have not only made librarian trading card No. 100...(will that add to its value?) ...but also a flickr badge of some of our 2007 holiday snaps.

It's all due to T.H. , she is an inspiration. Only 25 more days to go and still only on #6. Almost as many stops and starts to get this on the page as there were to get this far up the Katherine Gorge. Uploading a lot of photos (60) is a slow business as is putting meaningful tags on them all. That task might have to wait for a bit..but poorly chosen tags meant that my snaps don't show in photo montages or on flickr maps of the NT. I loved searching via tags, thousands of photos of almost everything I looked up but if I get in quickly I will have a first with Whistle Duck Creek . Amazing.

#5 Success at last

Look a picture and it wasn't difficult but it was only added using the blog toolbar no complicated flickr flights at all! Are you wondering what I am doing leaning on a pick-axe? Searching for topaz and finding them too.

Subsequent to the previous post I avoided the ironing trap navigated my way through a jungle of accounts, passwords and installs and am ready to have another go with les flics this evening. Got to be up to ready for the Monday study session with the ever energetic Ev. I'm going to try one of those thingies that Tara has flickering on her blog but as my poor old Toshie is dying i am stuck with just the most recent holiday snaps...everything else is unavailable due to an unacceptable 'looseness' in those all important USB ports...I learnt too late to be gentle with my computer and it is one problem Iam not game to use blutak to fix.

#5 flickr'd up

Becalmed! Pooped! Whats the good of it all. I'm all flickered up and ready to fly and THERE ARE NO PHOTOS AVAILABLE FOR ME TO UPLOAD ON THIS COMPUTER!

You know what will happen when I head home to my very own pictures folder. The ironing will reach out, all wrinkled sleeves and scrunched up slacks and capture me . I will be dragged all unwilling and by the time I escape ..it will be too late...I will have forgotten those passwords.

Seriously you reach my age and short term memory loss is too real. The keyboard, the screen set up, the chair will all be slightly different and combine that with a gap of a few hours and it is possible that the photo thing won't happen!

Leaving this screen will be a leap of faith...I don't want to go home...will Norman let me have tea here? You have worked out that I am at the library haven't you! Its where we all hang out on a wet Saturday...lousy coffee but no ironing.

Well the kids don't care about coffee or ironing but I do. So there's the girls, the guys and us two seriously uncool Learning2.0 students.

#3 grabbed one blog

Way behind the 8 ball up here....
First Saturday in November and Ev and I are off and running in an effort to get this done by the deadline.

Luckily its raining - no garden guilt!

It's a collaborative effort to get us out there and on the web. Blogged up, flickering, RSSing (whatever that is) like they say the web's our oyster.