Helenw’s Weblog

All done, now to complete the feedback form.

This has probably been the most useful, interesting, and (dare I say) fun pd activity I’ve undertaken.

Certainly encourages me to think outside the square when it comes to interacting with, and supporting students.

Great work - thanks and congrats to all who have been involved with 23 things!

I can see the benefits of using Second Life for distance students - but this brings with it the challenge for those students who are struggling with technology to begin with to create an avatar and then be able to interact with others. I can also see the benefits for subjects such as graphic design, architecture, web development where development can be done in a virtual environment.

How can Deakin Library use Second Life? Unless we had a dedicated staff member prepared to do all the design and set up of our space, I think it might end up not being so useful. Could possibly be used as a virtual reference service (but we already have IM, which students are familiar with and it is relatively simple to use) or for information literacy - but the take up of eLive sessions has been disappointing, would SecondLife be any different?

Is this the future of learning at a University level? I really hope not! Apart from a degree, the real life interaction with lecturers and fellow students is one of the big pluses of attending university. As one who has studied both on and off campus in the past, I know that the on campus experience was preferable. Not everyone has that choice, and we try to make the off campus experience a bit more inclusive and supportive, but I wouldn’t want to spend all my time interacting via a computer.

So many podcasts to choose from! For me the shorter duration ones are immediately more appealing - having said that, I ended up subscribing to the ABC Book Show (which are all more than 30 minutes) - as I rarely, if ever, get to listen to it on the radio.

Very handy for those students who can’t get to lectures - hopefully their lecturer has an interesting voice - just one more way to communicate.

YouTube is lots of fun! Good for promotional stuff - library tours, information about services, marketing ourselves, but perhaps not so good for education purposes - the definition on computer screens isn’t all that good, so it’s hard to see what you are looking at (or is that old age?)

The video clip I’m sharing has been around for a while but I still like it!

Catherine will be living in the village of Lezan (1200 people) for the next eight weeks, going to school in Ales (Lycee J. B. Dumas)

Putting the pet photo on the wiki wasn’t quite as straightforward as I expected (possibly due to the fact that I didn’t read the instructions thoroughly)

With a bit of help, and a lot of copying and pasting it is done! Check out the lovely Sienna (Ali looks cute too!)

Are our users motivated enough to involve themselves in a Library 2.0 environment? Not too sure. You certainly run the risk of a library evolving in a way determined by the articulate few, while the majority sit back and let things change around them. Possibly not happy with the direction the library is heading, but don’t care enough to contribute themselves.

It is certainly about trusting the user to collaborate with the library, in developing library services and resources and also about library management handing over an element of control to the user. The library may have goals about the direction it is heading, but the users might take it in another direction altogether.

Have been wandering around del.icio.us for a bit now - the ‘randomness’ of it is a bit much initially - I think you need to lose the librarian’s compulsion to categorise according to rules. I followed some interesting ‘trails’ relating to photography and quilting and dogs - I ended up creating my own account, and have imported all my work bookmarks which I am reorganising - quite useful for that, because rather than putting them into one folder eg. statistics, I can now have a statistics tag, and a finance tag…so a bit easier to find things if I can’t remember where I put them. And with the number of bookmarks I have that’s handy!

iGoogle is pretty cool - have added quite a few things to my page - did have a couple of problems with the Facebook gadget, but just removed the one I had chosen and picked another and that seemed to work ok.

So Google is taking over the world…good to see a bit of competition for Microsoft. The Google applications certainly seem more user friendly and intuitive (and free!)

Would I like to work at Google? Hmmm…how do I get that green card…

Searched in Google Books for a book my daughter had to study at school - Tim O’Brien’s “The Things they Carried”. What’s nice is that not only are you presented with links to the book itself, but literary criticisms - pity we didn’t think to search on here about two months ago…

I’ll now check the books she is studying at the moment - “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”, and see what I can find. Anything on the ’sacrificial victim’ would be good!

I’d need to play a bit more to come up with a specific use for it in the Library - till then it just gets added to the box of tricks.