Thing 23: Is this really the end? Or just the beginning ...

Wow! This is it! Drumroll please! Thing 23. When I started this learning journey, I had no idea that I would learn so many interesting and challenging things. If you had asked me a year ago, if I would have my very own blog, well, I would have laughed and said "Who me?". I had a lot fun creating my blog. My favorite discoveries or exercises were Thing 11: LibraryThing, Thing 10:Image Generators, Thing 5: Flickr, Thing 6: More Flickr, Thing 20: You too can Youtube and Thing 18: Web-based Apps. I have enjoyed the discoveries and exercises (some more than others - te! he!) of Learning 2.0 and I would be a willing participant in future discovery programs. Thank you!

Thing 22: Audiobooks (or "The end is near")

Hurray! The end is near! Wow! Only one more discovery exercise to go. Creating a NetLibrary account was easy. Whew! I was amazed that there are 2,046 eAudiobooks in the LCPL eContent collection. I chose the browse by subject search. There are a lot of titles that I thought I might want to download once I have my mp3 player. Some of those titles that I am considering are language studies and romance eAudiobooks.

Thing 21: Podcasts, Smodcasts!

For this discovery exercise we were asked to take a look at one or two of the podcast directories listed and see if we can find a podcast that interests us. I picked Yahoo podcasts and selected NPR book review podcasts to add as a RSS feed to my Bloglines account. I picked NPR book reviews because I don't get a chance to listen to NPR as much as I would like to. Now I have another way to stay up to date with some of the latest news from NPR.

Thing 20: You too can YouTube

What I liked about YouTube is that it gives people a chance to have their 15 minutes of fame. It gives musicians and singers a chance to be heard and possibly be discovered by a record company. What I don't like about YouTube is that anything can be posted. There's videos posted of people fighting and doing all sorts of other things that I won't mention. You get the good, bad and the ugly. Over all I think YouTube is a good thing. Can I see any features or components of the site that might be interesting if they were applied to library websites? Well, patrons could click on a link to see what a storytime program, summer reading program and adult programs are like. I picked this funny and cute video because of the beautiful tiger cubs and the cute monkey. Adorable and smart!

Love the sport and the music!

Thing 19: Discovering Web 2.0 tools

I selected Wetpaint. What I liked about Wetpaint was that it has combined the finest elements of blogs, social networking and wikis. While exploring Wetpaint, I discovered a wiki by Nancy Pearl. It was very user friendly. It offers a lot of great info that I found useful. Could I see any applications for its use in a library setting? Patrons could create a wiki of their favorite books, cds and dvds. We are often asked if we keep a record of all of the items that they've ever checked out. This could be a good way for them to keep track of what they've read, listen to or watched.

Thing 18: Web-based Apps: There not just for desktops

For this discovery exercise, we were asked to take a look at Zoho Writer, create a document and then document your discoveries in your blog. At first I didn't know which Office Suite or Productivity Tools to choose. Finally I picked show zoho. After I decided what I wanted to do in show zoho, I had fun with it. One problem I encountered when I added a text box, was that I couldn't backspace or highlight a letter or word to delete it. I had to delete the whole text box and start over again. Here's what I created!

Thing 17: Playing around with PBWiki

I accessed the PLCMC Learning 2.0 wiki and create a login account for myself. To mark my adventure, I added my blog to the Favorite Blog page. I decided to give the optional exercise a try. So, I added a few favorites to several pages. It was interesting to see what other bloggers had added too.