Thing 23

The end is here so what have I learnt...

I thought I knew a lot when this started and I did but I was hoping to learn some more.  I'm pleased to report that I have indeed learnt a lot more.

I was already well acquantied with blogs, twitter, flickr and a few others.  It has been nice to reflect in writing on my experiences with these tools during the course of the programme.

As for the things I didn't already know I'm pleased to say that some have stuck with me.  I love my igoogle page, especially the Twitter widget.  RSS feeds were something that I had played with a litte but now they are very much part of my internet experience.  I've discovered an app that lets me read my feeds on my Sony Ericcsson phone too which is great, I either like to catch up with blogs on the go or during breaks at work.

Of course other things won't have stuck in my life, Delicious and LinkedIn aren't really for me.

I've enjoyed writing this blog, I already had a library stuff blog but writing about web2.0 and libraries on a regular basis has been very interesting.  I will continue to blog about library things and my trainee/student experience over on my real blog.

Things 21 & 22

A nice easy thing this week - widgets are great - simple as that really!

As you can see I've added the Flickr widget thing to my blog, so now everyone can admire my brilliant photography skills.  Quite clever really that one little bit of script can retrieve my photographs from Flickr and then put them on my blog, and all with a few clicks of a mouse and not very much effort on my part.

Since starting 23 things, these kind of applications have been very much part of my everyday, especially with iGoogle gadgets.  My favourite iGoogle is a Twitter gadget, its fantastic!!  I added a Delicious gadget to my iGoogle too but I think I still prefer the Delicious sidebar as my prefered means of using Delicious.

Computing in the Clouds

I've noticed a lot of negative feeling across the 23things blogosphere about ThinkFree...I'd never heard of it, let alone tried it out before.

Usually I'm a Googledocs kinda girl but tonight I thought I'd give ThinkFree a quick spin....or should that be a slow spin.   I'm still waiting for mine to load.  Perhaps ThinkFree is best suited to fancy super fast new computers with superdooper memory processors and all that jazz.  It is definately not suited to this ancient dinosaur of the computing world found here in the law bod.


When it does work then its great.  In the true spirit of cloud computing its like having Microsoft Office without installing it on your machine...well to an extent anyway.  If you needed to do something a bit more complex than what Googledocs can offer then this would be a brilliant tool.   As someone who has no Office on my laptop it could be great for those times when only Word will do. 

The share function can have its uses too, I've seen people use it as a way of linking to an electronic copy of their CV on more professional websites.  It is also a good way to share work with coursemates on a university course, a function I might find useful next year.

It's still a bit clunky though....I think I'll stick to google when I fancy a bit of computing in the clouds for now!

Wikipedia

Thing 18: Wikipedia

Perhaps the most famous wiki of them all...and yes I do often use it as a starting point when it comes to research.  For a simpleton like myself I find it is a nice easy way into an unfamiliar topic. For example when watching that programme about the Queen on Channel 4, I found myself curious about people mentioned, so I hit Wikipedia and learnt things like Prince Philips mother was called Princess Alice of Battenburg.

 

Here is Alice of Battenburg, in an image sourced thanks to the mighty Wikipedia!

I also learnt that Battenburg cake perhaps came about as the cake created in honour of the marriage in 1884 of Queen Victoria's grandaughter (Princess Alice's mother & Prince Philips grandmother!) to Prince Louis of Battenberg, with each of the four squares representing each of the four Battenberg princes. Is it true? Who knows! 

Let's leave that there because the royal family can get very confusing

There are many arguements against wikipedia holding any academic value and its use is frowned upon in education.   But what if it is wrong I hear you cry!

However I think it is great.  I'm not stupid and I do know how to question the validity of a source.  With every source used it is sensible to think about the context, creator and point of view amongst other things so I won't discredit Wikipedia as a worthless source of knowledge just because anyone could have written it. 

In my view Wikipedia is no less reliable as a source of knowledge than a blog post or a newspaper article, an illustration or ancient vase.  Wikipedia is at least a peer reviewd source of information, people are more than willing to jump in and correct someone elses mistake.  Nothing should ever be taken at face value, not even a textbook so I don't see what harm can come from using Wikipedia as a starting point as long as we are sensible and remember to question.  One of the most important things I learnt at university was to question everything and anything, a lesson I carry with me and use when browsing Wikipedia for information.

Wikis

Thing 17: Explore and contribute to a wiki

Recently Helen, Jess & I had to put together a short presentation about wikis and the possible uses for them in libraries.

As we don't work together we decided to put the whole purpose of a wiki to the test and colloboarate on the presentation using a wiki.  I set up a wiki with PBworks as I already had an account set up.

Here is our wiki - http://wikis4libraries.pbworks.com/  It is very basic and limited because it was just thrown together for a quick presentation.  Proved one point about how wikis could be useful to a library service though, they are a great platform for collaboration and sharing.

So that's my main wiki experience.  The only other editing encounters I've had with wikis so far has been adding myself the Library Day in the Life project wiki.

However, I might gain some more experience during my trainee year as I'm on the Law Library web team and we've decided a wiki is needed there too.  For our wiki we are going to use the wiki function of Weblearn. 

Tweet Tweet Tweet

Thing 15: sign up for Twitter and find people to follow

Thing 16: start engaging with your network

Over the last few months I've gradually warmed to Twitter.  At first I didn't like it because it is such a huge online community, so as a newbie its easy to feel overwhlemed by all the people and information.  However once I started to make some connections and learn the ways of Twitter it all became a lot easier.   Also the various platforms for Twitter rather than using the website make it great.  I have Twitter in my browser and Twitter on my phone thanks to the Snaptu app.  For a regular not smart phone Snaptu is brilliant, miles better than mobile internet, you can reply, retweet and do all the other things.

You have to learn how Twitter works.  What to do, what to say, what is appropriate and what isn't.  Essentially create an identity for yourself on there.

I was recently linked (via Twitter of course!) to an excellent article, Getting the Most Out of Twitter; It covers all the basics of how to use Twitter properly, and goes into some useful detail about the best ways to connect with people. The article also talks about Twitter as a more personal new feed or current awareness tool.  You can connect with people who might post links to interesting and relevant articles online or follow discussions about topics that interest you.  For me this is one of the best things about Twitter, just by following a selection of LIS professionals I've learnt so much and been introduced to some things that will be really good for my own professional development.

I don't just follow LIS tweeters though.  Using the list feautre I set myself up with an arts & culture feed to keep up to date with some of my favourite theatre companies and venues as well as galleries and cultural organisations.  It's hard to keep track of what theatre companies are up to or what on by checking a million websites all the time, so Twitter helps.  Yesterday I discovered that Filter  (@filtertheatre) are doing another tour of the amazing Twelfth Night I saw last year and loved so much I wrote a paper about it.

I follow some restuarants too as they often run twitter comps, in January I won a £20 Las Iguanas voucher in a twitter lucky dip draw....free stuff FTW!

I realise I have neglected to mention libraries here at all, apart from Twitter for librarians to talk to each other.  With Twitter I think its only useful if there is a number of students on Twitter, people who already use Twitter tend to think its a great way to share infomation anyway.  So more information is probably good!

Thing 14: Getting connected on LinkedIn

I'd never really heard of LinkedIn but I've joined up and made some connections already.  It's the kind of website that satisfys the nosey busybody within me; I probably spent far to long looking at peoples jobs and past jobs, for some reason it interests me.  I guess I've always been interested in people and thier place in the world, something that was nutured by my theatre and performance degree, so LinkedIn is great for that reason alone.

I was surprised by how many people from university have LinkedIn profiles, after reading through some of them I became quite despondent and depressed at how they all sound a lot more successful than me.  My job title of library trainee doesn't sound as impressive as graduate account executive or trainee technology consultant.  After reading many profiles with silly impressive sounding job titles I decided to blame it all on job title inflation and rapidly added the word graduate infront of my own to boost my own standing in the LinkedIn world. Also many of my friends had listed thier degree as a first class honours whereas I'd just put mine down as a BA, don't want to show off my distinctly average 2.1 more than I need too.  Cue more jealousy and wondering if it would look totally desperate to indicate to the world that I was cruelly robbed of that glorious first I worked so hard for.  For these reasons, perhaps LinkedIn is not so great.

LinkedIn goes through your email contacts to find people for you to connect with; it found my mother which amused me greatly though I haven't told her that I found her LinkedIn yet.  I attempted to connect with some university contacts but declined the offer of a potential connection with my estate agent, university admissions tutors that I've never met and someone I bought a jumper from on ebay.