Online Tools and Applications

Looking at other possibilities to manage my work and files is of interest to me. I have been using GoogleDocs with a group of people that are organizing a library conference next year and it appears to be working well, particularly sharing documents. I hadn't looked at the templates before and they offer other ways to organize which give me ideas I hadn't thought of before.

Lifehacker looks really interesting to further explore.

IMMMMMMMMMMM, but I am and I'll be what I'll be....

IMing is fun. I played with Gretchen the other day using yahoo's version and Meeboed Richard after hours at Skokie Public Library. The idea of instant messaging without speaking is awesome, however, I don't know if my fingers are as fast as my tongue....sigh.

Since I have been at work since early and it is 10pm, my IMing is silly...forgive me.

In libraries helping people through this tool can be very useful. Exploring these functions will be a great learning experience.

Socially Networking and Facebook

First entering the hallways of Facebook is rather daunting because of my reticience in not being anonymous, but after talking with a lot of my library colleagues, I wasn't so fearful I see many possibilities for libraries to create friend networks and neighborhood networks for sharing information.

My son is on MySpace so that was fun finding him and his friends. TO BE CONTINUED... Rose

Del.icio.us Dawdlings

Using Del.icio.us in libraries could be a great tool as we create more wikis for research topics. One way to use it that I thought would be particularly useful was the OCLC organization's creating of tagged book records that appeared in WorldCat by subject. I could see some good uses for tagging book records and creating bibliographies especially when Oakton's holding are listed.

I love the word folksonomy to describe this tool!

Comparing Del.icio.us with Google, I chose to look up Volvos since we just got a new old one. In Del.icio.us I found 100, many of which could be useful. Googling Volvos resulted in over 2 million hits and of course, a lot were sales sites. Definitely, in this case Del.icio.us won out.

Flickr and YouTube

I had been familiar with Youtube, but had never used Flickr before. It was a lot of fun playing with pictures and I added some pictures I had on my Oakton account since I am the last holdout from buying a digital camera.

Gretchen helped me with many find out about some of the cool features in both Flickr and Youtube and I experimented with placing a video on my blog. It was a cute video of a boston terrier, but I decided to take it off the blog. Just a warning to any of you when you edit videos and comments off of your blog they still appear on the RSS feed in the reader. Another example of this happening was when I was looking at Uri's comments in my Google Reader and wanted to see a video he had put on his blog. We discovered that he had edited it off the blog, but it was still posted on Google Reader, but the video was gone.

Wiki Wanderings

The possibilties using Wikis seem endless and the opportunties to edit without laboring on html make them extremely useful. With Wikis students can be enlisted as partners in their own education experience. How cool is that!

Using the current 24/7 wikis on the library web site has allowed us to create and update information in a very organized and efficient manner. As the wiki host allows for more "bells and whistles" the wiki pages will become more visually appealing. It looks like a great future for Wikis and Oakton.

RSS Feed Experience

Working on the RSS Feed was worthwhile. Syndication of resources is a useful to save time and put a number of resources right at your fingertips. Julia has been very helpful in coaching my RSS lift-off.