#24 Got file conversion issues?

Well, here it is not yet New Year and I am starting on Learning 2.1. So thing number 24 here I come. I can imagine why the people at Learning 2.1 could consider Zamzar.com a new friend. Unless you want to convert mega files or deal with file storage issues, you don't even have to register or signup for a program. In a simple four step process you browse for the file you want to convert, choose the file type you want to convert it to, type in your email address and press convert. Voila! You get an email with a link to enable you to download the converted file. As the link only remains there for a day (for free users anyway), you would want to be doing this as a pretty instant process.

There's a tool that you can add to your browser toolbar to facilitate the process for urls - I haven't tried that yet as I'm using someone else's PC while Hawthorn Library is being painted. There seems to be a very comprehensive list of text, image, video, and audio formats (including compressed types). I was particularly impressed by being able to convert to and from PDF as this is something I often want to do. My one gripe was that when you browse for the file it doesn't show the link in the box and you, therefore, don't know that it was selected it. I will install the link to my browser toolbar once I am back there and am sure that this will come in handy. It would also come in handy for the public PCs, I'm sure.

A change in the wind for public library managers?

SLCPL Director application instructions
Originally uploaded by hblowers

I was surprised recently to see this ad featured in Helene Blowers' Librarybytes blog. She was also surprised to see the ad! It looks like a change is in the air. I might have to start looking at key selection criteria for jobs. Helene's post had a comment from someone who thought she/he wouldn't want prospective employers reading the blog. What do you think?

Life after #23?

I think that I have been having withdrawal symptoms since the end of Learning 2.0. I have missed the intensity of learning and the excitement of experimenting with new things. I haven't been wasting my time, however. I have spent quite a bit of time going back and exploring things that we touched on in the course. I have explored Flickr, its emailing, and its networks and in the course of this have found some great photos and struck up a correspondence with someone about Collingwood's history, as well as communicating with people I know virtually and physically. I have explored LibraryThing a bit more and signed up for some of the book discussions. I am still monitoring them via Bloglines but I don't really think that it is for me. I use Bloglines and del.icio.us regularly still and occasionally glance at Technorati. I have also been intending to get on with setting up some wikis on some historical topics, starting with Boroondara's hotels, but I haven't quite got there yet.

But the really exciting thing I have been spending my time on is Ning. Fiona introduced me to this and we have set up a Ning network for City of Boroondara Library Service. You can see the link to it on the side panel. To date, the network is pretty embryonic with Fiona, Jonathan and me rattling around in it. However, we have had some good discussions particularly around Christmas books and will no doubt have more as we encourage more people to join in the New Year. Today I have been experimenting with setting up a Ning network for Hawthorn's history - again the link to it is in the badge on the side bar.

One side effect of poking around in Ning was that I discovered the Learning 2.1 Ning network and discovered that indeed there is life after Learning 2.0. It is Learning 2.1 and there are many more things to learn. Apart from the Learning 2.1 Ning network, there is also a Learning 2.1 blog as well as a Learning 2.1 wiki which I notice several Australians have already registered on. I have been spending too much time on Ning today, but my brave new world will start soon and I will embark on #24! How exciting! Helene Blowers may have moved on to Ohio, but this program continues and continues to have an amazing world-wide effect on libraries of all types.

Menzies unveiling - an historic event now!

This is another item I found on Youtube when I was doing Learning 2.0. Given the recent theft of the bust from its pedestal outside Kew Library, this is indeed an historical account!

#23 Is this really the end? No, it's a new beginning...

I started off on this journey with the avowed aim of exploring Web 2.0 particularly in relation to my private and public passion, local and family history. As I progressed through the course I was diverted into more general applications for Web 2.0 in libraries. I was familiar with a lot of the Web 2.0 tools but only as a passive user. E.g. I have been looking at other people's blogs, other people's MySpace accounts, Youtube, and other people's Flickr collections for ages. The key thing that the Learning 2.0 program did for me was make me become an active user, rather than a passive one.

However, as the course progressed I also became so much more aware of the huge number of possibilities out there. This course for me has definitely been the beginning of a journey. I feel that what I have done so far is like the tip of the iceberg. It will take me a long time to reach down underwater into the lowest crevices, particularly as parts will melt, and new bits will freeze up as time goes by.

What were the specific highlights for me?

• Bloglines is something that I am now using every day. It has been particularly interesting to use it to chart the progress of Boroondara staff in the Learning 2.0 course, but I also use it for a number of library and book related feeds and as well as for news links, ABC podcasts, new and programming links, and Flickr sites and friend's and family's blogs. I can't imagine not using Bloglines! Firefox makes it so simple to add to these feeds. You can find the link to my Bloglines on the side of this blog.
  
• Del.icio.us is another tool that I can not imagine not continuing to use. I am not at this stage using it to its fullest extent, but simply to keep track of my own tags. So there is room for further advances there. I was pretty cynical about Technorati when I first used it but have since found the need to use it, and have signed up and claimed my blog on it. I also installed the Technorati link on my blog so that people can add Hecuba's story to their favourites.
• Wikis also offered a range of prospects for use in public libraries and for local and family history. I had used Wikipedia for ages and am not in the least worried about the "unauthorized" nature of the information in it as some people are. However, I had not thought about using a wiki for a reference desk manual or creating my own wikis for various topics I am researching in local and family history. There is a lot of food for personal thought and action here.
  
• The web-based applications, such as Google docs and Zoho, seem a fabulous concept and I will explore them further. I have put up a biggish spreadsheet about Collingwood hotels and invited someone else to add material. At this point in time I must say that I think the software is a bit clunky, though the idea is a great one. Someone told me the other day that there is even a translation tool in Google docs - this would assist in getting feedback from people who read a range of languages.
• One exciting finding for me related to e-audiobooks and the implications for LOTE users. I was very excited to find Chinese, French, Portuguese and a multilingual site at a very cursory glance. Alas, Greek does not seem available. I did a search on Kazantzakis and came up with his work in many translations but none in the original.
  
• Other tools such as Librarything, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, podcasts and Youtube were useful and fun but not things that were unfamiliar to me, except in that I had not previously joined them.

During the course, I have regularly read the blogs of my Boroondara colleagues and those of some of my colleagues from other libraries and have tried to comment where appropriate. I have been amazed by the excitement out there and by the possibilities that are being thought of in terms of Web 2.0 and public libraries. Some staff have fully embraced this program, while others have had difficulties getting started or difficulties keeping on with it. We set up a system of mentors in each Boroondara library using people who had finished early and this peer support has helped many Boroondara staff on their journeys. One library is rumored to be using chocolate bribes (aka encouragements) so we will see if that affects their completion rate ;>).

The real issue is where to now? I know for myself what my learnings are and I can identify tasks that I need to pursue. What I am really interested in at this point is the "where to now" of this Victorian Public Libraries Learning 2.0 program. I hope that the course blog will stay up and that our staff can continue to access the training after next Monday. I am sure that Boroondara will have some staff who have not quite finished and who would like to continue. I am very happy to take over registering their blogs and doing the staff tracking. I am sure that other staff, particularly those who have been mentors, would also be happy to help with the monitoring.

Now that the program has been set up, I would also like to encourage into the program other Boroondara staff who for whatever reason could not participate within the existing time-frames or parameters. Some of this course could easily be incorporated into our induction program, and it would also be useful if staff could just access particular modules. E.g. when we are working on developing podcasts, it will be useful for staff who have done Learning 2.0 to go back to that module as a refresher and for staff who have not done the course to do that module. There are many ways that we can use this program in Victorian public libraries in the future.

#22 Audiobooks (or the end is in sight!)

The idea of providing online audio-books to library users in such a way that the subscription stops after the nominal end of the loan period and there is no fuss, no overdue notices and no fines sounds wonderful. I explored the various collections identified in this task and downloaded a Shakespeare sonnet from one site and some Rudyard Kipling from another site. They both downloaded swiftly, but I don't know how long a whole book would have taken. That is something to be explored at leisure.

I became particularly interested in the benefits of this sort of technology for users of languages other than English when I spotted sites for e-audio-books in Chinese, French, Portuguese and a multilingual site. These will all be good to explore further and obviously one of the many tasks I will need to set myself when I review this programme. One of the real challenges for libraries providing collections for our aging populations who speak a language other than English is that usually the populations of those languages do not support the same large print and talking book publishing industry as the English language does. So this was a real discovery for me. The success of our Chinese computer classes for older people indicates to me that for the Chinese community at least this could be a real goer.

#21 Podcasts, Smodcasts

Topic #21 is Podcasts, Smodcasts. I took a look at the suggested podcast directories,

• Podcast.net
  
• Podcastalley.com
  
• Yahoo Podcasts

They all seemed pretty straightforward to use. I have been listening to podcasts for a while but hadn't subscribed to any properly. So I went to the ABC site and got some of them linked to my Bloglines account, The Health Report, At the Movies and Mornings with Margaret Throsby. It was as simple as that! Now I will get them fed to me and not have to go hunting for them if I remember! This was another Duh! experience for me.

In terms of libraries, I think there is huge potential for the use of podcasts and have been saying so for some time, so that Boroondara staff think I'm a broken record. Aside from providing links to podcasts from other sites and people, we can use them e.g. for our Chinese storytime so that this is available to the world 24/7, or for other programs such as booktalks. In terms of local history, we could use them to provide oral history over the web, for providing podcasts of talks, for giving informational sessions, like Helen Blowers has done in this course, but on a local history topic like where to get started on how to trace your house - these could be for staff and the public. So there is lots of food for thought here.

Menzies Bust Unveiling - Kew 15 July 2007

This is an example of a video I found on Youtube that relates to the history of Boroondara, namely a video of former Kew Mayor and one of Boroondara's 150 significant people talking at the afternoon tea after the unveiling of the Menzies bust at Kew Library earlier this year.

#20 You too can Youtube

Like other tools, I have played around watching things on Youtube often. This task made me focus on the potential use it might be to me as a librarian and particularly the use I might put it to for local history, particularly as it appears to be enjoying a massive explosion of use for people of all ages and backgrounds.

I enjoyed watching a number of the videos about being a librarian and particularly enjoyed two clips that my colleague at Melbourne Libraries put up her Infosleuth blog. Searches for Hawthorn and Collingwood mainly resulted in videos about football, but I hit gold with Boroondara and found a couple of videos relating to a function I attended at Kew Library earlier this year, namely the Menzies bust unveiling. Once I had found them, I wanted to store them as favourites and share one of them on my blog, so that meant I needed to sign up to yet another site. After a seemingly abortive attempt at signing up, I realized that I could log in using my Google account. Duh! Then it was plan sailing and I was easily able to create a link to my blog so that I could post the Mayor and Gerry Petrie to my blog as I will in the next post. Of course, I may now be signed up twice, so I had better clear that up too.

This tool obviously has potential use in terms of searching it for items that are of local interest, like this one and some other ones I found of gigs in local Collingwood hotels. But we can also potentially use it to put up our own videos.

#19 Web 2.0 awards

This was a fun topic. I was interested to explore all the different categories and was pleased to see that in the course of Learning 2.0 I had explored quite a few of them already. Certainly it gave me lots to go back later and explore. With the Organize category it helped me with my frustration in the previous task with Zoho. For this task, I decided to focus on social networking tools and joined up Facebook.

Like many of the other tools I have explored here, I knew and had talked about Facebook but no action! So I signed up and used it to explore the profiles of various politicians, as I was doing it yesterday between voting and watching the election results. This is a link to my local member, Linday Tanner's Facebook. It was interesting to explore the different categories of "friends" he has, to watch his Youtube, and to see his photographs. I was particularly interested to see that we shared some favourite films and TV, and indeed that Kevin Rudd and I did too. Kevin 07 is also fond of Vivaldi, and has a cat named Jasper, so the Hecuba in me liked that. John Howard seems not to have used this tool in his electioneering, though there are some made up profiles for him.

I am amazed at the number of links to others that are available using Lindsay's Facebook as an example. I could link to see who else was at his address, who else had a Master of Arts, who else had Life of Brian as a favourite film just to give a very few examples. Facebook has lots of potential for developing communities of interest. I made a few additions to my stump of a profile and found that there were a few people on Facebook who had breast cancer as an interest, and others who are interested in family history and/or local history.

For comparison purposes, I also took a look at MySpace and of course checked out the topical, namely Kevin Rudd and his Kevin 07 campaign. Kevin's MySpace site seemed to provide a bit more scope than the Facebook site in terms of customization. You could also search and view the sites without signing up, though you couldn't comment. This was a disadvantage with Facebook.

In terms of my aim to discover tools that are potentially of use for local history at Boroondara, I will have to think about this further. Obviously as individuals need to join personally, I am not sure what the extended use could be. Yes, one could use it to develop communities of interest, say in the history of Hawthorn. But I tried adding "History of Collingwood" to my Facebook profile and ended up with lots of people who were interested in the Collingwood Football Club as well as History. So I think the usefulness of this tool for local history needs a bit of reflection. But it is good that I have finally signed up and now know more hands on stuff about Facebook and MySpace. At the very least, I can now use this information to make an informed decision when next we talk about it in terms of local history at Boroondara.

#18 Google documents again

I have been exploring this tool a bit further. Previously I tried uploading a word document, and then publishing it on my blog. This worked well and seemed not to lose formatting. I have just played around with creating a presentation. The software is very clunky and I also discovered that you can't upload the presentation document to a blog. I also experimented with uploading a biggish excel file on Collingwood Hotels. This seemed to work fine. Again, the Google spreadsheet does not have an option for loading to blog.

Continuing to play around with this has been of use to me in terms of discovering a practical and immediate use for this. I am working with a team of people from the Collingwoood Historical Society to update material about Collingwood hotels. I have the master excel spreadsheet of information on my desktop. Now I have it also on Google documents and will be able to invite the others to add their comments there directly. I notice there is also a chat facility. So my next step will be to invite the other team members to make their additions to the spreadsheet on Google documents. I am not sure how that will display, ie will we know who has made what changes? I presume that won't be like track changes, but will appear in the list of versions which seems to track even the most minute change. The first trick will be to make sure that the people I invite to share don't dismiss my invitation for spam. This happened recently with a new blog I set up! They just don't know me as Polyxena.

#18 Web-based applications: they're not just for desktops

I've had very mixed results with this topic. I can see that the concept of taking emails to the document, rather than attaching the document to multiple emails is a great concept. At work we manage this for shared documents by putting them on a common drive and all doing our commenting and editing there. But it would be very useful for moving things between work and home and vice versa and for material that needs looking at by people who are all in sorts of different places.

Ever obedient to my instructions ;>), I first went to explore Zoho and was excited by the prospect of a site where I could write, use a spreadsheet, notebook, database, planners, create a wiki, do mail etc. But that's where my excitement stopped. I tried to sign up and crashed Firefox three times attempting this. At that point I gave up and moved on to #19 which explores the Web 2.0 awards. I was interested there to note that in the Organize category they gave Google the first prize and Zoho the second. Why not try the best as the second-best didn't want me?

Using Google was completely simple from a sign in point of view as I, of course, have a Google account and it just welcomed me and identified me. Google documents allows one to create or upload documents, spreadsheets and presentations, others can be invited to join in either to read or write, and publishing is possible to your blog or to a url. I was particularly interested in uploading, so I uploaded a word document from my desktop. That seemed to work very well and to keep all the formatting. Then I successfully uploaded the document to my blog, and also to a website. These both seemed to work very well. I have since deleted that post as a long document on Foy & Gibson was not likely to be of interest to most who would be reading this blog ;>). I'll do some shorter ones when I finish this post. Experimenting with the presentation part was more problematic. I tried uploading several Powerpoint presentations from my desktop and none of them seemed to work very well.

So, my reflections on this topic are that it is a great concept and could be very useful. However, it does not seem to be working perfectly for me at this point, and maybe Google documents need developing more. It might work better with documents created internally as almost inevitably something is going to happen to formatting etc if you are transferring them. Zoho, I can't comment on except to say @#$%.

#17 Playing around with PBwiki

I've just been playing in the PLCMC sandbox for a while. Before that I checked out www.pbwiki.com and www.wetpaint.com as sites which provide for wiki creators. I also had a reference from #16 to a site called www.wikispace.com but it appears not to exist. I played around and looked at various things, corrected some spelling, added a few restaurants and with the new editing tool adding a url to one of them was easy. With the new edit features the instruction for adding my blog url had changed and it was much more straightforward. Fortunately I had seen some posts by colleagues who had been there before me so it was easy. What was confusing was that the Victorian public libraries weren't in alphabetical order. Maybe I need to go back and put them in order ;>).

I can really see a benefit in setting up wikis for local history. I am currently working on a couple of projects researching hotels. I can see great benefit in setting up a trial wiki for the smaller of the projects and seeing how it goes. I am starting to see lots of tangible evidence of benefits of this course. Bloglines is really useful as is Del.icio.us, both of which I am now using regularly.

#16 So what's in a wiki

Wiki wiki, Hawaiian for quick. I was familiar with Wikipedia before I looked at this task but hadn't really thought about what wikis could be used for in libraries. In terms of community content and input wikis are ideal. Examples that I read about were developing subject guides, annotating the catalogue, community information type wikis, booklovers' wikis, local history wikis.

I was particularly interested in the library that converted their reference desk manual into a wiki - that was something that it would be good to emulate! I can see potential use for wikis in working on joint projects, developing joint documents and I think particularly in local and family history where the world can comment on a particular topic or artefact. It's another version of oral history in some ways and such an exciting way to get information from anywhere. Anything is possible. I note a few places to start such as www.pbwiki.com, www.wetpaint.com, and www.wikispace.com but I haven't tried them yet. And, of course, there is always that great social networking encyclopaedia!

#15 On Library 2.0 and Web 2.0

This whole question of Library 2.0 is a fascinating one and not one that can easily be covered in one post! I see the two main directions for public libraries as being libraries in a virtual environment and libraries building communities. Both of these converge and have as their key component social networking and user participation. I agree that we certainly need to get away from the "just in case" collection and the "come to us model" of libraries as they are traditionally perceived - except that there are other definitions of what these mean. The 'just in case" collection might be a combination of virtual and physical as may the "come to us" model. I can participate and form social networks at home with my computer, as much as in the library or in a face to face forum. I can come to the library virtually and I can search and find all sorts of "just in case" stuff out there from my computer at home.

But I am not sure that I agree with the issue about getting away from user education. I know this article was talking from an academic library point of view, so maybe it is different there. In public libraries, it is the Web 2.0 tools to say nothing of basic computer skills that people are thronging to the library to learn from us. I am thinking in particular of our hugely popular Computer Savvy Seniors program, a peer based one on one training program in computer skills for older adults, and our computer classes for older Chinese. Both of these are overwhelmingly successful, as has been our Click goes the library series which has been introducing the community to blogs, e-bay and other Web 2.0 tools.

We are atavars for the community and I don't see why we can't continue to be so. We want empowerment of users, we want user input into content creation, we want to participate, we want social networks, but we also want to help the marginalized and the dis-empowered and show them how to do all these things. We are there to help people meet their potential.

#14 Getting not so technical with Technorati

I like the idea of a word play on technology and literati! I first came across Technorati in an earlier task in Learning 2.0 and remember being surprised that this very blog was appearing in its search. Duh! I obviously did not realize the focus of Technorati then, nor the comprehensiveness of its coverage. After quite a bit of time playing around with Technorati (including watching a video of two cats talking!), I think that I still have a lot to learn about its potential. I found 11 blogs with Hecuba in the title and lots of photos.

I find the site a bit confusing and feel that I need to spend a bit more time on it. A couple of actions for me relating to Technorati are to go to my photos in Flickr, tag them and see if they appear in the Technorati photos search. I thought I had tagged them, but they don't appear so there must be a glitch somewhere. I also haven't been putting tags on the posts to this blog, so that is another action that I should take both prospectively and retrospectively. Then I can explore what "ping" is all about.

As we have been reflecting in an email exchange at Boroondara this week, this topic, like many of the others, is simply showing me how much my knowledge of Web 2.0 is simply the tip of the iceberg. There is so, so much out there! Some of it I want to know about and I want to learn how to use, whilst I know there are positively millions and even billions of blogs and blogposts on topics that I simply don't want to know about.

#13 Tagging, folksonomies & social bookmarking

This is an interesting topic, and not one dear to the heart of those interested in things like LCSH, DDC, and other library structures. Ranganathan comes to mind too, but my memories are dim. I registered with Del.icio.us and found that pretty frustrating as I took about 15 goes before I got all the elements to meet their desires. It may have been my incompetence in answering their questions, of course ;>). However, I didn't ever receive the confirmation email so I think there might have been glitches on both sides.

Now I can save links there and search them. I also explored other links that were there and pursued some through subjects and those who had bookmarked them. I tagged the Boroondara Learning 2.0 site and one of my tags was Boroondara. I was amazed to see that there were other people who had set the tag Boroondara for all sorts of reasons. I will explore this further and see already that this will be useful tool for exploration. What will I search tomorrow?

Finally I explored the option of creating a bookmark: you can see my bookmark on the blog!

#12 Roll your own with Rollyo

Rollyo provides a search engine that is customized by you. It is easy to register and copy favourite urls into a search engine. I registered and loaded some Breast Cancer websites from my bookmarks and then added the searchroll to my blog. This was very easy and I can see that it would useful to store favourite sites and add them to a blog or elsewhere.

I am currently also working on a blog for some breast cancer women who want to tour South Africa. I can imagine using this this tool to put together some useful sites on that blog.

#11 All about LibraryThing

This is a fun tool. It certainly is easy to catalogue books! I just added a few that came to mind or were lying around; it was interesting to see the range of records that came up. I chose ones with covers as I wanted to display them on my website. As you can see I also uploaded a list of my recent books to the side of my Blog. There were lots of things to do in this book community - apart from cataloguing books, one could blog, review, etc. My library is at http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Polyxena.

#10 Play with online image generators

There seems to be an absolute mass of these. I tried using http://www.festisite.com/tools/generators/cardgame/ to generate personalized playing cards and this was the image of me as the Queen of Clubs. I also went into Letter James http://www.letterjames.com/ and created graffiti. It seems to me that there are endless sites which will allow you to generate anything!

#9 Finding feeds

In this section I reflected a bit upon my previous post about RSS. Yes, I am a convert but I really need to work out how I want to do it. I note that Firefox facilitates the use of Bloglines and I really should be exploring the possibilities of that. I explored the various search tools. Feedster was down for work on the website. I found Topix very US based and newsy though did manage to pull up some articles from the Age so maybe I wasn't giving it much of a chance. Bloglines search and Googleblog were quite accessible. And Technorati actually found this blog, Hecuba's story! I think that my knowledge of RSS feeds is still on a learning curve. Maybe it always will be with the current rate of change in technology and access to information! What an exciting time this is to be a librarian!

#8 Using RSS to make life simple? Convert?

I had seen and heard of RSS feeds before I tried this module, but I wasn't sure that I needed them. I already subscribe to a mass of email news feeds and they don't clog up my inbox as described in one of the training videos. I have them organized so they go to separate folders so that I know when they come in and I read them when I want to.

However, I have set up a Bloglines account and I have subscribed to a number of blogs and Flickr sites as well as the BBC and some book and library sites. I had a hunt around some of my colleagues' blogs and have linked a couple of those in. I made the list public and have published the link to that on my blog. Though it shows the proper link in Explorer, it doesn't seem to show the whole link in Firefox, although it links properly. Now that I have worked through this module, I think that it will be a useful tool for keeping up with blogs and Flickr sites for example. Before I was always having to search for them. So I am a convert!

I have also played around with the template and put Hecuba's photo on the blog. I hadn't worked out how to do that before.

#7 Reflections on technology

My aim at the beginning of this program was to learn about Web 2.0 so that I could work out applications for local history. I was particularly interested in it for Boroondara's history but also for other research projects of my own. Doing this course has made me look at tools in a systematic way and finally to sign up to use them interactively rather than just as a passive user. I think that the potential for using local history to foster a sense of place in such virtual social networking environments is amazing and represents a real growth area for public libraries.

#6 More fun with Flickr: Anne Warholized

Anne Warholized
Originally uploaded by Hecuba's Story

This is one of Anne Warholized; as it was from a black and white original it seemed to work better because of the different contrasts.

#6 More Flickr Fun

Polyxena in Warhol
Originally uploaded by Hecuba's Story

When I started looking at all the tools for having fun with Flickr I was amazed. People must spend all their time thinking of new ways to play with photographs all the time. I played with different things but particularly liked the Warholer! This is Polyxena who has been Warholized. I think it works best with photographs that are black and white in the original, but Polyxena only has colour photographs in her files.

#5 Flickr Letter to you

letter to you
Originally uploaded by miss mardi

This is a small tapestry done by Miss Mardi, called Letter to you. she says she has trouble doing such small works but it really works for me. The layers of the original come out and the interface between the woman and the letter. Look at Miss Mardi's work further at Flickr

#5 Flickr

I don't seem to be very good at sticking to instructions: I have just discovered that I should have labelled my previous posts #5 Flickr and that I should have posted a link to MissMardi's Flickr account. http://www.flickr.com/photos/missmardinowak/ She has great shots here of her exhibition in Munich as well as her own corpus of works. As part of pursuing this further, I also discovered how to link my blogging to Flickr so that I can post from Flickr. That was another step in my learning!

Week Three: Photos & Images again

It is great that Learning 2.0 has finally made me set up a Flickr account. Why haven't I done it before? I know it is partly that I find it very tedious to set up and keep track of different accounts. Now that I have set up Flickr I can see lots of uses for it in terms of sharing photographs, be they personal ones, family history ones or ones related the local areas whose history I am particularly interested in.

Week Three: Photos & Images

Photos and Images are themes very dear to my heart and particularly important to my Learning 2.0 goal of working out the best ways to use Web 2.0 for local history. I have been viewing other people's images on Flickr for a long time and have many favourites there. I like MissMardi's site. Mardi is our stunning Gallery Curator at the City of Boroondara and also an artist in her own right. She creates multi-layered woven works that you can see images of on Flickr.

I also really liked the geographical function and had lots of fun clicking onto images relating to Athens, Greece. Obviously many other people share my Hellenophilia and even my love of Athens. There were not many Australian photos taged, so here is our chance to put parts of Boroondara on that map. It is good to be able to publish photos to the world but also to be able to limit them to friends or family. I limited my photograph of me and Hecuba to friends, but they really aren't private. I assume at any stage I can change the status, so I will try that too.

Getting started on Library 2.0

This is my second attempt at starting at Library 2.0. I created a blog in September and didn't note down the address or login details! That has provided me with an opportunity to mentor others in my workplace who have been doing the program, so hopefully they have learnt from my errors. This time I hope that I will stick to this and get through beyond step 3.