#blog12daysxmas Post 9 Yay for Helene Blowers!

Fox Hotel , Collingwood

Yes, I am behind again but I have two posts ready to do today.

On the ninth day of Christmas I had a wonderful social media inspired time at the Fox Hotel in Collingwood.  We were having a Melbourne Flickrup for members of the #2013PAD and #fp13 Flickr groups. My involvement in both of these groups started in late 2010 when I joined the #2011PAD along with Caroline Ramsden, the only other Australian in a group that we got involved in because of UK library Twitter friends.

Those of us who gathered were @emerald_j, me, Nicky from Civica, @birdsey7, @pru (a prospective member!), and Fiona and Terence who are fiant and their two children.  Unfortunately @csmramsden, @kat_frame, @bonitoclub and Pat M2007 all couldn't make it because of other commitments or last minute ill health. How amazing that we could have a face to face gathering with more than a couple of people!  That was unbelievable in 2010.

It was great to meet the people behind the photos and work out how we were all connected. We discovered that Fiona and Terence, the non library people in the gathering, had become involved via @csmramsden's daughter.  There were those of us there who reported that we were taught by @csmramsden's father in library school.  So now there is a hash tag on Twitter #ramsdengenerations! Unfortunately we were so interested in our face to face interactions that we forgot to take photos of the people.  But photos of the Fox Hotel were taken and posted on Flickr.

Fox Hotel, Collingwood

This probably sounds like a very personal little gathering of no interest to anyone else except a few Flickr geeks.  But I think it was a very significant gathering.  I joined Flickr as part of Thing 2 (I think - the number is the query not the process) in Helene Blowers' 23 Things when we did a Victoria wide roll out of it to all public libraries. And I am still there using it as an integral part of my life. A couple of others mentioned above did that Victorian 23 Things program too.  Many of us also started experimenting with a new thing called Twitter at that time and through it we made UK contacts and so the story goes on.  And we are still there enjoying our world wide networks.

All of the Melbourne people who are mentioned above have come together virtually and physically via various combinations of Twitter, Flickr and personal connections that can be traced back to several of us doing and embracing 23 Things as part of our lives.

So I say:  Yay for Helene Blowers!

#blog12daysxmas Post 8 #anz23mthings Thing 7 Communicate: Google+Hangout and Skype

This topic's theme is Communicate! And we are asked to look at Skype and Google+ Hangout. I've had a Skype account for a while and I have used it mainly for communicating with overseas friends or with family and friends in Australia when I am out of Australia. However, I really do find email, Twitter and Facebook often a very good way for virtually instant communication. So I do tend to use those mostly. On Facebook you can easily do group discussions and I have found these very useful for many group discussions, be they with friends, family or colleagues.

I have also had a Google+ account since beta days but I must say I still don't use it very much.  In the early days I remember thinking that the Hangout was one of the best things about Google+, and experimenting with a couple of people. I can see from the use that it has been put to for discussions about the #anz23mthings that it is really beneficial.

I can see great opportunities in libraries for various things with all of these sites. Really anywhere you would like to have some face to face discussion. That could be with staff in various locations or with the community either in groups or singly. In terms of local history, I can see advantages with both Skype and Google+ for recording oral history and for group discussions about local history topics. Often people enquiring about local things will come from interstate or overseas and these tools could be used to great advantage.

Another tool that is worth considering is Facetime now that so many people of all ages have iPads and use them regularly. The photo above shows it being used in Virginia Beach, Virginia on two iPads which allowed the two people in Virgina Beach as well as the person in Amsterdam on one iPad and the person on the other iPad in New York City all to communicate!

Since my diagnosis with breast cancer I have been part of an international online breast cancer support group. The group has a face to face gathering once a year in North America whence the majority of people come. For a number of years, as part of this gathering, I have organized an international chat. It is really for any members who are in either in North America or the rest of the world and who would like to participate whilst not being physically present, so it is strictly speaking an online chat session on the program. We have experimented with a number of ways of doing this - successfully and unsuccessfully. We have an online chatroom on our website and that has been a constant for a number of years.

But in 2012 for the first time we trialled Facetime. You can see Jax in Amsterdam on my iPad participating in this photo opportunity in San Diego, California in 2012. In 2013 in Virginia Beach, Virginia, we used Skype, the BClist chatroom and also Facetime as seen in the photo at the head of this post. We had a couple of laptops set up for Skype and for the chatroom, as well as a few iPads for Facetime. People used what they felt comfortable with, or swapped around. We had talked about a Google+ Hangout but it didn't come off. The reasons were complicated (and involved illness and death) and don't need to be gone into here.

But when the BCList has its 2014 Gathering in Akron, Ohio this year, I certainly hope that we can get a Google+ Hangout organized.

#blog12daysxmas Post 3 #librarysecretsanta

#librarysecretsanta 2013 H365/361 #happy365

One of the very pleasant outcomes of being part of an Australian library community on Twitter is that I get to take part in the annual #librarysecretsanta project.  I have taken part in this for the last few years and have had great fun researching my allocated twitter colleague and trying to find an appropriate present that is postable and costs $10 max.

I received my  #librarysecretsanta present on 23 December.  So thanks to my gifter for pulling out plugs and sending it Express post all the way from W.A. I did tweet its arrival on the day according to rules but I have been a bit slack taking and posting a photo.  But today is the day and it is done! It's here and it's on Flickr and I'll be tweeting it after I finish this blogpost.

We have a #librarysecretsanta Flickr group too, so you can go over there to have a look at photos of presents people have received over the last few years if you wish. I see that not many people have posted their gift photos to the group this year - or last year for that matter.  That's a pity as it is nice to see what ideas people have come up with.  It also allows us to use another bit of social media for connectivity.  I love that, but maybe everyone else in the library community doesn't? I would be interested in hearing about the community's views on this.

And what was my gift?  It was a BOOK. Yes, I am shouting that to the hills. A P-BOOK!  In fact one of only two books I got for Christmas :(   One of my greatest joys at Christmas from when I was very little was the receiving of new books as gifts.   So I really associate Christmas with books.   And obviously my gifter had checked out my interest in Greek and Roman classics and ancient history. Thanks #librarysecretsanta gifter!  It is a very appropriate gift.

Games to play - or not #blogjune Day 7

I am not really a dedicated games player, online or elsewhere. I play the occasional spider solitaire on my phone or iTouch and have been known to play a few Zynga games on Facebook. I can get a bit obsessed with the latter but my interest in them ebbs and flows and at the moment they don't particularly interest me. Some of them I never liked at all (e.g. Farmville) and others that I enjoyed in the past (Yoville, Cityville and Castleville) have passed their use-by-date for me (and most others I suspect given the recent Zynga lay-offs).

So a couple of days ago when I was sitting near the local Post Office answering an email on my phone I was a bit surprised to be handed a flyer for a new app game, pokem. This was particularly so as my head was totally in the space of the email I was responding to - slowly I may say as I was trying to work out what to say. I was told using the game app would help my hand and eye coordination, help keep my mind alert, and speed up my ability to text!!  I think I was the one who sarcastically mentioned early onset dementia.  I have never been told I needed to speed up my texting!

Oh dear! Like many members of my family, I started going grey when I was in my 20s and I love silver and white hair.  But I do think people make all sorts of assumptions based on it. This episode reminded me of an experience at a library unconference a few years ago.  I was in a small group discussing local history/GPS/photos etc (basically the topic of #anz23mthing 5 but before its time obviously).  In response to something I raised, a young woman (who probably didn't know that I had put up this topic for discussion) suggested that if I joined Twitter I would get all my answers.  I thought one of my young staff whom I had bludgeoned (in the nicest possible way) into joining Twitter and was in the group was going to explode.  He still talks about the incident.

I had another experience last year on a tram in Melbourne. It was late one Friday or Saturday evening and I was tapping away on my phone, surrounded by a group of young men (slightly the worse for wear from alcohol) who started talking about Twitter.  I think it was pretty new to them.  The one sitting next to me turned and said smartly "Maybe this lady is tweeting".   I responded that of course I was on Twitter but I was currently doing some stuff on Flickr.  Well, that was a conversation stopper.

This wasn't the post I meant to write but it is how it emerged. The people who created the pokem app are young neighbours of mine and are trying to promote it.  I did download the app and try it. They say it is suitable for all ages and I think it probably is.  I think from trying it that my hand/eye coordination probably does need improving and that this app could help.  Try it and see if you want. But maybe also spend some time thinking about some of the issues I have raised here. I am thinking about them too.

#anz23mthings Week 1 A Twitter Dilemma

I've been a Twitter user, both on my desktop and on mobiles, for years and I have used both Twitter and a range of third party clients, some now defunct and some still operating. As some of you know, my Twitter handle is @polyxena and you can read about the significance of that in this blogpost.

Twitter is an integral part of my life - or is it?  Now I am in the midst of a real dilemma about my use of it.  This post is about my history of using Twitter as well as my current dilemma.

I thought I joined Twitter as part of the original 23 things that I did with Victorian public libraries in 2007.  But as an historian I wanted to check that out, and I discovered that I didn't!  When I looked back through this blog, I found out that I had decided when I was doing Thing #19  that Twitter wasn't for me and that I wasn't going to join up!   I looked at Facebook and MySpace instead.  However, after the 23 Things were completed I continued on with the Web 2.1 which Helene Blowers' library was running.  And guess what?  Along came Thing #35 Mini or microblogging and I relooked at Twitter and joined up then on 5 January 2008.  You can read what my views on it then were here.  Yes, I was pretty cynical about its value for me or for my workplace.

However, as I started to use it my views changed radically. Once I had built up a body of followers and people I followed, I realized the amazing benefit of Twitter to me in a number of areas of interest. I currently follow 1,594 others and have 748 followers.  On a whole these cover a wide range of my interests though it is true to say that librarians are probably over-represented and some other areas of my interest have not yet been re-educated.

I had been a voracious user of RSS feeds and got most of my general news, public opinion and professional reading that way. But as time moved on I realized I didn't need (or wasn't using) RSS feeds for this and was only occasionally reading them.  I was doing most of my professional reading through a Twitter filter and I typically started each day with an early morning coffee in bed and with Twitter where I got the latest news (normally before I heard it on the radio) and got my professional reading fix.

We had had a Twitter account (in fact more than one but that is another story) at the City of Boroondara Library Service from about the time I and a number of other staff members joined and we used it mainly to advertise events or to link to our blogposts or Facebook but also to post or RT items of interest.  However, we had quite a number of staff on Twitter and one thing I found it very useful for was to put out pleas for emergency staff on the weekend when someone rang in sick!  Posting on Twitter sure beat ringing around and rousing people from their weekend sleep. We also found it a great tool for communicating about system outages.  Often on weekends, if systems and the VOIP connected phones were down, that was how staff communicated with me and I could set recovery into play.



Aside from the professional reading, I also built up a great personal learning network on Twitter with librarians from all over the world, but predominantly in Australia as they are in my time zone.  This meant that there was always somewhere to go to float an idea, get some data, cry for help or engage in all sorts of discussions (yes even about cat photos and Cats).  Twitter provided me with amazing professional support from across all the sector and provided a supportive environment to test ideas. Many of these people I have never met, though through local Tweetups (see one heading this post with @flexnib and @restructuregirl at Tulks), various serendipities, and overseas travel I have met some of these people in real life.  VALA conferences in Melbourne were always a great meeting place. But the reality is that it doesn't matter if I have met these people.  I have many, many friends that I have had as online friends for decades, and these Twitter friends are similar.

An astute reader of this post may have realized that there has been a bit of past tense usage. And therein lies my dilemma. Late last year I retired from my position at the City of Boroondara Library Service and not unsurprisingly I have been pursuing other interests.  I realize that my Twitter life has now changed.  With my early morning coffee, I am much more likely to go to Flickr first to check out on what has been going on in the rest of the world overnight, or to my email. I also find that I am using Facebook more than I did when I was working. Once Twitter (or Echofon) would have been the first thing I went to.

Does this mean that Twitter is no longer an integral part of my life? I didn't think Twitter was just about libraries for me, or my personal learning about libraries, but now I wonder.   I don't know and I would be interested in getting people's comments on this.  I will continue to monitor this and see how I go.  Maybe I need to embark on re-educating some other areas of my interest. Surely Twitter must be important to everyone?

#blog12daysxmas Day 11 Who is Hecuba and what is she to me?

This is about Web 2.0 although it may not appear so at first. There has been a bit of discussion in the last day or so about how one decides on Twitter handles and such like. @shewgirl did a blogpost on it and @bonitoclub forwarded a post he had done a while ago about the historical origins of his name. I commented on this and made an aside about the banality of my Twitter name. I thought it was so obvious! But apparently not! I thought there were lots of clues in this blog and even in my current Twitter avatar. Maybe my #secretsanta this year knew?

Like @shewgirl my name has its origins back in 2007 when we were all doing the 23things project in Victoria. To this day I don't understand why anonymity was required but it was and like @shewgirl I spent ages tossing around trying to find a Google identity so that I could set up the required blog. It was just too hard! Then suddenly like a flash it hit me! I was going to be Polyxena and my blog was going to be Hecuba's Story.

To this day, I am not really sure why I came up with those two names. I do know that they were called after my cats, Polyxena and her daughter Hecuba. But why I came up with them in that order or at all is a mystery. I think one of the reasons was some wise advice given to me a few years earlier by an online friend. I was mourning the death of my much adored cat, Messalina, who had been there for me throughout my cancer treatment - and lots of other things. My friend from the BreastCancerList told me that one thing he had done to celebrate his cats who had died was to call new email addresses etc after them so that he remembered and celebrated them every time he used the account.

Once I had my Google identity as Polyxena, I started using it elsewhere and when I started up my Twitter account later on, well of course I was going to try for that moniker and it was available. So that is where Polyxena comes from. My white Xena's name and her ginger girl, Hecuba, form most of my online identity. And where did the feline Polyxena's name come from? Well, as some of you know that was a sheer mistake :)

The Story of Polyxena on Storybird

Brizzly interface for Twitter

Thanks to @ladymidnight I have been spending time this afternoon experimenting with Brizzly, yet another interface for Twitter. Brizzly has some cute features: you can view full urls in tweets, see videos and photographs immediately without clicking and can divide your followers into groups. The extended url, and immediacy of photos and videos works well.

I got quite excited about dividing my followers into groups as you can then click the group and get only their feeds. As I have been struggling recently with the number of Twitterers that I am following I thought this would be great. And it is a great feature - but alas one is limited to five groups only! I wish I had known that before I started setting them up and I would have made the groups broader. So it's back to the drawing boards for me now with that feature.

Another interesting feature is that you can temporarily make people you are following "mute". I can see that this could be quite useful when people are live-twittering something that doesn't really grab me. The DM function seems quite useful too as you get threads and can see what you have sent. You can also favourite and retweet and there is an easy interface to allow you to work with more than one Twitter account. No, I don't have multiple Twitter personalities. However, I do post tweets to both my personal account and to the City of Boroondara Library Service one.

There's an introduction to Brizzly on Youtube:



And here's a short grab on the key features:



There is a lot that I really like about Grizzly and I think that Thinglabs have done a great job with this interface. It is interesting to play with all these interfaces and speculate what impact they will have on Twitter future development.

Learning Languages Using Social Media

People who follow my blog know that I am interested in learning languages and have recently been going back to try and re-learn some of the Greek and earlier the French that I have forgotten. I have been using Web 2.0 skills for that and primarily have focused on Livemocha, though I do feel some inadequacies in the site which I have described elsewhere.

Laura Gomez over at Mashable recently did a guide to learning languages using social media. She looks at three categories of sites: Community, Video/interactive, Blogs and Twitter. Most of the examples she gives for Blogs are really general stuff about language quizzes, language learning and not really about intensively learning an individual language. The video/interactive category includes a range of things from BBC languages to plain Youtube, with a number of them being paid courses.

Twitter was an interesting newcomer to the field with a range of sites to follow which give words of the day etc. Examples Laura gives are of Linguick, I kinda like languages, Learn Japanese, Learn Spanish, and French language. I have signed up to follow these (excluding the Japanese one) and I'll report back on how I find them.

I am particularly interested in those that fall into the category of Community as I think that that is where social media has its strengths. How good is it to be able to get in touch with native speakers who are happy to help you learn a language in an unthreatening, sharing environment! I already use Livemocha, of course but was keen to explore the other five: Babbel, Busuu, SharedTalk, iTalki, and xLingo.

Babbel is a site where you can learn French, English, German, Italian and Spanish. There are free vocabulary and phrases packages but the actual online courses are charged for. Though this is essentially a business, there is a community element to it with learning partners, chat, messaging etc.

Busuu whose image heads the post also focuses on four main European languages, English, Spanish, French and German and was established as a project of UNESCO's Year of Languages. It is free and provides online interactive courses as well as a learning community. There's vocabulary, dialogues, interactive exams as well as community elements. Check out an introduction to Busuu at Youtube. It looks quite good, so I might give it a burl for my slack French some time, but it's not much help for my Greek given the limited number of languages it offers.

Shared Talk by Rosetta Stone (cool image that if nothing else!) is a place for practising what you have learnt, according to Gomez. It is also an adjunct to paid Rosetta Stone products. There's voice chat, text chat, language partners and all in about 30 languages, ranging from Afrikaans to Yiddish with a lot of minority languages in between on the list. Presumably this list is dependent on whether anyone is signed up on the site for a particular language. I checked out Greek and discovered a potential pool of 99 people who were interested in Greek. They were listed by name, native language, practising language, country, and age. I am not sure what relevance age has, but maybe some people only want to form communities with people their own age? I also checked Amharic and found 15 possibilities. This might be a site worth checking out - it is certainly worth knowing about.

iTalki is more of a learning exchange: it helps you find a teacher, find a language exchange partner, ask questions and discuss in groups, and find resources. They seem to cover most languages, though there is more focus on the more populous European languages. Resources seem to be submitted by members as well as by links to other resources. The teacher marketplace puts one in touch with paid tutors. Again I checked out Greek and found resources and nine teachers. Amharic wasn't on offer, so I tried Latin and came up with resources and eight teachers.

The final site, xLingo, is also a language exchange where you can find language partners to chat either one on one or in forums, make resources and share. I checked out what was available in Amharic and came up with three possible language partners: you can choose by age, gender and country. Then I checked out the Greek and found a page and a half of possibilities. I tried Latin for fun and came up with 12 people. So here's another site where I could practise my lost language skills.

Use of social media for language learning is an interesting topic and probably an area that is going to grow. I was interested in a comment I received on my blog about a new site hello-hello.com. It's not up yet but it says it is about learning a new language anytime, anywhere and with language partners and teaching others yourself. There was an offer for pre-launch signups to become VIP members though I don't quite see the benefits of that if it is all free as stated.

It has been interesting to do this survey but I think that I'll stick with LiveMocha for the present. I want to do free, actual online courses specifically in Greek and LiveMocha has that for me. I am happy to participate in the Livemocha community by helping others to learn English, though I don't do much of that. If I want to pursue my French further (and I have done some French on Livemocha too) I can see that there are other options out there for me, as indeed there are if I want to practise Greek rather than doing an actual course.

#51 Libraries and the social web a hot topic

Libraries and the social web is certainly a hot topic. If for example you do a browse through Facebook pages (ie not personal profiles but organizational pages) you will get over 500 hits with the word library in the name! There are also groups on Facebook which are library-based.

It was interesting to run through Jessica Hupp's 25 useful social networking tools for librarians and to realize that, whilst I don't use all of them, there were very few that I was not aware of. I took the opportunity to look at a few that I wasn't aware of: LinkedIn (a site for linking professionals), TeacherTube (a YouTube for teachers), Footnote (a history site which is very US based), Community Walk (a mapping tool for history talks etc), and DaftDoggy. Of these, Community Walk was one that I felt could be useful for family and local history and I made a mental note to go back and try it.

If I think about the City of Boroondara Library Service in relation to the tools mentioned and how we are using them. I do think that we are starting to get somewhere. We made a decision to set up profiles/pages on Facebook, Bebo (not mentioned here but very big in the UK), and MySpace in an effort to cover most bases in terms of age groups. The Facebook has been up and running for a while and the challenge there seems to be to work out ways of linking the page into other applications, Web 2.0 or otherwise, as it seems very different from how you do it on a personal profile. We have just set up Bebo, and MySpace is still a work in progress. We have been focussing in these sites on general information and news about the library service and particularly in promoting events. The next stage needs to be putting the links on the website, and adding applications that will encourage interaction such as reviewing.

Number three is Ning and at Boroondara we have three nings: a general staff ning, a training ning for learning 2.1 and an embryonic local history one focussing on Hawthorn's history. I belong to a number of other nings as do a number of Boroondara staff. With nings, I am coming to the conclusion that they are great for staff but I am not sure that they provide the tool I want for community interaction, hence the stagnation of the Hawthorn history ning.

Four is blogging. The City of Boroondara Library Service has had a staff blog for some time, though a limited number of people use it and we have found that more seem to be attracted to the nings. We have also finally got a library blog developed for the public and this is fed into our Facebook page and hopefully the link will be on the website soon. The Town Gallery and Art Nerds blogs are linked now, so hopefully ours will be soon. At present we only have the one library blog that covers the whole spectrum of library services, though we will probably develop a local history specific one. Outside work I have been working on a blog for the Collingwood Historical Society and this one is integrated in the website. I have also set up another blog, From the news desk, which enables me to post clippings relating to books and libraries to the blog and thence to the Facebook page.

Meebo is five and we have done some experimentation about using this for enquiry in wikis; it could be installed on the blog(s), Facebook, Bebo, on wikis and hopefully in Spydus on the "no hits" page. Before that can be achieved however work will need to be done with the organization about the ability to load such tools on the Council network.

Twittering is number seven: a number of staff Twitter, follow each other's tweets, have links from blogs to Twitter, links from Facebook etc. We have been following some libraries and their Twittering and will shortly set up a library Twitter account which in the first instance will be linked to the library blogs via Twitterfeed. This is another way of getting out into people's spaces.

We have an embryonic Flickr account for the City of Boroondara Library Service (tool 8) and need to do some serious work loading images on to it. Whilst we are using Wetpaint as the platform and not PBwiki as favoured by tool 13, we do have two experimental wikis, one general one and another specifically relating to the Hotels of Boroondara.

Many of the other tools mentioned in the list (or related ones) are used by City of Boroondara Library Service staff, either in their work or play. It is certainly an exciting time to be working in public libraries with all these possibilities for interacting with our users.

#35 Mini or micro blogging

Back in #19, I remember Jonathan deciding to explore Twitter and there it is still on his blog (s). It is easy to see how these short messages started life as SMS messages, but perhaps less obvious how useful they can be outside SMS. They remind me of the quick takes in Facebook where people tell you what they are doing at this minute and indeed that is one use for the tweets. And so I suppose that if these tweets are coming through on blogs and other network applications, people will know where you are and where you are heading, and whether you can be at Brunetti's for a coffee in ten. I am obviously working this through in my head as I go.

So this is possible, but do I want to be reporting on my actions every minute? I looked at Twitter when Jonathan was experimenting with it in #19 and my reaction then was that I didn't. However, despite yesterday deciding that I wasn't going to bother, today I have enrolled and have linked Twitter up to this blog, Hecuba's Story, and also to my Facebook profile. Doing both of these connections was simple as and just a really good example of how interconnected all these applications are and how interconnected people expect them to be.

I can see the usefulness of it, but don't seem to have many friends who use it. Surprise, surprise - I found two colleagues, Jonathan and Fiona. It certainly could be useful if friends were online and wanted to catch up. Maybe having it up on my Facebook profile will make people more aware of Twitter and encourage them to join in. Like many Web 2.0 things it is good to know that they are possible and to know how to sign up and operate them. Again, in terms of my specific personal learning goal, I am not clear what I could use this for in relation to local and family history. In the library generally, however, Twitter could used to tell people where you are and what you are doing, e.g. at a meeting. VOIP should enable us to do this when installed but in the meanwhile maybe this is an option.