# 17 Avatar

My Avatar is me, Serious Sue by name...


I do not live in Second Life and probably will not in the future. I rather like finding my information and communicating in real life.

After seeing some of the virtual world, I can see why librarians use it as a learning tool. Many young people enjoy Second Life and I can understand why librarians use it to disperse information, making learning fun. It also gets the person more actively involved with learning, giving them a sense of creation and accomplishment.

Lesson # 16 Online Applications

OK, I think that I have done this right. Here is the Google doc that I created... HERE

#18 Maps and Geotagging

I loved this lesson! The fact that my husband and I are planning a trip to Spain made this lesson particularly relevant.

I have used Google Maps before and a lot of what you get in Google Earth is in Google Maps...but Google Earth has so much more. Currently I am not very interested in Mars, undersea geography or the constellations of outer space, but there is a lot of information on Google Earth for those who are. I like how there are connections to information sources on their tutorials. I can see how this would be handy for students and telescope hobbiests.

I did use this lessoon to find out more about the towns and cities we are going to visit. I looked at the city centers... finding the points of interest(photos included), transportation hubs, and lodging locations. Some of the lodging even showed on Google Earth marked by little red beds, restaurants as little knife and fork symbols. All of this is helping us make our decisions about where to stay and what to see. In Madrid I zoomed down to street view and traveled the streets where a group of hostels were located and found the area full of graffiti and questionable shops. Needless to say, I talked my husband out of booking accommodations in any of those hostels.

Not all of the city and towns have street level views (Edmonds does). I saw a progran on television recently that showed how the street views are done. There is an Oregon company that is hired by Google to travel through all the streets of major cities. They do this in teams of 2 or 3, using volkswagen bugs with multi-lensed cameras (64 lenses in an orb on a pole) mounted on their hoods. The task must be difficult in cities with many narrow, winding, one-way streets.

In conclusion, Google Earth (as well as other map programs) is fun and is a useful tool for librarians to share with their patrons when seeking travel or geographic information.

# 15 Search Engines

I had some fun doing this one. A few weeks ago my husband (Irv) and I were down at Golden Gardens at sunset when I saw a small animal in a brushy area by a small creek. At first I thought it was a very large rat, but I saw no tail. It looked about two or three pounds. Perfect thing to investigate using the previously created searchrolls of rollyo, mamma and dogpile. I also looked at mega search engines... google, yahoo and ask.com (ask.com lists unrelated comercial sites first).

I narrowed the critter down to a nutria or a mountain beaver and entered the same search phrases for each searchroll. Rollyo was my favorite though I did not find that much of a difference between it and dogpile. I didn't like mamma much because it first listed comercial sights that didnt' relate very closely to my inquieries and had a lot of ads next to the articles. They took up the right half of the page.

I found out that it was probably an elusive mountain beaver which makes me feel better than if it had been an invasive nutria. Nutrias have long rat like tails and can weigh up to 10-20 pounds.
Although it was dark and it was hard to see much detail, I don't think it had a tail.

Both searchrolls (rollyo and dogpile) had newspaper articles on the animals and a blog site (same one) that was real interesting. People blogged about their sightings and some bloggers even took pictures which they posted. These pictures helped me with the identification of my sighting.

Maybe if I used these engines more often, I would be more proficiant with them.

#14 Podcasting

Well, I looked through the "list" of library podcasts and selected two...infopeople and Pierce County Library. I used my bloglines when subscribing to these and found that I could get the written articles but could not play the audio or video ones... So I broke down and subscribed to itunes which included the downloading of quicktime. Now I can view and listen to the whole podcast feeds on Bloglines.

But now that I have itunes, I felt that I had to make use of it too. I subscribed to LearnOutLoud.com's Audio Book of the Month using itunes. It only gives the first chapter or two of each book, but this may introduce me to books that I might otherwise ignore and miss out on.

Info people had a lot of good articles on how library systems can improve their services and I listened to one of their podcasts about how a national study has concluded that readership is up among the American population. I also read an article about usage of library space, which I believe of interest to Sno-isle librarians because of the ever expanding sources of material and our limited public space available. I subscribed to the Pierce County Library podcast just to keep abreast of what other nearby library systems are doing.

The podcasting lesson was fun but I don't know if I would want to use it routinely to keep up with many subjects. I guess I am getting over stimulated with the web 2.0 and am ready to just settle down and get lost in a book off the shelf!

Lesson # 12 Overdrive downloads

Wow, it took me hours to figure this one out! It was fun shopping around the virtual library and picking items. I finally chose an O'Henry audio book on "classic American short stories and and a language audio "In Flight Spanish" to prepare for my upcoming trip.

The trouble started after I had installed the Over Drive Media Console and tried to check out and download the items in my cart. I tried to open them, I tried to save them as files then open them, I tried just about everything I could think of to get them into my Over Drive Library. Nothing seemed to work. I looked through the Over Drive Media Console help menu. I even asked my son. No help.

Finally, I clicked the Sno-isle media help button and it came to my rescue. Since I have Firefox the downloads were being blocked and Firefox had to be instructed what to do with them. Thanks to the good instructions, I went to the tool box and changed the options. The instructions were step by step and clear. I should have clicked that help button earlier!

Lesson # 11 Delicious-Social Bookmarking

Well, this is a tool that I like, being the unorganized person that I am. I like the ability to categorize things (tag) into as many groups as you wish, making it much easier to find the item your looking for. It is now set on my home computer.

I enjoy cooking so I looked up some recipes and tagged them. This would be a good way to create my own "recipe box" on line.

I have not figured out how to share my tags with others yet, but I will be asking around to see if anyone wants to do some sharing and will figure it out.

Librarians must love tagging. It would sure quicken their searches of often asked questions and often sought after subject matter if tagging was used.

Lesson # 13 Online Image Generators

I down loaded this image twice because I forgot to save my blog.
I need to remember all of the steps involved in down loading and posting! This lesson was fun but I don't know if I would use it. I suppose that I would if I needed to create cards or posters.

Lesson # 10 Wiki

Actually, I was surprised to see that there were so many wiki programs out there. I can see that it would be a wonderful tool for any group that needs to organize itself.

I like the fact that anyone can add or edit the information on a wiki website or it can be restricted to members only (user name and password needed) or be private if wanted. The choice is up to the person or group that creates the wiki. With the fact that the wiki is on the web, it is a real nice feature that pages can be repaired if they are spammed or "adulterated" by going back to the original or previous page.

PBWiki seems to be a very user friendly program with some nice plug ins or widgets like chat, templates, calendar, video and slide show options.

Wikipedia is a fun site to use because there is so much information on just about everything. I understand that it is self monitored so not all information can be trusted and it is continually being edited, questioned and changed.

Wiki's can be used by libraries in many ways. They can be used by staff to share information about their work place rules, procedures, meetings, work schedules and workshops. This is different than the Sno-isle intranet website, which doesn't have as much flexibility. The average employee doesn't add or change anything on the website. Libraries can set up wikis for book groups, historical societies, genealogy groups, study groups and youth or cultural clubs. What a good substitute for the old one- way directional news letter.