Finally!

I'm really glad this challenge is coming to an end, because I have been having a horrible time finding time for this! But I need to do one last post just so it's finished. :)

Let's see, the last lesson I did was social networking, so now on to tagging and social bookmarking. I opened a delicious account at home one night this week, and it's pretty helpful so far. I'm using it for research for one of my college classes, though since I only use one computer I'm not sure how much I need it personally. But I do think it's a nice resource, and it could be really helpful at work I'm sure, just haven't had the time to work on it!

Wikis of course I have used, with Wikipedia and all. The bad thing about that is not knowing if the information is reliable, but it's easy and if you just use it as a reference I think it's ok. I've also participated in the State Library web site wiki, and that was pretty helpful. A lot easier than everyone having a meeting!

I did learn a lot with this, though I'd have to say for work the blogs are probably my favorite. I found some really good ones to keep up with books and blind resources.

Catching Up

I guess I got behind in the assignments, so I'm going to try to catch up. It looks like the last post I blogged about was the first part of Flickr. The second part... eh. Didn't look too useful, so I didn't do anything with those.

Podcasts and videos are cool, though. I've used podcasts before with my iPod, so I just did a little looking since I already know how to do that stuff. I use iTunes myself, since it's easy with an iPod. Podcasts are a great way to keep up with things, whether for work or not. As for videos, those are always fun. Here's one of my favorites.



Google Docs is interesting. I've never used it before, and I may try it when I start with my college classes again in a couple weeks. Before I used to have to email my documents to another computer to print, since I don't own a printer myself, and it was a pain to reformat it since I have a Mac and the computer I emailed it to was Windows. Maybe I'll give this a shot and see how it goes. I can definitely see this being useful at work.

Social networking - I'm really not sure how this would work with a library. I know libraries have MySpaces sometimes and all, but I'm kind of suspicious. Sometimes I think libraries are trying too hard to be cool. Whatever. I guess it can be helpful to keep people up to date on news. I have a Facebook (here) so... I know how to do that. :)

I sound really grumpy in this post. Ha!

Flickr

IMG_0351
Originally uploaded by wutheringsongs

Ok, posting from Flickr now. I've never used Flickr either, though I have used Photobucket - I've been meaning to try Flickr because it seems to be more popular. Anyway, this is a picture I took from my recent trip to Spokane, Washington. This was actually taken over the border into Montana (I think that's right, Liesl?), and I thought it looked great. I have it as my wallpaper here at work! I haven't had time to play around with Flickr too much, but I imagine it's not that difficult to use.

Going on to blogs, one of the most interesting ones I've found is The Reader's Advisor Online Blog. This has been very helpful. One of the recent posts was Becoming an Expert Reader's Advisor, which basically said to read a lot and a variety. I don't know about that, because even though I recommend Danielle Steel for our patrons, you aren't going to catch me reading one of those! Some of the other posts that I find really cool are the ones with readers classified by ages and what they are reading.

One more interesting thing I found in a blog: Zoomii. It's an online bookstore that has the books on shelves, and you can browse them like a physical bookstore. I really liked this site, because that's one thing that's great about real bookstores, just being able to look at the books.

RSS

RSS feeds are pretty neat, I think. It really is a timesaver to not have to check a million different pages, but rather have all your updates in one place. It's a great tool to be able to keep up with either blogs for work or personal stuff. There are some really good library blogs out there, and I've have a Bloglines account with tons of those. For personal stuff, I can keep updated with all the blogs I read about the Washington Capitals, my favorite hockey team. Woohoo! (Haha, bet you guys didn't know I was a hockey fan. :P)

I'm using Google Reader which I like a lot more than Bloglines. I like the layout, plus the fact that a post is not marked as read until you actually scroll over it is nice. With Bloglines, when you click on the feed all of the posts in that feed are marked as read. Maybe there's a way to change that, but I didn't check. ^_^

One good way to find blogs in Google Reader is to click on the top recommendations page. That will have a list of blogs similar to the ones you have already subscribed to. Another good way is to browse the directory and search blogs by keyword.

New Name

I decided to change the name of my blog, since it was excruciatingly boring and all you guys had such creative titles! So I picked this one from one of my favorite poems. Bonus points to anyone who knows the poem!

First Post

I had a terrible time thinking of a name for this blog. I still think the name is pretty lame, but it'll have to do. Anyway, I've had personal blogs before, so I'm not totally inexperienced here. It wasn't hard to set up since I've done it before of course, but like I said thinking of the name was the hard part. I'm not too great at that!

With the 7 1/2 Habits, the hardest one for me is probably Habit 4: Have confidence in yourself as a competent, effective learner. Sometimes I have a hard time getting the confidence up to do something, though it's something I've gotten better at lately. The easiest one is Habit 2: Accept responsibility for your own learning. This might have something to do with the fact that I was homeschooled! I know that in order to learn something new, it's up to me to do it and no one else.