Week 7 #17

Technology... it surrounds us all.

It's inescapable. It's flawed and perfect, dangerous and safe, fundamental and innovative all at the same time. It will never stop changing. Technology is the wheel, the pencil, the boat, the machine, the factory, the computer, the spaceship, it is what always has, and always will push us forward, it is what separates us from all other species.

Technology is the product and physical manifestation of mankind's most prized possessions,

human consciousness, human thought and the human brain.

Week 7 #16

Exploring Wikis was really interesting. I've had a little bit of experience with Wikis because I often use Wikipedia. I think Wikis could be used by our library system in many ways. If enough patrons knew about it, there could be a library wiki to announce updates, story times, events, etc. It could also be used to discuss library satisfaction or recommended books. It could talk about which library could best fit the needs of different patrons. (for example if a patron needs to learn computer skills they could look on the wiki and find out which library has a computer tech who teaches classes.) Wikis are useful sources of information and can be used by patrons all over the county.

Week 6 #15

Library 2.0 is something I think the library system is definitely heading towards. Eventually, books may become obsolete altogether and in order to save time, paper, money, and work books may stop being printed and become solely electronic and downloadable. Already some college textbooks have an electronic option that is advertised as "inexpensive and convenient" in comparison to their print counterparts. So in this case, I think that moving toward electronic material is inevitable.

I think the shift towards electronic libraries is a good option for a lot of people. I personally enjoy the old-fashioned book. I think having both e-books and print books is the best option for our diverse society at this time. Although in the future there will come a time where print books will simply fail to be.

Week 6 #14

When searching for "learning 2.0" under the different types of search categories, I noticed that each type of search gives you different kinds of results. In my opinion, the tags search was most specific. I think the popular blogs, searches, and videos are great for keeping up to date on what's going on in the world. I can tell Technorati is a very time consuming website because it can lead you to a million different places. I think it would be best enjoyed by someone who has a lot of time, and a good stress reliever for someone busy. Although I'm sure Technorati would cause severe Dorito syndrome, or my name for when you do something and 5 hours go by and you really feel like you didn't get much done. Kind of like when you're hungry and you eat a bag of Doritos without realizing it, and when you're done you're really not full.

Technorati is good, but time consuming.

Week 6 #13

Del.icio.us is a very interesting tool. I think it can be really useful for general information and for social networking, but doesn't fulfill it's full potential for academic uses. This idea of free tagging would be really useful in a professional/academic database. Being a college student, I understand how difficult it can be to find sources for research papers, if college libraries or even our own public library would allow users to "tag" different articles in a database, it could make the process of finding material for a paper much easier.

The capability of having portable bookmarks is a great idea, especially for librarians or anyone that moves from computer to computer and needs easy access to websites that are useful to them. This is really useful for a student who is working on a paper and goes to many different places throughout the day. Once I explore this tool a bit more, and depending on how convenient it is, I may use this for my own academic purposes. Such as when I'm writing a paper and I want to work on it at the college library, and I'm looking for articles or blogs that can contribute to my research. It will be much easier to just add the bookmark to delicious and go back to it later than the usual copy-paste into a word document or email that I will send to myself. Delicious takes one tedious task out of saving useful websites, and will make the process of retrieving those websites once you get home a lot easier.

Week 5 #12

Hmmm library elf wasn't my favorite "thing" but I suppose it is a useful tool. Sometimes I think we all have difficulty remembering our items.

Week 5 #11

LibraryThing was another great website for us library workers. Being a shelver there's always all these books I would like to read, but when it comes to picking a book, I simply can't remember which ones I was interested in. Now I can make a list and check it later!

Here's the link to my LibraryThing: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/macandcheesemaniac

Week 5 #10

Making an avatar was really fun! I've used the Yahoo avatars before, but the Meez avatars were much more detailed and personalized. The avatar represents both my love of Holloween and Harry Potter. Plus pumpkins and fall just go hand in hand.

Week 4 #8 & #9

Using the rss feeds was really neat. I didn't know about these before using Ihcpl. I set up my newsfeed to tell me about a few of my coworker's blogs and my livejournal account. It was easiest for me to use the method of typing in the username of the person you are searching for within an accout. They've really done a lot to make it easy to find blogs.

Week 3 #7

sepianegrhino
Originally uploaded by macandcheesemaniac

I picked this picture off of Flickr then edited it with Pixer. I made the picture negative then changed it to a sepia color. He was a tired looking rhino, maybe he'll enjoy viewing Greece below.

Week 3 #6

I really enjoyed the colorpicker feature on Flickr. Seeing all the beautiful pictures and colors is really neat!

Week 3 #5

1454611373_ad06cf7712
Originally uploaded by macandcheesemaniac

This is a photo I liked. I want to visit Greece someday.