Things You Should Know

Expect the Unexpected

Here's a motivational poster I created with BigHugeLabs.

Online Collaboration

I've used Google Docs a little. Mostly for specific problems - uploading Word 2007 documents and downloading them again as Word 2003-compatible documents, maintaining documents that I can work on from multiple computers without worrying about carrying around a flash drive. But in the Adult Services Committee we did have occasion to do some collaborative editing using Google Docs, and it worked pretty well. I think it's a great way to go, and I'd like to see HCPL use it more often.

Delicious - easier to pronounce than I thought!

Del.icio.us is the first tool CHPLearning has presented that I really knew nothing about. I think I've been intimidated by trying to pronounce it - I can spend long minutes trying to form a practical pronounciation in my mouth that isn't the obvious, without-periods way. Now I find out that the obvious is right. And Del.icio.us has even officially changed it's name to Delicious! (Now it's without a period. Is it now male?)

So now I'm ready to try it.

And I find that it looks really useful! I've never liked Favorites - I work at lots of computers, I don't like the time it takes to create an organizational structure, I never think to look in the Favorites folder. Using the Save to Delicious button is simple, and tagging is a much better way to identify what's key about a site. I'm looking forward to bookmarking with Delicious. The social aspect is cool - not that I care who sees my bookmarks, or expect to share them with others, but it is fun to chase down tags and see what sites they identify and how people put tags together. I haven't had occasion to create tags myself until this blog, but I like using them, and as I get used to using them I think they're going to bring about a big change in how I organize and search.

Face(book)ing Up to Social Networking

I have a Facebook account, with lots of friends [looks] [tired of counting] - close to 100! I find Facebook frustrating - they're always making changes and moving things around, it's very aggressive with trying to make me do things I don't want to do, and all the gifts and goofy games drive me nuts - but it sure is a good way to stay aware of what my friends are doing. Actually many of my friends are relatives, especially younger relatives, and they keep my Wall and NewsFeed (wait, where did this come from?) very busy. It's fun to see what people are up to, occasionally follow a picture link into someone's photo albums, add a snarky comment here or there. I do make contacts with old friends every now and then. Just the other night, at the suggestion of the class agent from my prep school, I went looking for prep school classmates, and linked to several. I have friends from many corners - church, politics, relatives, neighbors, old classmates, and it's amusing to see the mix of cultures, though I wonder what visitors conclude about me from what they see. I don't post many updates of my own. My daughter spends huge amounts of time cultivating her Facebook, and I like to see what she's up to, but I can't imagine spending too much time with it myself. But I don't really have to - everyone else contributes my content!

I'm also on LinkedIn. My wife has used this application fairly productively in her job search over the past year, but it's nothing I need right now and I don't put any time into it. I did link to a few old college classmates in the run up to last spring's reunion, and that was convenient; and just last week I connected with the editor of Skirt!, with whom I'd like to talk about a program next year. But I actually wound up getting her email from another source - I couldn't get it from LinkedIn without upgrading my service plan or playing more wasteful back-and-forth games. No points for LinkedIn here!

I liked the "12 Ways to Use Facebook Professionally" article - I plan to spend more time studying this. But I may need to create a second, cleaner Facebook!

Bad Crazy? or good learning?

The next module focuses on online gaming, something I've avoided over the years. My personality type has a dangerously addictive bent - I've spent enough sleepless nights with Minesweeper and Sudoku to want to avoid getting tangled in immensely more involving multiplayer online games. Fortunately the learning curve for these games is sufficiently intimidating to keep me away.

I did follow some of the links to professional librarian takes on the value of gaming. Though I wasn't familiar with the phrase, the value of symbolic learning is obvious when I think about it.

I also followed a link provided by a commenter to Bad Crazy in Internet Space , describing shenanigans associated with the MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) EVE - activities that move back and forth between the online realm and the real world. The commenter cited this as an example of "downside", but it sure sounds pretty fascinating - and funny - to me!

I went birding this morning and saw a Wiki!

This week's lesson is about wikis. Wikis are a great tool for collaborative sharing - an opportunity for many hands to contribute to building a useful knowledge structure. The wikis that HCPL has set up have been useful, though I think we need to show more confidence in their value and raise expectations for staff to make more visits and contributions. Wikis are clearly more useful with specific audiences willing to contribute, so I'd expect to see them more often on intra-nets rather than out there for the general public; the inter-net examples cited in the training are interesting, but several of them are apparently closed and not very fresh.

Unshelved, the popular library-oriented online comic strip, has just started a wiki for the (mostly) librarian community called Unshelved Answers . This past week I spent some time on this site, submitted a question seeking information about a scifi novel from the 1980's that I'm trying to identify, and got a prompt response pointing to a book that HCPL has and I'm eager to reread. Yeah wikis!