library tech head

(Man. Woman. Dog. Birth. Death. Infinity. They were all so nice, I couldn’t pick just one.)

What were your favorite technologies, tools or activities?

• That’s a tough one — what wasn’t my favourite? Online tools, Facebook, blogging — I liked it all!

Has Learning 2.0 @ Mac helped you get comfortable with emerging technologies? How?

• made me take the time to do some things I just hadn’t taken the time for, like install & use FireFox & create an account on Facebook
• showed me a better way to do some things I was already doing, like del.icio.us vs. Furl
• introduced me to some things I’d never even heard of, but now know I’ll use a lot, like the AutoCopy browser add-on, online tools like sign generators and photo editors, and some of the other online tools that I haven’t yet checked out, but will go back to the Learning 2.0 blog list & try

Were there any take-aways or unexpected outcomes from this programme that surprised you?

• how quickly I got sucked into Facebook; all it took was finding a few friends & relatives & getting a few people inviting me into groups & writing on my wall, and I was a goner. As my cousin’s son, a student at StFX said on my wall when I friended him, “Game Over! And so your addiction begins! Mwahahahah!” And since I’m already sort of addicted to 2nd Life, I’m going to have to make an extra effort get to the gym so all my muscles don’t completely atrophy sitting at my computer all day & half the night…

• start it in May when people aren’t as busy & have 1 activity per month until the following May, with a monthly deadline for each one “
• we didn’t really take that much advantage of our groups or group leaders, so maybe set something up in LearnLink or WebCT? Not sure though; people could have commented in the blog, but not that many did & I was one who didn’t; maybe a more “secure” environment like one of the course management software tools, or some other kind of bulletin-board-like thing — like the Facebook group even! — would encourage group participation and discussion more
• other than that, it’s been great, and I really wouldn’t change much

(And this is what we really want to know!) If the Emerging Technologies Group offered another discovery programme like this in the future, would you chose to participate?

• without hestitation; just tell me when, and I’m there!

OK, I’ve finally been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the world of FireFox. The first thing I did was to import all my settings, bookmarks, cookies, etc. from IE, using the instructions on Introduction to Mozilla Firefox, part 1 (installation) – OSA . So easy!

Next, I tried to make my bookmarks look like I want them to look: folders grouped at the top, individual pages grouped at the bottom. Not so easy; the Bookmarks edit window popped up under my open window; didn’t notice it was there; clicked a few times & it looked like nothing was happening. Finally found it, but couldn’t get the folders at the top and the individual pages at the bottom automatically. Did it by hand. 

Now where’s my Links toolbar? Oh, it’s called “Bookmarks Toolbar”. Edit… drag all “Links” into ”Bookmarks Toolbar”. Presto! There they are. I have to put them back in the order I want, though, and no nice icons. Oh, OK, when I visit each page for the 1st time, the icon is harvested and appears in the toolbar when available. Nice.

I already had some bookmarklets in IE, one for Furl & one for a dictionary lookup. They didn’t work when imported into FireFox, so I deleted them, reinstalled the dictionary & added del.icio.us. So far so good. Now for something I haven’t used before. Chose AutoCopy & tried it. That is really nice! Any time I can eliminate unneccessary keystrokes, or especially, mouseclicks, I’m happy! Also installed URLFixer & tried it out. Nice! It corrected google.rom to www.google.ca

Also installed GreaseMonkey but I guess I’ll have to learn how to use it later! (Oh, Amanda just told me that on its own it doesn’t do much; you have to install the things that work with it, of which there are many, to actually use it; later for that!).

Neat that you only have to restart FireFox and not the whole computer to install these; and when you restart, it seems to remember what windows you had open where. Spooky.

I’ve been using the Google Toolbar in IE for ages, and couldn’t live without it. I love the “search this site only”, backwards links, and PageRank especially.

I’ve been Devi Daviau on Second Life since March 21/07 and have really loved it. The interaction on Orientation Island with people from around the world was great, and having to collect gold stars for each tutorial completed made it seem like a game. Oddly enough, walking in to the library from the parking lot this morning, I saw a flowering shrub and found myself thinking “that looks a lot like the flowering shrubs outside the McMaster Library in Second Life”!

In a way I’m sorry now that the goal-oriented, game aspect of it is over, because it reminded me of Myst, one of my favourite CD-ROM games. I prefer adventure to warfare, and don’t yet know of an immersive online multi-player game (or MMORPG) that focuses more on adventure and social interaction and less on fighting, but still has the complexity and cinematic qualities of World of Warcraft. A lot of the places I go in 2nd Life right now are currently pretty empty, though beautiful, like the hot springs pool on B-Dazzled Island, or the waterfall at U. of Hawaii on EduIsland.

Gaming and virtual worlds are of interest to libraries (other than because that’s where a lot of our user are) because they offer such rich potential as teaching tools. The most fun I ever had learning something online was when I got my first PC at home, in the 90’s. It came with a full-featured interactive tutorial on Windows, with sections on mousing, navigation, file management, system maintenance, etc. I found it so absorbing I used to get up early on Saturday mornings just to get another section of the tutorial under my belt before breakfast!

I’m already on 1 social network, Macinsiders, as part of the Library Lounge (or Library Corner — they don’t seem to have settled on the name yet) pilot project, but not much has happened there yet. I did manage to upload my photo there, though.

Just took way too long to edit my Facebook picture. Snipshot was a great tool for that.

Update: I’ve now only been on Facebook for 1 day, and already have half a dozen friends and 3 groups. I can see how addictive it could get.

OK, RedKid is cool, and so is Snipshot. I used RedKid and Signmaker to make the signs. I tried to resize them with Snipshot so they’d fit on this page better, resizing in Snipshot & saving, then uploading the altered file seemed to have no effect whatever, so I ended up resizing the picture right in the WordPress visual editor, once I found it.

It also took me a while to figure out how to get the graphics where I wanted them on the blog post. What I ended up doing was uploading them and sending them to the editor, then cutting them and pasting them in where I wanted them. I was also able to resize to some extent, but not to get the whole image to show; if it started out too wide it was always truncated to the right, no matter how much resizing I did.

But – finally! …a web-based tool that has an Undo feature! (Snipshot)

I got really excited when I thought of the possibilities of this kind of thing for info lit. For example:

• Q: How is the library catalogue like the 403?  A: It’s local and it’s free.
• Q: How are article databases like the 407? A: They cost money (but the library pays)
• Q: How is the Internet like the 401? A: It’s free, like the 403, but covers a lot more territory….

Well, whatever. “ ;-)”

…and I still don’t understand why some of my blog images fit perfectly in my editing window, but get cut off in the actual blog.

Oh, well, as they say…

I read A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, Clay Shirky (2003) because it had been saved by the most people in del.icio.us — 551.  I found it quite interesting. Here are a few notes of the major points, mostly in Shirky’s own words:

• describes one of the core challenges for designing large-scale social software, which he defines as software that supports group interaction
• Part One: How is a group its own worst enemy? …based on ideas from a book by W.R. Bion, “Experiences in Groups” (l961): groups tend to sabotage their own more sophisticated goals because they often get distracted by pursuing these 3 basic urges:
  • “sex talk”: the group conceives of its purpose as the hosting of flirtatious or salacious talk or emotions passing between pairs of members
  • “the identification and vilification of external enemies”: even if someone isn’t really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion; groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies
  • “religious veneration”: the nomination and worship of a religious icon or a set of religious tenets, be that J.R.R. Tolkein or social software ;-) 
• therefore, group structure is necessary to keep a group focused on its goals
• and it’s not just “We need to have some rules.” It’s also “We need to have some rules for making some rules.” And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.
• Part Two: Why now?

Activity #1

How do delicious and Google results compare? Actually, for my topic, delicious results were more interesting; seeing the tags helped me choose more interesting links to follow; also there were just fewer links, so less noise. 

Were there any that you didn’t expect? Did you find any tags that were confusing or especially useful? Not really; they all made sense.

I was really more interested in how the search engine worked, so I used the help function to find out the following info:

• AND is the default operator, e.g. bacon lettuce tomato   …should find things with all 3 terms
• searchable fields: descriptions, notes, and tags
• field-specific searching is supported, e.g. to search tags, type:  tag:bacon
• phrase searching is supported, e.g. “bacon lettuce and tomato” 
• OR and nesting are supported, e.g.  (bacon OR tofu) lettuce tomato 
• NOT is supported and most of the time the - (minus) prefix may also be used, e.g. lettuce tomato -bacon -ham
• XOR is supported, e.g. (bacon XOR ham) cheese …gets you bacon and cheese, or ham and cheese, but not bacon, ham and cheese

Activity #2 

I was using Furl up till now, but since I created my del.icio.us account I’ve been merrily bookmarking and tagging, and I think I prefer delicious. Other things I found helpful:

• the ability to bundle similar tags
• if you need to rename a tag, all instances of that tag are replaced with the new name

Activity #3

It didn’t take long to find a fabulous picture: Claudia1967’s Tranquility. I also like her Flickr Interestingness set. And with a single click I can bookmark it in del.icio.us! Convergence! Spooky!

Activity #4

I especially like how you can add notes to your post by highlighting text on the web page before saving it. Handy!

Well, I thought I knew everything I needed to know about wikis, since I’ve been using PBWiki since October ‘06 to track and document the progress of the Endeca Implementation Team, but apparently I was wrong! I’m used to PBWiki, and like it very much, so saw no need to bother to learn another kind of wiki software.

I had used WetPaint to make a few contributions to the Digital Reference Shelf and at the time, found it a bit awkward and non-user friendly. Now that I’ve gone back to it though, I found it surprisingly easy to use after all. I created a separate page for Music, searched the Endeca version of our catalogue for the word ‘music’, then limited to Online > e-Reference and Databases, and cut and pasted titles and urls into the interface.

I like the EasyEdit Toolbar that makes it so easy to format and add links without scrolling up and down, and the WYSIWYG interface. I also like that you can use control keys for editing, like CTRL-C to copy, CTRL-V to paste, and CTRL-X to cut. There sometimes seems to be a bit of lag, especially when cutting and pasting. I also miss drag-and-drop. You get so used to certain text editor features that you just expect them to be everywhere. And I wish there was some way to add an Undo feature to blogs and wikis!