Week 24: Congratulations and Summary

Congratulations!! You’ve reached the 23rd thing. Give yourself a pat on the back for completing the program. Please give us your feedback on your experience by reflecting on your learning journey by posting a few thoughts on your blog. Here are some questions to prompt you:
What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?
Were there any unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?
What could be done differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?
If another discovery program like this were offered in the future, would you choose to participate?





Here is your blue ribbon award for completion.
Hastings District Libraries Staff -Upon receiving you last email and blog update a certificate
of completion will be emailled to you.


How would you describe your learning experience in ONE WORD or in ONE SENTENCE, so we could use your words to promote Central TAFE learning activities?We hope this is not the end of our learning journey together as a staff and a system, but the start of something amazing …such as:
maintain your blog as your educational journal
add your blog URL to your e-mail signature line
re-purpose it as your library blog
share it with your colleagues and ManagerNow, are you ready for Learning 2.1?
to: Posts (Atom)

Week 18 #23 Ebooks & Audiobooks

Explore eBooks and Audio eBooks
For this thing, you will explore where you can get free ebooks and get an idea of the types of titles you can find here. Take a look around and locate a few titles of interest. Many school and public libraries have audiobook and ebook collections, so check what they have in their collections. Audiobooks are popular for ELL and Special Education students, as well as communters who enjoy a good story during a long ride. There are a number of commercial audiobook and ebook sources, and many of these companies have exhibits at library conferences.Discovery Exercises:1. Explore World EBook Fair for FREE downloads from the Gutenberg Project. Also just explore the site - there's much to check out.2. Create a blog post about your findings.Discovery Resources:
LibriVox, audiobook versions of copyright-free books from the Gutenberg Project. Read by volunteers. Started in August 2005 by Hugh McGuire. Check it out!
Check out this "Best Places to Get Free Books" site, too.

Week 17 # 22 Podcastings

Podcasts (No iPod Needed)
The word podcast is used to refer to a non-musical audio or video broadcast that is distributed over the Internet. What differentiates a podcast from regular streaming audio or video is that the delivery method for podcasts is often done automatically through RSS. In 2005, "podcast" was named the "word of the year" by New Oxford American Dictionary and with the growth of podcasting over the last year and a half; it’s easy to see why. Podcasts take many forms, from short 1-10 minutes commentaries (like the ones used in this Learning 2.0 program) to much longer in person interviews or panel group discussions. There’s a podcast out there for just about every interest area and the best part about this technology is that you don’t have to have an iPod or a MP3 player to access them. Since podcasts use the MP3 file format, a popular compressed format for audio files, you really just need a PC (or portal device) with headphones or a speaker. iTunes, the free downloadable application created by Apple is the directory finding service most associated with podcasts, but if you don’t have iTunes installed there are still plenty of options.For this discovery exercise participants are asked to take a look at some popular podcast directory tools. Do some exploring on your own and locate a podcast that is of interest to you. Once found, you can easily pull the RSS feed into your blog reader (i.e., Bloglines or Google Reader) account as well, so that when new casts become available you’ll be automatically notified of their existence.

Discovery Exercises:
Take a look at one or two of the podcast directories listed and see if you can find a podcast that interests you. See if you can find some interesting library related podcasts here like book review podcasts or library news.
Add the RSS feed for a podcast to your blog reader account.
Create a blog post about your discovery process. Did you find anything useful here? Discovery

Resources:·
To find out more about podcasts start with Yahoo: What is a podcast tutorial· There are many, many podcast directories and finding tools out there. Here are just three of the more popular ones that don’t, like iTunes, require a software download:
o Podcast.net
o Podcastalley.com
o Yahoo Podcasts

Ideas:
Idea #1: Interview candidates for local office, or town officials about top issues in your community.
Idea #2: Create a daily Library news podcast, including an issue of the day such as copyright/music downloading/file sharing, Internet safety tips, or newest web 2.0 applications.
Do you want to learn how to be a podcaster ?
(Here are optional Resources for those who want to learn to create podcasts)
Yahoo: Publish a podcastOdeo’s Studio – online recording studio.
Beginners guide to Podcasts & Creating Podcasts How to podcast tutorial

Week 16 # 21 Sharing Videos Youtube, Google Vids and more

Discover YouTube and a few sites that allow users to upload
and share videos.
Within the past year online video hosting sites have exploded
allowing users to easily upload and share videos on the web.
Among all the web 2.0 players in this area, YouTube is currently
top dog serving up over 1 million video views a day and allowing
users not only to upload their own video content easily, but also
embed clips into their own sites easily.Do some searching around
YouTube yourself and see what the site has to offer. You'll find
everything from 1970s TV commercials and 60s music videos to
library dominos and a video made by library school students for
National Library Week. There's also the cult classic
Conan the Librarian. CLA 2006 conference Library Cheer was fun,
too.

See also:
Introducing the Book
Web 2.0
Library 2.0 Manifesto
March of the Librarians
Jack O'Connell Goes Back to School
Of course, like any free site you’ll also find a lot stuff not worth
watching too. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t explore and
see for yourself what the site has too offer. :)

Discovery Exercise:
Explore YouTube & find a video worth adding as an entry in your blog.
Create a blog post about your experience. What did you like or
dislike about the site and why did you choose the video that you did?
Can you see any features or componets of the site that might be
interesting if they were applied to library websites?
OPTIONAL: Try placing the video inside your blog using the
copy and paste code for the for "Embeddable Player.”
Note: you'll need to use Blogger's Edit HTML tab when pasting this code.

Discovery Resources:
Other popular video hosting sites:
Yahoo Videos
Google videos
TeacherTube
Jumpcut by Yahoo!Teachers
Others - top video site list

NOTE: Videos, like music downloads, are bandwidth hogs. It is recommended that you complete this exercise during light Internet usage times.

Week 15 #20 Online Productivity Tools

Take a look at online productivity tools (word processing, spreadsheets, and more)
One major benefit to web-based applications is that they eliminate the need to worry about different software versions or file types as you email documents or move from PC to PC. Another bonus is that they easily accommodate collaboration by allowing multiple users to edit the same file (with versioning) and provide users the ability to easily save and convert documents as multiple file types (including HTML and pdf). And, you can even use many of these tools, such as Zoho Writer and Google Docs (Formerly known as Writely) to author and publish posts to your blog. It’s this type of integration with other Web 2.0 tools that also makes web-based apps so appealing. For this discovery exercise, you are asked to take a look at a web-based word processing tool called Zoho Writer, create a simple document and then document your discoveries in your blog. If you are up to the challenge, you might even export your document as an HTML file or publish it through Zoho to your blog. With Zoho and web-based applications, the possibilities are endless. This document is authored and published online using Zoho Writer.Discovery Exercise:1. Create a free account for yourself in Zoho Writer2. Explore the site and create a test document or two.3. Try out Zoho Writer’s features and create a blog post about your discoveries.Optional: If you’re up for the challenge, try using Zoho’s publish options to post to your blog.* Note: You can also explore Google Docs (formerly known as Writely), Google's online word processing, as an option for this exercise. FYI: On Oct 11th, 2006, Google re-launched Writely (which it acquired in Spring 2006) as Google Docs.BTW: Here’s a Zoho-created document (viewable as a webpage) about some of the beneficial features of Zoho.Discovery Resources:A short list of web-based productivity applications – Note: This list was authored in ZohoWriter and exported as HTML.Connections:
Idea #1: Challenge your colleagues to count all the books in their house (not including cook books.) Have them sort them by type (fiction/nonfiction, mystery, sports, subject, size, color -- their choice) and list these on a spreadsheet. [Note: you may want to limit the books to 200.]
Don't forget to write a comment on this blog about your thoughts experience in using these tools.

Week 14 # 19 World Cat & NZ Libraries Catalogue

WORLDCAT
WorldCat is the world's most comprehensive bibliographic database. Updated at a rate of nearly one new record every 10 seconds, WorldCat contains more than 100,017,500 bibliographic records and 1,256,923,495 holdings contributed by more than 9,000 libraries around the world.See the latest WorldCat record here

New Zealand Libraries Catalogue
When the Catalogue went live some of the larger library management systems had already been successfully ‘deep-linked’ from the Catalogue to individual library catalogues. The library holding s in the tepuna search when clicking on library symbol now link to the home catalogue to enable you to straight away see if it is available. Check It Out!
http://nzlc.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=first

Week 13 #18 Ning & Web 2.0

Explore any site from the Web 2.0 awards list OR Ning and write a blog post about your findings. Do you thing Ning is useful?