Dancing Librarians

The Infomaniacs in Second Life are a fun-loving, stimulating group of people and I am honoured to be one of their number. Here we are dancing in our new clubhouse. I'm the first avatar to appear in the clip.

Video tools

Central TAFE's "23 Things" team has had a lot of fun playing around with various online video tools, mostly visible on YouTube. In particular there have been some hilarious mashups using JibJab. It's fortunate that our colleagues (and bosses) have a sense of humour.

To find videos why not try the Google Video Search Engine? This article from Research Buzz tells us more about it:

** Fun With Google Video
<http://www.researchbuzz.org/wp/2007/09/17/fun-with-google-video/>

As you probably know, the Google Video Search Engine (http://video.google.com/) now encompasses other video sites, like YouTube. But if you don't want to search anything but Google Video, you can go to the advanced search page and specify that you want video only from Google.com, or you can use site:google.com from the home page.

That's how I discovered that site:google.com works as a standalone search. That's also how I discovered that Google Video has something over 4.8 million videos (just over 4.9 million if you turn off filtering). But if you start sorting the results by anything but relevance, the result count drops to about 333. So I couldn't get a handle on what the highest-rated video was or how many videos have been rated lately.

If you use inurl:video.google.com at Google, you'll see that the main search engine gives a result count of about 1.5 million pages.

SL as a showcase

The Virtual Librarianship course I'm doing is very stimulating. It's great to thrash out ideas with other librarians, mostly from the US, with the same problems that we have here. I'm currently trying to persuade our IT people of the need to lower the firewall so we can utilise all the wonderful possibilities.

SL also has great potential as a showcase for our colleges. Visit the new Swedish Embassy in SL to see how they do this.

This wiki has great ideas for using SL as a teaching and learning tool http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Second_Life_Education_Wiki

And here is the URL for a wiki relating to an education island maintained by an Ohio University in SL. http://www.bscsecondlife.info/. I met one of the lecturers while I was online observing a reference librarian in SL for my course this morning.

Or this YouTube video from The New Media Consortium (NMC), a community of hundreds of leading universities, colleges, museums, and research centers. http://www.bscsecondlife.info/