Change of Address

I am trying out WordPress blog software and my new posts may be viewed on http://maeverest.wordpress.com. I've changed the title to On Libraries and Other Stuff In the hope that more readers will know what it is supposed to be about but am also intent on on commenting on a lot of "Other Stuff".

Relay for Life in Second Life

People often wonder whether Second life has any use other than enjoyment and entertainment. There are, of course, may educational institutions who maintain a presence and conduct classes. The Second Life Library is a flourishing community dedicated to helping people find information on a wide variety of subjects and many businesses had established themselves there.

Second Life residents also support several charities, one of which is Relay for Life. Events are planned throughout the world culminating in the 24 hour relay scheduled for this weekend. Apart from the relay 33 sims have events planned to educate and entertain you and encourage you to part with your lindens

In 2004 Second Life’s Relay For Life Gala raised US$2,000.00

In 2005 Second Life's Relay For Life raised US$5,000.00

In 2006 Second Life's Relay For Life raised US$41,000

In 2007 Second Life's Relay For Life raised US$118,500

That gives Relay a grand total of having raised US$166,500.00 in Second Life for the American Cancer Society.

In 2008 as of July 13 Relay For Life of Second Life has raised US$160,128.92

So this year already the total raised is almost as much as the combined total of the previous four years. I have several friends who are or were stricken with this dreaded disease and I'll be there to help raise money for cancer research in the hope that one day the world will be cancer-free. If you attend and see my avatar Galia Beck please stop me and say "Hi!".

Free !

Free - how I love that word. Whether I'm finding things on the web or scrounging through shops in Second Life I'm always on the lookout for special bargains and freebies.

Sarah Houghton-Jan, Librarian in Black, has posted about free software cheat sheets available at http://www.customguide.com/quick_references.htm . These are useful guides that may be printed out and made available in the library for clients who need assistance with a variety of software applications for Microsoft or Mac.

Now this may not be the type of freebie that everyone is falling over themselves to obtain, but I think most educational libraries will find the cheat sheets very useful and time-saving.

Technology Trends

Librarian in Black, Sarah Houghton-Jan, summarises her contribution to ALA 2008 in Sarah's Top Technology Trends - virtual presentation for ALA 2008. I would like to draw attention to point #3 in the hope that the comments may filter through to the bureaucracy running our organisation.
I really like the way so much of the technology trends that are buzzed in Library circles were used in this presentation.

Web Taming Ringmaster

Michael Stevens' blog, Tame the Web, has two articles this week that I find particularly thought provoking.

1. Keys to a Successful Self Check-Out Project (linked from Michael’s blog)
Our new library is under construction (it's exciting to see progress with the new building across the road) and it would be good to consider implementing a changeover to a fully automated checkout policy. Please don’t argue until you have read the report and its answers to possible objections.

2. Brian Kelly: What if We’re Right? & Libpunk’d
Brian poses questions aimed at the detractors of Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 and proposes that there are more risks involved by not accepting such things as social networking and open source technology than by adopting them whole-heartedly.

Web 2.0 Tutorials

As anyone who reads this blog regularly will have guessed I am a great fan of using Web 2.0, particularly its potential for making libraries more "with it". This list of 100 Free Library 2.0 Webinars and Tutorials from the College@Home blog will help anyone who wants to find out more or give instructors ideas for spreading the word amongst unbelievers. I'm sure that library staff have already been converted but part of my mission is to get others to understand. Any library that hasn't yet run a variation of the 23 Learning 2.0 Things programme should consider implementing it as soon as they are able.

Wordle Cloud

This is fun. I Used Wordle to create a web cloud of my tags in del.icio.us (see how interested I am in web 2.0 and Second Life). Similar clouds can be created for any body of text you choose.

Thanks to Phil Bradley's Weblog for giving me this idea.

Firefox Download

Don't forget to download the new Firefox browser on June 17 to help Mozilla set a new world record (most software downloads in 24 hours) for the Guinness Book of Records. For Perth users the time period starts at 1.00am Wednesday 18th.

Tips and Tricks to Create a Learning Space in Second Life

50 Tips and Tricks to Create a Learning Space in Second Life is the title of a blog post by Laura Milligan at Collegedegrees.com. This is a wonderful resource for anyone looking for ideas for teaching in SL. My college is still reluctant to try this new technology but I live in hope.

7 Things You Should Know About

The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's (ELI's) 7 Things You Should Know About... series provides concise information on emerging learning technologies and related practices. If you have ever struggled to explain why various Web 2.0 tools are useful in the library or teaching environments here is a most useful series of explanations about technologies that may demonstrate positive learning impacts.

Currently there are 37 applications in the series which should give you all you need to stay up-to-date on emerging technologies.

Virtual worlds

The Association of Virtual Worlds has just released its new title The Blue Book: A Consumer Guide to Virtual Worlds listing over 250 virtual worlds and is pleased to offer it free to anyone who is interested in the rapidly growing field of virtual worlds.

Download it as a zip file and open it in .pdf. You will be rewarded with 43 pages of definition, explanation and links to all the virtual worlds currently available.

Open Source and Web 2.0

iLibrarian directed me to an article about open source software in online learning in the April-June 2008 issue of Educause Quarterly. After defining it and giving the history of open source software the authors go into detail about it's impact on learning and describe some of the applications that are used by education institutions around the world.

For me the most significant segment was a description of web 2.0 enabling students to participate in information sharing and combining that with open-source software(How can I persuade my director to reconsider attitude towards web 2.0?).

With Web 2.0, the concept of student-centered learning has acquired a new dimension. Previously, the greatest critique of student-centered learning was the lack of resources and the isolation of each student from other learners. Web 2.0 has provided a means through which both collective and individual intelligence can be harnessed, while students bond in stronger, redefined ways.

These concepts all have the potential to change distance education but still need more focussed developers to produce reliable, quality online education.

Keeping up-to-date

During a recent advanced web searching workshop I tried to demonstrate Yahoo! Mindset but the link didn't work. Thinking that I was at fault for not updating my presentation I apologised and later set about trying to find the new link, with no success. I then read on Phil Bradley's weblog that it had disappeared. It was a useful little gadget and I'm sorry to see it go. So many useful links that I have built into presentations have either disappeared altogether or had their urls changed that I would like to stress the importance of checking every link before using it in a presentation or listing it on a handout - unless you don;t mind your audience losing faith in you.

Google Generation is a myth?

Librarians' Internet Index: New This Week reports on research commissioned by JISC and the British Library about young people born or brought up in the Internet age and their ability to use the web to find information. Hmmph! I could have saved them the expense - as could most Librarians who struggle to teach Information Literacy Skills to students. The annoying thing is that members of the "Google generation" do not believe for a moment that people from any other generation can teach them anything about the Internet.

This thinking is often aggravated by people who talk about "digital natives" vs. "digital immigrants". I swear that, even though I am the most senior person in my college library, no-one else here is particularly interested in improving their skills, other than knowing just enough to be able to impart some of these skills to their students.

Web 2.0 distractions

I was asked to do my standard presentation on Wikis and Blogs yesterday but "to make it fun". Well, these workshops are always fun but I thought that I could provide a new slant on this one by running through a few Web 2.0 applications and letting participants make whatever use of them they could.

I gave everyone the following handout and we worked together through each of the activities, referring along the way to what other people (myself included) had done with the tools available.

What are we doing here?
1	Create a Google account www.google.com
2	Create an iGoogle page www.google.com/ig
3	Add elements to your iGoogle page
4	Create a Blogger account www.blogger.com Write about what you hope to achieve today
5	Create an avatar -- a representation of yourself. Go to http://avatars.yahoo.com/ ; design an avatar with a funky background. (You will have to set up an account if you don't use Yahoo!) Save your avatar and export to your blog.
6	Create a reader and add some RSS feeds http://www.google.com/reader
7	Facebook http://facebook.com Create an account, find some friends and send them a message.
8	Del.icio.us http://del.icio.us/
9	LibraryThing http://librarything.com
10	Picasa – organise your pictures http://picasa.google.com/

Participants were fully absorbed throughout and I had to get stroppy to get them to stand up after a couple of hours to help themselves to coffee and biscuits.

These are only some of the activities that we do in the 23 Things programme. I'm still thinking of rolling it out to the whole college but also struggling against lack of support for such "distractions".

Bored? Never!

What does one do when stuck at home recovering from minor foot surgery? I caught up with some reading and finished the Life of Pi, spent many hours in Second Life and also played with StumbleUpon and discovered many fascinating new sites. If you haven't used StumbleUpon you are denying yourself hours of entertainment and finding sites that other people have considered noteworthy (yes, it's one of these new-fangled Web 2.0 tools again).

Some of the pages I discovered are listed below:

15 Handy Google Search Tricks
Most of us use Google but here are several built in functions within Google which make searching even easier. Learn how to use Google as a calculator, a dictionary, a currency converter and for several other useful field searches.

Maximize Firefox Without Extensions Using about:config If you type about:config in your address bar, Firefox opens the master directory of user-defined preferences and built-in settings. The ultimate arena for performance tampering, the about:config settings are the foundation for programming Firefox extensions.

The caffeine click test where I found out that my caffeine level for the day was High - Well Caffeinated & Easily Excitable.

This May Help Your Firefox Memory Leak is an excellent blog post that details how to reduce Firefox’s high memory use.

The search engine list is a list of umpteen search engines sorted by genre. I must admit that I have never heard of most of them but one day it will be fun to play around and see how they compare. There are special search engines for news, medical, maps, legal, jobs, games, enterprise, blogs – and many more.

5 Ways to copy music OFF your iPod. I have moved office to one with a new computer and my music folder was not transferred with me. I have all these tunes on my iPod and want to be able to edit and re-organise them, so what am I to do? It’s easy enough to copy music (or videos) from computer to iPod, but not the other way. Luckily this site has come to my rescue.

Getting ready for the New World

I am forever shouting the praises of Second Life in which I can learn, create, socialise and play. I joined a year ago today and my avatar took her first steps inworld when we studied a course in Virtual World Librarianship. This was so rewarding that I then went on to do the Intermediate course and have registered for Working with a Class in Second Life next month.

If you don't know what all the hype is about read Second Life - what is the hype? a new post in the makeuseof.com blog. The writer claims that Education is one of the most progressive fields in SL and while I am still hoping that one day my college will see the light, I am preparing to offer training to our lecturers to get them ready for the new wave.

Web2.0 in a nutshell

eLearn Magazine has this feature article Ten Web 2.0 Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes to Be a More Successful E-learning Professional. It could be valuable for all "23 Thingers" or anyone interested in learning about or maintaining their Web2.0 skills.

Social networking in the library

Jessamyn West on librarian.net has a thoughtful discussion about why libraries should be socially networking. She mentions popular tools such as flickr, facebook and twitter, with helpful links to the ways in which some libraries are using them and recommends that all libraries should be offering 23 Things to help their staff get up to speed with the technology.

Google or Syndetics?

Sarah Houghton-Jan, the Librarian in Black has posted about Google Book Search API: LibraryThing and libraries grab it right up.

Google has released a new API that allows easy linking into any of the books included in Google Book Search. It's called "the Books Viewability API" and lets you more easily embed links to books on your own website. As an example, Google pointed to the Deschutes Public Library that uses "preview this book at Google" links in their catalog (here's an example). Tim at LibraryThing used the API immediately to fold Google Book Search content into LibraryThing results and has also released code that lets you fold Google book covers into your catalog too. Ooooh, sweet open goodness.

Does this mean that our library can use this feature instead of subscribing to Syndetics?