Week 8 - Web 2.0 Awards

I went to the Web 2.0 awards site and decided to look at the three philanthropy sites - Care2, betaGiveness, and Donor's Choose. I had thought that the sites would in some way rank different philanthropic organizations based on certain criteria such as % of dollars that actually go to the charity cause, but this was not the case.

With the first site, Care2, I had a hard time figuring out the purpose of the site. The blurb says that it incorporates petitions, donations and tips. It was too scattered for me.

The second site, betaGiveness, seems to be an online shopping site. A sales commission is then given to a charity.

The third site, Donors Choose, is a site where people seem to post what they need and you can donate money to help them obtain their goals. This site was cool because of the types of things that people posted. I looked under the education section and found teachers who had posted things that they needed for their classroom. Grass roots giving.

Week 8 - Online Applications and Tools

Of the top ten productivity sites I knew three - TinyURL (introduced to me by Isabel Espinal), Remember the Milk (I picked this up at SLA this past year), and MyStickies (I don't recall where I first learned about this one). All of the tools seem like they have a purpose and would be good in the right situation.

Week 7 - Wikis

I remember making a wiki in library school for a class project. It was easy and a great way for a group of people to organize material for a project. Overall, they are easy to use, edit and a good tool for information sharing.

Social Bookmarking video by CommonCraft

I thought that the social bookmarking video by CommonCraft was very good. It made lots of sense for those people who have lots of sites to keep track of and use many different computers. Since I tend to do work at work and play at home my bookmarks don't really need to be shared. Although, having a Del.icio.us account would have proved useful when I was on vacation and used a variety of machines.

Week 6: Tagging and Folksonomies

Behind again, darn summer vacations. I don't know whether I should forge ahead or drop out completely since I am behind. Today I am feeling optimistic so I will move forward and try to make some headway on this project.

As I get ready to explore the world of tagging I must say that I am rather skeptical due to the non-standardization of the language that people use in tagging. I like controlled vocabulary.

Week Five - Play or Rest

Since I was away last week I did not get to explore new technology applications. I am feeling a bit behind and don't know if I'll have a chance to catch up before I leave again for vacation.

Paulina with Flickr Spell

Somehow I can't get the letters to go across - maybe my blog set up prevents it. Thanks to Rebecca A. for helping me in 23 Things study hall.

Week Four - RSS

Setting up an RSS reader account was easy, I decided to go with Bloglines. The dilemma will now be to find blogs that I want to read. I am not much of a blog reader, so I will have to do some exploring to see what is out there.

Week Four - RSS feeds

Okay, so I'm already behind again due to vacation. I need to get back on track. I played with the Flickr banner speller and tried to get the banner picture in my blog but I could not figure it out - I always got the first letter, but the remainder did not appear. Maybe I'll play around with it some more in 23 Things Study Hall. I am hosting study hall tomorrow so I better get cracking on the RSS assignment.

Okay, so I had a little fun today making a librarian trading card. It was fun and very easy.

Week Three - Flickr

Okay, so I made the mistake of thinking that I could just dabble a bit in Flickr, find a picture in the creative commons to add to my blog, and found that it did not want to work - invalid image URL. Now I am frustrated. I guess that I sometimes have a low tolerance to learning new technologies. Somehow I thought that it would be easy and obvious. Time to step back, regroup and try again.

Week Three

Week three and I am already feeling behind. I knew that finding time would be the greatest challenge for me. I just got back from vacation, am trying to catch up on emails and phone messages, and don't really feel like I have time to play with Flickr. My plan - catch up today and plan to set aside one hour on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Week One - Getting Started

I found the 23 Things Lifelong Learning Habits video to be a bit boring. I also found the contract to be a hokey but I did it anyway. The biggest obstacle for me will be time - allowing myself time to play with new and different technologies. I think that I will take advantage of the 23 Things Study Hall on Thursday's 2-3pm (room 1620) to gather encouragement, support and ideas from others. Going to the study hall each week will set aside time for me to work on this endeavor.