Info desk at the Sesame Street Library

While I'm on the Sesame Street thing, I can't resist sharing this clip of Cookie Monster in the library. Watch to the end. We all have 'special' clients like Cookie although we're better librarians than this guy, I hope.

hubby n littlins play with Gorilla

this is a very exciting moment - my first you tube upload, available here for y'as to see.

this bod trod pod vod

Now this is what I call fun.....I decided it was time to create a YouTube account so I did and linked it with my google account. Now you tube appears on my i google page along with my google group, gmail log in, my RSS feeder/reader, and this blogger as well (sounds so rude) - so google is looking like my main portal today - I've just got to see if facebook can appear there too but another day.

My desire was to upload a video of my kids to this blog but I realised I can only link to a video which sits on a server somewhere (duh). To get the video from my home computer to my work space, I exported it from i photo at home in a smaller format and uploaded it to temporary large file platform that is FREE called YouSendIt - files stay up for seven days before being automatically deleted, giving plenty of time to email the URL to friends or yourself in another location. So my first 'shared' video is currently uploading to YouTube. It will appear on this blog soon if all goes as planned.

In the meantime I have homework to do. I am a huge fan of 70's funk and YouTube is a place where I explore a lot of music, before trying other sources like my space and last fm. I know that some clever people have already digitised this fantastic old video footage of Stevie Wonder's Superstition on Sesame Street from 1973. The coolest kids show EVER. (I have this on video tape - a personal treasure) It is GOLD. The black kid in the red jumper going bananas dancing on the staircase....that's me.



The pod/vod cast I subscribed to via RSS is Lee Lefever's CommonCraft channel on you tube. Who else but!

Enjoy the music and let me know what you think.

Wiki week

What a chunky project this week - With NO previous wiki experience, I thought I'd take a closer look at Wikipedia. I searched out something I was legitimately interested in and saw an opening for my blossoming and expanding wiki learning. There was a little [needs citation] link next to the mention of an episode from a television series. I thought, ahah, yes, I can add the citation......being a library bod n'all so this got me interested in finding the ins and outs of citing television media, or any other non print media. I came across an excellent summary page called How to cite film, video and online media from the Media Resource Centre, UC Berkeley Library (where else but Hollywood) which is neatly put together and freely available. This was the easy part. Armed with my 'correct' citation I headed back to Wikiland.

After creating an account I read the 'getting started' pages. I have to say, a citation was not a great place to start my editing life on Wikipedia. The citation guide pages are really dense and I don't know HTML language so more time is needed to explore formatting. Anyhow, I did the edit and saved the citation which is 'accurate' but perhaps wiki won't be happy with the style of it - what's missing is internal and external linking. Perhaps even a Reference section at the bottom of the page would have been a better solution. Hopefully someone will see it and Edit my Edit. (name of my next band)

I can see that groups of people will gather in different sections of Wikipedia much like communities form around any common factors in the physical world. For students of any particular subject who share learning objectives, I can see how wikis would be a great way to pool high quality information and leave it there for access by future students. Because the style and nature of content follows the authors interests who are the audience and participants at the same time, a wiki is likely to remain relevant and useful for a longer period of time than perhaps a web site or a text book. I don't see wikis replacing these, just supplementing them with much faster and relevant access, and that's the hook.

Bring on HTML FREE Wikis please.

Delicious technoratious googaliscious

This has been some journey, travelling through the latest in web 2.0 through a search on technorati which led me to mashable which then led me to an amazing bunch of articles about microblogging on twitter where I got well and truly lost in microblogland for quite a while. Delicious was a wonder. I can really see that this form of communication would be great for people in distance education - fantastic and fast connectivity of people, ideas and resources.

The difference that I found between Google blog search and Technorati is volume (Google gives huge results) and accuracy (Technorati gives fewer high quality results). Depending on what you're looking for I'd say Technorati is a far better choice. For example, I searched an obscure artist's name and got 285 results in Google and 22 in Technorati which were the more relevant blogs, mostly included amongst the Google results but harder to find. I like the way Technorati displays the results with a thumbnail of the blog page to the left of each result and the title of the post as the heading and url below. It's a lot clearer than Google blog search results pages.

Up until today I have not used tags in my blog but I can see now how tagging is so crucial to good searching and why other bloggers here have complained about the slack tagging on flickr - there's definately no 'standard' except how much we want our 'stuff' to be found by the world out there. Delicious and Technorati drive home the importance of the tag system which is pretty elegant and logical if we apply the desire to be found. It's also easy to hone in on rare and more refined results with a more specific use of language, that is, as long as we're all thinking in the same language.

Sister Shuriken of Looking at All Sides of the Question

So the title to this post is my Unitarian Jihad Name. Not bad actually as my Goth name was Evil Orgasm (they wish!) I had a lot of fun with many different generators, visual and wordy and just got overloaded. Hence, a simple ending to a complicated afternoon. Colleagues were dying for mob names, goth names, you name it - it all got very demanding. Now, on to week 5.

Twinkeepr.

week 3 Flickr

Hi fellow bloggers,
Flickr has been a lot of fun. So far this has been the area most like a black hole for me - so much to explore and so many places to lose hours of time so Kontrol* and restraint have been part of the experience.

So what am I doing writing this at 4 o'clock on Friday before Xmas? nuts huh..... I spent a lot of time exploring the other flickr searchers on the pandia site, CompFight and FlickrStorm thanks to Chloe and Kate, which were fantastic fun to play with and gave far more interesting and varied results to Flickr itself. Creative Commons is really valuable for us as library staff and web 2.0 officianados if we were to utilise images in training IL and on the catalogue. Mash ups were illuminating - I had the thought of redesigning our entire catalogue just for starters (ha ha)

Scenario - imagine the catalogue screen horizontally divided in two. Top half visually represents book spines on virtual shelves in call number order. Scroll your mouse over the spine and the face of the book flips forward in the centre of the display with actual cover displayed. You will get a call number order visual and virtual browse of the shelves according to location or with locations mashed together as they are now, whichever you prefer. The bottom half of the screen shows all the metadata and catalogue info associated with the item on display including request and hold options plus status etc etc. This is where search fields will be available. Looks really good, functions well. My dream catalogue. You may even create maps and webs of items linked by subject. So many possibilities!!!!

Anyhow, I did not have many pics on my work PC so I've uploaded just a few things - my twin toddlers Miles and Audrey, my favourite people. Feel free to post comments and give feedback. I love this blog thang!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/33478752@N04/

Cheers and Happy Christmas, Bloggerena / Scitech

RSS should be called 'today on a page'

Hiya scribblers and tappers,
thanks for the lesson in RSS - what a breeze it really is. I am excited about all of this. The little video was excellent and clear and as I was already registered for google reader, as you all are, it was just a matter of adding URLs I want to subscribe to. I went to my regular stuff related to music, news and events, visual arts etc and had a question regarding facebook if anyone can answer it - is it possible to receive RSS feeds of friend's updates like it is possible with Flickr?

That's it for today. Tomorrow I might try adding some comments to your blogs and maybee putting up some pics of my kids (how exciting for y'all.)

Irena / Scitech, prima bloggerina.

Here I am....Finally

Hiya all,
Here it is, our last blogger to jump in and get started. Sorry for the delay but I was away last week and back just yesterday. I'll be doing my bloggin later in the week as these are the days I work. I am very excited to be doing this, and somewhat apprehensive, like I can see some of you are too. I ought to be down with all of this but alas, admit I need the training more than anyone. Thanks for the chance to bite this bullet. Irena / Scitech