Friday, January 30, 2009
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, January 23, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
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.
Twinkeepr.
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