THE END

I never thought I would make it. I must be the biggest technophobe I know but through the cajoling and coaxing from others and tremendous support from mumbaichic, I have made it and had my eyes opened to the seemingly endless amount of possibilities with the web.



I most enjoyed flickr and can see me making great use of this site when I find the time to spend researching my family history. I shall be able to add images and to also sort and file them in the correct family groups and hopefully be able to view images that others have put up for the different families.

Although I encountered numerous frustrations with the slowness of the internet, I persevered as can see the benefit of keeping current with what is available. RSS Feeds proved to be particularly frustrating and I was ready to give up at that point but my colleagues encouraged me through that hurdle.

Thanks to Jane for her help and for the positive feedback from the team. It has been a very worthwhile exercise. I just want to add that my blog is only focused on the exercises and is so boring when I look at the others. With time I may be able to lively it up!!!

Week Nine

This is the Dance of the Dying Swan from the ballet Giselle, probably my favourite ballet. To see this live is an amazing experience-look at the ballerina's arms, they are so fluid. I have had a lot of fun looking at YouTube and can see why it is so popular.

This site has an entertainment and youth focus on first glance. It could be used as an instructional aid in teaching information literacy, database and catalgoue searching similar to some of the videos we have viewed during this course.

The podcasting exercise was frustrating to say the least with the internet at an all time slow pace. Eventually I managed to attach a feed to my blog, http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheWorldAtNoon.

I am not sure that I would use this very often , happy to turn on the radio but can see the appeal of the visual plus the audio.

Had a look around Netlibrary and ebooks-certainly has its advantages: being able to search content is great but I am not sure how far the indexing is taken. I found a Family History book and a book on careers that I have added to my favourites and will look at both again.

Week Eight

On trying to create an account in Zoho Writer it seemed that I hadn't but was still able to create a document. I chose a background colour and as I typed the chosen colour appeared. I liked that.

I could also insert an emotion and an image very easily. The post to blog option is very obvious on the page although I did not choose this option as my document is of a personal nature. Zoho has many online capabilities such as web conferencing, spreadsheets and planning.



The fact that more than one person can access and modify a document at the same time has many advantages for those working on joint projects.

For the second exercise I have chosen www.biblio.com as this relates to my role in the library very much. At first glance the home page of this website looks just like other homepages for sites listing hard to find titles but further exploration reveals :

RSS feed and Del.icio.us tag

"Community' pages for Book reviews and discussion where users can add their own comments

It also has author biographies which I really like. Altogether a very user-friendly site to use.

Week Seven

The world of wikis : for this self-confessed technophobe, keeping up with the changes and advances in technology is a challenge to say the least. I have spent a fair amount of time looking at the various library wikis and the content of these is quite mind blowing. The links to articles, blogposts and various websites act as a one stop shop. I looked at Library success: a best practices wiki and the selection of books. Some very useful up-to- date information there.


I can see that a library wiki could provide a way for the customers to become more involved with the library by being able to post comments, access information and register with the librarians being able to respond and edit directly. Staff training conducted through a wiki could also have its advantages.

I couldn't access the PB Wiki Tour but have added my blog to the Favourite blogs.

Week Six

Del.ici.us is great. I have so many bookmarks in my favourites in folders and subfolders it can be frustrating getting to them sometimes.

With Del.icio.us I can see the advantage of the tags to not only find a relevant web page of mine but those of other users who may have located relevant sites that I have missed. The ability to use different keywords may retrieve bookmarks that perhaps I would otherwise forget about if they are not used regularly.

The Technorati exercises produced some interesting results. Searching entire posts returned a

11,515 results when searching the term learning 2.0. Searching for the same term in the directory returned 830 results and tagged posts search returned 281 hits. These results were obtained using the advanced search option.

Exporing a little further shows the huge variety of topics and languages on the most popular blogs with the most popular searches being about sexy women and what they are up to or displaying to the world, music and movies!!!!!

The readings on Library 2.0 are interesting. "On the way to the library experience of the future" raises the all important point of libraries being about real people, not just books. The article also suggests that Library 2.00 is just a point in time and as technology changes and advances, so shall this.

The article "Expose, expand, extend metadata using Web2.0" talks of libraries sharing data and also reaching a wider audience by customising and expanding the available metadata.

Week Five

What a welcome relief these exercises are after the agony of Week four.I played around with a few Online generators and the text generator below did work!!!! I can see that this could be very entertaining for finding images of all sorts.

My name is Clark the Bartender.
Take The Manhattan Socialite Name Generator today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.

Library thing was an interesting an easy exercise in cataloguing!!!! I have chosen four old favourites and a recently read fiction that I had trouble putting down. The choice of how to display "My library" is great, I do like the book covers style.



Rollyo is a great little helper. I can see this being useful in the future for adding my favourite genealogy sites. I have managed to add my searchroll to my blog-with it sitting there on my blog it will be a good reminder to have a look for any recent news.

Week Four

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Week Four
The exercise this week has been rather time consuming. Once I got my head around it I decided that I quite like RSS.I have a son with a severe peanut allergy so have set up a feed to John Hopkins University medicine news-there is ongoing research taking place at John Hopkins and having this feed will help me keep up-to-date with any recent developments in this field.I have also set up feeds to newspapers for general interest and a couple of genealogy sites relevant to my family history research.I did become frustrated when I couldn't get into Feedster and also when feeds did not work when it seemed they should have as in Reader's Club.Time permitting, I would like to explore this more and add more feeds to my blog as I can see it is a great idea.

November 16
After a very frustrating week and assistance from the techos, my feeds still did not appear as expected on my blog. Just this afternoon I heard that things were now "working" properly and an exercise of great frustration has been completed in seconds because the "settings" or whatever are correct!!!! grrrrrhhhhh.

Week Three

Flickr is a site that appeals to me. I also have an interest in Family history and can see that this could be a very useful site to use to share images with as yet unlocated relatives and for organizing those images I do have.

The exercise of adding an image to my post for week three has been a bit frustrating. I made at least three attempts to save this image to my blog through Blogger's photo upload tool. I did receive a message that there were difficulties so have delayed until now retrying, this time thankfully with success.



This rose is a recent addition to my garden, a real favourtie. It is a rougosa rose, highly scented and the most pure white.

The foilage always remains healthy and it is a great bush to plant near a window to deter burglars as it is extremely thorny. I have grown this in a previous garden with great success.
It grew to a beautiful round bush extending at least a metre across and with a similar height.

According to information found at http://www.csulb.edu/~odinthor/oldrose.html:

Rugosa roses are those derived from the thorny Japanese rose R. rugosa, the two main forms of which are wine-red and white. Though a few crosses had been made earlier (as early as the 1820's), in the 1890's several hybridizers became interested in working with the species due to its hardiness, health, vigor, and special beauty.

There is a place in France called Coubert but I cannot say for sure the rose was first hybridised there.

Have just been exploring Flickr color pickr and once again I have the problem of uploading an image. I enjoyed this color pickr, looking at Jbum in particular. What a great tool for color design and coordinating whether it be for interior decorating, clothing or gardening!!!!

Second week

Isn't this beautiful, very tranquil. I have now learnt how to add an image to my blog. ( Thank you to my colleague mumbaichick for her help with this).

The large rose reminds me of "Compassion" a lovely climber I have growing on my front deck but I can't be sure it is one in the same, though very similar.

This rose has a lovely perfume and is great for cutting for vases even though it is climber. It rewards the gardener with a never ending supply of beautiful roses for the house throughout summer.

Nature never ceases to amaze me with its colour schemes. More than once I have used the colours nature puts together when trying to decide on themes for decorating and gardening.

I have now completed the exercises and these sites Bebo, Myspace and Facebook are not for me!!! What happened to people getting out and about and meeting each other in person??? This seems to be a very isolated way of socialising. (Obviously my personal opinion only, I am sure it meets the needs of many but I like to be with people, not a screen!!!)

GARDENER'S DELIGHT

Isn't it lovely that the weather is now warming up. I have a number of tasks to complete in the garden that unfortunately has been sadly neglected of late.

What a joy to see the new buds appearing on my rose bushes and to smell the newly mown lawn.

The spring and summer months invigorate me, life becomes truly joyous.