Monday, October 29, 2007

Thing 14: It's about growing your own garden

Just the kind of reminder I need right now.




Thing 13: Flickr: 23 things participants


23 things participants
Originally uploaded by sirexkat
I thought that maybe if I posted it on a social site, some people would appear in the picture, so I posted it to Flickr

Thing 12: Photo of everyone who turns up for Tuesday 2pm sessions

Here they all are.





Tuesday, October 23, 2007

del.icio.us tag cloud

I cheated and set an "IF YOU WANT MORE" task that I didn't know how to do. I think the QUT tag cloud in their Creative Industries Subject Guide is the bee's knees, but want to work out how to do it.

Karen at Peel emailed me to ask how, so... here's what you do. Under your account settings, find tag rolls. Or go straight to this tag rolls page. Fiddle with the settings, then copy the embed code from the bottom into a post, using the "Edit HTML" tab.

Done!


Sunday, October 21, 2007

del.icio.us as a search engine

I had fun trying out different search engines for Thing 10. Like Sue, I found kartoo gave the most distinctive looking results. I really like the way tagging sites let me trace the origin and "brothers and sisters" of a link by seeing what other things a person also tagged.

My friend Peta jokingly suggested that she'd try del.icio.us as her search engine of choice after I posted the Information R/evolution clip on librariesinteract.info . She gave it a burl this weekend and has blogged extensively about it over at Innovate, Yummy searching ?

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Essential viewing anyone working with students

I found this when I used another one of their videos for the Social Tagging section of 23 Things next week.

This clip was made for the Kansas Digital Ethnography programme. 200 students collaborated on a document and designed their own survey about what they do with their time and how it relates to their uni studies. They made this 5 min video clip showing their findings.



A Vision of Students Today

Monday, October 8, 2007

Doing the happy dance on slideshare.net

Out of the hundreds of slide sets uploaded to slideshare.net each day, my slides that I made about "What is Library 2.0?" is Slideshare.net's Slidecast of the day today. It's the one I linked to from the Week 5 post on 23 Things.



A slidecast is an audio track with slides synchronised to change at cued places during the talk.

Last night I was practicing my talk for Thursday, to make sure I could say what I needed in 20 minutes, and I had Audacity open as I did it. I edited out a few umms and errrs, published it as an mp3 on the librariansmatter.com server and linked it to the slides. A bit of cueing later and I had a slidecast ready to give the link out to participants on Thursday.

Except someone at slideshare.net obviously liked the cut of its jib and published it on the front page. Erk! That's my 15 minutes of fame done for this lifetime.

Here is the slidecast. Press the little green arrow to play.

Sunday, October 7, 2007

Voki, Year Ones and blogging in education

I fiddled with Voki, which is an online tool to create a cartoon character that appears to speak an audio track that you record. I discovered it at the 1M Little Gems Blog which I discovered in turn via Tama Leaver’s excellent post about blogging in education: Reflections on the Australian Blogging Conference and Blogging in Education . If myVoki doesn’t show in your aggregator, you can go here .

Get a Voki now!

I love the Year One’s blog. As a parent, I would really appreciate a web page for the class that lists what is happening each day, what the kids need and significant dates - as they have icluded on the sidebar of the blog. I can see that they have used online graphing software to embed the kids’ graphs in the blog. The Voices of the World project in which they are participating is very cool too - kids around the world are using the same software (in September it was Voki) to record the same information. I love the voices of the Scottish kids featured on the blog.

Tama’s post outlines the pros and cons of blogging in education and is really worth a read.