Librarian Kathryn's reflections

Thing 21 : Videos of Librarians

2008-12-11T20:52:00.000-08:00

Here they are, the results of mixing a group of librarians and Viddler.

Thing 21 workshop. Murdoch University Library. 9 December 2008

Thing 21 workshop. Murdoch University Library. 12 December 2008

Thing 21 workshop. Singing Librarians Murdoch University Library. 12 December 2008

Playing with a Twitter Client - Twhirl

2008-11-30T19:17:00.000-08:00

This week I'm using the 23 Things as an excuse to play with using a Twitter Client.

Earlier this year I used Flowgram to make a little history of microblogging where I talked about the different products that tried to fill twitter's niche and the different tools to use with Twitter, Adventures in Microblogging . Flowgram is an online screencast making tool, with the difference being that the user can interact live with all the screens shown.

In the Flowgram, I mentioned that I hadn't had much time for Twitter Clients - that is pieces of software that let you access twitter without using a web browser, and allow you to do much more fancy things when you post or read tweets. The 23 Things is an excellent time to test my "tried it but didn't like it" prejudice.

Twitter and Facebook

2008-11-27T21:00:00.001-08:00

I use Facebook because I have to understand it for work. I don't use it to keep tabs on what my friends - real or imaginary - are doing. I have used it to send casual messages to "friends" that I would otherwise be too timid to email officially. Very occasionally I will use the chat function if someone I know is on at the same time.

Twitter has changed my life. I am on it almost constantly. It keeps me in touch with librarians all over the world, the Perth web community and international social media specialists. I have found a cleaner, obtained birthday entertainment for one of my children, get useful links pushed out each day, watched over twenty international conferences via the tweet streams of my friends, vented, sympathised, been incredibly silly and become up to speed with all sorts of random issues that later I discover are very useful.

I have embedded a twitter badge for my work twitter account in my work blog. It tells people when I am on campus and how to contact me each week.

I love this slideshare set that was created by Michael Sauers when some of my librarian friends tried to explain what Twitter is like ...

Twitter is like...

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: cil2008 twitter)

Oour feet in the 23 Things workshop today 26 November 2008

2008-11-27T20:50:00.000-08:00

Things 13, 14, and 15

2008-11-20T21:50:00.000-08:00

I joined Flickr when we first started the MULTA project back in June 2006. Since then, I have uploaded 572, but 387 have been this year - and 174 since the start of the month.

I'm using it more and more as a public diary, and a social tool and having much more conversation with others using Flickr.

One of my favourite photos from the last month is this one from the kids' section of the Botany library in Auckland:

My most frivolous set is the Minifigs go travelling (Set). My sons each gave me a minifig (lego person) to take with me on my travels. They were very helpful. I'm taking photos so the boys can see what their minifigs have been up to.

Minifigs are almost eaten by an amorous rat and pig 2.

I also contribute to theLibrarian Shoes (Pool).

Elizabeth shows me her other shoes

I think that using Friendfeed has made me use Flickr more, as I keep seeing fabulous photos in the feeds from my contacts and then friending them on Flickr.

For my image generator this week, I went to the Generator blog recommended in Amanda's post and chose the (product name) baby generating site . I gave it a photo of my husband and me from which to create a baby. It is a nifty way to advertise a product that I am sure you will be able to guess from the results below. Click on the mouth and it makes baby noises....

Thing 11 and 12

2008-11-13T21:24:00.000-08:00

THING 11

I did my searches on the term "cerebral palsy". Most people (I would hope) would use more than one term and narrow down the aspect they are searching for.

I found that:

• del.icio.us Was a rather blunt instrument, although much of the focus was on childhood cerebral palsy and family issues, which I'm most interested in.

• Connotea Retrieved "popular" scholarly articles of the soft education, general overview kinds, rather than hard scientific medical studies

• CiteULike Retrieved scholarly articles with much more medical focus.

• Murdoch University Library catalogue subject search A list of LCSH subject headings

• http://www.library.uq.edu.au/ Book records, faceted searches, a tag cloud and enough to make me feel there were threads to follow to get to exactly what I wanted.

• google Wikipedia entry first and then Australian entries. - because google knows who I am and where I am. The ads on the left hand side always annoy me - although I'm not sure there are any searchers who are naive enough to believe they are actual search results.

zuula - I like the ability to pick the search engine, but again a rather blunt instrument.

• kartoo - I'm a very visual learner and I find this suits my style really well. I find it very easy to narrow down the search and find exactly what I wanted - even finding suggested topics that I hadn't realised I want via serendipity. Do I use this in my everyday life? Nope. Maybe I should.

Thing 12

I have been using delicious for a couple of years now - and I use it almost daily. Unfortunately I use like I used photocopying when I was a student .... I presume that if I use delicious I will actually read or go back to the items linked there. I never do really...but I live in hope...

I added 23katethings to my network. I can see this working for groups of teachers sharing their resources. I tend to use Friendfeed to pick up links from my friends on delicious.

I did discover when I did this that I have 9 fans - and real people that I know - but I'm wondering whether it should fan them back, and what the point would be...

Video and voice in gtalk via gmail

2008-11-13T20:40:00.000-08:00

Yup. Video and voice are now integrated into gtalk in gmail - but not yet via the gtalk stand alone client. A Skype-killer I would think?

Cindi-cam via gtalk in gmail Uploaded to Flickr on November 13, 2008 by sirexkat

I remember going to the Science and Technology discovery centre (Scitech) 15 years ago and seeing an “amaaazing” and expensive device to allow video telephone calls - with a screen refresh rate of about 10 frames per minute.

google video chat w/kathryn Uploaded to Flickr on November 14, 2008 by cindiann

As Cindi pointed out, all it needs now is screen and ap sharing functionality….and it’s still useful how you can do this in a window while working on a google doc together …. or anything else. Me? I want to see split screen conference calling so you can have three or four people video conferencing at once.

Do like.

Pasting into wordpress without getting gobbldygook code

2008-11-11T01:21:00.000-08:00

Here's how you cut and paste text into a Wordpress post without inserting gobbldygook code at the same time.

The screencast can take a while to load, so it is easier to:
1. Press the play button
2. Pause the playback while it downloads, then;
3. press play when you have the whole screencast downloaded.

Things 9 and 10

2008-11-06T22:48:00.000-08:00

I find Google docs extremely useful to store my travel itineraries. I can print them out to carry with me, always have an online copy to check details and times. I share them with my husband so he knows where I am at any time. If I am going to lots of places on a trip, I will create a google map too so I can check where I will be.

I use PBwiki extensively for work projects and things like the WA Library Unconference. I should get around to creating a MediaWiki installation on the webhosting I have for work , but I find that it is easier to have separate wikis that other people can "own" as much as I do. I do use the backup facility for PBwiki to ensure the data is safe - as I don't like the idea that if PBwiki company goes under, then I lose my data :(

I also like using the original version of PBwiki as a place to experiment with what is produced by the embed code from other web services. For example, I was playing with Stickam, video conferencing site with a mob of other librarians when I noticed we could embed our live output - so I whacked Jason Griffey's channel into a PBwiki wiki: Libcasting. When we were live, it looked like this:

week 3: Thing 7 and 8 - Firefox

2008-10-30T22:04:00.000-07:00

I have been using Firefox and extensions for quite a while now. It's ironic, I'm using google's chrome browser to make this post :) It is much lighter-weight and requires less processing from the PC, so I use it for reading. It's not so great for editing, so I tend to edit things in Firefox.

I still use Internet Explorer to read my Outlook Webmail from home as - suspiciously - this Microsoft product only works properly with the Microsoft reader.

The major Firefox extensions I use are:

Colourful tabs - which makes each tab display in a different colour
Del.icio.us toolbar - lets me tag things instantly for upload to del.icio.us
Evernote web clipper - lets me upload almost anything as a "note" in my private notes database
Greasemonkey - allows me to run a number of little useful scripts that do other things
Meebo - instant messaging
OpenURL referrer - from OCLC - I was fiddling with it for the Web Presence project
Remember the Milk for gmail - puts a "to do" list into my gmail account
Ubiquity - I press [CTRL] [SPACE] and a command line appears, allowing me to just type a command and look up something on wikipedia or sent a message to twitter or something to gmail, all from one spot
Zotero - see Thing 8

Week 2 Thing 6 - RSS feeds

2008-10-23T21:10:00.000-07:00

The feed that I subscribed to this week was Dave Pattern's photograph feed on Flickr. Dave works in the library at the University of Huddersfield and creates very beautiful data visualisations based on things like book covers and the number of hits on particular terms on the OPAC.

He also illusatrates how RSS can be used in creative ways. Check out this "portrait" he created in coloured words taken straight from my RSS feed: kg_001

There are more portraits of librarians in this set here: In their own words....

Dave explains how he did it on this post: Librarians - in their own words .

Why am I trying to use video in my 23 Things Blog ?

2008-10-22T02:45:00.001-07:00

This exchange between me and Connie Crosby on seesmic explains why. Connie had just conducted a workshop about video etc at Internet Librarian 2008 and was questioning why she doesn't tell more stories using video. I replied telling her about how I find it hard to socially find a way to ask people to talk to my video camera - but I want to learn how to do it. She answers with her experience with trying to get people on her podcast - suggesting that after hearing Howard Rheingold keynote the conference - there are new literacy skills involving knowing how to talk into a video camera, how to create movies.

23 Things Week One - the video

2008-10-22T02:41:00.000-07:00

Here is my 23 Things Week One video. I've used seesmic, which is usually a post and reply kind of site, not a "record things for embedding" site - so I hope the users are OK with it:

THINGS 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5

2008-10-20T04:14:00.001-07:00

THING 1: I've read the "About" and "Timetable" pages - heck I wrote them, so I should know what they say.

THING 2:
Lifelong learning habit that is easiest for me - probably playing, followed closely by teaching/mentoring others. Sounds really corny but I find that whenever I teach people something, I often learn more about it than I would with independent learning. Others can ask questions or suggest an approach that I often haven't thought of. I like that.

Lifelong learning habit that is hardest for me - beginning with an end in mind. I like it when my learning meanders and takes me places I didn't expect. I like learning for learning's sake, and as part of an overall process...so often just jump in without a goal.

My goals for this 23 Things session
* To learn more about how other people learn
* To help others grow and develop their skills in teaching and presentation
* To learn from my colleagues
* To do every Thing as quickly as possible after it is published so I have an idea of what participants are going through
* To use unusual publishing tools to create pretty embeddable graphics and movies in my blog posts.

What I need in my learning toolkit
* Moderation - I need to do this to the best of my ability but balance it with other commitments
* Patience to support other people who are doing for the first time what I have done oodles of time before
* Some groovy graphics and some nice publishing tools.
* Webcam

THING 3
My gmail address, if anyone wants to know is: libkat(at)gmail.com

THING 4
Here's the blog.

THING 5
Just about to tick off these things now.

Testing Blip.tv embedding

2008-05-30T00:34:00.000-07:00

Let's just see what this screencast looks like when embedded. Can you read the text? Is the sound quality OK?

Brown bag lunch

2007-12-10T20:14:00.000-08:00

Irene and I are talking about our travels on Tuesday 18th at 1pm and I wanted a spot to place some useful links.

The events I visited were:

QULOC Social Software and Libraries one day event (Program here: Librarian Too ) Oct 10
State Library of Queensland Unconference ( Wiki here: slq Library 2.0 Unconference ) Oct 11
WA Tafe Libraries' Learning Resources Network Libraries of the future Forum 2007 Nov 29

The presentations I gave were:

QULOC - Second Life, libraries, universities and Murdoch University Library. Plus one hour workshop about doing more with avatars in Second Life, plus panel discussion
Unconference - What is Library 2.0? plus session on Second Life and facillitated the closing session -" Library 2.0 skeptics"
TAFE - Five Social Software Sites that Libraries Shouldn’t Ignore.

Bits and pieces I picked up:

Overall theme from all events - libraries are trying to use the tools that users are already using, (eg. google docs, CE6 ) and integrate library content into these.

QULOC and TAFE followed similar format - presentations to everyone before lunch, break into smaller groups after lunch. QULOC's focus on hands on workshops was great. The unconference was less formal than the WA unconference, with many sessions being "sit around and talk" sessions. Like WA, it was a useful sharing of information across library sectors.

QUT Creative Industries have use delicious tag cloud embedded into a web page as subject guide - and have embedded this into Blackboard / CE6 Learning Management System

Yarra Plenty Library System incorporates LibraryThing tags in its catalogue. See this example for Tim Winton's Cloudstreet.

QULOC

University of New England - received funding to create a social network for students, but beginning to conclude that it is not necessarily a case of "If you build it they will come". May be better to use an Open Source network or to tap into something pre-exisiting like Facebook - especially by making widgets to tap into this. Cameron Barne's presentation slides are here,:

Gina Velli is a young librarian working in legal deposit at the State Library of Queensland. She gave a presentation about MySpace / Facebook and concluded that MySpace is not what it once was and Facebook is preferred by more mature library users.

Andrew Bennett from UQ talked about using Web 2.0 tools as part of the IT Standard Operating Environment, citing the advantages of single sign-on, standardisation of tools, "light-weight accesss to heavy weight tools". Disadvantages - bakups and repository, scalability. **. Focussed on Zoho and Google docs.

Unconference

I went to those sessions I was most unfamiliar with at the unconference - so learned about how to offer services to youth, and a bit more about using chat reference.

TAFE -

Deb and Pim also presented about the Learning Common.

UWA Library have integrated their information literacy into Blackboard / CE6, but wanted to ensure their course content was more portable. At the moment it is very hard to reuse material from course to course. They are experimenting with using HIVE to store learning objects that can be access from different learning modules.

Kay Schneider's igoogle presentation was excellent.

Jody ex-Curtin's "start with google" information literacy classes. Demonstrated a search on google giving tips about using the + and site: operators. Then took same search to google scholar. Then went from google scholar into library databases...all the time talking about accessability, search strategies and academic validity of the sources.

IRENE
The event she attended and presented about at the Brown Bag Lunch is the Learning Futures Symposium .

Here's a meebo chat box

2007-12-06T03:11:00.000-08:00

Here's a meebo chat box as an example of how it can be embedded in any web page. I'm sometimes logged into meebo to access the Library Society of the World chat room, but more often am offline.

The chat box won't show up in an RSS reader. I have also embedded one into the sidebar of this blog

My other blog nominated for an Edublog Award

2007-12-04T15:05:00.000-08:00

My other blog, Librarians Matter, has been nominated for “Best Librarian/Library Blog” in the 2008 Edublog awards.

To vote for me, click here, Best library / librarian blog 2007. Or, you may prefer to vote for one of the other nominees:

Previous library blog winners have been:
Library Stuff - 2004
Joyce Valenza’s NeverEnding Search - 2005
Hey Jude - 2006

I’m chuffed to see that West Australian Sue Water’s blog, Mobile Technology in TAFE has been nominated for three separate awards, and that Australian Jo Kay’s Second Life Island, Jokaydia, has been nominated for Best Educational Use of a Virtual World .

I'm hoping to attend the awards ceremony on 8th December in Second Life.

Blogs in Plain English

2007-11-30T04:49:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's another Commoncraft explanation - this time about blogs. Did you realise you were creating alternative news sources and community just by blogging?

Blogs in Plain English - when I looked at it on Friday at about 9:30pm, I was the 78th person to view it. Would love to know where it was at when you looked (you'll need to click through to YouTube see those stats ).

Social Networking in Plain English

2007-11-22T04:36:00.000-08:00

I didn't use this one in the Facebook/ Twitter section of the 23 Things - mainly because I forgot .

It's rather short, and talks about social networks connecting you to a great job or a fantastic partner. I don't use my online social networks for either of these, but every day I use them to get information that I need to do my job better...and to find out about what is happening in Perth and hundreds of quirky little things that make me smile or think.

Here's the CommonCraft video - Social Networking in Plain English

CSI 2.0

2007-11-20T00:18:00.000-08:00

Okay - a couple of weeks ago CSI set an episode in Second Life and I didn't mention it because I didn't want to seem THAT geeky.

But last night's episode of CSI where they showed Twitter just had me wondering what's going on with them. Quote of the night: "These people don't care about privacy, they value openness".

Has all this stuff become mainstream now? Is US commercial television cutting edge?

A place for organisations in Facebook

2007-11-07T16:24:00.000-08:00

According to the Facebook blog , they now encourage and have a place for organizations - Facebook Pages.

The "and more" bit mentioned below includes a category called "Library/Public building" that you can select when you create a Facebook Page .

We've launched Facebook Pages, which are distinct, customized profiles designed for businesses, bands, celebrities and more to represent themselves on Facebook. We noticed people wanted to connect with their favorite music, restaurants, and brands; but there was no good place for these types of affiliations to exist. Now, there is a place for them and you can become a fan of whatever pages you choose in order to interact with your passions in new ways. You can post reviews for a local restaurant, buy tickets to a new movie, or be the first to get a heads up about new promotions.

Should libraries be in Facebook?

2007-11-05T06:29:00.000-08:00

Maybe not libraries, but definitely librarians - it is a useful way to network.

Should we try to offer our library services there? I wasn't so sure in July 2006, when I wrote:

Our younger users are definitely there. The question is “should we be there too?”. Or would we come across like a little kid following the big kids around, yelling “wait for meeeee?”.

I guess it’s a bit like blogs. If there is a need for them, then they are great tools. A couple of times recently I’ve heard of organisations considering starting blogs “because there’s an expectation”, but without really knowing what they’d post. Same applies with some of the social web sites. If there is a need that they fill and we enjoy using them, then we should do so. If we are just doing it to join our users on their own turf, I’m not sure it is a good enough reason, and that we won’t come off looking like prats.

Today I would answer the question "Yes - we should offer services there" - but the operative word is OFFER - not coerce, demand, stalk, or invade. This doesn't necessarily mean setting up a "library friends" group (unless users want one) or even using a Facebook profile at all. I'm much more interested in offering a starting point to our library content, which users can install or ignore as they want.

Since August this year, it has been possible to create small applications that Facebook users can choose to add to their profile. There are currently over 5000 on offer. It is easy to create a small application with a searchbox for the library catalogue, a searchbox for the library portal and a link to the "Ask a Librarian" service.

If staff or students spend a large amount of time hanging out in Facebook and prefer to search our library from an application they have chosen to add to their profile, then it is a win/win situation. They are in control and can choose instead to go straight to the library web site, or straight to google Scholar.

I remember the debates that librarians had about whether we should put our library catalogues online - it wasn't just "How soon should we divert resources and do this necessary thing?", it was "Should we be online at all ? Is this really space that it is appropriate for us to occupy?".

Last Thursday google announced OpenSocial, where google gadgets can now be embedded into other social sites like Open Social partners Orkut, Ning, MySpace, Friendster and LinkedIn. This is aimed directly at weakening Facebook's market share - users can now embed these cool little aps at other places where they hang out, not just inside Facebook. Google gadgets are easily created by the layperson who knows a bit of html.

The implications of these little aps is that successful web sites will morph into successful web presences.

I agree with Karen Coombes who is the Head of Web Services at the University of Houston Libraries, who had this to say in The future of Web Services isn’t the Library website:

meeting your users where they are isn’t about making them come to the library website. In considering our long term virtual presence plans, the library website is a given. People who come to the site know we exist and want to use our services. To truly be successful we have to get our content into the path of the people who wouldn’t walk through our door (physical or virtual)...

...[some issues with potential website redesign ]....would be resolved if users had alternate ways of accessing our data. Does the typical mobile user want the library website or a specific piece of information or tool from the library site? If faculty could do their searches without coming to the library site would they? I think the answer is yes. Focusing on content rather than look and feel will allow us to provide these different types of services. It will also allow different types of users to potentially selectively access content.

2007-11-01T22:28:00.000-07:00

Thing 14: It's about growing your own garden

2007-10-29T22:35:00.000-07:00

Just the kind of reminder I need right now.

Thing 13: Flickr: 23 things participants

2007-10-29T22:23:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-29T22:03:00.000-07:00

Here they all are.

del.icio.us tag cloud

2007-10-23T05:58:00.000-07:00

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!

del.icio.us as a search engine

2007-10-21T04:00:00.001-07:00

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 ?

Essential viewing anyone working with students

2007-10-16T16:58:00.000-07:00

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

Doing the happy dance on slideshare.net

2007-10-08T08:24:00.000-07:00

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.

Voki, Year Ones and blogging in education

2007-10-07T01:08:00.000-07:00

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.

Still it comes....

2007-09-27T07:44:00.000-07:00

I made a slideshow with music, copying an idea from a Central TAFE 23 Thinger - and embedded it into a post here on the blog. I'm too tired to work out whether there is a way to stop the jolly thing from playing, but every time I open the page now I hear the "chi chi chi, chi chi chi" soundtrack I added.

Driven to distraction, I have changed the date on the post so it is pushed off the front page. If you want to hear those "chi chi" sounds, you can still click through tothe Slideshow of the Library 2.0 unconference.

Sorcerer's apprentice

2007-09-27T07:34:00.001-07:00

In an attempt to stop the slide show from loading automatically because it is embedded in the first post, I'm adding this emergency, band-aid post. Please stop.

Impressed

2007-09-25T17:53:00.000-07:00

Gee there's some really good reflective posting going on at the moment. I'm checking the browser for libkat a couple of times a day and feeling a little sad when there is no new post. The time to check seems to be just after hometime - people seem to be winding down a bit by blogging. Nice.

I've realised that I'm going to have to go back again a subscribe to comments feeds for all the blogs if they are available. Bloglines seems to have better autodiscovery of feeds, so maybe I'll try pasting the URL into adding subscription there, then export the whole bunch into google reader. Still playing with that one.

There are varied levels of skill at all this, but overall I've been very pleasantly surprised that people are doing more sophisticated blogs than I expected. I'm writing weeks 6 and 7 today, and I feel much more confident that people will cope with it easily.

I've noticed that the 23 things are progressing from tools you can use for yourself (blogs, gmail) to tools you can use to collaborate with small groups (wikis) through to the outrageously social in later weeks. I'd like to pretend it was deliberate.

There are a small number of people who have registered who haven't started at all - and a few I know have done tasks but not marked them on the wiki. I'm wondering whether they'd appreciate a bit of help, and the best way to offer it.

My workflow with RSS

2007-09-24T05:33:00.000-07:00

I read a lot of feeds, but most of the folk in my online network would read the same amount as me.

LOTS OF FEEDS
According to the "Trends" in my google reader, I subscribe to 230 feeds and in the last 30 days, I read 1395 items. I would guess that maybe 4 of these items per week are emailed out to someone else at work.

FOLDERS
I have about 30 feeds in my "00 I read this" folder, that are at the top of my list of feeds and I tend to watch daily. There are another 50 or so in my "01 I sorta read this" folder. I read these weekly. The rest are categorised into folders like "51 Library techie - hot " , "53 Library techie - warm" or "31 - Australian library " - they get a look in every fortnight or so.

I subscribe to blogs by people who read other blogs - by following their links, I read excerpts from more than just 30 blogs each day.

TO ME, IT'S NOT ANOTHER PLACE TO LOOK

I'm not too fussed about being notified when there is an update or having to "go" to a different place. I have so many windows open at once, that to me, all of these sites ARE already in the same spot - in my browser on the web. It doesn't feel like another place to go - just different facets of the same place.

Right now, I have 34 Firefox tabs open on my home PC and another 3 open in Internet Explorer. On my work laptop, where I'm writing this, I have 10 tabs open.

Each morning when I switch on my home PC I open up:

1. Firefox
1.1 Gmail for sirexkat
1.2 Twitter
1.3 My blog, Librariansmatter.com to check who has linked to it overnight
1.4 librariesinteract.info to check whether anyone had contributed a post that needs publishing
1.5 Sitemeter to see hits on Librariansmatter
1.6 Google reader to read my feeds
1. 7 My Facebook account
1.8 My "Remember the Milk" account so I can see my To Do list

2. Internet Explorer

2.1 Webmail for work - as it being a Microsoft product it works best in IE
2.2 Gmail account for libkat (as I can't log into two on the same browser)
2.3 Google reader for libkat

3. Thunderbird mail reader

3.1 For my "running the household" email account with my ISP

4. Outlook calender

4.1 Our central "running the household" calendar that Co-Pilot and I sync our PDAs to.

Within a few minutes I also have open:

5.1 Several posts from my reader upon which I comment
5.2 Several links that friends have thrown out on twitter
5.3 Del.icio.us that I have used to bookmark the most useful lot from 4.1 and 4.2 .

Using the ALT TAB key sequence, I give all of them my continuous partial attention.

Two otters holding hands

2007-09-21T02:43:00.000-07:00

Well, Ruby Tuesday over at Blog 1 posted a cute animal clip, so I just couldn't resist. It's not a Lion Hug like she posted, but it is very, very cute. Keep watching, because they drop hands and then do it again....

Awwww....

Spam filter and gmail

2007-09-18T19:53:00.000-07:00

I just found a whole lot of emails in the spam filter for my libkat@gmail account. I thought maybe eveyone had gone all coy and wasn't emailing me their blog addresses.

Problem solved and I'll add the big bunch of blogs to the list when I go into work today.

69 Things marked off

2007-09-17T08:40:00.000-07:00

Wow! There are smilies or dates or checks in 69 boxes on the chart already.

Some people have not emailed me their blog address, but have ticked off their blog on the chart, or entered the blog address there. I'm not sure whether they are ready to have it added to the list of participant blogs yet. Probably they are - but I'd hate to post a link to something that people don't want others to know about yet. I'll add a note about it when I send out the next two Things.

I'll also send a note out asking people who work ahead to find my "libkat" profiles rather than my real profile. Someone has already friended the Facebook libkat one, and another person has friended my real twitter account. I guess I don't mind..but it feels kind of funny.... As one of my twitter friends said last night after he found his mum and sister on Facebook - "The real world is beginning to invade Facebook and I'm not sure I like it".

If anyone is reading this, the twitter account to friend is http://twitter.com/libkat and the Facebook one is http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=642109108

I have the first workshop tomorrow. Mr9 is going into Princess Margaret to have his teeth done under a general anaesthetic, so I'm not sure I'll be 100% focussed on the task at hand. Poor kid has to be there from 10 - 6 :(

Two blogs already !

2007-09-13T07:10:00.000-07:00

Two people have already created their blogs, and we are only 4 days in.

Someone else was asking about how to upload an image to the sidebar. You just use the "Picture" page element on the "Page Elements" tab. Yes, it does automatically resize. To get the image from your PC, you need to use the "browse" option.

With 60+ people registered, next week is going to be very, very interesting as I am deluged by new blogs to put on the participant's blogs page and to subscribe to. I have folders ready in my email box for "blogs notified", "blogs done" etc...and have been working on tags for google reader so I can keep the feeds in some kind of sensible order.

Central TAFE library are doing it - me too !

2007-08-30T07:13:00.000-07:00

I'm a shameless idea pilferer. For their image generator week in their 23 Things, one of the TAFE librarians played with slide.com to make a slideshow about their trip to the New Norcia Lecture.

I nosed over to the site, pointed to the Flickr set I uploaded on the day of the "Library 2.0 on the loose" unconference, chose an effect, whacked on a soundtrack and copied the code to paste here. If I hadn't had so much fun tinkering with the different effects, I could have done the whole thing in 3 minutes, max. Is fun. I like. Can be useful?

UPDATE: Is a bit too flashy for me - soundtrack is overkill and I can't work out how to stop the jolly thing once it is playing in the blog page - without refreshing the page.

Goals / obstacles / toolkit

2007-08-26T09:40:00.000-07:00

GOALS

1. To learn better how to accomodate people of different abilities in hands on workshops.

2. To read every post made by every participant (if we get 20 and they post only the minimum of 12 posts, then that would be...let's see...240 posts ...over 3 months, this is managable. 30 - 360. 40 - 480 0r almost 500...hmmm...).

3. Not to rush each post on the 23 things blog.

4. To provide something comprehensive enough to be worthwhile reading, but not so full of detail that it wastes people's time.

5. To have some fun and try to play along with the participants at the same time in this blog.

OBSTACLES

1. Time. Need to be very disciplined to focus on the core tasks involved.

2. Perfectionism. I need to accept that some weeks I'll not be able to do the perfect job I'd like to do - that I'm still getting something out of it anyhow

3. Desire to please people. I want it to be fun and a postive learning experience for people, but I also need to sit back and let paticipants take responsibility for their own learning.

4. Other tasks I need to prioritise my 23 Things work for the next 3 months, but I have other projects that I need to do too. Sometimes I will need to cut back a bit on the 23 Things work to get the rest done.

LEARNING TOOLKIT

1. Headphones
2. Quiet space
3. Time to think about each tool before I post
4. RSS feeds for each participant blog and a well organised feed reader
5. Separate accounts in my libkat user name for the duration of this project
6. Digital camera
7. Timetable of weekly goals
8. Mindfulness

I made a meez

2007-08-24T00:39:00.000-07:00

Looking through the Learning 2.1 blog, I found the post about making a meez at Meez.com, and I just had to have one. Here it is.

Oh yeah, I've done Thing 1, too - I have a gmail account - libkat at gmail dot com. I wonder whether this would be useful for joining sites where I have to give an email address and don't want to give one I actually USE.

This post means I have done Thing 2. I'll go and update the mullet23 wiki, and then I will have done Thing number 3. I'm glad it has rollback, so if I accidentally stuff it up I can just make it go back to the previous version.