Reflection

Wow its great to have made it to the end of this learning exercise! I have discovered several things along the way which I had never even heard of and the experience introduced me to Facebook, which I have continued using in order to stay in touch with family and friends, and for uploading all the photos I've been making!

EBooks

I think ebooks are paving the way for the future of reading and publication. They offer significant advantages over hard copies of books such as the convenience of not having to carry a book with you when you go away on holiday and being able to access the content from multiple different electronic devices.

Podcasts

There seem to be thousands of different podcasts covering as many genres as you could imagine. I checked out a travel podcast and was interested to find out that podcasts basically seem to be similar to listening to a radio talkshow. The advantage podcasts have is that they cover so many different topics that would interest anyone, and since they are based online, they can be accessed from anywhere in the world!

Youtube

The vast number of videos on this website is amazing. Videos range from movie clips, to sports, and even to home-made films, all of which number in the millions. Its wonderful being able to simply think of something you feel like watching, typing it into the search box and then finding a video that interests you. The website also makes it very easy to upload your own videos.

Web 2.0 Tools - Picasa

Picasa is a program that allows people to organise, edit and share photos online. Exploring its features was particularly pleasing for me due to my passion for photography. I was amazed at how easy it was to perform powerful editing operations such as removing red eye, altering colours and cropping images. One of the stand out features was being able to easily create slideshows of photos and then quickly upload these as a movie on youtube to share with friends after returning from an oversaes trip.

Online Productivity Tools

I was surprised to find that I could access all of the functionality of Microsoft Office online in a web-based application. This online software even incorporated Web2.0 features that we had learned about previously such as tagging. The ability to create documents online and then share them with my peers is a very powerful tool that can be put to great use.

Week 7: Social Networking

It was interesting to finally go out and look into some of these famous social networking sites that I had heard so much about. Bebo and Myspace seemed to be packed full of teenagers and I felt that they weren't really my thing, although it was interesting that many famous people and bands have set up pages on these websites too.

Facebook seemed more straightforward and professional which made it appeal to me more above the others. I think that making a Facebook page for a library, as was done by the Hennepin County Library, is excellent advertising for the library, making it easy to access for the countless potential customers who happen to be subscribed to Facebook. Plus its all free!

Library 2.0

I think that the huge advancements in Web technology such as social networking, photo sharing and video broadcasts that have become such a big part of everyone's lives, have also begun to become part of libraries, the way we do things in the library, and how we interact with our users. As time goes on we will see more and more of these advancements being incorporated into libraries and hopefully this will help popularise libraries and strengthen our relationship with the community.

Technorati

I was really amazed at the sheer amount of blogs featured on this website. I used what I learned about tags to try and find a blog about cocktails! This blog particularly stood out from the others and I've enjoyed reading up on some excellent recipes: http://cocktailhacker.com/

Tagging

The concept of tagging was new to me and I was eager to check it out. I've found out how I can make tags for all sorts of things such as photos or websites to help me categorise them. I enjoy the freedom involved in being able to add any keyword as a tag and how adding multiple tags makes it very easy to find things when searching through countless folders.