Okay maybe not quite done

I saw a post last week of someone else who was still working on their 23 things. Now that person is on vacation so I'm not sure if she will finish or not. She was up to #20 the last I saw. Overall, I think at one point there were 47 people listed on the Moodle site. Some never got started, some got started but didn't get far. Many got halfway through. Only a few made it to the end. I did a quick count last week and saw that 6 were done completely. Only 1 or 2 people I couldn't identify. "Smile4" is a mystery to me. I have no idea who that blogger is. Others were easier to spot, and probably weren't trying to be anonymous anyway.

Oh well. I hope I can remember some of what I learned. I was working on one of my other blogs the other day and trying to remember how to put an image into my blog.It took a few tries but I finally got it. That was something I learned here.

Probably the most useful thing for me is the RSS feeds. I am reading a lot about other libraries, books, things in the "business" etc. from these feeds. Definitely educational. I am also trying Twitter occasionally and I know I could do more with it. I'm getting better with Facebook too.

Are we done?

I'm not positive, but I think everyone is done now. I see Miss Information is posting still, but I'm pretty sure our access to Moodle has probably been cut by now.

So my next question is what do I do now? Do I delete this blog? Or just stop checking in on it. I'll probably just let it sit here and do nothing with it for a long time.

Just musing on what everyone else is doing..

I just took a peek at some of the blogs and noticed that some folks are up to #16 and others are still back on #3 or #4. I think it's a good thing about this class how everyone can just work on this when it's convenient and be at different places. I am surprised at how many people are not going to complete it, some have just given up. I thought it was fun, and I thought everyone else would think so too. Shows you what I know!

Farewell to Lucinda. From reading her blog I can guess that she is not sad to be leaving. Today is her last day I believe. I hope she enjoys that garden and feels better soon.

NELINET Classes for the fall!

I've been following NELINET on Twitter. I don't check it all the time, but today I noticed that there are some classes announced for the fall. I know some people have said they might not finish the "23 Things", and a few others said they might be interested in exploring some of these things in more detail. So I thought this might be of interest to you.

http://www3.nelinet.net/services/education

Thu 09/10 Facebook Privacy Settings: Take Control of Your Profile (online)
Mon 09/14 Learning 2.0: The 23 Things (online)

Wed 09/23 Social Media Monitoring (online)
Thu 09/24 Technical Services Efficiency: Beyond one-by-one OCLC Online Cataloging (online)
Fri 09/25 Twitter Basics (online)

Week 10, #23 Congratulations!- wrapping up

I think my favorites were Facebook, Bloglines, Delicious, and Twitter. Although I haven't really used Delicious enough, it has great potential for when I get serious about it.
As far as lifelong learning goes, Bloglines introduced me to a lot of librarian blogs and now I feel I'm more in the loop on things. Unfortunately, I also have several on Google Reader, so I need to find a way to either merge my lists, or just get more efficient with my time because keeping up with it all can be time consuming. Right now I'm skipping a lot.
I was disappointed by Twitter. I thought there would be more going on there that interested me. I'm still going to keep an eye on it, and see if it gets better in the fall, but so far it's been a disappointment.
If I was to improve something for the course, I'd have something different for #23. :)
I would do another class like this though. I like things that are online and self-paced, it works well for me.

I do plan to continue to follow what others are doing. It was always my goal to finish this before my fall ordering started in August, but I know I rushed through some of the assignments and skipped some details. I'm curious to see what other people come up with, and I will probably back-track a little when I have time, and do some more.

Misc. plans right now

I took out the image in the banner. It was just so big that I felt like it was a waste of space. Maybe I'll find something smaller to put in later.

Yeah, I blew right through a few assignments and got the first 15 done pretty quickly, but I didn't do every SINGLE thing that you can do. I explored Flickr but I didn't do all the mash-up stuff. I just got the idea of some of it and moved on. Now some folks are asking me how to do certain stuff and I haven't got a clue. So I think I will be doing a little back tracking, especially with Flickr. I'm also going to see if I can figure out how to get a tag cloud for my labels on here. I saw some "hacks", but when I tried to do it, it didn't work. Eventually I'll be on to assignment #17- trying to get a YouTube video to show up in the blog. That should be interesting.

Looks like there are still about a half dozen people who haven't even logged into the Moodle site yet, so I know there are still some blogs out there that haven't been created or registered yet. I'm looking forward to seeing them. I think it's great how everyone is finding different angles to learn on these assignments. We're all doing the same work but coming up with different answers so to speak. Very cool! Reading the other blogs is a lot of fun. I hope Erin likes her job. :-)

Week 8, Assignment #15 Online Productivity- A long post!

Week 8, Assignment #15 Online Productivity- this is going to be a LONG post!

"Create a blog post about your discoveries:How does the application you chose compare to word processing software you’re familiar with? What features did you like/dislike the most? Can you think of any ways the application you chose would be useful to you?"

So I am going to attempt to write this in Google docs, and then send it to the blog. We'll see how that goes.

Today I caved and went back to the 45 minute You Tube video of David Allen's "Getting Things Done". I actually took a few notes even. As I said before, there is a lot in this assignment, especially in the Resources and Discovery sides of things. I've taken several handwritten pages of notes, kind of ironic since this is supposed to be an online project.

Anyway for the Top 10 Productivity Sites
1. Tiny URL- I've seen it used by others, but never bothered myself.
2. Google Desktop- I know some people love it, but I never see my desktop so I'm not sure if it'd be useful for me.
3. Backpack- Sounds cool, but can't Google do all that?
4. Remember the Milk- again, I have Google.
5. Calendar Tools- GOOOOOGLLLLE
6. GMAIL- LOVE IT obviously.
7. Bloglines- I was introduced to this by the 23 Things. Still need to check in today. Need to check iGoogle too.
8. Google Docs and Spreadsheets- I've used these before for home and work, and like them a lot.
9. Joe's Goals- Cool! I wish I could find a practical use for them, maybe if I do a "43 things" (we'll get to that later). I think it would be great for someone losing weight, trying to get his/her degree, change jobs, or maybe for teens doing chores or trying to earn some reward from their parents or something.
10. My Stickies- I'm not sold on these. Clicking on "properties" on a bookmark does the same thing I think.

LifeHacker 46 Free thing list
No, I'm not going to list all 46 things!
#1 Firefox, #8 Gmail, #13 Google & #17 Thunderbird-- my lifelines
#4 Open Office- this is what I have on my personal laptop
#11 Picassa- I've used version 2, and finally got version 3. Still learning it.
#15 Gimp, on my list to learn about
#19 Dropbox- could be useful, haven't checked it out yet
Winamp, Google Apps, Google Calendar, Avast Anivirus-- use all of these
My father-in-law has been using Skype for quite a while.
And of course Linux... my husband is a Linux pro, but I refuse to give up Windows on my computers.


Moving on to David Allen and GTD... a lot of common sense in this video, and I won't rehash all my notes here. Interesting to think about though- You lose speed when you are not relaxed. That is so true. You really need to be "in the moment" in order to be productive. My most productive days are days when I have a lot to do and set my personal brain aside, and just focus. When work is slow I tend to work more slowly, and I get distracted more easily.

Onward to Discovery--

I had never heard of "Mind mapping tools" before. I had no idea what that meant so I was curious to check these out. I didn't really understand the Del.ic.ious/mindmapping thing, but maybe I just wasn't relaxed enough to absorb it. I did like Gliffy better than Mindomo. It looked more versatile, and I liked the room diagrams and things like that. Seemed like it would be useful for reorganizing office space, or home furniture. I didn't feel motivated to sign up for either one.

Personal Web Pages- Never used Pageflakes, but it looked easy enough. I do use iGoogle, although I don't check it often, and I have the Yahoo thing set up on one of my pages. Mostly I use it to look at the current headlines in the news and check the weather.

Not much use for the PDF Converters. Goign to skip right over that, and I'm skipping over the Sticky Notes too.

Online Productivity- As I've said repeatedly, I use Google and I'm happy with that. Zoho looked very similar and okay. Basecamp looked interesting for collaboration and Lazybase looked okay too, but I'm not sure if I need them. Maybe if I was in a collaborative project with someone I could, but I like one stop shopping, and Google pretty much has everything.

Going back to Goal Setting- I liked "43 Things". I thought it was just going to be an expanded version of "23 things" but it was different. At first I told myself "maybe later I'll come back and set up an account" but then I started browsing around, and saw other people's things, and decided I could contribute to what others were doing so I set up an account just to do that. Maybe later I'll go back and try to set up a long-term goal. In the process, I dug up some material that makes me want to vent elsewhere. So getting updated on an old interest of mine, is leading me to another thing to put on my "to do" list. Sigh. So many distractions!!!

So getting back to the original questions of the exercise- I like Google and it's many applications. I can be in GMail, and have my calendar and tasks there with me. I can set up iGoogle and have a whole range of things in front of me. Or I can simply click on "Reader" or "Maps" or "Documents" to get to what I need. Read the news, plan activities for the weekend, send a thank you note to a friend, write a grocery list, or itemize what I need to get done at work, I can do it all under a single login if I want to. Easy, convenient, user-friendly, and free. Love it.

Now let's see if I can get this into the blog.... I did, and only had to make some minor edits to the formatting. Yay!!

Week 1, Assignment #1- About this Program

Backing up a bit-- our first assignment was just to get signed up, attend the kick-off session (if we could, or watch it online), etc.

Logging into the Moodle site, I did notice a few typos. "Survey Monkey" is misspelled, under Blog Rolls, and there is place where it says when the course will run, and the dates are all wrong--

http://moodle.nelinet.net/moodle/mod/assignment/view.php?id=570

I figure Erin has a life, and hasn't customized our Umass stuff for us, and probably just copied from another class she gave, but I do tend to notice stuff like this, and there it is....

I am hoping to "work ahead" and complete the 23 things before the 10 weeks are up. This week in particular is slow at work since they are doing a system upgrade to our Aleph program, so I should have lots of time to do this stuff.

Here we go!!!

Okay, we're kicking this thing off finally! I know some people are ahead of me, but I haven't seen their blogs yet.

Recently the Staff Training Committee invited Erin L., a consultant from NELINET, to come to the W.E.B. DuBois Library and get us started on learning some Web 2.0 technologies. Erin gave us a presentation last week, and got us all enthused to learn 23 things in 10 weeks. We're due to have this all done just before Labor Day I think.

This blog is part of that. Each participant is required to create a blog, and register it, to keep track of all we are learning, etc. Creating the blog itself and posting this first post is #3 on the list.

If you are reading this, you probably know all that already, and are in the class too. However, I do have it set up right now, that anyone can find this blog on the internet. I have another blog that I use as well. I'm hoping to learn how to make that blog better, and who knows? Maybe I will find a professional use for blogging as well.