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.

Cleaning up!

I've decided that I like Google Reader better than Bloglines so I just went through and opened up all my Bloglines feeds and decided what to move over to my Reader account and what to just delete. Do I really need Dilbert? No, I didn't think so. I don't need LOL Cats either as cute as it is.
I also read Disabled Kitty's post about Delicious. I have been really bad about putting my bookmarks into Delicious. I have many, many bookmarks on my work computer, and I very rarely take the time to put them into Delicious. The day will come when I will be out with my laptop and I will be cursing myself for this.
My newest goal is to try to figure out how to read things offline, and compose responses and blog posts offline too. I don't think this is going to be easy, but it's a goal. I don't sleep well at night, so maybe I could do a little reading at 2am. That could be nice. A netbook is still on my xmas list as well. :-)

Another thing I did this week was start filtering my Facebook settings so I don't get all the Mafia Wars stuff that my friends post, and other applications too. I enjoy playing games on my lunch break, but I can do without the notifications and status updates from my friends and the applications.

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.

Week 10, #22 Social Networking

Wow, there certainly are a lot of social network sites. MySpace seems to be on the way out from what I read, and FaceBook is very popular now with people I know. I'm not sure if I'm "professional enough" to be on LinkedIn.

I looked at the 350+ sites- wow! How do people and organizations choose? I think I'll just stick to what I've got. I was glad to see that they were organized at least. I've done the BookCrossing one before, a few years ago. I left some books in various places, but I don't know if they ever got found or not. I can't remember my log in information to go back and check.

I am starting to think the Commoncraft videos are kind of cool. Maybe I've seen too many of them. Did anyone watch "Zombies in Plain English". Well done, and funny.

The commentary about how users don't necessarily WANT the library to be on Facebook or Twitter is interesting. When people log into Facebook they aren't going there to do research. They are going there to see what their friends are doing, find out what their Hippie Name is, play Bejeweled, or Mafia Wars, or post photos of their friends and family. They aren't going to Facebook to find out info they need for their research paper, or to get a list of the New York Times Bestsellers for the week. However, Facebook is useful for librarians, and everyone else as a social network. It helps us to connect with our peers. If a librarian in Maine ends up connected to a librarian in Oregon, and they decide to get married. Maybe they will have a mutual friend in Kansas who knows of a library that is looking to hire 2 librarians. Yeah, right! But it could happen. Isn't that what CommonCraft said that social networks were all about? Extending your relationships. It might not be to our patrons though, it might be to our peers. And maybe one of our peers has posted a link to a blog about how great Cataloguers are, and how much he appreciates them. Sharing links is another great use of Facebook as well, and that's useful to all of us I think.

Week 5, PLAY!!!

Rolling right along, I almost missed this! It's not a numbered assignment, and didn't show up on my nicely printed to-do list.

Okay, I've spent a couple of hours playing now. I messed around with the Avatars on Yahoo. Not sure if I am allowed to use the Yahoo Avatars on Facebook, but I tried. I also found an Avatar thing called DoppleMe, not nearly as good. Tried to put that on Facebook but failed I think. Oh well.

Checked out Rollyo. It's just not for me. What can I say? It's too much work and I don't like it.

LibraryThing- hey, we're already there! I think this could be very useful for the serious reader, someone who is organized, etc. I see UMass Libraries is on it, Maxine S is there, and maybe some others too. Cool!... but I don't need it for anything. I'm too much of a peon. If I need a book review I go to Amazon or the New York Times Books. Oh well.

-Nice to see more and more blogs coming along too. I just saw a nice one done on WordPress that I liked. Seems like people are slowly coming around and getting going. I'm sure more than a few of us skipped ahead a little and set up Facebook accounts too. :-)

Week 4, Assignment #8 First Clip

http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs_display?sub=2787044&site=12846126

This whole thing about how hard it can be to find things on the internet sometimes. A conversation on Twitter at ALA, and how it got archived and now it's hard to find and there was good information in there etc.... well I haven't gotten as far as Twitter yet, but I can see some truth to this. I have heard this kind of comment before too. When you don't own the content, when you aren't hosting the site, etc... you can't control the information. When you have your own website and you post something, it stays put. However, if you put something on Facebook or Twitter, or MySpace or whatever, and then the people who run those services decide to do a reformat or if they go down or whatever, you lose your stuff and have to start all over again etc etc etc. It's something to consider. There are lots of places to put your stuff. Facebook might be popular now, but if something better comes along, or if Facebook does something stupid, then you have to start all over again. Just a thought.