Week 11

YouTube is definitely a fun website and you can easily get lost in it! I've mostly viewed it when others have suggested videos to look at and also to see my nephew play the sax in his ska band. I like the idea of posting a video of a tour of our library.

Here is a real-life application that came up just this past week. A student was looking for a video about game wardens in Africa to use in his presentation for the following week (of course). We had no such thing in our library and I could not find anything online to purchase. So I searched YouTube and found a 9-minute video clip posted by WildlifeDirect which showed the work of park rangers in Africa! Pretty amazing.

Oral History of Town Hill and East Hill in Wolcott, Vermont
This was a senior research project completed by Taylor Knopf, one of our Sterling graduates. It includes podcasts of her interviews. This is part of the Digital Communities Project at Sterling College that was set up by Pavel Cenkl and Ethan Darling.

Thank you for Vermont's 23 Things! It was a challenge to keep up sometimes and I didn't have time to explore everything that was posted, but I learned so much and came away with some new ideas. I hope that this site will stay up, so that we can refer back to it when needed.

802 Music Video

An amusing rap about Vermont

Week 10

Okay, I'm going to try to publish this Google Docs post to my blogspot. I've been taking some shortcuts by not exploring every link on the 23 Things lessons, in order to catch up, so I hope this works. I really did not know about these online productivity tools, though it makes perfect sense. I like the fact that you don't have to worry about transfer to different applications on other computers. My daughters have encountered this problem when they do class assignments on our home computer and then transfer them to school.

Wow, so many sites listed on the Web2.0 Awards! I'll need to go back and explore more at another time. I've just started looking at Meebo to begin a reference chat option for our library. Don't know how much use it would get as we are a very small community, but I'm interested in trying something new.

Week 9

I added a few favorites to the PBWiki. Our webmaster at Sterling set up a "closed" type of wiki (Writeboard) for us to contribute comments about various Web2.0 features that he and a professor introduced at a faculty meeting. I told him about Vermont's 23 Things and then later emailed the link. He was impressed! I've read, though not necessarily contributed to, other wikis, e.g. Vermont College and Special Libraries (Wetpaint)

Week 8

I learned about del.icio.us in a workshop last year and have been using it at work to tag articles and information that I come across on the web and want to save for future reference.

Technorati is pretty cool. Just had a quick look at it. We're going sailing in the BVI's in a few weeks, so I searched for British Virgin Islands and then coral reefs to learn about their current state.

Week 7

Okay, I couldn't resist the Lederhosen Dance Generator, given my German background and the fact that I actually did this dance as a teenager in a folkdance group!
http://www.huettengaudi.de/?dance=g478r63rr35k351i

If you want to try it yourself, here is the link to the generator:
http://www.huettengaudi.de/flash.php

I have been using LibraryThing to keep a running list of new titles arriving in our library and I love it. I've posted the link on our library page on the Sterling website. I'll have to explore adding the widget. Here is our link:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/pseidl

Week 5

I am really behind here ... trying to catch up! I've decided to set up a MySpace account, since my two teenage daughters have accounts with MySpace and I figure I can start out by practicing with them. Will they even want their mom as a "friend" on MySpace :-) Update: My 15-year-old has not accepted me as a friend and my 17-year-old has, but with "weird mom" as her comment. I probably won't keep this up much after the 23 Things. If I decide to post our college library, I would use Facebook. Not sure if it would be worth the time and effort, since we are such a small community anyway (around 100 students)