flickr toys trading card,
originally uploaded by pollyalida.

I’m definitely having a little too much fun with all this. Here’s my trading card created using 2 different graphic generators. I used Face Your Manga to create a fun avatar that doesn’t look at all like me. And then fd’s flickr toys to put that image on a trading card.

This could be a fun project for kids and staff. I was talking to a school librarian in a class earlier this week and she was thinking about having students use these cards as a way to present key information for reports on states, countries, biographies, etc. Also as “get to know you” cards at the beginning of the school year. Great ideas!

smiles all around!, originally uploaded by pollyalida.

Flickr is my all time favorite online place. I love photography and what better place to indulge that interest than a site built by photographers from all over the world. It’s just amazing to me how easily we can share the experiences of someone else’s life through their photos.

At it’s simplest, it’s just a really easy way to share photos with friends, family or your library community.  But what I’ve come to appreciate most has been the sense of community here. Through comments left on photos, people make connections and share the events in their lives and communities. And sometimes those connections spill over wonderfully into ‘real life’. And what do flickr friends do when they meet up? Take pictures of course!

Since I’ve been using flickr for a long time now, I used the time for this “thing” to look for features I hadn’t noticed before. Being a travel addict, it was fun to discover the PLACES feature. Here you’ll find pages for places all over the world, places big and small. Each page includes a map, selected photos, featured photographers and flickr groups about that place. What a terrific way to explore new destinations or our own back yards.

I use a wiki to organize resources for the classes I teach.  I used to maintain web pages with all the resources and host them on my own server. That was fine, but it wasn’t easy to make changes at the last minute or add resources that students discovered in classes. I love being able to update the pages immediately when someone finds a great new resource or runs into dead links.

And being able to open the wiki up for editing by class participants and other instructors is so handy. During the “taste of 2.0″ class that I teach, each participant creates a wiki page to get a feel for how they work and how easy it is to edit. They’re also welcome to add to and edit the other pages on the wiki. That’s a kind of trust that I wouldn’t have imagined having 10 years ago.

Wikis are easy to create, but do take a fair bit of tending! Mine is very much like my garden: a bit sprawling, a bit out of control, weeds here and there and gems that get hidden.  I would advise anyone starting a wiki to think through what they want the wiki to accomplish, who will be contributing to it and who will be the “master gardeners” taking responsibility for keeping it from getting too disorganized.

It’s also important to set up some initial structure to help contributors and readers find their way around the wiki. Even if you just put up some pages with headings and subheadings suggesting what might be added and where, that will help your contributors overcome that ‘blank page-itis’ that we all suffer from now and then.

One of my favorite library wiki projects is from the Ipswich Library in Queensland, Australia.  Remember When : Memories of Ipswich is “a collaborative, web based story writing project by Ipswich seniors in partnership with the Ipswich Library”.  Such a wonderful  way to for the library and participants to create on online collection of  memories, stories and photos from the town’s past.

Hard to pick just a few!

• BBC Radio 4 Ramblings with Clare Balding - Delightful interviews about walking through various parts of Great Britain. Strap on your walking shoes.
• SirsiDynix Institute - Terrific professional development events.
• OPAL Podcasts - More great interviews and professional development programs.
• Spark on CBC Radio - Technology and culture
• Fran Sorin - Quick gardening tips.

What I’ve learned so far is that I’m already behind! It is really hard to keep up with work, life and any sort of courses or learning opportunities. Particularly when it’s up to me to make sure I’m on schedule. I’m very deadline driven, so any sort of project without a deadline (like weeding the garden?) tends to get back-burnered.

Anyways, I’m determined to catch up! And even if a topic is already familiar to me, I’m going to take advantage of the learning time to explore new things about that “thing” and will consider this time my own personal indulgence time. Anything I learn can only help me with the teaching I do. And understanding what others are going through when they participate in a Learning 2.0 project will help me adminster similar programs.

I <3 podcasts bigtime. If anything is responsible for me getting healthier, it’s podcasts. The connection? Listening to something interesting gets me out walking and running more often than I would otherwise. And listening to library and technology related podcasts lets me do some professional development along the way.

My mp3 player is NOT an iPod - it’s an Archos 104 player. It’s similar in size to an iPod. But unlike an iPod, I can use it to play books downloaded from the library. And it has that all important bookmarking feature, which lets you put virtual bookmarks in multiple files so you can return to the right spot in any of them.

For this discovery exercise, I thought I’d use the time to upgrade Windows Media Player and clean up my virtual piles of podcasts and music. The latest version of WMP (version 11) still doesn’t have support for subscribing to podcasts. Not sure why, seems like there will be a growing demand for this.

I tried out several podcast retrieving programs that were supposed to work with WMP. The programs, iPodder and it’s later incarnation as Juice, just didn’t work. Rather than waste any more time, I’m still using iTunes to subscribe to podcasts. iTunes downloads the new episodes to my computer. Then WMP scans the hard drive for new files. It works well, but it’s not the most straightforward process.

I was also determined to finally learn a bit more about WMP, so finally spent a few minutes creating playlists and getting them synched properly to my mp3 player. This wasn’t hard, but I just needed to set aside a few minutes to do it and this was my excuse to take the time.

And that’s my podcast experience for ‘thing 3′!

(p.s. true confessions - I don’t run any more, but I can walk pretty darned fast)

I recall a time not too many years ago, that I kept running into very scary pages full of frightening code, with scary acronyms like xml and rss popping up in them. I knew I should figure it all out, but I kept saying “later”! I’m sure many people can relate to that feeling.

Finally, I took the plunge and instead of drowning, I’m swimming gleefully. I drew this silly sketch to use in classes that I teach, it shows a happy smiling me with all my favorite web sites sending me information. (it was inspired by a far more polished graphic!)

I’ve used bloglines, google reader, desktop feed readers, netvibes, igoogle, pageflakes and probably some other tools too. For now I use Google Reader the most. I keep a tab open in my browser and dip into it now and then throughout the day.

The advice that “You don’t have to read every single RSS item!” is key! Ignore the onslaught of info if you want to, dip in and read what looks interesting,
scan the headlines, save things that you want to refer back to.
Important stuff that you missed, will usually pop up in another place. We don’t all have to be on the cutting edge every minute (we used to call it the “bleeding edge” at my FPOW!)

How I keep up:

• Scan the headlines.Don’t read everything.
• Save items to come back to later (yeah, sometimes you won’t get back to them!)
• Mark everything as “read” now and then, (ah, doesn’t that feel good?)
• Don’t hesitate to add new stuff - better to add it than forget where that really useful resource is.
• That said, drop suscriptions that you never read
• Organize things into groups that work for you - “must read” “fun” “work” “personal” - whatever works for your life.

I love RSS, it’s the glue that lets us paste pieces of the web content wherever we want them. What do I mean by that?

For one thing, it makes it so easy to get all the news and info that I want to keep up with, constantly feeding into my Google Reader account. It keeps me ’stuck’ to all those sources without ever having to seem them out.

Nifty RSS tools (like feed2js) make it possible to ‘paste’ constantly updated information on our web sites. Little boxes full of the latest news headlines, book reviews, blog posts, events, etc. - all automatically updating without our help. Nice.

And how about the ability for us to get our library info out into the community?
RSS feeds of library booklists, events, blogs, topical information - we can use RSS to paste that content on our town web sites, on the pages of community organizations, businesses, schools, into library customer’s RSS readers and so on. That keeps those people and organizations constantly glued to our content and info.

And along those same lines, one of my favorite use of RSS - getting content out of our library magazine databases and into the hands of users. Students doing research can paste RSS feeds for subject searches into their own NetVibes (Pageflakes, iGoogle, Google Reader…) accounts and get frequent updates on the latest articles on their topics. Or use subject searches from databases to put something like the lastest consumer research articles on a subject guide page on your library web site. I call it “exposing your databases”! (the photo shows results from a database search showing up on a web page.)

RSS = magic = better connections

Hi, I’m Polly Farrington, guess that means I’m not being anonymous here! I’m a librarian without a library. I run a training/consulting company and work with librarians, schools and library systems. I’ve been teaching technology classes throughout the US for the last 12 years, after 17 years working in a variety of positions at an academic library.

I’m hoping some of the school library folks I work with will take advantage of this terrific opportunity and join in this learning 2.0 project.

We’re also hoping to run a similar project for one of my clients sometime soon, so I thought this would be a fun way to get a feel for how the program works from the learner’s point of view.

Cheers!