Exercise 23

Ow! Ouch! Ow! (That's me hurting my arm patting myself on the back, turning myself black and blue.)

I am really glad I decided to participate is this program. And thanks to the "powers that be" (my supervisor and my director) for letting me.

1. What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey? This is hard to pin down. I think Flickr, RSS feeds and del.icio.us. In fact, I plan on going back and reinvestigating many of the exercises to learn even more and incorporate them into my daily activities.

2. How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals? It has furthered my goals by allowing me to explore things in a way that I probably wouldn't have taken the time for on my own.

3. Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you? Not really. I still don't see any use for me personally in blogs or podcasting, but I do see now that they could be useful in keeping students up to date on library or college happenings.

4. What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept? I can't think of anything. I think the do it yourself pace and format was great for me. And some of the others seemed to like being able to pick and choose which step they performed when, although I liked going in the order they were presented.

And last but not least…
If we offered another discovery program like this in the future, would you choose to participate?That would be a resounding YES!!!

Exercise 22

I think NetLibrary and Project Gutenberg are both great. I know that sometimes our students shy away from using the ebooks, but I think it would be great for research. Personally, I don't think I would want to sit and read a novel on the computer. I would much rather curl up on my sofa or in my bed with a book. I also do not have any of the hand-held devices that would allow you to carry it around with you, although I can see the advantages of that.

Our BI people are talking up the NetLibrary and other ebooks in the library classes, so maybe they will get the usage they deserve.

Exercise 21

http://learnchinesepod.com/feed/ Maybe I will try this podcast to learn Chinese. I found it on Yahoo Podcasts.

Or maybe this Computers in Libraries series would be better. http://groups.blogdigger.com/rss.jsp?id=1725 although it does take forever to load.

Exercise 20

We'll see if this works. I can see some uses for YouTube but I will probably not use it much. If this worked it was fairly easy to do. You can probably offend a lot of people very easily.

Exercise 19

To explore the sites from the Web 2.0 awards list, I decided to try the Health division. The winner PEERtrainer was not what I expected. It is for weight loss support, whereas I was looking for health information.

Medstory, the second place winner, was oriented more toward those who understand the medical jargon.

With the third place winner, Healia, I hit the jackpot. It is oriented to ordinary people like me, but with authentic medical sites such as the National Institute of Health and St. John's.

Each of the has its own particular niche and specific users. For me, Healia wins hands down.

Exercise 18 Part 2

I think Zoho.com is a good idea for people who send many documents through email to people that may have different word processing or spreadsheet software. This seem pretty easy and intuitive to use. I think it would take using it more than the 15 minutes that I have played with it to discover all the things you can and cannot do with it, but unless you need a powerful word processing package, this seems more than adequate.

Exercise 18

Cats

Did you ever wonder what a cat was thinking? If not, you have never sat and watched one. It is easy to put words in a cat's mouth. It is harder to know if they are anywhere close to what a cat is thinking, but it sure is fun. Sometimes one will sit absolutely still (except maybe the tip of her tail) and stare at a spot on the wall or ceiling or anywhere. No matter how hard you look, nothing can be seen. Then she will look at you like she is saying, "What are you looking at? You must be crazy, because there is nothing there." Other times she will look at you like she is laughing and saying, "Ha ha, made you look!!"

Our two cats are about a year old and sometimes they decide they are still kittens. One of the two likes to jump on my back whenever I bend over. This might not be so bad if she didn't weigh about 10 pounds and want to lie down on my back, rather than getting off when I am ready to stand up. Try getting a 10 pound weigh with claws off of your back!

When we got the kittens, we got two so that our children would each have one. It is true that they each claim one of the cats, but the cats don't necessarily agree. Sometimes they do actually seem to claim the child that claims them, but other times they seem to claim the opposite one. And then other times, they will have nothing to do with either, and will claim one or both of us instead.

I guess the old saying about the difference between cats and dogs is true. When you call a dog, he will come running, but when you call a cat, he will take a message and get back with you later (maybe).