THING15 Web 2.0, library 2.0, and the Future of Libraries

I like the idea of changing the "mind set" of librarians and libraries. I am from the old school; when I started, we had card catalogs and research was done with books. We have come a long way baby! Now we are in an explosion of technology that almost grows faster than we can keep up.
According to the video " A Vision of Students Today", kids will only read 8 books but they will read 2300 web pages and read 1281 facebook paages. They spend 3 1/2 hours on line. They write only 42 pages for class but will write 500 e-mails. These students of today must be multitaskers. They are also preparing for jobs that may not exist right now. I can't read a book and listen to music at the same time. But thses kids have grown up with all of this technology around them. They adapt quickly to new things. I go to my 24 year old sons when I have a problem with the computer.
Dr. Wendy Schultz said in her article "To a Temporary Place in Time," that libraries are communities. She futher says that in a 2.0 world that the "library is everywhere, barrier free, and participatory." We the librarians will become the "experienced tour guides." I like that---we can be seen as helping travelors as they begin to chart their jouney.

THING 14 TECHNORATI

According to Wikipedia Technorati indexes over 112 million weblogs. The name points to the technological version of literati or intellectuals. I listened to the people of technorati talk about their site. They like to think that they track conversations. They are interested in what a regular person has to say for example rather than a critic. they feel that this site lets people connect with one another. One of the men thought it was about the human experience. I enjoyed looking at the video of all of these people talking about their site.

I searched for school library learning 2.0 and found 1652 results. I looked at a few but to see all of them would be daunting. I also found lots of posts on the library 2.0 "things" that we are doing here in Spring Branch. In fact I found a couple of our people in the blog section. I also looked at the top 100 blogs, top searches, top 100 blogs by authority, and top videos. again, I got lost in this site with several hours flying by. Oh well, back to the real world.

Thing 13 Del.icio.us

This is not just a place to find delicious food although you can search the food tags
Del.icio.us is a place that lets you oraganize your bookmarks or any other other places you want to save. This site looks easy to use and is nicely put together. I liked the "tags to watch" area. I looked in the library, technology, travel, and google tags. I got caught up in the google and recipes tags. You could lose hours here.
Another place I looked was Digg which is the same kind of site but in this one the user is in charge of which sites are the most popular. You can rate story with a thums up or down button. You can contribute by submitting an interesting article, video, or podcast. It will appear in "upcoming stories". Another feature is a friends share folder that is kinda like my space or facebook.

THING 12 ROLLYO

I started out very slow with this site so I looked at what others had done with their Rollyo. After that I got excited. I began to think of how many times that I had worked with teachers to find web sites for a particular lesson. I had to type all of it up and hand it out to each student. Rollyo would be the perfect place to put all of these sites and the kids would love it. The teacher or I could put these rollyos on our web sites. One of my history teachers is a big library user and I am always working with her on research. We just finished working on a World War II unit so I thought I would creat a World War II site on the Rollyo. It was fun and easy to do. I could do searches from there such as "home front" and "women in the war". I plan on showing several teachers how to use this.

I still like to use I Keep Bookmarks as well. It kinds works on the same principal. Several people can add to this site at the same time if several teachers are working on the same unit.

Thing 11

Library Thing

Ok--don't throw me into the briar patch!!! I could get lost in this one. It is just books, books, books--my favoorite thing. I loved it because it is a site for book lovers. I started making my list and it could go on forever. I liked the Zeitgeist to see all of the places you could go such as 25 most reviewed books, top 25 authors, top books, and others. I got lost in the groups, so many to see and read. All in all a most excellent site. I am now reading the new John Grisham boo, The Appeal. Also I added 2 of the new James Patterson books. He is my new craze. I love reading his books.

Thing 10

I had some trouble getting some of these sites to work so I got frustrated. The Sites were blocked from school and when I tried at home I had trouble again. I will try again tonight. I did use the Image Chief to make a sign which was fun. I had already made a trading card with another "thing" and I shared that with my 7th grade teachers to use with their Texas History charactors unit. The teachers were excited and they thought the kids would have alot of fun using it. They plan on using this technology.

Thing 9

I found that there were lots of things to go through with this"thing". I am not sure how many of them I would actually use, but I did like a few of them. Bloglines was easy to use and you can search for your interests or can create your rss feeds like google reader. It seemed to be the easiest to use of all of them. Of course google rules the world and google blog search is easy to use. Everyone knows how to navigate through any of the google sites. Technorati was intersting but it seems to have so much stuff on its home page---just lots to go through. Cool Cat Teacher was a good site that I would recommend to my teachers as a helpful place to go. I liked School Library Blogs as a specific place for librarians to use.I did not like Topix because the comments seemded to get to radical and I got tired of it quickly. I though Syndic 8 was hard to use. I got bogged down in this going through all of these sites. But I can see the usefulness of some of them.