Week 16: Wrap Up

Wow, made it! I'm really glad I participated in 23 things Kansas. I consider myself pretty tech savvy, but I have to say, I definitely learned more than I thought I would. Every week, even if I was already familiar with a tool, I learned something new about it. Or, just the occasion to go back and rediscover, in a hands on way, was really useful. Some tools were completely new-- like animoto & screencast.com. They were refreshing solutions out there to the more complicated camtasia or movie editing software. I didn't produce any awesome products to display or revolutionize my department. However, I feel pretty empowered that I have a few more tools under my belt that will come in handy as I proceed with my work. It was really fun to see others in my library excited and feel empowered as well. Again, I'm very glad to be a part of this community. I wonder what comes next....

Week 15: Wikis

What a good idea to have everyone edit a wiki. Especially good to see how easily Wikipedia can be manipulated. There is great good and potential for harm in that fact. I read an article a few years ago about a researcher comparing wikipedia to encyclopedia brittanica. Wikipedia fared surprisingly good. Good to know there is some stability there. It certainly is handy- though not always reliable.
Collaboration is definitely more and more important-- wiki's are good tools to foster collaboration. I appreciated the Library Best Practices wiki. We all benefit when others are invest time & effort and are willing to share. Like so many of these tools, we benefit from the mass of people using them. Working on my own manual wiki to be used in our department... Here's my entry on the 23 things wiki:
http://23thingskansas.wetpaint.com/page/Amanda+McConnell

Week 14: Library Thing, Shelfari, Etc.

I really like Shelfari the best for the visual bookshelf it provides. I could care less about cataloging a collection, so I didn't find Library Thing that interesting for that reason. I was still amazed about all the the information I could gain through Library Thing though. I liked the Zeitgeist page, that really highlighted all the information & data you could gain through the mass nature of social cataloging. I was disappointed that Shelfari didn't have a better facebook application. While I had set this up originally, trying to install it on my facebook site this time didn't work at all. Several others had issues as well, with little response from Shelfari allowing other applications to dominate there. I also appreciated examples of libraries using goodreads to enhance the opac. I think library users would have great interest in book tools like shelfari. What great tools to expand the way people connect & interact with books and other readers.

Memories of Peru

Memories of Peru

Week 13: Slidesharing

Wow, this week was fun! I used slideshare to share quick power point presentations. A little too shy to add too much audio, but worked well without even. This is a tool I know I’m going to come back to again and again. Then really loved discovering animoto! I had heard the name at the Unconference last year, but had never taken the time to really seek it out and see what it could do. Wow. I think I may have to upgrade to a pro account, so I can really play more with this nifty tool. In the next post you can see a quick show I put together.

Week 12: Screencasting

All righty, I did it. Here's a link to the quick screencast I created: how to set up a new game of scrabble

This was really fun. I'd used Camtasia a long time ago in the past. I was really excited to see just how easy using screencast.com was! Super cool. Definitely requires some planning to make a good screencast. The example I provided above will win no awards, but I feel prepared to be able to use this tool when the next opportunity comes. I latched on to the suggestion about how good this could be for troubleshooting computer troubles-- communicating with IT staff. I also really liked the screencast example of how easy it was to take a snapshot of your screen and quickly email it. Sweet.

Week 10: Video

Okay, first I'll embed someone else's video, but I'm still going to try the whole process from start to finish. It's coming...

But for now, check out someone else's work:




Ummm… yeah. Still working with premiere video editing software. Fun, but its been awhile since I’ve seen it, trouble figuring out the settings, but its coming…