Naviagating New Technologies - 23 Things Details

Welcome to PLAN’s Navigating New Technologies - 23 Things program & blog. Chances are if you’ve found your way here you’re either:

a. a PLAN member who’s participating in the Navigating New Technologies Challenge.

b. interested in learning about and playing around (yes, playing is allowed in libraries) with some new web 2.0 tools that will help you expand your information literacy toolbox.

- or -

c. are just interested in earning a flash drive and the possibility of winning other cool prizes (Nintendo Wii, MP3 Player, or Digital Camera)!

Either way… I’m glad you’re here!!

Navigating New Technologies - 23 Things is an online learning program that encourages members to learn more about emerging technologies on the web that are changing the way people, society, and libraries access information and communicate with each other.

Over the course of this program, this website will highlight “23 Things” and discovery exercises to help members become familiar with blogging, RSS news feeds, tagging, wikis, podcasting, online applications, and video and image hosting sites.

To familiarize yourself with this project, be sure to read the About page. The FAQs should answer most of your questions about this program. If not, send me an email.

So fasten your seat belts, grab your mouse and get ready for a discovery adventure… and remember, it’s OK to play in the library and have fun!

Among libraries, lifelong learning is one of those core values we shelve our books by. So it makes sense that before we embark on this new online learning and discovery journey that we should take a few minutes to review a few habits that can assist in creating lifelong learners.

These habits, called the Seven and 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners, will provide you with a refresher on what it means to be a lifelong learner.

This program has been borrowed with permission from Helene Blowers at Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County (Thank You Very Much Helene!). At the end of the tutorial, Lori Reed at Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County invites her staff to send Questions and Comments to the We Value Your Opinion Link. This goes to her at PLCMC. Please do not use this link. Instead, send an email to me.

Discovery Exercise:

Make sure you have headphones or speakers attached to your computer.
Open up the 7 & 1/2 Habits online tutorial and view the online tutorial.

As you watch and listen, write down which habit among the 7 & 1/2 that is easiest for you and which is hardest. You will use your personal blog (which you will set up next) to post your thoughts about lifelong learning.

Have fun! If you haven’t jumped on board yet, it’s never too late to become a lifelong learner.

PS: The tutorial is actually 14 minutes instead of 5 minutes.

PSS: If you can’t get to the contract she tells you about on the podcast, check your popup blocker and temporarily allow popups.

Now that you’ve done some exploring around this website and understand how this program will work, it’s time to setup your very own personal blog to begin recording your thoughts, discoveries and exercises in. For this program, I recommend that you use Blogger*, a popular free online blog hosting service that is extremely easy to use.

Creating a blog using Blogger takes just three steps:

1. Create an account (view screenshot)
2. Name your blog (view screenshot)
3. Select your template. (view screenshot)

Once you’ve created your blog here are two important things to know:

Step 1. To add posts: The maintenance interface that you will use to add posts, edit or change the step-up your blog is accessed online at http://www.blogger.com Be sure to write down your login and password.
To view your blog: Your blog address is http://(xxxx).blogspot.com, (xxxx)=the unique identifier you entered in

Step 2. Be sure to also write down your blog address.

If you run into problems or would like more information about blogs and using Blogger here are some discovery resources you can use:

Freevlog’s Quicktime Tutorial: Setup a Free Blogger Blog Note: Ignore the opening comments about downloading Firefox if your PC doesn’t have it. This will work in Explorer just fine.
Blogger’s Quick Tutorial

OK — Now, it’s your turn…

Discovery Exercise:

Setup a blog for yourself through Blogger.

Add a test post or two.
Note: Use one of your test posts to create an entry about the habits among the 7 and 1/2 lifelong learning habits that is easiest and hardest for you & why.

Have fun!!!!

IMPORTANT NOTE: How you choose to identify yourself on your blog is your choice. You can blog under a screen name, anonymously, or as yourself. However, in order to qualify for the prizes, you will need to send me an email so I can add your blog to PLAN’s Participants Blog.

~Please make sure all of your blog posts are clear and contain substance or insights into what you’ve learned. And if you don’t know how to measure “substance”, then your posts should be no less than 100-125 words.~

If you’ve made it this far, you have already complete three things on the list.

In order to qualify for the flash drive, you must do two things:
1. Register your blog with me by sending me an email, ahedgecock@plan.lib.fl.us with your blog link and name so I can add it to our Participants Blog.

2. You also need to record your progress on each of the 23 Things on your blog.

Reminder:
Clearly identify each week and each exercise in your entries.

PLAN will track and verify your progress. Remember, you only have 19 more to go!
Have FUN

Photo sharing websites have been around since the 90’s, but it took a small startup site called Flickr to catapult the idea of “sharing” into a full blown online community. Within the past year, Flickr has become the fastest growing photo sharing site on the web and is known as one of the first websites to use keyword “tags” to create associations and connections between photos and users of the site.

For this discovery exercise, you are asked to take a good look at Flickr and discover what this site has to offer. Find out how tags work, what groups are, and all the neat things that people and other libraries are using Flickr for:

Discovery Resources:
- Flickr Learn More Tour (6 steps)
- Mediamazine Flickr Tutorials
- Flickr: Popular Tags Interesting: Last 7 days
- Flickr Services (3rd party applications & mashups)

Discovery Exercise:

In this discovery exercise, you have two options…

Take a good look around Flickr and discover an interesting image that you want to blog about. Be sure to include either a link to the image or, if you create a Flickr account, you can use Flickr’s blogging tool to add the image in your post. Another option you have for including images in your post is to use Blogger’s photo upload tool.

– OR –

If you’re up to an easy challenge … create a Free account in Flickr and use your location’s digital camera to capture a few pictures of something in your branch. Upload these to your Flickr account and tag at least one of the images “Navigating New Technologies - 23 Things” and mark it public. Then create a post in your blog about your photo and experience. Be sure to include the image in your post. Once you have a Flickr account, you have two options for doing this: through Flickr’s blogging tool or using Blogger’s photo upload feature.

PS: A quick word about photo posting etiquette - When posting identifiable photos of other people (especially minors) it is advisable to get the person’s permission before posting their photo in a publicly accessible place like Flickr. Never upload pictures that weren’t taken by you (unless you have the photographer’s consent) and always give credit when you include photos taken by someone else in your blog.

Like many web 2.0 sites, Flickr has encouraged other people to build their own online applications using images found on the site. Through the use of APIs (application programming interfaces), many people have created third party tools and mashups* that use Flickr images. Here are just a sampling of a few …

Mappr - allows you to take Flickr images and paste them on a map

Flickr Color Pickr - lets you find public photos in Flickr that match a specific color.

Montagr – create a photo mosaic from photos found on Flickr.
Discover more mashups, web apps, and Flickr tools.

Discovery Exercise:

Your discovery exercise for this “thing” is to:

Explore some of the fun Flickr mashups and 3rd party tools that are out there.
Create a blog post about one that intrigues you.

One very cool mashup is FD Toys’ and look for Trading Card Maker. You can make you own Library Trading Card and there’s a ton of librarians out there that have created their own.

Here is one I made of John, our Tech Guy.

So have some fun discovering and exploring some neat little apps. And if you’re up to the challenge while you’re at it, why not create a trading card of your own. (I did and it is really easy)

* Mashup Note: Wikipedia offers some great articles that explain mashups. Basically they are hybrid web applications that take features from one application (like Flickr) and mash it up with another (like a map). In this example, you get Mappr (http://mappr.com).

For this thing, simply blog about anything technology related. Yes, anything that relates to technology! You just need to share a few thoughts.

PS: Also be sure add at least one comment to another participant’s blog. That’s what online communities are all about - connecting and communication.
You can also leave comments here! Let us know what you think.

You’ve heard of RSS? You’ve seen those small funny tags on websites? You’ve heard co-workers and acquaintances swear by it, but still have no idea what RSS is? Well don’t worry, according to a recent survey you’re still in the majority, but this is changing rapidly. In the information world, RSS is not only revolutionizing the way news, media and content creators share information, but it also is swiftly changing the way everyday users are consuming information.

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and is a file format for delivering regularly updated information over the web.

Just think about the websites and news information sources you visit every day. It takes time to visit those sites and scour the ad-filled and image-heavy pages for just the text you want to read, doesn’t it? Now imagine if you could visit all those information sources and web pages in just one place and all at the same time … without being bombarded with advertising… without having to search for new information on the page you’d already seen or read before… and without having to consume a lot of time visiting each site individually. Would that be valuable to you? Well, it’s available now through a newsreader and RSS.

This week’s discovery exercises focus on learning about RSS news feeds and setting up a Bloglines account (a free online newsreader) for yourself to bring your feeds together.

Discovery Resources:

The Common Craft Show - RSS in Plain English

CNET Video: RSS – Feel the Need for Feeds (3:32) – a good over view of what RSS is and the benefits to users.

Feed Me: A gentle introduction to Internet feeds - a good tutorial from Palinet, a library cooperative

Using Bloglines Tutorial (how to keep up with dozens of blogs everyday) – This online tutorial walks you through how to setup a Bloglines account and add newsfeeds. Follow Steps 1 to 3 to set up your Bloglines account. Steps 4 – 9 are optional and cover how to subscribe to different types of feeds (podcasts, Flickr albums, etc)

Adding RSS Feeds to Bloglines - A short YouTube video that was created showing how to add feeds.

Additional Bloglines news feed subcription information (screenshot image)

Discovery Exercise:

Follow the discovery resources above to learn more about RSS and newsreaders.

Create a free online Bloglines account for yourself and subscribe to at least 10 newsfeeds to your reader. See Using Bloglines Tutorial steps 1-3 for instructions.

Newsfeeds:

Navigating New Technologies participant blog feeds - Subscribe to feed of other participants. This is as easy as typing the blog URL into the subscribe field in Bloglines. Try it, it’s easy!

Then try adding a few other types of news feeds from news sources. (Select at least 3 from the list below to subscribe to)

Yahoo! News Feed

PLAN’s Blog Postcards from the Cracker Coast

Northwest Florida News

Reader’s Club new review feeds

Unshelved - Library cartoon feed

Create a post in your blog about this exercise. Optional: If you’re up to the challenge, you can provide the URL address to your public bloglines account (find where to find this below)

Don’t know what to blog about? Think about these questions:

What do you like about RSS and newsreaders?
How do you think you might be able to use this technology in your work or personal life?
How can libraries use RSS or take advantage of this new technology?

How to find your public Bloglines URL:

1. Look on the right side of the screen and scroll down to locate the heading Publish, Share & Save.

2. Click on Share your blogroll and locate the public URL.

3. Be sure to add this as part of your post to demonstrate your completion of this activity.

In conclusion …Here is link to PLAN’s public Blogline’s account: http://www.bloglines.com/public/PanhandleLibraryAccessNetwork

Why have a public account? To share blog rolls with others, of course. That’s how the Navigating New Technologies participants list is updated; it’s powered through a public blogroll.
PS: Once you tackle this discovery exercise, you’ve tackled the most difficult one of the whole 23.

Now that you have a newsreader (your Bloglines account), you can begin adding other newsfeeds that interest you. There are several ways you can locate newsfeeds:

When visiting your favorite websites — look for news feed icons that indicate the website provides it. Often a feed icon will be displayed somewhere in the navigation bar of the site. (Here’s an image that contains a sampling of several feed icons).

Use Blogline’s Search tool - Bloglines recently expanded search tool lets you search for news feeds in addition to posts, citations and the web. Use the Search for Feeds option to locate RSS feeds you might be interested in.

Other Search tools that can help you find feeds:

Feedster - One of the largest collections of RSS feeds, Feedster lets you search for feeds in three categories: news, blogs & podcasts

Topix.net - This search tool allows you to locate recent newsfeed items based upon keyword or phrase searching. The tool focuses specifically on news and media outlet RSS feeds for information, not weblogs.

LisZen - This blog is dedicated to finding library and information science search engines.

Syndic8.com - Syndic8 is an open directory of RSS feeds that contains thousands of RSS feeds that users have submitted.

Technorati - Technorati is a popular blog finding tool that lets you search for blogs. Since RSS feeds are inherent to all blogging tools, Technorati Blog Search can help you find RSS feeds for topic specific blogs you may be interested in.
Additonal Resource: Technorati Tutorial on finding and adding your blog

Discovery Excercise:

Explore some of the search tools noted above that can help you locate some news feeds.

Create a blog post about your experience. Don’t know what to blog about? Here some questions to think about …

Which method of finding feeds did you find easiest to use? Which Search tool was the easiest for you? Which was more confusing? What kind of useful feeds did you find in your travels? Or what kind of unusual ones did you find? What other tools or ways did you find to locate newsfeeds?

EXTRA STUFF — Feed icon information:
In February of last year, the adoption of a standard feed icon among websites and browsers finally began to assist in stopping the madness and confusion caused by so many variations. So far this icon has been adopted by many websites and browers, including Opera, FireFox, and IE 7.0 where it displays in the address bar. For more information about this emerging new standard, see Feedicons.com

Generators? No, I’m not talking about those gas powered back-up things. The generators I’m talking about allow you to easily manipulate image and graphics to create fun images like these:

For this discovery exercise, I just want you to have fun. Find a few fun image or text generators to play around with and write a post in your blog about one of your favorites and display the result. Often adding the image you mocked up to your blog is as simple as copying and pasting code that the page provides. If not, you may just need to right click on the image and then save it to your hard drive before using Blogger’s image button to add it to your post.

If you’re having difficulty getting your image added to a post in your blog, ask a co-worker for help or send me an email.

Discovery Resources:

The Generator Blog
Add Letters
FD Toys
Also try searching for online generators, text generators or image generators!

Discovery Exercise:

1. Play around with some image generators and find one that you like.

2. Post the result of your discovery process in your blog.
Note: Be sure to include a link to the image generator itself, so other participants can discover it too.

So take some time and have fun with this exercise. And remember to be tasteful too!

P.S. FD Flickr Toys and Image Chef were used to make the images on this page. And just in case you were wondering, the top picture is my cute baby Braden and the magazine cover is Bill.