Final Post

When I started this Web 2.0 course I thought myself very web-savvy, and was skeptical that I would learn a great deal. Yet there was a credulity there too...

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." - Slavoj Žižek

I didn't know I didn't know so much! I found the Google reader and Delicious applications solved my very common problem of losing sites important sites because I had bookmarked them to browsers. It saves me having to Google them every time. I also appreciated taking the time to learn about RSS feeds, something which had confused me in the past.

Finally, I found one of the most rewarding aspects of the course to be keeping this blog. Many universities now use blogs as a medium for tracking and recording learning processes and I now see what an excellent form it is: to have access to all fellow learners records and links and solutions to problems! Great work everyone!

Week 9: Vids, pods, etc

Youtube:
I was familiar with Youtube and faced no problems embedding the following clip, which features Brewster Kahle talking about the Digital Library he is building. Because Youtube clips are so easy to embed and link to from other sites and are widely accessible as far as web browsers go they are great for educational purposes (such as the clips we have been viewing in this course).



Podcasts:
Last year I became I great fan of podcasts. An excellent site for short fiction podcasts is the New Yorker website and for superb author talks visit the NYPL website. These are excellent examples of readers and writers taking advantage of digital forms, and it makes perfect sense for libraries to create podcasts of the talks and seminars that take place.

eBooks, Audiobooks and Downloadable Media:
I was already familiar with ACL's eBooks and Audiobooks collection but I made a free account and found some items that looked interesting. I must say I am much more drawn to short stories and essays when it comes to books in digital form. I think shorter texts suit this form very well. Also language courses work well in these forms.

Week 8: Googlemaniac

Part I:
Today I learned that you can make Powerpoint presentations with Googledocs. I suppose they're no longer Powerpoint though, and those word processing documents are no longer Word documents. Soon everything we make on a PC will be able to have a Google prefix. We will GoogleBuzz on Googlespace and Googlemark it to our GoogleCals.

Behold my Googlepoint presentation:



Part II:
I browsed through the award-winning Web Applications and found Colorblender, an online colour mixer which I liked, because the blog interface only offers so many colours and I like to have more choice. For example, there was no HOT PINK! A great improvement for link colours, wouldn't you agree? And I can see how this its great for people who like to know what the HTML codes for all the variations of colours are.

Week 7: Wikiwiki

Before this exercise, my familiarity with wikis was solely through my use of Wikipedia. Being a skeptic, I don't take everything to be the whole truth and nothing but the truth, however, it is very useful for finding out general information and it is on and will remain on my Del.icio.us site forever.
Today was the first time I have contributed to a wiki, the Learning 2.0 SandBox wiki . I must say it was a dreadfully straightfoward task. Yet I did find that the whole layout of the wiki rather like a messy desk used by many and tidied by few, and I imagine that the more people who contribute to a wiki, the more chaotic it must become. Perhaps wikis are better suited to very specific topics, to keep things easy to navigate minimize sprawl...

Week 6: Claims to infame

Unfortunately, the technorati site is not very appealing - jam-packed with Before and After ads claiming to improve your physical defects! I just claimed my blog and got the hell out of there. Many thanks to XXXholic, with their blogpost on how to actually do this.

I didn't have any luck finding "Learning 2.0" on any of the blogs or directory. But looking at XXXholic, perhaps it wasn't just me... However, all is not gone to waste, my account of much tastier bookmarks can be reached here.

I wonder whether if once my 'claim' has been approved, one could search for my blog on technorati and see my criticism of it, drowning in a swamp of Before and After ads. I'm not sure if I could bear to find out.

Week 6: Delicious chaotic order

I set up a delicious account and imported all remotely interesting saved bookmarks from my Internet Explorer. Tagging them is a bit strange because what's obviously relevant to one person is completely different to another. Take the TED talks website for example, which has been saved over 43,800 times (unsurprisingly because its fantastic). Some people get all pragmatic about the formal aspects, tagging things like "conference" and "speeches", some call it "education", whereas other users tag it simply "psychology". I guess it is the mere quantity of users that create any kind of order in this ever-expansive mass of tags...

I think delicious would be beneficial to categorising sites relating to more specific topics, like shopping for a specific product, or looking for a particular field of psychology, because the tags would be like a more complex way of organising than putting them in folders in your Browser's "Favourites" bar. They can be in multiple folders, so to speak.

Week 4: Tweet treats

I signed up to Twitter and am currently following 4 tweeters. Initial response: It seems to be like the facebook feed except with famous-famous people, rather than people-who-should-be-famous-who-are-your-friends.

At this point I can't imagine why anyone would follow an average non-famous tweeter. But again, like facebook feed, its a good way to advertise events and find out about events hosted by institutions or musicians etc.

Week 5: Library Thing Stuff

I set up an account and explored the Library Thing site. It was very easy to use. Books you load are matched with books in other members' libraries which could be good for social networking and getting recommendations.

The 'Gallery' function was nice, featuring the author portraits of books in your library. Author portraits happen to be a favourite of mine. Here's a good one: Banana Yoshimoto (pictured)

Unfortunately, I could not get the search widget to appear on my blog.

Week 4: Feeding time

Well that was super. I had had this RSS thing explained to me a couple times by various people, and I had nodded "I see, I see..." yet had NOT seen. I didn't get it. Now I have seen.

I can immediately see the value in subscribing to blogs. I have often found an interesting blog and saved it to my 'Favourites' folder on my browser only to find myself on a different computer and having no way of finding my way back to the blog. Never again.

I subscribed to a bunch of art and fashion blogs because I like to see the pictures. I rarely read blogs, but enjoy skimming through them. Also subscribed to this Good News site because I hate bad news, some friends' blogs and library news feeds but I guess there's little need to spell it out when it is so conveniently illustrated on my list of shared items.

Week 3: Mashing it up

I made a flicker account and uploaded some photos I had taken a couple years ago of poems made out of cigarette health warnings. Those health warnings are terrible. I would attack my flatmates packets with vivids and make them entirely new cases full of collages made out of national geographic cuttings. However, this has nothing to do with Web 2.0.

For my Web 2.0 lesson, I attempted and failed to work out how to put the photographs them on the world map using a 3rd party application. They were taken in Dundee, Scotland so that would have been pretty rad. But I managed to put one up on this blog:

A friendly colleague pointed me in the direction of a great mash ups site: Multicolr search lab




I picked some dicordant colours and got a pretty selection of images which I then attempted to paste them into my blog. Perhaps the above chaotic ramble of thumbnails is what I intended. Who would ever know?

Finally I looked at an online image generator called Letter James which I used to create the image below.

All up I found this week's lesson rather fun, thanks and see you again next week.

Week 2: The digital stage

Having already become familiar with facebook (and myspace back in 2007 when it was the hippest thing out) this week I endeavoured to take a look at bebo and linkedIn.

I signed up to linkedIn because I couldn't seem to browse any of the groups as a guest. Naturally, I automatically signed up with a psuedonym, because I don't really like to put my personal details on semi-public sites. But linkedIn is like a job seeking site / social networking site, so it really requires a real name.

I searched on google and found a comparative review that looked at some pros/cons on linkedIn and facebook. I agree that the silly applications that facebook features are a waste of time but it is really quite easy to ignore them. I use facebook solely as a means of finding out about events and contacting people I am not intimate enough with to email or text. A friend of mine (facebook friend/real friend) uses the live feed function as a 'stage' to 'perform' on. I am too shy.

Bebo seemed like even further towards the solely social side of the continuum. I found a song from a band I liked: the chromatics in the city, and I could watch the video streamed from youtube.

I think these sites work well for advertising events, and for gathering a large pool of distant more formal contacts (fans for bands, venues, institutions like the library). They rely on the digital word-of-mouth: if someone mentions it, everyone they know hears about it. Sometimes its nicer to casually glance over what other people are doing / are into, rather than be emailed or spammed about it.

Week 1: An exercise in credulity

Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.
- Charles Lamb

If this course is all about play then it seems appropriate to suspend my attitude of skepticism about the new interactive web technologies springing up everywhere like they're going out of fashion.

Perhaps it is a way of complexifying the ways in which we interact. Which is good. I like complexifying.

I consumed the podcast, signed my learning contract, made a gmail account, created a blogger identity, changed the colour of my links, posted this blog post, all with no trauma Well, perhaps signing the contract was a minor trauma. Commitment, you know.