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.