#12 finale

Social networking has been a mystery to me. How to get access to other people's facebook sites? how to remember the addresses for the sites I am invited to visit? In our last National elections John Howard was publicised as using Facebook to reach the youth of Australia, but how did they acces his site? John Howard's use of the site triggered my imagination, how to use this in the Library Industry? I am keen to put some of this into practice for my Library's marketing to youth of our reference services.
This week's Learning 2.0 has answered some questions for me.
Powerhouse Museum in Sydney appears to be leading the way in NSW and encourages me to think that Libraries can follow this example, but as usual, time is never permitting for me to follow up with this iniative at this time. something to put on my wish list of things I can do one day.
Second Life did not interest me at all, I was already aware of this phenomenom through a colleague who has trained in this, but I do not find myself drawn to it. to sign up for the second life library project, calling for my date of birth, seemed unnecessary for me, I do not like giving any personal details out to sites in this way.

I am currrently a distance education student in Library and Information Services, and this training has been invaluable for me in my studies and understanding of a subject which previously daunted me. I am now taking a greater interest in the Web, and finding the mysteries of the internet not so mysterious.

Thanks for the journey, I cannot say I enjoyed the trip, but I certainly :
learned heaps
conquered the fear (of all those names like blog, wiki, del.icio.us, etc)
gained confidence
can now blog along merrily

I have a few tips from my experiences in the past 12 weeks for those who, like me, are technology challenged:
1. work with a buddy for the entire 12 weeks. A colleague and I teamed up. I found her support invaluable and I loved having someone else around who felt as inept as I did.( she wasnt inept at all, but she felt it)
2. persevere. It gets easier as you go along.
3. see your IT people first up to get access to all those internet sites to avoid hearing ACCESS DENIED every time you try to access sites.
4. do watch every video and visit every site, really useful information is to be found.
5. do keep a notebook to jot down notes especially user names, passwords and other sign up details.
6. enjoy! I took it all very seriously but I realise in hindsight what fun some of those activities could have been for me.

After spending half an hour trying to edit a photo and some text into the 2009 calendar (which would be a useful thing to do for me with the monthly calendar of events) I think the site is too hard to work with for a novice like me. I need really user friendly sites. I can download an image from google images but not change the size or move the image around the calendar so I am feeling pretty fed up but have perservered and have instead customised the cityscape letterhead to suit my library. I have added logo, and my details, but I also found this document very difficult to work with, I could not put the logo where I wanted it, I could not change the spacing in the letterhead. not a satisfactory experience for me. I can see that in time this site could be useful for me if I needed to send Minutes of Meetings, information or letters to all/some of the libraries in my Zone. However, like most of the free sites available, this one has limitations and I would probably be lucky enough, in my workplace, to have better sites to work with than this one. In my work we use photos for our promotions and marketing and I find them easy to work with and to size for my purpose, so there will be better sites available I am sure.

Mashups

I found this very limiting. I made a calendar, sent it to flickr, but I made it hoping to incorporate the calendar in my work, which would mean I could edit the calendar, I wanted to put all our current events in the days of the month, and use a photo to market our Library. Unfortunately this was not possible.
I was very pleased to need to learn how to compress photos which a colleague taught me. so I continue to make progress.