Final thoughts

I enjoyed doing the 23Things course. I have learned many new things from this course. Although I did not have time to explore more on each topic or Web 2.0 applications, I know the concepts and can check them out later when I have time. Finding enough time each week is my biggest problem in this course. I always feel like I do not have enough time each week to catch up with the pace. It took me longer than the time I had allocated for each topic. I also felt frustrated when I had a question, or was stuck on something, and could not ask anyone at that time. This was the reason I mentioned in one of my blog entries that I prefer class room learning to online learning. Sometimes the problem could be just because I could not see an icon to click. I had to spend a lot of time to find an answer which an instructor could easily point out to me. I read an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that a US online education survey showed that online teaching does not save academics time and students do not get better grades than they were learning in a classroom. I can see the reason from my experience. I like the idea suggested by Astrosloth that having a collective blog so we can get instant answers or at least get notice when we encounter problems in the course.

Thank you Usyd 23Things team for offering this course. I hope to use some of the things I learned in my projects.

Google books and LibraryThing

Google books

Many of the titles I searched are not available in fulltext in Google Books. I do not see many differences between a search in Google Books and a normal Google search.

Although Google Books sounds like a good idea, especially if it becomes a catalogue of all the books in the world, I am still not sure how this will benefit users if Google wants to charge libraries to subscribe to it. I can see libraries will move away or get rid of their print copy books once they have electronic copies. Users will not be able to just walk in to a library to read books anymore. They will have to become a member of the library to be able to read books online. In an academic environment, due to license restrictions, only enrolled students and staff are allowed to have remote access to most of the electronic resources. If a small library can not afford to subscribe to Google Books, it means their users will not have anything to read.

I believe Google Books is a good idea only if it is open to everyone freely. I do not want to see a good project become a tool to divide people into those who can afford and who can not afford information once Google achieves its goal to digitize every book in the world.

Can libraries benefit from Google Books? I think it will make our life easier if we can use it as a union catalogue to find and locate materials.


LibraryThing

LibraryThing is a very good tool. It definitely can replace our index cards at home. The drawback is that we have to go online to check everything. LibraryThing gets all bibliographic information from professional sources and saves people from putting in bibliographic details themselves, and the information can be shared with other people. I wonder whether it allows export of bibliographic information into a Word document. If so, we may be able to use that to replace EndNote. The Web 2.0 function in LibraryThing offers more information than EndNote program allows. The tagging function also allows people to organize similar bibliographic information together.

Embeded video?

I am not sure what went wrong with my video. It takes me forever to put the video link into the blog. It seems I can only copy one part of the url. I have to paste the url into a text file, then copy and paste one part at the time to my blog. Here is the clever cat playing piano:

It is always fun to look at YouTube. You can always find something interesting. I notice more and more conference speakers use videos found in YouTube in their presentations recently. I think we can find something to show to our students during IL classes. They can be relevant to the class, or just to get students attention.

Wiki

Wiki is a good tool for collaborative projects among a group of people. Because it is on the Web, and can be accessed anywhere, it is a much better communication tool than emails for projects. Everyone can contribute their ideas, edit contents and see all the updates. I used it when I was doing the iResearch project.

Personally, I use Wikipedia a lot. I like to use it to get some general ideas on a concept or a new technology, especially when I am unfamiliar with the topics. I then do a more specific search to find out more information. It is a good starting place. For this 23 things course, I searched Wikipedia on some of the topics when I had no idea at all.

There are a lot of clever people in the world, but not everyone wants or has the opportunity to publish a book. I think Wiki is a good place to start, and the rest of us can benefit from their good ideas.

I believe students use Wikipedia often for their assignments. As a librarian, I use it often as well. I think the important thing is not to rely on one source and also do other kinds of research.

I did not create an account to edit Wiki as I can not find anything to edit, but I sesarched for various Wiki and found some interesting ones.

Delicious & Technorati

I heard about Delicious, but never have time to try it. Because this course, I decided to register and do something. I found I like this site. I did not import my bookmark, but created new ones. It is good it immdiately shows how many other people have bookmarked the same site. It gives some idea on how good/popular the site is. Tagging is an interesting concept, it encourages participation. I think it will help to promote the site as well.



Persoanlly I prefer search results from Google/Yahoo than from the Technorati, but I think they serve for different purposes. I don't normally spend time to look at blogs if I want to find information. I prefer to find a few reputable sites. Google/Yahoo allows keyword searching, and the results are relevant. Technoratic gives a lot of results, but they are not always relevant. I think it is because the tags are not always reflect the contents accurately. After all, not everyone is a catalouger.



I need to think about how they can be applied in the library. I will post my comments here when I have some ideas.

Fun

I had so much fun in the Generator Blog. It is really cool. I always wonder why every one is so creative. Now I can make some fun images of my own. I try a number of things and created an comic strip at the end (url: http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/comix.html?comix_id=385040313).

Thanks for the information. I never thought I can create something online so easily.

Photos

Have another attempt and this time the login and password worked. I suspect my keyboard does not work properly sometimes.

I uploaded 5 photos on Chinese garden windows. The url is:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33524293@N08/