Week 5, Thing #12: Rollyo

I must say, part of the reason I stepped away from 2.0 for awhile was this week's topic. Perhaps I should learn how to just say, "not interested" rather than fretting over how I can best use every tool. Rollyo seems like overkill. Well-phrased search terms in Google will find what I want better than a roll in Rollyo.

I created a search for finding poetry, but it did not work very well. In my attempt to be inclusive, I had way too much , so the first hits always come back with dictionary definitions, reference books, etc. Try it and you'll see what I mean. I suppose, if a teacher had a specific topic with preferred sites, I could create a useful Rollyo. But on the fly, without inspiration, I was not impressed.

Select Search Engine...Find PoetrySearch The Web

Powered by Rollyo

I also played with Google's Custom Search, and found it easier to work with. I input exactly the same search parameters and got much better results. I believe the reason for that is that Rollyo only searches by top-level domains, whereas Google allows deeper, more limited searching. Yes, the industry goliath triumphs again.

Week 5, Thing #11: Web 2.0 Award Winners

Wow! There went a couple of hours. StumbleUpon seems to be a random sampling of stuff that other people found interesting. And, if in not too discriminating a mood, you'll find it interesting too. It is not unlike wandering into a library and picking up books off the shelving carts. Random but fun and sometimes informative. I found myself reading "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strips. I also learned that there might be a habitable planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. Maybe Spaceman Spiff can go there. And then I saw a photo of a solar eclipse from space. Whoooaaa! What a fun time vacuum.

I looked at a few other sites, too. Some widget sites, some mobile technology, but several required setting up an account which was just one too many steps for me.

Ning looks like a nice forum for a virtual book club. Hmmm.... Is there a benefit to virtual over face-to-face? I will need to ponder that one.

And my score on the Travel IQ was 93... below average? I need to brush up on my African geography.

Web 2.0 in the Hands of Students

Our school has been suffering from a bit of bad press lately. I will not rehash it all here, but suffice it to say that an administrator has been put on temporary leave and everything bad that can be said about a person who has been working as a disciplinarian in a public school setting has been said. Not just said, but printed in the local paper.

Now, some students have posted a video titled "Willard Sucks" to a site holding a contest for students encouraging change in their school. Other schools were installing wind turbines, managing food waste, etc. Our kids were griping about cafeteria food and how the teachers don't listen.

I have removed the link to the video because I have decided that I was just adding to the negative publicity.

I hate to think that linking to their video is validating them. But I also think it is important for us as educators to consider the variety of ways our students will use these new tools. Have any of us crafted lessons about the impact of public posting on our communities? In a sense, this is a bit of cyber-bullying, at least because it made all the teachers feel picked-on and victimized. Also, the teacher whose name was used to post the video without his permission is extremely upset.

Week 5, Thing #10: More Image Generating

Image chef was fun and simple. A computer class at my school has students designing T-shirts on-line at CustomInk.com. It works in a similar way. The kids have a lot of fun with it and get quite good at navigating around in an on-line design environment.

I was much more enamored with a couple of cartoon generators I came across. Toonlet is fun. It lets you create your own comic characters using preexisting templates. I like the variety of choices, from head shape, torso, hair, eyebrows etc. There is a lot of variety. That does not mean that the jokes are good as you can see by my attempt at humor.

I also liked Stripgenerator because it was fairly simple and straightforward. As opposed to the International Reading Association's attempt which is just clunky. I could imagine using Stripgenerator with a class because there are limited options. They won't spend all day trying out different noses with different hairstyles like I did on toonlet. But I think it would jazz up a dry lesson such as writing with different sentence structures. "Create a 3 to 5 panel comic strip with two characters where one speaks only in simple sentences and the other uses at least one subordinate clause in each sentence."

Week 5, Thing #10:

This came from imagechef. Simple. Fun. Seemed appropriate for the approaching holiday.

More to come...

Week 4, Thing #9

I love google's blog search! Whenever playing with a new search system, I like to put in two disparate things and see what comes up. So I searched "library bike" and checked out the results. Most of the blog searches found me lots of library blogs and lots of bike blogs, but few that brought the two together. Google found ME! Yes, this very blog was its first hit. I think this may have been due more to currency than relevancy. I had just finished that post a couple back in which I had written about bikes and libraries. But I must admit that I am amazed by Google's search logarithms which somehow always seem to find what I am seeking. Even when I am not so sure myself. So what if they read my e-mail to send me targeted adds? Surely "Do no evil" does not mean they should sacrifice potential revenue streams.

So now I have a bunch of rss subscriptions. Some comics, some columnists, School Library Journal's Breaking News, and education articles from the SF Chronicle and NY Times. And I find that, like my e-mail in box, I feel guilty if there are unread articles in my rss reader in-box. At the end of the day, I can toss my printed newspaper in the recycling bin, guilt free. But there is something about marking an article as "read" just so it won't show up that seems wrong. I mean, isn't that lying to say you read something when you really just skimmed the first two sentences? How high school! Of course, I could just ignore what I don't feel like reading. But the nagging guilt...

As far as finding feeds, I just thought about what I look at or search for regularly. Or what I would like to know about without going looking for it, like local education news. I skim the headlines in the print paper, but my rss does it for me now. The searches didn't find me anything that seemed worth reading regularly. I subscribed to a couple fellow CSLA bloggers, but those were folks I already knew in the real world.

My favorite thing about Google Reader: There is a button that says "manage friends" as if one click could manage Rebecca or Jess or.... Oh, but according to Google, I don't have any friends. Well!

Off Topic

Since I wrote about my little guy's seizures earlier in the blog, I may as well keep it up even if it has nothing to do with library 2.0. He has been doing great. He is in kindergarten now and is really starting to read independently. Just last week he wrote a story about a robot. It was furry, cute and cuddly. (or as he wrote: free, cuet and cutily)So you can all see that his brain works just fine, thank you very much. He also sings, dances, tells jokes, is learning to play the violin, and throws the occasional tantrum.

Last week, after 3 months with no seizures, he had a mild one in the night. I woke up, sat with him until it was over, then we all went back to sleep. The next morning I went to work, and he went to school. I'm thinking, "No big thing. I can deal with an occasional twitching fit in the night." Then three nights later it happened again. It was slightly longer, three minutes instead of two, but the jerks were bigger and stronger than the past. It left me feeling scared and helpless again, like the first ones over the summer. The hardest part is that I can't settle in to sleep. My son sleeps on a single bed pushed up next to my side of the bed so that I will wake up if he seizes. My husband and 90-pound dog share my bed. They both twitch, toss, and make strange noises from time to time. And it all wakes me up. So I am grumpy, tense, and did I mention the PMS?

To add to my general level of worry, a close friend of mine has a daughter who is also epileptic. (This condition is amazingly common, once you start talking about it.) But her daughter is a very different case. She is older than my son by six months, but is developmentally behind him. When she was younger, I thought she might be autistic. She talks now, but still has some symptoms of Asperger's. We have suspected for quite some time that she might be having those mini absence seizures because she does check out from time to time. So her mom took her to Children's Hospital to have an extended EEG done, where they watch her brain patterns for several hours. Within a one-hour period, they recognized 16 brief seizures. Sixteen! The family had been avoiding medicating, but after that they decided they had to. Obviously her frequent brain storms are getting in the way of her development. But then she had some reaction to the medication that was life threatening. I didn't get all the details, just that if a rash showed up she should stop the medication and go to the ER. The rash showed up last week. And the mom has had both thyroid cancer and breast cancer in the last three years. So what am I whining about? Thankfully, she is doing great.

Week 4, Thing #2, The Avatar

I teach my students that research is cyclical. I am finding that Library 2.0 is as well. Yes, I finished my avatar oh so many months ago. Or 2 weeks ago, according to the assignment order. But today my kids became enthralled with it. Then they wanted to make their own so they played around with the program. Then they wanted to look at other librarian avatars. (Yes, they are geeks in training.) So we took a tour of the SLL 2.0 blogroll and looked at lots of avatars. And they all look essentially alike. We are all so trim and wrinkle free. Honestly, the avatars do not look anything like us. I have been to our conferences. So I added my most recent school photo to my profile just to counteract the unrepresentative avatars amongst us. Let's show our true faces, warts and all.

Week 4, Thing #81/2, RSS Part 2

I have tried Bloglines. It is much easier to share. But I do prefer the layout of Google Reader. I like how it displays all of the feeds in a single in-box. Bloglines shows the folders, but you have to click on each one to open the folder, making it feel like I am opening bookmarks rather than receiving a feed. More pull, less push, technology-wise. So, I guess I prefer Google's passive consumption. If I am going to feed, just shove it down my throat.

I have also found, thanks to a X-Mas gift from Aunt Becky, that yes, I am smarter than a 5th grader.

Week 4, Thing #8, RSS

My old RSS feed was a fellow named Erik who sat in the co-pilot's seat of my library and routinely flopped around on the Internet occasionally turning his monitor toward me and saying, "you gotta read this!" Hence my regular blog reading paralleled his interests, more than my own. Yes, I like bikes, but he was a true bike snob. I like dogs, but he would spend hours ogling photos, saying "Wook at da cute widdle puppy." But he has moved on. Just a few days ago, he moved to Santa Cruz to further his education.

The most intimidating thing about this assignment was selecting my own interests without my sidekick. So, no bikesnob, no dogblog. Education. Libraries. Some humor and random stuff. I used Google Reader, which works fine for me. But I notice that I can't just publicly share my RSS feeds. I can only share particular items. So, I starred a bunch of items to be shared. But I wonder if bloglines is more fluid in its sharing abilities. I will go play with that. Until my kids demand my attention. For now, here is the link to my public Google Reader.

Week 3, Thing #7 I'm Back!

It is nice to see that my blog has been sitting here patiently waiting for me all these long months that I have been neglecting it. So, that is my thing that I like about technology. It can actually be patient. But that is also one of its downsides. I wonder how many blogs sit around gathering dust, started with the best of intentions, maintained daily for awhile, then every few days, then just petering out. By the time the writer tries to revive it, the audience has lost interest. Look! Over there! A new blog, all new and shiny, whose author is still excited and the posts are still fresh.

For awhile I was reading a dogblog regularly. It was fresh. It was funny. Then the poster stopped posting. I stopped checking back daily, then weekly. Months went by. Then, for old time's sake, I typed in the URL. There was something new. But the humor felt old, worn-out. The dogs all looked the same. I had moved on. To a bikesnobblog.

Another thing I love about technology is craigslist. It is my resource for all things old and out-dated. I'll take some digital photos of my antique typewriter and bicycle found on craigslist and add them to the post once I am back at work.

I also love that I got an e-mail from a physicist in Romania who had a question about a statue I had taken a picture of and posted on my flickr site. And a travel site, schmap.com, asked to use one of my flickr pics as well. It is included in this widget.


Side Note: In order to edit this post, I had to spend quite some time realizing that my widget was not working, figuring out why I was unable to edit my post, and then downloading a new version of Internet Explorer (not my favorite browser!) in order to edit my post. Ah, technology! For every new wonder, we wonder where all our time goes.

I am off to post a comment on someone else's blog now.

No Week. No Thing #. Just some Final Thoughts

As I suspected, the blog was generally amusing when I had nothing else to do. However most of the time I have enough on my plate without feeling a need to publicly post on a regular basis. I feel that if I actually created a library blog for my school's library, it would languish for long periods of time with no updates. So I don't see myself starting a liblog anytime soon.

More importantly, since some folks have asked, my little guy is doing great. He has not had any seizures since the first two. The neurologist says not to worry since he is fine developmentally. Sure, his brain is physically abnormal, but it functions just fine which is the important part. As far as why there are physical abnormalities in his brain, my doctor surmises they developed in utero. This means that things won't get any worse. We are not looking at anything degenerative. And though his lobes are not balanced, he is missing large bits of white matter, and bundles of neurons appear where they don't normally, his functioning pathways are all working quite well. Apparently he has rewired himself to compensate for the structural glitches. The seizures themselves may have absolutely nothing to do with his brain structure anomalies. So, we are not medicating. The only difference in our lives is that one of his parents always sleeps with him. If he goes a year without seizures, we will stop monitoring so closely. For now, his attention is on kindergarten and playing soccer.

And my older son is doing quite well, too. He just finished HP7. He is 7.

Week 3: Thing #6: Photo Mash-ups

My photo mashup used an image from my son's MRI made into a horror movie poster. It seems to capture my current mood. I realize this has nothing to do with libraries, but it has everything to do with my summer. My little guy had a couple of seizures so now we are in medical purgatory running a bunch of tests, looking at data, talking with doctors, learning more than I ever wanted to know about brain anatomy. At this point, nothing major has been found. Developmentally, he is fine (slightly ahead of the curve, brags his mom). But the neurologist is concerned. They keep finding minor abnormalities in the anatomy of one lobe of his brain. That is not something a parent wants to hear. So, I am applying all my good research skills on my personal I-Search. Below is a photo of him with skin for comparisons sake.

Week 3: Thing #5: Flickr

In June I traveled to Barcelona with my family. You can see lots of photos (119 to be precise) of our trip on Flickr with my boys' smiling faces. One of those photos (without boys) was, conveniently for this exercise, of a library. This is the comment I originally wrote for the photo: "This was the local library in Gràcia. I think the two apartment buildings behind it are a really nice example of the contrasts in Barcelona architecture. What I wish I had photographed was the dog-rack next to the entrance. It looked like your typical bike-rack, but had a little metal dog placard and a large bowl of water next to it. " What I also noticed about the libraries in Barcelona was that they were open late into the evenings and were usually located next to other amenities such as parks and public transit. Great city!

Week 1: Thing #2: Lifelong Learning

My thoughts on life-long learning: How can someone work in a library and not be an active learner? Considering the random queries that come to the desk on a daily basis, not to mention all the other information needs that we are constantly seeking out and identifying, of course I am a life-long learner.

I guess if I had to choose one of the 7 1/2 steps as the hardest, it would be goal-setting. This is simply because all the other steps seem so obvious and intuitive to me. Setting goals in my learning would be more of a conscious step. The other steps like seeing problems as challenges , having confidence in myself as a learner, using technology, teaching and playing all seem a bit like breathing to me; I do them without even noticing.