exercise 23

I'm afraid I can't think of any great insights to send you. I thought some of the sites might be quite interesting, if you really had nothing better to do, and all day to do it in. I mean, you could choose a subject and then investigate more and more people's ideas and comments about it, I suppose. But I can't see myself ever sitting at a computer and vaguely surfing other people's blogs or comments or anything. I'd much rather read a book or do the gardening. But I suppose I should look at it from the library's point of view, and obviously it's useful if library staff have some idea of what young patrons are doing and talking about, so in that way I suppose it's been useful, though I still know so little about computers that it's very soon obvious that I really haven't got a clue what they're on about. I can't see myself using anything I've done on the course - even if I remembered what it was, which is fairly doubtful, I'm afraid. As far as my lifelong learning goals go - well, I don't know that I've got any, actually; I just tend to absorb things as they come up. My life's being made up as I go along, with no master plan in mind. But I can't imagine that my goals would include looking through other people's holiday photos and writing "Wow" and "Awesome" under them, or having anyone do the same to mine. Or sitting through a cooking demonstration of some basic dish, when all I wanted was a recipe.

exercise 22

I thought the "Information just wants to be free" (if that's the right title) was quite interesting, but I must admit I didn't read all of it, as it wasn't as interesting as all that, and it was very long. So were some of the others - fairly interesting, I mean, not very long. I still can't imagine wanting to be a "friend" of a library, but then I can't imagine putting personal information about myself on a site like that, so perhaps I'm not the right person to judge. It sounds as though quite a lot of young people do respond to the library sites, so they must be making a connection with them, and perhaps it will increase the teenagers' willingness to use the library, which is surely a good thing (from our point of view, anyway). But why just libraries? I'd be interested to know what other organisations ae also there: schools? music shops? clothes shops? McDonalds? Pizza Hut? Greenpeace? I can see that some teens might feel their space was being invaded.

21

I'm supposed to add an image. So I clicked on the image button, and it said "Add image" (so I knew I was on the right track). Full of entusiasm, when the next page came up I clicked on "Add an iamage from your computer", then chose the file from the saved ones on my computer, and then ... I didn't know what to do next. I tried "Upload file", but nothing happened; I started to go back and do the whole thing again in case I'd missed some vital bit, but when I was about halfway through, I must have clicked the wrong thing, because an incomprehensible list of things came up, so I went back again, and it was all just the same as normal, except for one thing: when you put the cursor on the image button, it doesn't say "Add image", and sure enough, it won't do anything at all, even if you click until you're blue in the face and you've run out of insults to hurl at it. I even closed it and started it again, thinking it might have forgotten, but no. So I suppose I'll never know how to do it. Unless you have some advice.
It might also have saved me a lot of time and frustration if you'd indicated how to request to be a friend. I spent a lot of time clicking random things trying to find some way of requesting to be a friend, until my ever-helpful son told me that you had to click on Add friend (which I'd alreaady done, of course, but didn't realise that it worked reciprocally, and that that was the only way to do it).
Anyway, apart from that, I looked at them all, and looked up a few famous names. I don't think I learnt very much, except that Helen Clark likes the "Star Wars" films; unless that was John Key. It all seems a bit desperate - I mean, having to tell everyone that you exist and that you've got lots and lots of friends, so you must really be a fabulous and interesting person - a bit like Ja'mie from Summer Heights High. But obviously, if you're the right age, and all your friends are on it, then you'd want to be too. I didn't quite see what the libraries were doing there - why not just have all that on the website? If you think that people are more likely to look on Facebook (was it Facebook? I can't remember), I can understand that, but if they're not going to look at the website, then why would you expect them to look you up on Facebook?
I think I'm supposed to tell you which I liked best, but I'm afraid I can't remember any differences between them; or I can't remember which was which, which I suppose is the same thing. Is there any difference, or is one just cooler than the others?
And by the way, the request to be a friend will be denied, as it's under this name, not my real one.

exercise 20

I read all those things about ebooks, and I can see there are plenty of good things about them. However, when there are also such obvious disadvantages (having to lug a computer round with you when you just want to read something when you're at the beach or on a bus; not being able to read it in the bath; having to have batteries or electricity, etc.), why shoot yourself in the foot by trying to promote it by saying things like: "You can mark your page with an electronic bookmark and jump straight to it when you open the book"? I mean, has it ever struck the author why it's called a "bookmark"? Because it's a copy of a device which has been used for centuries to "mark your page and jump straight to it when you open the book"!
I looked up "Mary Barton" in Gutenberg. It was a bit hard to find, as I'd put the author's name (Mrs. Gaskell), and it said it didn't have it. I thought perhaps I'd made a mistake, so I just tried "Mary Barton", and found that they'd used the author's full namd, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell. I would have thought they'd have had it under both. (I've also just looked up "John Halifax, Gentleman" by Mrs. Craik, and found the same thing. As both authors were only known by their maried titles, it seems odd that you can't find them using that name).
It's offered in Plucker and plaiin text.
I didn't really find out anything interesting about it, as I've read it several times, so I knew what subjects were covered. So I thought I should try one I hadn't read, so first I tried "Hereward the Wake". Well, the interesting thing I found was that it doesn't exist as a book - it's just a chapter in another book, about heroes. So then I loked up "Dombey and Son" and found what that was about, and it was interesting that it covered many of the same subjects as "Mary Barton", but is obviously not as dramatic "Murder trials" doesn't feature in the list, for instance). It's available in another format as well, HTML, but that wasn't exactly riveting information.

Oh dear, oh dear. I tried, I really did. I became so bewildered that in the end I had to ask my son, who came, with much eye-rolling and with loud, heavy sighs, to see what stupidity I was up to.
It started with the introduction. Words like :
regular streaming audio or video
RSS
MP3 file format
compressed format for audio files
directing [can't read my own wtiting] service
pull the RSS feed

are designed to strike terror, as well as incomprehension, into my heart, but I know that the exercises are usually fairly straightforward, and you don't have to know anything about what you're doing. How wrong I was! I started trying to follow the techtorial, but didn't get very far (ther was nothing saying "Free download" when you went to iTunes). After scouring the whole page several times, I asked my son for his advice, and he said I didn't need to do that anyway, because he already had iTunes installed. I can only assume it was a different edition of it, as every instruction they gave seemed to be different (top right instead of bottom left, iTunes store instead of music store, etc.) , but my son helped me through that. (The fact that I have thereby reinforced his considered opinion that I am a complete halfwit not worthy to be left in charge of a wind-up toy, let alone a computer, is obviously my problem, not yours). I was left alone to ponder how I would know "when the podcast appeared in my music library", and in the end, after trying a number of things, I clicked "downloads", which seemed to get me to the next page all right.
Anyway, then I tried to listen to some podcasts. I couldn't see anything that seemed to be related to libraries or books, so I tried Food again. The first one turned out not to be about food at all: he was talking about someone who'd recently died of cancer. So then I tried some of the others, but there seemed to be no instructions on how to hear the podcasts. I kept choosing things and clicking away with enthusiasm, but without audible results.One of them (Podcastalley) was fairly typical. I chose a podcast and followed the instructions to copy the address. The next page (to download a podcast aggregator, which seemed to be what they wanted me to do) was next, and I got as far as How to use podcast downloader. I thought success was within my grasp! Until I saw instruction 1: Select the "podcast" in toolbar. I'm afraid I was stumped. I know that the toolbar is one of those lines of icons and things along the top, but I couldn't see anything sayding "the podcast". In fact, I'm not even sure there was a toolbar.
So I gave up, and went back to the exercises, to see whether I could salvage anything from the whole sorry business. But I saw that the next instruction was "Add the RSS feed for a podcast to your Blogline account." Now, I think that a Blogline account was something we did a while ago, so perhaps if I go thrugh the old exercises I could fiind out what it was - but what is an RSS feed? I'm sure that's never come up before. I'm afraid you often assume rather more knowledge than I've got. (And while I'm in this state of shame and degradation, I may as well ask what "browser" and "server" mean. I hoped that would eventually become obvious the more they were used, as when learning a foreign language, but alas! no).
I was workng all this week, as it turned out, so I couldn't get to Birkenhead until today (Friday), when Kathy wasn't there. I may be able to come over one day next week.

I chose one called "Sophie can walk", which I thought was quite funny. And I watched a couple of library ones, but it's getting late, so I haven't got time for any more. Personally, I wouldn't want to spend a lot of (any, actually) time searching through Youtube for one that might be interesting - I prefer my son to tell me about good ones and then I can just watch them.
Yes, I'm sure if someone could make an entertaining one about libraries they could use it as a recruitment tool or something (though I can't quite imagine what they would put in it that would make people leap up out of their seats shouting,"Yes! yes yes yes! I want to be a librarian!")

I looked at the "Food" section. They were mostly video clips of people cooking particular recipes. I suppose if you chose a particularly tricky recipe, this would be very useful, but the ones I watched could have been very easily made just by following written instructions, so if I'd wanted to make them I would probably just have Googled "apple sauce brownies" or "salt roast chicken" and got he recipe that way - quicker than waiting for someone to do it in front of you. I'm afraid I can't see an application for this in a library setting. But one of them might be, I suppose, if it worked properly. It was called urbanspoon, and it said it was going to tell you where restaurants could be found near any address in the chosen city. Apart from the States, you only had the choice of London or two in Australia, so I tried "Paddington Station" - and it said sorry, it couldn't find it! So I tried a street near there (Norfolk Sq, Paddington), and it said it couldn't find that either, but did I mean Norfolk Sq, W2? I clicked that, but it said it was still lost, but then on another part of the page I saw that it was already offering me some choices. They didn't have menus, but you could tell from the reviews what sort of restaurants they were, so I suppose if you had a patron who wanted information on restaurants in a city, you could use that. But they probably wouldn't ask a librarian, they'd ask a travel agent.I also looked at the education one, but that looked a bit boring, and then a health one, but that was too exciting. Well, there were so many things you could look at and find out about - if you were particularly interested in some disease, I expect you could find out a lot.

That was easier than I expected. When I sawthe introduction and read words and phrases like "different software versions or file types", "versioning", "convert documents as multiplt file types" "HTML and pdf", I thought it was going to be yet another exercise I couldn't do. However, I found that you didn't need to know what any of those things meant, which was good, but there were a whole lot of new things. It was just like an ordinary word processor, but with more things on it. I tried them all, with varying degrees of success and comprehension. Why does "quote" mean "orange box"? What do "subscript", "superscript", the anchor and "page break" do? What does "Toggle HTML source" mean? And why did I end up in a large (and expandable) box (and why was it called a layer?) which I didn't seem able to delete?
I'm sure this would be useful if you wanted to do some fancy documents - fancier than you can do on your ordinary word processor. Did you ask me to say how you could use it in a library? (Or is that the next exercise? I misread the numbers at first, and started doing no.17) Well, I'm sure you sometimes need to make fancy signs and things in the library, so ti would be good for that.

Stuck again, I'm afraid. How do I create a link to my searchroll? I looked all over, and couldn't find anything that looked like an address that you would be able to use to find it. The one at the top just says rollyo.com/createroll.html - nothing to do with my particular one.
Is Rollyo just like a large "Favourites" list? That's what it seems to be - except that you can apparently get into other people's favourites if you and they want. I couldn't think of anything to put on my searchroll, so I just found some sites in my "Favourites" list and put them in. I hope that's all right.
I spent a while looking at the things you suggested to see what Rollyo was about. I found that one of them seemed to be a place to look up books , and then if you belonged to a library I think you could see which libraries had them, so I suppose it was a sort of interloan facility. I also looked at the Freephotos one, but found a strange thing in the middle (buzzwords) which was nothing to do with photos, just telling me about Britney and Paris and Pepsi iced cucmber. Which might have been quite interesting, but my son's anxiously waiting for the computer.
Another thing I've obviously forgotten is how to stop losing pages all the time - I keep having to go right back to square 1 to read the exercises, for instance, but I'm sure Kathy showed me how to keep things handy so that you just have to click on something to bring them up again.
I think I 've got a day free next week - in fact, possibly two, so I'll see whether I can fix a time to come and ask for advice. I seem to be ploughing through the exercises quite steadily, but actually I'm usually having to give up before they're finished because I don't know how to do the vital bits.

no.14

I can't believe that anyone who is interested enough in books to join librarything could have only 200 books! I must have almost that just on my bedside table waiting to be read. So it's a bit silly to say you can do it free, or pay and enter as many books as you like - obviously, everyone would need to pay. But it would take years to put all your books in! Time that could much better be spent reading more books. I would need to keep running upstairs and collecting boxloads of books off the shelves to bring downstairs to the computer to add to my list, and then taking them back upstairs and putting them back on the shelves ... it doesn't bear thinking about. I'm afraid I can't really see the point (yet again). Unless you wanted to borrow someone else's books, perhaps. It just seems like a rather expanded book group, really. The free books for preview would be nice - but then you'd have to make sure you read them in time. Speaking as someone who's had a book out for nearly seven weeks and hasn't yet had a chance even to open it, I can see that might be a problem.
http://www.librarything.com/home/stagregory

no.13

I'm afraid I've failed again. Unfortunately, some of your instructions are a bit vague for people who don't know what you're talking about. I right-clicked on my image, saved it with a file name, and found the image button (at least, that's what it seemed to be - it said something like "add image"). But how do you get the image on to the blog? I typed in the file name at every opportunity, but it just sat there looking at me and not doing anything. I hadn't been able to find a code to copy - the bit at the top jsut said "image generator" or something, but it didn't change when I put my word in, so I'm sure that wouldn't have been much use to you.
I looked at all three of those things - the first one seemed a bit laboured and pointless - just making up silly names and things. I thought they were actually going to use my name to create another one, which might have been quite clever, but if you're just going to pick words at random, I don't know why you'd bother. I thought the James one was much better; and the third one might very well be quite interesting if you've got some photos, but I haven't, so I didn't really look at that one much.
Now this is where you should see a nice picture of a happy German person playing Scrabble, and just putting the last letter of "Spaetzle" in, but it's obviously lost inside my computer somewhere, and I don't know how to get it out.
And oh, dear, sorry, I can't remember what number this is. 13? I'll try that. I really will check when I find the exrcises again. It could be 14.

no. 12

I put my name on the list, but I don't know whether that was what I was supposed to do. Was I supposed to put the address at the top there instead? (I mean, the http://blogger.etc.)
I was a bit worried, I must say, when they said (in the last exercise) "Staring a wiki is easy!" and then bombarded me, in Step 1, with words and phrases like "choose software", "configure wiki", "wiki farms", "server" and "customizability", which are like a foreign language to me, so I can't believe that just writing my blog name somewhere constitutes a whole exercise.

no.11

Yes, I looked at a lot of those ... what? websites? (Some were wikis, but some were about wikis, so I don't know quite how you define them.) Anyway, they seemed quite sensible and useful - like sending an email to everyone concerned, with them replying with suggestions, but obviously much less cumbersome. The one drawback from my point of view is that with an email addressed to me, I'll read it (or at least consider it and decide whether or not to read it), whereas with anything else on the web, I would never think of looking to see what there might be to read. Except for airline tickets, and things like that. I mean, I would never go trawling around in the hope of finding something interesting or useful. Unless, perhaps, someone sent me an email saying,"Go to such-and-such a wiki and read it." But I'd probably forget to.

exercise 10 - future of libraries

Well, that was quite easy. I read three of them, and they all seemed to be saying that people use computers a lot more now, and books become out-of-date, and librarians need to know how to help people use the internet to get information. Which all sounds very true, though perhaps hardly world-shattering in its originality. However, it obviously doesn't apply to fiction, which is a large part of a community library. The major effect it had on me was to make me glad that I'm not just starting out on a lifetime career as a librarian: what attracted me to the job was being able to work with books and people, and it sounds as though books at least, and a lot of interaction with people (e.g. at the issues desk) will become a smaller and smaller part of the job.

number 9

I hope no one has been sitting with bated breath waiting for a communication from me - I'm afraid I'd completely forgotten about the whole programme! Then a couple of days ago I saw a newsletter in my inbox, and wondered what on earth it could be about, and opened it .... and remembered that I was supposed to be doing all these exercises. I couldn't quite remember where I was up to, but I settled on the first one that was completely unfamiliar, the Technorati one. However, I haven't got very far with it. We're supposed to do a keyword search for "Learning 2.0" in Blog posts, tags and blog directory, but I don't know where any of those things are. I tried entering them in the "Search" boxes, but came up with useful things such as "My dog ate your blog", which I felt was probably not what you had in mind. I'll go back and have another look, but if I have no luck I'll just go on to the next exercise.

exercise 8

My first experience of the site was complete bafflement, as I clicked one place after another, with every one just giving me more and more of the same. But then I tried Bookmarks, and managed to fine one that actually had some comments attached - but as they were all things like "Wow!" and "Awesome!", they weren't terribly interesting. then I found another one, about computers, with (no doubt) much more intelligent but cery technical comments. The next one turned out to be an auction for some silver tableware, so I don't know what that was doing there - no comments, as far as I could see. The next one was followed by lots of comments, most of them obscenties about Canadians. Unfortunately, most of the time I had no idea from the title of the article what it was going to be about. Well, usually about computers and things like that, but precisely what, was a mystery; so I can't really comment on the quality of the comments, but people certainly seemed to be willing to take the time to write them, so they must find them useful, or at least interesting (I can't see that adding "Awesome!" to an article really adds to the sum of human knowledge, but at least it means they aren't out beating up old ladies or racing their cars through the streets). I can see that if you wanted to use these tags (once you found something you were interested in), they could be very useful.

continued frustration and time-wasting

Well, I started an account and accepted its invitation to click on some of the feeds it offered, but when I tried to subscribe by clicking "Subscribe to my selections", it kept coming up with "An error occurred" and a list of incomprehensible numbers and letters. So I presume I haven't managed to subscribe to them, but I don't know why not. Perhaps I'll have to go back to the instructions yet again, and see whether I can find how to get on to the page that's illustrated there. I'm afraid my (originally very slight) enthusiasm for this programme is rapidly waning.

technology

I can't understand how you can keep saying "Play around!" and "Have fun!" with the internet and things like that. The internet is very useful (for communicating by email, and for finding information and booking things), but a computer is just a machine - a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. I don't "have fun" with my food processor, or "play around" with my washing machine, and I really can't see the difference.
By the way (an example of how technology has already defeated me), I think I labelled the last exercise nmber 6, but it must have been number 5.

trading cards

I looked at the trading card site (I would have spelt it "collectable"). I'm sure you could make some very entertaining pictures, if you wanted to. I can't imagine myself trading them - I think it would just be a one-off for a particular occasion.

comment on photo

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lomokev/2533017507/?addedcomment=1#comment72157606712455857 This is a photo of a bright pink car, which would be horribly conspicuous and the occasion of much eye-rolling and contemptuous heavy sighing on the part of men watching you doing a three-point turn or trying to parallel park.

This is exercise 6, I think. I have to make a technology-related comment! Well, here it is: I'm afraid it's been about three weeks since I started this, and I've completely forgotten how to do anything, so I'm having to go through it all again. It was bad enough the first time, but even more mind-numbing the second, third, etc. (depending on how much I manage to achieve) time. And to think some people do this for pleasure!

Color Fields Colr Pickr

This has got very nice colours on it, but there doesn't seem to be any explanation of what it's for or how to use it.

torreaux

I wonder what language "torreaux" is? The stadium looks very full - I don't know whether you would find so many people at a bullfight today: I believe the "sport" is losing popularity. I saw one on television when I was in Spain a few years ago, and it was quite sickening.
The photo I'm talking about it "torreaux", in the George Eastman House Collection.