Monday, December 8, 2008

Week 11 - #'s 21, 22,23

Do I detect a note of irony in your "great sadness" message? I, too, am tres, tres sad...
Videos and podcasts ahoy!
Love YouTube, with which I am fairly familiar (I've got a crush on Obama.) This assignment did give me an excuse to spend quality time searching for a clip I viewed months ago and was not able to find again. Eureka!!! I found it. I won't tell you what it is, because it's a tiny bit embarrassing. The thing is , I can't remember how I originally came upon this clip, so had to spend some time trying search words/phrases until it surfaced.
For #22, I viewed the video on CommonCraft entitled "Podcasting in plain English." CommonCraft is a useful site, and this segment enlightened me on what POD stands for (personal on demand - who knew?) Anyway, the simple rule of create, subscribe, and take it with you was helpful.
I then went to the podcasting tools portion of the lesson, where I found a directory. I chose religious podcasts, then selected one on discussing questions of faith - agnostic and atheistic. Yes!!! Very interesting.
A summary of my thoughts on Vermont's 23 Things is as follows:
The practice on downloading and uploading photos was valuable. There are a million steps, and they vary, depending on one's computer and its settings and capabilities. This is an example of the more you do it, the more you can remember it. I would say that rule holds true for all computer activities, for me anyway.
I had trouble with the lessons/activities which involved registering or subscribing. For one thing, I simply cannot remember all my user names and passwords. For another thing, there is a limit to how much I want my name and info floating around in cyberspace. As it is, people have tried to track me down using my old stage name, and have succeeded occasionally. This I don't want.
I can see how it would be easy for anyone to get sucked into doing stuff online the live-long day. From a professional standpoint, knowing how to help library patrons get information is necessary and wonderful, but what is the quality of the information they are accessing? Some of the sites I visited were not up to date or the information was of a highly subjective bent. It takes time to sift through all of this stuff, and to make assessments.
In terms of the program itself, I would say (think I mentioned this before) that the lessons take longer than the suggested 15 minutes per.
It was fun, though, seeing how much is out there. Thanks for setting it up, Mara!