The Last Posting

This is my last post and all I can say is that I really really enjoyed this course and thank you very very much for putting the course together :-) I am now waiting with baited breath for the next course :-) (and I am sad that this one has now finished :-)I have learnt some really cool things and what stood out for me the most was the Week of being Creative, with Animoto and Go Animate - I had such great fun with these that I now want to (hopefully) do a course on animation and video-making :-) I really enjoyed the Social Networking and the genealogy exercises as well....actually I enjoyed everything! I think all the exercises are relevant to my job because I will be able to point customers in the direction of these websites and technologies. I would also very much like to try using Animoto and GoAnimate to make short promos for some of the events we have here. I would also like to possibly provide Click and Learn classes on some of these topics. I think the genealogy sites, the social networking sites and Animoto/Go Animate are topics that would be very popular. I am sure that children would love Go Animate - maybe classes could be provided for them as well as for adults. There are many possibilities...

Social Networking sites

Digg is amazing! I could sit there all day looking at all the photos and reading all the stories etc...if I didn't have to do other things (like work) of course :-) I signed up to this site and will definitely be a regular visitor in future - it is a great way to find out what's happening in the world and to expand your general knowledge etc. I read the story "What's a hulu? The origins of 8 High-Tech Names" from the "Popular" pages, and learnt the origin of names like TiVo, Bluetooth, Blackberry and Wii etc. I'd heard of the latter three but hadn't heard of TiVo so that is another bit of technology I am now aware of :-) I also read a story from the Science pages "Extremely rare bird photgraphed for the first time - then eaten," about a Worcesters' Buttonquail which was thought to be extinct. Then one was found in the Phillipines and videoed and photgraphed before it was cooked and eaten! Amazing! And such a shame...I couldn't quite believe it! And I can now say I have seen a 100 billion dollar note...under the Lifestyle pages, there is a photo labelled 3 eggs cost...3 eggs are shown above a 100 billion dollar note supposedly from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe - I'd really like to know if that banknote was real! I'll have to follow up on that one...I also signed up to Stumble Upon and now have the Stumble toolbar installed on my home computer...and using the toolbar and my selected interests I stumbled upon Scribbler, where you can do scribble drawings, and "Collected quotes from Albert Einstein" - my fav quote was "Imagination is more important than knowledge", and I believe it is 'cos with knowledge but without imagination, I am sure that many of these web 2.0 technologies would not have been invented in the first place. I have set Scribbler and the Einstein quotes to My Favourites, and I am sure I will be stumbling upon many more interesting websites/webpages using Stumble Upon...and saving them to My Favourites...the only problem is that I am likely to end up with hundreds and thousands of websites/webpages listed under My Favourites! ...if my computer will store so many! :-) I also joined up to Reddit and read about an asteroid that recently came very close to Earth. And I joined up to Newsvine and read the story of the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team. So I now have all the news and articles I could want just sitting their at my fingertips. I really enjoyed all these sites.

Go Animate, Animoto and The Klingons' Library Card

I embedded my animation, "The Klingons' Library Card" from Go Animate in my blog. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you will see it. I had to put it there because if I had put it at the top (and I did try that), I couldn't figure out how to make it bigger so that you could see the whole thing. I had great fun doing the animation and got carried away a bit :-) I could have done a lot more if there were no constraints on my time. I did wish that all the text could be made bigger - maybe it can, but I haven't managed to work out how yet. The text just seemed to get smaller the more you wrote so that it would fit inside the speech bubble and so I felt a bit limited there as to how many words I could use...and I guess there is a size limit on the speech bubble :-) I enjoyed my week of being creative. I really enjoyed Animoto and Go Animate and I can see these being used for short promotions of events maybe in the library, also as you have said, for Click and Learn classes. I can imagine that animating and setting up videos would be something that a lot of people would be interested in learning. I am sure these technologies could also be used to produce our annual Xmas cards...and I will definitely be coming back and playing around more on Animoto and GoAnimate in the future...and I am even inspired to maybe do some sort of further course on producing videos/animations etc...

Thing No 7: Animoto.com

Well, I've sort of semi-embedded my video (Sunsets to Blues) from Animoto on my blog, but the links don't seem to be working very well today, so I will have to try and re-do it later. I first tried through Add a Gadget/Link list/Configure Link list, but the "add button" button was not working. So I then tried saving the video to my home computer and then uploading from there - but that didn't work...so third time sort of semi-lucky, I tried Add a Gadget/HTML/Javascript and it's on there now but not working properly as a link. However, if you highlight the whole web address, then right click and click on "Search web for http://animoto.com/play/z0La9y9Zxn3t3Tvn2586LA?autostart=true", it will take you to a results page - click on "Go directly to http://animoto.com/play/z0La9y9Zxn3t3Tvn2586LA?autostart=true" etc and you will end up at my video, which I am very proud of, even though I just used the photos and music supplied by Animoto :-) I am now imagining myself as a Film/TV producer or director....and looking forward to making lots of video clips in the future, both for work and personal use...but more about that next post :-)

Thing # 7 Bookjetty

I enjoyed Bookjetty and had fun adding books to my bookshelf. I couldn't think of any books that I'd "dropped" lately so I just added the book I am currently reading, which is The Warrior's Princess, by Barbara Erskine (interestingly I am apparently the first person to add that book to my bookshelf:-), some books that I have already read and some that I want to read in the future. Bookjetty seems to be a great way of keeping track of what books you have already read and what you would like to read etc and I would definitely recommend it to customers who wanted to keep track of their reading. I would also recommend Authors on the Web and Litlovers...all great ways of finding out more about books...how could any booklover resist them ? :-) And I will definitely revisit all these sites myself and do a lot more with them in the future.

Thing # 6 Authors on the Web

I looked at all the sites and enjoyed them all even though they didn't have some of my most fav authors on them...Barbara Erskine, Christine Feehan etc...and have embedded links to Author yellow pages and Bookreporter.com on this blog. My fav site was Bookreporter.com. I like the daily quotes, and the Awards section where books that have won various awards are listed. I love the Contests Section! :-) I subscribed to the Bookreporter.com newsletter, partly so that I would be in the draw every month to win 5 free hardcover books, but also to keep up with all the book news...well, one does that when they're a librarian aka bookworm, don't they? :-) I like the author bibliographies, although again some of my fav authors weren't on there...but no site can list every single author of course :-)And I really, really like the "Books coming soon" section - it's a great way to find out what's going to be hitting the bookshops soon etc.

Thing # 5: Litlovers

I enjoyed looking at Litlovers and I passed details of this website on to other staff at work who run or might want to run a bookclub. I really enjoyed reading about the feature bookclub and ended up being inspired to start my own bookgroup outside work - which is a good thing because I used to belong to one that was quite boring and I'd sworn never to join one again! :-) There are some great tips for making bookclubs different and interesting and I love the idea of having different food according to what book members are reading etc. I did the first Litcourse called Literature Matters: Why we Read and although I found it interesting, I felt that the summing up of the Romance genre in particular was a bit one-sided and actually incorrect in places e.g. the Tip Sheet for Love Scenes says there is only one love scene in a romance and that is near the end - well, as a Romance Reader and would-be-Romance-author, I can honestly say that most romances I read have lots of love scenes and definitely not all towards the end of the book! And the Romance reading, if based on a book written in the 1940s, is very different from what Romance authors write today. I do have to agree that I read Romance for escapism though :-)...but yes, I do read "literature" as well...and there is a place and time for both. I thought Dan Brown would be a good author to read and discuss at a bookclub meeting, and found that his book The Da Vinci Code was included in the Reading Guides. I found out all sorts of interesting things about Dan Brown and the book - there was a summary of the book (which I have read, along with all his other books - I am definitely a Dan Brown fan :-); a bio of the author, book reviews and even bookclub discussion questions. The most interesting thing I found out was what inspired him to write this book. I have saved Litlovers in My Favourites and will definitely be using it in future for finding information about books and readers and different bookclubs and also to do the other Litcourses.