Week Nine: Instant Messaging

When I was overseas working I used an early version of Yahoo! Messenger to stay in touch with friends and family.  I found it to be a useful tool so long as you had previously set up specific times taking into account time differentials as to when friends and family could expect to find me online.  After I got back I found myself more and more frequently putting myself offline due to the number of IM requests appearing nearly every time I signed into Yahoo.  I guess my biggest problem with IM and chat in general is the same problem I have with Facebook, etc.  I call it SOCIAL INTERACTION OVERLOAD.  Admittedly I have a very low threshold of social interaction tolerance in general and I do not begrudge anyone who wants to be in touch 24/7/365 but that is not my cup of tea.  Thus, don't expect to find me online for chatting up with any frequency if at all.  Now, having said the forgoing, I do see some valid uses for IM and chat.  One that I really like is the online reference librarian.  I have actually used this service through ESU's White Library's Ask a Librarian and found it to be most helpful from time to time.  I can also see how it could be very useful when working on a project collaboratively on a tight deadline.  As with all of the tools we have looked at thus far in this course of study I can see some valid uses for them.  I would venture to say that I am skeptical of most of the uses to which they are put

Week Eight: Cloud Computing

Here it is Saturday of Week 14 and I'm just now getting to Week 8's lesson.  By now I assume (Yes, I know what that word tends to do) that nearly everyone has moved on to something else.  Thus, I am not going to try to ask someone to "go back" and help me out with the collaborative portion of Week 8's activities.  Rather, I will take a little time to say what I did do and expound a bit on the advantages I can see to this "cloud computing" concept. I chose to use the Google product since I already had a Google account and G-Mail.  After walking through the suggestions and playing around with uploading a few documents it occurs to me that this product could also be used to keep files related to various projects you are working on to access from different computers ( home, work, the library, etc.) without having to haul around floppies or flash drives (assuming you have internet access.) I messed around a bit with the Scriblink.com white board and found I have the same problems with it as I do with a chalk board or regular white board (i.e. writing a level line) except that I do have somewhat better control of the piece of chalk or marker in the real world than I do trying to write with a mouse.  Click here to see my results pitiful as they are. I couldn't use Drop Box because I was working on this at work at I cannot download software from the internet on the computers at work.  After watching the little video on the Drop Box home page I think this product may have even greater potential than the Google product for organizing files and having access to them from anywhere except for the requirement to download software to whatever machine you are using to access the files at  Drop Box. As for the 30 Boxes web based calendar program, after reading the privacy statement and terms I think I'm going to mull using this one.  I guess this site and many of the others just seem to open my personal privacy space to a wider and wider audience until eventually I don't think there will be any privacy left.  I will however, save that subject for a rant another day.

Week Seven: Microblogging

I chose Twitter because it seems to be the most ubiquitous. Frankly, I simply don't get this need to be constantly in contact with people. Where do people find the time to be on Facebook, Twitter, etc. all day and all night? I have a relative that is on Facebook every single time I sign on. For the most part I couldn't give a hoot what most of the people I know that are on Twitter blather on about. Perhaps, I am inherently antisocial by nature but what happened to sitting at home reading a good book. I will concede that Twitter might be useful for keeping up to date on schedule changes at conferences and I am somewhat intrigued by the use of Twitter during the Iranian mess alluded to at the beginning of this lesson. Never the less, it seems to me that most of the tweets I've looked did not serve any good purpose beyond idle chat. In order to be fair though, I started following 23thingsks, hbraum, the List of Kansas Librarians on Twitter, and the List of Kansas Libraries on Twitter and will keep an open mind as I monitor the these tweeters.

Week Five: RSS and Feed Readers

I decided to try the Google Reader because it looked like it might be the easiest one to get started with. Easiest or not it was fairly easy to get set up and use. For purposes of this class I subscribed to the 23 Things Kansas blog and T-Dawg's Blog. As time passes I will probably add others but for now I am so far behind on these 23 Things Kansas lessons I am going to move on to the next one.