LibraryThing: Thing #14

The LibraryThing tool is quite intriguing! I opened an account and started to add books, and I decided I will focus primarily on listing the books that I have read with my various book clubs and indicating what rating I gave them. This will be a convenient place to keep an up-to-date list of many outstanding books!

I have tried another somewhat similar tool called Shelfari that allows a user to maintain a "bookshelf" and ratings and alerts you when someone else has added the same book to his or her bookshelf, but I found it to be a little more cumbersome that LibraryThing.

I am in four book clubs, so I have PLENTY of opportunities to share ideas about books and get suggestions for good books to read, but I can see where someone who is not participating in any "live" book clubs could get lots of good food for thought by interacting with other book-lovers through LibraryThing. The social possibilities of this site are endless!

Here's a link to my LibraryThing so far:

Productivity Tools: Thing #13

I like the interface of iGoogle the best of the three personalized home page options. It seems easy to move around, and the option of adding a "theme" backdrop is nice. There were so many to pick from--yikes! I customized my homepage and will use it as my regular homepage in Firefox from now on.

I used to be teased by my co-workers for having so many little yellow post-it notes all around my computer screen, but several months ago I started using the electronic version of sticky notes that comes with Macs. It's great! I now keep my computer screen much cleaner, and I can open them, close them, add to them, delete them, color-code them, etc., as I wish!

Zamzar is another product mentioned in this Thing that has been a lifesaver for us in the Media Dept. We have many students in our school who have already converted to (or purchased) the newest version of Microsoft Office, which creates documents and PowerPoints that are not backwards compatible with the earlier version we have at school, so we have been teaching them how to use Zamzar to easily convert their .docx documents to .doc documents, and .pptx PowerPoints to .ppt Powerpoints. Slick!

I'm not sure creating an on-line "to do" list is useful enough for me. I am having pretty good luck with my un-2.0 method!

Do You Digg?: Thing #12

My goodness, there are a lot of possibilities for sharing favorite news items and seeing what other people have shared that resulted in items becoming "popular." Of the four tools listed, I thought Digg and Reddit were cluttered and unattractive, Mixx and Newsvine less so.

I find it interesting that The New York Times online version, which I go to frequently, builds in a capability of sharing articles via Mixx, Digg, etc. I typically share links to articles via e-mail to people I think would find an article interesting, and I haven't given much thought to "sharing" them in a much broader way.

As far as uses go, I can see where keeping tabs on "most popular" news items would be a good heads-up for possible reference questions (and even my personal e-mail provider, Comcast, has started putting links to popular news items on the opening e-mail screen), but I have to admit that I'm not necessarily otherwise interested in what the general population has made "popular." Judging by the very unimportant items that can easily pop up in "most shared" lists just because of their novelty, and the inane YouTube videos that are often the most popular, the taste of the masses does not always match my own! I also tend to feel that many people clog up their lives and minds with nonessential information, while important issues of the world sink below the radar. With SO MUCH information on SO MANY topics, having ways to tailor the "feed" to my personal preferences would be helpful, but I'm sure I will continue to rely on The New York Times and other sites with readers like myself for a more trustworthy gauge.

Tagging and del.icio.us: Thing #11

I tagged a blog entry, set up a del.icio.us account, and tagged and stored some of my favorite sites for book research when I am working on orders and cataloging.

I believe there is potential for this tool in the uses I mentioned above--it will save time when I want to quickly get to my favorite bookstore inventory sites to find out whether a copy of a book I need is on the shelf. This is something I do frequently when students request a particular book and, before I run over to Borders or Barnes and Noble by Ridgedale to buy a copy, I want to make sure there's actually a copy available on the shelf in one of those stores. In addition, when I'm doing original cataloging it's often helpful to double-check some subject headings or classifications that the Hennepin County library uses, and going to "my del.icio.us" would give me a quick link there as well.

I can imagine that the tags would help categorize these various favorite sites in a helpful way. I will be retiring soon, and putting my favorite helpful sites into categories would even be a useful tool to share with whoever has my position next!

Wikis: Thing #10

I enjoyed the entry on Wikis, which are a quick and easy way to collaborate. The little video on planning a camping trip was great--my own camping group could have used that tool when we first started planning an annual camping weekend, although we've been doing it far longer than Wikis have been around!

I was sorry to see that some of the example Wikis are no longer active, particularly the one on library best practices. However, I think that shows that Wikis are particularly useful for collaboration on a specific, focused activity or topic, rather than perhaps having them just go on and on. I made an entry on the "23 Things" Wiki, and I noticed that someone has suggested a focus topic on strategies for marketing books, which provided a good focus for sharing.

Pooled knowledge can be very useful, particularly when one knows and trusts the people in the pool. That's one of the problems with Wikipedia, which isn't banned as a resource at my school, but any information that students find in Wikipedia they are asked to verify in another source. I've read articles comparing entries in Wikipedia with entries in Britannica Online, and several of the Wikipedia articles were found to be more complete, especially about topics in popular culture about which there is lots of information out there that might never be considered important enough for a serious encyclopedia like Britannica. In other words, there are topics about which Wikipedia is likely to be an excellent source, so the idea of banning it entirely seems short-sighted.

Online Collaboration Tools: Thing #9

GoogleDocs has proven useful in recent months as a way to share documents with Media colleagues in my district. The most recent example is a room-by-room inventory of all tech equipment in each school that was compiled by my colleague Terri Osland and then shared with the other Media Specialists for their review. Compiling this inventory is a first step in getting a handle on exactly "what's where" as we try to move forward in a more planful way with technology purchases. Part of Terri's contract is Media at Hopkins High School, and the other part is coordinating technology integration throughout the district, so having a way to easily share documents has been a big help to her and to all of us.

Another interesting use of GoogleDocs in my school has been as a way to have students store documents created at home that they need to open at school. Now that many of our students have a newer version of Microsoft Office on their home computers than the one we use at school, there have been compatibility problems. We try to remind students to save their documents in an earlier version, and we have some computers at school on which they can open them and convert them, and we also tell them about the zamzar.com free conversion site, but sometimes it's easier for students to just use GoogleDocs and avoid having to use any of those other steps, even though they don't need to "share" those documents with anyone but themselves in other settings.

GoogleDocs will be a good way to share my draft of my goals report this spring. Every fall I set several goals for the year (which I communicate to my principals and district-level coordinators), and then in the spring I prepare a report on the progress I made on those goals, along with a bunch of statistical information, of course. I invite my department colleagues to contribute notes to my draft, and rather than e-mailing the document as an attachment, this year I will use GoogleDocs.