46.) It’s been two years since Helene Blowers of the Public Library of Charlotte-Mecklenberg Counties put together a handy self-study guide to Web 2.0 applications for the librarians at her place of work. Since then, this tutorial has burned a path across the English-speaking library world like a comet. But like the real world, the virtual world never stands still which is why the current Learning 2.0 webmistress is updating the original lessons.

It was fun to revisit the first ten lessons although Zoho Notebook doesn’t want to scroll down more often than not. I made it a point to recheck my blog address in Technorati and I’m pleased to report that “If This Be Method” is now ranked 2,124,756th. Yes! My journey to world domination continues! I’m also pleased to report that Technorati’s indexing is much more on the ball now. My blog entries are caught up to the present although some of the images are not.

–Great Big Sea, “The Hard and the Easy”

Soooo, the library gives me a gift certificate to Amazon for completing the Learning 2.0 training so I at once send away for this lovely CD of Newfoundland folk songs by a band of Canadian folk singers, the Great Big Sea. A CD of folk songs, by the way, that are all about flouting authority and convention and hauling horses out of ponds (the 19th century equivalent of your snowmachine falling through the ice). Yeah, I’m a rebel

Inspirational, no? Today the library, tomorrow the world! Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!

Wheel of morality, turn, turn, turn
Tell us the lesson that we should learn.
–final scene at the end of every Animaniacs episode

At long last, the day has finally come when I can say hasta la vista to Learning 2.0. It has been a long slog and I was beginning to think that I wouldn’t make the Sept. 25th deadline. To my fellow colleagues still out there trudging along, I say take heart. It gets easier after you pass the halfway point.

I’ve made some specific suggestions for changes in the Learning 2.0 presentation, both here on my blog and in a separate evaluation we had to turn in. First, I’d like to say that I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to have on-the-job time to explore these new technologies. I had heard about many of these tools, but hadn’t actually investigated any of them and didn’t know how they might (or might not) be applied to my work.

Second, I know that I spent much more than 40 hours on the whole 30-lesson project. While some of the subjects I could breeze through, others I spent hours on, reading and exploring. It wasn’t a question of technical difficulty for me. It was a question of fully exploring all the facets of a program. I think that if you were willing to breeze through all the lessons, just doing the minimum, you probably could make it in 40 hours, but I don’t think you really learn anything that way. I know I don’t at any rate.

Along those lines, I would definitely break up this 30-lesson unit into smaller units of 10 lessons. I know started to run out of steam before I had gotten a third of the way through and I wasn’t alone in this. I think that breaking the training guide into three 10-lesson units would make it more manageable and less intimidating.

A deadline is definitely a good thing. Without a fall deadline, I would have probably let the whole thing lapse before I was a third of the way through. You have to set aside a specific amount of time every day (or every week) to work on projects like this. Otherwise, they don’t get done.

Things that I will go on using after this training program is finished: YouTube/BlipTV, my blog (love my blog!), Wikis, LibraryThing, Flickr/Digital Photography, and Del.icio.us (whose bright idea was this silly name, anyway?). I was already predisposed to like blogging and digital photography, but Learning 2.0 gave me the necessary shove to actually do those things. I had heard of Del.icio.us and wikis before, but hadn’t seriously considered using them in my work. I had never heard of LibraryThing before, but now am completely and utterly addicted. It’s probably some kind of controlled substance for librarians.

I will definitely be going on to Learning 2.1 and I hope that we will be to get other Arnorian libraries to undertake Learning 2.0 programs of their own.

Okay, I just can’t resist bragging a bit on Project Jukebox. Definitely stop in and check out our latest multimedia project, the Dalton Highway jukebox. This collaboration between the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and the library is one of our most ambitious projects to date combining archival film footage, photos, maps, oral histories, and scanned documents. If you or someone you know is driving the Dalton as a tourist, definitely have them check out this jukebox before they go. The trip will mean a lot more to them.

A federated search engine is a good idea, but if it’s only going to search three content providers–and those three are common databases that can be searched from other engines–what’s the point? Show me something that can search the databases my university get and then I’ll be impressed. Like the interface, but the search engine needs more content in order to run with the big dogs.

Re: web browsers, I’ll use Internet Explorer if I have to, but I’ve always preferred Netscape Navigator. Currently, I use Mozilla Firefox and like it a lot.  I checked out Opera, but apart from some interesting widgets, I didn’t see the difference between it and Firefox.

While MySpace and Facebook are the new kids on the block, the fact is that on-line communities have been around for a long time. The Well, currently owned by Salon.com, is the oldest on-going community and has about 4,000 users. The Well, interestingly enough, does not allow its users to correspond anonymously. They have to use their real names. LiveJournal, a blog-based community, is another one. And, of course, one shouldn’t forget Tribe.net, a bulletin board service where a lot of Middle Eastern dancers hang out.

Lee LeFever has a good article on how social networks differ from on-line communities. For further reading, I recommend Clay Shirky’s speech on persistant behavior patterns of people in on-line communities over time. Shirky is an adjunct professor of Interactive Telecommunications at NYU which means that he both teaches how to create social software and studies how people interact with and through that software.

You may have noticed, gentle reader, that the posts are coming hot and furious now. That’s because I’m determined to plow through the last of these Learning 2.0 lessons before the September 25th deadline.

After I found my house with Google Maps–and finished screaming (the gubmint knows where I live!)–I checked out some of the mashups. I was amused by the Where’s George map? (who knew currency traveled so far?) and intrigued by the Pisco map (plotting coastal ecosystems in California).

The coolest map I found was this one of Mars located through Google Labs. Is that awesome or what? If you click on the “Stories” feature, you can also check out detailed information on some of the places like these lava channels.
In terms of beta applications, I was most intrigued by Google Scholar. Can’t say that I was really impressed by Google Base.

Elves? Don’t they live in trees and give you cookies? Oh, wait, that’s Keebler Elves. Hmm, maybe Library Elves give you books? Hey, it could happen.

Don’t see this service being of use to me. However, I can see it being of use to grad students, faculty, or anyone else that may be doing long term research.

Of course, if libraries have elves, then they’re sure to have fairies as well. Click here to see a better picture of the fairy’s door and their house in several hollowed out books.

I remember checking out Project Gutenberg when it first became available on the web and I’m pleased to see how much it’s grown and how much more sophisticated it is. I use Project Gutenberg as a handy way to check quotes if I’m pretty sure that they’ve come from a specific Shakespearean play, for instance. It’s also handy if you are looking for out of print popular literature like Rafael Sabatini’s “The SeaHawk”.

ListenAlaska is a great idea. People love, love, love audiobooks. When I worked at the public library, we could barely keep them on the shelves. People liked to listen to them in their cars on their regular commutes or on long trips down the highway. I notice, of course, that Microsoft has made sure that their software won’t play on Apple iPods. It seems to me that making your software cross-platform compatible could only boost your sales, but apparently that’s why I’m a librarian instead of a bazillionaire software mogul.

I didn’t subscribe to any feeds, but I did enjoy searching for various podcasts on the podcast search directories. Yahoo seems to be the best. For some fun, click here to listen to one of Radio Bastet’s vintage bellydance music broadcasts. If you click on the website link, you will see a detailed playlist.

Marisa, the lady behind the webcasts, broadcasts music from the old (and mostly out of print) vinyl LPs that everyone learned to dance to in the 1970s and early 1980s. Although some of the albums have since been converted to CD, not all of them have (it is ever thus with niche markets) so this is a neat way for people, especially dancers, to hear the great music that was being produced back then. The LP covers may be cheesy, but the musicians are usually first rate.