Zoho

I've had a look at Zoho writer and gone into templates and made this ID card. Looks wonderful and makes me realise that people don't need to but all the software that they used to. It's all here on Zoho! Golly it used tobe such a big deal buying Publisher and all those bits and bobs! Now you can just go into thing and probably many things like this and away you go! I had some problems uplifting the evidence of my work but ( as always) learn a lot about the functions of print screen and cropping.

Thing 17 finished

Have followed the instructions and have added my blog to the favourite blogs there. While I was there I had a good look at some of the other blogs there. Some people really have brilliant blogs done in so much detail. This is the beauty of this 2.0 programme- I guess that people are finding what really interests them and going into it and using it straight away.

I have added a contibution to the Favourite move site and played in the sandbox. What a great name for this tool!

Online Applications and Tools

Have gone into Medstory and was impressed. My husband suffers badly from sinus problems and I thought that the range of resources and hits that this brought up was good. Most of the articles displayed were up to date and relevant. Along with scholarly articles on the causes, diagnosis and treatment of this tricky condition, I was impressed that the various medecines themselves brought up further links with attached articles. Often disease presents with non-specific symptoms and I can see that you could get a lot of very relevant information and prompts to look also at this side issue and that one. I thought that the only limitation of this was its American-ness with most information coming from that country.

Playing with PBWiki

https://my.pbwiki.com/

[http://grippingnews.blogspot.com/]

[http://plcmclearning.blogspot.com Learning 2.0]

Am having some difficulty getting this link to work. I've set up a PBWiki account., but nothing much is linking just yet.

Wiki

Now this is interesting! I had had the mistaken impression that the only wiki around was the Wikipedia which is a source I sometimes use in finding information for people. The thing that is interesting for me is that all wikis are collaborative websites where people edit and add information. Of course it would be open to malicious input, but I am impressed that steps have been made to watch for this.

I see that wikis provide a very positive avenue for sharing information between members of the community and within the workplace. Perhaps ACL needs to look into this for upgrading exchange of information on various projects that people are working on together? The enthusiasm that people feel when they share useful things would keep it fluent and up to date.

One of the authors makes the very good point that people ( including me!), have the mistaken impression that only technological whizzes can create a website. Now with this wiki tool anyone can contribute to the site.

As far as libraries go I can see that the now pretty defunct "fitch" thing that we had could work the wiki way on our website and intranet.

Newsletter

Have read 3 of the 5 suggested contributions in the eOCLC Next Space Newsletter and found them interesting. I am intrigued by the concept of " collective intelligence " which one suggests we have as a result of the internet. I can only partly agree with this rather grand anthropolical type descriptor. It may be collectively used but certainly the internet does little to advance the intelligence of anyone. In my opinion, the access we all have to the information spinning about the world, is all that we collectively share. Understanding anything that we read there is a completely different ball game.

Another points to the seamless intersection of the various capacities of the internet to gather, spread and store information without the help of the physical realities of the bricks and mortar of a library. This is a tired old chestnut ! The point of libraries has always been more than the provision of a storehouse of information. Libraries have been safe places, seperate places and meeting places for people since the dawn of time. Of course Johnny aged 18 can use the internet in far more sophisticated ways than anyone of an older age. But Johnny is usually missing the whole muscle of other sorts of learning action. Johnny can usually not read much, source much premium type information that has been peer assessed by the academic community who teach it to a specialised level. Johnny cannot be bothered ! So librarians who can, have even more work than in the past to do.

Accessing a great deal of rubbish in cyberspace is not an advantage to anyone. Spending 16 hours a day playing around with the computer leads to a superficial grasp only of anything interesting. Life an all its complex demands and expectations still requires people to interact with each other, learn from the mistaken information they have picked up and move on and away from computer nerdhood and into life.

Technorati Time

Have taken the technorati tour and have learnt a bit about this search tool. I can see that if you are living and breathing blogs and blogging this would be a godsend! Using it and the keyword searches etc you can locate and tag the sorts of blogs that you want to read. The thing is, that you would have to be really interested in this style of communication and I am not really. The blogging concept is great for keeping a personal log of what you are doing and thinking about but I can't say that I am specially interested in reading anyone else's. And quite frankly, I don't need to know what anyone else thinks about global warming! I feel a bit sorry for people who are this cut off from actual people for conversation and lively debate that they have to resort to blogging about worls events.

But good to know it exists.