Overview

Photo credit - Sand dunes by Em Mires



I took the above photo whilst on my holidays recently, depicted is me amongst the impressive natural sand dunes of Maspalomas in the Canary Islands. This picture illustrates how I feel about my journey through 23 things (I have travelled up and down some things have have been frustrating and difficult to conquer but definitely worth the feeling of achievement no matter how small, I have come some way but there is still more to explore and develop).

I have found the experience really useful and although it has been difficult at times to keep up and find the time to dedicate to the new tasks I am glad that I have perceivered, especially as sometimes I have found it is more the process than the end product that has proven the learning opportunity. Working your way through a task and solving difficulties along the way has helped improve my confidence in creating and using Web 2.0 applications.

The highs were achieving tasks and understanding what contexts they could be useful in - much of this picked up from reading colleagues blogs, lows were on the whole technology fails in particular the pod cast was very challenging but at the same time, I think it could be a really useful tool to use.

Favourite things: I really liked a lot of the visual tools such as the image generators and also wordle, I have used these devices to liven up blog posts and personalise messages rather than using generic images.

Least favourite things: The Rollyo search engine I felt was not that effective and didn't add a great deal enhancement to the blog, I don't think I would tempt people away from Google. I think the RSS feeds linking to relevant information for the subjects were much more effective and widely recognised.

The things that I think I will use the most are the iGoogle page and LibraryThing. I have set my hompage at work to my iGoogle page and it is really useful to have everything on one screen, tasks, weblinks, favourites, RSS feeds etc. so practically it helps me to access information from one point (within reason). LibraryThing I had already set up previously before I did the 23 thing task, I do think it is worth mentioning though as it has made a difference to how I can publicise new acquisitions.

Social media

Photo credit: signposting by Em Mires

I already like a lot of people use social media for a variety of reasons from social in the sense of personal life and also social in terms of finding out information for related subjects for work purposes.

Facebook - I was persuaded to join facebook a number of years ago by a colleague, at first I was not that convinced that it would be useful or something that I would use all that often - this of course was prior to it going global and being the number one choice for the majority. I still use it (although not as much) mainly to keep in contact with friends who have departed to far flung countries so that I can see all their photos and growing families. I also find it incredibly useful for keeping up to date with events and things that I am interested in, I seldom now have to buy listings like TimeOut etc.

LinkedIn - I haven't ever signed up to it although I have seen it, so I created an account to see what it had to offer. I think it may be a useful way to professionally keep in contact with colleagues as opposed to adding on facebook if this is used as a more personal tool. The jury is still out on this for me.

Twitter - I do have a generic twitter account that I set up a while ago, I rarely tweet but use it to follow organisations or people linked to the types of subject areas that I support i.e RIBA ad other library people. I have to say this is a real benefit and a great way to find out information quickly, I don't think I am using it to its potential at all and really need to spend some time thinking about how I can publicise the subject blogs I keep and to make better contacts with any academics within the school who may be enthusiasts. I do follow the University of Westminster.

In my mind there is no question that social media will continue to play a key role (advent of Google +) in communications, although of course there is always a need and desire for face to face contact but with limited time and money social media can bridge the divides between distances and helps to disperse and share knowledge quickly helping to build new professional and soacial networks at the same time. A concern for me within education is digital literacy and whether this is addressed?

Creating a podcast

So I have to say I have found this task the most challenging so far. Mainly due to technology fails at home when after successfully recording my podcast using audacity I couldn't link to the Internet Archive or Google pages as the captcha's weren't displaying (due to other bugs downloaded with audacity I presume).

Any way I managed to access the Internet Archive successfully on my work PC so could create an account and load my MP3 not quite 3 minutes but it was all I could bear in listening to myself.

I think podcasts would be a good addition to the work we do, it would be good to have audacity on our work PC's too.

You can either click on the title of this post to access audio file via Google Apps or play below.

Creating a website

I have used Google Apps to create a website before as part of Task & Finish and a way to disseminate and present findings, this was joint venture with Ellie & Alice - we used one of the templates available from the sites section you can see it here

I thought it would be good at practising creating a site from scratch as some of the templates available can be quite restrictive, I remember that trying to adapt and amend the site template we used previously was quite time consuming!


Here is my second attempt:

Online applications

I have used Google Apps for various tasks, I have used a RAID log to assist in the management of a journals review project that took place earlier last year and found it to be a useful project management tool.

I have also explored the Google Apps sites and used this with Ellie & Alice to create subject profiles for ALL's which are linked to from the University webpages. These were quite straightforward to create and have the opportunity for lots of functionality, there is also the benefit of being able to edit pages directly.

The collaborative elements of both the applications were valuable especially when working on tasks with cross site colleagues, although I have found that Google Apps (Docs) in particular can suffer from delays in saving changes etc. which can be a little frustrating at times.

Technorati

I spent quite a bit of time navigating Technorati trying to find the section for claiming the blog, I eventually found it and decided to claim the blog I keep for Architecture & the Built Environment (I hope people won't be too put off by the test blog post here).


In terms of searching for posts I didn't really find it that useful, I tried some searches for Kurt Schwitters (as I went to see an installation in Manchester that is inspired by Scwitters practice of collage/rearranging techniques), but failed to find any references to this. I tried searching for some more general terms such as architecture which unsurprisingly did produce many results.


As a blogging/tagging tool I can see its benefits especially for building up a community however its search engine capabilities for me cannot compare to Google.

Photo credit: Sweets taken by Em.

Tagging & folksonomies

I have used Delicious before, so looked out my username and password details to revisit some of the URL's and tags that I had saved there (I am getting used to writing all these usernames and passwords down now, wish there was some sort of universal login for web 2.0 applications).

My primary aim for using Delicious the first time around was to explore how it may be used for information literacy (see previous post), however I did think it would be useful to put together for example a lists of web resources for students after an information literacy session. I have now explored the use of creating bundles of URL's using tags to indicate which areas you want to include in the bundles, this may be useful for my housing and planning students who use a lot of official publications freely available on the web - especially as I am plaaning on weeding the print collection we currently have in the library.

Here are a couple of my bundles:
http://www.delicious.com/emmamires/bundle:E-learning
http://www.delicious.com/emmamires/bundle:Induction

Create your own search engine

Photo credit: by Jack Delano used under creative commons, coutesy of Library of Congress LC-USW36-645

The thing for this post is to create your own search engine using Rollyo which is a way of setting up customizable topical searches. I created a searchroll for my ABE blog but on quite a small scale (I only added in three websites), considering that this blog is supposed to support three departments the 25 limit on total URL's may prove too restrictive.

With an IL head on I was pondering whether any use could be made of these tools for this end - I remember that I used to deliver a session split over two days where I would ask students to go away and evaluate some websites using the accuracy, objectivity, currency, authority etc. and then report back on their evaluations. Perhaps I could have created a searchroll of sites and then asked students to search for a topic and identify credible sites out of the results...or perhaps I am just looking for novel ways to reinvent the wheel...

Being your own librarian

I set up a LibraryThing account for my Resources for Architecture and the Built Environment blog, and use it for adding new titles I have ordered for the library and like the visual element it adds to the blog.

I have to admit that I haven't explored the full functionality in terms of tagging, reviewing, recommendations etc. but do intend to look at the tagging option inparticular to tag books with courses, module codes, subjects etc.


Here is my LibraryThing account.

Wordle

I have used Wordle before but more as a way of creating something visually out of textual information.

I have considered in the past the use of tag clouds and tagging/folksonomies in info literacy as a way of of creating an interactive exercise which encourages students to assess and evaluate their search terminologies. I thought about using a bookmarking tool like delicious to save an article in and then ask students to access and tag with keywords they feel are appropriate to describe the topic, the tag cloud produced by the keywords could then perhaps be evaluated to see if it is representative of the topic.

I am yet to try this out though.

Image generators - Cool text

Similarly to most other comments regarding Cool Text, I found this to be the least useful and very outdated in style and appearence and reminds me of some of the early luridly coloured websites that you would commonly come across on the web.

Big Huge Labs was quite easy to use and I liked the way you could conect easily to other web services like facebook and flickr, this has potential for repurposing your own work in a number of ways and I think I may well use this again for brightening up blog posts.

Letter James, what I liked about this was the ability to personalise images and again I would use this I feel to add relevancy to the group of users I am addressing in the blog, rather than a generalised image.

Image generators - Big Huge Labs

Image generators - letter james

Creative Commons

Em's 23 things by Emma Mires is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at em23things.blogspot.com.

Flickr

It has taken me longer to do this than I expected, much of the delay seems to be due to difficulties with the yahoo account which I set up a very long time ago and passwords etc had escaped me.

Once I had resolved the yahoo issues then it was fairly straightforwards to upload some pictures, I usually use facebook to share and view pictures with friends.

RSS

I had already signed up for Google reader previously in order to feed relevant built environment updates from other sources into the subject blog.

I too initially needed to remember to login to the Google reader to keep up to speed with all the feeds, however now that I have set iGoogle as my homepage I have added it as a gadget so that it is much easier to check new feeds and filter categories i.e 23things or architectural resources.

I tried both browsing & searching within the reader and also directly adding via sites using RSS icon, personally I found the reader was slightly easier in terms of using within one interface.

I particularly liked this from daily dose of architecture feed, a project site for Mexico Public Library...now that is some serious stacks.

Blogging

Now that I have created the basics for the blog, I am going to use this opportunity to explore some of the other elements I could incorporate.

This will also benefit my other blog for Architecture & the Built Enviroment as I haven't really revisited/evaluated it's design since I created it and I know it can be improved. I really want to look at ways of encouraging interactivity via comments and try to build up a web 2.0 dialogue in particular for the subject based blog - so this will be something for me to investigate.

First post

Hi,

So this is my first blog post for 23 things - a little delayed but better late than never. I keep a blog for architecture and the built environment and have experimented in the past with blogs as a visual diary to record ideas that could be developed into something creative at a later stage.

For the task #1 I set about personalising my Google ipage, results below:

I really like the idea of having all this type of information at my fingertips and am pleased it was one of the tasks for 23 things. Particularly as it is something I had thought about creating before after being inspired by one of Phil Bradley's courses where he demonstrated some of the home/start pages he had set up using other web 2.0 applications (netvibes, pageflakes etc.)

I am going to make a concerted effort to maintain this and like Ellie perhaps use it as my homepage so it encourages me to make the best use of it!