A Few Things I Learned This Week

My Wimba presentation was high on my priorities list this week,

and yet I was unprepared.

This was partially because I spilled my pop about ten minutes before the session,

which ruined my slide notes and copies of my project.

By the time I cleaned it up and reprinted my notes I had 

no time to import my presentation before the session began.

Lesson learned: put the lid back on the pop even if you are busy! 

I enjoyed looking at the others' presentations. 

I hope others put their presentations in our course wiki so I can see them.

I mentioned on an earlier post that I posted to a discussion board on LibraryThing.

So far the only response has been tell me that I used the wrong verb tense for a word;

not really the response I was anticipating!

I have only tweeted eight times.

Sandra sent me a tweet and it was nice to receive one from someone talking to me!

I stopped following some of my interests because they took up to much space.

I added my fellow students, and a couple more library people.

I was down to following 15 people/organizations, but I am back up to 20.

I have not had a response to my tweets so I am far from developing a "hive." 

I found a few tweets that I had to look at the URL provided.

One was from Random House; an opportunity to win the entire Jane Austin collection

by entering a sweepstakes.

I could also answer 10 trivia questions about Jane Austin and her books and

I discovered I do not know a lot about Jane Austin.

Another was "Top 6 Archives Myths" from Smithsonian,

such as them having an underground storage facility under the National Mall.

I have not tried Second Life again as of yet.

A couple of my other courses are keeping me busy as well as this one.

I have my grandson this weekend,

so I believe this will be a good time for this activity.

Picasa Photos: Public Libraries

Amazing Building Around the World 
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/     

https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/sredir?uname=malvinder.virdi&target=ALBUM&id=5309757591411985089

Does anyone know where this building is located? 

I agree with the license owner, this is an amazing building.

---------

Urbandale Public Library pet show June 11, 2009

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

https://picasaweb.google.com/rjkenagy?authuser=0

 -------

I retrieved these photos from: https://picasaweb.google.com/

I searched for "public library" and specified "creative commons" for the license. 

This post completes the Picasa section of my Photo Sharing project.

Next week I move on to Flickr...be prepared ;-)

Book Reviews on GoodReads

Library Lion by Michelle Knudsen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this book to my three year old daughter. She has just recently developed the ability to sit through books that take more than a couple minutes to read. I was surprised when she not only stayed interested during some of the longer pages, but also wanted me to reread it as soon as I had finished it. It is an imaginative story that takes a known icon of the library and brings it to life. My daughter held her ears when the lion ROARED very loudly. I had as much fun reading the book to my daugther as she did in listening to this charming story.

I really like this book and it is almost a five star book for me.

I really have a hard time giving 5 star ratings!

View all my reviews

Going Bovine by Libba Bray

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The beginning of the book is very slow and I found the author's teenspeak a little hard to take at times. If I had not been reading this book for a class I may have stopped before it became interesting. A teenage boy sees the worst in his family and feels extremely sorry for himself. He becomes ill and begins to hallucinate. He starts to live in another reality as his disease progresses. He sees the moments of clarity, filled with pain and suffering, as the hallucinations. I know this sounds very morbid but it becomes almost light-hearted and funny. He learns to hope; which is refreshing after the depressing beginning. The conclusion is satisfying and uplifting, despite is inevitable end. I reread the last two-thirds of the book a couple times before returning it to the library, which is always a good sign!

I hope I do not offend anyone with my review. I did like the book and the storyline stayed with me for a long time after I had finished the book.

I think I even dreamed about it!

View all my reviews

GoodReads and LibraryThing

I really like GoodReads. They give me a lot of choices of books to give ratings. These help make recommendations for books I may wish to read. I have discovered a lot of books that I want to read; now I just need the time! I have only reviewed these two books at this point in time.

I think LibraryThing is better for people who have a lot of books they wish to catalog. I do not have a large collection of books but I do like to read when I have time. I prefer to get them free at my local libraries ;-)

I did not add more books to LibraryThing but I did contribute to a discussion thread. I am the last one out of 102 people. Hopefully I will have some direct comments to my post and I can post some of these next week.

The topic is if William Shakespeare wrote his plays; an old debate. I did a research paper on the "Wooden O" and I have an opinion about the debate. 

My New Projects and Skype

Photo-sharing:

I uploaded some of my pictures from my honeymoon in 2007 to Picasa

and these are on my blog as a slide-show.

Twitter:

I opened an account with Twitter. 

I added over twenty people to my list, but it is a bit overwhelming!

My twitter name is ChristinaDawnH.

LibraryThing:

I joined LibraryThing and GoodReads.

I wanted to join both and see the differences between the two.

So far I find GoodReads easier to use. 

I got to rate a lot of books. 

I found that I do not give 5 star ratings, 

even for books I really like.

LibraryThing so far seems better suited

for people with larger collections of books.

I tried Second Life last week but found it confusing.

Someone recommended new users go to Orientation Island.

Although I am not officially on this project,

I thought I might go back and see if this helps me.

Skype:

We role-played this week;

once as a patron and once as a staff member.

I learned a lot from the experience

and would like to thank both of my project members.

Picasa/Flickr Project:: Phase One

A few pictures from my honeymoon in the Tuscany region of Italy in 2007. 

My husband took hundreds of pictures; here are a few of them.

Following Sources: the End?

Resource Shelf-6 new postings on a short week. 

An interesting post today:

"Alexander Street Press Launches Free Search Platform"

Alexander Street Press has a video collection and

libraries who have access to Alexander Street video can

now search the collection in one place.

 ALA Tech Source-3 new postings this week.

A posting from today:

ALA is extending a special price for the ALA Tech Source online subscription.

From October 14th:

Overdrive already has a 200% increase of eBook checkouts 

over all eBook checkouts of 2010.

---

We officially wrap-up following our sources this week. 

Resource Shelf was very productive.

I always had quite a few posts to pick from for my blog.

The topics had a lot of variety and were interesting.

ALA Tech Source usually had between one to three posts.

Most of the topics were about workshops from ALA.

Many of them sounded interesting but I am not a member.

A source I found through Delicious was the ALSC blog.

(Association for Library Service to Children)

I believe all my sources had helpful and interesting information.

ALA Tech Source had the fewest postings; 

Resource Shelf the most postings;

but ALSC was the blog that I personally found the most interesting.

I did learn some new information from following these sources, 

that I feel will benefit me in the future.

It led me to find out more about items that I did not understand. 

I will leave the sources on my Google Reader,

and occasionally read something that catches my attention,

or my curiosity.

Goldilocks and Me

My professor in my ECED class took videos of us last Monday,

during our storytelling project.

She showed them last night as video clips,
so I thought I would try to upload mine into my blog.

It would not just load, possibly because it was in high-def video?

So I tried using Windows Live Movie Maker,

saving the setting for "computer," which still did not work!

So I tried saving it for an "e-mail" and it worked!

Yea!

Originally my professor said we would all be sitting in

a circle/semi-circle on the floor. 

She changed this and everyone is in their chairs. 

I have already introduced the story to everyone at this point

and sat on the floor, since this is what I practiced!