Final 2.0 thoughts and feedback.

This series of lessons was very convenient, in terms of time and ease. I appreciated being able to leave it for a few months and come back at will. It took me a long time to complete all the lessons, but in the end, I am very excited to be finished.

I think this way of self-directed guided lessons worked very well for me. As I mentioned in the survey, I appreciated the Discovery Exercises and liked how they forced me to delve deeper into the application. My general social networking, 2.0 application behavior is to join, noodle around for a bit and pass it off as some extra thing that I don't have time to develop either for myself or for my school. This experience gave me suggestions for how to delve and some examples for how to use the information as I go through the lessons.

As I mentioned several times before, I would love to see MORE examples of how these applications can be used in the classroom both for information professionals as well as teachers. A breakdown or brainstorm of what kinds of skill development each application would teach would be great. Some applications merely have a cool factor. Others actually teach something. I would love evidence from folks who have tried these things out as to what kind of success or challenges they faced.

Many thanks to those of you who organized all of this! I am grateful for the opportunity and grateful that it was FREE.

#23 week 9... Creative Commons and THE END!

I still struggle with understanding copyright and Creative Commons. I am fully supportive of people sharing their work. I appreciate it. In light of trying to make things like blogs and Power point presentations interesting with photos and video, it is very difficult to understand what images and videos are available for use without breaking these rules. Flickr has some explanation of the concept and also what is available on their site under which license, but understanding the details is still very difficult. For instance, if I want to use a photo on my blog, what sort of use is that? It's not for profit; it's not for commercial use; I am not changing the photo. I just want to use it to make things interesting and more aesthetic. AND there's the whole issue of book cover imagery. Hmmm...

So, from what I can tell, this quote links the 2.0 lessons to it's Creative Commons cousin in another incarnation. "Learning 2.0 is a discovery learning program created by Helene Blowers. Content and style for School Library Learning 2.0 and Classroom Learning 2.0 have been borrowed and duplicated with permission, under a Creative Commons License."

#22 week 9

Wow, I had no idea how many famous authors' works were online and in the public domain. What a great resource for students and teachers alike. Especially for some of our students with learning differences, audiobooks and e-books would be a great service.

Personally, I would like to take advantage as well. Perhaps I can get through some of the drier classics if they are read out loud to me. Of course, that might put me to sleep too.

#21 week 9: podcasting, etc.

Oooooh, I am very interested in learning how to make podcasts. Apparently one can make a podcast with video or photographs on Garage Band. A smarmy Apple salesperson came to our tech meeting recently and showed us how. Since then I haven't had much time to experiment with it. Maybe next week.

Other than that, I haven't found any regular podcasts that I absolutely need to follow. I think it is one technology that I haven't added to my information reviewing portfolio. I am sure there are ones out there that I would appreciate, so if anyone has any suggestions. I should browse other blogs.

#20 week 9... finishing the job

So, after quite a long hiatus (part 2 or 3), I am intending to finish this here 2.0 lesson. Before the hiatus, when I was working on this lesson, I found a few hilarious library/librarian related videos that I promptly put on my Ning (which noone looks at, but that's fine). My favorite being the Cookies in the Library Video featuring the one and only Cookie Monster.


Since then, HNHS has developed a youtube presence. Our recruitment video is there as is the video from our 140th celebration walk. I tried to add to our cadre of HNHS videos by putting a student's video about our brand-spanking new school garden on Youtube, but because the file was so big, the server reset before the video was done uploading. This led to much frustration. So far, no gardening video online. I will keep trying.

Today's the day...

For all the events... This morning I had a pretty good workshop on collaboration: Maximizing Your Impact. There were decent lesson plan examples that could help me. An ongoing issue I have though with information literacy attempts is that I haven't found a good curriculum set for high school students. Most of the stuff I encounter is for the younger-aged student (middle-ish) or the college student. Has anyone in high school found a way to not re-invent the wheel?

On another note, I got Francesca Lia Block's autograph this morning on my very own copy of Weetzie Bat. Next up, I am going to hear her speak (or read). Then it's off to hear Greg Mortensen (Three Cups of Tea). Pictures to follow this evening!

Nothing official to do today...

Well, as there was nothing official to do today, I spent the day planning my attack. It took considerable time and I haven't really gotten it worked out yet. There is always too much to do. I am pretty excited for tomorrow. My mom has put me in charge of getting my picture taken with Greg Mortensen and I am stoked to get my picture taken (or maybe just a dorky autograph) with Francesca Lia Block. I am so in love with Weetzie Bat. My favorite book in her series though is definitely Missing Angel Juan. Other highlights for tomorrow are a workshop on information literacy collaboration and if I can squeeze it in a workshop on the Millennials and one on ethnic literature. The title of that one has evolved from Street Lit to Bestsellers of a Different Color. I like the second title better.

Yesterday was a pretty amazing day of presentations from some of the big names in diversity and librarianship. I got to meet my personal library celebrity, Sandra Rios Balderamma. I read many of her publications when I was doing research for school. At one point after I had completed my last culminating paper (Topic #2 2005, about the diversity among library employees), I wrote her an email to tell her how much her writing meant to me in the process of my experience in school. She wrote me back with a gracious reply and thanks. So, it was pretty awesome to meet her to say the least.

The pre-conference was a pretty small group of people, 30 or so. It was a great thing to be able to have conversations with the presenters and with each other about our experiences with diversity work. I shared with the group about my own attempts at diversity work and they were incredibly supportive. It was pretty powerful that the people I look up to professionally applauded my attempts to create a more accepting environment.

So far, so good...