A big thank you to the organizers, presenters, and all who made this course happen.  I don't feel I've expressed my appreciation clearly enough.  I appreciate your time, perhaps most enough, as I found it hard to find enough of it to participate fully so I realize your commitment.  I admire your thoughts and ideas that went into this course and the advocacy and promotion that this will help build for implementing social software into librarianship. This course will always remain a highlight of my library career.

This course has been a terrific experience! Really, my favorite experience has been the interaction with fellow librarians, whether in chat or comments on the blog posts. It's a rare activity for me to be able to talk about technology such as we have with other librarians, and that has been great. I've had some experience with many of the social software tools we've been learning about, but this course gave me a better understanding of how they work, clarification of their differences, and how they might work in conjunction with each other. I think what I have found most interesting is how to use del.icio.us and using it with tools such as grazr or feed2js- a concept I think I may find most useful. Experiencing the course, too, and how it has been constructed has provided me with an excellent template that I hope to use in the future as I hope to promote and teach the use of these tools with other librarians.

I added a wiki page for Second Life Avatar names so we can recognize each other when we cross paths.

I found a photo that was placed on the map.
Here's what you see in the Additional Information:

When you click on (map) here's what comes up:

You can then zoom in or out, etc. as we're able to do in most maps now.

I had mentioned in our webcast about students being able to learn about other cultures through flickr photos. There's actually some relevance for several content areas. When you're editing your photos, adding comments, tags.. on the right, under Additional Information, there's an option to "Place this photo on a map".

When I had blogged about this a while back, I had come across some underwater animal photos that had been placed on the map. I thought it would be a cool way for students to do research on animals, or people, or a multitude of 'things' via that map. You could also, obviously, search the tags for a country city, region, etc. to view photos. As I have just been looking, though, I see there are many photos that havent been placed on the map.

I think there is something to the notion that many young people don't necessarily see their digital world as being a part of reality that it is. There's a bit of a disconnect for some, I believe, and a perception that us adults aren't there. My students are technically too young to have a myspace account (although I don't doubt many do). I get the feeling that with much of the social networking activities, young people are presenting themselves in the context of this alternate reality and 'say' or 'do' things that their future selves will regret(?) Yes, this is nothing new, in general, but this activity is far more visible and potentially archived.

Well, for starters, MySpace, as well as Facebook, are blocked in my school district. I don't see them ever getting unblocked, either, as long as there's legal liability. I somewhat understand, but still see some potential for use in my middle school. Our students don't get a lot of computer time at our school but I know I've heard some of them talking about MySpace. I'll have to see if I can get one of them to give up their myspace username. i don't know if they'll be willing or not. I set up a myspace not too long ago; freducational. I had some thought in mind of trying to reach students or to give them an opportunity to communicate in this other venue. I kind of worry, though, about potential problems in interacting with students in myspace, particularly middle schoolers. I was looking, but didn't see an age requirement- I thought there was a minimum age for myspace now? It seems its getting easier to get into trouble in public education now, and some false move or misunderstanding while in myspace seems a perfect opportunity. Are there some other social networking sites for teens? I thought i heard of one recently. But, like they say, one where theres more supervision is not the one teens want to be on.

As one thing leads to another while piddling on the computer, I came across Mindomo, a free, online mind-mapping application. Something like the program Inspiration, if you're familiar with that. As I was also thinkng about my proposal, and that I have several ideas floating in my head, I signed up and created a map of my thoughts (still in progress); heres' the link to my map. Perhaps it might help some of you in coordinating your ideas.

I see a couple uses of a wiki for my library and the school. One use I can see is to provide a place to collect and display student work within my school as well as develop topical pages for the various research projects teachers assign. We have a school website, but access and editing is done through Contribute, a stand-alone program with limited installation in our school. A wiki would allow easy access and updating for everyone. A huge benefit I see is that students can become a part of the creation process. The collaborative process that can occur with the creation of a wiki is an important skill for students (and teachers) to learn. I like the idea, too, of having future students evaluate and build on previous students' research. In addition, I could develop pages that incorporate instruction with research guides. The centralization of these resources together would be very beneficial.

So here's what I learned how to do today. I wanted to try out placing a grazr widget in my blog. I thought I would do this with the feeds from our organizers' blogs (some of them). The difficulty is in that Grazr doesn't have an easy way to pull in multiple rss feeds except through a linked opml file. I've learned that an opml file is basically an outline list with multiple feeds. To make a long story short, I found OPML Builder, where I listed the feeds and it created the opml file, which I then saved to my desktop. Then I knew I had to have the opml file hosted somewhere, so I found opml manager where I uploaded the opml file. I had to edit the urls for the feeds as they were pretty messed up somehow after i played with the file a little. I learned that Omni Outliner on my Mac lets you open and edit opml files. So I then went to Grazr, put in the url for the hosted opml file, did a little customizing, and copied the script provided. Then I went to my blog, which is an edublog, went to the presentation tab- sidebar widgets, and put in a text widget and within that text widget I pasted the script from Grazr! Shazaam! My little victory for the day!