Thing #11 Library Thing

I created an account on Library Thing (any librarian's delight!!) and added loads of books by my favourite authors. Guess what - there's not a single taxation or accounting or law title among them..............

Most amazingly of all, I inserted a widget from Library Thing into my blog containing some of my favourite literature titles!!!!!! This stuff (Web 2.0) is finally making sense to me - how content can be created, manipulated and shared across different internet locations without ever needing to download to a local computer. This makes the content always accessible - so long as you have an internet connection.

Thing #10 Online Image Generators

This is definitely the best fun so far- it all feels so not work related - but I know that it is helping me to learn to manipulate content from the internet and design new creations of my own.

The movie theatre marquee image is available at http://www.redkid.net/generator/marquee and the Confucius image is from http://confucius-says-it.txt2jpg.com/

Things #8&9 - RSS and Newsfeeds

Bloglines
I set up my Bloglines account (very easy) and added some feeds available for selection such as literature, gardening and fashion of course - and then went on to subscribe to some ABC Radio National podcasts inlcuding Life Matters, so that I can later download the content to an MP3 player. To keep up to date with what my ATOLearning colleagues are doing, I included a few of their blogs as well in my Bloglines account.

Library related feeds
I tried out Feedster, Syndic8, Technorati and Topix.net to search for RSS feeds and while they where OK, I found the search function on Bloglines was returning more relevant sources and it made it easiest to subscribe to feeds directly from one location. I signed up for the ALIA feed, the Library 2.0 podcast feed as well as an interesting site called Library Technology NOW.

Thing #7 - New technology

I have been using an Apple Mac computer which has a lot of multi-media functionality. I have created special effects on photos and then combined these with music excerpts to create really lovely slideshows of family photos.

Things #5 & 6

I have been exploring the Flickr website and created a Yahoo Flickr account to enable me to add photos directly to my blog.

There are some amazingly beautiful photos on this site and I probably spent way too much time on the weekend absorbed in browsing and checking out web applications and Flickr mashups.

I created this trading card using http://flagrantdisregard.com/flickr/deck.php

Starting the lifelong learning journey

Listening to the 7 1/2 habits of highly successful lifelong learners has reminded me that it is never too late or too soon to learn something new.

Habit 7 1/2 is about playing and having fun when learning - and I think this is a challenge because learning in the organisational setting tends to focus on the serious aspect of conveying knowledge to inform people of their obligations and responsibilities.

I hope to be able to break away from the old model and have some real fun learning new Web 2.0 'things'!!