Tina's Learning 2.0 Blog

the bride and her girls

2009-02-27T13:16:00.001-08:00

the bride and her girls, originally uploaded by morganiscool.

Heh, or this. I love the shades of green in this!

peonies, yup.

2009-02-27T13:15:00.001-08:00

peonies, yup., originally uploaded by morganiscool.

If I wanted an all-white bouquet, this would be it!

just like strawberries!

2009-02-27T13:12:00.001-08:00

just like strawberries!, originally uploaded by morganiscool.

More!

clashing beauty

2009-02-27T13:10:00.001-08:00

clashing beauty, originally uploaded by morganiscool.

Loving this photo found on flickr!

Scenes from the Obama Inauguration

2009-02-17T07:17:00.000-08:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

and this...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

~Tinooseus!

wiki do or wiki don't

2008-12-08T09:58:00.001-08:00

Image from Sniki Wiki http://sniki.org/

I really love wikis. I love setting them up and I love opening them to other group members to edit. So far I've set up 3 wikis and assisted with one. One of my wikis is all about dolls, Asian ball-jointed dolls (ABJD) to be specific. There is a LOT of information in that wiki and it's sad to me that the other club members have not explored it or added much content after the initial couple of weeks since it debuted. Another wiki is a work-related one, for a committee. With that one, I think it's simply a matter of "out of sight, out of mind." The library staff are only invited to go to the wiki when we have an event, so far just 2 a year. That's not often enough! My third wiki is one related to a grant project and it is still in the planning/drafting/outline stages. In any case, I've learned some basic things via those three wikis. Here is a short breakdown of what I've learned so far:

wiki do
1. Training is VERY important. If co-writers do not know how to work/edit/add content to the wiki, they won't. It's that simple.

2. Exposure is good, more exposure is better. The more co-writers use the wiki, the more comfortable they will be in that environment. My first 2 wikis suffer from the lack of exposure and lack of interest. It seems that people don't like to ask for help. And then they go away and forget all about the wiki. I think I need to keep referring co-writers (and even just viewers) to the wikis when they ask questions rather than answering them over and over again. I'm thinking that I might try highlighting/featuring a specific section several times a month with invitations for members to check it out and email the administrators if they have questions.

3. The simpler the Front Page, the less overwhelming the wiki. I think you can REALLY pack a lot of information in a wiki, just not all of it on the front page!

4. Links are really good. Relevant links are better. Periodic link-checking is even better!

wiki don't
1. Now, I love graphics and colors and designs and the whole 9-yard when I surf the Internet. Nothing bores me more than plain white space with black text. However, after viewing a good share of wikis, I'm come to the conclusion that the simpler the wiki the better the wiki. Especially if you are a work-related wiki rather than a club or hobby wiki. Why? Because otherwise people think that they are looking at a regular web page and not a collaborative platform. Then look and click a few links, and then move on. They may find typos or erroneous material, but never think that they can pull out their red cyber pen and make corrections.

2. Keep style and font and colors as uniform as possible. It's hard to read something that changes all over the place according to individual preferences and favorite fonts and text and background colors.

3. Don't put everything on the front page! Most people won't scroll down that far or read that much. Better to have an outline and each "topic" point to another page with more details.

4. Don't expect users to just go to the wiki on their own. Promote it! Invite people to it! Highlight it!

Hmmm... I'm sure there's more, but those are the 8 points that first pop into my head when I think about wikis. That said, wikis are really cool!

Anyway, I created a new wiki using a new platform, wet paint. It was fun! Here is my new wiki: http://tinoose.wetpaint.com/

By the way, here is my favorite You Tube video about wikis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY

Crimetime's Very Cool Water Picture

2008-11-26T14:10:00.001-08:00

IMG_8091, originally uploaded by crimetime.

Wanted to share one more before I call it a day on Web 2.0 Learning! Hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Week 5, Photos: Adjusting The Bokeh

2008-11-26T13:59:00.001-08:00

Adjusting The Bokeh, originally uploaded by cmbellman.

This is my Flickr photo to share! It's pretty dazzling! I love lights and clear details and this photo has both!

I love photo hosting sites! They are very relevant to my life and hobbies so I've been doing this for probably about 2002- on. However, sharing became a LOT easier since 2005. I have a Flickr account that I opened last year but didn't take to it due to a lot of technical problems I was experiencing. I'm not sure if it was due to my clunky computer at the time or the site itself. As a result, I also opened a Photobucket (PB) account and now have almost 1500 original photos there (one of them is a video and it's not mine). I also have an older photohosting account at The Doll Page (TDP) with over 2300 photos (thousands of other photos have been deleted over the years), not all of them my own (and not all of them dolls!).* I've used TDP differently than I have PB-- the difference is in the tagging and sharing realm.

I started TDP account when I joined my very first online doll community (Prego), and the Dollpage was created so that collectors like me could host and then share their photos on the community forums. It was simply a linking thing for most of us. The only features of TDP is a view count, a rating system, the date the photo was uploaded, and photo properties (i.e. file size and dimensions), and the ability for users to describe their photos (i.e. tagging before it was called tagging) so that other members can search for specific doll pictures in the entire TDP collective. Another feature is that people who look at your photos can vote on them. I've never done this when looking at other photos, and neither has anyone done so on mine.

With PB, I've only just started to tag my photos--last week in fact! I always saw labeling and tagging as extra steps that were annoying and took too long because I was used to the old 'TDP Way,' and only needed a photo hosting site for linking. Posting my pictures on doll forums and boards was the lone reason I opened all of my photo hosting accounts. But recently I realized how much easier it would be for me to search through thousands of my pictures in response to someone's request for photos of X doll or Y doll. Ah, if only I had tagged them in the first place! Thus begins the long, slow, torturous process of retro-tagging. Kind of like a retro-conversion library project, actually. Although I still primarily use PB as simply a hosting place for my photos, I can't wait to start exploring ways to share my photos in new ways!

*Since we were primarily using The Doll Page as a place to host images that we wanted to share on doll forums, a lot of collectors sometimes uploaded photos from fashion shows, websites, etc. in order to show folks the things that they were talking about and/or wanted to share. So many copyright violations that make my poor new librarian heart cringe! I've been in the process of deleting all of the photos that are not my own and I'm almost finished! Partway through, I decided that maybe I should start labeling my photos, too. So it'll probably take longer than I'd hoped. I believe my final count will be around 2200. (Hanging head in shame...)

Flickr

2008-11-26T13:56:00.001-08:00

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Catching Up to Week 4: RSS Readers

2008-11-26T12:34:00.000-08:00

cartoon from http://www.cartoonstock.com/lowres/bmm0073l.jpg

Whoa! Let one week go by and then suddenly it's three weeks later! But here's my report on RSS Readers:

I actually signed up for a Bloglines account a ways back and have been too afraid to check on it because I have not been faithful to it--it's been almost half a year since I've logged on. There is simply too much out there, too many interesting things, too much to read, and too little time to do it all! So, as part of this assignment, I bravely logged on and this is what I found...

Bloglines keeps things nicely organized so that it actually didn't look like my Outlook in-box after a long vacation. Whew-- what a relief!

I have signed up for 16 feeds. That's a manageable number! So far, so good...

10 of the feeds have 200 items on it that I have not yet read-- YIKES! (dry mouth)

2 of them have 80+ unread items

3 have 35 and under

1 of them has had no new postings since I've last logged in about 5 1/2 months ago

I have no idea why I signed up for 3 of them...

Since signing up for Bloglines, I've added rss feeds to my blogs. A lot of the same ones in Bloglines, plus a whole lot more. I bet I have at least 50 feeds between my 3 blogs! I seem to prefer to read them there because Blogger allows a list of up to 5 recent postings for each feed. Although for layout aesthetics, I only have them list the most recent post on most of them. This is not a feature of Bloglines as far as I can tell after exploring the Options tool. Sometimes seeing someone's title (such as Ruby's), I am intriqued and want to read what has been written. In the case of Bloglines, I see the numbers (i.e. "200") and want to log off and pretend that I didn't see that.

I really love the idea behind Bloglines and other readers. It's like a personal homepage only better. If I could add everything else I loved to my Bloglines account (pictures, music, comments, etc), I'd probably go there more often.* However, I have to admit to suffering a bit from information and technology overload. There's just so many tools out there, I run into the problem of having accounts everywhere (photobucket, flickr, bloglines, blogger, facebook, de.licio.us, etc), and all of them want to be my one place to go, my portal to everything else, that I almost tend to neglect them all in favor of whichever one appeals to me the most at the moment (which would be my blogs). And I can't help but think that in using something like Bloglines to screen my content, I'll end up missing all of the goodies out there on the good ol' World Wide Web.

*Actually-- I see that I can add some of those things. So now I just have to roll up my sleeves and figure out how!

Delicious? Not So Much!

2008-11-10T07:04:00.000-08:00

Image from: https://www.allposters.com/-sp/Typewriter-Eraser-1972-Posters_i3173743_.htm

Ok... I give up! I don't "get" what's so great about Delicious. I've read other people's postings about it, and I get it that it's a place to manage all my bookmarks no matter where I am, but I even have pages in mine that I definitely did NOT bookmark! Like all those Microsoft pages, for example. Who bookmarks Microsoft???! Since there are over 250 bookmarks in my Delicious account, I'm not all that keen to go through them and edit them. So for now, no Delicious for me!

It feels kind of weird when I run across a technology that others seem excited about and I'm completely not. It's like my brother and his Blackberry. He can't stop talking about it, and I've zoned out a while ago! He first got a PDA I don't know, about 8-10 years ago maybe. He was really into it. I found that I had absolutely no desire to get one. I liked my paper personal organizer with all the pretty pictures and spaces to write things. I had a sense of being technologically 'left behind' under all the pressure. I thought that I was definitely too young to be displaying preferences for old technology like that. Anyway, I remember a few months ago when my brother was trying to force me to use the map thing he had on his PDA to find a destination that we were trying to reach. So yeah, kinda convenient, but what if I was alone in the car driving? Not so handy, eh? And whatever happened to getting an address and simple directions before you leave the house? "I'll just check on the road," is what my brother always says...

The typewriter was as far as my dad got-- he never really took to a personal computer although we all tried to get him properly introduced to one. He just never really "got" it, was never curious about surfing and playing his solitaire games online or writing with a word processing program. He prefered his typewriter, fresh ribbon, bond paper, and tissue thin carbon sheets. He even still had one of those old wheel eraser things on a stick with a brush on the other end that left streaks of red rubber across every page he tried to correct. He very grudgingly advanced to liquid paper whiteout. Anyway, I've heard about Delicious for a few years now and this was my first time actually checking it out. I'm thinking that 2 years ago I might have been more enthusiastic about it. So yes, I'm too young to be an "old fogey" but that's how I feel about some of these gadgets and technology out there...

Nostalgically Yours,

Tina

Wordle on Learning 2.0

2008-10-28T14:05:00.000-07:00

I created a Wordle today, to show you all the words I've used and how often on this blog so far! It's so cool! Worlde determines how big each word appears depending on how often you use it. And then it creates a cool image of it all! Click on the image below to see the big picture, and then go check out the rest of the site! It's very cool!

P.S. Who knew that I really like and use the word "Really" so much???!

7 1/2 Habits of Highly Effective Lifelong Leaners... or something like that!

2008-10-15T14:33:00.000-07:00

Habit 7 1/2: Play!

Well, I signed up for this 10-week Learning 2.0 @ MCR/PSR course, and I'm eager to see how it goes. I think the habit that most speaks to me is #4: Have confidence in yourself as a competent, effective learner. When I think back to my high school and early undergraduate years, I don't think that I had this confidence, and in some cases I really thought that I was too dumb to learn some things... like Chemistry, for example. Two years of Chemistry 101 at East High School, and 3 pity-grades later, I left Chemistry behind and remember nothing to this day! Other learning opportunites, on the other hand seemed like too much fun to be "Learning" and I guess I didn't really think of it as something so noble. So I also really like habit # 7 1/2: Play! And if you check out my other blog (Tinoose's Other World), you'll be able to see that I play a LOT, and in doing so I learned more about photography in the past year than I have back when I was reading a manual and talking to people!

It wasn't until 1998 when I returned to school to finish my undergraduate degree that I experienced this life-changing shift in how I viewed learning, and I have the fabulous professors, co-students, and other mentors from the University of Denver Women's College to thank. In my first quarter, we had to write a paper about a quote that I can no longer remember verbatim, but the quote said something along the lines of how we each have to CLAIM our educations. For me, that meant that not only did I have a choice to make about how hard I was willing to work to receive an eduaction (in other words, am I just taking classes because I have to and aiming for a passing grade or did I want to LEARN something in my classes?), but also that the opportunity for learning was there and it was mine to take and make of it as I pleased. And back then, we also talked about having confidence in ourselves and our capacity to learn and grow despite whatever messages we may have assorbed over the years to that point in our lives where we found ourselves congregated in a little classroom in Hutchinson Hall. I don't know why that was such a liberating thought-- maybe it was because I didn't have a stern parent standing behind me with a checkbook telling me what he will and will not pay for and dictating what classes I shall and shall not take or even placing a value on what I was (or was not) studying. I really had a lot of fun in those 4 years, much more than I did in the 2 years as a music major at the same institution a decade earlier. And I'm positive that it was not what I was studying-- I'm willing to wager that if I re-took the music classes that I had struggled and cried through after that first quarter at the Women's College, I would have had a LOT more fun and I would have learned a lot more about music theory, music history, the art of playing and performance, and all those impossible Leo Brouwer studies...

Even after 23 years of formal education, the hardest part of learning for me is habit number 1: Begin with the end in mind. I think this is mostly because I can easily feel overwhelmed and intimidated by those lofty-sounding course goals outlined in class syllabi:

Student shall learn how to write a sucessful grant application and to determine the best sources for funding for grant projects.
Student shall perform J.S. Bach's Suite in G-major.
Student will identify and describe global environmental issues.
Student will identify, explain, and apply general theoretical principles related to interviewing including the major types of interviews, the parties involved in interviews, the roles enacted during interviews, the role of perception in interviews, and the nature of communication interactions.
Throughout this process, students will gain confidence in their use of the notation, terminology, and concepts of set theory, calculus and matrix algebra.

Even as a hyper-organized person, having a learning objective or outcome often feels unnatural and uncomfortable. I'd rather read about the requirements and weekly schedule and even the expectations for the grading scale for a class than to read about the expected outcomes. So folks-- if there was a learning outcome listed for this Learning 2.0 course, I've somehow missed it! :-D